I think they do serve a purpose, but not everyone on the stage was aware of what that purpose actually was. The purpose was to audition to be Trump’s new VP pick since he’s definitely not going with Pence again.

D&D 3.5 got me into both kinds of gaming. I remember me and some of my friends wanting to play it, and I remember tracing characters from the dot hack manga for our character sheets and playing the starter set. Later on I found out my friend had an old computer in his house (I think it was an Apple II?) and one of the Gold Box D&D games, and that ended up being the first computer game I spent a ton of time playing. Before then I had played SNES and Genesis a bit but they weren’t really a focus for me at that point, but then when I got Morrowind I was fully bought in to video games too.

Hexbear has so many good ones, I’m quite fond of &

But I also grew up on Battle.net playing Starcraft, so I often resort to kirbys. t(" t) (> ")> <(^o^)> (g ")–o

Doesn’t everyone in the Federation have a universal translator? I always assumed it was some kind of implant.

God damn I just found out the other day about this guy’s accusations in the UK which had actual texts of him admitting to sex crimes and the cops still refused to investigate. What a POS I hope he rots.

sovietsteeds.com It’s a really niche forum that was made in the distant past and then stubbornly refused to change, much like the motorcycles they ride.

deleted by creator

Sure would be cool if the logic of eminent domain would be applied to housing that sits vacant for ages. If they’re not using it just take it.

deleted by creator

Clickbait Remover for Youtube makes that site a lot more pleasant. It’ll replace all thumbnails with a screenshot from early in the video, and un-capitalize all titles to make them consistent.

I’ve fucked a lot with language generation. I’ve never been able to generate anything that isn’t uncanny in some way, but with the right prep you can get a language model to spit out a lot of text that almost seems like it’s from an actual work of art.

Also tell them they can improve their fortune by buying your homemade candles for $150 each.

The article also says this guy was recruited from prison, something Wagner’s been doing from the start. AFAIK this is an actual “both sides” thing, and I’m sure that both Ukraine and Russia are guilty of more than we currently know as a result of this practice.

I think this is a fundamental property of social media. It’s a basic catch-22 - you need new users to attract new users. Sometimes a seismic shift will occur like the migration from MySpace or Digg, but neither of those websites were as big as any of the big social media sites are now, so the gravity well wasn’t nearly as strong.

People will just normalize the new anti-user features and get used to them.

Portion sizes. Your mom isn’t controlling you so you gotta do it yourself.

I think a basic insurance pool makes sense, but big insurance companies are quite far removed from being basic insurance pools. The whole industry exists to get people to sign up for policies they don’t need, deny coverage to people to who need policies, and when someone actually makes a claim to find any and all possible ways to deny it.

TrueAnon did a pretty good episode on this. Insurance was pretty straightforward before financialization kicked in on it - in the future get ready for pay-as-you-go insurance contracts where the rates change on a daily basis.

Land enclosure. Screwed everything up for everyone stg

Microtransactions in video games. Remember when everyone got pissed over horse armor?

Trading Card Games. The whole trading card thing is about psychologically manipulating you into buying shit you don’t need, shoulda been stamped out as soon as cigarette companies started doing it, but if you think about it the ideal capitalist institution sells you literally nothing and selling people heavy paper with little pictures on it is damn close to that ideal.

Software. Should be free, isn’t. Blame Bill Gates.

Advertising. We all know about propaganda (even though we might disagree on what is and isn’t propaganda at times) and we all know it’s bad, but we literally let rich people propagandize us every single day in every single orifice.

1. Stats are stats. If Cuba, even while facing a crisis in its food production due to lack of seeds, gas, and fertilizer, is still able to feed its people better than its neighboring countries, then that is a stirring indictment of capitalism.

2. Both of your examples link to a drop in imports as the cause of shortages, itself a symptom of the ongoing global production crises caused by COVID-19. A wealthy country like the USA can paper over a problem like that by throwing around money and credit - a small country like Cuba can’t.

Consider how Cuba’s economy could possibly respond differently to this situation if it were capitalist. I suppose they could take massive IMF loans in order to shore up imports, at the cost of “structural adjustments” that cause untold damage to future generations by eliminating the government’s mandate to run public services - but that plan hasn’t exactly worked in the long term anywhere it has been tried.

The fact is that these crises are well outside the sphere of influence of Cuba’s economy or government, and are exacerbated by American imperialism against Cuba and its allies (ie literally hijacking Venezuelan oil shipments using the US Navy). Regardless of political ideology or economic policy, Cuba would be facing these crises one way or the other, and centrally planned communism has proven time and time again that even if it’s not perfect it’s better at navigating these problems than a competitive market capitalist system is.