… I’m sorry, what?

Do … does any Mario Party game even have microtransactions? You know, specific game content unlocked by an additional purchase with real world currency? Much less ones where the outcome of a purchase is substantially randomized?

And then right wing media and talking heads run with only that news and voila the election was rigged, against them.

According to a recent FD Signifier video, they have already purged him and a whole ton of other people (cough probably black people cough) from voter rolls in Georgia, he said that hadn’t happened to him in nearly a decade, gotta re register, and of course they don’t tell you if you’ve been purged, that onus lies on you to figure out.

Its already illegal to hand out water to people in line for polls.

I would be entirely unsurprised if say I dunno maybe your scenario happens… or maybe they just call in a bunch of bomb threats to polling locations in blue areas, seems to be doing a good job of shutting down Ohio at the moment.

Judging from what I’ve seen so far from reports which are early and incomplete, I would eduguess that Mossad basically intercepted a particular brand of these ‘pagers’ known to be used by Hezbollah, put small bombs in them and wired them in such that they could be activated by a broadcast signal, and probably a lot of non Hezbollah people who just happened to buy this model of ‘pager’ in the target areas and timeframe for introduction of these tampered device onto the market also got an exploding hot pocket.

A decade ago I was contracting for MSFT as a database admin / data analyst.

A far older and more experienced contractor told me that he had been part of a team in Saudi Arabia, in 1990, that intercepted computer and electronic equipment bound for Iraq’s air defense command and control systems, flashing the firmware with exploits and backdoors as fast as they could before they were sent to Iraq.

Supply chain interception has been a thing for a while.

EDIT: This is a total off topic aside, but hearing about and seeing shit like that at the various tech jobs I’ve worked is why I laugh when people say ‘oh but alexa only activates on keywords’ or ‘no its totally impossible for phones to listen to your convos and then give that data to advertisement systems’.

Call me paranoid, I don’t care: If you don’t have a hardware disconnect for your microphone and personally have the source code to every bit of software, at every level, then we just have to take the giant tech corpos at their word.

So I wasn’t there for 2042. I don’t know what the rationale was, but for me, it’s like the team tried something new.

The rationale was to make a 128 player battle royale ala PUBG or Fortnite. You know, shameless trend chasing!

It was supposed to basically be a spin off, non mainline BF game with the potential to be the next big thing while the next mainline game was being produced, but that only works if BF5 has staying power.

Which it did not.

And EA want MONEY, BIG MONEY ASAP!

So then BF2042 got massively reworked in a tiny amount of time to try to make it into a mainline series game by throwing a ton more developers at it than originally planned, ending up as a rushed, buggy, undercooked mess with tons of crap (half baked half reworked game modes) thrown at the wall to see what stuck.

That is why distinct armies were replaced with a cadre of mercenaries, as well as the entire 2042 timeframe setting in a world where nation states had basically collapsed already.

It is also why the maps are gigantic and seem like they were designed for a battle royale.

I’m guessing also their original plan was to have the much hyped dynamic weather systems serve a similar function as the the closing force fields or bubbles of death that battle royale’s have to force players into conflict and games to eventually end, but they couldn’t actually figure out how to make that work.

Any questions Vince?

May I suggest you take up learning a martial art?

Not sure what they’re like in your area, but when I learned Karate as a kid in the 90s/00s, everyone was treated according to their skill level and discipline, gender/sex is irrelevant (beyond cups for guys and thick sports bras for gals).

Its not likely to make you bullet proof, but it does stand a decent chance at bettering your physical and mental health, give you more options when a gun is not part of the scenario.

Also, I would second the notion of going to a range and signing up for basic pistol and rifle familiarization, as well as basic medical training, unless you legitimately are totally terrified of firearms or have some kind of trauma or PTSD related to them.

Such courses usually provide you with firearms for the course, you don’t own them or take them home, they stay at the range. You just learn the basic principles of operation and safety and shooting technique, under hopefully an extremely serious couple of range masters who will hopefully teach you to treat all guns as if they are loaded until you have personally verified they are not, and to never, not even accidentally, point the barrel of a gun at something you do not intend to destroy.

You don’t need to go buy a gun first and not trust yourself with it.

In fact usually a novice shooter is going to want to experiment a bit with different calibers and guns with differing grip styles and weight distributions untill you find something comfortable to shoot.

On the one hand, I am glad this is finally happening.

On the other hand, I am 99% certain my father, who’s worked at variously the Everett and Renton plants his entire adult life, is continuing to be a scab, as he has also done his entire adult life.

Raised me on Rush Limbaugh, last I talked to him he was a Q Anon nut that believed Antifa did Jan 6th and Tom Hanks’ son rapes and kills children for their adrenochrome.

The 1% uncertainty is not from a 1% chance he might actually also be striking, its the 1% chance he’s either retired or died from a heart attack since I last spoke to him.

Either way, fuck Boeing.

Kero kero.

Alex Jones and others have been pushing this notion for over a decade, that Planned Parenthood actually operates a black market for baby parts and organs.

I think they used some shitty, vastly out if context stealth footage from Project Veritas, if memory serves.

Hell, the whole crazy Q Anon adrenochrome shit at least partially spawned from this: Live, scared babies have more or more pure adrenochrome, therefore thats how we know they do post birth abortions!

Its a delusional reinforcing loop of explanations for things that are not happening leading to explanations for those explanations… evidence is no where, but if you’re prone or susceptible to the idea that there is a true, objective, hidden evil in this world, then uh, well facts don’t care about your feelings and if you feel scared and angry, any ‘facts’ will do.

Except that you can effectively screen for basic interpersonal skills with a casual conversation of 15 to 30 minutes where the interviewer throws in some flashpoint / hot topics and asks a few more pointed or consequential questions after a general report has been established.

Or better yet, do that with their possible coworkers, or get said coworkers to suggest topics and questions for the recruiter in the above scenario.

Why ask?

To further solidify the notion that you, as a recruitee, must show total devotion and unwavering loyalty to a potential employer.

Obviously recruiters know that people jump around after contracts or when they feel they are not being paid enough, that people scatter shot apply to anything like guys swiping on tinder because their prior experience trying to get a job has shown them that there’s really no rhyme or reason to it, that desired qualifications are nearly always absurdly niche or dramatically overinflated, and that there’s a hundred or a thousand people applying to every job opening.

It is literally their job to facilitate this process. Of course they know how all if this works.

This rhetoric is basically an attempt at conditioning you into being servile. If you ‘play ball’, you might get this particular job, and then they’ll basically lie to you about upward mobility, job stability or repeating contracts.

They are salesman. They sell the job to you and you to the company.

Why would they be anything other than slimy underhanded liars?

The deforestation of the Amazon is largely driven by a desire for more land to grow biofuels (sugarcane) on.

The byproducts of sugar production (the leaves and stalks) are used to produce ethanol from a biological, renewable source, as opposed to fossil fuels.

Oh, and in the Amazon, said sugarcane farming is often done by slaves.

You either need more farmland to grow what will become biofuels on it, or you have to stop growing food on existing farmland, which means food gets more expensive.

Personally I’m a fan of Smurf Juice brand colloidial silver.

I used to know sooo many people that would justify this, a cryptoscam, shilling literally any outright fraud or vastly overpriced bs on their social media.

‘They’re just getting their bag, you’re hating cuz you broke!’

This is the cyberpunk dystopia.

• Made in a facility staffed by boned babies.

• • We mean babies with bones.

If this was a real lemmy shitpost it would be blinding bright beans splattering all over the windshield.

I mean… on the right side, we have what you are describing, as well as many conservatives just outright being pro-Russian invasion of Ukraine, with some now literally moving to the former Soviet Union they despised 30 years ago so that they can legally beat their wives and never have to see an openly gay or trans person.

This is fairly straightforward: They’re religious, traditional conservatives who love hierarchy and hate and fear ‘weird’ people as an animating drive in politics. Y’all Qaeda, just another flavor of fundamentalism.

On the left side, you have people who take their support for anything standing against American dominance and imperialism so far that they are openly in favor of China taking over Taiwan, totally denying or massively downplaying the Holodomor or Uighur encampments/persecution, saying they support Yemeni pirate-terrorists just shooting missiles at any cargo ship of any nation or destination that cruises nearby.

A person I used to be close to, and thought I had reasonably similar politics with, described Hu Jintao being basically arrested and disappeared extremely publicly as part of a CCP conference as… him being placed into witness protection due to a threat on his life.

That makes literally 0 sense.

Hell, I myself started in a conservative family, got lost in the ancap sauce for a while, then discovered oh, there’s basically nothing anarchist about any kind of capitalism, capitalism’s prime function is to aggregate power, replace all ‘free markets’ with monopolies and oligopolies, ancapism is basically total bullshit that stole the word anarchist from left wing movements, and then I read Baukunin and Kropotkin.

Now I’m just tired lol.

Horseshoe theory is sadly real, for a small number of hypervocal people.

Millennial here: I think what Gen X and Boomer authors mean when they say ‘GenZ is more tech savvy’ is basically just that they use social media apps on phones and play video games, and that more of their culture derives from such things.

Maybe tech-immersed would be a better term.

As far as actual tech competency goes?

Yeah I agree with you. Phones and apps are generally reliable enough now that there’s far less need to figure out anything under the hood, unlike in my day where you kind of had to learn more about a system to do what is now common, and you had to type on a keyboard.