It’s not everything, but it’s at least something.

Hopefully buddy is doing well, whatever his name is, and wherever he is now.

I live in Canada and we have some of the same stuff included in our taxes.

Our whole system is pretty fucked up when it comes to taxes, but it is what it is. At least we have things in place.

Sure, I’m “paying” for other people to get healthcare, or to get social assistance, police protection, help from fire departments, ambulances… Good banks and even welfare…

I couldn’t possibly give less of a shit.

I like knowing that, when it’s my turn to rely on my fellow countrymen for support, I will get it. If I’m sick and unable to work, I can get financial support, and go see a doctor without having to take out a loan or anything.

Social services are good. I’m not going to get denied coverage for a medically necessary procedure. It gets booked and performed.

And I know that Canada’s systems are way less comprehensive than most European countries. We have a lot to do before we can get to where we should be. But we’re still better off than our southern neighbors.

A cue is a marker point, usually for media production. It can be used in several contexts.

Queue would be a line, more or less.

I’m being reductive, of course. Just trying to help people who are too lazy to Google or look at a dictionary.

I’m in this same boat. Unless you count Reddit, or Lemmy, they ain’t finding shit.

Not that I want to go to that shit hole country.

Child.

Ok

According to that, I should be 53.

That’s over a decade older than I am right now.

These people need to read and learn from sources that aren’t Twitter/Facebook.

I’m not going to tell anyone that they’re wrong. I will instead point to history, and the reasons these organisations exist. Compare the original concept to the current programming and I think you’ll find that not much has changed about the purpose of their existence.

Whether your opinion agrees with the original, actual, and ongoing purpose of these organisations is completely irrelevant.

Probably not. That’s basically a full week of take home pay for me.

I get what you’re saying.

I afford them a modicum of respect not because they were part of the war machine, but because they faced that danger, in the spirit of defending their country (whether it actually achieved this goal or not, is up for debate), and encountered who knows what kind of horrific scenes and circumstances along the way, then survived to tell the tale.

I give them respect for personal bravery more than anything. I certainly don’t want to poke my head out from behind cover while being shot at, to try to defend myself against an attacker that doesn’t even speak the same language as I do, regardless of why the fighting is happening.

Their sacrifice, of being there, and participating in the war machine, means that the government doesn’t need to conscript people, or force them into mandatory military service. Therefore, I don’t have to go there and experience what they did.

Idk, that seems like something worthy of at least a little respect.

But I’m not here to tell you what to think or do people braver than me died in world wars gone by for us to have differing opinions, so hold whatever opinion you want.

I definitely want it. If it’s cheap, I definitely want two.

Actually everything they recently announced looks great. I really want to try to frame.

I gave up on VR after the oculus CV1 got canned. I bought one, got a few decent years out of it in spite of “meta” buying the company and making it shit, but when they stopped selling the connection cables for the CV1, which was the part that broke most frequently, I just backed the hell off and thought to myself, “this shit is cool, but it’s clearly not established enough to be predictable, maybe some day”.

Whelp, I think we’re finally there.

Until now, you had the “option” of either something mainstream like the quest 7 (or whatever number they’re on), or you can pick from either the index, which was on the pricy side for what you were getting, or the bigscreen beyond, which required an iPhone to scan your face so they can make a custom face shield just for you (and to get more you had to scan those people in and get face shields for them at a premium). Anything else was so niche that you probably were not getting support, if the company even existed in a few years to support you.

Now? A first party VR that actually looks good and works natively with steam…

So yeah… Where do I sign up?

I’ve wanted a steam deck for years but I don’t game on the go so I can’t really justify it, but the rig I’m using for couch gaming is getting pretty dated… So this seems like a great time to get back into everything… Though, finding the money I need to get the systems is going to be a challenge…

I hope this name sticks.

Take your upvote and get out.

If this isn’t real, it should be

I struggle with this. I hesitate on both sides. “Just following orders” isn’t enough of a defense to justify some seriously bad shit that any reasonable person would stop and go “are we the bad guys?” over. For big picture stuff, the individuals in the military wouldn’t have the entire context of what’s happening, they would just be given orders and expected to go and do.

So on one hand, I understand the “just following orders” defence, on the other, I don’t think that’s an excuse for doing shitty things to people, especially non-combatants/civilians/whatever.

Operational ignorance only accounts for so much.

I don’t want to blame veterans for what happened, but I also don’t think they’re innocent in all of it because they were “just following orders”…

It’s definitely something that I’m split on. Either way, veterans, at the very least, deserve to be taken care of and given a certain amount of respect for their work and, in many cases, sacrifices, so that we can enjoy a relatively peaceful and free existence.

And my feelings on this don’t change based on what military someone served in. This applies to all veterans. Thank you for your service, I sure hope you’re not guilty of war crimes regardless of if you were “just following orders” or not.

I would argue that capitalist monopolies are the problem.

There are examples where a “monopoly” has 100% of the market and they do a good job, usually in non-profit driven contexts. To provide an example: there’s only one organization in pretty much any given area, that handles extinguishing fires. Usually called the fire department, and it’s run by the local body of government in a monopoly context.

They still do a great job, but there’s no competition in fire fighting.

They’re not inherently profit driven.

Also, hats off to the firefighters out there, you guys are awesome. Anyways, back to my point.

There are good organizations that operate a monopoly in their service segment. They’re just typically owned and operated by a democratically elected government. Of the people, for the people, by the people.

Any monopoly that is profit driven, especially any that are capitalistic, will succumb to enshittification, 100% of the time, it’s just a matter of when it happens. The only time that it is possible to not have that happen, is in privately owned corporations, which are rare… But the leadership believes in improving the product more than profiteering. But on a long enough time line, that will also fail because inevitably someone will buy the company or inherit it, and they will want to maximize their profits over everything.

It will always happen when things are privately held, and especially if they’re publicly traded.

There’s a paradox I heard of that’s pretty relevant in this line of thought that is pretty transportable to most things. I heard it in the context of IT security.

It goes something like this: you buy security and after 2 or 3 years when you need to renew, nothing bad has happened, so it seems like you don’t need security. When in actual fact the extra security has been the reason there haven’t been any incidents.

So it’s almost impossible to prove that buying the security is helping without extensive analytics.

In many cases those analytics are either very difficult or impossible to get.

To demonstrate the transportable nature of this concept, let’s transpose it to vaccines.

If everyone is vaccinated, then nobody gets sick from those diseases, making it seem like the diseases are not a threat anymore, which means that vaccines are no longer useful.

Meanwhile, in all actual fact, the only reason why polio is so rare is because there is a safe and effective vaccine for it that everyone has taken (replace polio with whatever disease you want that has an effective vaccine).

It’s a paradox of: how do we prove this is working, without discontinuing it and possibly being eaten by rats/leopards/whatever.

If there’s only monopolies in the market then is their product the best on the market, or is everyone using it because there’s no alternatives?

Leaning that monopoly argument against capitalism, it’s almost certainly not the best product. When you have a captive audience, those that need your service and don’t have an alternative, there’s no incentive to innovate, or invest in improving the product at all. Do innovation stagnates so that corporations can maximize shareholder value; because the focus of a corporation isn’t to innovate, or improve what they do, their focus is always on extracting the most value for the least cost.

Therefore, monopolies will almost certainly lead to a sub-optimal product. The people that suffer for this are the users of that product. In the case of something like Google search, that’s basically everyone.

There’s a more modern term for this phenomenon: enshittification. Actively making a product worse specifically for the purposes of creating profits for shareholders.

Late stage capitalism is fun, isn’t it?

This. Entirely this.

The frustrating part is when there are laws in place for something, and they’re not being enforced and law makers think that making more laws about something will somehow fix the enforcement issues…

Making it more illegal only harms law abiding people, enforcement actually harms the law breakers.

It’s not rocket surgery.

I haven’t either.

Speaking of things I haven’t done… I’ve have, not once, turned the wrong way down a one way street.

… It was twice.

The most disturbing part of this is, she made it to 93, and wasn’t able to pay rent. Does America have no way to pay their retired and elderly people a living wage at the end of their life?

Like, she’s not even just retired, she’s elderly. The “Golden years” of wearing a diaper and needing a walker, kind of elderly.

Even if the charges were dropped and she was allowed to go home, the fact that it got to the point where she was hauled off to jail in an orange jumpsuit and cuffs should not have happened. Someone should have stopped and said, “are we really going to try to send a 93 year old to jail?” And that should have been where it stopped. Because that’s not something you do to a 93 year old for missing a few rent payments.

America is cracked man. Should not have gotten there. What the actual fuck.