To be elected, someone needs to win the swing voters who aren’t rabid Republicans or rabid Democrats. Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, Obama’s presidency, and Kamala Harris’ run for office shows that a lot of those swing voters are racist and sexist.

Even if Fox News went off the air tomorrow, along with Newsmax and all the various right-wing podcasts and streaming junk, there are a lot of swing voters who won’t vote for a woman, or won’t vote for a gay man, or won’t vote for someone without white skin. Many of them probably don’t even think of themselves as bigots. They just think things like “I support women, and I had no problem with Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, but commander in chief of the military is different, maybe if she had military experience…” Or, they’ll think “I have gay friends, and Mayor Pete seems like a great guy, he’s really smart and caring, but I don’t think people who choose that lifestyle really have the right values to lead the country”. Or they’ll think “I don’t have a problem with it, but people in Washington will, and they’ll never get anything done as president.”

Of course outlets like Fox News are always going to go hard after every Democrat, even a straight, white, male, christian one. Maybe that will influence some swing voters. But, it’s more about energizing enraging their base. I don’t think your typical swing voter is a fox news addict.

Overall, the general shape of the system makes sense.

Everybody receives services provided by the government, so everybody should help pay for that government. The FDA tests to make sure food and drugs are safe. The NHTSA makes sure cars and highways are safe. And, of course, the big one, the military protecting the country from invasion. The standard deduction exists so that people only have to start paying taxes once they get their basic needs met.

Of course, I know that in the real world it’s much more complicated than that. The US military might actually make Americans less safe by getting involved in all kinds of conflicts overseas. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11th would probably never have attacked if the US had a defence-only military. The FDA is being corrupted by an antivax nutjob, and so-on. But, the theory of everybody contributing taxes to pay for things provided for the common good makes sense. The real standard deduction is absurdly low and almost nobody can actually fully meet their needs with that minimal amount.

It also makes sense in the abstract that corporations don’t pay taxes on money that doesn’t get distributed to the owners. If a Mom and Pop grocery store is doing really well and Mom and Pop pay themselves huge salaries, they pay personal income tax on those salaries. If they arrange to do it through corporate dividends or something, then it’s the corporation that pays taxes. On the other hand, if the store is doing really well and they want to expand, it makes sense that the government not tax them based on their revenues if they’re re-investing those revenues into the business. If they’re investing the money into making a bigger, better store to serve their community rather than simply taking the money out as profits into Mom’s purse and Pop’s wallet that’s good for the community. Also, if Mom and Pop made $400k in revenue but spent $390k on expenses, and that includes the wages of some cashiers, it’s probably unreasonable to tax the revenue before the employees are even paid.

The problem is really in the various loopholes and ways corporations claim to be re-investing the money. We wouldn’t want Mom and Pop’s grocery store to be unable to expand because they’re taxed before they can even invest. On the other hand if Pop buys a Porsche SUV under the store’s name and claims it’s a grocery delivery van, that’s not fair. Other people have to buy their SUVs with after-tax money. In theory, if Pop is caught claiming that SUV as a business expense but using it for purely personal purposes, the IRS will go after him. But, of course, the reality is that companies get away with that kind of thing all the time.

I think part of the complaint here is based in the reality that corporations get away with lots of things, and that taxes are a real burden on the poor and middle class. On the other hand, I think there’s also a lot of financial illiteracy where people really have no idea how the taxation system works. They just see ragebait on social media and get angry because something about it seems unfair.

And the money they spent on that bribe came out of the pockets of its customers. But, not to worry, with no IRS autofile, those customers now have limited options so Intuit can now raise its prices to recoup the bribe money and more.

I wonder if there are other " genericized trademark" companies that have failed that spectacularly. You can still buy Frigidaire refrigerators. Vaccuuming is known as “hoovering” in the UK, and Hoover is still around.

It would be pretty interesting if “a GoPro” exists as a word for an action camera and the company / brand no longer exists.

At the beginning they weren’t “kinda crappy” because there really wasn’t anything else you could compare them to. Nobody else made a camera that you could strap to your chest, or your helmet, or your motorcycle while you did something action-ey. They had fully waterproof cases too, so you could take them underwater.

As a camera, they weren’t amazing. But, people weren’t using them to take wedding pictures. They were using them in situations where a normal camera would be too heavy, or wouldn’t stay attached, or wouldn’t survive.

There’s a reason they became a household name. They enabled people to do things that had never been done before, and they changed the way a lot of sports are shot.

Boomer and Gen X retired people didn’t typically grow up with computers. So, I think part of the challenge is a way to play games that’s easy. Probably games on mobile phones are a good approach because the process of finding, installing and launching those games is easy if you’re not a “computer person”. OTOH, old people’s eyes aren’t great, and they don’t tend to have a lot of dexterity, so while a phone UI might be good, the actual device is maybe too small and fiddly. Games on tablets is probably a much better option.

Steam deck might be ideal, but only if you can bump up the UI font size so that it’s more readable if you’re older. That would give them access to hundreds of thousands of games. But, the problem is most are probably designed for a PC screen, so they’ll have tiny UI elements.

In terms of the games themselves, probably something turn-based would be ideal. I happen to like those kinds of games anyhow. But, as I get older and my reaction speed gets worse, I think I’ll play fewer and fewer games that require fast reactions and good aim.

Another consideration would maybe be something social. A lot of older people are still in relationships, and want to be able to do something together. That also means either multiple steam decks so each person can have their own, or maybe couch co-op games.

So, I think it’s:

• Turn based strategy, or any other turn-based game – visual novels might work, trivia quizzes, detective games, just so long as it isn’t reaction speed based
• A system that’s easy to find, install, and launch games. Even steam for PC is probably intimidating for people who haven’t been on PCs for most of their lives.
• Big fonts for people with fading vision.
• Easy controls.
• Maybe couch co-op for couples to play together

Based on that, I can see why Nintendo Wii games were really popular. The system is very easy to use. It runs on the TV so fonts can be nice and huge. A lot of it is couch co-op so couples can play together. They also have a lot of games meant for kids, but those games are also easy for older people to understand and enjoy. They also didn’t have sexual / violent themes that old people are sometimes more sensitive about than your typical gamer.

It also shows why Nintendo’s follow up consoles didn’t work as well. The Wii U had a gamepad. That’s more intimidating, and not as easy to use if you have poor vision. Then came the Switch, which was even worse if you have poor vision. Plus the detachable controllers are ideal for kids, but old people now have to fiddle with little almost hidden buttons to detach them. Not good.

This essentially makes those people sin free and able to enter heaven."

A place I invented and set the rules about entering.

Also, I wasn’t actually dead. I’m a god, so I can’t actually die. My super-powered avatar’s human body died. But, that was really about putting on a show for you guys.

Молодец, товарищ, это вызовет большой раскол.

Yes, losing half your children before they became teens used to be normal.

In addition, there were a lot of trees, fruit and water. But, the majority of the fruit wasn’t something humans could eat. It was simply there so that the plant could reproduce.

It took millennia of cultivation to get nice, juicy fruit like we have today. Even just a hundred years ago, a sweet orange was a rare treat.

For most of history, just getting enough calories every day was a challenge. The whole reason why debt, feudalism, war, etc. exist is that life was hard and sometimes people were willing to kill or die for the chance at something better.

Suuuuure they are. No accounting gimmicks at all! Just suddenly profitable via magic right before they go public.

They make it up in volume.

(Volume being how loudly they shout about how it’s going to change the world and dupe more people into investing.)

What’s funnier is that typically the AI providers lose money on every query their customers make. So, this may have cost some company $500m to Anthropic, but it cost Anthropic a whole lot more than that.

It is strategic for Canada to invest in its air force because:

1. Hmm, what happened in that far northern area? We should go check it out. Oh wait, we don’t have planes to do that.
2. Russia attacks Finland. Finland calls for help from its NATO allies. Canada sends its air force.
3. Every single flight from Europe to the US west coast flies over Canada. Even flights from Europe to Mexico City pass over Atlantic Canada. One of those flights stops responding and there’s a fear it was hijacked. Oh well, I guess the USAF can check it out once it crosses the border… if it crosses the border.

You can see some of the absurdities of not having a proper air force in Switzerland. They used to have an Air Force that only operated during daytime business hours. In 2014 an Ethiopian Airlines pilot hijacked his own plane and landed it in Geneva. Italy and France scrambled to escort the plane through their airspaces. Switzerland had to just let it do what it wanted because their Air Force didn’t operate 24 hours a day.

In fact, for a huge and nearly empty country like Canada, the air force is arguably the most important military branch. Since prehistoric times, the size of a country / kingdom / empire was defined by the region in which it had a monopoly on the use of force. If Canada wants to claim sovereignty over the entire North, and not just the Montreal to Toronto corridor, it needs to be able to notice an invasion in the north, attack anybody there tying to claim its territory, and transport soldiers up there if necessary. That’s all Air Force stuff.

A modern Air Force might not mean fighter pilots in supersonic planes. As things in Ukraine have shown, it might instead be mostly drones.

Also, mix in that social programs that helped them are different.

Think of the famous Craig T Nelson quote: “I’ve been on food stamps and welfare. Anybody help me out? No.”

Things that they personally benefited from when they needed them aren’t socialist, they’re not government that’s too big. They’re programs that are OK, but only as long as the people on those program genuinely need them like they personally did. What they don’t realize is that most people on those programs do genuinely need them, and the rare people that are freeloading are hard to catch. It’s almost always cheaper just to open the program to anybody who claims to need it than to try to investigate people who you suspect might be using the aid fraudulently.

So, someone like Craig T. Nelson are probably against housing laws because he personally hasn’t been homeless or close to homeless. He’s probably against worker’s rights, even though he’s almost certainly in the SAG union, and has benefited from their health insurance. He’s reluctantly for the idea of food stamps because he used them himself. On the other hand, he’s probably sure that most food stamp users are frauds and don’t actually need them like he did.

If you’re going to put a word in quotes, you should at least learn to spell that word. It’s “Octagon”, not “Octogon”.

UFC is better at spelling than OP. Idiocracy indeed.

That’s the thing about wealth taxes. People argue that they’re unworkable. The truth is that we already have wealth taxes. We just have the most useless style of wealth tax.

Instead of the ultra-wealthy paying the highest percentage in taxes, every home owner pays a similar rate. But, that means that the people who have most of their wealth tied up in their homes pay the highest effective rate. Even if it might be hard to come up with a perfect wealth tax, it would be extremely easy to come up with one that’s more progressive than property taxes.

I remember using it back when it was called “Audioscrobbler”. I think the “scrobbler” part stuck around somehow?

The demo would be a lot more impressive if the questions you were asking weren’t longer than the extremely simple SQL queries it generates.

Let’s be real, oil / petroleum / gasoline / aviation gas are going to be part of the economy for decades. Countries are going to get by with less oil, but not without oil. There are things like planes that really require a very energy dense source of energy. There are other things like buses and local delivery trucks that can do fine with batteries, but where vehicles are an investment that is paid off over a decade. The new ones might be electric, but the old ones won’t be replaced soon. This might have accelerated the transition in a significant way, but oil is such a big part of everything that it’s still going to be around for a long time.

What I hope is that there are countries, say in Africa, that never really fully industrialized with an oil-based economy. Hopefully they can skip right past that and start with clean energy right from the start.