I was gonna say, this looks stock photo as hell. Not a single bit of individualism at each desk in an industry filled with artists and companies that have Weta Workshops make statues for their entryways. Plus, laptops? I can’t imagine rendering and compiling being done on laptops, nor is there the room for hardware like Wacom touchscreens.

Feels very “give me a photo of an office with computers.”

Why would Krasnov end the tariff war that’s proving so effective against his master’s enemies?

I’m Back by Dope.

To quote a chopped up recording of JFK from a song: “Trusting in the sanity and restraint of the United States is not an option. Go home and die.”

Plenty of red outside the cities, though, and if they figure out why they’re suddenly paying more for electricity, it may change a few minds about Republicans.

Of course, they’re more likely to just blame Democrats for it, but one can hope.

This is why I’ve always maintained the distinction between conservatives and Republicans. Not all conservatives are Republicans, but all Republicans are toe the party line goose steppers. And there can be no compromise with fascists or white supremacists.

As my grandfather and first boss both would say when you asked them who they were voting for, “I’m a Republican. I vote for the nominee.” Doesn’t matter if it’s Reagan, Stalin, Hitler, or Karl Marx risen from the grave to destroy the spectre of capitalism once and for all, so long as they have an R beside their name, that’s all that matters.

one finger on the monkey’s paw curls

Millennials are ruining the marriage industry!

Is. Continues to be. And it isn’t just Japan. Worldwide, the games industry has always had horrible work-life balance (some cases being better or worse than others, of course).

I went to college to go into the industry 10 years ago and never did because of the things our professors (who were all industry veterans, some still actively working in the industry and some having been in the industry since the 80s) told us. “Nobody makes video games because they want to get rich.” Upon graduation with a 4 year degree (and a hundred thousand in debt probably), I was expected to make the same annually as I did if I worked year-round at my summer job. Everybody today talks about crunch time as a problem in industries. Video games are crunch time. We were told to expect to work on a project for 4 years, with the last few months being spent in the office 7 days a week, no holidays, and orobably eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the office. Maybe even sleeping there as well. Clocking out after 8 hours would be seen as being a traitor to the company. And after a project ships? Dust off your resume, because unless you’re senior level, you’re gonna be fired as the company downsizes until the next project.

The mass layoffs the past 3 years have been worse each year than in the 2008 recession. There are people working at the Blizzard main office who live out of their cars because they can’t afford an apartment within commuting distance of the office. The list goes on and on. And they can get away with it because they’re exploiting the passion of people who just want to make something that people will enjoy and there’s an endless stream of starry-eyed college kids ready to throw themselves into the grinder.

YouTube has some sort of sorting algorithm, but I have no idea what it sorts by. I’ve had a video open, looked at some of the comments, then come back the next day, refreshed the page, and had a new set of comments at the top from the same time period, with no discernible pattern to why they’re positioned where they are. You might find the top comment you saw previously with 1.5k likes 10 comments down the next day and a comment with 200-400 likes at the top, followed by a comment with 7k likes you didn’t see previously, and all from 5 months ago when the video was first posted.

I’d prefer them to be suffering on the outside as well.

Don’t forget that Trump and Epstein used to fly on Trump’s private jet as well, along with the young contestants of Trump Beauty Pagents, who Trump says he liked to “surprise” by opening the door of the changing rooms at the pagents.

That, and drones are both small and therefore harder to detect - especially flying close to sea level - and they can be remote controlled, which allows them to move erratically, making them much harder targets to hit. There’s definitely a reason that countries are looking into things like lasers and blasts of air to knock them out of the sky instead of just filling the area with a lot of bullets.

It’s also a sample of what asymmetric warfare will look like. Militia groups can now buy or make their own loitering and guided munitions on the cheap. They won’t have anywhere near the range or capacity of the military grade stuff, but a remote-controlled flying pressure cooker still blows up well enough.

We’ve had these for decades now. They’re called CIWS, and they’re capable of taking missiles out of the sky and turning inflatable dinghies into flotsam. They’re mounted on every aircraft carrier in the world - both US and otherwise - and we’ve fielded trailer mounted variants for at least 20 years. They were using them in Iraq to blow mortar rounds out of the air.

We have automated systems on vehicles capable of identifying a tank round traveling 1,700 meters per second via radar, figure out whether it’s going to hit or miss the vehicle, and fire an explosive at it to neutralize it if it is, all within a span of about 300 milliseconds.

The biggest issues with drones are largely man portable solutions and things that don’t send thousands of rounds of lead into the sky to rain down on a population center. Drones are small enough to fly indoors and cheap enough to be deployed in swarms. Figuring out how to counter those aspects is probably where the most energy is going to be spent.

But they’ll also toe the party line, no matter what that line is or who’s drawing it. I’ve known enough “I’m a Republican. I vote for the nominee” conservatives in my life to know that.

In the US, the system is overwhelmed in large part thanks to the financial side pushing for ever increasing patient loads and reduced staff. So nurses are saddled with more patients than they can safely take care of because an empty bed is lost profit. This has a cascade effect because staff are leaving the industry as a whole because of the understaffing, stress, and poor pay/life balance.

I don’t know if the ACA has the same tax as your system does, but I know my state also has a tax penalty if you’re not covered by insurance. The upside to this, though, is that the state offers insurance. It’s not a great system (before you even get into the plague of issues with the finer points of the system), but it’s better than just leaving people to fend for themselves.

I’m in Massachusetts and can report much the same here. Outside the cities, there’s plenty of MAGA maniacs. You could see “Trump 2020” flags still up all throughout Biden’s term in spots.

Half of the people who voted*

Trump got about the same number of votes this time as he did in the previous election (marginally less, I believe).

It makes little difference to point out, but it’s good to remember that the Dems are a bunch of feckless corporate shills who lost the support of their voters, and about a third to half the country simply doesn’t vote.

Trump is a symptom and the end result of deeply systemic and cultural issues here, and as an American, I hope you guys make it hurt. Maybe then we’ll wake up to the problems here. I doubt it, but at least the economic collapse here will hopefully spare the rest of the world from a dementia patient with daddy Putin’s leash on his collar swinging the biggest military budget in the world around like he’s got something to compensate for.

This country was a mistake…

Yes, but the internationally recognized name is the Gulf of Mexico. It has that history behind it that even Americans agree with. Trump might as well have decreed that it should be called the Gulf of Trump and that the state of New Mexico is now South Colorado.