Tch tch tch, those damn self combusting, self immolating Teslas.

Someone should probably just ban them all, astoundingly unsafe, especially the cybertrucks.

Sorry to hear you’re in a similar situation with family, but at the same time, happy to hear your story, to commiserate, to have an impromptu therapy session haha.

Do… do you think…

That a person working… at Walmart…

… has the financial resources…

… to sue Walmart?

I had a hunch, looks like I was basically right.

I… come from a family that’s… well let me just put it this way:

The last time I talked to my dad, I think 3 years ago now at this point, he was fully, fully down the QAnon rabbit hole, told me about how Tom Hanks’ son rapes and kills children, after extracting their adrenochrome… and he then proceeded to show me how he partially mills, taps, and assembles AR 15s and 18s in his garage, having sourced parts that don’t have serial numbers… thats what you call a ghost gun.

He is exactly the kind of person that does these 180 flip flops and … either doesn’t remember he did, or has an elaborate nonsensical excuse/explanation.

I am unfortunately way, way too familiar with basically nearly every right wing conspiracy theory that’s existed in the last 40 years.

… I actually have Jewish cousins, and … yeah, basically since as long as I can remember, he’s made bigoted ‘jokes’ either behind their backs or occasionally even actually at family functions.

My dad is my archetype for MAGA people: an abusive alcoholic narcissist asshole with no friends, who is never wrong, proficient in gaslighting, life didn’t go the way he wanted it to, and it’s all the fault of whoever right wing AM radio/ Fox News/ insane facebook posts and shit tier ‘journalist’ grifters told him to be mad at in the last week.

… thats all probably a bit more info than necessary, but I’m still pretty traumatized from a life time of that, and venting helps lol.

I don’t think that’s what is meant by that comment.

Back about a decade ago now, the USS Liberty ‘incident’ was a bugaboo of Alex Jones and many other right wing conspiracy theorist types…

…who were correct in that yes, that is a thing that happened, it was basically covered up for decades, and almost no one knew about back in the 00’s and 10’s, and that the Israeli government and AIPAC have a huge amount of influence over US politicians and political discourse generally…

… but were very incorrect in then just slap dashing it into their growing conspiracy centric view of the entire world, which very, very often actually was just anti-semitic generally, utterly oversimplifying and overnarrativizing their understanding of ‘how things actually work’ into insane nonsense.

Fast forward 10 years, and basically all the people that were really concerned about the USS Liberty attack, you know, anti-Israeli government/military… well now they are basically all ardent Trump supporters, they all love violent Israeli genocidal expansionist Zionism, but also somehow simultaneously think Trump is … anti-war or something?

I am of course guessing and cannot read Birch’s mind… but yeah, if you come from a right wing upbringing and then later realized how bs that worldview is, like myself, and possibly like Birch…

It is indeed quite notable how much of a total 180 shift that is, amongst the right wing conspiracy theory types, and I think that is what they are referring to.

I don’t think they are saying that those (mostly liberals, progressives and leftists) who’ve been vocally opposed to the Israeli genocide of Gaza (and everything else its now grown into) in the past few years suddenly changed their opinions about that in the last few months.

Not a VPN, but you may also want to look into I2P.

https://i2pd.website/

https://proprivacy.com/privacy-service/guides/i2p-guide

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FNp0TRDG0BQ

Basically, a p2p protocol for the entire internet.

Its considerably more complicated to set up than most modern VPNs, where nowaday’s its usually as simple as install an app with a GUI, verify some settings and you’re good to go, and i2p is also quite slow…

… but its totally free, and you can torrent over it, and as far as I know, if you’ve set it up properly, it is basically undetectable by ISPs, due to how it uses ‘garlic’ routing: basically, a whole bunch of users net requests are encrypted, anonymized, and then smashed into a big packet… so an ISP would have to untangle all of that for every packet, and afaik, none of them have figured out how.

I2P would obviously be horrible for watching streaming content though, snail speed.

Link to the song, for those who don’t know the reference.

Its actually perfect. No notes. No possible improvements.

This deserves some kind of award.

‘Wondering’ is a conclusion neutral, unbiased exploration of possibilities.

You used the verb ‘bet’ in your post, as in, you already have a conclusion from that wondering that you’re convinced is more likely than not.

So yeah, you got called out for making a prediction that flies in the face of the actual data, because you didn’t bother to read that data, and now you are backpedalling via describing your actions with less direct and intentional verbiage than you actually initially used.

You weren’t ‘wondering’.

Wondering would be done by maybe asking what the potential effects of modern social media are on younger generations, by maybe positing multiple possibilities, then trying to evaluate them all against the same standards of evidencd.

You were asserting. Being willfull.

You’ve done the first 3 lines of the narcissists prayer already.

That didn’t happen.

And if it did, it wasn’t that bad.

And if it was, that’s not a big deal.

And if it is, that’s not my fault.

And if it was, I didn’t mean it.

And if I did, you deserved it.

Thanks. =)

Enjoy your … entirely restful lie down… Brave Little Hitachi Wand.

lol

np! =]

Aw, been a while since someone’s complimented me, thank you!

Yes, I too fucked up the city planning stuff a good deal until eventually… it clicked.

It isn’t the same game as Civ, a lot of the sort of ingrained ideas you don’t even realize are baked into your subconcious from playing Civ a lot… will lead you to knee jerk, make the kind of ‘well obviously i do this in this situation’ decisions…

and yeah, then get slapped with ‘nope, no workey’.

But… if you stick with it… just like you probably did, many moons ago, with Civ, you can absolutely get much more skilled.

You must empty your mind of false notions you didn’t even realize you had, before you can begin to fill it with correct ones, haha.

Its funny you bring up stellaris… i spent like a month just utterly failing until that ‘click’ moment.

Then, a few months of ‘i am actually decent at this’ and then a few more months till ‘actually this is boring because i win by stupid margins every time on anything but the most absurd difficulties, and in those games its pretty much a completely random dice roll of surviving early game or not due to the absurd early game ai bonuses… and then by mid to late game, the AI is just literally too stupid to engage in 80% of the micromanagement strategies i am using to snowball’.

I never played the demo, started with the full game… maybe a couple weeks after launch.

As I said in another reply, yeah, it absolutely was rough on a technical level for the first few months, a good number of actually fairly common edge cases where the game’s systems would break, things wouldn’t actually work as intended, as described by the game itself.

But, after about 6 months, they fixed basically all of these… and didn’t really even have to do like major tweaks to the balancing of the game… the problems were technical implentations of the designed game, and once they got those ironed out, the game as envisioned was now actually the game as it performed.

Go pull up the steam store page right now: Overall score is still ‘Mixed’ it did indeed have a rough launch… but Recent Reviews are ‘Very Positive’.

The people that bothered to stick with it… well they seem to very much like where the game is now.

So, I’d say yes, the general consensus of people still playing it is that it did indeed improve significantly.

Also, its pretty undeniable that 2K, Civ 7, very much did try to ape some, but not all, of the changes that Humankind put on what is basically the Civ formula, that just never occured to them.

The entire concept of you and other players basicslly just having the avatar of your civilization remain the same for all time, but the civilizations themselves change, with historical eras?

Thats one of the most obviously visible differences between Humankind and any Civ game that existed … prior to Civ 7.

It is also, somewhat ironically, one of the main reasons those initial reviews of Humankind were ‘Mixed’: a whole lot of Civ fans just thought the whole idea was stupid, and were vocal about it.

… And then Civ 7 does the same idea, but more watered down, with only 3 eras, 3 different civs per playthrough, as opposed to Humankind’s … well basically 6 + 1, where that + 1 represents your pre-civilization nomadic tribe/culture, basically playing a fairly different kind of game, prior to building your first real city and thus advancing to your first choice of civilization.

Also, worth throwing in here I guess: Advancing through eras works with a similar mechanic as to racing to build wonders in Civ: You can only have one player as each civ at a time, so if you really want to have first dibs and the full range of civs to choose from, you have to be the first to era advance, otherwise another player may beat you to it and pick the one you were planning on.

But, it also works differently than wonders: Wonders are just built by a city in Civ. Eras in Humankind are advanced by earning points for completing basically era specific mini objectives… and you have a range of different options to choose from, maybe you go for numerous easier objectives, or focus on a few, more difficult ones.

… Its possibly actually more concerning than the idea that the giant orange man baby has access to the nukes and that Elon fired all the people in charge of… you know, maintaining and guarding the nukes.

You can cause almost as much damage across the country and entire world by giving an idiot the keys to the USD money printer, and its a lot easier for an idiot to do that damage via monetary debasement than it is for them go DEFCON ‘time to kill everyone everywhere spectacularly’ with the nukes.

You very, very obviously didn’t read the paper or even the article summarizing it.

Basically, what the paper found is that all groups, regardless of birth era… their narcissistic traits lessen overtime as any individual ages.

But also… Boomers are still, as in, after doing most of their ageing… more narcissistic than any other generational cohort that came after them.

Meaning they were even more narcissistic in early adulthood than they are now, that level of narcissism leveled off a bit as they aged… and they are still more narcissistic than younger generations, despite younger generations having not aged out of as much of their narcissism.

Its a longitudinal study, which means that they looked at studies that tracked psychological narcissism scores of the same individuals over many decades, in addition to running all the proper math to come to statistically significant conclusions.

… Thats a lot of words to say: Found the boomer.

Did you know being overly defensive is a prime trait of narcissism? They call it ‘hypersensitivity’ in the study, a maladaptive form of narcissism.

You would if you’d read any of the sources.

But you didn’t, which … makes also sense for a narcissist.

‘Willfullness’ is another defined narcissistic trait the study goes over, which is basically the extent to which you feel you must impose your ideas and beliefs on others.

Its a lot easier to be willfull when you just entirely disregard facts that are inconvenient to your opinions.

Anyway, I’ll take the actual science over a boomer providing factually baseless, useless conjecture, in a condescensing tone, based on a hunch, without evidence.

Thanks for proving my point!

(PS, the incredibly narcissistic people you see on social media all the time are always in your face because the algorithms automatically select for and hyper promote and popularize the most egotistical and narcissistic personas, due to their propensity to turn their own lives into drama filled reality tv plot lines, all on their own!)

(Its the algorithmic method of automatically producing soap opera / reality TV grade slop, because outrage and drama are the most effective ways to draw a large audience.)

(Its entirely unrepresentative of the 99.99% of people who use social media and never go viral, an actual perfect example of the selection bias that you apparently do not think that you, as a social media user, are subject to … despite you describing how social media algorithms tailor the content they serve to each individual, specifically.)

Well, you see, the boomers are finally having a generally harmful and cruel policy/leader/platform they’ve supported for decades because it makes them feel validated… actually affect them personally in a negative way, so now the lizard brain is activated, and they become angry.

The narcissist can’t actually empathize, only sympathize. A narcissist is the only person that exists, every one else is all ‘other people’.

Yes, I am speaking generally, obviously not all boomers are like this… but boomer is a mindset, a mindset of privelege, inherent superiority, coddling, demanding respect far more than you deserve, never being wrong or needing to learn anything and update your world knowledge, and always, always, offering useless, ineffective advice in a condescending, infallible tone.

… It’s just that that mindset is more common in American boomers than any other generational cohort.

https://www.scarymommy.com/boomers-more-narcissistic-than-millennials-study-says

Journal Link:

https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpag0000379

Actual Full PDF of study in (via?) google scholar:

https://files.osf.io/v1/resources/bf7qv_v1/providers/osfstorage/5defaab9e82e20000c060af5?action=download&direct=&version=1

You don’t have to tell me, I know.

Thats why I’m … vent-splaining? on lemmy.

I haven’t talked to my MAGA father in almost 3 years now. He fell all the way down the QAnon rabbit hole, and … is just delusional, just insane.

I spent literal years, years going through every single nonsense belief he had, showing him its actual origin, explaining in detail, tracing the entire evolution of the story from proximal exposure to root source… that its always either entirely baseless speculation, often based on no actual evidence, or a wildly spun out of context story that leaves out 90% of the important details and context, just focusing on a highly misleading cherry picked narrative.

It doesn’t matter. He picks up insane nonsense and instantly believes it 10x faster than I can debunk it, he lies and says he’s not reading some non credible news source for a month and then comes at me with a story he only could have gotten from that news source, when you actually corner him in an argument he laughs and instsntly switches back to some other insane nonsense I already debunked months ago but he forgot about that.

Talking to a MAGA person is worse than talking to a wall, its talking to a zombie who is only decaying in the brain, a cult member thats in denial they’re in a cult.

Err… well, without any mentions of specific gripes or difficulties you are having… entirely seriously, actually play through with the tutorial enabled.

There are 3 different tutorial settings:

No tutorial

Moderate tutorial (ie, you’ve played some Civ games and want to mainly focus on what is different in Humankind)

Full tutorial (baby step you through everything like you’ve never played any kind of turn based 4x before)

The middle of the road tutorial does a pretty good job of highlighting and explaining systems and actions that work differently from Civ, or are just entirely not present in Civ, but doesn’t hold your hand through every single basic concept that you would already be familiar with as an experienced Civ player.

EDIT: Beyond that, I guess uh… a lot of the game sub systems kind of work… similarly to a lot of Civ game mechanics, but not quite the same, in some cases, significantly differently.

For starters, your civ progresses as you unlock new ages, but your leader stays the same. NPC leaders have a set of traits that affect their demeanor in diplomacy, as well as give them varying kinds of buffs for their gameplay.

These NPCs and their traits are actually classed by the total score of their cumulative traits, basically just a few minor traits are ‘easy’, up to a whole lot of powerful traits as ‘hard’. You can pick to play against easier or harder NPCs as you like.

You can also unlock traits for your own leader by basically doing in game achievements.

But uh yeah, get used to the idea of swapping civs situationally as your progress through ages… or you can sort of ‘prestige’ a civ beyond its roughly historically accurate age, if you want a buff to … i think its your renown or fame score generation the purple one lol. In some situations, it might make more sense to continue with the unique units, buildings, and sometimes civ specific gameplay mechanics through an age.

Other stuff uh…

City planning is pretty important, Humankind uses a multi tile approach to cities, where you can plop down varying kinds of districts and unique buildings according to the terrain around the actual city center. You may have to balance between urban design/zoning that is super efficient in the short run, but actually inefficient in the medium or longer run, as well as defensive structures, which you’ll may want to place on a choke point tile, even if it would be highly productive with a non military structure on it.

Human kind uses a heigh layered terrain approach, with I think 7 different heights. A height 6 tile right adjacent to a height 1 tile will have an impassable cliff on that border. I like to play with more extreme height variations so as to both make the world feel larger in that land traversal takes longer, things like mountain passes and terrain chokepoints become as relevant as they often are in the real world, and it offers more interesting battles.

Rivers are in tiles, not borders between them. This makes crossing rivers more time consuming and annoying… but plays well into the rest of the games combat systems… also, if you embark on a river tile early game, this is basically the representation of building small makeshift boats… and now you can move much faster up or down a river, which is very much in line with how many real world civilizations used rivers as basically logistics highways.

There’s also a system of regions, basically. You can assign a few cities to be connected to the same major city, and then basically micromanage the entire region of cities to coordinate their production to subsidize each other, in various ways. If you do this well, you can benefit greatly, but if you either screw it up or don’t take advantage of it, you can be at a comparative disadvantage to other players.

… theres a whole lot of stuff that is different than Civ games, I could type for hours lol.

This is infuriatingly disrespectful… just fucking sickening.

They already scrubbed Ira Hayes.

What the fuck are they gonna do next, rename every Army helicopter?

They are all either officially named, or given an… official-unofficial name, after native tribes or chiefs as a sign of respect for their determination, tenacity and ferocity in combat.

Blackhawk.

Chinook.

Kiowa.

Little Bird.

Shawnee.

Choctaw.

Cheyenne.

… and the Commanche and Arapaho, though those never went into full scale production/adoption.

The Huey is actually named the Iroquois, it’s just that its original designation of UH-1 got … nickname-ized and became more prevalent.

…

Oh my fucking god.

https://www.jbsa.mil/News/News/Article/2404797/why-do-army-helicopters-have-native-american-names/

This was the page that described what I am talking about with helicopter naming conventions.

… they literally just affixed ‘dei’ to the page’s name, pointed the old page to redirect to this dei- affixed page, and are then manually refusing to serve anything with dei- affixed to it.

… anger noises …

If you wanna see a full list well I guess now you gotta go to wikipedia because Trump and Elon are racist fuck sticks.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._military_equipment_named_for_Native_Americana

Copying my comment from this same story, other thread on another instance/community:

…

These actual mouth breathing morons have no idea what they are even attempting to describe.

…

https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/does-the-federal-reserve-own-or-hold-gold.htm

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_certificate_(United_States)

…

The Federal Reserve doesn’t actually own, nor physically possess, any physical gold, that they could just sell off or speculate with.

When FDR outlawed gold private ownership in 1934, all physical gold was handed over to the US Treasury, and the Federal Reserve (and other banks) were given gold certificates, valued at $42.22… per ounce… a set value that hasn’t changed, and is used for the Fed’s modest valuation of its previously held gold reserves… which are utterly insignificant and dwarfed by the other assets it holds.

(This isn’t super current, but it gives you an idea. Light blue is gold certificates. Its a one pixel thin line at the bottom. The overall balance is even more huge than this now after Covid, and Gold Certs, even if they were revalued from $42.2222 to the current market rate, would basically be small, it would go from about 10 billion to 750 billion, when the Fed’s current total assets are about 7 trillion)

About 5% of the US Treasury’s gold is held at the New York Fed, but the Fed doesn’t own it, it’s just there because there is a vault there. The rest of the US’s gold is physically held at Treasury operated locations.

…

What the Fed does own are Gold Certificates, back from 1934, which are still valued at the old $42.2222 price, in terms of the Fed calculating its own balance sheet.

To… have the US gov… order the Fed to sell off its gold certificates… that’s not a thing the US gov can actually legally do, not without asserting total direct control over the Fed, and thus basically instantly making its existence pointless…

Again, to repeat, the US government cannot legally command the Fed to sell off its gold certificates, the Fed cannot legally sell its gold certificates, nor could said certificates be legally exchanged for actual physical gold from the US Treasury.

This would be approximately analagous to the US government ordering a corporation to sell off its own capital assets and then just sending the money from that sale to a government account.

It is expropriation.

For this to be any kind of legal, they’d have to repeal or greatly amend … at least the laws that established the Federal Reserve, and the Gold Reserve Act, likely many more… or basically do a whole bunch of rat fuckery to get their own people in positions on various Fed Reserve boards, and possibly prevent other people on Fed Reserve boards from actually voting on motions.

This would amount to basically performing a coup on the US’s central banking system, and putting total control of the monetary system within the Treasury.

…

This would upend the century old bedrock of the US’s financial system.

Now, I am no full, uncritical advocate of the Federal Reserve system in its current form… but this is what it is, a complete usurpation of the US’s existing monetary system, which would then be put in charge of the astoundingly incompetent current administration.

This is how you get hyperinflation.

This is quite literally fucking with the money at its most fundamental level.

This is how you speed run destroying the USD as the world reserve currency.

…

tldr;

This isn’t only stupid in the sense of ‘sell gold to buy bitcoin’ is a dubious investment strategy, it is particularly stupid in that if the actual pursued strategy is ‘force the Fed to sell its gold certificates’…

(to who? its not legal for any private entity to ‘purchase’ them at the market rate for gold, nor is it legal for said hypothetical purchaser, not even the Fed, to actually redeem them for physical gold, nor is it even legal for the Fed to sell them even of its own accord!)

… then that method blows up the entire concept of a legally defined, semi-independent Federal Reserve, and that then blows up the entire basis of the US monetary system.