Your house gets to have a yard?

If it isn’t carved into a sheet of limestone using the Mayan character set, I don’t want to read about it.

Upset we didn’t get a “Half a score, two years, two months, and four days ago…”

M2F transition drug

Kids in 1990s thinking they’re going to be counterculture badass: “I’m gonna to sell dope every day. Get rich, diamonds on my teeth, pimped out ride, straight to Hollywood and Vine. Ain’t no pig gonna fuck with me, clack-clack-clack!”

Kids in the 2020s thinking they’re going to be counterculture badass: “I’ve created a series of dropsites across the city to clandestinely request Estracil. Laying low, blending in, and building a network of allies who can smuggle people out of the country if they’re targeted by the police.”

the kind of phenotype that will produce the most offspring

That’s only beneficial when your children are an asset to community survival. Predators tend to produce fewer offspring, because every new member of the predator cohort is an eventual rival. Prey species benefit from large populations when the populations’ role is to terraform territory or otherwise synergize with their kin. This is a big fundamental difference between animal and plant reproduction, since plants generally benefit from more members of the species in the immediate area while animals have a soft ceiling on their population tied to how much food / shelter is available.

One could argue that the human habit of terraforming and the synergy enjoyed by a large population of active brains in a small area puts us more in line with plant species than animals.

The Survival of the Fittest trope is flawed on a whole host of levels. The idea that you want a small number of apex predators as a survival mechanic neglects all the instances in which a very large number of prey species perform significantly better.

While technically true, you’re neglecting that a lot of these agencies employ quotas and performance awards and other metrics to track and promote the more hustler-mindset goons while dumping the less enthusiastic. That’s been at the heart of the DOGE campaign - finding and removing anyone who might potentially obstruct the administration’s agenda in any agency suspected of hosting opposition bureaucrats.

The purges guarantee the admin can bring in loyalists, more dedicated to the optics of the administration than the role of the office. The performance metrics produce a high rate of false positives in investigations, arrests, and prosecutions. But that’s not a bug in this system, its a feature. The “oops I’m bad at my job” strategy of internal disruption isn’t a bad one on its face, but it is also not one higher ups aren’t fully aware of (and often unjustifiably paranoid about). When the fascist regime begins to fail and starts searching for scapegoats, some of the first they pounce on are the incompetent or unenthusiastic agents on the inside.

That’s a big reason why mid-level bureaucrats best serve the system by exiting it entirely. Simply leaving an empty desk does more to clog the gears than doing a mediocre job in the role. And you’re not around to take the heat when a Trump AG feels the need to arrest a judge or prosecute a prosecutor for failing to torment local residents fast enough.

We’ve surpassed evolution for fuck’s sake

We’ve become self-aware, but the evolutionary impulses persist. Ecological pressures don’t vanish because you begin to understand them. We can adapt rapidly - even within one or two generations - to enormous changes in the ecology. But these are still responses and they still exert evolutionary pressure on the population.

Nevermind that most people still don’t actually understand evolution in a manner that benefits them individually. The idea is only useful at the social level, via community-spanning collective actions and policies.

But then you introduce parasitic organisms, which prey on the more selfless and mutualist functions of complex species. And you end up with a cyclical rise and fall of survival strategies.

Predator organisms proliferating in periods of organic wealth and collapsing when they’ve depleted the reserves.

Meanwhile, prey organisms trade their mutualist reproductive impulses for traits that are defensive and alienating from their kin… until the predator collapse, at which point they can open up again.

Optional survival varies with the historical movement, which is driven by the strategies that preceded that moment.

Fitness isn’t a solved problem, it is a constantly moving target.

The Senate passes a lot of bugnuts bills. Watch the House calendar if you want to see what has a chance of actually passing. It took Abbott nearly a decade to get his watered down voucher bill through, in large part because the calendars committee guy hated the idea and would book the legislation at the tail of every session.

there are the likes of South of Midnight and Clair Obscur launching at $50.

Beautiful games, both. But again, they aren’t having the full court press of advertising like a new Call of Duty or Final Fantasy or Diablo would.

That’s the real cost savings. You don’t need to change $80+ for a game if you aren’t focused entirely on presale figures to justify your studio’s budget.

Incidentally, you also get to focus on a better game. Balatro didn’t need wall to wall subway ads in New York to end up on everyone’s phones.

Steam doesn’t advertise at the scale of Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. It won’t have a ripple effect because it won’t change the degree to which artificial hype drives people towards the “Buy” button.

$80 on release day. $60 a month later. $40 a year later. $20 a year after that.

What you’re paying for isn’t the game, its the hype. An enormous component of a modern AAA game’s budget is just advertising. That’s what your $80 is going towards. You’re paying to have people tell you to buy it.

Even assuming you don’t feel like pirating… Just be patient, play something that came out a few years ago, wait for the next Steam Sale, and own the game for pennies on the dollar.

The gross display of militarism is what brought the world to the brink of destruction during WW1.

So… obviously we cannot, no. If anything, we’re going to see more military parades in the coming months. You can guarantee the US is going to be an absolute orgy of flag draped tanks and helicopter fleets and blue angels air shows in time for its 250th anniversary.

Did all of the Trump stuff happen under Bush, and we were shielded from most of it because he didn’t say it out loud?

It was all widely reported and remarked upon for the better part of the Bush Presidency. But liberals just choose to forget. We don’t talk about the gross abuses of power and manipulation of public opinion under Bush or Reagan or Nixon anymore. And if you bring it up, you’re discounted as a crank or an apologist.

America has been compromised for a long time.

Practically since Day One. You can find parallels to this historical moment running straight back to the Adams administration. American liberal democracy is deeply flawed and fundamentally broken, thanks to the privatization and monopolization of so much of the social infrastructure surrounding it.

But we generate enormous amounts of wealth for an enfranchised minority. So please don’t rock the boat. Just vote a bit harder next time. Everything will be fixed in the next election cycle, we promise.

I’m genuinely curious to know whether the majority of Lemmyites believe Tim Pool gets more money from Vladimir Putin’s bagman than Google’s YouTube advertisements and SuperChat kickbacks.

So many Americans do not seem to want to believe their own network of oligarchs have deep pockets and a wide net of social media influencers. As though organizations like DailyWire and One America News Network and the Murdoch suite of publications simply don’t exist. The Mercers, the Adelsons, the Kochs, The Thiel Foundation, The Hoover Institute, the American Enterprise Institute… its like they don’t even exist.

There is one group to blame for all this and it’s not hard to find them

I’m told it is anyone who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000.

Welcome to the future of journalism.

They still can’t top Jeff Gannon but they’re getting very close.