Actual journalists didn't stop doing journalism by choice. They were fired and it's difficult for them to get by without an income.

There are some people left trying to do journalism. Mostly keeping their heads down and hoping that psychopath like Elon Musk don't rip them off while waiting for the public to come back to their senses...

I guess what I'm saying is I'm not blaming the journalists. The propagandists can go fuck themselves. Anyone working for Fox News knows what they are. I dabbled a little in journalism in high school and college and I respect actual journalists. It's a tough and miserable and largely thankless job.

Most of that money was spent bribing politicians because what they're doing is illegal. They also were paying the drivers a reasonable amount of money in order to tell the public that it was okay that all of the traditional protections for workers had been gutted.

So yes Uber did have a short-term amount of money they had to put out in order to do something profoundly illegal and antisocial and something that your great-grandparents died to prevent...

But they weren't losing money because of a lack of profitability or even how much they were paying the drivers. They could have of course competed honestly with the taxi cab system but they were massively underpricing taxi cabs.

So like I said yes paying the driver's okay will cause fares to go up slightly. This means that people who take Ubers for casual use like say I don't feel like driving to the grocery store or kids putzing around in them will no longer be able to afford them. That will more than be made up for by the people who have to take a taxi cab for a variety of reasons. For example every year I go see my eye doctor and I don't have a choice I have to take a cab because everyone I know works during the day so I don't have anyone to drive me in the middle of the week and when they dilate my eyes I'm basically blind. So yes they can double the price of my trip and I will pay it.

But here's the dirty Little secret they already doubled the price of that trip. Because they have a shitload of data and they know I have to pay it

You need to accept that you're wrong. That we can have a decent civilization that pays people a living wage and you won't have to give up your lifestyle for it. That we don't have to torture people just to make you happy.

On the other hand you might not want to accept that because you might be one of those deeply unhappy people who desperately need somebody else to be even more unhappy. I meet a lot of guys like that and they are always anti labor and right wing

People still need cabs. Also Uber is a highly profitable company.

On the other hand if the only way we can have a transportation system is borderline slave labor then you might have a point. But they're not going to curl up and die what's actually going to happen is that the need for cabs is still there the prices are going to shoot up and people are going to have to pay it. Yeah you might have fewer people using them for convenience but when you need to get to the airport you need to get to the airport.

If however our economic system is so dysfunctional that we have to have 15 to 20% in abject poverty for it to be functional then that's not sustainable and there's going to be Mass violence very soon.

And always remember, no matter how good a shot you are or how good a shot you think you are you're always going to run out of bullets before the world runs out of desperate people with nothing to lose.

The part that pisses me off is that the company responsible for the shoddy work flat-out admitted it was their shoddy work. Of course they didn't do this until they were at risk of being under oath but you know how that goes...

And the part that pisses me off is that anyone who pays any attention to Trump has to know or has to at least easily be able to find out that he is constantly lying to them in the most obvious ways imaginable implying he has the lowest opinion of them possible and they still love Trump.

So this may sound insane but you can actually use the internet for something besides getting angry. You can do a little bit of googling and pretty easily confirm what I said.

The point of my comment was I was not aware that Gloria Steinem was a CIA asset at all. Of course no I did not take a handful of Internet comments at face value. But I found it striking enough to be worth doing a little bit more reading.

That's how critical thinking works. You get a new piece of information and you decide if it's worth confirming and if it is then you confirm it.

Journalists used to. If you're a good journalist then somebody should be accusing you of harassment.

In the 2024 election we basically fired all the journalists. And by we I mean the billionaires who own our media. I watched dozens of journalists get dog walked for really basic elementary journalism. The slightest criticism of trump was enough to get you shit canned. It got so bad we created a new term for it, sane washing.

If you've ever wondered why the coverage between Trump's mental decline and biden's mental decline was so different there's your answer.

Back in the day it's what the civil Rights guys called good trouble.

Shows up the break them up... Or at least the pinkertons. Fun fact the Pinkerton detective agency still exists and they are still union busting.

Gloria Steinem died recently. I never paid her much mind I knew the right wing had a giant hissy fit about her all the time. But it turns out the left wing didn't like her either. She was a CIA plant. Like you can do some googling and discover that it's real.

Basically the labor movement and the feminist movement were cross-pollinating so the CIA recruited people from the feminist movement to break that up and they were quite successful. I found this out when I read a few comments sections after she died and people were complaining about that...

It is absolutely crazy that elements of our government have repeatedly been used directly against labor movement in an effort to lower pay and wages and we all just kind of either pretend it's didn't happen or shrug our shoulders and say what are you going to do that's the government? No. That's not the government. That's not how governments are supposed to function. You have to actually take part in politics to keep that shit under control. And you can't just do away with the government because if you try that somebody else will build the same power structures. It's called a power vacuum and you can't pretend it's not a thing. I mean you can but you'll still have the consequences...

It's like finding out that the Federal reserve raising interest rates is how they engineer a recession. And then reading all the euphemisms for that from economists...

I wonder if he accidentally ripped off one of the Trump boys and we just don't know it.

That's what happened with Andrew tate. I don't know the details but he was apparently running around with Barron Trump and caused some problems for the Trumps. So it's off to rot in prison for him.

Is something I find especially infuriating. There was a time long ago when people would put a little effort into the lies they were telling the public but these days they don't even bother.

There's been a massive amount of Media consolidation so if you want to get a message out it is difficult and expensive. Online advertising frankly does not work.

Go look up the history of when Konami left the AAA industry. It was right after metal gear solid 5. It was a successful game and they made money but the folks running the company is just flat out said that if the game had not been a huge success the whole company was going to go under. And they said they didn't want to deal with that pressure.

I bring this up because normally when a company does something like that you get weasel words out of them but Konami was pretty open about it which was unusual.

I kind of feel like you're arguing for the sake of argument at this point. Like you don't believe anything you just wrote you just kind of showed up for an argument like that old Monty Python sketch... Your post has a bunch of bait in it in the form of pot shots at Konami in order to get some outrage and anger going and trigger a response.

It's a weird game people play on the internet. The Internet isn't even all cat videos anymore it's just outrage porn. People looking for reasons to get angry and indulging in that anger. Years ago Facebook and Twitter figured out that that was what monetized people and so here we are all taking part in constant misery. While world falls apart around us because we keep putting pedophiles and rapists in charge of everything for stupid reasons

My Ryzen 5600 is a bit long in the tooth but it's more than up to snuff for anything out there. I'm stuck with an old GTX 1080 I bought used but I could pretty readily upgrade to a 3070 or a 3080 even if there was something I actually wanted to buy but honestly I'm playing old Sega games and digital pinball tables right now.

I did play through the second horizon forbidden Dawn game on that 1080 and it did shrug a little in places even at 1080p low with a couple of the other settings turned on. I would like to try out the new ratchet and clank but by all accounts it's 5 to 10 hours and spending three to $400 on a GPU upgrade for that much game is pretty rough. And I can't justify it because I never did finish the PS3 ratchet and clank games although to be fair that was because I thought the puzzles in the time themed one grinded the game to a halt. I wanted to jump around the levels and shoot stuff.

It's also kind of tough for these companies to compete with a lot of the games that are already out there. I've got Tekken 7 sitting on my hard drive largely unplayed and I do want to give it some more time. I keep meaning to get back into virtual fighter since I haven't really played it since 4 not that I was ever terribly good at it. I gave King of fighters 15 to try and I had fun and there's plenty of people still playing it but I didn't like how the matchmaking system worked. Not who I was getting matched up with but you're basically stuck in training mode or just sitting watching a static screen waiting for a match.

All this is to say there's plenty of other games to play so AAA game has to really grab me and since I'm not a GTA fan I have basically become useless to the AAA industry. I really didn't like the direction final fantasy 16 went though that was a game that might have gotten my attention but all they seem to be doing there is cribbing from elden ring. I played through final fantasy 15 on an RX 580 and it ran great.

So that's kind of the problem a lot of these companies have it's tough to hit critical mass and get enough players to pay for these absurdly huge games that cost $100 million plus to make. The occasional game like clara obscura can make something that takes off for around 20 or 30 million but that's still a big chunk of change to risk. So I don't blame anyone who bows out of the industry

Oh wait you're a troll. You didn't actually want or expect a legitimate response. Sorry. Trump fucks kids or something have fun with that.

They were pretty honest about it. AAA games made a lot of money when they succeeded but it tended to be kind of All or nothing and they just couldn't handle the risk anymore. I can't really blame them you're really betting the entire Farm every time you put out a game that's got to be miserable and high stress.

Sega for example had a string of well received Sonic the hedgehog games none of which they made any money off of. But the brand itself and the movies made a shitload of money to make up for it.

On the other hand the new wolverine game just looks completely unfinished. Like they built the story parts but not the game parts so you've got this elaborate story and no game to go with it. That kind of sucks. It might have just been rushed out to get out the door before GTA 6 though. The entire industry is basically going to shut down for a year or two while people play through that. Kind of like what happened with Skyrim but on a much larger scale

The other major shipping lane. At the rate Trump is going we're going to be the United States of Iran by the middle of his third term.

Is the idea that God punishes everyone for the sins of some people. Like a fucked up all powerful drill sergeant with a violent streak.

If you take this to its logical conclusion then the world has what can be described as a kind of sin thermometer. There's a certain amount of ambient sin in the world and if it gets too high God smites us all.

So if you are an Evangelical then anyone committing sin is an existential threat to you. You of course are minimizing your sin as much as possible but no matter how perfect you are you are always going to send because of The Fall. And you are already as perfect as you're able to get.

So if you are an Evangelical extremist you're going to go around to everyone else who is sinning and fuck their shit up if they don't stop it right now. If all else fails you'll lock them up or kill them. And if you look around it doesn't take much to find Evangelical Christians in America talking about stoning gays to death.

This is the inevitable consequence of right wing extremism where you will push to achieve your goals by any means necessary. Right wing politics fundamentally do not work in the real world and so they inevitably become extremist and destructive. Because as their policy continues to fail right wingers are forced to confront those failures and they have to resort to increasingly extreme measures and increasingly bizarre rationalities and justifications to stay right wing. They could of course stop being right weighing but we wouldn't be having this conversation if they could do that.

So you pretty quickly get people policing every single thing you do in the bedroom and every single substance you imbide and every single thought you have All in a desperate bid to protect them from what they see as a violent power mad deity ready to kill them at the moment's notice.

The fact that dying takes them to eternal Paradise in their worldview doesn't really seem to enter into this either. I guess consistency really is the hobgoblin of somebody's mind right?

He's pretty well hated by voters and even quite a few people in the Republican party but Abbott is very very good at voter suppression so they let him stick around. You can find video if you go looking of Greg Abbott openly admitting that Texas would have gone blue in 2016 if it wasn't for his efforts preventing his opposition from voting. Like just flat-out admitting it on video.

Bizarrely that's not the scandal that dogs him. Honestly I can't remember all the things he's done to pissed people off but you can look them up. Every single political position the man has ever held he has openly abused.