Thanks, fully agree.
Somehow, my post was downranked to -1 Troll, I guess?

BL was groundbreaking as a looter-shooter.
BL2 was probably the pinnacle of the franchise. Great writing, great characters, good story. Child Schmafficking.
Tales was probably the peak writing/narrative delivery.
PreSequel was...we don't talk about the pre-sequel.
BL3 was completely disappointing.
BL4 The fact that Gearbox was militantly woke by this time is basically irrelevant (wrap your trannie franken-unit in the pride flag, I don't care I just want a good game) but their writing has been utter shit since TT. That a $3k PC chugs to run it - is asinine.

Hmm. Lost the end of my sentence there somehow:

And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones who are least likely to spend time filing out a survey

The BLS monthly numbers are always off when the underlying economy is changing rapidly, because of the "birth death problem", meaning that when large numbers of companies are being created or closed (born or died), the surveys that provide the quick data are guaranteed to be quite far off because the surveys go to companies that are already establish, i.e. those that weren't just born and didn't just die. So when there's a lot of market change, they're sampling the part of the market that is changing less. This means the estimates are off, and the faster the economy is changing the further off they are.

A related issue is that the survey results are only a sample, but BLS needs to extrapolate to the entire population of businesses -- but they don't actually know how many businesses there are in the country, much less how many fit into each of the size / revenue / industry buckets. So their extrapolation necessarily involves some systematic guesswork. In normal, stable economic times good guesses are easy because it's not going to be that much different from the prior year and will likely have followed a consistent trend. But when the economy is changing rapidly, that's not true, so the guesses end up being further off the mark.

Second, it's worse when things are turning for the worse, because of something kind of like "survey fatigue", but not. The problem is that when lots of the surveyed companies are struggling, they're focused on fighting for their existence and don't have time to bother filling out voluntary government reporting forms. It's not that they're tired of surveys, but that they just don't have the time and energy to spare. And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones w

The phone thing is a red herring, because these BLS surveys are not conducted over the phone.

A new issue compounding the above is that the BLS was hit hard by DOGE cuts and early retirements. They've lost over 20% of their staff, and the loss in experience and institutional knowledge is far larger than that, because the people who were fired and the people who took the buyouts tended to be very senior. So a lot of the experience that would be used to improve the estimates has walked out the door.

Anyway, the core problem is that the economy is going into the toilet, really fast. The BLS didn't break out how much of the 911,000 fewer new jobs were added 2024 vs 2025, but I'll bet a big percentage were after Trump started bludgeoning American businesses with tariffs. Most of that pain won't really be known until the 12-month report next year, because the monthly reports are going to continue underestimating the rate of change. Well, assuming the BLS staff isn't forced to cook the books, in which case we'll just never know.

I only care insofar as truth matters? Does it to you?

And I don't care what pronouns THEY use; I'm going to use the one that's descriptively factually appropriate. If it upsets them, maybe their bitch is with reality, not me.

I don't give the faintest shit what sort of role-playing someone wants to do in their life.
OTOH If a dude in a dress pretending to be a woman walks into the bathroom while my wife or daughters are in there, I'll make sure he's exiting that bathroom immediately. IDGAF about his kink.

You mean the democratically elected president and congress?
"Authoritarian" does not mean "someone who disagrees with me that is in power".

Maybe if your team stopped loosely throwing around terms like 'authoritarian' 'fascist' and 'nazi' because you're either disingenuous or too stupid to know what real ones look like, fewer people would get assassinated by your psycho crazy allies?

You want to see actual authoritarianism? Watch all 9 hours of Shoah, maybe you'll grow up a little at the same time?

Fully agree.

Pollsters generally are finding people are growing unresponsive to polling generally. Their task relies on the largesse of people's voluntary participation and that's been badly damaged by:
- fatigue: ain't nobody got time for that shit anyway.
- robocalls: nobody, I mean nobody, is going to wait to hear if it's a "real" survey or some marketing bullshit
- political everything: elections now never seem to end
- deliberate skew to polls: I don't know about you, but the last handful of times I bothered to listen, the polls were skewed in a way a 3 year old could tell the way they "wanted" you to answer. "Who will you vote for, our guy that loves puppies or that despicable Nazi?"
- deliberate skew to answers: it's a well-demonstrated effect that one side of the political fence in the US *loves* to overshare their opinions about everything, and the other tends to tell pollsters to fuck off.* This leads to a strong political cleave-line in the responses, and the near-impossibilty of getting an actual representative sample. On this basis, if I were asking a polling company to answer a question for me, I'd be highly suspicious of any answer essentially coming from one voice, not a bellcurve of the population generally.

*fwiw, when I do amuse myself by not hanging up immediately, I generally give them an answer based on a coinflip, to taint their data with noise as best I can. It's mildly amusing to do this as I have to often hastily give contrarian answers to the previous answer I just gave them. Call it an exercise in rhetorical nimbleness. I hate polls.

Ask anyone who lives where it is COLD in the winter, and they try to start their car what happens. ldiots...

Oops, those are the wrong direction. But you get the idea.

Keep these permanently attached to your peripherals. You'll never notice them. They don't qualify as "dongles". I'm curious to hear how these reduce portability.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c...

Keep a few adapters handy. Very tiny, very cheap, very easy. That makes a lot more sense than continuing to put USB-A ports on laptops.

Also, a totalitarian state or doesn't that matter for you?

Genetic offcasts from the complex process of heterosexual reproduction, like someone born without an eye or 2 girls with a merged body below the thoracic vertebrae.
We need to care for them, help them have as normal a life as possible, but there's absolutely no reason to change broadly accepted societal mores for them.

(his)
A human with xy chromosomes is commonly called male and referred to correctly with masculine pronouns in English, no matter what costume he's wearing.

And many to do. It'd be analogous to how, at one point, the British Empire was convinced by Christian militants to put its Navy in the service of ending chattel slavery, and then went and did exactly that.

Too bad they don't make Christian militants like they used to.