This is why I have stopped buying anything Blizzard. They removed the Warcraft 3 I payed for and replaced it with a completely unplayable something I didn’t want. Ubisoft has been on my shit list for a while for unrelated reasons too, but now they are on my never again list. And I never even played The Crew. Bad business is bad business even if it doesn’t directly impact me.

Starseige Tribes prepared me for this. Let the telefrags commence!

The Juke is the perfect amount of hideous that it flips the bit back to being great. Even the Cube is the right kind of quirky.

The informal name for a vehicle transmission.

Voyage of the Mimi theme song intensifies.

He completely turned his life around and became a martyr hero by killing the most evil person alive at the time, even though it cost him his own life in the process.

I guess that’s one thing you could take from the existence of the Hitler Youth, instead of “holy shit, do NOT do that”.

Thank you for taking the time to discuss this with me, I am finding this very enjoyable and educational.

I agree with Friedman in principle, but then I look at Ford and the other car companies with the Pinto and Takara airbags, etc. The cost of paying lawsuits gets factored in and until the cost point breaks over the deaths and injuries are just a cost of doing business. With regulation that actually has teeth and enforcement, just doing the bodies-to-profits calculations becomes an untenable solution and the recalls happen even if they aren’t profitable. I don’t think a private tort system is capable of having the teeth to achieve this in the real world. It is why Libertarianism still has a central government. It will have its inefficiencies, but it’s a right tool for the right job kind of thing.

Same with asbestos, lead, fillers in food, etc. The damages from them are so divorced from the product that many may not know who or what caused it. Lawsuits have a hard time with those kinds of things even if you know exactly which business is the cause. Look at tobacco and leaded gasoline and myriad others where lawsuits failed initially because damage was difficult to prove before the government stepped in. If fossil fuel companies can pay for the science that muddies the water on climate change, what chance does John Doe have doing enough through a lawsuit to stop DuPont from flooding the planet with forever chemicals?

I like where Friedman is coming from, but I hold him at the same level as Marx or any other economic theorist: assuming a spherical cow, at a specific temperature, without friction, and without wind resistance. I like Henry George the same way. That’s why I still claim to be a libertarian (just a left leaning centrist one), because I think Friedman and George are actually the better end result and closer to a workable solution than Marx. Marx was onto something though, and shouldn’t be dismissed outright. I do think we have stuff to learn from all branches of economic theory, and subscribe to a “the truth will be somewhere in the middle” philosophy.

There is some merit to that, and free education has the same issues in other countries besides Germany. My planning process was to treat the 2 year associates degree like we do with high school, no performance testing or path tracking. Everyone is entitled to a high school diploma of they want one, and with an associates degree being the new high school diploma it makes sense to include it.

It is what we as a society have determined makes the bare minimum education standard for then learning the rest on the job. The employment sector has moved this bar from high school graduate to associates degree, and the education system should reflect that.

The complete abolishment of public everything and allowing the market to dictate and provide is great in theory, but the same was Marxist communism is. There are always those that will break the system for personal gain.

There are also efficiencies of scale that business in a healthy, non mono/duopolostic environment can’t take advantage of that the government can. This is why I put education and healthcare under the “provide for the common defense and well-being of the people” that it exists for. This is why we the taxpayers should be paying for education in what may be or appear totally irrelevant: it results in a net gain as far as expenditure across the country as a whole and makes companies better able to train workers on the job. It also allows easier job transitions allowing more economic mobility, and also helps maintains balance of power between the worker and the employer.

In a libertarian ideal the worker is not trapped working the job or for the specific employer because that is the only job they are trained for and where their healthcare comes from. It is a contract of mutual gain. It is unreasonable for a worker to start over from scratch to change jobs if an employer is not maintaining market wages. It also allows a worker to more easily become an entrepreneur and open his own company, as this requires a broader education basis to succeed at than the job he does for another.

Strong but limited regulation is need to keep markets free. Regulations preventing pollution of the environment as a common resource, truth in representation of goods and services, prevention of anticompetitive actions and regulatory capture., etc. Without this markets inevitably fall to monopoly and the system switches from mutualism to parasitism.

There is a careful balance to maintain and government overreach is just as easy in the other direction. This is true is any economic and sociological system though. Perfectly free laze fair markets do not exist the same way perfectly egalitarian communism doesn’t exist above the small commune level and for the same reasons. Or perfect democracy where everything is voted on by everyone and everyone is making fully informed and educated decisions. If none of these are possible in the real world, all we can do is take the best parts and attempt to create the best possible real world results.

You need solid anticorruption laws the same way you need solid antitrust laws and they need to be liberally enforced. The problem is that neither have been since the 70’s. Regulatory capture by big business is a massive problem, and I am not sure if it is possible to 100% defend against.

I self identify libertarian but lean left. I’d argue that while things like funding higher education may currently be regressive, if free education extended from the current cap of 12th grade to encompass at least an associates level degree you would have a lot more lower and working class taking advantage of it and making it less regressive. With the country having jettisoned it’s manufacturing and blue collar industry, I would further argue this is necessary for the country to compete on the international stage.

The real question is if there was enough backlash to the spyware crap with Civ 6 that they learned their lesson or not.

Roughly 1 in 473,000 if I mathed that right? Why did I not expect that to be half of Australia’s odds? I feel like that should be reversed for some reason, but I guess that’s a good thing for America for once? Obviously should be better, but not as bad as I thought it would be. Now I get the above poster’s worry about Australia though.

1 in 270,000? Ignoring what those odds are actually for, I’d like those numbers. Less than getting struck by lightning, more than a shark attack. More than good enough odds for just about any bet. Not exactly the intention behind thinking about it for a moment, but it was one of those intrusive thoughts…

If only it was as noteworthy for rarity as struck by lightning, instead of the statistic it is.

What do you mean older show, it is part of Cartoon Network’s cartoon cartoons and only started airing when I was in high school.

Oh God… No… It can’t be. The year 2000 was only…

Mr. Stark, I don’t feel so good…

I wish I had a party that even paid lip service to representing my political leanings, but left-libertarians apparently don’t exist in the US. I voted for my district’s Democrat as that was the closest I was going to get this time around, but even that was a protest vote as I am in a conservative bastion. Even if the Democrat party is wrested away from the corporatists, it will be temporary and the problem will repeat

We need to pass graduated voting nation-wide so we can get some viable alternative parties in here. I would love to have viable candidates ranging the gamut from conservative to communist, as that promotes a healthy political ecosystem instead of the current monoculture two party system. Makes a blight like the Christian nationalists or the Trump cult or the “leftist” oligarchs capable of infecting large swaths of the system.

Honestly? I won’t hold my breath, because the only thing that gets unanimous bipartisan support is congressional raises. I doubt we will see any of my suggestions or any campaign finance reform in my lifetime. We can’t even get a majority of elected Democrats to agree that insider trading by Congress should be illegal.

Realistically it’s probably a lost cause, but I will vote for, and campaign for, anyone running with that on their platform. Not supporting ranked choice voting is one of the many, many reasons I voted Democrat and not for my district’s Republican candidate, but that was a substantial issue I looked for in every candidate on my ballot.

Strict campaign finance laws, where all political donations go to a bipartisan elections department and then are split equally between all candidates in graduated stages from the primaries through until the general election. No contributions to candidates directly, no PACs or Super PACs (they can exist but fund everyone equally), no ads paid for outside the provided war chest. Any dark money found results in IRS forensic audits and criminal penalties for the campaigns.

If you want more money for your “side”, you get it at roughly 50% of what you put in. The “other side” gets the other half. Should still drive donations, including mega-doners, because their candidate still gets more money for ads and campaigning. This also allows 3rd party candidates to compete equally at all stages. If we can get graduated polling too this should spur a further plurality of viable candidates.

Political commentary from news and independent “journalism” on places like YouTube would still be covered under free speech, but audits are allowed to look into them being dark money ads with the above consequences for the campaigns.

Foreign ads are what they are unfortunately, but the IRS is good at finding US money laundering through offshore institutions. Make sending money to foreign assets to be spent circumventing these laws especially steep. A few campaign managers and money managers getting 20-life or going to Gitmo for laundering campaign money through Russian agents should help curb some shenanigans.

Yes. All money needs to be removed from politics with the same amount given to all candidates to run with and dark money investigated and prosecuted. Politicians shouldn’t be NASCAR teams, and lobbying should be called what it actually is.

If I didn’t need more proof you are trolling, after accusing me of gaslighting you come back with the “I’m sorry you feel that way”. Thank you for confirming.

You know that that words can have different connotations based on how they are used, and there is a vast difference between using maybe in a sentence like “maybe you want ice cream” and “maybe you should shut up” when used in an argument.

Both still indicate a positive stance or recommendation to the other person, and “maybe you should rethink your positions” can only be taken as the speaker passive aggressively advising the other person to change said positions. Hell, it’s almost impossible to find another connotation to “maybe you…”, as it is almost exclusively used in a passive aggressive manner.

Attempting to claim gaslighting is a cheap cop out, like a TV mob boss saying they didn’t threaten someone when they said “maybe they will encounter a little ‘accident’”. Gaslighting also has a definition, is a form of abuse meant to cause a person to question their sanity and grasp of reality, and I take major offense to being accused of such.

You accuse me of bigotry and either quote other people as if they were me or make up positions you say I hold for said accusations, accuse me in a round about way of white supremacy by saying I think normalness is whiteness, then accuse me of gaslighting for taking your comment as passive aggressive and want to report me for trolling? If this isn’t trolling from you then I feel really sorry for you.