The problem is that the broader Democratic electorate is a much bigger tent, with overall much more moderate politics, than online leftists are typically willing to admit. We’re still only eight years past an election where Hillary Clinton took the Rust Belt for granted, and we all paid the price for that when traditionally solid union votes swung to Trump because he was boosting fossil fuel extraction while Clinton implicitly threatened the livelihoods of families dependent on coal and fracking jobs.

Healthcare you have a point on, but also keep in mind that the last time Dems had the votes for sort of sweeping reform was 2008, and what we got out of that was the ACA, which for all its faults was still a big step up over the status quo. Obama was going for a big bipartisan win, in spite of McConnell’s announcing that he was killing bipartisanship in the GOP caucus, and that was a mistake, but perhaps an understandable one given that up to that point that’s how Congress had always worked.

There have been windows of time since in which Dems have held the Presidency and both houses of Congress, but never with enough margin to defeat a Senate filibuster, and with DINOs like Manchin and Sinema standing in the way of filibuster reform. I do not doubt that progressives in Congress would move an M4A or public option bill through the legislature if, in 2025, the House flips back and the Senate stays Democratic in spite of the unfavorable cycle, but withholding your vote doesn’t get you any closer to that happening.

Please be moddable…

FWIW there is a cottage industry for OnStar disable/delete mods for GM vehicles. It can be done, usually without breaking too much else of the car’s electronic functionality.

I agree, this is a good use of the live service model to improve the gameplay experience. Previous entries in the Flight Simulator series did have people purchase and download static map data for selected regions, and it was a real pain in the butt – and expensive, too. Even with FS2020 there is a burgeoning market for airport and scenery packs that have more detail and verisimilitude than Asobo’s (admittedly still pretty good) approach of augmenting aerial and satellite imagery with AI can provide.

Bottom line, though, simulator hobbyists have a much different sense of what kind of costs are reasonable for their games. If you’re already several grand deep on your sim rig, a couple hundred for more RAM or a few bucks a month for scenery updates isn’t any big deal to you.

My wife is in the “they’re false-flag psyops” camp, whereas my position is “the ourobouros is eating its own tail.”

TLDR: the polio vaccine used to contain weakened versions of the three strains of poliovirus. When weakened live virus vaccines are used, the people inoculated with them shed copies of those viruses, which is usually no big deal… except that one of those weakened polio strains would, very rarely, mutate back into its full-strength form and sicken unvaccinated people living around those who were being vaccinated.

Eight years ago, the decision was made to remove the problematic strain of polio from the vaccine, because it was thought low wild infection rates meant that the risk of vaccination-derived infection had become higher than catching it from the environment. Regrettably, it seems that decision was made in error – type 2 polio outbreaks have soared since then.

I’m bleeding, making me the victor!

I had quite a bit of fun with it for a few weekends with my friends, but ultimately the lack of a system for mechanical progression left it feeling a bit shallow (ha!). As a primarily PvE game with light PvP it’s in a weird place where it doesn’t have quite enough RPG-like elements to hold my interest on the PvE side, or enough player-on-player combat to make it a gripping contest of skill.

It’s still a fun game to hop into from time to time, but it’s never been appointment gaming for me

Right now Intel and AMD have less to fear from Apple than they do from Qualcomm – the people who can do what they need to do with a Mac and want to are already doing that, it’s businesses that are locked into the Windows ecosystem that drive the bulk of their laptop sales right now, and ARM laptops running Windows are the main threat in the short term.

If going wider and integrating more coprocessors gets them closer to matching Apple Silicon in performance per watt, that’s great, but Apple snatching up their traditional PC market sector is a fairly distant threat in comparison.

Rotovap on a flytrap.

10

Lindsey Graham is a piece of shit, but he’s an entertaining piece of shit. Not to mention, he’s like the yappy little Chihuahua that barks bloody murder at whoever the bigger dog he’s hiding behind doesn’t like – I’m pretty sure I could get him on side to shit-talk Thomas to his face for at least the last half of the flight.

Lies! The only way to participate in political discourse is to demand rigid adherence to every point of dogma promoted by my idealized conceptual political system of choice – only by maximizing ideological purity can we achieve a world worth living in!

Quite sure – and given that one game I’ve been playing lately (and the exception to the lack of shooters in my portfolio) is Selaco, so I ought to have noticed by now.

There’s a very slight difference in smoothness when I’m rapidly waving a mouse cursor waving around on one screen versus the other, but it’s hardly the night-and-day difference that going from 30fsp to 60fps was back in Ye Olden Days, and watching a small, fast-moving, high-contrast object doesn’t make up the bulk of gameplay in anything I play these days.

The old one and the new one are literally side by side on my desktop, don’t know what to tell you…

At launch the 360 was on par graphically with contemporary high-end GPUs, you’re right. By even the midpoint of its seven year lifespan, though, it was getting outclassed by midrange PC hardware. You’ve got to factor in the insanely long refresh cycles of consoles starting with the six and seventh generations of consoles when you talk about processing power. Sony and Microsoft have tried to fix this with mid-cycle refresh consoles, but I think this has honestly hurt more than helped since it breaks the basic promise of console gaming – that you buy the hardware and you’re promised a consistent experience with it for the whole lifecycle. Making multiple performance targets for developers to aim for complicates development and takes away from the consumer appeal

Eh… Consoles used to be horribly crippled compared to a dedicated gaming PC of similar era, but people were more lenient about it because TVs were low-res and the hardware was vastly cheaper. Do you remember Perfect Dark multiplayer on N64, for instance? I do, and it was a slideshow – didn’t stop the game from being lauded as the apex of console shooters at the time. I remember Xbox 360 flagship titles upscaling from sub-720p resolutions in order to maintain a consistent 30fps.

The console model has always been cheap hardware masked by lenient output resolutions and a less discerning player base. Only in the era of 4K televisions and ubiquitous crossplay with PC has that become a problem.

Might just be my middle-aged eyes, but I recently went from a 75Hz monitor to a 160Hz one and I’ll be damned if I can see the difference in motion. Granted that don’t play much in the way of twitch-style shooters anymore, but for me the threshold of visual smoothness is closer to 60Hz than whatever bonkers 240Hz+ refresh rates that current OLEDs are pushing.

I’ll agree that 30fps is pretty marginal for any sort of action gameplay, though historically console players have been more forgiving of mediocre performance in service of more eye candy.

If Kamala and Walz are my neighbors, we’re gonna bully the shit out of Walz about spice levels at the next neighborhood cookout and have a grand old time.

Conversely, I’d probably go bankrupt from bullshit lawsuits over the maintenance of my lawn if I was stuck between the other two.

Alas, I was so looking forward to hearing them parrot the talking points of acclaimed Leninist… (checks notes) … JD Vance.

Conservatism is about preserving a historical social order, rather than existing conditions generally. Acknowledging an environmental change and altering the structure of the economy to prevent it threatens the social order that allows oil companies, chemical companies, and auto manufacturers to be some of the wealthiest and politically powerful entities in the world.

Further, in the short term, ignoring climate change preserves the status quo for the wealthy and powerful. In the long term, though, it only really becomes an existential threat to those who are not positioned to profit from it – look at Nestle attempting to take control of water supplies for an early example of what this might look like. Cataclysm is a life-and-death issue for the masses. For the powerful, it’s an opportunity.