I think the first stat in the graph is the most important one and really speaks to the reason for the last one. I said this is another post about this article, but video games have become their own kind of third space. Going out with friends has become so expensive, whether you’re going to a movie or something else, and in a lot of places you can’t go to hang out without having to spend money anyways, so video games have become a replacement way to hang out with friends. And that’s before you start talking about stuff like friends who moved across the country for work or something.

I’m reminded of a comment I saw once where somebody was saying how when they were young, they were told that AI would do the miserable jobs so that people would have more time to make art and poetry, while today the AI makes art and poetry so that we can work longer hours at the miserable jobs.

And the AI bros say that this is just a necessary step towards automating away the crappy jobs, but it’s not like they’ll stop automating everything else if/when AI reaches that point. The AI will still continue to automate away the hyman experience of art and culture for the rich. They’re not going to suddenly decide to implement Luxury Gay Space Communism at that point. They’ll just cram everybody into Kow Loon style ghettos.

That’s…literally how hardkill APS works. CIWS takes the same approach but uses a rotary cannon instead. The issue ain’t putting a missile in the path of the other missile. It’s in having enough time to do so. This is why the US concluded that the most effective way to intercept an ICBM is to destroy it before it finishes its acceleration stages. Ballistics is a known quantity.

Still aren’t convincing that you know what the hell you’re talking about.

Tell me you don’t know what you’re talking about without telling me.

You don’t need to hit the bullet with a bullet. You just hit it with a shotgun blast or grenade, either destroying it outright or blowing it off course enough that it loses its energy and becomes ineffective. We literally do this all the time on tanks and humvees. It’s called a hardkill APS. The Russians had one working in the 70s. Modern ones are capable of detecting incoming tank rounds moving between 700-1700m/s, identifying which will hit the vehicle, and blowing them out of the air once they reach 10-15 meters away. All in a span of nanoseconds. It’s standard equipment on Israel’s MBT, and Germany, the US, and the UK have all field tested various systems and are considering making hardkill systems standard for the next generation of tanks and IFVs. Multiple companies across multiple countries make them for upgrade kits. Germany already produces vehicles with standard hardkill APS for their export market.

This isn’t crazy sci-fi technology. It’s just rocket science.

Barcelona is not the only city in the world that attracts a large number of tourists. Many cities attract more. Yet Barcelona is the only place I see with so many of these xenophobic nutjobs.

Then you’ve never interacted with the locals in these other places. Having grown up in a vacation town, I can tell you right now that the only difference here is that the people with water guns have hit their breaking points.

Have you ever seen the movie Jaws? There’s a small throwaway bit in there where the wife of the chief of police is asking a friend of hers when she gets to be an islander (because the family had recently moved to the island from New York), and her friend responds, “Never. If you weren’t born here, then you’re not an islander.” Having grown up near where that movie was made, that’s 100% accurate to the local sentiment. On that island, they call people who move there “wash ashores” because they feel that they washed up like the flotsam and jetsam on the beach. In my town, we called the rich people who would come up to vacation in their lavish summer homes “snowbirds” because they migrated at the same time as the birds and couldn’t handle the winter weather.

The most consistent thing I’ve found about tourist areas is the negative impact the industry has on the area for locals and the hatred locals feel towards the tourists.

Whether these people are acting rightly or wrongly, they’re trying to hit the government and businesses where it hurts most - their profits - because it’s the only way they’ll ever care about the local problems.

They didn’t say that it doesn’t create jobs. They said that it creates poor paying jobs. Which it does. All those restaurants and shops and guides are low wage jobs, and often, only seasonal jobs as well.

In the vacation town I grew up in, up to 50% of businesses were closed 8 months out of the year. In these kinds of areas, tourism isn’t a boost to the economy. It is the economy. It eats it up until there’s almost nothing left. Any industry that doesn’t serve the tourism is pushed out by the high profit margins of only being open long enough to service the seasonal tourism. I used to work at a fish market in that town that stayed open all year, and outside the tourist season, the boss reduced the hours to half of what they were during the tourist season. Because he couldn’t afford to keep the business running full-time. The store ran at a loss 8 months out of the year, and the busiest day of the tourist season largely kept the place open the rest of the year. It would’ve been more profitable for him to close down, but he stayed open because he didn’t want his local customers and employees to go somewhere else.

Most of the towns in that county are tourist towns, and that county has the highest rates of drug addiction in the state and huge homelessness problems. Because there’s very little to do most of the year since everything is closed, and combine the seasonal labor/low wage tourism industry with the housing stock being bought up by wealthy people for their vacation homes or Air BnBs while apartments prioritize short-term seasonal rentals because of how much more they can charge, and locals can’t afford to live in town anymore. There’s one town there that has a year-round population of 2,000 and can see up to 60,000 people there in the summer. And anybody I’ve ever talked to who has lived in a vacation town has cited the exact same issues consistently - high rates of poverty, homelessness, and drug use/addiction.

Because of the American Puritannical values, which dictate what the credit companies and advertisers are willing to do business with and the cultural zeitgeist along with it.

The Puritans were some of the earliest British colonists in the US, and were either thrown out of England for attempting a coup to replace the king with a puppet to force their more extremist form of Christianity on the country, or left by their own choice because they felt that the Church of England was too liberal. They were basically a bunch of prudes who believed that the human body and sex were shameful and disgusting.

This has led to the dichotomy where advertisers want nothing to do with sex/nudity, except when it comes to implied sex in advertisements. Because sex is bad, but it also sells, which is good.

PG-13 and rated T for teen, respectively

It’s the result of growing up under 2 very different impending calamities. Nuclear annihilation was a constant but invisible threat that promised to wipe the world clean before you would even have time to comprehend what was happening, so the mentality was to live in the moment and pretend it didn’t exist, because it all might not tomorrow. While climate change is a constant but blatantly visible threat that clearly gets worse and worse as time goes on, giving a real sense of desperate urgency to do something now.

So you have a dissonance of the older generations who shrug their shoulders at the horrors of the news and pretend that nothing’s happening because it doesn’t immediately affect them, and the younger generations who are freaking out about everything all at the same time because their whole lives they’ve basically been on the train tracks watching the train come barreling towards them and begging the older folks to just drive the car off the tracks.

I agree to some extent, but even before then hardware was getting expensive thanks to stuff like the Bitcoin mining craze. Harddrives have been getting cheaper on a dollar per TB basis for a long time (as they should), but I remember the days when it was cheaper to build a gaming PC than to buy a new console, and those days are long gone. And after COVID hit, greedflation set in to declare what the new normal is.

Not to sound snarky or anything, but since when do prices go down? If people were willing to pay the inflated price, there’s no incentive for them not to make that the new standard.

Don’t bother, he’ll just take offense at you trying. If you look at the other comments, I and several others tried to point out how hypocritical he’s being victim-blaming the people doing the things he says they’re lazy for not doing when he himself gave up, and he just became more and more belligerent. Here, he made fun of a guy’s wife who has disabling chronic pain and accused him of “voter suppression” because of it. In another comment, he made fun of women no longer having access to abortion. He’s not looking to fix things, just a target so he can make himself feel better.

He came in here to hate Texans and nothing you or I say will change his heart. You can’t fix that any more than you can compromise with fascists.

Ah yes, the good ol’ “I’m not an asshole! The Russians are plotting against me to make me look like an asshole!” defense. Nobody needs to pretend to make you look like an asshole, you’ve shown your whole ass all over this thread.

I get it, you really wanted me to know how much you don’t read my responses and don’t care, baka, but at least look at the context of who you’re replying to so you don’t make yourself look like an even bigger cunt than you already have.

But based on your replies so far, aren’t you happy those kids are drowning? After all, they’re in Texas, so it’s their fault for not voting hard enough.

Jesus, and I thought you were just an ass. Here you are making fun of a woman with chronic pain who does the exact thing you’re calling people losers and lazy for not doing. What a scumbag.

I bet you think the dead kids in Gaza deserved it for not voting hard enough or just leaving, too.

Agreed, the hypocrisy on display is fascinating to me. Apparently hates the people in charge, and yet is all too happy to see them hurt people who voted against them, like he claims he did?

It’d be one thing if he was laughing at the Republicans who now can’t access porn, but he’s laughing at pregnant women who might die or end up in jail due to the abortion bans too? Does he think trans kids deserve to be denied access to healthcare for not voting hard enough? Where does he draw the line. Does he draw a line somewhere at all?

It’s clear he has that good old Republican “I got mine, fuck everyone else” and “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mindset now that he managed to get out of Texas.

Okay? Good for you? Do you want a gold star for your MAGA hat or something?

We already knew that you ignore any information that doesn’t fit your narrow worldview, just like any other Republican.

Dude’s in here literally talking about how he gave up and ran away rather than fighting against the fascist government, and he thinks he’s won and is better than the people who can’t turn tail like him. Can’t find entertainment like this on TV, that’s for sure.

I was hopeful that you might see the hypocrisy of what you’re doing and stop making a fool of yourself, but I don’t care what you do. I have no skin in this game, and you’re a free person, you can make your own choices like a big boy. And you’ve shown that you’re just another Republican anyways. All too happy to see pregnant women die and victim-blame because it doesn’t directly affect you, and ignoring any information that doesn’t fit your narrative.

Don’t worry, the leopards are coming for your face, too. Texas ain’t some other country, what happens there affects you too. I’m sure the Democrats of Texas will be all too happy to motivate you to go vote when the fascists are knocking on your door. Gotta give you something to hate, or you’ll just keep making excuses.

Nah, I just hate that holier-than-thou attitude that you got because you and I are lucky enough to live in places where we don’t have to deal with the crazy bullshit places like Texas heap on top of the normal crazy bullshit like not making voting days holidays and closing the polling places before people get out of work. You’re blaming them for being too lazy to vote when you yourself skipped outta town instead of voting. Would’ve mistaken you for a Trumper if we weren’t literally talking about how awful they are, with the way you make assumptions about people.

That attitude ain’t gonna get those asses out of office any faster. It’s just gonna make sure that when the jackboots come for you, no one will have your back.