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Or worse yet, they split the vote and a solid blue seat sends a Republican to Congress with 35-40% of the vote. I just love FPTP!

Yup, this was one of the central debates with gay marriage vs. civil unions, so many LGBT+ couples were absolutely screwed pre-Obergefell by one of the partners getting sick or dying, and the surviving partner either having no say in medical decisions or getting screwed out of inheritance because the sick/dead partner’s family was anti-gay and froze the surviving partner out of everything.

Why make a better UI when it’ll probably introduce a slew of new bugs?

Yeah, that’s what happens when the LLM they use to summarize these articles strips all nuance and comedy.

For what it’s worth, I played the NES release of DQ1, and then a translation of the japan-only SNES release of DQ2 recently (I actually beat DQ2 last week) and I found DQ2 to be a much better game than DQ1 overall. DQ1 was… interesting, but it was very much a game that did not respect the player’s time in the least, to the point of expecting the player to fight literally hundreds of battles in order to grind up enough money and experience to afford the gear. The most charitable thing I can say about it is that the battle system was so rudimentary and so grindy that the gameplay felt more like it was focused on resource management–there was a tension in deciding whether you could afford to take another fight, or if you needed to return to town and spend money sleeping at an inn to heal (setting your grind back at least 1-2 fights with how piddly gold and XP drops were), optimizing efficiency in spending your MP to heal vs. the risk of dying to the next monster, etc.

DQ2 meanwhile was a much more robust and much less grindy game–the simple addition of multiple party members and multiple enemies in a single battle meant that your gold and XP gains were multiplied over the first game. While it still demanded grinding, it was much more reasonable about it, and it felt much more like a “modern” JRPG like you’re used to seeing.

Really? Fusion stops holding your hand around the time you get to sector 4, but it’s strictly linear until you’re literally about to go fight the final boss–the game explicitly blocks you from backtracking to areas that aren’t immediately plot-relevant.

Copyright is the only thing protecting us from getting absolutely fucked even harder by the rich than we already are, yes.

Do you want corps just stealing every new idea and product, cloning it, and muscling out the original inventor without paying them a dime? Because abolishing copyright entirely would be an excellent way to do that.

God, yes, I tried to get into the game twice and both times I bounced off right around the part where you go from Hell on Earth to a fucking high fantasy castle on some random planet. I’ll just replay Doom 2016 if I want to shoot some demons.

They did use them as best they could. They were hamstrung by a filibustering Senate, and two conservative Democrat senators (Sinema and Manchin) who refused to support getting rid of it, making killing the proposition of killing the filibuster DOA. As a result, their only choice to pass legislation was budget reconciliation, which aren’t subject to filibuster. The issue is that reconciliation has several big limits:

1. The bill has to be related to government spending, revenue, and the debt ceiling. You can’t toss in things like minimum wage increases or voting rights legislation.

2. You can only pass one of these bills per year (theoretically you can do more, but additional reconciliation bills have to go through the budgrt committee and with a 50/50 senate the GOP can just skip those meetings to deny quorum and keep it stuck)

3. Whatever passes still has to get at least 50 votes, which means either appeasing Manchin/Sinema or getting Republican votes (which ain’t gonna happen)

And despite that, we still got the CHIPS act, an infrastructure bill, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which–even with Manchinema throwing as many grenades in the process as they could get away with–was the biggest climate change bill in our country’s history. Not perfect, no, but a sizable step in the right direction, for once.

I’m utterly blessed because my personal area of coverage is in the hardware and storage systems (disks, RAID, filesystems, virtualization, etc.) so I am way more likely to interact with business users instead of individual home users, which is where the vast majority of the “I have XX decades of experience” types come from. They’re also generally a lot more willing to listen to me because if I’m talking to them it’s fair odds that they fucked up bad enough that they’re at risk of losing all their data, and that’s usually enough to get them to shut up.

But god, some of the tickets I’ve seen from other employees…

In my experience, any time someone mentions how many decades of experience they have in IT, it means they either:

• Think that clicking the Facebook button on their desktop and finding their Downloads folder qualifies as experience in IT

• Have decades of actual IT experience, but think everything still works like they did in the 90s. Yeah, maybe you were an IT expert at one point, but you never bothered to keep your skills fresh, you geezer.

In either case, they think they know better than the lowly flunkie trying to help them, and trying to get them to actually listen to you and “please sir just upload debug logs, I beg you, no those aren’t debug logs, I gave you the instructions to generate debug logs three times already, maybe things will be different after the fourth time, there’s a literal KB article with step by step instructions to sync your photo library, no I won’t call you to handhold you through this, I’d literally just be reading the steps in the article” is pure suffering.

God, the unrelenting misery is killing me in this platform. I think the thing I’m most sick and tired of more than anything else is the constant stream of The Usual Suspects butting in with “But what about Gaza?!” on Every. Single. Post.

Post an article about Biden proposing a ceasefire agreement in the war? Complain about Biden giving support to Israel!

Post an article about Biden celebrating pride month? Complain about Biden funding Israel!

Article about Biden forgiving another batch of student loans? “BUt Biden supports israel!”

Article about Trump getting convicted of felonies? “But Biden! Gaza! Israel!”

Article about a small town library fighting LGBTQ+ book bans? “GAZA! ISRAEL! BIDEN! BAD”

Article about a goddamn random topic completely unrelated to Biden, Trump, Israel, politics, or the US at all? “GENOCIIIIIIIIIIDE!”

It’s at the point where I’ve cut back on Lemmy usage entirely because every comment thread I click on is like navigating a fucking minefield of misery. Nothing good can ever happen, no policy changes can ever be celebrated, no events can be remarked upon, without someone butting in with a reminder that Genocide Mother-Fucking Joe is personally shoveling coal into the palestinian child incinerator. No post can ever leave you with any emotion other than the thin veil of doomerism settling upon your shoulders, a pall of depression casting itself over the tragedy of the world, and a sense that modern society is an Aristocrats joke that has long since crossed the line from “horrifying” to “funny,” then back to “horrifying,” then back to “funny,” before settling itself so firmly in “horrifying” that the audience is casting nervous glances and hoping that someone else is the first to call the police.

How about you fuck off and chug a diarrhea dogshit smoothie :^)

Don’t bother, he’s one of the many trolls whose entire purpose on Lemmy is to shit on biden

I’m pretty sure he was agreeing with you…?

And on the other side of the coin, hard-right Israelis work to paint any criticism of Israel as antisemitic, regardless of legitimacy.

So on the one hand, you have antisemites using this as an opportunity to blame all the world’s ills on tHe (((gLoBALiStS))) (I really hope that came across as sarcastic enough), and on the other, you have ultraconservative Israelis using the first group to lump the people saying “please don’t do a genocide” in with them. And on top of that you also have Hamas doing the goddamn Goofy “and I’ll fuckin do it again” meme, along with a bunch of people in Palestine who are literally taught antisemitism and hatred in the classroom, while Russia, Iran, and the same goddamn Israelis painting everyone as antisemitic pour money into the group that would genocide Israel back in a heartbeat. And caught in the middle of this category 5 shit hurricane are a bunch of innocent people who just want to be treated like human beings with equal rights, and to be able to go to the goddamn grocery store without worrying about getting exploded by a piss rocket / laser-guided cluster bomb made by Lockheed Martin.

I’m so goddamn fucking sick and tired of everything with this. Literally the only “good guys” in this entire fucking 70-year conflict are the noncombatants on either side of the Gaza border wall trying to go about their day and whose entire lives are reduced to a casualty sheet and a propaganda blurb, while both sides just keeps fighting and killing because perverse incentives mean it’s the only way both Netanyahu and Hamas can cling to power, innocent life be damned.

It’s all well and good to say “choose another system of governance” but how do we implement this change? What is the mechanism under which we can replace our current system of government with Swiss democracy, without the old government just saying “lolno” and bombing it to shit? The only method I can think of is a constitutional convention, and right now we’re closer to the right wing being able to call one and rewrite it to take pur rights back 200 years than we are to leftists implementing Swiss democracy.

Like… I would be thrilled if that were within the realm of possibility, but as it stands any possible options for dramatically overhauling our system of governance is more likely to lurch us straight into permanent hard-right minority rule by a bunch of fascists. That’s what I mean when I say I’ve never seen an actual plan by leftists to overhaul the system–it’s all arguing about what the sexy end goal should be, without bothering to talk about the boring minutiae of how to actually get to it. So far as I can tell, the “plan” to make all these needed changes, so far as any thought is put into it at all, is just a silent assumption of either “we lobby our politicians and they do what we tell them and nobody opposes our ideas” or “we do a violent revolution and kill all the bad guys without harming the good guys and we definitely win and accomplish our goal without someone else taking advantage of the chaos to do a fascism instead,” depending on how radical the change is.

More like we don’t want to crash our only car when we don’t have another means of transportation, and oops, now we can’t get to work.

It’s great to say “the system is broken and must be replaced.” I agree! But nobody who says that, me included, has ever had anything resembling an actual plan to replace the system or to prevent something even worse from taking over once the system is destroyed.

Everyone gave the GOP shit for screaming about how Obamacare needs to be “repealed and replaced” but never saying what it should be replaced with (though that was because the “replace” part was a lie and they just wanted to go back to the bad old days of people being trapped in a job or entirely unable to get insurance because of a preexisting condition). It’s the same thing with people saying the entire system of government needs to be replaced.