discouraging people from calling help when they need it

This is literally why they’re doing it. Government makes simply existing illegal for a huge class of workers so companies abuse them as much as they want while they’re too scared to call for help, no matter how bad it gets. Bonus points if the general population hates them too so even publicity doesn’t matter. (Hey, totally unrelated, isn’t it great how convicts are so heavily vilified for life?) I know the phrase is way overused, but The Cruelty Is The Point isn’t (only) about how psycho some of these people are, it points to how they’ll do anything for money.

In the end, though, this a great way for gangs gain power. People aren’t going to stop calling for help, they’re going to stop calling the police for help. I guess the party of law and order would love a good crime wave.

There it is. When Russia does it, it’s helping, but when Western countries do it, it’s colonialism. God I hope you’re at least being well paid for your doublethink

For sure, but the argument being made here isn’t that Medvedev is speaking truth, but that he can be referred to with “Russia says.” Which, yeah, he’s a mouthpiece for the Russian government, so that checks out, accuracy of the statement notwithstanding.

And nooticing is nooice

Maybe it has something to do with also needing international support in order to defend itself from its neighbor… talk all the shit you want about the US’s stance on Israel, but shifting that to Taiwan is on par with claiming Ukraine deserved to get invaded.

Which I now realize is probably your next line. Anyway, oh well

This is kinda where I’m at. So far it’s been a lot of hot air, like always, but no one’s been arrested or had their subsidies cut yet.

Well, of course the real answer is that calling it fraud is simply how they justify the transfer of wealth to already obscenely rich people. But as for how the propaganda works, it ties into how they don’t believe in due process. Right now it’s most visible in how they’re kidnapping people, but it also extends to fraud. They claim fraud, no prosecution happens because ThE CouRtS ArE cORrUPt, and so they get to go outside the law and do things like cut already allocated Medicaid funds without losing support.

this isn’t a falling out. i swear there’s been an article once a week since january pretending This Is IT between the richest man in the world and one of the most corrupt, but turns out, they have a lot to offer each other. they’re talking a bunch of bullshit like they always do and news outlets are reporting their meaningless words uncritically like they always do.

wake me up when spacex loses funding.

No, the logic stops as soon as we can drill more than one hole per pigeon. We could just drill M holes in one pigeon, leaving N-1 pigeons with no holes.

You’re not an asshole for going faster, you’re an asshole for tailgating

AI is a flawless technology and they’ll have fixed it by next month for sure this time

How do you think DOGE and RFK Jr’s research priories will impact that?

At a guess, they’ll stop tracking the data?

This isn’t about trans people specifically, but the very existence of gendered bathrooms dates back to hilariously sexist 1800s ideas about how men and women should only be allowed to coexist at home. No surprise that religious fundamentalists continue to weaponize private spaces against anyone that doesn’t fit their norms.

Same with people who blast music in public. There’s a bike/pedestrian trail near me I use a lot and people are constantly riding or running while blasting the worst music imaginable to everyone nearby. Maybe someday I’ll build up the courage to tell them to shut the fuck up… or at least teach them what headphones are. Maybe I could buy a bunch of cheap ones and just chuck them at the heads of anyone who apparently needs them.

I guess we’re all too busy watching number go up to actually manage anything. For them it’s their stock prices, for me it’s my seed ratio!

They also care about ruining trans people’s lives in any way possible. I’m sure there are plenty of transphobes who simply haven’t thought the bathroom thing through, but don’t forget the other reason they’d be happy to put passing trans men in women’s bathrooms: it forces them into an impossible decision. When an angry mob drags a trans man out of the women’s toilet, you think they’re going to listen to protestations of being AFAB? If anything, that’d just rile them up further. So a when someone is faced with the decision of choosing either the room they’re least likely to be noticed in, or the one the law technically assigned to them, they may instead choose to stay home. They may even start considering detransitioning. This is a feature, not a bug.

They do often talk about “it needs to be new,” but for the most part the things they release don’t actually follow that philosophy. Artifact was trying to follow the likes of Hearthstone. CS2 is a glowup of CS:GO. DOTA2, League. Deadlock is the closest they’ve come to something genuinely innovative in at least a decade, but even that is still following on the heels of MOBA/FPS hybrids like OW and Paladins, just taking more elements from MOBAs.

And the “not caring about money” thing wasn’t true in 2008. They were probably getting to that point around 2012, as Steam began to turn into a money printer and their microtransaction games took off, but that wouldn’t have been until after HL3 had been cancelled at least once. At some point Valve talked about the difficulties in selling Portal 2 (I think it might have been in the dev commentary? Idk it’s been years) and one of the points they bring up was how even a huge success like that game wasn’t living up to their other titles. They tried to implement microtransactions with the co-op mode, but they learned lessons about how that model only worked in bigger multiplayer games. One of the big stories they tell in both the HL1 and HL2 documentaries were the troubles they ran into with funding, and I guarantee they were not looking to repeat those experiences by continuing work on a game that had far less potential for return on investment. Again, that might have changed by 2012, but by then the momentum was already gone.

I’m not sure I believe that Valve ran out of ideas for HL3. That’s clearly the image they want to project, and maybe even what they tell themselves, but judging from the ideas they did have for Episode 3 they showcased in that documentary, there was more than enough to justify releasing a game. Certainly there was as much or more new stuff than there was for either EP1 or 2. I think it’s much more likely they simply decided their other projects at the time–CS:GO, DOTA 2, even TF2–had way more moneymaking potential. And I mean, they were right! They made a ton of money off of lootboxes and cosmetics for their multiplayer titles. I don’t think Steam had totally taken over the market yet, so they were hedging their bets on multiplayer microtransactions.

I dunno. The whole “it needs to be new” philosophy they constantly espouse to hasn’t really been true at least as far back as Portal 2. Even Alyx wasn’t particularly revolutionary as far as VR titles go. Maybe doing that type of design was new to Valve, but the only standout features that distinguishes Alyx from other games are the graphics and the (genuinely very good) grabbity glove object pickup system. Pretty much everything else is several steps behind other VR shooter games in the name of Accessibility™, from movement to weapon selection to the painfully dumb AI.

They didn’t run out of ideas. The movement FPS genre is alive and well for a reason, even today: there’s lots to be done. They just lost interest in it themselves, and I believe the reason for that is primarily monetary.

Next week: Trump claims to be an Eldritch being that coalesced out of Jesus’s anger while up on the cross over 2000 years ago

Go big or go home. “Russia starts using nukes and us government blames ukrainians for it”