Romneycare*
Never let Republicans forget that the best socialized healthcare system in the country was copied from a Republican system created and approved by voters in one of the most leftist states in the nation. It makes them so mad that they can’t blame a black guy for it when you do.
I don’t have the data to back it up, but I disagree. By the time that lootboxes and micro transactions appeared, the video game industry was already in competition with Hollywood for profits - if not already making more.
One of the largest costs for the industry historically has been manufacturing the physical media. It costs a lot to produce all the cartridges and packaging, and to have that shipped around the world. As technology improved, however, those costs began to drop on a per unit basis from the cartridges of old to the cds and dvds of the 2000s, allowing for a higher profit margin on a per unit basis. But the biggest kicker was the development of digital storefronts. Suddenly, you didn’t have to make a single piece of physical media in order to sell a game, and companies suddenly began to make back a lot more of that $60 directly instead of having it spent on manufacturing. They make the game once, and then each copy they sell after the first costs effectively $0 to manufacture since it’s the exact same copy as the first. Then you also have every game selling a “digital deluxe edition” for as much as $100 (or more!), often for just some exclusive cosmetics.
Micro transactions and live service is what they call the “long tail” of a game - you already made the product and sold it, but it continues to bring in money after the fact. Companies don’t have to spend huge sums to make a brand new game when they can just trickle out incremental updates and skins and rake in the money.
Whales are largely a myth told by video game (and gambling) companies to hide the truth of who they’re actually targeting and to keep you blaming the wrong people.
They want you to blame the dude with more money than the church and not enough brains to know the difference between cents and sense, but the truth is that the vast VAST majority of money made through lootboxes and other forms of gambling comes from 3 sources:
Kids aged 15 and under, people with addiction issues, and people with mental health issues like depression or neurodivergent conditions like ADHD.
Game companies hire psychologists to develop the most effective ways to exploit the way the human brain functions in order to maximize the amount of money that they can squeeze out of people, and all 3 of these groups suffer from the same issues that they exploit: poor impulse control and difficulty with keeping track of how much they’re actually spending. Kids because their brains aren’t physically developed enough yet, addicts (and people with ADHD to a lesser extent) because their brains are literally wired that way, and people with mental health issues have reduced capacity for both and are more likely to seek out things that promise quick access to dopamine and serotonin (think “retail therapy” or self medicating). Also of note is that researchers suspect that kids who grow up spending money on lootboxes and micro transactions in general are more likely to develop addictive personality issues later in life - basically being groomed into gambling addicts.
That’s also why they never let you buy stuff directly with money and use fake currencies that don’t have a 1 to 1 translation - it makes it 10 times harder to track how much you actually spent. It’s also why you can never buy the exact amount you need for an item: if you have currency left over, you’re more likely to buy more so that it isn’t “wasted”.
The children only matter when they can’t speak for themselves.
That way they can’t disagree. It’s why they put so much emphasis on the unborn. Once they can speak their own opinion, they’re worthless.
It will be 100 degrees and data centers will be draining local water supplies, while residents will be told not to water their flowers or take too many showers.
Wasn’t this already the case like 2 years ago in Texas? Except I remember the governor telling people to drink less water and shower together when possible to save water for the data centers.
I see, so you understand that an economy exists, but not that it has many different interlocking pieces that can be examined in different ways. Let me see if I can break it down for you:
When you spend money at the store, when the store pays its employees, or when it buys goods from other vendors, are all examples of what is often referred to as “economic activity”. This can take many different forms at many different scales, in much the same way that a walk around the block is not considered an international flight.
For example, you go to the store and purchase a head of lettuce to make a salad. The store buys that lettuce from a local vendor who gets it from a local farm. That entire chain of transactions would be considered part of the “local economy”.
The fact that the US buys more than half of its aluminum from Canada would be considered “international economics” as the transactions involved take place between two different countries. In this way, you can examine different economics from as small a scale as you buying eggs from your neighbor who has chickens to the macro-economics of multinational corporations dictating the stupid price of RAM by effectively buying goods that don’t exist with money that doesn’t exist while handing the same 20 dollars back and forth to inflate their stock value to a disgusting degree. Hell, you can even pick out specific sectors, like with the aluminum example: when Trump started his pissing contest with Canada with tariffs, the American car manufacturing industry said that tariffs on aluminum would cause them to shut down plants within 6 weeks.
So when we talk about the economy of California, people are talking about the farms, the restaurants, the businesses that exist in the state. The people who work and live there, and the money that flows between them all. If these companies were to pull out of California, they’d be leaving all of that behind. Even ignoring the idea of the loss of sales, they’d also be losing the experience and skill of the people that they employ in the state, and the “value” of the property that they have there - whether that’s real estate or more logistics based like renting storage for goods or the cost of transportation from a manufacturing facility in a new location.
What economy is exclusive to the United States?
That’s what they said about Massachusetts’ “millionaire’s tax” - a 4% additional income tax on household income above 1 million dollars. And despite what finance rags claim, the data says that between when the tax was voted into law in 2022 and 2024, the number of Mass residents with at least $50 million in total wealth grew 35.2% from 1,954 people to 2,642 people. And the tax brought in an extra $2.46 billion in tax revenue during its first year.
So despite all the crying, the data says that they won’t leave. We’ve seen it happen multiple times across the country over the years. A state or a city enacts a new tax on the wealthy, the wealthy threaten to leave and cry bloody murder, and nothing happens except an increase in tax revenue to be invested back into the area.
People and businesses located in California buy goods and services, and produce goods and services that are sold both in the local region and abroad. This exchange of goods and services is frequently called an “economy”.
The economic activity within the state of California would make it the 4th largest economy in the world if it were an independent country, and it is the largest subregional economy in the world.
That’s so much cooler than the plastic shell that you could put your phone in that Bethesda sold with one of the games for like $200.
I don’t engage at this level anymore, where people show no respect.
False. Your first few sentences are insults, and the rest of your post is literally just this:
One of the most controversial uses of this discovery was as a means for sex verification at the Olympic Games, under a system implemented by the International Olympic Committee in 1992. Athletes with an SRY gene were not permitted to participate as females, although all athletes in whom this was “detected” at the 1996 Summer Olympics were ruled false positives and were not disqualified. Specifically, eight female participants (out of a total of 3387) at these games were found to have the SRY gene. However, after further investigation of their genetic conditions, all these athletes were verified as female and allowed to compete. These athletes were found to have either partial or full androgen insensitivity, despite having an SRY gene, making them externally phenotypically female. In the late 1990s, a number of relevant professional societies in United States called for elimination of gender verification, including the American Medical Association, stating that the method used was uncertain and ineffective.
They already tried that 30 years ago and it proved ineffective and only led to false positives.
Various international medical and sports professionals have, since 1986, advocated for the abolition of sex verification in sport, and specifically the Olympics. In 2000, following the 1999 IOC ratification of the 1996 decision to discontinue sex verification, the view was reiterated in the Journal of the American Medical Association; it included commentary that, while the purpose of such tests is to uphold a perceived fairness, the insufficiency of the tests can produce unfair results due to potential inaccuracies and the possibility of both false negatives and false positives. The authors also deemed the tests unfair and discriminatory towards female athletes with disorders of sex development (DSD), whom it felt should be considered as women for the purposes of sport, as “few if any plausible athletic advantages exist”. It also considered the implications for female athletes who “fail” a test (either as an error or through unknowingly having a DSD), in their personal lives and future career, as too severe to impose the tests.
In 2022, the World Medical Association (WMA) demanded the withdrawal of hormone-based regulations, arguing that they discriminate based on gender variation of female athletes. The Association also expressed concerns with physicians treating athletes with high levels of endogenous testosterone when the condition is not pathological.
Other criticisms are that there is no natural physiological limit imposed on male athletes, including those who have, for example, naturally high testosterone compared to their competitors, and that there are many biological factors that produce sporting advantages but “only those associated with gender are used to exclude or disqualify athletes.”
In a joint statement published several days before the official IOC announcement on genetic testing in March 2026, over 100 human rights and other groups criticized the proposed rule change as “a blunt and discriminatory response that is not supported by science and violates international human rights law”.
Over 100 human rights groups apparently disagree with you on this kind of testing being discriminatory. Also that it’s a violation of human rights.
Edit: I also like how you completely ignored the fact that all these black women were told that if they wanted to compete, they could take the same kinds of drugs that trans women take everyday. It’s almost like being trans was never an issue in the first place, since black women apparently have more testosterone than trans women. It’s always been about hate, and nothing more.
Don’t forget TV, movies, and video games. I met soooo many furries who went to school for animation.
Go back to /b/ then, channer. The internet has moved on since the dial-up days and realized that furries are actually really chill people.
I remember reading about a group of researchers many years ago who had developed a subdermal LED screen that could be implanted and ran off of the oxygen in your blood stream via a tiny turbine or something.
And Michael Phelps has a condition that causes him to build up lactic acid at half the normal rate, effectively doubling his endurance compared to his competitors. And yet he’s allowed to hold the world record for the most gold medals won. Sports have never been about “normal” people.
And Caster is far from the only black woman to face these kinds of punishments. In fact, not only does the Olympics have a history of racism and sexism against black women, but all three medalists were affected by the ban on Caster that year. Christine Mboma and Beatrice Basilingi were banned in 2021 for their “naturally high testosterone.” It’s a frequently occurring reason for banning black women from sports. All of them were told they could either take drugs to lower their testosterone, you know, the kind that trans women take, or undergo surgery to reduce their “naturally high testosterone” to “acceptable levels”. Understandably, none of them did. Especially not when men and white women don’t face the same kind of scrutiny. In fact, historically gender tests have often targeted female athletes of color who don’t conform to typically Western, white ideals of femininity. Serena Williams. Brittney Griner. Indian sprinter Dutee Chand. Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-Ting. Algerian boxer Imane Khelif. The list never ends, and we haven’t even gotten to when the Olympics used to do chromosome testing in the 60s and gave up due to the extremely high number of woman athletes who came up as XY women.
Also, the European Court of Human Rights later ruled that Caster’s ban was discrimination.
“I was on a world scene, and what made the news was, another gymnast saying that if we painted our skin black maybe we would all win because I had beaten her out of beam medal, and she got upset,” she said on the TODAY show. “And that [was] really the news, rather than me winning worlds”
-Simone Biles, Olympic Gymnast
Sounds a lot like the criticism levied against trans athletes.
I bet it’s the second one. People tend to listen to things that they find relatable, so trans people tend to listen to trans musicians making songs about the trans experience.
I saw a video just the other day that you might like that’s related to this. It’s called dissociation and the “trans aesthetic”.
You might also try a “swamp cooler” to cool down with:
Grab a bucket and a fan, and pour ice water into the bucket. Put the fan on behind the bucket and sit in the cool breeze it makes. It’s like having your own little a/c unit.
The one downside to this is that the evaporating water will eventually make the air humid and make it harder for your sweat to cool you down, but it works great in the short term.
It’s also a clever double entendre because there has been plenty of hating on the French in the US over the years despite them being one of our closest allies since they armed us during the revolutionary war. I noticed it decades before 2001, but it really intensified again for a while during the Iraq war because France refused to get involved. Remember “freedom fries”?