A cult is just one example of this pattern. Humans in groups will have a tendency to follow the same pattern whether it’s a political movement, religion, social media, criminal gangs, workplace department, or even a fandom. The person seen as the leader is not questioned, anyone that asks questions is ostracized, proving loyalty is rewarded. People will knowingly tell lies since that proves loyalty to the tribe. People will pretend to believe the lies since that’s also rewarded. With social media it gets really stupid since the reward is usually just a number beside a “like” icon.

When you go along with a lie long enough, you may start to believe it’s true.

I wasn’t aware that they had a ball throwing mechanic in the game. Considering the context they put a Pikachu with a machine gun on the cover, yeah they were just copying someone else’s shit.

No, it’s just a monster capture and battling game.

Do you really believe the similarities are coincidental? Like if Pokeman didn’t exist, they would’ve had the character on the cover look like that and would’ve had players collecting creatures with balls?

They’re obviously just ripping off someone else’s ideas.

Humans lived in tribes for millions of years. Tribalism is hard-coded into our brains.

An attack on the tribe is considered an attack on every individual within the tribe. Saying “Trump is racist” is an attack on everyone in the MAGA tribe and makes you an enemy of the tribe. Not someone to be trusted. Someone to fight back against.

Things that are obvious to anyone outside of the tribe won’t even be considered by anyone within the tribe. If there’s any doubt, the other members of the tribe will tell them “no, we aren’t racist, they are the racists!” The obvious thing becomes a lie and rejected.

Even when something impacts your life, you may think “well that was just a mistake” so you can continue feeling happy to be in the “good tribe”.

No one is good at questioning these things because we don’t want to think of ourselves as not all that much more evolved than apes. So we develop ideologies to paint over how we really think.

Are you able to question your tribe? What are the things that are obvious to anyone not in your tribe that you can’t consider?

Whose faces do the leopards you hang out with want to eat?

That’s not how the law works. It’s not a thing where this company sued another company for patents and won, therefore all future lawsuits on patents automatically win. There may be some precedent about specific details in the case, but there’s no reason to assume a future judge in a future case wouldn’t rule in the same way even if this case never existed. Seems to me precedence paranoia is just some internet lawyer thing.

The strangest thing about this case is that Nintendo didn’t sue for trademark infringement or copyright. I assume Pikachu is trademarked and this company had a Pikachu with a machine gun on the cover of their game. Looks like an easy win for trademark infringement, given everyone referred to it as Pokeman with guns.

I like how you think of wealth solely in terms of money. That’s just a number in a database.

There’s a lot of houses owned by boomers and the housing market is insanely expensive. When all of those houses go on the market, people might be able to afford to buy a house again. Owning a house is wealth.

Or just a way for someone that owns a rocket company to get a trillion dollars. Maybe someone making ships can get a cool $100B from suckers investors.

In the dot com bubble it was a running joke where someone would take any business idea and and add “on the internet” onto it. “We’ll sell dogfood… on the internet!” Boom! A billion dollars in VC money.

So now it’s take anything and add “using AI” to it. This is even better, it’s not just “using AI” it’s “and put a bunch of AI chips on it.”

“We build ships.” Yawn. “We build ships and put a bunch of AI chips on it” Ok, here’s your $100 Billion!

Samsung: Can we have AI monies too?

Ships have to be registered in a country and follow the laws of that country when they’re in international water.

If you don’t register your ship you’re effectively a pirate and any navy can just blast your ship out of the water.

I’m not even American and I understand that sort of thing would’ve required a super majority which hasn’t happened since the 1960s.

But go on and find more ways to be angry at the political opposition not being effective at opposition because not enough people vote for them.

I’m pretty sure it’s still a federal crime in the US.

Here in the True North Strong and Free, weed is legalized at all levels of government and I can confirm that I can indeed buy weed with a Visa card. I can even buy it online and have it delivered to my door by the postal service. That got me through the pandemic.

Sorry your country kinda sucks about this, but it’s not really a credit card thing. CC companies suck for many reasons, but this isn’t one of them.

The US has a fascist society where most people are against the free press and political opposition to the fascist leadership. The wealthy have created social media so that anyone that might oppose them will waste all of their energy on that instead of doing anything constructive.

You never know, maybe things might turn around. But I’ve given up on Americans ever actually doing anything other than sporadic acts of violence (which only serve to help the fascists) and are completely incapable of mounting any effective resistance. Americans are broadly narcissistic and cannot bring themselves to vote for the opposition because of a fear of what their friends and family might think. Or because they need to maintain a social media image of being so hardcore leftist that voting for a “centrist” might hurt their “brand.” Most Americans are narcissists, so they are ruled by the biggest narcissist in the country. Trump won’t live forever, but I don’t see any sign of American culture changing for the better, so nothing will really change when he’s gone.

It’s obvious how the US can get out of the mess it’s in, but Americans are simply too narcissistic to do it. Social media is basically like crack to a narcissist, and while most countries have issues with social media, nowhere are the problems more acute than in the US.

Having Alexa automatically order stuff is really insane. Like it’s just going to buy stuff without checking the prices and and comparing products.

But I suppose it makes sense to Jeff Bezos who doesn’t care about the price of anything and has a human assistant that checks product reviews and such to make sure their boss gets a good product. So of course everyone will want to have a crappier version of what billionaires have and no one cares about the price of the things they buy, right?

I buy weed with a Visa card all the time.

Do you mean you can’t buy weed in places where it’s been only decriminalized but not fully legalized? Decriminalized means it’s still illegal but the government just decided to stop enforcing the law. It’s not actually the same as legalization, and yeah it results in all kinds of stupid situations. And yeah, a big company isn’t going to engage in something that’s technically illegal even if the law won’t be enforced.

I reiterate: Leftists just sit on their asses whining on the internet about not getting what they want and unwilling to make an effort to even start.

Exactly what are you doing to change this labor party you’re upset with? Do you think whining about it on the internet is going to change things? Do you I think I’m the Labor Party? That’s not even a party that exists in my country.

You can see that a minority of people can make happen from being continuously engaged in a party. With enough dedication you could change your Labor Party to be how you want it to be with decades of work. Are you going to start doing that work or just whine on the internet about it and do nothing?

Political parties want to win elections. If you’re not doing anything, then there is no incentive for them to do anything you want.

Politics isn’t like ordering a product on Amazon. You pick what you want and get it delivered within 2 days.

The reality is politics is a grind. You vote in every election over decades to push things in the direction you want it to go.

In the US only a minority of people wanted abortion to be made illegal. They voted and voted and voted for many decades to make it happen. Don’t agree with what they wanted, but they were dedicated to it and got it.

Leftists just sit on their asses whining on the internet about not getting what they want and unwilling to make an effort to even start. Mocking those that are doing the work to try to make things better because people that work are stupid and being lazy is smart. Leftism is all about convincing people it’s smart to do nothing while things get worse and using the fact that things are getting worse as proof of their intelligence.

But wouldn’t that be velocity of money, not GDP? GDP is a measure of final goods and services, not money. Unless you have a poop fetish and consider the eating of poop to be a final service, then this wouldn’t impact GDP.

Here the point is that they’re passing the money back and forth. That’s like the AI companies right now - passing money round in a circle and that being presented as if it were the same thing as the industry as a whole making money

The stock market value isn’t the same thing as GDP though. The GDP measurement is never really a great measurement of economic well being because of inequality, but even then, we really don’t know what it is in the US because Trump fires anyone that gives out a bad report.

The people handing money back and forth quickly was actually what happened when the pandemic ended, the increase in the velocity of money resulted in inflation but people blamed it on Biden. Now Trump is President, the economists have been fired and fraud has been decriminalized.

I’m just thinking about the people I know who purchased a PS5 Pro and I’m not sure they’re going to be the ones tinkering with proton settings on a Linux desktop.

I’d think if you get the steam machine you won’t be tinkering with the proton settings. Valve will do that and since you’re running on the same hardware they’ve tested there shouldn’t be any issues.

I did build a PC a couple of years ago, but I found myself wishing someone would just put out a decently priced PC that has hardware that’s tested with Linux. If the steam machine had have been a thing then, I would’ve gone that route. Also there’s a lot of people that aren’t happy with Windows and would like to try Linux but are worried it will be a major headache to switch (which it can be in many cases). With MS basically forcing many people to buy a new PC since Windows 11 doesn’t work on a lot of PCs currently running 10, some people might want to give the steam machine a shot… and they do have the option of paying the MS tax later and installing windows on it if they it’s not to their liking.

Hard to say how it will go, but there are reasons to get this thing. We’ll have to see how many people actually want to get it.

Some people may not want to spend time on cobbling together a Linux machine. There’s some research involved in figuring out which hardware works best, and maybe fiddling around with configuring a system. There is value in know that all of the hardware in your system will get priority support from the OS maintainer and game developers. Some glitchiness in a game on a steam machine will get fixed before some glitchiness on someone’s custom rig.

And many of us don’t buy a new PC every year. What benefit is it to me if a new AAA game has higher resolution options that aren’t available on my 2+ year old PC unless I spend a thousand dollars to buy video card or whatever?

No idea if this will be a success or not, but there is a lot of upside to having a standardized platform (there’s a reason consoles are so popular) and little downsides for anyone that’s not spending more money on hardware than on the actual games. Sure the PC Master Race types won’t want this, but I think that’s a very small group of people.

Isn’t this just the broken window fallacy but with a poop fetish?

Yeah, Nvidia invests in Open AI, Open AI uses that money to buy Nvidia chips. More people invest in Nvidia because it’s revenue keeps growing.

Charles Ponzi would be proud.