It can still be worth adding generators and wiring to exercise machines to offset energy consumption

It seems like a lot of extra overhead for marginal benefit.

The world’s billionaires are heading back to NZ

BusinessDesk talked to real-estate agent Caleb Paterson, who works with a number of offshore agents and high net-worth individuals mainly out of the US and UK markets. He said interest had “definitely perked up” since National said it would repeal its ban on foreign buyers.

Foreign buyers, with the exception of Singaporean and Australian citizens, have been barred from owning NZ properties since 2018.

Assuming it makes up the next government, National’s plan would open the door to all foreign buyers to purchase NZ homes valued at more than $2 million, with a 15 per cent foreign buyer stamp surcharge clipped on, from the 2025 fiscal year.

Enjoy paradise while it lasts.

Its frustrating, because I see too many people read the “Reefer Madness” media machine as this excuse to just smoke their fucking brains out. Like, they go the complete opposite direction and take the D.A.R.E. program as evidence that chronic consumption has no negative side effects.

Now we’re extending it to fucking vaccines? Pure insanity.

The reality is that the vast majority of antivax kids will be perfectly fine

I remember being incredibly jealous of my sister, because she got the chicken pox vaccine and I (born six years too soon to receive it) did not. Spending a week covered in itchy legions, bathing in oatmeal, and running a horrible fever sucked ass.

“Perfectly fine” is such cowardly bullshit. You’re inflicting undue pain and suffering on people entirely because you’ve shoved the misery of your own childhood illnesses down the memory hole.

People on the fence can easily observe that these claims are false

People who are on the fence have been terrified with fearmongering and pacified with placebos. They’ve been systematically lied to and they still aren’t sold, precisely because contagious diseases still regularly torment our friends and loved ones.

This shit is the same exact propaganda I remember the fucking smokers’ lobby puffing up people’s asses decades ago. Hell, I heard it from Comedy Legend Bill Hicks live, back when he was on his “Why can’t I smoke anymore?” arc. Then he got pancreatic cancer and completely changed his tune. Too late, because the disease put him in the ground at the tender age of 32.

But a congo line of “Why can’t I smoke any more?” comedians rolled up right behind his hearse, churning out that slop for a solid ten more years before so many of them were playing pallbearer to their friends and family that the jokes couldn’t land anymore.

Yelling at a homeless person for owning a telescreen.

It’s also true though

We’ve had plenty of instances of “Real Communism” being tried at various stages of social and industrial development. And we’ve had a wide range of results, from the abysmal failures in Romania and Israel to the marginal victories in South Africa and Vietnam to the genuine economic miracles in China and Yugoslavia.

What we haven’t seen is an ideal Star Trek style global utopia. As a result, countries with large capitalist run media tend to suffocate any kind of domestic progressive dialogue with “Um, aktuly…” critiques while their own leadership does Nazi salutes at Presidential inaugurations and profit off the munitions used to flatten whole townships in Gaza neighborhoods.

At some level, you can’t take this critique seriously because its purely reactionary. The folks who insist efforts at socialist reform should never have been tried are the same ones that want us to get back to a Bourbon Dynasty ruling the world.

It’s the click-whir response of someone who has been programmed to hear and respond to an argument that only reactionaries are making.

Orwell was a leftist

Orwell spent five years from 1922 to 1927 as a police officer in the Indian Imperial Police force in Burma (now Myanmar). The British had gradually annexed Burma in stages, and it was not until 1885, when they captured the royal capital of Mandalay, that Burma as a whole could be declared part of the British Empire. Migrant workers from India and China supplemented the native Burmese population. Although Burma was the wealthiest country in Southeast Asia under British rule, much of the wealth was in the hands of Europeans. As colony it was seen very much as a backwater. Under the British administration, the people of Burma were at the bottom of social hierarchy, with Europeans at the top, Indians, Chinese, and Christianised minorities in the middle, and Buddhist Burmese at the bottom

He was a liberal who operated as an agent of an oppressive fascist government and developed pangs of remorse, which he then translated into his writings.

Also, not to be totally essentialist, but…

Come on. The dude even looks like Hitler.

Imo what we are seeing is far closer to the slow collapse of an empire.

Which, in fairness, 1984 effectively documents.

But Orwell clings to the idea that this collapse (a collapse that his own country of England was already sliding down) was something that could carry on forever. You could keep cutting those chocolate rations year after year and keep throwing away your youngest generation in war after war and keep churning out revisionist history after revisionist history and nothing would ever really change.

Orwell could predict the fall in the States (because, again, England in the 1950s was in the thick of exactly this revanchist totalitarian Red Scare crisis) but he couldn’t see where it all would end.

Bottom line is, things are falling apart due to incompetence, not a very competent entity taking full control.

One could argue that the consolidation of power into an increasingly remote and schloratic aristocracy will inevitably produce incompetent leadership. As voting districts get larger and elected leaders become more insulated from their constituents, they stop responding to the material conditions in their domains.

And as residents grow more hostile to the fumbling, self-important bigots managing the territory, you see vigilante acts that cause the leadership to retreat further and imposing increasingly stringent loyalty tests on their deputies and bureaucrats.

The focus of effort becomes suppressing dissent rather than fixing underlying economic conditions. So more and more resources go into policing, spying, fencing, and propagandizing.

This isn’t a single individual’s failure (even of you could find a host of singularly foolish, craven, or incompetent individuals) but a function of an aristocracy consumed by paranoia in a society with a shrinking supply of economic goods to spread around.

Orwell lived through the fucking holocaust and couldn’t call a future of eugenics. Embarrassing.

I don’t think people believe that climate change doesn’t exist

From the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works

You can argue Inhofe is being cynical, but there’s plenty of O&G heads in his district who make more money as denialists than serious inquisitors.

New Orleans got hit with the biggest blizzard in the city’s history.

Gonna need ah whole heapin pot ah Gumbo tah warm me through this heyah week.

For instance, they just ruled 9-0 on the TikTok ban while Trump was calling for the courts to rule the opposite way

https://newrepublic.com/post/190366/gorsuch-supreme-court-tiktok-ban

“But the question we face today is not the law’s wisdom, only its constitutionality. Given just a handful of days after oral argument to issue an opinion, I cannot profess the kind of certainty I would like to have about the arguments and record before us. All I can say is that, at this time and under these constraints, the problem appears real and the response to it not unconstitutional,” Gorsuch continued

Fortnite is just baseball with extra steps

If I’m playing a game where it feels like spending money like that is the only way to have fun with it, I just drop the game.

A big part of the “hook” in GACHA and other whale-hunting games is the initial hook of a fun and engaging setup. Genshin Impact and Sword of Convallaria both stick out to me as initially very fun and captivating games. They draw you in with the cut scenes and ramp up the curve like a normal open world JRPG.

But the longer you play, the more you start tripping over resource requirements and timers on abilities and the need to do “daily” activities that involve logging on every day. All of this is fun in the early cycles but feels more and more like work by the later stages of the game. Dungeons start looking more and more basic - big empty rooms with a bunch of respawns in the center. Fights feel more contingent on having a bigger number than any kind of strategy or skill.

If you’ve played older traditional JRPGs before, it’ll start feeling weird because you know you should be expecting the game to pick up towards a dramatic conclusion after 100 hours of play. But these games just… go on forever. There’s no payoff. You get tired and bored and you leave.

But if you haven’t played older traditional JRPGs, you’re just falling into this skinner box of induced anxiety. The game becomes habit-forming. The induced reflex to trigger a feature or use a power that’s increasingly paywalled encourages you to open your (parent’s) wallet.

Actually, I don’t even really bother with any games that I understand to have p2w aspects or any mtx that aren’t just cosmetic.

There’s a networking effect to a lot of these games. Up front, you’re strongly encouraged to get your friends to join in. And friends playing a game together can have enormous staying power. I know people who have been running the same D&D game for 20 years (literally the same characters and world, going on into the level 200+ range as they just crank those numbers higher). I know a couple that’s been doing WoW for their entire relationship - they started playing when they started dating and now they’ve got their ten-year-old son along for the ride.

I think part of what gives these games staying power is that they don’t require you to empty your savings account to participate. But I think its naive to discount the addictive power of a community space you’re comfortable socializing in.

These places are predatory. I can’t discount them just because I’m not one of the ones that got eaten.

Time-wasting respawns/progress loss seems like a very blunt tool with which to motivate the player to keep playing.

Tried playing a game of tennis with my friends. 0, 15, 30, 40, Point. Then if you’re two scores ahead the game resets. Wtf! Why did the game reset? I was 30-40 and now I’m back to 0? I should be allowed to keep my 30 into the next game.

Now I’m being induced into playing more tennis! I hate this.

And tennis has so few maps! Almost everywhere I go is concrete. Very luck to find a clay court anywhere. You need to buy the DLC to find grass, and only if you’re really lucky.

Its repetitive. Its exhausting. The rules barely make sense. And the match-making is completely fucked. I’m either playing people I trounce or getting my ass handed to me almost every time I go to a court.

I think I’m going to try and pick up chess instead. Does anyone know how I can upgrade my pawns to queens, though?

“This is logically flawed because <drops a stack of biology textbooks on the table>” won’t really bother a bunch of Young Earth Creationists. You’re arguing with people who will retreat to the baseline argument “because God said so” in a pinch. Getting into the messy details of embryonic development won’t save you, because that’s not how their nominations to the FBI, the DOJ, or the Federal Judiciary are going to interpret any of it.

If you can’t find shallow, mindless media on Bluesky then you’re not looking.

Also, just go on Rednote, ffs. I peaked in there and half the front page is just “Welcome Refugees! Learn hHow to monetize like you did on TikTok” which is soul-suckingly depressing and reminds me why I didn’t fuck with Instagram or TikTok to begin with.

According to your silly understanding of it, every mass-shooter in history was also “far left.”

???

Who did Steven Donzinger shot?