UnderpantsWeevil
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
- Comment on 4 hours ago:
We are heading towards a crash. We are very much already in one, and have absolutley no way out.
I think this is what folks lose track of when they talk about “the crash”. We’re all waiting with baited breath for the financial system to topple over. But the financial system is increasingly just a dozen private equity firms bidding up one another’s baseball cards. They can’t “crash” in the traditional sense until a sufficient number of them refuse to contribute more to the pot, and so long as everyone has easy credit there’s no real reason to do that.
Incidentally, JPow and Trump (and every Fed Chair/President going back to Bernenke/Obama) have both been militant in keeping Fed Interest Rates at historic lows going on nearly two decades.
Literally we are living through the gilded 1920’s again but with an American Hitler.
I mean, the parallels between Trump and Coolidge Eras are in abundance. War on Immigration. A finance/tech sector that’s eating the industrial economy. Massive spike in white nationalism paired with a full blown Red Scare. Deficit hawkery that never touches the national security state. Global ecological crises compounding into massive famines and agricultural failures.
We are a country being lead into disaster by the least competent people imaginable.
Part of the problem is that we’ve lost track of a consensus on what “competent” looks like. I see plenty of people (rightly) insist guys like Trump and Speaker Johnson and governors like DeSantis and Abbott are criminally incompetent. But then these same people get fully behind Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris, seemingly without recognizing that they’re pushing the backside of the same privatization / national security state coin.
What do you do when blue state bastions like California and New Mexico are turning out Crypto Shills as quickly as any captured conservative enclave like Wyoming or South Carolina? What does competency look like in the wake of Biden’s squandered four years or Obama’s or Clinton’s corporately compromised time in office, for that matter?
How do you talk about climate change or even scratch the surface of our US-backed genocides in Gaza and Yemen and Afghanistan or talk about housing policy or college debts or union organization when half the liberal contingent is just a commodity that’s traded on the stock market?
- Comment on 5 hours ago:
the world is rotten
The chef is routine. The world is beautiful. You just can’t see it from inside the steamer.
- Comment on Is anyone else not feeling that patriotic for July 4? 4 days ago:
Florida is well on its way
- Comment on Is anyone else not feeling that patriotic for July 4? 5 days ago:
- Comment on Anon hates reddit 5 days ago:
Stalinist approach
Capitalist prole looking at a private media institution managed by unpaid laborers intent on maximizing profits for a gaggle of overpaid administrative flaks and their indolent shareholders: “God damn, this is just when the Russian guy ran a Communist newspaper.”
- Comment on Xbox is cancelling Rare's 'Everwild' and ZeniMax's new MMORPG IP as part of broader cuts — with 'Perfect Dark' impacted as well 5 days ago:
Eliminating 9,000 jobs only guarantees they’ll flounder even longer.
Maybe. Microsoft’s biggest revenue stream has historically been government contracts. I don’t see that failing them anytime in the next decade.
But retail consumer spending? That’s something that could seriously take a few hits in the next big downturn. I can see a company putting its finger to the wind and betting a '08 style recession will kill the market for console gaming in another two or three years.
- Comment on Uber Eats or something idk 5 days ago:
Inflation, in absolute terms, is a larger benefit to people with higher interest rates.
Fair enough. I’m more thinking in a discrete sense… “saving money” versus “owing money”… rather than implicitly how much less are you paying.
- Comment on Uber Eats or something idk 5 days ago:
That’s a historically unusual artifact of the financialized housing market in a country where the population outpaces new available housing units.
Go to Italy or - God forbid - Iraq or Ukraine or Myanmar, and you’ll find record inflation combined with falling real estate values. Buying a home in Lebanon or El Salvador or Bulgaria in 1975 wasn’t a good move. You had to be a certain proximity from the US/EU money printing machines and a distance from the US/Russia bomb dropping machines to get that arbitrage to work.
- Comment on Uber Eats or something idk 5 days ago:
inflation is good if you borrow money
at below the rate of inflation
- Comment on So if we're just good with careening into fascism 2.0 what does the future look like? 5 days ago:
Even republicans don’t want fascism.
What’s been truly revolting is in watching how many liberals have jumped on the fascism bus. Kristen Gillibrand is fully in bed with the Silicon Valley techno-fascists. Richie Torries can’t get enough genocide, whether its via our migrant concentration camps at home or our outsourcing of genocide to the Middle East via Israel and Saudi Arabia. Sitting Democrat NYC Mayor Eric Adams has gone all in on MAGA, after receiving pardons for his chronic misuse of public office and funds from the President. Gavin Newsom is flirting with Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon as a podcast host. Half the 2026 Texas Dem Congressional slate is fully in favor of turning the US/Mexico border into the new Iron Curtain. The Florida Democratic Party wants a Bay of Pigs 2.
It’s Italy in 1924 all over again. Oops! All fascists.
- Comment on Democrats Bet Jobs in Red States Would Save Clean Power Projects. They Lost. 6 days ago:
Sort of the hard math of building clean green energy is where it is most cheap and abundant to expand.
Texas, for instance, has been a boomtown for wind and solar thanks to its geography (and the ERCOT [mis]management of the grid accidentally incentivizing construction through sky-high prices at peak hours of solar/wind production).
But the real snag in the liberal plan to blue-ify red states with green jobs is that all the jobs are still private. Obama/Biden had a chance to put together a brand new TVA with lots of dedicated infrastructure capable of delivering at-cost electricity to undercut fossil fuel provides while creating jobs that paid well above the prevailing rate for wages. Instead, they just handed Wall Street magnets and their allies in the construction industry a series of blank checks.
- Comment on You swallowed your siblings! 6 days ago:
Imagine thinking that person behind that hole is a woman
- Comment on Sincerely, your literally poorest europoor. 6 days ago:
아니요
- Comment on Young men are 'playing videogames all day' instead of getting jobs because they can mooch off of free healthcare, claims congressman 1 week ago:
That’s a billion dollar scratch that could have made a huge difference in thousands of lives.
Okay, sure. But consider that they didn’t earn those billions of dollars by sucking up to the right assortment of Wall Street financiers and rich family members.
- Comment on Sincerely, your literally poorest europoor. 1 week ago:
A real picture of colonialism, when the three largest English-speaking populations after the United States are drowning in US debt and surrounded by US military bases.
- Comment on Sincerely, your literally poorest europoor. 1 week ago:
Imagine if IBM and Ford and Chase National Bank had pretended like Germany didn’t exist, rather than flooding the country with cheap capital and credit.
- Comment on Sincerely, your literally poorest europoor. 1 week ago:
从今天开始，仅限中国表情包
- Comment on Steam Summer Sale 2025 has begun! 1 week ago:
I’m sorry, I didn’t see Undertale anywhere on the box art.
- Comment on Steam Summer Sale 2025 has begun! 1 week ago:
There’s always the five finger discount
- Comment on Amazing Grace 1 week ago:
I gotta say, given the state of Tennessee at the moment, I would not want my statue anywhere near the other icons they’re raising.
- Comment on Any other trauma victims? 1 week ago:
- Comment on Bernie Sanders says that if AI makes us so productive, we should get a 4-day work week 1 week ago:
It did, for a select few. Less than four days, even. You just had to be one of the finance sector aristocrats who laid claim to enough passive rents.
- Comment on Netflix is delisting some of its best indie games 1 week ago:
But then again, the mass general population is fucking dumb
That’s a lazy explanation. It neglects that Netflix did have a lot of accumulated goodwill from ease of access and quality content.
But now its in the enshittification era. All the streaming services are behaving like this. There’s no alternative that doesn’t suck with a comparable library.
- Comment on Netflix is delisting some of its best indie games 1 week ago:
*Also the writing generally sucks ass and assumes I’m not paying attention.
I’ve seen the articles dealing with the phenomenon of “Standard Netflix Show” and how it has become so painfully formulaic that it can only be described as background noise.
Really not a great sign when your premium service is treated like elevator music. But hey, they’ve got a near-trillion dollar valuation, so clearly I’m dumb and their C-levels have earned every penny.
- Comment on Netflix is delisting some of its best indie games 1 week ago:
Netflix getting in on the streamed video games wasn’t all that crazy. I flirted with it initially, as they had a few good Steam titles on there that I was effectively getting handed for free.
But the marketing approach of jamming “Play this clickbait garbage game, you stupid idiot!” install button into my face every time I visited the site ultimately lead me to cancel my subscription. Like so much else in modern streaming, the website’s admins do not want you to have any control over your front page. The end result is utterly alienating.
- Comment on The "We Tried" Award 1 week ago:
I couldn’t name anyone I knew who actually went through the shit of Vietnam and wore one of those hats proudly.
They were exclusively for the ranks of the Texas Air National Guard, the straight up draft dodgers who wanted to look cool with their chud friends, and the handful of sociopaths who thought burning down people’s homes was cool.
- Comment on Square Enix acknowledges Expedition 33 success as inspiration for next Final Fantasy as turn-based is still beloved by gamers 1 week ago:
I genuinely enjoyed the Kingdom Hearts action-adventure with a couple of celebrity minions supporting your Dark Souls-style main character and the occasional Big Summons to drop a global special effect. I don’t think its bad on its face.
But they’ve invested so much time and energy into making Live Action work as a system that everything from the story to the game mechanics have suffered. Like, if you want to make a FromSoft game, then go over to FromSoft and do a business partnership to make Eldin Fantasy: The Soulslike Crystal Saga. You don’t need to keep tinkering with this engine that clearly doesn’t work.
Also, the FF7Remakes seem to have found a sweet spot. Why can’t the mainline games deliver this level of quality?
- Comment on Crikey 1 week ago:
I wish that were true, but I’ve got a stack of home movies that say differently.
- Comment on How to make friends 1 week ago:
On Lemmy, idk. Some definitely exist.
Anywhere else, a lot more
- Comment on bisexual 2 weeks ago:
More seriously, I think erasure is only part of it. Lots of LGBTQ folks deliberately remain in the closet for the sake of family relationships, careers, and local politics.
If you’re bi, it’s just easier.
But that heterosexual camouflage does get confusing to process when you “come out”. Especially with the reactionary attitude that heterosexuality is a choice.
