Itty53

He was hired, performed the task he was hired for, and left, sounds like it to me.

Executives have used this for decades. Governments with armies hire mercenaries for the same reason, has gone on for centuries. Romans did it, it’s so old. It’s not a far off speculation here … it’s a well known, well practiced pattern of authoritarian behavior.

Why do you guys think bad cops who resign over and over keep getting hired the next city over?

It’s actually a really old practice, “the first DRM”. You’d place things in your game that could only be solved by having the manual on hand, meaning you purchased it. Many games took a jovial approach to it, letting you play the game, but in a broken state if you answered incorrectly and indicated you’d pirated it. Castles II comes to mind, also Kings Quest 5. Others did the “die if you didn’t have the manual”, but those let you go on … just knowing you’d lose every single time.

It’s this. It’s a business decision. You don’t spin servers up in a second and take them down hours later, there’s contracts involved. You spin up enough servers to handle the load you expect normally, not at launch.

Honestly I played Payday 1 A LOT, enough to be in the top 1% of 1% of players. Got invited to the studios after being among the first to complete the ARG.
Then played Payday 2 A LOT.

But I quit halfway through the lifetime of 2 because it was clearly not getting any better, but worse. They stopped innovating and just started looking at player builds and releasing more and more powerful bulldozers. Got boring really fast.

So when 3 was announced? I haven’t even looked at it.

This sounds like a joke but this is the explicit problem: doctors won’t be the ones to do it.

You guys all knew that right? Doctors don’t administer those chemicals for lethal injection. And they won’t be administering gas either. Some po’dunk cop will.

Because doctors take an oath that begins “first, do no harm”. This has forever been the problem of the very notion of “humane execution”, there are no physicians involved. None. At any step.

Know what’s just as effective? Bullets. But we can’t call a firing squad humane with a straight face, and the witnesses remaining are traumatized, including the shooters. That truth exposes the truth of the death penalty. It’s not about justice, but retribution - for the living. They’re lynchings. Violent theatrics. That’s the point.

They shouldn’t be legal, it’s barbaric. But you already said you weren’t for them, so I’m just preaching to the ether.

And even those wouldn’t be affected by a shutdown. When the government shuts down, it’s not like the justice department grinds to a halt. Federal trials continue.

He’s a fascist troll. Block him. Check his history. Classic “rack up reputation in game subs and then spam right wing hate speech everywhere else”. Dude is a total fash troll, again, block him. Fedi works best when we block those guys because just responding to them is spreading their messages through your network.

Bo Peep and Woody flirting isn’t universal … and being unwed, the sexual innuendo presents a double standard. But that’s not politics to you.

But make her a him, call him Beau Peep and change nothing else in the same sentence? “Politics”. Ugh.

This is important for managing heat on a human level in cities. So I’m not saying this is stupid.

But don’t get this twisted: This is useless for addressing the climate change problem. It’s not even a bandaid on a stab wound, this is equivalent to offering someone bleeding out a glass of warm water and fanning them with a brochure about new plastic doodads. A trillion trees planted tomorrow wouldn’t even be a pebble on the pavement to that SUV flying down the fiery freeway.

If a private, but not secret agency has access to the physics and can’t engineer it, there’s a question of why. As much as we’d like to disassociate engineering from discovery, they’re linked together. Engineering leads to further observation leads to discovery and vice versa back the other direction. It’s entirely possible there’s “new physics” at play even if they’re only theoretical to the Discovery Channel right now. Who’s to say, really?

So while I’m not gonna disagree with you, and you’re right there’s a difference between engineering technology and physics itself, I still don’t really see the distinction as that important to the discussion here.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, after all. We’re talking about exactly that level of technology, commonly being called physics-defying by many engineers today. That’s magic to common understanding, for all intents and purposes, even if it’s possible that we could all eventually understand and demystify it given the education to do so.

Until then? Hard to close doors other than just “do we need this for the story”. And aliens don’t need to be there, hence my whole line of thinking above. That’s just another example of “any secret is the exact secret I want it to be” kind of thinking. See also “everything I don’t understand is a communist” or more recently, “everything I don’t like is woke”. I like to make reference to dinosaurs, because no one ever does. Why not? It could be dinosaurs in those crafts too! There’s more evidence for that than aliens, right? We know 100% dinosaurs existed, here. They would’ve had much much more time to develop technology than we did, eons longer. So again why not? “Because it’s absurd.” Yep. It is. Every argument against it counts against aliens too.

I’m gonna propose to the alien believers a different explanation of UAPs: they’re black projects. Yes all those physics defying things are man made, and they probably have an understanding of physics we don’t currently know about in the wider public.

Technology trends exist. We can see them. It’s no wonder that every generation’s stereotype of unidentified craft always always always mimicked the latest generation of military flight tech. That’s what’s been true since the inception of the whole thing. It’s true today too, thirty years from now we’ll get a public look at the crafts they’re testing out in the skies today. Be that because they get used or because they become obsolete. Thats how it goes.

So why the hearings in Congress? Because they’re black projects. We’re talking trillions in this rabbit hole. Congress very much has an urgent want to understand what they military might be keeping from it, vis a vis private contractors. We’re talking multiple times the budgets of nation-states and we’re getting receipts that are basically "trust me bro"s.

But Congress can’t very well tell the truth of all that without undermining the American military, and thereby America itself. So they go along with the same “aliens” reasoning, “uhh yeah, let’s go with that, okay”, and keep pressing for more information.

Is that crazy? Yeah, you bet. But it’s no crazier than believing all that and that there’s aliens. Because the alien conspiracy crowd asserts virtually everything I just said, just, with aliens. Aliens aren’t necessary for any of it though.

In the history of nations there’s never been a more sure-fire way to lose democracy than making an enemy of the military complex propping it up. So Congress ought to be careful too, keep a little plausible deniability for themselves.

Check it out.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB799

This is a bill to amend the existing laws. The amendment is really just about removing hurdles, period. There really aren’t added stipulations about who it applies to. They also took the opportunity to make the wording more inclusive of everyone, dropping him/her, etc.

Proud of my state today.

therefore everyone must suffer

You do realize you can walk right up to that counter, point to the good stuff, and they’ll just give it to you right?

They didn’t just put it behind the counter to be pretty back there.

Counter point, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I’m not gonna argue your brother (“my sister in law is the wife of a cop” is a strange way to say that) is evil simply for being a cop, no, but your brother does defend bad cops all the time. Every cop does. They call it a brotherhood for a reason, and the expectation is that their brotherhood runs deeper than yours. Be aware of that and keep him aware too. Because if he’s “one of the good ones” he’s in real danger if ever he spoke out against the bad ones. Real, life threatening danger. That I can say that of police and back it up with a dozen examples of cops killing other cops should at the very least give you pause.

By the way if you do the “don’t assume their gender” thing from my assumption that it’s your brother, oh boy they’re in a lot more danger than I originally thought.

And guns are still legal after countless school shootings, so don’t hold your breath.

Case provides further evidence. We know peppers can lead to serious consequences. Case in point, these chips have warning labels on them already. Don’t eat if pregnant, nursing, heart condition, etc.

That last one is the active player here. The kid had an undiagnosed heart condition. It’s not his fault, it’s not the fault of the chip maker either. It’s just a sad happening. Not every sad happening needs to result in legal actions and regulations or … anything, really. Guns are still legal after all, I don’t want to hear fuck-all about banning fruits and vegetables.

Somehow? I’m not stopping you. You keep talking about something else - you keep insisting China and America do the same bad things. And I’m correcting you. That’s all.

I’m not stopping you from talking about what America has done, in fact I already told you we can talk about it. Four times I said those words, in each individual comment I wrote to you. Every time you made a choice not to and instead chose to double down on your original take, flawed and incorrect though it was. Every time you just insisted I was defending America and I never did.

So talk. You have things to say, say them. Don’t do this childish “well fine” act where you pretend I’m controlling what you can and cannot say.

By the way China never murdered and raped the middle east. Just one more example of the point isn’t it?

Call me a hypocrite, that’s fine. I never cared much what children think of me. Grow up kiddo.

“gamers are doing with a new Bethesda game what they’ve done with every previous Bethesda game! You won’t believe what comes next!”

He is being propped up by Saudi investors, which are aligned with Russians on more fronts than one.

Don’t think for a second that his wealth is connected to the success of his businesses, never was. It’s always been connected to his investors. His investors own him. His investors are the Saudis.

Musk is America’s new 9/11, just, in slow and prolonged motion. Same money, same people behind it.

Again, we can talk about the terrible shit America has done and still does. I won’t deny it. Yes murder is bad. Okay? That’s not what you’re here arguing though. You wanna try again, no sweat. I’ll listen. Will you?

“Anything bad China has done, America has too” is what you said. That is not just factually wrong, it’s childish and ignorant and above all lazy. You can’t even be arsed to be more than nominally aware of things.

I was very clear about this already, so that you want to keep arguing tells me you’re not reading my replies at all or they won’t matter anyway, you’ll just pound your fists and stomp your feet. Fine. Do that. It’s alright. Won’t help you, won’t get you any closer to a better world, but you’ll feel better for a half second. Neat yeah?

I’m gonna point out that it is only complex to not be white. It is not complex to be white. That’s a simple determination white society makes, that’s all the complexity there is. That determination.

Irish people weren’t white, then they were.

Italian people weren’t white, then they were.

Latino people weren’t white, then they were. They’re getting there. See my other comment.

Jews still aren’t “white”. They’re “Jews”. Secular Jews get to be white though. “The good ones”, they’ll say. Hrm.

There’s no group mastering over white people making them play by some ever-changing set of made up rules. That’s what it is to be not white in America. Literacy tests, citizenship tests, background tests, sundown towns, don’t look a white woman in the eye, mind your manners, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc. Those are all things done to minorities that have never been done to white people.

“White” is not a complex thing. Full disclosure, I’m a white guy. First generation Italian American, my dad came off a boat at Ellis Island and his family had to cross America all the way to California to find people who treated them as equals. Italians, they’re as complex as Germans and the Dutch. But white? White isn’t complex.