Auracle

To me, the level scaling just completely annihilates the game. Why even have a leveling system if practically everything just stays leveled with you?

The rich already pay most of the income tax in our country. We probably have the most progressive tax system in the world.

Voluntary donations are practically impossible. Sure, you get the odd straggler, but it’s so, so rare.

I have the most popular NSFW LoRA (actually a LoKR but whatever) for at least one major text to image model on CivitAI.

Once it blew up I made a Patreon, maybe 6 months ago? I get $50 a month from it. I doubt that even covers my electricity costs for training.

Podcasts and videos do have the advantage of being able to ask for people to donate with every podcast/video, but people just aren’t inclined to give their money away when they don’t have to. It’s a rare trait.

I'm not the one in the bubble. You are so far left that think that MS NOW, Huff Post, Vox, etc. aren't on the left in a No True Scotsman type manner, and in your comment you used the word 'fascist/fascism' over 10 times in reference to people that are simply right leaning or even very centrist.

I personally have individual beliefs that align with both of our two major political parties, which is something very few people can actually say, for what it's worth.

The mandatory trigger at 5,000 encounters/day (or 8,500 single-day) implied acceptance of very high volumes—potentially ~1.8+ million encounters/year—before full expulsion authority kicked in. That expulsion authority only lasted for 3 years. It also codified/expanded release authority for asylum seekers under certain "operational" conditions.

The main point is that Biden acted like his hands were tied and Trump showed that they clearly weren't, and that we already had the tools to effectively shut down illegal immigration (through the border, at least).

As an example, a lot of times when women have a bad experience with a doctor they blame it on misogyny. As a male, I've had a ton of bad experiences with doctors. I've known men (more than one!) that have died because doctors ignored their pain. My dad almost died because he had something that's more common in women.

So, when a woman has a bad experience with a doctor it could be misogyny. It's probably not, though, and if all we ever do is look into doctor's supposed misogyny then we aren't dealing with the root issue.

"I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."

"By the way, Pennsylvania has now seen all of this. They didn't know because it was so quick. They had a vote. They voted. But now they see all this stuff, it's all come to light. Doesn't happen that fast. And they want to recertify their votes. They want to recertify. But the only way that can happen is if Mike Pence agrees to send it back. Mike Pence has to agree to send it back.

(Audience chants: "Send it back.")"

"

The Democrats are hopeless — they never vote for anything. Not even one vote. But we're going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones because the strong ones don't need any of our help. We're going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country."

What he hoped was that the protest would show that there was a ton of support for his position that the election had been stolen and for the relevant people to take that into account.

I'm not defending them, I'm just pointing out that the two things aren't equivalent.

And yeah, sure, the message was that they thought he was a traitor. I don't agree with them on that and I certainly don't agree that's a good way to send that message. My point is that if a bunch of conservatives want to do an actual coup they would be armed to the damned teeth.

NPR. NBC. ABC. CBS has decided to try being moderate, so we'll see how that goes. MS NOW or whatever they call themselves now. The New York Times. The Washington Post. Politico. USA Today. Vox. Slate. The New Yorker. Huffpost. The Atlantic. Much of the gaming media, weirdly. Reddit. Twitter was. Bluesky is. Wikipedia, if that counts as media.

Allsides even lists the AP as left leaning, though I don't ingest enough direct AP stuff to verify. I'd disagree with them listing the BBC as neutral on quite a few topics, nowadays, and put them towards left - but that's just me.

Sure, there are right-leaning places like The National Review, but apart from the opinion section of the WSJ and Fox News as a whole they're pretty small.

Why are you just comparing refugee numbers? That's incredibly disingenuous. A very large portion of the US's population is here illegally, and it would be significantly larger if we didn't have birthright citizenship.

They're effectively the same thing.

Well, some people are far more affected by it than most people. I'm in an area with a huge influx of Somalis in proportion to our population and I've heard many vague hushed conversations about it but our newspapers are filled with stories about how great our diversity is.

Biden: "Here's an app where you can make an appointment to illegally cross the border. Our system will be so backed up that you won't need to go to actual immigration court for years, and even then if we tell you to leave and you don't we probably won't go after you. You'll have plenty of time to make an anchor baby. Oh, I can't close the border without a bipartisan bill that essentially enshrines a certain level of illegal immigration. Can't be done."

Trump: "Border is closed. We're deporting people, starting with mostly those that have committed serious crimes."

Tell me, how do you, as an immigration judge, actually judge someone that says their life is at risk due to x,y, or z but you have no way of actually verifying that? Especially when they crossed quite a few countries to get here? I don't see how that's an actual solution to the problem.

One could easily argue that Trump made for more progress as far as the immigration courts being backed up by simply not having an almost completely open border like we did with Biden.

> Would you not see it as ethically bad to split the citizens into "true" citizens who can't have their citizenship stripped and second tier citizens who can?

Potentially. I'm not familiar enough with their system to have an opinion. In the US system, I feel like actual citizenship is the hard line. With everything else you're here at our convenience, though I'd say if we were to kick out greencard holders en masse (for some reason) it should just be that they don't get renewed, not immediately kicked out.

Again, I don't disagree, I'm just stating it should be a broader discussion. When you pick and choose individual cases (especially political ones...) people lose the forest for the trees.

Alright, so all of these die hard Republicans had a plan to do a coup...and none of them brought guns to the actual coup? Really?

It was stupid for many reasons, but it was a riot, not some preplanned ambush with weapons like is being talked about in the OP.

I don't disagree, but our justice system is absolutely rife with unequal sentences. That doesn't make it right, but it doesn't mean we should go crazy over an individual instance of it when the whole system should somehow be overhauled.

That may be, but everyone is afraid to openly criticize it because they're afraid of being accused as racists.

You're right, apologies. I was trying to cut off an argument before it started but I went about it completely wrong.

It's incredible that someone can come to that conclusion when given direct evidence to the contrary. Which blurb is closer to Merriam-Webster? Or are they biased as well.

I just skimmed both Wikipedia and Grokipedia's articles on remigration. Wikipedia has effectively no positives or reasons why people would want remigration listed at all. Almost the entire page is criticism, including a large section of tenuous links to nazism. Grokipedia lists BOTH positives and criticisms of the policy. Which one is designed to push an agenda and which is there to inform and let people make up their own minds?

Larry Sanger (one of the Wikipedia cofounders) was just blocked by Wikipedia indefinitely for trying to balance the ideology back out.

It's beyond incredible that anyone thinks that the far right has taken control of the mass media. It's clearly the left that has control of most of the media, which makes sense. People in cities tend to be on the left. Journalism majors tend to be on the left.

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Even if you scope it out to "everyone that's not a citizen or has the equivalent of a green card," is that so evil? If a country accepts immigrants they should be able to send them back at will unless they become citizens. That shouldn't be controversial. You can argue if it's a good or bad policy, of course, but it's not ethically wrong to do so. Yes, they'll be in more danger and have worse lives when they go back to wherever they came from, but again - a country should exist to serve its citizens, not the entire world. It's not sustainable.

Does Sweden have a single Canadian there under 'asylum' policies?

Yeah, sure, people probably wouldn't care if they were Canadian, because they wouldn't be committing crimes at far higher rates, wouldn't be pushing for more religious rule, and the majority wouldn't be on welfare. That's not what's happening though.

As for your second paragraph - do you really think the governments of the countries these people are coming from are any better? Should every US citizen that wants be able to immigrate to Afghanistan and take a good portion of their GDP as welfare? What about Japan? Should US and Chinese citizens be able to move there if they want and relatively quickly become the majority, right? They need the population, no?

I certainly don't agree with a lot of our Middle East policies, but that doesn't mean European governments should throw open their doors to mass migration. Governments are supposed to exist to help their own citizens. Sometimes that means bombing someone. Sometimes that's the right thing to do, sometimes it's not, but it's pretty damned clear mass migration from third world countries isn't helping their citizens.

Define "good." The people immigrating aren't suddenly going to behave like Swedes - we've seen that. Will the geographic entity that is Sweden maintain or grow the population? Sure. Will it still be Sweden? No. If the majority of people are from, say, the middle east, it'll be run like a country there. I don't think that'll be good for the existing Swedes.

If you could somehow pick the best and brightest from those regions to immigrate - sure, great, probably good for your country. Existing countries are the way they are because of their people. When you shift your demographics to such a degree, your country will also become that. I don't know why this is such a hard concept for people to grasp. It's the same base concept that explains why the US policy in the middle east has failed so badly over decades. The people there largely don't want US-style democracy. Some do, sure, but the majority either don't care or like the system they have.

I think you'd be surprised at how quickly that sentiment has moved from the far-right to close to the center. People are (rightly, in my opinion) pretty upset at their governments for letting mass migration happen with pretty much only downsides for their actual citizens. People are all about the idea of helping the downtrodden when it's just an ideal, but when they realize it's having negative consequences for them that can easily change.

> that there is widespread availability of a variety of guns and ammunition to anyone who wants it

Felons (largely) aren't allowed to own guns. There are other restrictions as well. Apart from that, yes, in most states most people are allowed to have firearms.

Dyed hair, nose rings, tattoos, short hair on women, effeminate type looks on men, etc.

People on the fair ends of political spectrums tend to change their plumage to show their affiliation.

I’ve hit the limit on Codex/ChatGPT one time on the $20 subscription since it came out, when I accidentally left the thinking limit on very high all day. I still could have resumed using it just 2 hours later.

You know, I would actually use little Pokemon sprite emojis, unlike the real thing.