cannonedhamster

I highly recommend you give the Exile series from Spiderweb Software a chance if you haven't. It's a bit dated graphically, but it's engine has been kept up and there's some new Avadon series as well. It's hands down some of the best storytelling and I've easily played hundreds of hours. I've definitely played from night to morning without realizing it more than a few times.

I remember this. You have the link change names every time you refresh the page. I couldn't believe that app store was something they wanted to copyright. It's literally short for Application Store. I always thought if you had someone sell your product on dedicated hardware it might work, but then that's a ton of overhead. :/

Based on the average that most people received, it's unlikely that unless you were making decent money already you received much. The average worker in the US makes around $45k/year which amounts to a tax break of about $20 a week. So a single fill up of gas or less per week. I'm not thinking most people are wowed. Now shareholders got a huge break, companies flat out admitted that they were going to use the money to make their shareholders wealthier, which is plainly their right. It was a terrible tax plan that increased the deficit, did nothing to really help those who needed it, and moved more money to the already wealthy.

https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/01/pf/taxes/paychecks-new-tax-...

https://www.thebalancecareers.com/average-salary-information...

Japan has a large portion of their military spending covered by the United States. It's not a fair comparison. You would need to compare another global superpower such as USSR, Great Britain before the empire waned, Spain, etc. Most of the world's advances have been funded by military resources or wealthy private individuals. I wish it wasn't true because I personally think we'd be better served on cancer research than almost any research into better bombs, soldier exoskeletons, jet packs, etc.

Waiters and some service industries where tips are expected are not paid standard minimum wage typically. They are paid a separate, lower minimum wage which essentially pays the tax and are taxed on income expected even if they don't receive 15% tip.

Entirely depends on where you are working and what place you're working for. $40/hr is a lot for most of the waiters I know and is significantly more than I made at approximately $10/hr. I'm personally supportive of just raising prices and paying people a standard wage, but those at the top end of the tipping industries tend to make a really solid take home pay.

Sadly it was supposed to be a nicer project, but the person who finally got it under control wasn't at the helm from the beginning. I suspect it would be far better if he had. :(

If you have a Walmart nearby, there's a good chance you've got a place to recycle plastic bags. They generate a ton of them and as part of their greenwashing they usually have recycling stations available for the plastic bags.

https://www.news-leader.com/story/news/local/ozarks/2018/05/...

Do people really not realize that there are reusable K-cup inserts that you can put your own coffee in, it's nearly just as fast and can be cleaned in the dishwasher? We've been doing this for years and basically use the Keurig to waste less water and energy when we need a single cup. I mean the insert isn't perfect as it's still plastic, but it's significantly less waste.

The tax cut wasn't that great, most Americans didn't get enough to notice it and it didn't spur any job creation, in fact it's pretty much been used to pay out shareholders. Job growth has been slowly since Pres. Trump took office, mainly due to the uncertainty he's created in the markets due to trade wars and destabilizing relationships with allies. It's also true that as the markets have become more saturated this is to be expected, however salaries haven't risen despite a favorable business environment suggesting pretty much every company expects a downturn and backlash to reality. I got a pretty good sized tax cut. I'd rather pay more and have guaranteed healthcare that wasn't employer based, but that's a sample size of one. In your case you're touting $9-$18 a paycheck for the middle class as something to be excited over? They're going to lose their healthcare and jobs because of that tax break. Pretty sure that's worth more to them which might be some of the reason that support for the tax cut was lackluster.

Obama didn't increase the deficit. Congress did, congress controls the budget, the buck stops with them. Obama had a friendly Congress for precisely two years and they basically did nothing worth remembering other than the Affordable Care Act which will be rolled back and push us back to the pre-existing conditions, even higher cost healthcare the at predated it, because Congress won't allow Medicare to use competitive drug pricing.

The reason the debt went up is because we were in a recession, fighting wars, and cut taxes. Of course the debt went up. You always need to spend governmental money to pull a country out of a recession, the government is the only one with enough money to do so. Same thing prior to capitalism. Cities that flourish have strong governmental spending. What we need to do is actually raise taxes and pay for what we've already spent. There's no amount of cutting taxes that will make us reduce the debt. I personally prefer the balanced-budget requirements, i.e. you can't spend money unless you say exactly where it's going to come from beforehand. I also wish that there were more studies spent on efficacy of money spent against the purpose and this was published regularly by the CBO.

As for the border wall, it's a terrible idea. No one is against border security, however border walls are a relatively terrible idea in most places due to costs, land rights, water rights, etc. It would be far more effective to spend money on more agents and automated drones to assist border control. Add to that we don't have a wall at the border with Canada so the idea of only protecting the Southern border comes across as silly since most people who are here illegally simply overstay their visas. If someone really wants to get into the US, it's trivially easy through numerous locations.

Literally there are states where they closed voting locations and DMV locations in predominantly minority areas. They created a requirement for a license and then claimed it would only impact 16 year olds and they would "drive to people's houses" at the same time that they claimed they were "out of money". Nevermind that the whole state has an issue with not enough polling stations.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2015/10/01/alabama-drivers-licen...

https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/georgia-county-abandons-pl...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/10/30/midterm-elect...

Yes it's absolutely spurious.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/judystone/2016/05/07/health-car...

It never happens.

https://abc7ny.com/health/michigan-lesbian-couple-says-pedia...

Nope. Not Ever.

https://www.self.com/story/denial-of-health-care

This literally took me less than two minutes to find. I'd imagine longer than it took to intentionally bury one's head in the sand.

Another Bostonian here. :)

I don't think that guerilla warfare is considered "unfair" by the US military today (can't speak for the 70s), the US still encourages it when it suits them, especially when encouraging regime change. Asymmetrical warfare requires guerilla tactics by the less conventionally powerful armies against more conventional armies.

The schools conveniently ignored the Native American assistance in fighting the British, and overstate the actual impact of the peasant rebellion. It was an organized army with discipline founded on the French that really cemented the colonists win over the British. George Washington really is one of the few Americans that was as amazing as his legend, if not more so.

Americans also really don't give enough credit to the French for their assistance. We sort of gloss over that point, however we did at least return the favor in WW1 and WW2 as well as taking over the mission in Vietnam. So I think I pretty much wrote all of this to agree that yes our narratives definitely evolve.

Have an awesome weekend.

These have been around for purchase for quite some and there isn't a widespread rash of these devices burning out devices. I'm sure it happens, however the same could be said for TVBGones, car hacks, Wifi Pineapples, etc. If you're in the mood to destroy something it's relatively easy to do so. It's just a matter of time. This is why current disposable design trends are so pernicious. A motherboard is relatively inexpensive to replace on work environments where this is likely to be the most used. Access to other people's hardware can be somewhat risky for most people. There's a reason why most crimes of passion are easily caught. If you're intelligent enough to use this effectively, you're generally intelligent enough to find a different, legal way of revenge.

KDE has too many options. That's the problem, there's too much desire to tweak just one more thing. By then you've blown a week of time. I've personally also had bad luck running KDE. I love the look however it's always run dog slow for me on any computer I've used it on when compared to other DEs. To each their own though, that's the beauty of GNU/linux.

Samsung launched the first mass market laptops with SSDs. I'll absolutely agree on their monitors, DVDs were already on the way out but it was a smart move for their target market. Claiming thunderbolt as a win seems a bit will since they are known for ditching their own standards often.

I can't say I'm seeing much innovation that isn't design related specific to form factor. Their software has stagnated, iTunes and Apple music are a hot mess of garbage. Aside from removing the headphone jack to force people into higher priced headphones, I'm having a hard time finding the value and the market seems to be agreeing.

Can confirm WiFi calling works great. I've used it in multiple points on the globe without cell signal. Telegram also is a drop in replacement for Hangouts and iMessage. I use it on Android as well as iPhone.

At this point in time Apple really doesn't provide a compelling reason to me to use them. They lack a ton of polish, podcasts, family sharing management, dongle hell, and uninspired hardware that makes a lot of trade offs in order to be trendy are why I'll be moving back to Android. I guess in the end for me that's just a better market fit.

To the linux v Microsoft v MacOS there's really little difference aside from gaming and MS Office. If you're running servers or coding an Ubuntu purpose made laptop or server will generally work. If you need PowerPoint or gaming then you need Microsoft, and if you like a Unix environment or own an iPhone then MacOS and dongle hell is your best bet. From personal experience I've had the most problem with Apple products but ymmv. I know people who've never had a single issue and don't mind the dongle.

Please tell me you're not referencing the widely debunked Anderson Cooper conspiracy theory.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/anderson-cooper-hurricane/

He wasn't banned for being far right. He was banned for sending racist comments to another user. Send pretty straight forward violation. They are just enforcing he agreed to when he signed up. Why is this news?

Weird, married a Texan and have a Texan teacher as a mother in law. They both know about Texas dancing around the slavery issue defining it entirely as a states rights issue, while also glossing over the fact that the South started the war by firing on Fort Sumter. Seems rather inconsistent in Texas.

Government is also supposed to create jobs. It's a double edged sword. While it's been relatively lax on the oversight, everyone loves jobs. Unfortunately not enough regulation can lead to the same outcome as too much regulation as when there are too many monopolies like there are right now, it crowds out small businesses which actually create most of the jobs.

Is it really possible to say none of these could/don't exist in New York city already? Can you truly say that with a straight face? Same with D.C. for that matter. I didn't want this in Boston because Boston proper doesn't have the infrastructure to support an influx of people this size and I don't want my tax dollars supporting yet another company that will be big on promises light on results, see nearly every other time a company has been given money while promising jobs, and oh look they split the HQ cutting that perceived tax base in half. This is sporting arenas all over again.

Punitive actions are meant to correct the aberrant behavior by acting as a deterrent. The end goal of anything in criminal justice is to make the victim whole, and if that is not possible to deter future crimes of that type. This is why there are limits to how cruel we are allowed to be, as cruelty for vengeance sake is no more effective than is securing an individual who is very likely to continue their behavior.

Had a major DNS bug with Google DNS, it was on their side and they were completely messing up how they were handling some requests. Took them 2 months or so to fix it, they never described what happened, never said what was broken, and it took finding resources inside the company to solve. Google doesn't functionally have support for many of their paying services, nevermind their non-paid services.

Theoretically I think it's possible to submit bugs using GDocs especially since you can essentially use Javascript to do so. The coding engine is pretty powerful. I can imagine using forms to do so.

They don't care about people with disabilities. They don't even care about people without disabilities. It's not usable for people who are not differently abled.

The only way that you matter to them is how much you bring to their bottom line. This isn't the Steve Jobs era where you have a sole visionary crafting something of value. This is a run of the mill hardware company charging luxury prices for above average hardware in the best of cases and a ton of vendor lock in.

I was going to say that as well. A lot of these groups had large followings and brigaded unsuspecting other subreddits for no other reasons than giggles.

I left the site not because the whole site was toxic, but because it had gotten out of Reddit's control and they had no way to fix it. I got temp-banned for trying to be a freaking adult and make friends with someone who was harassing me. There is no oversight of the mods and it nowhere near a place for intelligent conversation in anything remotely political.

This article still seems unnecessarily harsh. Reddit didn't set out to be bad. Most of the moderators try to do a good job. The bad elements on the site are pervasive and can destroy a positive subreddit with a sideways glance. Let's not forget this is the place where a conspiracy theory was born that caused a pizza place to get labeled a pedophile ring causing a man to shoot up the place.

Atheists are killed in Africa and the Middle East as well to also include some places in the South Pacific. Basically all the places Christians are persecuted, Atheists are too.

Atheists are also banned from serving in government in 7 US states as part of their state Constitutions, though the laws are unenforceable. Atheists also can't be Freemasons or Boy Scouts. So yeah you're wrong again.