Lurker > adjl

BoomerKuwanger posted...

adjl you crazy

I'm not getting into the Israel discussion again, especially after this guy was outed as MAGA, they aren't even worth trying to argue with

Perhaps not, but he's not the only one reading this thread, and I don't want to leave his propaganda unchallenged. Especially around Israel, there's a ton of ignorance about the region's history and what's actually going on there right now, which is why so many people default to "I feel bad about the Holocaust, so I should probably stand up for the Jews here." Propaganda like his preys on that ignorance, so I do what I can to challenge it and educate the ignorant.

Remember that the goal in a public argument is not necessarily to convince your opponent, but to convince the gallery.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

So supporting our greatest ally in their time of need

Massacring civilians en masse and deliberately engineering one of the worst refugee crises in recent memory are not "needs" that I particularly care to support. I'm all for helping Israel defend themselves as needed (I think establishing the country after WWII was a mistake, but at this point reversing that decision would likely cause more harm than good, so we can really only work with what we've got), but what's happening right now is not defense. It's genocide.

To call Israel anyone's "greatest ally" is also quite the stretch. Globally, the country is a pretty minor power with little historical significance to back up that title (bearing in mind that they didn't exist during either World War and weren't particularly involved in any other high-stakes conflicts since their inception). The largest benefit they offer as an ally is a staging ground for any offensives the West wants to conduct in the Middle East, which is useful, but hardly "greatest ally" material when you can name a country that single-handedly allowed the US to form in the first place.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

Just be aware your true colors are showing with statements like this

Personally, I don't have any issues showing the colour of "genocide is bad." I'd even go so far as to suggest that anyone who does have issues with that particular colour should immediately re-evaluate their views on the world and consider permanently isolating themselves from society in every possible regard if they choose not to change their mind.

https://imgur.com/Pq46tmD

Accrovideogames posted...

When will people realize that voting for the lesser evil is only helping the rigged system stay in place?

The alternatives are to vote for the greater evil or not vote at all (which increases the chance that the greater evil wins). Unless there is actually a viable candidate that's including voting reform in their platform (and even that's not a guarantee, just ask Canada), the election is not an opportunity to push for voting reform. The election is an opportunity to work within the system you have to get the best outcome that system allows. Treating it otherwise will never accomplish anything more than helping the party that most benefits from lower voter turnout.

OhhhJa posted...

Easy to become apathetic about politics/voting when you vote and vote and either nothing changes or it just gets worse

It is easy to become apathetic, but that just justifies giving up and disengaging. Actively deriding people who are still motivated enough to care and try isn't apathy, it's a thinly-veiled effort yo defend the status quo.

Trump didn't push the vaccine conspiracy. He cemented "Covid is a Chinese/liberal hoax they're trying to take away your freedoms" as the official MAGA position pretty much right out of the gate before trying in vain to walk that back a bit when it became apparent it was making a colossal mess of things, and said a lot more things that undermined the response (like "I'm not going to wear a mask, but you all should if you're scared," which had exactly the effect you'd expect on the insecure people glomping onto his every word) or were outright stupid (like injecting bleach), but he was generally pretty pro-vaccine. By that point, though, his cultists treated his pro-vaccine statements as evidence that he was being forced to say such things by those behind the vaccine conspiracy, so it didn't help much.

darkknight109 posted...

Honestly, the idea of populations being monoliths is hilariously ignorant. As Randall Munroe so adroitly put it: there are more Trump voters in California than Texas, more Biden voters in Texas than New York, more Trump voters in New York than Ohio, more Biden voters in Ohio than Massachusetts, more Trump voters in Massachusetts than Mississippi, and more Biden voters in Mississippi than Vermont.

I'm a big fan of when people lie with statistics while telling you that they're lying with statistics to make a point about how easy it is to lie with statistics, and Munroe does that often in some pretty elegant ways.

Geaux1210 posted...

quick question; why do yall assume MAGA is so horrible? What did he ever do to hurt gaming?

Are you suggesting that you believe the only reason anyone here opposes a given political movement is that they think it's going to hurt gaming somehow?

ItIsSoOver posted...

yall are fucking hysterical and its well... hysterical

youre about the same level of cringe as schmen on one of his captain capitalism rants, and similarly to him you all turn it up a notch every election season

democracy was a mistake

I remember thinking I was so much cooler than everyone else for being apathetic about politics. Those were good times. It's a pity that high school ends so fast.

SinisterSlay posted...

I never noticed. Emulators do a pretty good job of ignoring this problem

They do, but that's where the "legally" part comes in. It's significantly more common to get in trouble for downloading a SNES ROM than for downloading a digitized version of a film that was only ever released on projector reels. Part of that is the age (if the projector film didn't get a VHS or DVD release in the last 60 years, nobody really cares about it, while 30-year-old yet-unported SNES games do sometimes get rereleased), which gets into the fact that the medium is relatively new, but the issue remains that there are legal concerns around emulation.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

We have a skewed view of how well media was preserved in the past because we really only remember the things that were preserved.

Yes, I will gladly concede that survivorship bias plays a huge role in how we perceive the issue. Games being as new as they are also makes it much easier to learn about games that have been lost, as does the ongoing battle between companies protecting their IPs and emulation sites preserving games that would otherwise be lost.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

But the same thing happens with games - in precisely the same way you might have a film reel copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, a VHS copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, and a DVD copy of To Kill a Mockingbird (and you need specific and unique hardware to play all of them, and none of them are cross-compatible), a popular game like, say, Halo gets released on the original Xbox, gets an updated port for the 360, gets released as part of the Master Chief Collection, and so on.

Here's the thing: VHS lasted for 20+ years before DVDs replaced them, and that VHS version was sold for much of that time. DVDs have been around for 20+ years, and a DVD version of the film has been available for much of that time. Nothing is set to replace DVDs entirely (BDs have ended up as a premium alternative instead of an actual replacement), so anyone can still go out and buy a DVD player and a DVD copy of the film and watch it.

By contrast, the Xbox was available for sale for 6 years, and isn't anymore. The 360 lasted 7. Each release of Halo was available only in those windows, and if you happen to find an older copy you won't be able to play it without also tracking down the old hardware. For games less popular than Halo that don't get ported to every single generation, if you missed that initial 2-3-year window where the game was being printed, you're probably never going to get to play it without paying through the nose for one of the rare surviving physical copies (or piracy). Conceptually, older media becoming obsolete and difficult to play is nothing new, but the timeline is much shorter for games than for other forms of media, which makes it much harder to preserve it through services like libraries.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Combined with virtual libraries becoming more and more common on both consoles and services like Steam, and tons of past games are still perfectly available to modern players on modern systems even if you don't own the original hardware a game was on. And that's not even taking emulators into account.

I'd argue that that's a big part of why it seems like games are so much worse than other media in this regard. Digital libraries are indeed doing an excellent job of preserving games (with a few hiccups), which is making it that much more apparent just how many haven't been given that treatment. For the vast majority of games, there is no technical reason that they could not be available to purchase today. Companies have the ROMs and are already paying to store them, emulators already exist that can run those ROMs on most modern hardware, and every platform already has one or more digital storefront services that could be used to distribute those ROMs and emulators to anyone looking to buy them (at whatever price is needed to cover the distribution costs). That they aren't is a deliberate decision on the part of IP holders.

Loss of physical media is to be expected. Between attrition caused by normal use, other damages like fires and floods, and the simple physical reality that you only have so much storage space and therefore can't store everything indefinitely, stuff is going to be lost. Toss in that physical distribution is comparatively expensive and that stores only have so much shelf space, and you similarly expect physical media to stop being sold. Some loss is also inevitable with digital media (copying files is not perfect, after all), but not to the same extent, nor are the concerns about distribution relevant, so giving games a pass under the same standard that gives historical physical media a pass doesn't make much sense. That's not to be expected. That's a choice to create artificial scarcity, one for which I'm all in favour of criticizing companies.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Games may have a greater rate of loss, and have unique aspects (like abandonware being a thing), but overall it's not that qualitatively different from any other form of media.

Qualitatively, no, but the idea of games being playable only within 1-6 years of their release is significantly more extreme than what's seen in other media, and given the tremendous potential for far better preservation and accessibility than that, I'd say it's still worth identifying as a problem.

orlouge82 posted...

Trump seems to inexplicably get more support and donations from Republicans the more indictments and convictions he racks up.

He's playing the helpless, innocent victim angle pretty hard. The more he's convicted, the more people who believe he's done nothing wrong (or that he shouldn't be punished for doing wrong things because he's somehow above that) want to push back against that perceived injustice.

SinisterSlay posted...

Sounds like you just discovered hardware based DRM. Congrats, that's the entire point of consoles.

That's the point he's making. Far more so than other media, retro games are restricted by the hardware they were released on, outside of comparatively rare ports/remakes that make them accessible with modern stuff, and efforts to pirate stuff that isn't available on modern systems tend to be treated more harshly than pirating other media. Part of that is that the medium is relatively new and nothing is public domain yet (nor will it be for quite some time), but console games in particular have been quite deliberately designed to be accessible for only a very short period of time.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

the needing to endlessly fiddle just to get stuff to work on pc is just obnoxious, yeah

"Endlessly fiddling" is pretty rare unless you're either trying to get really old stuff running (which consoles can't even do in the first place) or delving into modding (in which case you're voluntarily wading into the fiddling), and for many games modding is considerably more straightforward now than it was even 5-6 years ago (like Factorio has a mod portal built right into the game and installing mods is a simple matter of picking from the list and restarting the game). The vast, vast majority of the time, starting a game on my PC is no more complicated than starting one on a console.

As a bonus, actually, being able to fiddle is handy when a game doesn't work. If a game isn't working on a console, you're pretty much SOL. If a game doesn't work on a PC, provided you meet the requirements (and even then there's quite a bit of leeway there), you can often fix the problem without having to send the system off for repairs/replacement.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

the only "pros" for pc at this point are just "xbox and some playstation games games are on pc anyways" and "you have mod options for some games"

Also 20+ years of backwards compatibility (more if you're willing to fiddle) and more control options.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

which the latter isn't as much of a selling point as a lot of pro-mod people think, since it involves fiddling, and needing to fiddle with things is exactly why people don't get a pc.

It makes for better games. That alone is enough to make it a major selling point. Sure, there are going to be people who don't want to fiddle enough to take advantage of that, but that doesn't make it any less of a selling point. There are just some people whose desire for a completely mindless experience outweighs the value mods could provide them.

"It's okay, he deserved to be murdered because he still lived at home at 22."

That's quite the... interesting take you've got there.

Nightwind posted...

You know dadjokes are bad on purpose, right?

I am quite familiar with dad jokes, yes. I would not have suspected that this topic was meant to be one, though.

?

https://imgur.com/GgIoicf

The gratuitous caps lock and quotation marks around "wireless" is giving me big boomer complaining on Facebook vibes. It's like trying to add mocking emphasis to the word, but not understanding the current formatting conventions for communicating that tone. It's kind of weird to see that juxtaposed against a post about video game controllers.

Also ?

Count_Drachma posted...

That and we aren't in a post-labor society where UBI could function.

Virtually every UBI/minimum income experiment conducted has been successful in that it shows overall improvement in pretty much every regard, but sure, keep repeating that dogmatic mantra like it means something.

Count_Drachma posted...

Except net worth isn't billions of dollars that they have, it's holdings in companies where the valuation of the company's shares is volatile.

Which can be liquidated. I'm not sure why you insist on conflating "net worth isn't just a big bucket of money" (which is true) with "net worth can't be compared to liquid assets in any way." Trying to downplay the wealth of the world's wealthiest people is a really weird hobby.

Count_Drachma posted...

While "okay, you're successful, we want to take a good chunk of your money" is questionable, suggesting "okay, you're successful, we want to take over your company" is straight-up Soviet.

It doesn't have to mean the government taking over the company. Just that if a company becomes successful enough that a shareholder becomes a billionaire, that shareholder needs to sell off shares (and spend the proceeds) or otherwise reduce the value of the company until their net worth drops below that threshold. That can take the form of passing the reins to somebody else, profit sharing within the company, choosing not to expand further once the company has reached the threshold... All of it works out to avoid leaving too much power in the hands of any one individual or company, which is the goal. If the individual doesn't drop their net worth by the required amount within whatever time frame is defined (like if your net worth breaks $1 billion, you have two months to reduce it), that's when the government can step in and tax the excess by forcing the sale of shares/claiming liquid assets.

Also, I'm not sure which version of history you're reading in which Soviet citizens were allowed to freely gain wealth up to a point where it was beyond question that they could live out the rest of their lives in absolute luxury and never want for anything before the government would collect anything in excess of that, but I imagine most actual Soviet citizens would prefer to live in that reality instead of the one they got.

Alpha_MaIe posted...

All those sites that check if you can run a game arent even 100% accurate. Having it on Steam would just set themselves up to take all the blame and have the forums spammed with people bitching and threatening to sue or other stupid shit.

Also that. A third party site is just information. If Steam itself is telling you you can run it, though, that's Steam trying to make a sale, and that makes them liable for falsely advertising the product you bought if it turns out you can't. In practice, between the refund feature and the ability to hide behind weasel words like "you can expect," I doubt they'd ever actually be successfully sued over it, but that's just a hassle that's better to avoid.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

adj why are you defending nonsensical decisions

For justice.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

how much is big steam paying you for this

$2.35 and a green popsicle.

SinisterSlay posted...

Although technically with the overlay they do know your resolution and framerate, so they could take a guess.

True, but that's still data they'd have to collect and turn into a summary, which is work that's largely redundant when other services offer similar answers.

Bear in mind also that the primary use of such a feature would be to identify games you shouldn't buy. There'd be a handful of sales that would be made to people with crappy computers who didn't think they could run something and realized they could after Steam told them, but those would mostly be cheaper games anyway. On the flip side, I expect there have been many sales where the buyer wouldn't have bought the game if they knew how poorly it was going to run, but because it was kind of borderline put up with it instead of refunding it, and even more where the game turned out not to run but the buyer didn't figure that out until after the refund period had passed.

Basically, it would cost Valve money to implement it and would likely only reduce their total revenue instead of giving them any sort of return on that investment. It'd be convenient for users, certainly (I quite agree that it'd be really nice to see a "users with similar hardware to yours have averaged X FPS at 720p, Y FPS at 1080p, and Z FPS at 4k" section on each store page, and the technology is absolutely there to do that), but I understand why they haven't.

That is, however, something one of Steam's prospective competitors might want to look at, since that would be an actual service advantage that might justify jumping ship.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

steam also collects the necessary data for that though lmao

you think they don't know what hardware you have?

They know what hardware you have. They don't know what games people have managed to run on that hardware or how well.

SinisterSlay posted...

Some part of that seems wrong.

We know inflation has caused all prices to double since 2012.
Did anyones wage quadruple in these last 12 years? mine didn't

The causality doesn't go both ways. Increasing wages by 10% increases prices by 0.4%. Increasing prices by 0.4% doesn't necessarily increase wages by 10%.

Because there are several other services that have collected the necessary data to answer that question, making it unnecessary for Steam to also collect (and store and process) it.

Lokarin posted...

what if it's the realdoll you're trying to hide?

Another pair of Groucho Marx glasses.

Indeed. The usual suspects lose their collective minds whenever the idea of a wealth cap is tossed around, but really, the only reason to want more than a billion dollars is if you're trying to exercise way more power than any one person should ever have anyway. If you want to watch numbers go up, go play Cookie Clicker or something and stop ruining the economy for everyone else.

As a concept, a flat minimum wage will never work. It'll inevitably fall behind inflation, stagnating until the gap becomes severe enough to generate enough political will to fix it, by which point the economy has come to depend so extensively on poverty wages that fixing it is deeply disruptive and gives more ammunition to opponents of future increases.

Instead, it needs to be a sliding scale based on the regional cost of living: the minimum wage for a given position must be high enough that working for 40 hours a week pays as much as median rent for a 2-bedroom apartment (equivalent to paying 2x what's needed to pay for half of it, aiming for paying 3x what a sub-median apartment would cost) within a 30-minute walk of the workplace, or enough for a similar apartment within a 30-minute drive if you also cover the cost of owning and using a car. The benefits of that are twofold: you ensure that employees are able to afford to live, plus it automatically moderates the cost of living because jacking up prices to cover higher wages will prompt people to move somewhere cheaper and thereby force housing prices down.

The exact numbers will obviously need tweaking, and the increase will initially cause many of the same problems that any minimum wage increase will, but codifying that sort of policy is what's needed to ensure that minimum wage laws serve their intended purpose in perpetuity instead of being a constant uphill battle. Toss in some re-zoning measures to add more mixed-use properties in neighbourhoods to make it easier for people to work and shop locally, and you've got a recipe for a self-regulating system that ensures everyone is able to afford to live.

That, or just do UBI and abandon the idea of minimum wage altogether. That's probably simpler, though it still runs into the issue that living wages are not universal and there'd need to be some regional variation there (with some kind of checks to make sure people don't just move to expensive neighbourhoods so they get more UBI).

SinisterSlay posted...

So maybe the quick solution, if you openly support dictators, your taxes are raised to 99.99999%. Call it the treason tax. So only Musk, Trump, etc have to pay it basically. And we end poverty overnight

Fun fact: If you took away 99.99999% of a billionaire's net worth, they'd still have $10k left. Musk and Bezos would still be millionaires. A billion dollars really is a ludicrous amount of money.

At least this time was shorter. Still weird to have it two days in a row, though.

Not helped by the fact that anyone calling about an insurance claim is probably already having a pretty bad day to have to claim something against insurance.

JOExHIGASHI posted...

I think bad customers just stick out more. Usually people get what they want pay and leave with no trouble.

Pretty much. You don't notice the people that don't do anything to make themselves more noticeable, which skews your perception of how common remarkably bad customers are. Unless you've actually kept a tally, I can almost guarantee you're overestimating the percentage.

Solid_Sonic posted...

What happened? GameFAQs doesn't update its social media feeds anymore.

The site went read-only for a couple hours. Nothing terribly unusual, but I'd be lying if it didn't cross my mind that it might have been the end of the site.

Pretty much every notable game wins some GotY award or other.

BoomerKuwanger posted...

If they were gonna shut the place down it doesn't make sense to me that they'd put it in read only mode. If only though. Set me free from this dumb site

It makes some sense. Read-only would be less resource-intensive than having to process inputs as well, including not needing to have anyone to moderate content. In read-only mode, they still get ad revenue from anyone that ends up coming to read guides or whatever posts are left (which show up in search engines), so there's some value in keeping the site alive in read-only mode for that.

Well that was a thing.

BoomerKuwanger posted...

I think that PS2 is unequivocally retro at this point, but the scale isn't linear. Some games that are 10 years old (or more) still strike me as "modern" whereas, say, 1988 to 1998 has a much wider gap of what popular games of the time are like.

It also doesn't help that a lot of modern games deliberately evoke the styles and mechanics of older games. There are still often noticeable differences, like you'd never actually ask if Sea of Stars was a contemporary of Chrono Trigger despite the obvious similarities, but it does mess with our ability to assign an overall "feel" to a given era when that feeling has been mixed with that of prior eras.

Thinking about it, that sort of deliberate retro styling is something that mostly started after 2000 (in part because handhelds were 1-2 generations behind consoles and therefore effectively kept retro-styled games alive without a deliberate effort to do so), so I guess that might be part of why I don't feel like gaming has changed as much in the last 20 years as in the 20 years prior.

Lokarin posted...

Klingons are still called Klingons even though their ancestral homeworld of Kling is gone

That may just be their decision to kling on to the name, though.

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

Wait, why am I finding Direct Videos on Youtube already, TC said tomorrow?

He said "tomorrow" yesterday, in all North American time zones. I guess it would have been like 2 am today your time, but it was between 5 and 10 pm for all NA users.

The URL also specifies 2-21-2024, which should clear up any confusion.

Finally, a Fantasy Life release date. That was announced *last* February as a 2023 release, and kept being listed as such until like December when they said "Yeah it's not coming this year we're aiming for next summer."

Otherwise, nothing super exciting. Can't say I was expecting a new Endless Ocean (I honestly forgot that game existed), but I guess it makes a lot of sense with the currently popularity of chill exploration cozy games. Not really my thing, but good for the people that like it.

Metalsonic66 posted...

Penny's Big Breakaway!

I can't say I've followed it closely, but I'm getting the vibe that it's a matter of Sonic Mania doing well, Sonic Team not following through on its success because that's just how Sonic works now, and the studio just saying "fine, we'll make our own game that follows through on Mania's success." That's something that's good to see. The management of the Sonic franchise has just been baffling in how insistent they seem to be on trying something different every time regardless of whether or not the last idea worked, which has resulted in a ton of wasted potential.

Just put a pair of Groucho Marx glasses on it and nobody will notice.

Idiot_Savant posted...

I generally assume that anyone that seems to die in any media will be revealed to be alive later if somebody decides it'll help the story

That too, but falling in a visual medium is deliberately ambiguous enough to make it easy to say they survived. Same with being buried under rubble or caught in a chaotic explosion where they disappear. If there's no body, there's a good chance they survived.

shadowsword87 posted...

Boycotting an entire town seems weird, normally it's one specific company or product.
An entire town seems dumb.

Depending on what they're shipping, it could even be characterized as terrorism. If it's stuff like heating oil or food that are essential for life, a large enough movement to limit the availability of those items is putting people in danger to coerce the local government into making changes.

I generally assume that anyone that seems to die by falling in movies/TV will be revealed to be alive later if somebody decides it'll help the story.

Probably like 6-7. Apparently I have shingles, and I spent a good chunk of Sunday in the ER getting checked out because it's right around my eye and that's super dangerous, but it's a fairly mild case and it's better today than it has been for the last few days. Still bothersome, though.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

No, it is the children who are wrong.

There is only one "old-school". The rest is just new school, slightly less new school, and still kinda new school.

As much as the chronology disagrees with us, I do kind of agree. Games from 20 years ago feel a lot more similar to modern games than games from 40 years ago did to those 20-year-old games. Many of the gameplay conventions that we consider standard now were established in the early 2000's, including the controller designs that have become pretty much universal, and there haven't been any major paradigm shifts like the 2D to 3D jump. I'm sure part of it is just that I make less of a distinction between the games that came out in the second half of my life than the first, simply by virtue of the fact that the second half feels faster and less varied, but the last 20 years of gaming have still definitely progressed very differently from the 20 years that preceded them.

I keep meaning to learn how, but with no driveway and no garage, I don't really have a convenient place to do it. I tend to just roll it in with a seasonal tire change (which, again, I could do myself if I had a convenient place, but I don't really want to do it on the side of the road) and a general check-up (which I can't really do myself). In the grand scheme of things, it's not that expensive, so I don't mind too much.

I have, however, replaced two lights now (rear turn signal on my old car, headlight on my current one), and that's something I'll never be going to a garage for again. That's an incredibly easy repair.

Not that many, though my experience is from working in a small bakery with quite a few regulars that were great, so I expect I got off easier than people in larger chains do. That was also nice because the owners worked in the store, so when we did get bothersome customers, they were just as bothered as the rest of us and would sympathize afterwards (or intervene if it was a real problem, though those were rare).

Problem customers do tend to stand out enough to feel like they make up a greater percentage than they actually do, though. Even if you're serving a couple hundred people in a shift and almost all of them are perfectly fine, one really awful one can ruin the whole day.

faramir77 posted...

Nintendo is at a weird point. There aren't any major titles on the horizon. They'll need to show something good otherwise this will be total useless. Somehow I doubt this will be where they announce the next system, unless they just acknowledge it's a thing.

Recently, they've tended toward showing major titles relatively shortly before their release. The last few February directs have come at an apparent lull in their release lineup, but set the stage for most of the rest of the year with titles that come out within ~6-8 months of their announcement. Personally, I kind of prefer that over the industry standard of "here's a trailer for a game that might come out three years from now."

That said, they're specifying this is a "partner showcase," which I expect means it's going to be mostly third-party stuff, and 25 minutes is pretty short. In the absence of another February direct, I suspect this means we're going to be getting a bigger one in March-April that unveils a new system. That's mostly just a hunch, though.

The nuance of determining whether or not graffiti/street art has enhanced its canvas gets really tricky to actually sort out in a formal legal context, given how inescapably subjective art and aesthetics are and the basic concept of people having a right to decide what their private property looks like, but as a high-level concept I do like the idea of not prosecuting people who have created art that does enhance the space.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

yeah, it's like they all think every city is the version of Detroit in robocop

Bonus points where the "high taxes" thing is often parroted by people who live in suburbs and therefore have their low tax rate overwhelmingly subsidized by those higher taxes in the city core. Most single-family suburban homes in America are tax-negative when you factor in all of the other infrastructure costs involved in servicing those neighbourhoods, and while I can understand preferring to pay less property tax than more (because who doesn't?), it's pretty short-sighted to gripe about cities' high taxes when they're literally the only reason they have a road at the end of their driveway.

Indeed. I'm referencing how similar his post sounds to the city-fearing rhetoric so common among the sort of people who glomped right on to that song when it came out.

Lokarin posted...

ya, but they're all poor people

100,000 people giving $5 each is $500,000. Poor people in large enough numbers can collectively afford some pretty expensive things, and there's no shortage of people willing to pay for their messiah's crimes.