“The Banks Russians are out of money!” rides again.

Who is reporting this?

The National Security Journal

Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia.

Why not just give us your government badge number, dude?

Everyone needs a hobby.

No they aren’t. Games flop all the time and the companies don’t quit this bullshit. No business executive has ever walked out of a tense call with their investors and re-committed themselves to being nicer to the staff. You’re delusional if you think people not buying a game results in the quality of life of that game’s staff improving.

What improves the lives of game developers is going indie and doing well. What improves the odds of doing well as an indie developer is producing games that can compete with the GTAs absent the absurd marketing budgets. That requires a symbiosis between indie games media, indie developers, and early adopters. But the gooner gamer is at the end of the line in any event. They don’t even know the game exists until it gets a splash ad on the Steam Store.

Your retail consumer market is a consequence of industry practices, not a cause.

ya’ll are taking sex too seriously.

I will stop taking sex seriously when it stops being special. If I only have 20 minutes to properly enjoy intimacy once every two weeks, it is going to be fucking magical. Joke sex is for when you’re in the cuddle puddle in college, knowing there’s half a dozen other hotties down bad you’ve got to get through before the end of the week. Once you get older, you realize sex needs to be professional. There’s special outfits. There’s devices. There’s ritual. You read books on it. You get degrees in it.

If you’re not having fun and if you’re afraid of saying the wrong thing and looking awkward or silly, you’re with the wrong person.

Have you ever tried to cum at 40? Fun is for people with a second load in them in another thirty minutes and a three day weekend with nothing to do. Fun is for people who aren’t sneaking this out while the kids are down for a nap. Sex in middle age is Seal Team Six shit. Yeah, we’ve done the drills. We know what to expect. But now we’re in the field and we are on the clock. We get in, we do the deed, we hit the extraction point, and maybe we have time for a cigarette by morning… assuming everyone comes out alive.

You can’t possibly be naked with someone and not feel a little silly

I will hang from that sex swing and not even crack a smile.

I missed the ANTIFA riots.

Conspiracy theories paint fraudulent reality of Jan. 6 riot

Several different conspiracy theories have emerged in the year since the insurrection, according to an analysis of online content by media intelligence firm Zignal Labs on behalf of The Associated Press. Unfounded claims that the rioters were members of antifa went viral first, only to be overtaken by a baseless claim blaming FBI operatives.

How are these people calling themselves Christians?

Anyone familiar with the history of the church can answer this.

No Epstein Files

DEMS LITERALLY JUST LEAKED ANOTHER BATCH OF EMAILS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein_client_list

WE HAVE THE CLIENT LISTS. THE FLIGHT LOGS. THE BIRTHDAY BOOK. WE. HAVE. THE. DOCUMENTS.

STOP SAYING THERE’S NO EPSTEIN FILES.

ISIS in the White House

FFS.

Subprime Rides Again, baby.

people are actually looking forward to a game

Hype around a game is directly related to the marketing budget. If people are looking forward to the next edition in a franchise, it is inevitably because they’ve been bombarded with “NEW THING! NEW THING! NEW THING!” radio/TV/streaming ad reels for months prior.

All that aside, yeah our countries hate unions and hate workers and everyone in power hates you and wants you to die.

We’re going to replace all the working class schlubs with AI, haven’t you heard?

why do the right thing when you can buy a new shiny toy

It’s not like they’re plastering “We Busted A Union To Get This Game Out Six Months Late” on the packaging. The overwhelming majority of retail customers have no idea how the sausage is made. Those that are curious enough to ask typically aren’t the ones going in on the “Rape And Loot Simulator” franchise to begin with.

Gotta get off this hobby horse of blaming the anonymous gooner gamer at the bottom of the food chain for decisions made in a smoke-filled board room long beforehand.

Delaying the game another six months cost the company a full 3% on their market cap and god knows how much in long term costs.

Employers seem ready to slit their wrists if it’ll get blood on a union organizer.

Gotta wonder what just parking all these gas guzzlers on the south side of the Equator is costing us.

Not that it matters, since we have unlimited money for stupid military bullshit. But I’m about to hear a bunch of hawks tell me the US Treasury is out of money and we can’t afford Medicaid anymore. I can’t help see this next Glorious Christian Invasion of a recalcitrant petro-state as a big hole in my pocket leaking money.

Reform is a tool deployed by the oligarchy to stay in power.

Its a political relief valve to limit the scope of corruption and the degree to which the public experiences pain. If you’re in the corona of folks who enjoy relief via reform, it is often enough to quell your desire to overthrow the system. If you’re not, it costs you support - often along ethnic or regional lines - in a way that divides your neighbors against you.

Reform gives the illusion that voters have a part in deciding political outcomes

Voters are deciding political outcomes. Large waves of angry voters do change policies by forcing the government leadership into a reform cycle. This is often preferable to violent confrontations between an increasingly unpopular state leadership and growing crowds of dissidents.

Reform isn’t an illusion. It has material consequences for a subset of the angry populace. Soothing this populace and winning them back to the establishment’s side is why reforms work as a mitigation of revolution.

The illusion is in the belief that reforms aren’t necessary. Government leadership pumped up on its own hubris will often exceed the limits of the institutional system and undermine their function. Because reform requires appeasing people outside your immediate interest groups, they can often be characterized as an act of weakness rather than a strategic concession. And leadership that relies on the impression of strength (and the overt displays of brutality) can abandon reform as a vehicle for tempering hostility to policy changes, leading to revolutionary movements.

studies showing voters have zero influence in politicians and their policies

Studies have shown a large gap between public opinion and public policy. What these studies regularly neglect is the popular rejection of ostensibly favorable public policy, often in the wake of a short term media campaign or sudden economic shift, which temporarily change their historically stated positions.

Consent can and does get manufactured. And this consent is reflected in subsequent election results.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States

The issue isn’t one of rationality or decency. The issue is of exhausting a constituency with barriers and terrorizing them with criminal liability while controlling the privatized mechanism for counting votes

At some point, its two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner. “No harm in voting” totally misses the problem at hand.

Bunch of sycophants all soft criticizing games like a review magazine afraid of offending the makers while talking about their playthrough.

Almost as though its a heavily astroturfed community and many of the accounts are exactly this.

Heaven help you if you have an actual opinion outside of the box

That’s just social media in a nutshell. You’re either a loyal footsoldier or a radical insurgent. But you need to find your opposing faction and do battle with them. And then, if you get too confrontational, the Mods/Admins need to ban you for doing exactly what the site incentivizes.

For badmouthing a sitting President?

I mean, I can think of at least one administration that agrees with you.

Soviet Russia Born

This is such a weird way to start a headline. Alexander Smimov was 11 years old when the Soviet Union collapsed. Does he just have Gorbachev-particles in his blood from thirty years ago?

which administration—which you promoted

Jeronimo Gonzalez did what now?

Listen, if you … uh … like your Measles, you can keep them!

Sort of the unanswered question here. Why was the app removed?

“China hates gays” is just the default western-facing answer. But there’s no coverage of the actual regulatory decision other than that Apple claims to have responded to it. Hell, the article linked on Engadget is just a partial reprint of the original Wired article, which reveals the two apps are owned by the same parent company, which had fired the original development team and pivoted the app’s audience to India and Pakistan.

Folks on here who are fully familiar with the enshitification of American-centric apps seem flabbergasted at the notion that a foreign country with its own regulatory board might censor an app for any reason other than “Hates Gays”.