arquebus_x

That phrase doesn’t mean what you think it means.

It doesn’t help that wage growth has largely been in the “unskilled” sectors (I hate that term, every job is skilled), but inflation reduction has largely been in non-essential goods. Which means that upper-middle to upper income people have been noticing their wages not increasing with inflation despite inflation overall being lower, and lower to low-middle income people have been noticing inflation impacting their budgets despite their wage increases.

But in aggregate, “everyone” is being paid more and “inflation” is down. So at a macro level everyone “should” be happy with how things are going. But human beings don’t live at the macro level.

Economists don’t call something a recession until rich people start feeling the squeeze. The definition of a recession, while vague, is really designed around that fact. So even if they’re not doing it on purpose, their analytical blinders prevent them from recognizing other conditions that are at least as meaningful to many more people.

Before we get out the flaming pitchforks, let us not forget that pretty much no one reads or cares about the New York Times. Their readership (print and web) is minuscule compared to entities like CNN, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, MSNBC (and Fox, OANN, Breitbart, Joe Rogan…).

Sure, it sucks that the NYT is sucking Trump cock, but in the end, that won’t move the needle.

It also has a 1v1 mode (player vs computer or PvP) that is just fantastic. I actually spent most of my time playing the 1v1 mode way back in the day.

If I’m not mistaken, a “militia” was understood to be an ad hoc, non-standing armed group, supplied by the resources of its members. The amendment was added so that if a militia were ever needed (again), it could be formed, because the pool of potential militia members had their own firearms. Laws limiting citizen access to firearms would hobble any new militia.

Given that armies at the time were only recently becoming “standing” (permanent) armies, and the U.S. didn’t really have one, their best option for making war was militias. They were acutely aware that the revolution began that way, and only later developed an actual (organized, separately supplied, long-term) army.

But very quickly, the U.S. developed permanent armed forces and never had to rely on militias again. At that point the 2nd amendment really should have been obsolete.

Or free Black people.

They weren’t quite the sharpest tacks in the box.

It doesn’t help that the sentence makes no sense. The second clause requires that the first be the subject of the sentence, but then the third clause starts with a new subject, and lastly there’s that weird “German” comma after “Arms.”

There’s more than one way to interpret the meaning, but strictly speaking the only syntactically accurate rendering comes out roughly as:

[The right to] a well regulated Militia shall not be infringed, as it’s necessary to the security of a free State (security meaning the right of the people to keep and bear arms).

…which is also meaningless.

It’s a stupid amendment for lots of reasons, but the big one is that it’s just shitty English.

If Kbin defederates from Threads, I’ll just leave Kbin, and stay with Threads. Defederating over vibes is not how the fediverse is supposed to operate. And for everyone advocating for this dumb idea, I’m just using this thread as a honey pot.

Do you disapprove of the idea that SCOTUS can decide constitutionality? It’s not in the constitution, so when they first did it, it was a “limit” on another branch of government.

Under many sane readings of the constitution, this isn’t a power congress has.

The constitution only explicitly articulates the process for establishing treaties, not ending them. So it’s a bit of a gray area as to whether the president can end them by himself, since he can’t establish them by himself.

To my mind, it would seem exceedingly weird if establishing a treaty required the consent of the Senate but breaking one didn’t. What’s the argument to be made that the two aspects (establish/break) are so fundamentally different that the rules for the first aren’t also the rules for the second? Why does the president need consent to say yes but does not need consent to say no?

It’s definitely been done before, but also never directly contested. (In previous cases SCOTUS has avoided answering the question by saying they didn’t have jurisdiction.)

At what point does the world look at this and say that enough is enough.

Do we ever, really? Over the sum of all war-related humanitarian disasters, the West responds to very few of them, and only when it’s economically or geopolitically useful. The Palestinian crisis is no different; it’s not exceptional in any way. There’s an ongoing nightmare in DRC that’s orders of magnitude worse than what’s happening in Gaza and… no one cares. Europe and the U.S. are on the verge of disengaging from Ukraine.

The thing is, it doesn’t even matter if we “condemn this behavior.” We could do that all we want and it wouldn’t make much difference. And no one wants to be interventionist - there’s too much awful history around it, and it smacks of colonialism, and it means taking resources away from “domestic issues” that always seem to matter more.

We’ve got to move away from the notion that the situation in Gaza is somehow unique. It allows us to conveniently ignore the root causes of the problem, which is much more universal, and stems from the ongoing sense of cultural superiority on the part of Europe and the U.S.

Ireland has been supporting civilian Palestinians from the beginning. The only Western nation to do so vocally.

Ireland has a lot of history resisting an occupying force.

These far-right Israeli politicians are basically saying, “You love them so much, you take them.”

Would be nice, but I’m not convinced that putting him in jail doesn’t hand him the presidency.

You probably already know this, but there’s a free open source version of all three original games, plus others:

https://alephone.lhowon.org/

I’m much more interested in the original games, which are now available for free as Aleph One.

https://alephone.lhowon.org/

if they gave these fucking companies china consequences

Post a photo of the Tiananmen Square massacre and see what happens.

It’s fish and children, isn’t it?

Welcome back to the 1980s!

@JohnnyCanuck is right in a bunch of important ways, but there is one additional factor to consider. The reason the Hollywood guild system works the way it does is because no one is contracted to any given studio. It used to be that actors and writers were required to have locked-in contracts - they couldn’t work for anyone else - but that hasn’t been true for a long time. (There are exceptions: writers and actors can choose to have multi-picture/script deals, in exchange for an up front wad of cash, but it’s not the norm outside of the really heavy hitters.)

A standard union protects a worker’s existing job, and helps that worker negotiate terms for an existing job.

A Hollywood guild protects a worker’s future jobs - because the one they have now will absolutely not be the one they have in 2 years, a year, maybe even in 6 months. This is the nature of the Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA): it dictates minimum terms of employment. It’s not designed to give writers/actors the best deal, it’s designed to give them the least shitty deal the studios will agree to.

Why does this matter?

It matters because what most people think of as “Hollywood” is all the extremely pretty, extremely powerful, extremely prolific actors and writers who make lots of money and show up on magazine covers and in media podcasts. (No writer is showing up on a magazine, I don’t care how pretty he is.) But the MBA is there for the day players, the low rung people, the staff writers, the gal who had one spec script produced in her career so far.

What the WGA managed to achieve recently with its negotiations is an absolutely phenomenal success. But it still only really impacts the MBA - the minimum basic agreement!

So… uh… why does this fucking matter?

The game industry doesn’t really have superstars. It doesn’t have the equivalent of Tom Cruise and John August. At least not at scale. And the ones who are that shiny are usually studio heads or creative directors, not “employees.” So they wouldn’t be covered by a union anyway (which cannot apply to managers - i.e. anyone who has authority over other workers).

Suggesting that the game industry adopt the Hollywood guild model is to suggest forcing a pear into a box shaped like an apple. The MBA protects low level employees in their future employment, and isn’t really all that great - at least not the way most non-insiders think. It still results in a ridiculous number of workers making poverty wages.

Is that what you want a game voice actor to have? A minimum basic agreement for their future employment? A programmer? A graphic designer?

No. You want them to be in a union.[1] Which will protect their current jobs and create conditions for advancement, sufficient income at the lowest tiers and long term stability. None of which the Hollywood guilds really do.

[1] The distinction between a union and a guild isn’t a “real” one in modern U.S. law, strictly speaking. But conceptually, as above, a union is for people in regular employment with a single employer, and a guild is for (effectively) contract workers. The terminology of “guild” came from the older, pre-industrial idea of “the X workers guild” (masonry, carpentry, bricklaying, etc.), which were really just social organizations that sorta kinda acquired enough power to flex their muscles against the people who were contracting them by having minimum demands in solidarity within the guild (does that sound familiar…?). Guilds eventually “became” unions in the modern sense, once people were working with single employers over a long term. Put simply (and a bit stupidly), unions make contracts between workers and companies; guilds make contracts between workers and their industry. Part of the reason gig workers (Uber/Lyft/etc.) in California have been more active about getting better terms is because that state is super familiar with how guilds work, which is exactly what gig workers need, since their employment is with the industry as a whole (they can work for more than one company), not so much with a specific company. (It’s also why they’re having a much harder time - because California employers are super familiar with all the shenanigans Hollywood studios use to suppress the guilds that feed into them.)