Yes, people keep finding ways to put others down in order to feel superior. It’s called being a bully. When everything was “blame and shame millenials for this”, there was a section of us millenials that swore we’d break the cycle of generational blaming. Now it’s all about blaming and shaming Gen-Z, because that shit gets clicks. Apparently being a bully never really goes out of style.

I agree parents should not force kids to have piercings. However trans health is a healthcare issue, like other health conditions. There is a problem that is causing suffering. In healthcare, we typically rely on parents as guardians to give legal consent, but kids also have to give their “assent” which carries crucial moral weight in the situation. While kids might not have the capacity to give fully informed consent, they can give assent based on their best understanding.

We apply this to things like cancer treatment, corrective plastic surgery, counselling, and mental health medication for kids. Some of these can be even more permanent and life-altering than hormone blockers for kids (we don’t allow bottom surgery for kids).

This is why transcare, like most healthcare for kids, should involve a team of healthcare professionals, guardians, and crucially the child themselves in patient-centered decision-making.

Do bad decisions happen? Yes. Are there misguided professionals, guardians, and kid patients? Yes. But this kind of care as standard is far better than parents deciding, or kids being left alone to figure it out themselves, or worse, policy-makers, who don’t give a shit about evidence-based healthcare, deciding no trans kids get care. That’s right, banning transcare is also making a decision for people with the consequence that trans kids continue to experience profound suffering without care.

Money

Fuck AI, it’s a bubble, etc. But I do wonder how much of the spending is actual revenue-generating operating costs and how much is further investment/R&D. I doubt Sam Altman sees spending Microsoft’s billions on whatever tf he wants as a loss.

Expedition 33 is freakishly good and it’s actually more of a AA budget at est $30mil.

Still, I think it’s easy to forget AAA’s successes next to the overall shitty syesten. Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate 3, Tears of the Kingdom, Spider-Man 2, Doom Eternal, Horizon Forbidden West, God of War Ragnarok, Ghost of Tsushima, Diablo 4, Armored Core 6 are all AAA with solid launches in the last 5 years as far as I remember, and arguably with distinct soul.

These days, probably Expedition 33, but there lots of others every year. Probably moreso than 15 years ago by raw numbers.

People over focus on AAA budget games, but there are several indie and AA budget games that are comparable or even surpass production quality of AAA games 15 years ago.

AAA budget these days should really be called like S-tier budget. In 2010 and earlier, the top end of budgets were like $50-100 million ($70-140 million after inflation) including marketing. Budgets started ballooning after that and hese days, top end budgets are more like $500-700 million)

You know, we restrict and ban certain drugs like fentanyl and heroin respectively because their addiction potential is so high and can cause a lot of harm at the population level.

Sure people have individual responsibility, but it’s also unrealistic to expect most people to resist an entire social and structural environments geared around certain behaviours, like drinking alcohol or smoking back in the day. Not everyone has the same has the same ironclad will and perfect emotionless reasoning as you, especially youth–remember they used to have smoking ads aimed at kids? And now it’s vaping.

While a lot of things I can easily resist, like narcotics and alcohol, I still get influenced by certain types of ads to try things, get addicted to certain games, and eat way too much junk food. For a lot of things, you can’t know it’s going to be a problem for you until it’s a problem. Plenty of people buy a few loot boxes here and there and don’t develop a gambling addiction. That doesn’t mean gambling addiction isn’t a risk and problem to take seriously and address at the systemic level, not just leave it to the individual.

I don’t know, I think adopting sanitary practices tops it easily.

I suspect survivability bias plays into it, as I imagine an empathetic and self-reflective anti-war film in the is more likely than a straight “US are the villains” film to be funded and see financial, and therefore popular, success in the US. It makes sense why domestic industries will tend to tell domestic-facing stories. I’d say the size of the US film industry means you actually get more diversity in war films compared to ones you see in places like Japan or Germany.

Because sadly, the attitudes and views of people making up Jan 6 are shared by a large proportion of the US population, even if they would not have participated given the means/opportunity.

Jan 6 is viewed by them with analogous sentiment to how the left views civil disobedience for civil rights movements, regardless of the substance/justice of the event.

While Ukraine is not anywhere near the scale of WWII, they’re hardly isolated. While the hot battlefield is geographically isolated, the logistical and economic battlefields deeply involve many countries around the world, including NATO countries, China, and Iran. It’s much bigger than a proxy war.

Depends on what class you are, which I think a lot of comments in this thread understandably seem to assume from a middle class perspective, even assuming “wage” as the main source of wealth.

Real estate is one major source of capital gains, but for a lot of the 1% and investors, capital gains is primarily from financial instruments, i.e. stocks, bonds, etc.

I’m sorry, either I’m dense or your explanation is confusing. How is what you described different from the capital gains tax?

At 3ml/pen and 100units/ml, that puts it on par (retail price) with Canada and Germany and around 50% more than France and UK.

As with a lot of US health prices, listed prices are massively inflated compared to average out of pocket expenses, creating horrible holes for uninsured people. In the US there are some recent caps for insulin cost of $35/month at the low end, and other caps in the $100/month range from what I’ve read.

Here is a good price comparison https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11147642/

He can’t promise anything about the FDI, it’s not up to him, it’s private investment. Like I said, both sides can make a deal that incentivized FDI. “half a trillion in the past 5 years, probably a trillion in over the next 5” is not exactly the language of a promise.

I don’t necessarily agree with the policy or trade deals in their entirety and I’m actually more worried if we’re opening up Canada for more US foreign investment in the same deal.

And we are making better friends in the rest of the world. We’ve been strengthening partnership with the EU including a new defense partnership. We’re also finalizing new free trade agreements with the south East Asian bloc (ASEAN). And there’s preliminary work ongoing on expanding free trade with the UK.

To clarify, they are talking about foreign direct investment, like Canadian billionaires buying stocks in US companies, which the fed does not directly control, but can incentivize through trade agreements. The US can change their taxes on foreign investment on their side. From the other side, FDI is a reflection of how many shares of US companies are being bought up by non-US investors. The Canadian government does not own foreign stock afaik.

Part of the mind boggling numbers is due to massive inflation of certain US stock valuations in the last few years and related reinvestment of capital gains. For example, if I had $1000 invested in Intel last year after it crashed, it would be worth $2000 now. If I sold that and bought $2000 worth of Nvidia stock, that would count as $1000 net increase in my foreign direct investment, even though I haven’t moved any “new” money into the US. Did Intel suddenly double in its assets or revenue? Hell no, it’s a lot of speculation. People are gambling in the US market or seeking to influence US companies for economic advantage.

The best part is, there no easy way to tell if this masked man in camo in a regular grey jeep wildly pointing his weapon is an official lunatic or not. Someone should call the police on the potential shooter. See something say something amirite?

That’s funny, in my bubble I’ve only heard references to gamergate recently from game developers in podcasts. I wouldn’t imagine non-gamers know what it is these days.

Huh, I did a quick search and interestingly, there are a couple mainstream news articles referencing gamergate re: recent anti-DEI in games. Lol I guess games really are part of mainstream culture now.

I’d say a vocal minority do. A common form this takes is resentment over perceived “shoe-horning” of “politics” into games that “leads to bad games”.

The thibly-veiled bigotry becomes clear when the shortcomings of the game are attributed primarily to the diversity representation, rather than anything else, with the assumption that it would have been better without it. “The writing is bad because they wanted to make a political statement above all else.”

This becomes especially apparent when you consider that those same people would never blame bad writing in a game on making all the characters in a game heterosexual.

Some people are just straight-up haters, no veil necessary.

I can sympathize a little with people who had a romantic expectation for a character that they might have fantasized or self-inserted and feel disappointed or even betrayed by having their expectations subverted, especially if they had a strong attachment, as in franchise characters. But they also need to get over the fact that not everything has to be made for them. 95% of whats out there is already made for them.