Do you think it’s better to block someone or add a note to them so you can still engage with their content? I’ve gotten into the habit of blocking people and I’m not sold on it being the best approach.

Damn, I moved out of the country in 2023. SMH

I never finished it because the alien would teleport too much. I need to install the larger leash mod and give it another go. It’s also sooo long for such a tense game. I loved everything about it and I’m upset I haven’t finished it lol.

I think the problem was their balancing strategy was largely nerf based and their design vision was primary weapons should suck against most things. That’s how it felt anyway. Like most guns weren’t viable and they kept nerfing the viable ones until they felt noticably worse but still noticably better than other options.

I really don’t understand their vision for the weapon landscape - most assault rifles felt bad compared to the laser rifle variant, most shotguns felt bad besides one pump and one auto and then they nerfed both of those so I haven’t taken a shotgun in some time, and a sniper or semiautomatic has never felt good as a primary despite being what I’d normally gravitate to.

Half of my play time is taking something like the auto cannon or the Quasar (before they were nerfed) and using them more like my primary weapon.

The slots don’t have identity because of this imbalance and the weapons within those slots don’t have meaningful decisions because they fit either check some boxes - A) can harm most things B) is efficient at harming most of those things - or they don’t.

In a game where part of their business model is releasing a couple of new guns every month I’ve used 90% of those weapons less than 3 times because they immediately feel bad at the highest difficulties.

So this new patch is, to me anyway, a blunt way to improve all guns and all viability - seemingly because they dont know how to do it any other way.

Ergodox EZ has my whole hearted recommendation. Their keyboards are amazing and the only thing better for ergonomics would be a more custom curved piece.

They’re a good company, I would recommend anyone checking them out.

Ya, for an alpha game with unfinished assets and lacking polish - it’s stupid good. I’ve been out of the mobs scene for like a year or two and haven’t had a shooter register for a while, so maybe I’m starved, but this thing keeps me coming back every night.

It’s partially that, the fact that instead of making the trucks more efficient they made them larger to skirt the regulation, but another factor is the profitability of larger trucks. It doesn’t cost them that much more to make a massive truck vs a reasonable vehicle but the target market for unnecessarily large trucks is willing to pay hand over fist for them and so the manufacturers and distributors make more money per sale by a large margin.

So when you see a large truck, don’t just think “someone who’s compensating” but also think “someone who got fleeced”.

The roads would be safer without massive trucks, no one should be above ridicule.

Until I trust my government to not go hard right, until I can own my housing wherever I want to live in a given decade, until work goes/stays full remote and/or reduces total working hours, until I feel like I have too much money that I could lose the cost of a child and not risk being in the danger zone - until then kids aren’t something I can guarantee a good life and that’s not an acceptable starting place for me.

Yes, of course. I wish you and everyone stuck there luck.

I am paying taxes and am able to vote, but because I make less than the required amount my taxes are essentially zero to the US because we have joint tax agreements between the two countries.

I don’t know if I’ll renounce after earning German citizenship or not but the exit tax is something I have to consider.

Ya, that’s rough. That feels like a very immature take. The two parties are not the same, voting does matter, and I’d even argue that there are people so awful that assassination does make sense but I’m happy Trump survived because I think the Republican party would have been stronger without him.

I left the US, I’m between a millennial and gen z, and I left explicitly because I was worried about the future of the US and because moving abroad is akin to time traveling 20 years into the future. I have healthcare now, I live in a walkable city with great public transit, the crime rates are lower (although most places in the US aren’t super violent, the probability of getting murdered goes way down when you leave), I have 6 weeks vacation, essentially unlimited sick time, and I’m not allowed to work overtime.

Both parties are not the same but if Democrats won in a landslide in every single election both state and federal in every chamber and every seat, how many years would it take to achieve all of those same things. I have no doubt these policies would happen with the right people in office, with radical change to the party they could even happen quickly and I believe it’s what half the people want. But the two other outcomes are 50/50 with the parties and little gets done in a timely manner and worse the corrupt judges continue to error the system, or the Republicans win one big election just one more time and project 2025 starts getting a percent complete tracker and we slide back into the dark ages.

So I left. I believe if things go bad in the US historians will look at Trump’s first victory as a period of brain drain from the country. But that’s my two cents to go with this article.

Some of the “claims without a citation” are things that were done under the first Trump administration.

• taxes did go up for most Americans under the last tax bill. It’s safe to say that if Republicans need to raise taxes it’ll be through the lower and middle class.

• kids go hungry or into debt for school lunches today because of how little some families make. Trump admin agnostic but definitely a feature for the Republican party and not a bug.

• books are being banned in the US at an alarming rate, look at Florida as a prime example. Trump admin agnostic but definitely a party priority.

• trump suggested multiple times as president that people should just be shot, killed, or executed for things as benign as protesting outside the Whitehouse. He didn’t do it, but it’s a pretty short distance between “the president wants to kill you” and “the president is having you killed”.

• the president did send in national guard and other militarily equipped groups to beat and pepper spray journalists and protestors while president.

• trump appointmented judges clearly lack the experience, qualifications, and apolitical-ness expected of a normal judge. You can see that in the supreme Court and you can see that at the federal judge level.

Insurance exists for a reason, loans exist for a reason, and the difficulty in selling a home is artificial because it’s treated like an investment that appreciates instead of a commodity that depreciates like it actually is.

Landlords buy bad appliances all the time, they are incentivized to, the cheaper the better because they don’t have to live with the consequences except for repairing it when it breaks.

In exchange for not owning anything in the place you live and having a fundamentally worse experience for it you get to pay someone else their mortgage AND their repair fund. You don’t take that into account. Renters pay for everything, we just pay it every month instead of in lump sum hits like an appliance dying.

Landlords do not provide a service, at best they provide living mobility which could be improved drastically if housing wasn’t treated like a private investment but instead a public service - so what little service they do provide is artificial.

US labels also contain weight. And again, unless you are baking all the water out and curious about that nutritional value, you’re picking up a package that has nearly identical labeling and testing standards and are therefore comparable and using that to make nutritional choices. In this case almonds are more calorically dense than tofu and have less protein per calorie. Water included or not.

What? Surely that’s not how nutrition labels are made. If I look at the label for almonds and I look at the label for tofu and they both list 100g of X has Y protein in it - surely they’re comparable. So what is your point? Are you suggesting I need to dehydrate tofu to determine it’s real nutrition? I don’t know if that’s practical or meaningful in anyway. I guess you’re suggesting that if we cook out the water certain foods like tofu get even more macro nutritionally dense?

I think people are upset with the foods included for comparison when they should be upset with metric being used to compare them. Protein per 100g tells me protein to weight but what I really care about is protein to total calorie count per 100g. That tells me if the food is efficient in delivering me protein and even that should be coupled with calorie per gram or volume per gram or something to show how much of the food can I eat.

The graphic makes almonds look amazing, for instance, but you get a handful of almond for 100g and also a fourth of your daily caloric intake at 550 kcal. Which means they’re not exactly an efficient protein source. Where as tofu is rather efficient at only 80 kcal per 100g.

It’s just a weird concept in general despite being wholly believable. I don’t blame you nor think you’re wrong or right. Just a hilarious and sad picture, a societies main hall for political dialogue being an endless feed of algorithmically addicting content. Idk, just a boring dystopia kinda thing.

Oof, if Instagram’s comment section is where we’re having political discussions these days that’s disheartening. There’s clearly a need for a town square application for these sorta things.

This is such a shame. I just moved to Germany and I haven’t had much time to engage in politics but it seems a fundamental misunderstanding of the solutions we need is still present here (possibly with the help of destabilizing countries like Russia or China who seem to have strong misinformation campaigns running online).

Guess I need to accelerate getting involved with my local politics as soon as possible. What social platforms do Germans use to communicate about politics? I used to post on Facebook for Americans, and obviously reddit was a good place to have small conversations, but is there any place I can directly address conservative talking points in a public forum. The fact that young people are voting far right tells me we’re losing the digital battle more than anything.

I’m swapping to Linux finally because of it. Few things are black and white but these things do have effects and some additional percentage of users are shifting over because of it.