BANNED USER: /comment/285089
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WhiningCoil
No bio...
User ID: 269
Banned by: @naraburns
WhiningCoil
16d ago
I mean... kind of. I'd have to check mine, but 1 oz gold American Eagles I think are still stamped with something preposterous like $25. But obviously nobody would apend them like that.when the melt value is north of $2000. Its an insane fiction kept up since Nixon for reasons I can't fathom.
WhiningCoil
16d ago
Your paycheck isn't money, it's income.
What's being talked about is switching units of account. For example, if you hold a ton of Euros and British Pounds or whatever, and convert them into USD, you might have a capital gains tax or loss. Switching units of account is almost always a taxable event. USD are the baseline, and any time you move your wealth out of and into USD the government dings you.
The argument is that Gold and Silver are the only units of account specified in the constitution. It might even be true! But our government hasn't care about the constitution for a long, long time. And ever since we went off the gold standard, or probably when FDR confiscated all the gold, this part of the constitution quietly became obsolete. The time to have fought that fight was in the 30's. Doing anything about it now is trying to undo almost 100 years of consistently moving past that goalpost.
WhiningCoil
19d ago
So far games have just worked. That said, performance of Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing overdrive was nowhere close to windows performance.
Well, one thing I'm rather surprised by is that I was able to just throw the open sourced RTX port of Quake into Steam, told it to use Proton 9.0-4, and it appeared to "just work". Not sure if DLSS was actually active or not, but it all seemed good.
Edit: Well this may be a pickle. Steam has begun "updating" about 50 or so games I had installed in the steam library I imported to their linux versions, overwriting the windows versions.
Following up on downthread, I've installed Mint Linux on a fresh 1 TB NVME drive. All in all it didn't go terribly. We'll see how badly I fuck the whole thing up. I got Steam installed and played Quake for a hot minute. Currently installing Doom 2016 and Factorio. Working on getting my music library imported off another drive. Oh wait, that actually just finished, along with Heroic installing. Hot damn.
WhiningCoil
23d ago
You son of a bitch... I'm in.
Ordered another 1 TB M.2 drive, got Mint Linux ready to go on a flash drive. We'll see how this goes. Steam on Linux and that Heroic program above sound promising.
WhiningCoil
24d ago
I wish I knew. I'm still fence sitting myself. Unless a compelling argument presents itself, I'm likely to default to Ubuntu.
WhiningCoil
24d ago
Apple ecosystem stuff - MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, iPhone [whatever version], old iMac. Apple things just work better than whatever else you can get and I am not very price sensitive. Everything I buy from Apple lasts forever and just works the way that a normal person would expect it to.
I've bought one apple product in my life. An iPad 3. It got an unprecedented refresh in 6 mo versus the typical year, making me feel like quite the chump. At this point nearly everything has stopped working on it. Netflix, Youtube, Amazon Video, it's all shut down. Most websites load funny because of outdated SSL stuff I assume. More than half the storage has been eaten up with remnant files of OS updates that I can't get back no matter what I do. Apps don't get released for it anymore because apple dropped 32-bit support. Some of the old apps I have for it are just broken now for reasons I don't entirely understand. But storage is so gimped it's a constant chore to remove the 2 or 3 games that still fit on it to make room for others. About all I can do on it anymore is copy ebooks over from my PC.
WhiningCoil
24d ago
I think I need to sack up and just switch to Linux. I have a spare machine that would probably be good for it. A 6th generation Intel I think with a Geforce 970.
It's kind of a cart before the horse problem for me though. I love my daily driver, and I actually really enjoy all the bonkers RTX features I can get in games now. Sadly it seems like these are mostly Windows only. And frankly, if I want my games to "just work", I have to keep Windows.
So, much as I have grown to hate Windows and Microsoft, if I want to say goodbye to them, I need to say goodbye to a lot of the features my fancy pants graphics card has. But maybe when I go to actually try it I'll be surprised! You never know.
Of course the other hole I've dug myself is I purchase most of my games on GOG first, then Epic, and lastly Steam. Because my top priority is how easy it is to check out without saving my credit card number, and Steam is by far the most odious, wanting my full address and phone number, and always attempting to greedily save it all by default. But Steam also has the best Linux compatibility, so fuck me I guess.
I should probably take the plunge soon, before support for Windows 10 runs out next year.
WhiningCoil
25d ago
I don't recall every one, but the latest was they added "Weather and More" as a widget to my pristine lock screen. The "and more" is ads. Nonstop obnoxious ass ads. I had to find just the right submenu in Settings to remove it. Which brings me to another gripe. I can't fucking believe how the settings are still scattered across a Windows 8/10/11 style "Settings" menu and a Win9x/2k/xp "Control Panel" menu.
WhiningCoil
25d ago
Microsoft products mostly ceasing to suck.
Are you out of your damned mind? My experience with every Microsoft product I use has gotten worse to the point where I'm planning on quitting Windows after support for Windows 10 finally ends in only a year.
I mean, lets start with Windows 10. They keep randomly pushing ads into my default experience. Windows updates will constantly start shoving ads into my start menu, lock screen, etc, that I then I have to look up how to turn off. Basic fucking shit like "Solitaire" has been turned into some Games as a Service crap they expect me to pay a monthly fee for in order to skip ads. On solitaire!! Windows 10 was the start of Microsoft pushing updates that, oops, brick your fucking computer. Our bad.
And good god, when it comes to my work, where I'm also locked into a Microsoft ecosystem, to this day nobody knows the correct settings for IIS to keep a web application running instead of going to sleep. I have to keep an instance of Docker running on Windows Server, but every time there is a Windows Update it somehow manages to fucking break "Boot Docker on Startup" and I have to run around figuring out some new goofy script or workaround to make it happen.
It is unfathomable to me that anybody can claim Microsoft's products have gotten better for the user since Satya took over. It's been downhill in a truly unprecedented manner, with unreliable software that is constantly shoving ads into every visible surface. It's enough that I'd rather go back to Win9X, rebooting my computer every day because it was so unstable, versus dealing with the cavalcade of forced advertising and things breaking out from under me that modern Windows represents.
WhiningCoil
27d ago
So I wanted to revisit a comment I made two years ago. Does anyone actually believe Biden is the president?
I don't mean in an election integrity sense. I mean, does anyone actually believe he is the one steering the federal government or making decisions? I could whole heartedly believe Obama was the Commander in Chief. I had zero doubt George W Bush was in command of the highest Executive Office. Sure, Trump seemed to be at war with his own staff half the time, but he ostensibly tried to exercise the power of his office.
Biden seems like he just gets wheeled out to mumble some words of a teleprompter about once a month. He gets 8/10 of them correct, adlibs something he shouldn't have, and then his handlers come out the next day and "correct" his statements. It just strains my imagination to think he is in charge of crafting policy or executive decisions at all.
Well, with two years of hindsight, and with the kayfabe largely being over, we are finally getting the reporting we should have gotten all along. Via the Wallstreet Journal, How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge . Unfortunately it's paywalled, so you'll have to excuse me if I refer to secondary reporting.
To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, they told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members—including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen—were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.
Senior advisers were often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy, with people such as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, senior counselor Steve Ricchetti and National Economic Council head Lael Brainard and her predecessor frequently in the position of being go-betweens for the president.
Press aides who compiled packages of news clips for Biden were told by senior staff to exclude negative stories about the president. The president wasn’t talking to his own pollsters as surveys showed him trailing in the 2024 race.
The New York Post has also gotten involved.
Presidential staff formed a tight shell around Biden, 82, right after he took office amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with staff immediately limiting his in-person interactions in January 2021.
By spring 2021, meetings were being rescheduled to accommodate for his “good days and bad days.”
Meetings were often scheduled for later in the day — a fact first disclosed after Biden’s debate flop against President-elect Donald Trump, when staff admitted the then-Democratic nominee had difficulty functioning outside a six-hour window that closed around 4 p.m. daily.
One cabinet official eventually stopped reaching out to schedule talks with the commander in chief after having been repeatedly rebuffed, an ex-aide revealed.
The White House also hired a voice coach, Hollywood mogul and campaign co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, to try to improve his faint, raspy tone.
So, looking back to my original comments circa two years ago, one criticism is that these claims were "too good to check". But now with the benefit of hindsight, it's not that they were too good to check. It's that nobody with any ability to do so was motivated to check. It turns out the 25th amendment is broken. Seems when you staff your cabinet with lazy incompetents, they actually enjoy having no boss while the world burns. It's a good gig if you can get, taking 6 months off as Secretary of Transportation while inflation is eating people alive and the supply chain is utterly fucked. Or utterly vanishing off the face of the earth to secretly get treated for Prostate Cancer while World War III is kicking off in the Middle East. Or just meekly apologizing for creating $15 Trillion in debt as a former Fed chair and current Treasury Secretary.
Is it too much to say the Democratic Party is a criminal enterprise at this point? That they executed one of the worst frauds against the American people in the history of nearly any nation? The more evidence that comes in, the more it seems undeniable that the last four years were a complete fraud. We didn't have a president, the country was utterly rudderless, we don't know who's need making decisions, and everyone lied about everything for as long as they could get away with it. In a sane country people would be executed for this treason.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
You know, in a perfect world, AI would finally stop the civilization destroying policy of importing the 3rd world because we need cheap, dumb labor. AI should be cheaper and less dumb than them.
Unfortunately, I know I'm going to get even more 3rd world "replacement population", because "We've always been a nation of immigrants" and apparently the neoliberal solution to global poverty is to invite everyone here so we can all be poor together.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
What, you don't enjoy constant iterations of "All this has happened before, and all this will happen again"?
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Sometimes it feels like Alpha Centauri was the last time they tried anything truly revolutionary with the formula. I should really play it again and refresh my memory. I remember it was the singular instance of being able to design my own units, do any sort of serious geo engineering, have floating cities, seriously need to worry about the local flora or fauna, etc. Many of those features haven't been seen again. I can't recall the last Sid Meier 4X game that let you create custom units. Even the spiritual successor, Beyond Earth, didn't.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I mean, there was Sid Meier's Beyond Earth.
It was OK I guess.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
But clicking on heads is even more awesome! It's like you have reached such a level of zen with the game, so mastered the physics and situational awareness, that all the ephemera melted away and you are literally just clicking on heads.
I mean, I get what you mean. Coming from a person who's never played an FPS, it sounds reductive. But if master Counter-Strike 1.6 players talked about clicking on heads, I wouldn't want to play a team game against them.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
death stacks
Appreciate the rant, but I'm gonna keep using it. I think it's awesome, and my primary enjoyment of the game is overcoming all the challenges you listed above and finally assembling an unconquerable death stack that end an entire civilization before it's exhausted. Maybe it's taken on a more derogatory tone since Civ 5, but I'm taking it back god damnit! I think it sounds awesome. You might as well be telling me to stop saying "head shot".
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Anyone play Creeper World?
I can barely explain my continued affection for these games. I just enjoy them. I think the series peaked with Creeper World 3, but they've all been good if you enjoy the fundamental premise. A bit repetitive from sequel to sequel, but it is what it is. He seems to alternate between doing top down economic grind the enemy down games, and side profile moving limited weapons platforms around games. Also I'm pretty sure they are just made by some southern dude alone.
Creeper World IXE came out, and I finished it in about 3 days. It was more like Creeper World 2 and Particle Fleet than it was Creeper World 1, 3 and 4. I enjoyed it enough.
I donno, any other players of this niche series?
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Except we're redistributing glory instead of material assets. Which makes sense given the sort of person interested in this sort of thing.
At least when it goes wrong no one starves or gets shot.
Citation needed. I'd argue misaligning our culture is even more damaging than naked redistribution of assets. At least that can theoretically be undone. A population demoralized by propaganda seems to just commit slow suicide. When Stalin caused a famine in Ukraine, they didn't stop existing. We'll see how Ukraine fairs now that they've fed the flower of their nation into the meatgrinder of war, and NATO nations will probably flood them with 3rd worlders to get their GDP up and pay back all the money they've borrowed.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I mean, in part, it goes to back to some things I said about "DEI" not being about diversity per se, but about raising up the most questionable unqualified people deliberately. Because they fundamentally don't believe in merit, or accomplishment at all.
Apply that to a game about historical figures, and it results in some odd choices.
You know, it's funny reading over that post I made from the distance past of August 4th.
Now if Kamala picks an absolute loser idiot white guy because she feels the need to placate white liberals, I could accept that being DEI. But it's looking like she's going to pick someone that actually brings something to the ticket, unlike she did in 2020. Most likely counting on Josh Shapiro to deliver PA's electoral votes.
Yeah, I guess Tim Waltz was a DEI pick.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I haven't played a Civilization game since I dabbled in 5, and decided the tactical layer with single combat ruined an element of Civilization that I actually really enjoyed, which was the death stacks.
That said, Civilization has always dabbled in some measure of political grandstanding. I recall reading about a minor controversy from Civilization 2 and the fact that it included a global warming mechanic back when the concept of global warming was far less accepted. That said, there is still something dispiriting about Civilization scraping the bottom of the barrel of "current year" so hard they have turned Harriet Tubman into, whatever she is in that game. I don't want to beclown myself criticizing it, because I honestly haven't kept up with the mechanics of how this new Civilization will work. That said, she probably would have had a quote attached to a tech tree upgrade (like "Emancipation" or the like) in previous games had they decided she were important enough to include over other abolitionist leaders.
Like I said, I haven't kept up. I don't know if they have 700 leaders in the game with an exhaustive and expansive coverage of even niche historical figures from around the globe. Or if they've developed a myopic focus on black hagiography and include the current year talking points to puts "The founding fathers were slave owners" above "Wrote some of the most important documents on human rights ever in history, and then fought and died establishing a free nation that lived those principles"
All that said, Civilization 7 will have 26 leaders at launch, and I guess 20 of them are known at this time. The white ones are Augustus, Benjamin Franklin, Charlemagne, Isabella, Machiavelli, Napoleon (two versions?). The black ones are Amina and Harriet Tubman. So I wouldn't exactly claim they've developed any sort of myopic focus on blacks.
That said, Harriet Tubman is still just goofy.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
What is actually the ROI on fare enforcement?
Keeping actual psychopaths off the subway. Not putting innocent people through the kafkaeque nightmare of defending themselves and then having the state come down on them like a brick of shit.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I think the bottom line, is this is just what a low trust society looks like. Everyone smashes the defect button as often and as quickly as possible, in every situation. There is literally no solving this problem, only clearing the way for a different species of defector who will ruin things, do material damage, and end lives with their greedy, corruption and indifference.
I was sitting in the car one day, pondering how low trust our society has become. I was at a gas station while my wife was using the bathroom. And I couldn't help but notice that the emergency gas shutoff switch is just out there, in the open, totally exposed. It got me thinking about the damage that will be caused when our low trust society devours that. I mean, it's there, unguarded, for a reason. Gasoline is dangerous, you can't just have it spilling all over the place. In case of emergency, you might not have time to grab the manager, have them get their keys, etc, etc. So it's just out there, for anybody to hit, whether there is an emergency or not. Which makes me wonder how long until some asshole tiktok prank becomes smashing that button as many times a day as possible until gas stations across the country have to start locking them up. Which then leads to more avoidable accidents at gas stations.
It's just going to be this way with everything. Nothing is going to be too trivial, or too important for some asshole to pillage, either metaphorically or literally.
California has been forsaken by God for longer than I've been alive.
Some fun word play with your title aside, it feels like at this point if you are stilling living in California, you deserve it. Once upon a time I would have looked at the devastation Democrats have wrought and felt bad for the state, which in my youth was still regarded a purplish state. The home of Ronald Reagan. Now I just can't feel anything. Everyone there voted for this for at least a decade. They voted for it again quite recently in a recall election. They are literally willing to die in a fire than vote for someone who might say something that offends a chosen minority.
I mean they literally refuse to hire white male firefighters. People voted for that. Like this isn't their first wild fire. Their priorities are unfathomable.
It's like hearing about the Heaven's Gate Cult in the 90's. What? They all dressed, talked and acted the same? Some of them chopped their dicks off?! And then they all killed themselves over a prophesy? Some people were able to feel sympathy for the cult members. Maybe they'd lost someone to a cult, or felt they had a close brush with one at a vulnerable time in their life. For most people it was entertainment. They were a laughing stock. And so California is to me now.
The suffering of a Californian is as the suffering of a Flagellate to me. A spectacle of suffering coming from a place of otherworldly confidence that it cleanses. I can't feel bad for them, because they so willfully chose it, and would actually probably hurt me if I tried to save them from themselves. It's best to just leave them to it until they kill themselves.
Edit: Your right, I forgot who I was talking to. Go ahead Californian Rationalist. Keep doing you. This isn't on you at all. Don't change a thing.
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