That's true, but I think people would be less upset if they were actually running it, you know? Like I fell off like legit six or seven years ago when there was a promised Heavy Update 2, and I came back a few months ago to find that that was still MIA. And that kind of inaction is kind of why fans find themselves making these kinds of projects in the first place. So this does still feel hypocritical, even if they are entirely within their rights to do it.

sentences that sound made up but have actual meaning

They've put a lot of work into locking people into an ecosystem. To pick one example, if you've got a Logic project you want someone to be able to edit, even if you manage to migrate it with all of the required stuff, they're still going to need a Mac to open it.

To borrow a phrase from Steve Hofstetter, I've never flown a helicopter, but if I saw one in a tree, I could still be like "dude fucked up."

that is also how it's always been explained to me

where i come from it's a carpet

or just particularly thick pubes

Bond Name's the james

But do the extremely rich really get to rest and enjoy their spoils the way you think? Just look at someone like Bill Gates or Elon Musk, they just keep working even though they already have far more than they can spend. Gates is especially funny because he’s working full time on figuring out how to spend his fortune. Almost like having all that money just became another problem that now requires solving.

Bro, I LITERALLY just said I don't give a shit about rich people problems. You can fuck all the way off trying to get me to sympathize with them. "Oh but it's hard to spend all that money!" Then don't fuck over the working class to accumulate so much money you have to work to spend it all! Or do the ethical thing and let the working class eat you. I might keep arguing with you but this is the last this particular stupidity is going to be dignified with a response.

Okay, see what you just did there? You went from “being able to maintain a good standard of living without having to work themselves to the bone to do it” to having an apartment in the city in walking distance to transit, and I’m willing to bet you’re not thinking of living next to skid row either. And then you want to be able to save money on top of that, too.

Ah, I should have clarified. American cities are built wrong and need a redo. Please refer to this educational content. I do sometimes forget that not everyone is on board with the reality that cars and car-centric infrastructure is destroying our mental health, our finances, our cities, and our world, so that's on me. The point is, what I described is a reality in several of the dozens of places that aren't the USA, and the fact that it's not a reality here is the direct result of the actions of people like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and just to throw another one in there, Charles Edwin Wilson. Look him up if you don't know him, but he ranks just under Henry Kissinger in terms of worst people in American history. Just to reiterate, if your goal is to get me to feel sympathy for the owner class, give up now.

and what pray tell would cause a neck kneel to be absolutely necessary

This poses an interesting question: what if this is in fact the most self-stable and therefore sustainable solution in the long term?

Then humanity is fucked.

Is it really preferable to sleep in a palace surrounded by armed guards because you are worried about assassins, just so you can own 50 nice cars you’ll barely ever get to drive?

Oh, boo hoo, won't someone think of the poor rich people, having to pay extra to keep their disgusting riches safe from the people they fucked over to get them. I'm sorry, I've been trying not to contribute to the toxicity I see in these threads, but come the fuck on.

Besides, I don't think people envy the rich and powerful the way you're describing, I think people envy the idea of being able to maintain a good standard of living without having to work themselves to the bone to do it, and they begrudge rich people's wealth and power on the grounds that they use it to influence politics and deny a decent standard of living to the working class. I don't want a mansion and fifty nice cars, I want an apartment in the city in walking distance to transit and stuff to do, and then to also save more money at the end of the month than I did at the start. Most people are similar: their specifics might be different, but the broad strokes are the same, especially the last bit.

That's very nice, but we've still got to contend with the reality that an entire political party in the US is using Christianity as an excuse to do horrifically evil shit, and a sizeable contingent of everyday people who also claim the label are in support of that. As an outside observer and not a Christian myself, it seems like a semantic distinction that ultimately misses the forest for the trees.

< nitpick >I could be operating with incomplete information, but I don't think that was technically Jesus, I'm pretty sure that was in Exodus, which was much earlier.< / nitpick >

True. A distressing amount of the time, you can make far more money from a problem existing than from solving it.

I don't think most people are selfish to the point of it being harmful. I think the problem is that a small number of people are, and those are the people who are in charge of things, where their selfishness can do way more harm.

As others have mentioned, though, a lot of behavior is heavily influenced by the incentive structures people live within. This can apply in very obvious ways: for example, when trying to get from point A to point B, people will use the mode of transportation that makes the most sense for that trip, which is heavily dependent on the infrastructure that exists between those two places, and that's why the Dutch will bike five miles, the Spanish will catch a train across the whole country, and people in Houston will drive across the street. It can also apply in more subtle ways, though, and that's where capitalism comes in. To pick one example, companies that are owned by their workers are more stable and better places to work than traditional privately owned or shareholder-owned companies, but it goes far deeper and gets far more complex than that, too.

People are responsive to economic incentives. If the incentives favor doing good things, then good things happen. Otherwise, you get what we have now.

$20? That's amateur stuff. Buy my $999 course and you'll learn from a master how to apply capitalism to problems!*

*For legal reasons, note that I did not say "how to apply capitalism to solve problems"

Trump became president by winning over enough Republican primary voters and then exploiting the electoral college's inbuilt favoring of conservatives.

For someone better to get in, they have to go through one of the major parties, and that means winning a primary. As such, by voting in a primary, there is the chance to actually stop a genocidal maniac from being put on the ticket in the first place. In our current system, that is unfortunately our best option. Voting third party in the general election in a first-past-the-post system that filters the popular vote through the electoral college is about as close as you can get to throwing your vote away without putting it in a literal trash can.

For the record, while this is the system that we live with and have to work within as long as we have it, this system is also total shit and we should absolutely abolish the electoral college and adopt a more parliamentary system like stronger democracies have elsewhere in the world.

I'm a musician for a living so it feels appropriate for me.

Voting for a better third party in our current system unfortunately just makes it more likely that the worse of the two genocidal maniacs becomes the president instead.

CAHSR at least is already under construction and has made significant, material progress in the last few years. Brightline West I'm less confident in, but CAHSR is definitely happening.

maybe but they're less cool than non-oil ones