I saw so many people play that game with the take-away “Communism in Eastern Europe / Socialist Latin America / China & North Korea was awful! I’m so glad I live in a liberal democracy where I’ve got rights and freedoms, here in <Insert English-speaking Western Country Here>”. Guys with Ron Paul rEVOLution bumper stickers would explain how we need to keep our guns close and never surrender to those liberty-hating leftists, so Papers Please! couldn’t happen here.

And as the years dragged on, the thing I heard over and over again was that liberty was under attack by Secret Communists who were infiltrating our newspapers and TVs and online forums, our college campuses, our office spaces, and our government bureaucracies. And the vector they were using to do it was… illegal immigration. First it was Al Qaeda slipping over the border to do more 9/11s. Then it was the Insidious Chinese with their America-Hating Confucius Centers, doing brainwashing and kidnapping and god knows what else. And at last it was the mobs of Venezuelan biker gangs, Cuban double-agents, and Che Guevera loving Nicaraguan/El Salvadorian/Mexican Ultra-Left Communists, breaking into the US to steal our welfare and ruin our public schools and take over our suburban neighborhoods.

The only way to keep us from living in Papers, Please! was to find these people and root them out. No more Iranian ISIS infiltrators teaching anti-semitism classes at Columbia. No more Woke DEI transgender employees at the State Department. No more speaking Spanish! Or surrender-monkey French! Or the vile tongue of the thieving, cheating, lazy, stupid Han People!

By god, if there was only some way we could find out who was evil and who was good. Some kind of document that only the righteous, God-Fearing, red-blooded American could carry (because if we caught you being a dirtbag leftist we could take it away). We need some kind of identifying document, some permanent record we could use to track the dissidents. Some kind of papers, please!

Touch grass, work on your mental health, get a hobby, start participating in society in a constructive manner and start showering.

All good advice on its face. But they do call it “Getting Lucky” for a reason. You can be the perfect specimen and still strike out (with people you’re attracted to in kind). Past that, celibacy and the resulting depression/insecurity has an impact on your mental health even if you’re getting all the other boxes checked. “Don’t be a fucking sad sack if you want to get laid!” is easy advice to give and hard advice to live. Doubly so when you’re a moody anxious teenager, already.

And it is this hyper-individualist “fuck you, I’ve got mine” attitude is a big part of what drives people off the deep end. The Mean Girls tier prejudice stretching to naked hostility that single people experience - particularly as they get older - is just the other side to the incel coin.

One of the things that gets to me is how often they mock the advice that actually helps.

There’s a degree of selection bias. The loudest, proud-boy-est incels are inevitably the ones that have made a brand of the identity and are trying to sell PUA bullshit. There are plenty of people who struggle with “good advice” in silence. And plenty more who take it, improve, start meeting people, and stop being incels.

But the Self-Help industrialization of dating is often flooded with the same simple “Why can’t you just be normal?” tips and tricks that seem ignore how many perfectly normal people are still incredibly lonely. Meeting new people can be scary, putting yourself out on an emotional line is emotionally taxing, finding the time and money to date is often a luxury, and plenty of people who initially fall for one another discover - sometimes painfully - that they aren’t compatible.

When you trivialize love, you aren’t being helpful. Your cavalier attitude towards other people’s pain can even be abusive. Is it any surprise that a person who feels mocked and insulted isn’t fun to be around?

Being trans in 2025 must feel like being Will Smith in Enemy of the State.

It’s rough to be an awkward teenager, struggling to find the kind of mutual affection that you’re biologically programmed to crave. Like, bares mentioning that the OG incel was a woman complaining how much difficulty she had getting laid. And one of her primary complaints was how clumsy, prudish, and superficial her male peers proved themselves to be.

The 4chan crowd decided to Rule 30 her blog and insist this was an exclusively cis-het male problem. And then the right-wing outrage machine keyed in on it and decided this was a problem caused by the villanious cartel of liberal feminists, who were all trying to groom eligible bachelorettes into man-hating lesbians with hairy legs and pink hair. And now we’ve got an entire industry dedicated to telling men “Go to the gym, eat meat, be extremely misogynist, and vote for Donald Trump so you can have your dream of a 10/10 stacked Tradwife hottie in the suburbs with 12 kids”.

“Incel” has gone from a feminist critique of unrealistic expectations of teen dating into a reactionary consumerist fantasy.

People that litter are atupid/lazy/poorly educated.

Littering is a function of the laziness of the individual combined with the inconvenience of normal waste disposal. If you live in a neighborhood where trash pick-up is infrequent or unreliable, you’re going to find a lot more littering as a matter of simple convenience compared to one where trash pickups are regular and routine.

The public expectation of efficient trash pickup also creates social pressure on individual neighbors not to dump illegally.

Hardly an issue of stupidity. We’ve got shops a short ride away that sell you disposables with the intent of bringing them into the park. And we’ve got a park that’s removed the bins used to cart the waste back out again.

The stupidity is in the policy. Either you have to prevent people from bringing this stuff in (incredibly difficult) or you have to manage the waste that exists by centralizing its collection and export (significantly easier and cheaper).

The US has been green-lighting genocide in the Middle East for decades. Party A only seems to notice when Party B takes over the White House. But this has been an ongoing horror story going back to Operation Ajax and the dismantling of the Egyptian democracy following the death of Gamal Nasser, largely through collaboration between the CIA, MI5, and the Mossad.

His base supporters don’t really know or care about the details, because they’re too invested in doing white nationalism at home. His opponents only seem to care about the genocide as far as it allows them to express racist sentiments toward Arab-Americans and other Muslim groups for being insufficiently enthusiastically liberal. His bourgeois supporters recognize genocide as a get-rich-quick scheme for their failsons and faildaughters.

This bloodshed won’t end before the western military occupiers are removed from the region. And I doubt I’ll see that happen in my lifetime.

Showing up in Midgard just in time for the Plate in Sector 7 to collapse on my head.

we are still many years from discovering the Epstein drive

If only he’d had a little more time to continue his research.

Love to be governed by an undead theocracy that persists through the deliberate cycling of apocolyptic events, because they’ve got 3D underwater volleyball in the capital.

Had states like Nebraska with unproportional representation actually voted for more progressive candidates we wouldn’t be in this boat.

Omaha, Nebraska is fully owned and operated by Berkshire Hathaway. The state’s legislature is fully in their pocket. The statewide representation is entirely Buffett/Munger pilled.

People will tell you these guys are liberals, then get all google-y eyed when the states put up straight fascist representation decade after decade, while the billionaire class goes on TV and says “Gee, I wish this wasn’t happening to you all.”

Zoom out farther and it’s worse. The stock’s been on a historic five year tear, matched only by his friend Peter Thiel over at Palantir.

Look at those fucking p/e ratios. The stocks are being valued at hundreds of times their earnings. “Normal” p/e is 15-20 and Tesla/Palantir are trading in the 150-400 range. That means for every $150 in share price, the stock represents $1 of earned income. The only stock I’ve seen with a more wild valuation was Twitter, which had something on the order of a 1000 p/e at one point.

And we’re seeing some IPOs in the same tech space - CoreWeave and Klarna, in particular - with valuations that are even worse.

The idea that Elon’s suffering because his stock is riding a massive bubble that’s off its peak is absurd.

Plenty of conmen and torturers can tell you differently. Whether your soul can bear the burden of your actions is far removed from what you can accomplish with your abilities.

It’s a useful skill if you’re trying to cultivate a popular following. The funny thing is that he used to have it and was quite good at feeling people out for a popular vibe. Now he’s too ketted out to feel anything. Just a rolling ball of Id, bouncing between hungry, cranky, and horny.

The BLS data has historically been a method by which capitalists measured and managed labor power as a fungible resource. It has historically been a tool of capital to evaluate the influence of policy on labor, not a tool of labor to pressure capital for concessions.

Not to say the information isn’t valuable on its face. But it should be worth recognizing that we are looking at autocannibalization of capital. The people most injured by dismantling the BLS are the people who do the bulk of the hiring, not the people being hired.

But the cells existed before us and we are simply trying to understand them.

So are the humans who are engaging in commercial activity.

We created the economic system and now we make conflicting theories about how it behaves.

We are participating in an economic system created by our forebearers and trying to create policy with an eye towards preferred outcomes. And there’s a lot of disagreement on which policies and which outcomes we should be aiming for. One could say that we are in a state of contradiction that is constantly refining itself in pursuit of new stable states. But this isn’t something any single individual - or even elite cartel - has dictatorial control over.

I only get to truly be a capitalist when I’m living in an industrial society. I only get to truly be egalitarian when I’ve reached a point of (perhaps Kropotkin-ian or perhaps more Roddenberry-ian) post-scarcity. We can create the technology and the social structures that allow for the existence of certain economic states. But we’re still constrained by our inputs and outputs. Understanding that is essential in achieving preconceived economic goals. And we can identify what those constraints are, how to mitigate them, and how to focus efforts toward an end by building new capital and new bureaucracy to channel human labor towards certain purposes.

Some individuals have the opportunity to exert exceptionally large forces over the system in pursuit of outcomes, while others are buffeted by the downstream consequences of these choices lacking significant agency. But we’re still all in and of the system, constrained by it to some degree. And we can extrapolate certain fundamental rules of order within the system, in the same way you could extrapolate the biological consequences of feeding a thirsty man a glass of water or a diabetic man a chocolate bar.

“Genius Bar” was always just a means of getting people back into the Apple Store to sell them another product. This is an iteration on a general theme.

I love how in a world where we banned straws

We didn’t. If anything, we are in a world where we banned banning straws, because even this trivial token concession was considered a Violation of Our Fundamental Freedoms. Media personalities screaming and nashing their teeth over straws was a PR stunt by petrochemical companies to backstop any kind of radical anti-plastic reforms.

Anybody who asks me about Windows 10’s EOL date will be introduced to the option of using Linux before i’ll help them select a replacement system.

Cheers to this.

People used to enjoy anime and MST3k episodes on fifth generation VHS copies.

As a general rule, I prefer getting torrent links from friends in a Discord stream over huffing it over to a Blockbuster and hoping their single copy of “My Neighbor Totoro” isn’t checked out. You can make the case for a better brighter tech future.

Just don’t put half your paycheck into “TotoroCoin” because its trending on pump.fun