Having children demonstrates one of two things: wealth, or intelligence.

On one hand, if you can afford to overcome the obstacles, children seem like a good idea, usually from family wealth, since nobody is going to become wealthy. You’re either born into it, or you’re extremely lucky and you win the lotto or something, which is so unlikely it’s hardly worth mentioning.

On the other hand, if you’re too dumb to know how fucked we all are, or you’re too dumb to use protection in some form… Well. Yay kids? Idk.

Everyone with somewhere close to an “average” IQ, or better, who isn’t part of the upper class with family wealth, is basically represented here.

And if you don’t sin, then Jesus died for nothing.

As a straight dude, I know lots of straight dudes that are represented in this picture.

We all have our little problems. ❤️

Hey! I bet you’re a really cool person!

Am I doing this right?

MVL (most valuable lemming) right here.

I’ll have to look into this. There’s a few spots around my home that I’d like to be less noisy.

WHAT?

I’m definitely of the mind that “if hell exists, we’re already there”.

I also believe that reincarnation is possible, and if you combine those two things, and “heaven” is being able to leave this place and not come back.

I don’t know what’s actually out there. I know what I believe to be out there and I obligate nobody to agree with me on that. I also think that athiesm is a more likely factual belief versus any religion that uses a text book to dictate their thoughts; but like with many things, I believe the truth is somewhere in-between, in the unknown chasm that science is trying to fill.

My beliefs will always be that science is fact, any “faith” I have beyond that is just an educated guess at best, and when science proves something I used to believe was different than what was proven, then I am wrong and my beliefs must change accordingly.

It’s a wild world, and I’m tired of suffering it, but someone put me here and unless I take “the easy way out”, I’m stuck here for another few decades at least, barring any unforeseen circumstances.

My logic is along the same line.

I didn’t ask to be here, nobody asked if I wanted to be here. Being here, I kinda wish I was given that choice so I could say no.

Why would I force someone, who I supposedly love, to suffer through gestures at everything this? I love my potential children more than to condemn them to dealing with the children of those wealthy enough to have them.

A cue is a marker point, usually for media production. It can be used in several contexts.

Queue would be a line, more or less.

I’m being reductive, of course. Just trying to help people who are too lazy to Google or look at a dictionary.

You monster.

Child.

Ok

According to that, I should be 53.

That’s over a decade older than I am right now.

Probably not. That’s basically a full week of take home pay for me.

I definitely want it. If it’s cheap, I definitely want two.

Actually everything they recently announced looks great. I really want to try to frame.

I gave up on VR after the oculus CV1 got canned. I bought one, got a few decent years out of it in spite of “meta” buying the company and making it shit, but when they stopped selling the connection cables for the CV1, which was the part that broke most frequently, I just backed the hell off and thought to myself, “this shit is cool, but it’s clearly not established enough to be predictable, maybe some day”.

Whelp, I think we’re finally there.

Until now, you had the “option” of either something mainstream like the quest 7 (or whatever number they’re on), or you can pick from either the index, which was on the pricy side for what you were getting, or the bigscreen beyond, which required an iPhone to scan your face so they can make a custom face shield just for you (and to get more you had to scan those people in and get face shields for them at a premium). Anything else was so niche that you probably were not getting support, if the company even existed in a few years to support you.

Now? A first party VR that actually looks good and works natively with steam…

So yeah… Where do I sign up?

I’ve wanted a steam deck for years but I don’t game on the go so I can’t really justify it, but the rig I’m using for couch gaming is getting pretty dated… So this seems like a great time to get back into everything… Though, finding the money I need to get the systems is going to be a challenge…

I hope this name sticks.

I would argue that capitalist monopolies are the problem.

There are examples where a “monopoly” has 100% of the market and they do a good job, usually in non-profit driven contexts. To provide an example: there’s only one organization in pretty much any given area, that handles extinguishing fires. Usually called the fire department, and it’s run by the local body of government in a monopoly context.

They still do a great job, but there’s no competition in fire fighting.

They’re not inherently profit driven.

Also, hats off to the firefighters out there, you guys are awesome. Anyways, back to my point.

There are good organizations that operate a monopoly in their service segment. They’re just typically owned and operated by a democratically elected government. Of the people, for the people, by the people.

Any monopoly that is profit driven, especially any that are capitalistic, will succumb to enshittification, 100% of the time, it’s just a matter of when it happens. The only time that it is possible to not have that happen, is in privately owned corporations, which are rare… But the leadership believes in improving the product more than profiteering. But on a long enough time line, that will also fail because inevitably someone will buy the company or inherit it, and they will want to maximize their profits over everything.

It will always happen when things are privately held, and especially if they’re publicly traded.

There’s a paradox I heard of that’s pretty relevant in this line of thought that is pretty transportable to most things. I heard it in the context of IT security.

It goes something like this: you buy security and after 2 or 3 years when you need to renew, nothing bad has happened, so it seems like you don’t need security. When in actual fact the extra security has been the reason there haven’t been any incidents.

So it’s almost impossible to prove that buying the security is helping without extensive analytics.

In many cases those analytics are either very difficult or impossible to get.

To demonstrate the transportable nature of this concept, let’s transpose it to vaccines.

If everyone is vaccinated, then nobody gets sick from those diseases, making it seem like the diseases are not a threat anymore, which means that vaccines are no longer useful.

Meanwhile, in all actual fact, the only reason why polio is so rare is because there is a safe and effective vaccine for it that everyone has taken (replace polio with whatever disease you want that has an effective vaccine).

It’s a paradox of: how do we prove this is working, without discontinuing it and possibly being eaten by rats/leopards/whatever.

If there’s only monopolies in the market then is their product the best on the market, or is everyone using it because there’s no alternatives?

Leaning that monopoly argument against capitalism, it’s almost certainly not the best product. When you have a captive audience, those that need your service and don’t have an alternative, there’s no incentive to innovate, or invest in improving the product at all. Do innovation stagnates so that corporations can maximize shareholder value; because the focus of a corporation isn’t to innovate, or improve what they do, their focus is always on extracting the most value for the least cost.

Therefore, monopolies will almost certainly lead to a sub-optimal product. The people that suffer for this are the users of that product. In the case of something like Google search, that’s basically everyone.

There’s a more modern term for this phenomenon: enshittification. Actively making a product worse specifically for the purposes of creating profits for shareholders.

Late stage capitalism is fun, isn’t it?

I kind of like this. When I’m searching for how to do something, I probably don’t want your entire codebase, just don’t snippet that does the thing.

I’ll probably need to modify it so the thing works in a specific way, so I can make what I need to make.

Usually I just need a point in the right direction and I can assemble the rest.

I was reviewing some PowerShell script today and it was absolutely atrocious. It’s only saving grace was that it was using actual PowerShell, not some hacky wmic call or anything.

I didn’t write it and I’m really glad for that. Whole lines of rewritten code commented out and just left there. Entire lines of # marks. There’s no reason this should be so densely commented. Your code should be self explanatory.

There were multiple queries to the same database that was then passed through a “where-object” selector by pipe, looking for a single value (pulling a database of thousands of entries for one line).

It was disgusting.

I’m not even a developer and I thought it was horrid.