That sounds very much like certain white trash family members in my family/extended family, and family of neighbor kids I grew up with.

Utterly shit people who have objectively fucked up or failed at nearly every opportunity ever presented to them, never seek out or attempt to create their own opportunities… but also somehow just infinitely smug and self confident about basically just random unremarkable nonsense details of their lives.

And of course, are never wrong about anything and are literally incapable of genuine introspection.

I mean, I’d appreciate it!

The entire history of the phrase ‘wrong side of the tracks’ also comes to mind.

They would all arrive at the market and insist on being able to open carry slung AR15s, and then be utterly baffled by the concept of a weapons check.

Like… even in ‘the West’ (yeehaw cowboys West) it was pretty common to have a weapons check at bars… because they quickly learned that if you don’t do that, well, patrons don’t enjoy the risk of getting their balls blown off while trying to throwback a shot of whiskey, because two other idiots nearby got into a fight.

Literally the fabled Tombstone, AZ, did this, as a city wide ordinance.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gun-control-old-west-180968013/

Gun control is older than almost half the states in the union.

IIRC:

It was an aerial, or highly elevated shot of an extremely wealth district of high rise apartments and condos in… Brazil I think?

Seperated by a giant fence with a favela on the other side.

And then labelled something to the effect of ‘this is your brain on communism’ or whatever.

EDIT: Something like this, I think:

Rio de Janiero.

Schrödinger’s tariffs, you don’t know what the tax rate is till it arrives at port!

Damn, my shipment of cats is all dead, this time, SAD!!!

aheheh…

Coming Soon!

Watch This Space!

sped up timelapse shot of giant billboard decaying

Another second or third order effect, depending on exactly how you class it:

Lots of smaller, more specific product segment oriented businesses?

Well, the smart ones ordered a bunch of supply at the end of last year or beginning of this year.

Which means their smaller ware and storehouses are fuller than normal.

Which means they… assumed demand would more or less remain steady.

Which means they took a big expense some months ago, maybe covered it with a loan.

Which means the Q4 24 and Q1 25 quarters are actually pulling forward from the rest of the year, which means we will actually GDP fall from… the baseline prior to that, not after that.

… And if when the economy generally tanks, and demand falls through the floor…

Well, some of them will survive.

But many won’t.

Even though they did the arguably smarter thing, they’ll still have to cut hours, do lay offs, even though the bosses told their workers that they didn’t get a Xmas bonus… so that they wouldn’t have to lay them off or cut their hours.

…

Beyond that, remember when the Ever Given got stuck in the Suez?

And… if you knew anyone in logistics… shit was back ordered and fucked up and people were paying premiuma for priority shipping that was still late, and dock processing times and land tranait schedules were fucked because everyone kept changing plans last minute?

Oh just multiply that level of chaos by 100 or 1000 or so.

Nbd rofl.

…

… As someone with a basic Econ degree, I always find it hilarious how often the highly praised and glorified ‘small business owner’… is actually pretty much ignorant of most basic economics.

What is it, 95% or 99% of small businesses fail within the first year? Just like how 99% of Youtubers or Tiktokers or OnlyFans people make essentially no money?

Nobody bothers to look into any of that though, oh well.

At least succesful Youtubers / streamers are generally aware of the fact they’ve won the lottery.

Small business owners on the other hand are usually the most self righteous ass hats I ever meet: We’re a abusive family business!

(though there are of course exceptions to that)

… My ex was SA’d by a staff member during one fairly long term stay.

Managed to get that guy fired, but not … you know, prosecuted.

The state of mental health is fucked because mental health, at its core, foundationally is built off of ‘how do we pathologize and treat people who have trouble being or cannot actually be any kind of an ideal employee.’

No one fixes this, or homelessness, because … no one cares, these people have no money or power, they are viewed as drains on society, instead of potentially productive members of society, or even fundamentally as just… human beings with consciousness/souls.

It is a structural issue with literally all of society, and the severely mentally ill, and the homeless (which often coincide, what a shocker) are literally the untouchables class.

We like to think we are more modern, more enlightened, more decent… no, we are not.

We are just better at technological propoganda and treats and distractions.

… Maybe there is a world where … now that the veil of this has been shattered by the rise of fascist MAGAs… maybe, down the line, this will lead to some kind of equivalent social/philosophical reexamination of how… we do everything, as there was after WW2 and the Holocaust… maybe that could be our future.

So… yeah.

I just wanna say… they’re not ‘imaginary’ tormentors, in the sense of someone playing make believe, who can just … not do that.

They cannot turn off the voices in their heads.

They cannot control the fact that they have vivid visual, audio, tactile, olfactory etc hallucinations that are indistinguishable from actual reality, that their memories of past events can basically just have things that did not actually happen… formed or inserted as a ‘core memory’, or things that did actually happen… wildly warped or just removed.

So… what do you do, show them a video of what happened, with them in it?

Nope, thats fake, thats not them, that is their doppleganger, that is their evil clone.

Nobody really knows how to ‘fix’ this, or if its even possible.

Antipsychotics generally just make them more docile and less prone to aggressive outbursts, but they also have massive sideeffects… they often do not actually stop the actual ‘unreal’ experiences.

It is nowhere near as simple as ‘stay on your meds and all the hallucinations go away.’

The result is that… they cannot trust anything… because quite often, the psychiatrists and other medical people they see will basically manipulate and trick them into beleiving the meds … are a cure… insinuating or even directly stating that their meds will solve the problem.

There is also a lot of other kinds of fraud and abuse going on with many people who treat schizophrenics because… who’s going to believe them?

…

I had an ex who … developed into severe schizophrenia.

Shit sucks man.

Not well. As RedditRefugee notes…

They do indeed usually incorperate you into their personalized, uber conspirstorial worldview.

If you have ever heard the phrase ‘Targeted Individual’ or ‘Gangstalking/Gangstalkers’… these are phrases commonly used by schizophrenics in online communities… who, having broadly similar underlying thought processes and lived experiences, will and do gather on the internet and discuss their … paranoid/persecutory delusions… and they do seem to have largely agreed on those phrases to describe their individualized, specific experiences.

I believe at one point, reddit had a fairly large r/TargetedIndividuals or r/TIs subreddit, something like that… not sure if it still exists or is active.

Gotta say, I love the idea of a private company being called ‘PublicSquare’… and the irony of this utterly whooshing over the heads of literally everyone involved.

In the case of Kanye… fell astoundingly far down the antisemitic conspiracy rabbit hole.

Before he went turbo-mega-ultra Hitler fanbo1 on Alex Jones… he was saying a lot of shit about how the entire entertainment industry was run by a cabal of Jews who secretly fucked over himself and other black artists in particular.

… He completely lost his mind in this process and has arguably been having the world’s longest sustained, continuous, psychotic break (I think he’s been far more obviously just unhinged bonkers for longer than Elon?).

He legitimately hated and hates Jews so much that the actual Hitler stuff came afterward.

How does he rationalize that Hitler would absolutely have killed every Black or African descended person he could, that he switched from being inspired by American rascism to calling the US a ‘mongrelized’ people, because of American society’s multiracial makeup, interracial marriage etc?

Easy: He’s completely insane and legitimately should be in a room with padded walls.

Logic? Reason?

404 error.

…

Have you ever tried to convince an unmedicated, manic schizophrenic that… the things they are saying just fundamentally do not make sense, at a basic grammatical level, that their mind invents things that did not happen?

Yeah, doesn’t go so well.

Is that some kind of speed run record?

For people not doing a ban evasion, who had a previous account?

It would appear to be about 2 years worth of Russia’s domestic arty shell production capacity… not sure about how many shells they normally fire per month or year…

Thats uh… thats a gigantic crime rofl, fucking wow.

Not quite sure exactly what that slots into, tampering with evidence, obstruction of justice, not complying with the discovery process… but uh yeah wow dang, that’s the kinda thing that can actually lead to charges against the actual people that do this, if not at least the people that order other to.

Great job, morons!

… fucking megacorp version of ‘the discord channel got leaked, nuke everything!’, especially if these directives were newly enacted after any of the anti trust suits began.

… Basically the entire US real estate industry uses Zillow.

It would be pretty darn surprising to find a for sale house or condo that is not on Zillow, but is only on some other site, or totally listed privately, or exclusively with some RE agench that isn’t posting on Zillow.

Been that way for at least a decade, if not nearly two decades.

… You are correct though that they are always ludicrously overpriced. That’s your housing bubble.

Reinstate Eberhard and Tarpenning.

As an Autist, I find it amazing that… after a lifetime of being compared to a robot, an android, a computer…

When humanity actually does manage to get around to creating “”“AI”“”… the AI fundamentally acts nothing like the general stereotype of fictional AIs, as similar to how an Autistic mind tends to evaluate information…

No, no, instead, it acts like an Allistic, Neurotypical person, who just confidently asserts and assumes things that it basically pulls out of its ass, often never takes any time to consider its own limitations as it pertains to correctly assessing context, domain specific meanings, more gramatically complex and ambiguous phrases … essentially never asks for clarifications, never seeks out addtional relevant information to give an actually useful and functional reply to an overly broad or vague question…

Nope, just barrels forward assuming its subjective interpretation of what you’ve said is the only objectively correct one, spouts out pithy nonsense… and then if you actually progress further and attempt to clarify what you actually meant, or ask it questions about itself and its own previous statements… it will gaslight the fuck out of you, even though its own contradictory / overconfident / unqualified hyperbolic statements are plainly evident, in text.

… Because it legitimately is not even aware that it is making subjective assumptions all over the place, all the time.

Anyway…

Back to ‘Autistic Mode’ for Mr. sp3ctr4l.

If I was on the Bethesda team, I would actually be very interested in trying to get feedback from the only other group of devs that remotely know what it’s like to do something similar. What approaches did they take? What’s similar? What’s different? Did the choices that other team make lead to a better product? How much more elegant is their code?

… And why didn’t Bethesda do this with the Skyblivion team?

Why didn’t they offer to at least pay them temporarily as contracted consultants?

Because management is full of themselves and maniacally, socio/psychopathically profit driven.

You can’t say they weren’t aware of the Skyblivion project, they literally coordinated a publicized action with them as part of their release schedule.

…

Game dev in particular, and even software dev generally, in America, at least… is absolutely chalk full of situations where one person or team or whatever’s work is either stolen, or fought over, or someone claims credit for a whole bunch of stuff they didn’t actually contribute nearly anything to, or make a whole big show of some streamlining effort that actually just cripples or eliminates the proverbial one dinky jenga block from the xkcd comic, and then all the blame for a whole bunch of other idiots’ plans, who never even consulted with the jenga block maintainer, well that guy or gal gets utterly blamed for all of it.

As well as of course all the NDAs and IP type bullshit where nothing even resembling what you did as a contractor or for another company can be used elsewhere, and become massively succesful, without a massive legal and financial threat.

… The actual devs, yes, did their work most likely without ‘lol lets fuck over these upstarts’ in mind.

That was in the mind of upper management and c suite though, guaranteed.

They don’t talk about that infront of the servants, I mean employees, I mean, who cares really, we’ll drive them nuts with crunch OT and then lay them off anyway, gaslighting them for the entire development cycle that that won’t happen.

…

Your instinct as a senior dev to reach out comes from a reasonable and good place.

But upper management and c suite is concerned with maximizing profit and business strategy, and in game dev, these folks have a long, stories history of routinely being as ruthless, cutthroat, duplicitous as possible.

It is warfare to them.

…

And I am not just pulling my credential check out of my ass here as some kind of gotcha style rhetoric, I also have worked in game dev, in software dev, in db admin and data analyst roles, for large corporations.

Though I do truly appreciate that you actually have the relevant credentials, and are talking from your own actually relevant experience, so I want to thank you for that, for actually having the conversation.

My experience has been almost entirely upper managers and VPs and the Board consistently doing the exact opposite of what actual developers suggest, request, or warn about, and then just slyly or sometimes quite brashly blame everyone else for causing the fuckups they were warned their plans would cause.

They think they are Gods and everyone else is a contemptible, digusting, unfortunately unavoidable part of doing business… and if a truly royal fuckup happens, they’ll turn on the people that built the corporate ladder they climbed without even a blink.