Your mortgage isn’t an option for me (or any renters) though. I get to choose between current rate+price mortgages and current rent prices. Median rent in my county is $1,250. The cheapest non-manufactured home listed on Zillow in my county with the lowest APR advertised (assuming a credit score of 760+) would have a mortgage payment of $1,642. That’s without any of the HOI, taxes, commissions, maintenance, PMI, HOA, or other associated costs.

I’ll take a stab. This is all conjecture though so pinch of salt, yada yada. Basically, it’s a mix of two or three things.

First, after record breaking inflation in the U.S., the real price of goods/luxuries went up. If everyone bought the exact same thing they bought on black friday last year, we would still have spent more money this year. If you account for our absurd annual inflation this year, “up 7.5%” does not sound very impressive at all.

Second, the economy and general luxury shopping are not necessarily positively correlated. For example, I feel really gloomy about the prospect of ever owning a home. Since I’m just renting, I have more disposable income for luxury shopping. The same could be true for any large purchases like cars, moving out of state, starting businesses, etc. We aren’t reinvesting our money in our economic systems as heavily so it follows that we have more spending cash (not a lot more, but I would certainly have less if I had a mortgage right now).

Third, budgetary reasons. If people do have less money then it follows that a spur of the moment purchase like a new TV would not be made so hastily throughout the year. Or even specifically held off on until the annual sale. It could be that we didn’t get our usual luxuries and are compensating by getting them at a discounted price. It may also just be emotional spending on ourselves, which many people do as a response to feeling ‘gloomy’ in a consumer-first culture, despite that actively making the problem worse.

CSGO was my go-to game since the literal hour it was released. I have well over 10k hours in it and have hit global several times, though not consistently.

I didn’t mind the first few weeks of CS2 because I assumed it would get better but it did not. As it is right now the game is unplayable to me. And not the melodramatic kind, I mean I literally can’t get a match if I want to. I’ve sat in queues over 24 hours long. On a really good day, we can manage one match every 4 hours. It’s a match full of cheaters, smurfs, and low silvers, but by God it’s a match. Apparently not everyone has this issue and good for them, but this is my experience in NA high elo competitive.

I honestly mourn the loss of my favorite time waster, but the game doesn’t want me there anymore so I won’t stick around. I’ll check every few months for it to be playable again

I don’t identify as a republican but in my deeply red state it is a given that they will win no matter what. I know some folk that vote for the best of the R candidates. There are actually a handful of R candidates that openly identify as Dem-lite to cater to this group and they are much closer to winning seats than any of the Democrat candidates. These voters usually register as republicans in order to help push through the dem-lite candidates.

The reason I think this is relevant is because the main differences in dem-lite candidates and actual republicans is usually down to the dumbest religious issues like abortion and lgbtq+ rights. They are basically just democrats except they like guns.

I thought I was being financially responsible by getting my car with a 4 year repayment instead of 7 at 1%. But because of all the inflation that happened right after I would be making money on that loan right now. :'( oh well, you can’t plan for extremes

It’s also a group think variant of a straw man fallacy. To attempt to refute an individual’s argument by arguing against group A’s opinion(s) instead of actually addressing the individual or their specific argument.

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They sure do, we try very hard to get as close as we can to what an objectivist would consider ‘true’. But nothing in objectivism states that we will ever know what the objective moral truth is. How many stars are there within 100 million light years outside of the observable universe right now? We don’t know. We can’t know. But there still is a correct answer even though we don’t know it. Just as an astronomer might average the count of stars in a similarly sized region and make an estimate of the correct answer, humans will share ideas of morality and endlessly critique them in hopes of getting a closer approximation of what “moral truth” might be.

So many improvements from when I played back at launch. The one thing that still bothers me is how boring the high difficulty modes are. In the Witcher 3 the tanky enemies encouraged you to research them and build effective counter measures. But tanky enemies in cyberpunk just feel like a chore/break the immersion. Instead of encouraging you to explore more of what the game has to offer, it limits you by making some play styles essentially obsolete. Def recommend lower difficulties and just focusing on enjoying the story and feeling like a god. I hope difficulty is the next thing they rework

I assume you would prefer to see stricter legislation/enforcement about smoking in public versus outright sales bans, correct? I can totally get on board with that.

On the subject of games, I highly recommend autonauts (scratch programming as core gameplay) and Turing Complete (perhaps better suited for 11-15 year olds. It may be a tad dense for an 8 year old).

People down voting you don’t realize how irritating it is to be blocked from kills by your own player model. Bunch of Dust II mains smh my head

Ngl bro it sounds like you just really wish your teachers did porn… which like, same, but even I have the frame of mind to know that that isn’t a healthy teaching situation.

What a horrifying reality.

I disagree with you but upvote for engaging. People are really bad about using that as a disagree button.

I agree that raising minimum wage won’t help, but I still think it needs to be done. For as long as our shitty treasury targets a 3% YoY inflation rate (and esp when it goes way over that), the minimum wage needs to keep pace. Personally, I’d greatly prefer that we lower our target inflation rate but that’s a totally different discussion.

I don’t think it forces them to increase the cost of the delivery fee, I think it gives them an excuse too. They always want to. To anyone that has used meal deliveries, we know that it is wildly overpriced as is, to the point where it’s downright foolish to use any of them. They can try to increase their prices if they feel ‘forced’ to (read:want to maintain profit margins), but the fact of the matter is they’ve already done the math to maximize profit and determined that fees any higher will result in fewer customers and less profit. That will shift a little as the upfront cost of providing the service does, but they simply can’t go much higher without losing more customers than it’s worth. I hope I’m wrong though, because if it does force them to go much higher then the entire delivery ecosystem of apps will collapse and that would be a good thing.

I don’t know the answer to the affordability crisis either but I do know that meal deliveries are not part of that crisis. It is an extremely overpriced luxury service. They are about as worried about being affordable as Apple and Cadillac are. Frankly, I’m rooting for their downfall.

That poor animal displayed fear of the humans that tortured her. How could anyone defend this. I get it, implants are super cool in sci-fi but jesus christ. If they have to be researched this way then they shouldn’t be researched. And if they don’t then this is just profit motivated medical torture. Horrifying.

I’m just curious but how/why would competitive pricing be illegal but not what Epic does with aggressive exclusivity agreements/offers? If Steam wanted to, could they keep prices the same to stay above the law but then use their overwhelming market share + capital to secure exclusivity across the board? I feel like the end results would be the same, securing a monopoly at the cost of short term profitability.

Im still boycotting them from the Hong Kong stuff back in '19/'20. I really miss hearthstone but fuck them.

They recently released a firmware update that disallows third party toner carts. You can downgrade it though and keep using the hardware. Not positive which models were impacted, mine wasn’t. Still a shit move from a brand that I used to recommend to people.

Brother