Yeah, once upon a time, a lot of young men were highly motivated to either prove themselves as men, get away from shitty home situations, and/or personally put a stop to the Nazi scourge…

… how did Patton put it?

"We’re not just going to shoot the bastards, we’re going to rip out their living goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.

We’re going to murder those lousy Hun cocksuckers by the bushel-fucking-basket."

… And that is of course to say nothing of the British, French, Russians, etc, who all either faced invasion and aerial bombardment, or literally were invaded an occupied by a murderous, rascist, mechanized death cult.

Not trying to sound like a jingoistic military enthusiast here, war is the worst hell that man has ever invented and perpetuated… but the fact is that some things are worth fighting for, some threats will not retreat or rescind against anything other than the use of coordinated violence in self-defense.

A fascist is nothing but a bully and a liar, who will stop at nothing to satisfy their own ego.

As the Brits would say…

Courage!!

Oh no I don’t find that idiotic, that is very annoying, literally anywhere, between any two countries.

I guess the workaround is to plan ahead and do your currency exchanges before hand, but at least in the US, if you do that in cash, well now you’re a drug smuggler or something if you’re brown and/or not in the best mood.

I mean, everybody just has the ability to open up bank account debit/credit cards in multiple currencies, right?

Your bank doesn’t do currency exchange?

Not my problem, pleb, stay in your geographically confined area with a particular force of monopolized violence.

Selfish, emotionally immature, fearful idiots believe that everyone else is like them, and is just lying about not being so.

Therefore, all those ‘other people’ are devious liars who are more crafty then ‘us’, so ‘we’ must outscheme ‘them!’

… all of this shit is literally scientifically verified.

The more conservative you are, the more likely your brain make up is to respond out of fear of potential loss, to shut out disconfirming informstion… as opposed to the potential gain of trying or exploring something new, that causes you to confront whether or not you may be wrong.

So, I’m from Seattle, basically, and for the longest time I thought no, I do not have an accent.

Then I learned that the reason I thought that was because well, the accent I have is basically the least distinct from the ‘General American English’ or ‘Region Indistinct American’ accent, out of all other regional accents…

With that ‘General American’ accent being what nationwide newscasters, voice actors and movie stars either developed on their own, or were trained into, for being easily intelligible to any other American accent/dialect speaker, or as just sort of a rounded approximation of ‘American’, with no specified regionality to the character.

Thats not to say the PNW or Cali or just general US West accents are all exactly the same as ‘General American’… they are not… its just that they are the least difficult to understand from a general audience perspective out of other regional US accents/dialects… or at least that is the explanation I’ve heard.

As I am aware, the main difference between PNW/Cali English and other US regions is that we have completed the cot-caught merger. Absolutely no difference in pronunciation, the verb sounds are the same… whereas in much of the rest of the US, these are different, distinct vowel sounds. We just use the ‘cot’ pronounciation for both.

Bot cot thot slot thought caught fraught not spot dot.

All the same. No rolling or bending of the first vowel into the u to make a more complex vowel sound, all just ‘bot’ or ‘dot’.

That and pop vs soda vs coke.

For whatever reason, I usually say soda, but that did make me an oddball of most people around me near Seattle saying ‘pop’… but a lot of other places in the US use soda, but also a lot of other places use ‘coke’ to refer to any … soft drink… which confuses and aggrevates my Autistic brain lol.

…

There are a few things that I remember being distinct to Californian accents/dialects as compared to Seattle:

One is the rising tone at the end of the sentence… thing.

I always called this a valley girl accent, and this is because no one I knew as a kid spoke that way… unless their family had recently moved north, from Cali.

Now though, it is more common generally in the PNW, at least in my own experience… but also that could literally be because a lot of Californians have migrated north.

Another silly, but super easy tell someone isn’t from Seattle: Their accent may be essentially indistinguishable from a PNW accent… but they always, always refer to I-5, as ‘the 5’… instead of ‘eye-five’.

No one born and raised near Seattle does this.

I-5 is the main highway that goes all the way down from Vancouver BC, through Seattle, Portland, San Fran, LA, and runs through all of those cities, so its a major reference point of conversation in all those places.

And yeah, the regional vocab difference for how people refer to it is an example of a difference.

Coming soon:

What do you mean my US dollars aren’t accepted at any big intl. tourist locations anymore… I have to actually exchange them?

I am a guy, but I have actually been to a few places, maybe two, in my whole life, that actually did have butler type people in the restrooms.

IIRC, one was some yearly corporate gala thing… utterly insufferable… the other was a fancy pants opera theatre.

Lol, as long as you properly plan in advance and coordinate such a thing, not the way that uh… Dead Matter tried to do it.

Dear god what a fustercluck.

So, I initially wanted to just kneejerk respond yes, it is absurd to suggest this ruling against Apple… would have any kind of generally noticable effect on inflation.

But I wanted to check the actual numbers.

Ok, so, total US consumer spending in 2024 is about $64 Trillion.

… The Apple App Store generated $105 Billion in revenue in 2024.

Ok, napkin math: 30% off of lets just say literally all App Store payments… , ok, we’ve cut costs by about $32 Billion… shave that off the $64 Trillion…

And voila!

A rough general price reduction of… 0.05%

Call a median US yearly income $60K, and they’ve saved $30 bucks. Maybe the cost of either one or two DoorDash meals, depending on where you live… probably much closer to just one.

We’re saved from inflation rofl!

This is where the magic of near meaningless corpo-babble comes in.

The layoffs are part of a plan to aspirationally acheive the goal of $10b revenue by EoY 2025.

What they are actually doing is a significant restructuring of the company, refocusing by outside hiring some amount of new people to lead or be a part of departments or positions that haven’t existed before, or are being refocused to other priorities…

… But this process also involves laying off 500 of the ‘least productive’ or ‘least mission critical’ employees.

So, technically, they can, and are, arguing that their new organizational paradigm will be so succesful that it actually will result in increased revenue, not just lower expenses.

Generally corpos call this something like ‘right-sizing’ or ‘refocusing’ or something like that.

…

But of course… anyone with any actual experience with working at a place that does this… will tell you roughly this is what happens:

Turns out all those ‘grunts’ you let go of, well they actually do a lot more work in a bunch of weird, esoteric, bandaid solutions to keep everything going, than upper management was aware of… because middle management doesn’t acknowledge or often even understand that that work was being done, because they are generally self-aggrandizing narcissist petty tyrants who spend more time in meetings fluffing themselves up than actually doing any useful management.

Then, also, you are now bringing on new, outside people who look great on paper, to lead new or modified departments… but they of course also do not have any institutional knowledge, as they are new.

So now, you have a whole bunch of undocumented work that was being done, processes which were being followed… which is no longer being done, which is not documented… and the new guys, even if they have the best intentions, now have to spend a quarter or two or three figuring out just exactly how much pre-existing middle management has been bullshitting about, figuring out just how much things do not actually function as they ssid it did…

So now your efficiency improving restructuring is actually a chaotic mess.

… Now, this ‘right sizing’ is not always apocalyptically extremely bad, but it is also essentially never totally free from hiccups… and it increases stress, workload, and tensions between basically everyone at the company, to some extent…and decreased morale, increased stress basically always reduces efficiency, to some extent.

Here’s Forbes explanation of this phenomenon, if you prefer an explanation of right sizing in corpospeak:

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/rightsizing/

Yep.

Thats another prime example of them literally doing essentially exactly their paranoid fears.

Oh howabout FEMA death/concentration camps?

… Well, FEMA is probably fucking over, but the plan for migrants, suspected migrants, and the homeless… literally is send them all to prison camps, and if we don’t have enough capacity, build more pop up semi permanent structure camps on the outskirts of major cities.

They became lost, staring into the void, and now are the monsters they dreamed of.

My recently diagnosed PTSD, following finally being able to escape from and ghost my family of abusive nutters by moving many states away … says yes, you are correct!

… This ia unironically what all the rightwing conspiricists have been afraid of for two+ decades now.

This is what they thought Clinton, or Obama or somehow the UN or ‘ZOG’ would be able to use as the mechanism to instate tyranny.

… And now they are doing it themselves, so utterly deluded that they would short cicruit if you tried to explain this to them.

I grew up in a right wing nutjob household. This is what I was told my whole life, growing up. I was indoctrinated into it, and had to deconvert myself out of it similar how I had to deconvert out of christian extremism.

These people are perfect hypocrites.

Jesus.

Yeah, if you only read short passages of a book… well you definitionally lose all the context of the entire rest of the fucking book.

I guess the teachers are just assigning Cliff’s notes summaries instead of the entire text now?

The attention span destroying effect of short form video content is literally stupifyjng us.

I’ve said this whole fucking time: TikTok should be banned for children. Not because its Chinese, its not like every US social media app doesn’t spy on you as well.

All short form video content is addictive, habit forming, spreads mis and disinfo, and ruins your attention span and ability to concentrate, makes you more emotionally unstable, fucks with your sleep schedule.

This has all been studied.

Brain rot is real.

Short form video content apps are the modern day cigarettes.

Turns out this fakepost is actually a Boards of Canada fan detector mechanism, apparently.

Sorry your kid and you and your partner went through that… that must have been just cripplingly stressful in so many ways…

But uh… yeah.

You understand got lucky by basically random chance, at least in the monetary cost part of that situation… but of course, there are so, so many other nonsense ‘exceptional’ scenarios which… well actually millions of people end up in each year, and they just get to be saddled with debt for the rest of their lives, for things that happened to them which would generally have been impossible to precisely predict or prevent.

We are ruled by idiot, corrupt nepobabies who just actually cannot theoretically grasp things that do not specifically, personally affect or traumatize them.

‘Functional Literacy’ is generally defined as 2nd grade and up.

By that metric, yeah, 21% of the US is functionally illiterate.

Technically, they can read and write at a very basic level… but not ‘functionally’, as in, they could not function in society. They couldn’t read a news article and understand all the words. They have a very limited vocabulary.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate

Wikipedia is currently going with an 86% literacy rate for the US, and I’d be willing to bet the discussion page is full of arguments about how to reasonably compare different metrics.

You may also notice that 86% puts us as neighbors with Iran, Iraq, and Syria.

This is what happens when Ya’llQaeda takes over a country.

We had considerably better literacy rates a decade or two ago, more like 95%.

I mean, there is literally 0 chance Trump has listened to or even heard of the … band? musical group? … Boards of Canada, only took me 7 words.

But uh hey, if you’ve never heard of em, give em a listen.

In particular, here’s the last song, the outro ‘manifesto’ of their album ‘Music has the right to children’, their debut in 1998.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=wnopyFg5msU

Rather poignant message.

Whole album is also great, of course.

Oh uh, headphones recommended.

If us Americans survive all this…

Well, here’s your hyberbolic hypothetical argument for euthanasia… realized as an actual case study.

TFLOPs generally correlate to actual, general game performance quite well.

A very demanding game will do poorly on a gpu with a given TFLOPs score, but a less demanding one may do fairly well.

So, if you can roughly dial things into a TFLOPs value, you can get a result that is then generally applicable to all games.

The most graphically demanding games require the most TFLOPs out of a GPU to render well and fast, but less demanding games can be fine with a lower TFLOPs GPU.

Like… a GPU with a medium high TFLOPs score may only be able to push about 50 fps on CP77 ultra w/o RT, but it could likely easily hit something like 200ish FPS in say, CounterStike2, both games at 4k.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/all-games-with-ps5-pro-enhancements.1026072/

A PS5Pro can render CP77 at ‘quality mode’ …which is roughly the ‘high’ graphical quality preset of CP77 on PCs, with… I believe all raytracing other than raytraced shadows off…

… at 2k30fps, or it can render at a dynamicly scaling resolution between 2k and 1080p at a locked 60fps.

https://www.gpu-monkey.com/en/benchmark-amd_radeon_rx_6700-cyberpunk_2077

An RX 6700 can render CP77 at 2k, 43 fps avg.

This site isn’t 100% clear as to whether these GPU scores are done at the ‘high’ preset, or the ‘ultra’, all settings maxed out preset… but with all raytracing off.

https://www.gpu-monkey.com/en/benchmark-amd_radeon_rx_6600-cyberpunk_2077

A 6600 can do the same, high or ultra preset, with no raytracing, at 2k, with 31 fps.

1080p at 51 fps.

So uh yeah, even with the top of the line PS5 variant, the PS5Pro’s graphical capabilities are a bit worse than a 6700, and a bit better than a 6600.

I have used many AMD cards, and yeah basically, if you only use raytraced local shadows?

At 1080p, or 2k?

Very roughly, you’ll get about the same fps with a ‘high’ preset, and only raytraced local shadows, as you would with no rt local shadows, but the game’s graphical preset bumped up to ‘ultra’.

There are now like 6 different raytracing options in the PC version of CP77.

They only work well with Nvidia cards… and the latest iteration of AMD cards, that now have basically their equivalent of RT cores, though they’re not as powerful, nor as expensive, as Nvidia cards.

Needless to say, PS5… normals, or whatever, are going to be even weaker than the ‘somewhere between an rx 6600 and rx 6700’ rough equivalence.

…

Playstation users only even see about 10% of all the graphical settings options that PC players see, really just the 4 post processing effects and motiin blur. PC players get many, many more settings they can tweak around.

Also, PS5 users generally seem to think CP77 is being rendered at 4k, in quality mode.

Uh, no, it isn’t, its rendered at 2k max, and that is likely using FSR 2.1,with a bit of dynamic frame upscaling within CP77, meaning the actual real render resolution is roughly 5% to 15 % lower than 2k, then FSR upscales to 2k,… then the PS5 does its own upscaling outside of the game, likely via an emulator style simple integer upscale algo, to display at 4k on a 4k TV.

… I am saying all of this with confidence because I have spent a considerable amount of time fucking with customizing dynamjc resolution scaling, and other graphical settings, in CP77, on different AMD cards, on PCs.

The PS5Pro is using the same dynamic resolution scaling that exists in CP77 on PCs. PCs generally do best with an ‘Auto’ mode for various frame upscalers, but the dynamic setting on PC basically lets you throw out the auto settings and fuck about with your own custom tolerances for max and min resolutions and frame rates.

… All Im really aware of as far as terminology goes is that basically its different everywhere, even inside the US.

What it was for me: grades 1 - 5 are elementary, 6-8 are middle school and 9 -12 is high school.

But different areas … either don’t do a middle school, or call it something else, or its only 2 grades instead of 3… it varies.

By the time you are done with all this, you are 18 yo.

So… 2nd grade is basically the schooling level of an 8 yo. 6th grade is the schooling of a 12 yo.

After that, you’re going to a college, community college, university, something like that, to get a 2 or 4 year year degree (associates or bachelors), then another 2 after a bachelors for a masters, roughly another 2 after that for a PhD (doctorate)… but there is also variation in terms of exact education track and how long it actually takes to complete them vs how long its ‘supposed to take’.

Public education in the US generally stops at grade 12, and then any college/etc after that is ‘secondary’, as in ‘optional’.

EDIT: Adjusted age dates. I just woke up from a nap, blarrrgh.