Most people on this list have taken their foot off the gas in a major way, and do more of what they want.

Elon is currently blowing tens of billions of dollars running Twitter into the ground, designs impractical cars because he thinks they look cool, committing light treason, and campaigning for a president who would be detrimental to his business interests.

While the Zuck is still involved at Meta, he also picked up a ton of other hobbies. A lot of them are objectively cool. He also seems to spend a lot of time with his wife and kids.

Bezos seems to spend most of his time having sex with his age appropriate mistress on his $500 million yacht.

I didn’t have anything specific in mind, but a lot of this matches up based on the one episode I watched. There weren’t any sex scenes though.

The Air Nomad genocide happens within the first ten minutes, while Aang is on a walk or something. It’s billed as this super metal moment that shows you this isn’t for kids. However it looks so fucking cheap and is written so badly. I just sat there rolling my eyes.

To be fair, the online discourse part also didn’t match up. The show got good but not great reviews. Avatar is a lot more popular that most adaptations, especially among millennial bloggers who do these reviews. While there were the usual 9/10s, there were also a ton of reviews written by people who grew up watching the show that were just like “yeah this is disappointing in every way. I guess it’s okay if you didn’t watch the original show, idk you do you 5/10”. Because of the diversity of the original IP, there was no culture war BS either.

Honestly never heard of it lol.

So I’ve noticed that there are a lot of streaming movies and TV shows that match a lot of these patterns:

• IP is announced. Adaptation of extremely popular series with existing fanbase
• IP is billed as “adult” with “mature themes”
• Producer/Director goes on a podcast and compares IP to “Game of Thrones” a few weeks before release. Said comparison treats GoT as an ideal to aspire to instead of a cautionary tale.
• Producer/Director also insults existing fanbase for some reason
• IP is previewed to critics, gets amazing reviews
• IP comes out, and gets high streaming numbers day one
• Writing ends up being terrible
• Plot ends up being surface level, with all the subtly of the original adaptation cut out. This somehow is true now matter how basic the source material may seem
• Acting is terrible. There is at least one race swapped character, who they also butcher from a writing perspective
• VFX is terrible, and expensive scenes are cut out
• Costumes are terrible to the point where everything looks like shitty cosplay
• There’s a few violent scenes that are extremely gratuitous. VFX and writing are so bad that it’s comical instead of jarring
• There are a few random sex scenes thrown in. The sex scenes detract from the pacing of the story, and are blatantly thrown in so producers can brag about them
• Sex scenes tend to focus on the female form. If men are involved, they all are hairless and look like boy band members
• If it is a gay sex scene, it blatantly written by women and for women with an extremely limited knowledge of men as a whole
• In a few days, the Internet erupts with needlessly vitriolic discourse about said IP.
• A year post release, the show is essentially forgotten.

In that context it’s no surprise younger people don’t like sex scenes. It’s basically a canary for a low quality show and extreme toxicity.

Look I’m sorry but this is ridiculous. The type of people to not be able to afford $15/month most likely don’t have insurance, or even access to a pharmacy. While there isn’t any real data on the venn diagram of people having sex more than once a day and being too poor to afford an extra 50¢ per day for every extra sex session, but I suspect it is vanishingly small.

At some point this is just virtue signaling. It’s eyeroll inducing.

The condom part is silly.

Cost and availability aren’t barriers to condom usage. They sell 36 packs of condoms at Walmart for like $15. Basically every single convenience store sells them for prices that, while massively inflated, are pretty low in the grand scheme of things. Most college health centers give them out for free.

The reason people don’t wear them is because doing it raw just feels better.

Does anyone have the actual sales numbers for these things?

They are basically perpetually on sale at Aldi and other discount grocers. I feel like you don’t do that unless you’re hurting for sales.

See I have to believe at least some of this shit was because the leader of that group was a federal informant. This is the kind of thing the FBI agents in Ms Congeniality would think is funny.

I was in college when this happened. Absolutely nobody thought he could win until Florida was called. Trump himself seemed mildly surprised in his victory speech.

I get what you’re saying but instilling fucked up religious values in a kid is a completely different thing than marrying off a sixteen year old to a middle aged man.

Honestly this is sort of ridiculous.

• Biden is a Washington insider now, but that’s because he had a lifetime to make something of himself. He grew up in the middle class
• I think we can all agree Obama was an outsider without any sort of elaboration
• Bill Clinton grew up dirt poor in a state that basically only makes the news when something stupid happens.

All three had to climb the ladder in a huge way, that simply wouldn’t have been possible in a lot of other countries.

I also feel like Trump embodies the whole “anyone can be president” in his own sort of fucked up way. Trump obviously was born into immense wealth and enjoyed tremendous status, but he was in no way ever considered leadership material by America’s political elite. His election was a complete “wtf” moment and wouldn’t have happened in most countries. In a more rigid system we’d probably have had something like a Hillary Clinton v Jeb Bush election, which strictly speaking would have been better than what we got but also let’s be real we would have all hated it.

I’m not saying America is some pure meritocracy. Bush was a third generation political dynasty member. His opponents were also pretty well connected. It’s just that he’s only one of several presidents to get elected in the past 30 years.

I want to offer another perspective.

I knew someone who got married at 16. The groom was 18, they both came from religious families, and they ended up divorcing at like 22, which was basically a few months after they moved to a liberal area on the west coast.

I don’t think any sane person would call this grooming. At no point was I given the impression that the husband in this situation was abusive. However the situation was fundamentally fucked in a way that was unfair for both parties. My friend felt pressured to be a homemaker while still in high school, while her ex felt even more pressure to be a provider despite having no real emotional or financial capacity for doing so. They also both tried to make it work much longer than they should have, which inflicted a further set of scars.

We live in a world fundamentally more complex than what the average person had to experience 100 years ago. We don’t let teenagers do things like buy alcohol or smoke cigarettes. It is almost expected that 18 - 21 year olds in the US will be on some major level dependent on their parents.

Even in cases where there isn’t abuse, we shouldn’t be letting minors get married. It is just an unfair position to put both parties in.

I love how every major bank came together to create an alternative to Venmo, but somehow it’s objectively worse. It’s not like Venmo is this grand fountain of quality either.

I’m actually in favor of the death penalty in theory, there’s just no way I trust the government to not inadvertently execute an innocent.

Case in point, this week.

Exactly. The problem isn’t diversity. The problem is soulless corporations who put out mediocre games, and then try to shoehorn diversity in a fairly surface level and lazy fashion as a distraction.

It would have been weird if AC1 didn’t star an individual of MENA descent, because the game was set in the middle east. Origins had minority protagonists for similar reasons Connor being Native American in AC3 added a lot of depth when it came to the concept of freedom and how it relates to the American revolution.

I feel like I’ve seen the same story a million times. Mediocre IP, lazy forced diversity, culture war commentary, undeserved stellar reviews, underperformance with audiences due to fundamental issues.

I’m railing about corporate making a mediocre game and then jamming some culture war shit into it in a blantant attempt to distract from the fact that the game is mediocre.

Also AC has had “more than just white guys” featured since the first game.

I feel like a lot of companies that put the most emphasis on making diverse IP make the worst products. I don’t think that the lack of quality is due to diversity. Rather, I think that companies with soulless corporate leadership have a habit of producing mediocre content and attempting to obfuscate said mediocrity by making an otherwise uninspiring game a referendum on the culture war.

I’m willing to bet that there are developers who can make a game that is more organically diverse and genuinely fun, but that they don’t get an honest shot due to the state of modern gaming.

Anyway this game is gonna be crap, IGN is gonna give it a 10/10, and Polygon is gonna go on a tirade when it underperforms in the same way every AC game since black flag has underperformed.

How old are you?

Kamala Harris was already middle aged when the DOCX standard was released or the workflow of converting a word to pdf became common. All of that stuff really didn’t hit mainstream until the Obama administration. It would have probably even been longer for a legal office to adopt it.

I think it’s safe to say she knows how to use Microsoft Word (or something like Lotus Notes), print a document, and even scan something to a pdf. I bet you could also teach her how to use ether “print to PDF” function fairly quickly. However if you just plop her in front of a computer and tell her to go at it I think the most likely result is Kamala swearing at the ribbon interface…

That’s generally how progressive tax brackets work, yes. Technically speaking if I rich person wants to take out a 30k HELOC they’d also not get taxed on it.

Okay but you can just apply the same logic to a HELOC. If you get a 30k HELOC for a bedroom renovation then it does not count towards capital gains tax.

Even normal capital gains taxes have brackets.