Open Veins of Latin America. Finished reading it today. It’s a 1973 book that explains some of the reasons for the massive underdevelopment of Latin American colonies. The general gist can be summed up as “it is a place full of riches, and the colonizers only want to extract everything and send it back to their masters” - that still applied to the industrialization efforts funded by foreign capital.

Although Spain and Portugal were the nominal masters, they, too, were fucking themselves over with debts to Dutch and English bankers back in 16th and 17th centuries, not to mention bad trade deals, effectively killing their own industries and those of their colonies.

EDIT: Galeano also exposed a lot of the shady deals made mainly by USA companies with governments in order to “develop” the southern countries, like ensuring that they’d get less taxes, better exchange prices and better credit options, that their goods would only be shipped by USA owned ships, etc. Not to mention that, during 1950-1970, the price of the commodities sold by Latin American countries kept falling (probably growing below inflation) and the income from the exports kept getting lower, despite larger volumes.

The majority of jobs simply don’t allow any sort of WFH: if it involves creating or transforming something, people have to be physically manning the tools. Healthcare can’t be WFH, education sucks when it’s fully online.

Smaller communities are great for peace and quiet, but terrible when you need anything they don’t have (or don’t have in decent quality), like jobs, transportation, healthcare and education. If you happen to be “socially weird”, you have to adapt and “unweird” yourself

Dink Smallwood’s wood

Hopefully game reviewers will heighten their expectations to meet these inflated prices.

I find it more likely Nintendo will DMCA them for daring to speak about their games

As others pointed out, it’s not only the US economy that will be hit, but also everyone that trades with them.

To illustrate some examples, Canadian aluminum might end up with 25% tariffs. That means anything made within the USA that uses said aluminum will get a price increase. Canadian companies might end up with a surplus, since their main customers won’t be buying as much (instead of paying 100 dollars for a tonne, 'mericans will pay 125 dollars per tonne). That surplus will drive prices down if they can’t find someone else to buy the aluminum.

Since the tariffs aren’t only on Canadian aluminum, but a lot of stuff from a lot of countries, some of that stuff will end up with a significant surplus and no new buyers. For smaller countries that rely on USA exports, that’s going to hurt a lot.

The right thing for meta to do is to implode and cause a complete crash on the stock exchange as it is erased from history.

Probably a lot of them, but he didn’t have the guts to share that plan

Don’t forget the 1990 Gulf War. That was probably the best example of the government getting the ENTIRE media on its side. Saddam was sent running from Kuwait, but the USA made sure to destroy a lot of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure in the meantime.

I did buy a number of fake flash drives, so they’re definitely up there. Luckily I’ve always won the disputes and got my money back from every one of them.

There were also a number of headphones whose sound was so fucking bad, listening to stuff off my phone’s speakers was better

Oh hey, it’s “won’t somebody please think of the children?” taken to the streets for internet clout! Absolutely nothing wrong can happen there! /s

I don’t think my computer can even run the game, the high requirements are the biggest headscratcher for me. One of the appeals of The Sims, at least 1 and 2 (maybe 3?), was that they could run on comparatively lower powered computers of the time, which greatly helped with sales

emergency-patch an oversight that allowed children to be killed by driving into them when in a car.

So, you can kill people with your car, but not kids?

I filled the survey as well. It’s mostly focused on “games preservation”. I’m not up to pay subscription for anything they’re willing to offer and even made sure to tell them that I’m willing to pay a premium for whatever useful content (games) end up exclusive to subscribers

I wish I had secrets worthy of being honey potted for. Best I get is 2 dudes on a motorcycle stealing my phone and threatening me to unlock it

Someone high up in WB asked for it, clearly someone who knows better than all those developers and consumers

/s

Those old computer dungeon crawler games, like Wizardry or Might and Magic 1-2. Jesus, they’re absolute exercises in patience. You don’t even have to play anything very recent to see how poorly they aged, even SNES JRPGs of 1992-4 were much better.

Brazil is currently fighting to increase the income tax of the top earners. I don’t expect it to pass because congress and senate are, by and large, protector of the interests of the wealthy.

Get certifications, those end up being worth more than degrees

Also, friends in high places. Anyone that can help you skip the bullshit automated job market (filling infinite forms and tests for 1000 openings, only to never get any reply) is extremely important.

I hate that most of these tests only have 4 options, Fully or Partial Agree/Disagree. Sometimes, the most correct answer for a person is “Neither” or “Depends” - or the question should be made clearer. Even a professional will just try to say “think about the most common situation”, which doesn’t help.

“I enjoy social occasions” -> Depends. What sort of social occasion? Game night? Church meeting after mass? Party at a friend’s? Family dinner? Going to a bar with music I don’t enjoy?

This is my uninformed, dumbass opinion: psychology/psychiatry are still in their baby steps in actually properly diagnosing neurodivergences in adults. The tests (which are these big folders that psychologists have to pay for, like WISC-IV or NEPSY-II) feel like they can only properly diagnose ‘mericans, because some of the questions’ “average answer” will vary significantly on different cultures. There’s also the whole problem of constant use of computers/phones/social media that creates several symptoms that are common in certain neurodivergences, so all this tech might be increasing the number of false positives or actually causing divergences on brains that wouldn’t otherwise

To me, some NSFW forums, like F95 and LoversLabs