sp3ctr4l

A whole lot of poorly configured or cheaply made electroninc appliances or chargers … yeah I can often literally hear when you’ve plugged something in wrong, it makes a high pitched whine, because it is overamping.

Also, if you’re near high tension power lines?

You have to be pretty darn close to be in danger from actual electromagnetic effects.

But… that hum? The buzz?

Turns out that that is actually what causes a lot of long term health problems in people sensitive to it.

Literally the sound, not the EM field, makes you agitated, stressed, on edge, and if that is just your baseline for 20 years, that constant stress accumulates and basically ages you faster, and can cause mental health problems.

Well I’m glad you have/had a supportive family instead of a dysfunctional awful one like me.

I’ve been forced through an ever evolving series of mental health diagnoses by my family until after 20 years of the wrong meds for misdiagnosis… yeah turns out I am autistic and have ptsd/cptsd from my insanely narcissistic and manipulative and mentally unstable family.

Turns out once I get the fuck away from them, I can actually manage fairly well on my own. Oh and theres the whole got two bachelors degrees simultaneously and am very good at a multitude of tech/programming/db admin/data analysis type stuff, and I was making more money than my entire immediate family combined until their most recent attempt to declare me insane for disagreeing with their (objectively wrong) econonomic and political opinions (my degreees are in econ and poli sci, none of them have any degrees).

… Anyway, there’s much more to an autism diagnosis than just the heightened hearing/seeing/touch sensations, but that is a fairly significant component of it.

There are some decent, long form, like 200+ question tests you can take online from actual medically endorsed autism awareness organizations… if you think you may actually have it, take one of those and then take your results to a psychologist.

I used to be able to do this as well until I got into my 30s and my vision naturally degraded.

Was quite good at FPS games, paintballing… the first time I went to a rifle range for an introductory shooting class, the instructor suggested i look into a shooting scholarship due to my exceptional fine motor control and visual acuity… I had very fast reaction times in martial arts (Karate), but being naturally timid and having a skinny twink build kind of cancelled that out.

The reality is most people think you are delusional, and if your family/friends are authoritarian, they’ll try to get you mentally evaluated as seeing hallucinations.

Its less Superman and more Xmen being persecuted for being different.

I too have significantly more sensitive hearing than seemingly just most people, and can hear and often get annoyed by high pitched but low decibel sounds, very often caused by electronics, off balance high speed fans, etc.

Got gaslit about it by my family as well.

You may wanna look into an autism diagnosis, autists often have this kind of thing going on.

You’d think it would be called super hearing, but instead its often everyone without heigtened senses calling you delusional.

Same thing happened to me when I described seeing the entoptic blue field phenomenon to my family, but not knowing the fancy name for it because I was 11. Family got very concerned I was hallucinating, the reality is I am just more attentive to reality than they are.

One third of Americans, about 100 million people, are in fact this stupid.

This is (one of) the real horror(s) of fascism:

It forms a cult of personality.

As in, a literal cult, a ‘Dear Leader can do no wrong’, honest to god, utterly delusional cult.

Just go check all the polls of people who still specifically support Trump’s tariff policy.

Combine that with the fact that 20% of the US is functionally illiterate (reading/writing skills of a 2nd grader or worse), and the average literacy level is between a 5th and 6th grader, meaning that next 30% of people are… just barely out of elementary school when it comes to literacy.

Those numbers are for US adults 18 or older btw.

As other commenters have mentioned, I too have multiple family members I have had to go no contact with in the last few years because they are in the MAGA cult, are incredibly aggressive, delusional, manipulativr, etc.

In my case specifically, my Dad fell all the way down the QAnon rabbit hole, and the last time I was with him in person, he was showing me how he manufactures ghost guns (no serial numbers) in his garage with some vintage machining tools.

In a sane world he would be on a red flag list as a potential domestic terrorist.

In the actual world he is just a retiree with a hobby.

For what its worth, CyberPunk 2077 is … an alt history that diverges from our own … at some point in the 1960s I think?

Like… the Soviet Union still exists. In 2077.

Point being: The ‘Japanese megacorps taking over much of the American economy’ fear of our own 1980s is very, very much a big part of the lore/universe.

Pondsmith published the first version of the lore in 1988 as the TTRPG ‘Cyberpunk’, originally set in 2013, and this kept getting added to and expanded with subsequent editions.

Arasaka is… well hopefully without spoiling too much, Arasaka corp is basically run by a Japanese fighter pilot ace who pretty much swore eternal vengeance on America after Japan got nuked and lost the war, and his idea of how to do this includes figuring out how to become immortal, so that he can continue to run a megacorp that ultimately usurps American sovereignty and turns the country into his neo-corpo-feudal subjects.

You can get almost all of that by playing through the Corpo intro character path and actually watching the informative slideshow thing in the elevator and on walls/screens in the … megalobby, so hopefully thats not too spoilery.

Also in Die Hard it is Nakatomi Plaza iirc, Nakatomi being the name of the fictional Japanese corp.

Anyway woo random trivia.

Platitudes do protect the poor from thugs if platitudes are embodied by people of courage and moral character willing to meaningfully advocate for them and protect them with force if necessary.

If your society does not do this, your society is of low moral character.

Actually acting in line with your expressed morality is the bare minimum, first threshold of your supposed, proclaimed, performed morals being… things you are actually willing to promote in the world.

If your morals do not actually guide your actions, you are merely cosplaying them, and are just a pedantic preening poser… with low moral character.

Socrates disagreed with the reasoning behind his assigned fate, but accepted it nonetheless, in accordance with his conviction to his principles.

A morality that is not built on responsibility and duty to others is no morality at all.

How to actually do games preservation:

Reform IP laws.

Mandate open sourcing of hardware and software architectures after some period of time. 10 years? 5 years after no more of that hardware/software is sold? Yes texhnicalities are insanely complicated but you get the idea.

Oh, how about government funding for emulator development? We fund libraries that preserve books, and movies, and other stuff.

I hope youre right.

In my lived experience… no, it is not.

90% of poor or moderately well off people I’ve known will still argue for supply side Jesus right up untill the moment their worldview is actually applied to them personally.

EDIT: And then the 10% that do agree with that idea theoretically, well they absolutely never apply it personally, in their own lives, amongst people they know personally.

A society’s moral character is best judged by how it treats its least, not by how it treats the average, or median, or best.

Hit detection doesn’t work, going into pure darkness makes the AI hallucinate to the point it distorts the map layout, npcs will teleport around ot just disappear… runs at like 640p at maybe 20 fps, textures are a blurred indistinct mess…

Oh and it requires basically a super computer to run this.

Brilliant.

All of college is supposed to be above the level of personal finance

Supposed to be, yes, but it actually isn’t.

We have just kept passing so many kids that shouldn’t have even been able to graduate high school, or even middle school, that now many colleges and unis have to pick up that slack and offer courses that start at what used to be like an 8th or 9th grade level just a decade ago.

Fuck, I felt like an idiot for redoing Calculus 124, 125 and 126 even after I already had the credits for 124 and 125 from my High School AB Calc AP test.

I passed it, but only with a 3, which was enough for the credits, but I didn’t trust my own understanding well enough, and just did the whole Calc cycle my freshman year.

I went to the best ‘public’ Uni in my state, from 07 to 11.

I was 2 years ahead of the ‘standard’ math track in my high school.

Even back then, absolutely tons of people were getting accepted into my Uni who’d only gotten as high as Pre-Calc, or even just Trig.

And thats to say nothing of the massive, massive number of foreign students who literally could not speak English, read it maybe, but speak it? No, not more than 50 words.

They would chatter in their native tongue during final exams, and nobody cared at all.

A lot of these kids were obviously from very wealthy backgrounds and had a ghost writer write, their submission/entrance papers, I know because their friends who actually could speak English told me they did.

But that is nothing, nothing compared to what its like now.

Its now been 40 years of the Republicans doing everything they can to fuck over education in every way imaginable, there is beyond negative infinity chance I could now afford to get the education I got a decade ago now, and there are shit tier, rob you blind pop up private colleges everywhere that cost even more…

The US functional literacy rate is now about 80%.

20% of US adults, over the age of 18, cannot do more with English than read Hop on Pop, functional iiteracy is basically defined as 2nd grade level or worse.

The average US adult literacy ability is … at the level of a 5th or 6th grader. Half the country reads at an elementary school level.

Thats on par with like… Laos, Belize, Iraq.

I am willing to bet a similar proportion of US adults are just utterly innumerate, cannot handle basic algebra, much less a compounding interest rate calculation.

Specifically in regards to criminal justice?

A broke, in debt, PI or cop or guard is more likely to be susceptible to bribes, corruption, graft.

These are all theoretically supposed to be public servants, right? Probably a good idea to do the bare minimum to make them less easily corrupted.

In general?

Financial literacy, you know like… how to do a budget for your home, home a mortgage or credit card works, low interest rates on debt work, reasonable total monthly expenses per category, rules of thumb for how much you should put aside in savings… how credit scores work…

All of that except credit scores used to be fairly commonly taught in just public schools, not too many decades ago. Credit scores weren’t covered because they were fairly new back in the 80s.

Now, its not. Hasn’t been for a while.

So, you can’t anymore assume this was ever covered by high school or your general requirements for any particular degree, thus must specifically require it.

Ah, the prison-industrial-degree mill complex.

Love it.

Fucks over everyone, in so many ways.

… A good portion of the families I grew up next to just actually had half of their family as criminals, in prison, usually for consistent DUIs or drug charges and domestic abuae…

… and the other half were prison/jail guards/staff.

Thats what I mean by ‘white trash.’

People that unironically described themselves as ‘wiggers’ back in the 00s.

Gaming has not been ‘fine’ since:

Hypercaptialist corporate acquisitions have basically bought all recognizable IP/dev studios and manage them under an increasingly smaller number of actual parent companies who own increasingly huge numbers of IPs/dev studios, and then basically all of these companies are absurdly mismanaged by corporate nonces who make bank, and game devs are routinely overworked and underpaid.

MTX became the new norm / the mobile gaming scene exploded (basically concurrent phenomena)

Nvidia/Unreal decided that actually, having efficiently coded lighting that runs on moderately priced hardware is stupid, what you actually want is horrifically inefficient lighting that runs on absurdly expensive hardware, and then Nvidia plasters a bunch of AI Frame Gen/Upscale all over that foundation to further enforce their monopoly.

… Like, yes, there are still great indie or AA games, but those are the exception to the rule.

The overall industry is a fucking nightmare for anyone who works in it, and from the consumer perspective, we keep getting overpriced, overproduced iterations of the same basic game… sandwiched on the other side by an avalanche of garbage tier indie slop/scams. Something like 80 to 90 % of the games listed on Steam are that, and they are constantly fucking with their algorithms to be able to actually detect them and filter them.

… It also doesn’t even matter if you personally will never own a high end gaming PC.

All the AAA game dev studios need them to develop the games. And now those are all 30% more expensive, at least. Oh and all of the employees cost of living just jumped 30% as well, I am totally sure that their wages will increase to compensate this. Oh wait no, they’ll actually lay them off even faster and exploit them even harder.

Game dev in America is going to largely grind to a halt, with again, the exception of a few, now even smaller in number, amount of new games that can be developed with much less powerful hardware, or an even smaller number of AAA titles that quintuple down on MTX, addiction based pricing models.

But uh hey, basically every other industry in America is utterly fucked too.

Leisure/luxury expenditures crater the hardest during a depression. Which is what we are looking at. Not a recession for a year or two, no, this is a gonna be a decade of you learning how to cook with rice and beans, sewing your clothes back together because you can’t buy new ones, where your Xmas gift to your kid is decent shoes, not a game console.

Yep. Unlike this … person … I got a degree in economics.

This is Great Depression 2.0.

We are fucked for 20 years, and thats the optimistic outcome, assuming we don’t thermonuclearly obliterate ourselves, and not factoring in how even without this entirely avoidable tariff disaster, the intensification of disasters and other stresses from the deteriorating climate was already indicating basically the collapse of industrialized society by about 2050.

So uh… I had to look up the term ‘CJ Degree.’

… Criminal Justice.

As in… learn ‘industry practices’ to be qualified as a corrections officer (jail/prison guard), private detective, cop, paralegal, etc.

The first thing that came up was a particular college’s course overview and goals checklist… one of the goals was …

Attend a financial literacy workshop.

So not only is this person a moron, not only is this person in all likelihood a prison guard, not only did they go to college to become a prison guard, they shouldn’t have even graduated with their degree.

As a person from a white trash neighborhood, who got real degrees, first in the family to go to college… I have not gotten white trash vibes this strong in quite a long time.

… Can the replicator produce a cubic meter of this?

In case people missed or are unaware of the context:

https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/2024/doj-google-must-divest-chrome-possibly-android-google-fires-back

https://www.howtogeek.com/united-states-doj-google-android-chrome-split/

The DoJ recently (before Trump got elected) won an anti-trust lawsuit against Google, and the lawsuit is currently in the stage of haggling over the extent of the penalty actions taken against Google as a result.

One of the things the DoJ is pushing for is breaking off not only Chrome but also Android from Google to just leave Google with its search stuff.

This is like splitting up Bell from decades ago.

What Google is doing right now is strategic positioning to be able to argue that Android can’t be split off from Google without causing them too much pain, and by making Android more and more dependent on, and nonfunctional without being under the same corporate ownership.

This is a powerplay to try to not be broken up so hard by the anti-trust lawsuit they already lost.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2020)

The actual penalty ruling is expected to come down by August 2025… unless the Trump admin fucks with it, somehow they… haven’t seemed to yet notice or care that this lawsuit is going on, despite Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, having a literal front row seat at Trump’s inauguration.