paultimate14

I did see recently some ads from right-wing PAC's that were shown in different swing states- some portraying Harris as an enemy of Israel in predominantly Jewish areas (I know Judaism =/= Zionism but if you were trying to direct ads to Zionists that's probably the closest you can get) and others portraying Harris as a genocidal supporter of Israel in areas with higher Palestinian populations.

Something that always surprises me is just how effective such dumb advertising is to the average person. I'm not even claiming to be some superhuman immune to propaganda, but political ads always seem particularly low-effort yet seem to control the outcomes of elections.

I remember in the weeks following the announcement that Biden would step down and endorse Harris people dug into her voting record and revealed that she was one of the furthest left-leaning members of the Senate, up there with Sanders and Warren.

Now that she's lost the election all of a sudden so-called "progressives" are claiming she lost because she was basically a Republican.

The GOP's strategy was clearly to promote voter apathy and drive down turnout for people more likely to vote Harris, and it worked. Trump finally won the popular vote- and he did so with about 6 million fewer votes than what Biden got in 2020.

Far too many progressive, and maybe even moderate Dems and independents, really believed all the nonsense. "Both sides are the same", "you're vote doesn't matter", "there's no way Trump can win", "Bidenomics is totally what caused the global inflation and we are just going to ignore that post-pandemic inflation in the US was the lowest of any developed economy", "she's a cop", etc. Heck, maybe there is even some misogynist or racism on the left that may have hurt Harris. And now instead of just trying to dig out way out of decades of neoliberalism we're just escalating to fascism.

I blame everyone. The GOP and Trump of course. The billionaires (the loud ones like Musk and Bezos, but also the quieter ones like Thiel and the Walton family). Russia of course. The spineless politicians and government officials who refused to put Trump behind bars. The DNC for the shenanigans they've been pulling with primaries for the past several elections and for planning to run a walking corpse in 2024 instead of setting up a real successor to Biden. All of the people who voted for Trump and the other Republicans. All of the left-leaning folk who didn't turn out for Harris. The decades of the GOP undermining democracy (really starting with pardoning Nixon, the whole Regan administration, the hanging chads in 2000, Mitch McConnell taking over the courts, etc).

The only comfort I have is that I know I did my part and voted.

No one said that came first or that those other things didn't happen. You're just trying to move goalposts on an internet argument now lol.

"I kept overdrafting my account even though I opted out"

Is this some SovCit shit where they think "opting out" of the terms of service for their bank account is an option?

Except that these are real, clinically-proven treatments for depression.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/in-depth/depression-and-exercise/art-20046495

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2020/04/nurtured-nature

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-nutrition/article/effects-of-hydration-status-on-cognitive-performance-and-mood/1210B6BE585E03C71A299C52B51B22F7

This isn't saying "it's just in your head". This isn't claiming taking a walk will cure you. But this is suggesting clinically-proven treatments that may ease symptoms.

Are there toxic people out there who think mental disorders are not real? Sure. But jumping to the conclusion that the people trying to offer solutions are downplaying your illness and being "heartless" and "stupid" is a fairly significant jump to make from just "hey maybe you should try these clinically-proven treatments".

I'm torn because I think it's going to be very different in a lot of different places, and I'm trying to account for my own US-centric biases.

Ukraine and Palestine are pretty much completely hosed. Heck, you could probably add other countries like Georgia to that list. NATO may dissolve.

Climate change is going to get worse. We went from "we have to stop now before we reach the point of no return" to "we really need to do what we can to mitigate how hard it it's". The US is now re-opening the floodgates for fossil fuels and rolling back environmental regulations.

People will be persecuted. Police departments in the US will continue to militarize. I expect more riots similar to the BLM ones. Race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, political affiliations, the works. Best-caae scenario is probably class-based riots at this point.

Billionaires will become trillionaires. Wages stay the same. I expect prices to go down at first with the influx of fossil fuels. The GOP will probably pass some tax cuts similar to 2017- temporarily give each individual a reduction of ~$200 per year for a few years while giving corporations billions in permanent cuts. But the prices will rise eventually.

There will be bright spots. Weird pockets of normalcy. The Nordic countries might be alright if Russia and Climate Change aren't too aggressive. China will be its own separate case- you'll still have the ongoing authoritarianjsm and genocide, but it'll be a bright and sunny solar punk version. I'm betting huge chunks of rural America will go unchanged- poor, straight, white Christians will remain poror, straight, white Christians. Those well-off enough to have their McMansions in the woods a couple hours drive away from the cities will probably stay the same.

Maybe California or other blue states are able to hold off the feds and other external forces enough to keep a semblance of the Old World?

Personally, I expect everything around me to just go downhill. Public infrastructure goes unmaintained. The occasional water boil advisory becomes more and more common over a couple years until it becomes a habit to boil water without checking. Certain websites become inaccessible, then ISP's roll out bandwidth caps and up prices. Electrical outages become more common- maybe even scheduled rolling blackouts. You'll need to factor poorly maintained roads when deciding what car to purchase.

Weird stuff is going to be cheap and available. There's still going to be new smartphones every year or two for a while. The PS6, the Switch 2, maybe a new Xbox all drop. Professional sports keep going just like theh mostly did during the pandemic. You can already buy a huge 4k smart TV for less than a month of groceries for 2 people, or less than a month's rent for a 1-bedroom apartment most places. The TV's will get cheaper while the rent and food gets more expensive. The streaming services will re-consilidate into one or two companies, force ads for everyone, raise their prices, reduce their libraries, and basically become exactly what cable used to be.

Gonna be weird.

Yeah and I've got a bridge in Florida to sell you too.

Seriously this is just copium to avoid the obvious: the majority of Americans voted to make the world worse. Criticizing Genocide Joe isn't going to change the fact that Trump will be much worse for Palestinians and Iran.

Did we already forget about how Trump nearly started WW3 with the illegal assassination of the 2nd most powerful person in Iran?

Are they even good at gauging general sentiment though?

Bruh if you're still giving a shit about what any pre-election polls were saying after they've repeatedly failed to predict so many elections I don't know what to tell you.

I said it before he stepped down- America is too misogynist and racist to vote in Harris. Even the economic left. Would Biden have done better? I can't say. But I do think it's pretty damning that Harris didn't even win the popular vote like Biden and Hillary did.

I mean... It's hard to really find solid numbers because Bethesda hasn't published them, but we know that Prey's opening week of sales was 60% less than Dishonored 2's was. All the estimates and discussion i can find on the Internet either concludes that the game lost money or, at best, broke about even.

It got great critical reviews. People who identify as "gamers" seemed to love it. But it gets compared to Bioshock a lot- Bioshock Infinite came out 4 years earlier and the market was saturated with similar games by the time Prey came out.

So I don't think it's unreasonable for management to want to move in a different direction. That direction ended up being a terrible one with Redfall, but i can't automatically assume that the studio would have been any better off making another game like Prey.

You can find every example you could look for in history. Studios who changed direction successfully, like Insomniac going from FPS to 3D platformer. Gamefreak went from platformers like Pulseman to making JRPG's and ended up making the most successful media franchise in history, while all of their later attempts to do anything else have failed miserably.

And it's not as if it would have made sense to have Arkane make Weird West. You can't just slash a AAA studio down to an indie overnight.