psvrh

psvrh , 6 hours ago

I think I bought Shadow of the Beast for almost that much in 1988 or 89. Of course, it came with a t-shirt and cool Roger Dean poster, which added some to the cost.

Point being, games certainly were this expensive for a long time, and I'd agree with them being that expensive again, but for the money going to vulture capitalists who'll soak me via DLC on top of that. And I won't get a Roger Dean poster, even.

psvrh , 14 hours ago (edited 14 hours ago)

“Neither party is willing to compromise”

What a load of faux-centrist bullshit. One party has been captured by a grifting demagogue and his protofascist enablers, while the other's run by milquetoast technocrats that have been Lucy-footballed since 2008.

But sure Joe, tell us again about "both sides".

psvrh , 13 hours ago

I mean, Howard Dean talked into an unadjusted microphone one time. That's totes just as bad.

psvrh , 16 hours ago

Either PBS or NPR had a thing a few years back where they’d read sections of the Bill of Right on air, as part of Independence Day celebrations.

The right wing folks who heard it thought it was communist propaganda.

psvrh , 1 day ago

This'll be interesting, because staying in power is the only way Netanyahu stays out of court, if not out of prison.

psvrh , 1 day ago

I don't think you can blame Gaza for this, the Liberals have spent the least eight years sitting so hard on the fence on every issue that they're unappealing to everyone.

What's the express: "stand for nothing, fall for eveything?" Well, in this case it's "stand for nothing, fall in the polls".

Gaza is just the latest thing the Liberals aggressively tried to not take a stand on either way in hopes they could "lead from behind", but it's kind of hard to drum up support when you don't support anything.

(not that CPC is much better; they're neoliberal tools, too, but instead of french vanilla milquetoast flavour, they've got a dusting of spicy protofascism)

psvrh , 7 hours ago

Wasn't the first time autocomplete made me look like a chump, and it won't be the last.

psvrh , 1 day ago

This isn’t going to stop until the rich are afraid.

In case you're wondering why fascism is on the rise, it's seen by the wealthy as a safe way to manage populist rage; get people angry about out- groups and they'll ignore the rich picking their pockets.

The wealthy don't think they're a line in Niemoller's poem.

psvrh , 1 day ago

The his had better not be a “well, we waited to fill these until the election year so that we can use it to mobilize the base”.

One, because it’s terribly cynical and self serving.

Two, because it doesn’t work on progressives nearly as well as they think. It runs the risk of alienating voters because they don’t feel respected for 3.5 years out of 4.

psvrh , 1 day ago

They shoot people who point things at them. They'll simply say they "feared for their life” when someone tries to take a picture of them at a distance.

psvrh , 1 day ago

Safeway/Freshco are Sobeys banners, so not really much better than Loblaw.

psvrh , 1 day ago

Since LTC was privatized, the cost of care has skyrocketed, and the LTC industry and it's hangers-on are salivating at the idea of soaking Boomers for every cent their house equity is worth.

This isn't poetic license on my part, either. I've been in board meetings with executives who say exactly this: their five- and ten-year plans amount to "suck the Boomers dry". The former premier of Ontario, for example...

Trudeau and his government are just the latest in a long line of neoliberal tools that started with Mulroney: killing unions, watching as companies' pension funds were underfunded, destroying bonds as a viable savings mechanism, allowing the stock market to become a lottery of quarterly price-inflation: all of it because the market values next quarter over next-quarter century, and each government was convinced that somehow, some way, it'd all work out, or at least that by the time it crashes they'll be out.

psvrh , 1 day ago

Not their problem. They, and especially their backers, expect to be well out of it by that point. The rich don't really think about the future; they think about how things were in the past, and how to keep it going, but they don't really plan or fret about the future because they don't have to.

If you want this problem to be fixed sooner, the government and their backers need to start being afraid enough for their bank accounts, if not their lives, to do something now.

That's how we got the modern welfare state: the rich and their pets in government were afraid they'd get Russia-in-1917'ed and begrudgingly put in the supports needed to prevent people from being that pissed off. After all, we'd just had a world war and there were millions of vets returning with PTSD and training and an informal support network, and they weren't going to put up with a repeat of the 1930s.

Every action since then is the rich trying to claw back the New Deal and it's equivalents in other countries.

psvrh , 18 hours ago

The Liberals would rather lose than be part of meaningful progressive coalition.

Even the current situation is unpleasant for them, as exemplified by how grudgingly they'll deliver even the meanest social program.

psvrh , 18 hours ago

By "devils" he means property investors, bankers and in general the kinds of people that donate to parties and give board seats and reciprocal business arrangements to politicians.

psvrh , 2 days ago

Hey, Log Cabin Republicans: these are your guys, you know that?

psvrh , 2 days ago

The software world is littered with the corpses of companies that did something successful and attracted the attention of Microsoft.

psvrh , 2 days ago

If Democrats want change, this is how to do it:

1. Win general elections; vote blue no matter who.
   2 Primary out the corporatist candidates every chance there is, right down to the level of school trustee.

This actually works, as we've seen with the GOP and their turn to rabid fascism. It can also work for good.

psvrh , 2 days ago

Halo is almost a quarter century.

Wolfenstein is 30ish

Now, imagine how us Gen-Xers who grew up with Karateka or Epic Games feel.

psvrh , 1 day ago

Yes.

Because by that point, the Boomers will have been soaked for trillions by the LTC industry. The investors will have already be rich and will have moved on to the next victim.

psvrh , 2 days ago

It's not that, it's more that two raging narcissists can't occupy the same space at the same time.

You end up with a kind of NPD supercriticality.

psvrh , 2 days ago

We need the rich to accept making less money, worldwide.

That's really it.

We can probably slow the rate of increase and even begin to reverse it, but we need to convince the rich that they need to accept making less money.

psvrh , 2 days ago

Yup, but it's possible to slow that rate and (if we're smart and motivated) geoengineer ways to reverse it.

Again, though, it would require the rich to make less money.

But yes, in general I agree with you; even if we pull out the stops we're already locked into some kind of increase, but that worse part is that it seems like we're going to do is go hell-for-leather because the rich don't have all the money yet.

psvrh , 2 days ago

And Sears. And many, many others.

psvrh , 1 day ago

This is what the rich are really afraid of: that support for Palestine acts as a catalyst for left-wing radicalism in general.

The wealthy know they've pushed it too far, that people are sick and tired of being exploited, from the jobless recoveries of the mid 90s, to the dotcom crash where we bailed out the wealthy, to the '08 crisis where we bailed them out even more only to have them piss it away on their own compensation, to the '10s where we rolled out the red carpet for them and let them party on cheap money for decade, to the pandemic where we shovelled money at them only to have them whine and cry about how we wouldn't work hard enough and how dare get off of our knees and ask, maybe, not to be ground so hard.

They know that this is a flashpoint, and they're scared, but despite that fear, they can't help themselves and despite ebing able to fix things by just not being so egregiously greedy, they're going to try to flex more and take more because, well, they've been able to since at least 1980. They think that because they escaped OWS, they're get off scott-free here.

So yeah, this is significant. If organized labour is getting off it's knees, and if the message sticks, there's a real cascade that could happen. We haven't seen labour do this since the mid-90s, if not the late 60s. It could, with momentum, result in some serious change.

psvrh , 2 days ago

That would be true of landlords didn't also know that and, in turn, redline rent to the maximum tenants can possibly pay.

I don't know about the US specifically, but In Canada, investors big and small have bought up all the rental stock and rents are now maxed out beyond what many people can pay.

psvrh , 2 days ago

Now I'm wondering about hummingbirds.

psvrh , 3 days ago

I maintain we need to measure social group distance in a unit I'll call "Niemollers", after the pastor and poet.

As in "how many Niemollers am I away from '...and there was no one left to speak for me '"

Because the Log Cabin Republicans are probably three Niemollers. He'll Clarence Thomas is five, maximum.

psvrh , 3 days ago

Remember the red line on Russia with regard to the first invasion of Crimea? Or Syria even earlier?

Obama, and now Biden, actually embolden autocrata with spineless moves like these. Netanyahu's going to keep pushing because, line a toddler, he's not sure where the actual "red line" really is.

psvrh , 3 days ago

We're going to get fascism back purely because the neoliberal idea of fucking over everyone for the greater glory of the wealthy, while strip-mining brown people for every bit of value apparently has consequences.

Imagine how nice the world would be if we could have convinced the wealthy to make do with less?

psvrh , 3 days ago

Dear media,

You're maybe two verses of Niemoller's poem from "...and there was no one to speak for me.".

Stop carrying water for this man and his sycophants, it will not end well for you, or anyone you care about.

psvrh , 2 days ago

Netanyahu put a target on every Jew's back just to save his own political skin.

psvrh , 2 days ago

I'd posit that a point you're missing under "We need" is "to tax the rich more to pay for the services and supports needed to manage the number of immigrants we plan to build.

You're right about immigration, but the problem, like anything our governments (LPC or CPC) do is that they'll do half the solution; the easy, cheap part (immigration, decriminalizing drugs, setting healthcare and education standards) but not the hard and expensive part (building infrastructure, providing treatment and housing-first at scale, actually spending money on teachers, doctors and/or nurses), and the reason they do the cheap part is they're ideologically unable to ask the rich to make do with less.

psvrh , 3 days ago

Oh no, not the capital investment! Anything but that!

For the record, the oil industry's global profits were $4T. Not revenue, profit. $75B in investment sounds like a lot, until you realize all it means is that they'll need to dig into that $4T to fund stuff, and that $75B is less than two percent of $4T, and the actual hit to revenue and income will be even less.

They can cut back on avocado toast, as it were.

psvrh , 4 days ago

I mean, other than Exxon, Shell or BP.

And the Knesset.

And Putin.

But other than that!

psvrh , 4 days ago

I mean, Windows 98's "Active Desktop" was pretty much this.

Someone at Microsoft has been trying to make MSN a thing for almost thirty years, and they're sure that if they ram it down out throats just one more time we'll finally accept it.

psvrh , 4 days ago

Because these people write big endowment cheques to the university, whereas faculty and students are just blood-sucking overhead.

This is interesting to watch, in sad sort of way: the universities were generally fine with protests and activism as long as it didn't cost them anything or threaten their donors' ego. LGBTQ or race issues? Fine, that's okay, no threat there, heck painting things rainbow and waving flags makes us feel good! Offend some rich donors and out comes the proverbial--if not literal--nightsticks.

I still remember being at UofT in 1995 and the only protests (on campus, not those directed at Harris) were when the administration got uppity that bands and student groups were making it hard to hear the TD Bank pavilion's marketing spiel as they tried to hook students on 25% credit cards. Normal drunken debauchery-slash-activism was fine, but don't dare get in the way of profits!

psvrh , 5 days ago

When people like Ron De Santis talks a "war against woke!", he's talking about a war on things that make privileged people uncomfortable and poor people pissed off.

They know that if more "woke" gets out there, it'll result in the rich potentially having to share.

psvrh , 4 days ago

No.

This is the era of modern neoliberalism; "thoughtful studies", "follow-up" and "enforcement" aren't things we do any more, not if there's money to be made.

psvrh , 4 days ago

Have you seen most Ontario communities? At least the ones being built today?

People drive to Penguin Centres because there are no corner stores anywhere outside of older downtowns, and said Penguin Centres are so large you have to walk quite some distance to get from your parking spot to the store, and you really have to drive between stores in the centre,

Anywhere you can walk to buy a chocolate bar won't see a problem. Anywhere else is going to be a train, er, car-wreck.

Did we really need to spend more than half-billion dollars to make this happen a year early? I really struggle to see what problem this is solving for Doug, other than his gnawing need to do something cravenly populist and perhaps to show the LCBO unions who's boss.

It's like we elected the protagonist from Dennis Leary's Asshole Song as premier.

psvrh , 4 days ago

Ten million over five years to help with the fallout, but six hundred million up front because Doug has delayed-gratification issues.

psvrh , 4 days ago

Ah, so you’ve seen the Liberal handbook too?

(The Conservative one is similar, only they spend the money to get a Big Four accounting firm to do an audit to tell them there’s no fat to trim need to invest more)

psvrh , 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

It was never left or right, it's about power and money.

The Palestine protests threaten the wealthy but things like LGBTQ rights don't. The former could be a flashpoint for general anti-capitalist action, while the latter has essentially been subsumed into mainstream neoliberalism ans is, at best, a great way to distract and redirect from class issues to culture war bullshit.

The rich are happy to have us fighting culture wars instead of class wars. That's why they're pushing the "antisemitism" narrative because it keeps people's eyes off of the real issue.

psvrh , 7 days ago

Biden doesn't really have a good path either way, and Netanyahu knows it.

If he goes too easy on Bibi, he loses support and Netanyahu gets Trump, which is great for Netanyahu. If Biden goes too hard on him, the same thing happens. It makes sense when we realize that Netanyahu's goal is to get Trump I'm office so that both he and Trump can stay out of prison.

What Biden is doing is probably the least bad option, and if he wins Netanyahu's toast.

psvrh , 6 days ago

In case you're wondering why we're even doing this now, it's likely because of the election. The LPC always pulls out the goodies before an election.

psvrh , 6 days ago

No, that one you'll never get.

The LPC (and the CPC) quite like the current setup where they can get a majority with 30ish percent of the vote. This means they get exclusive access to the levers of power every four to eight years and have to trade off periodically, which suits them fine.

PR would mean they'd never get another majority again. It's also mean that the NDP, BQ and/or Greens could get real political power and drive legislation without their involvement, and since the Canadian electorate is generally more left wing that. It's politicians, that would mean more progressive and less business-friendly legislation.

The LPC would be effectively shut out of power as they know it, and their donors would be dealing with a Canada that looks and acts more like western Europe.

The LPC would rather FPTP, where they'd lose an election or two on knowing they'd eventually get a chance again, then see PR where they'd be shut out forever.

For the record, the CPC would have it even worse. They'd instantly lose their protofascist base to extreme right-wing and/or western nationalist parties. There's very little ideological room between the LPC and CPC if you take away the latter's playing footsie with fascism.

psvrh , 7 days ago

How about we tax the rich to pay for it?

The problem is one of distribution: too much money on one side, too little on the other. Government has some great tools to fix that, but curiously doesn't use them.

psvrh , 8 days ago

I know it seems weird to think about this now, but back when Mandela was being released, the conservative establishment was calling him a terrorist and insisting that we still needed to support the apartheid government In South Africa against terrorist communists like Mandela.

Reagan and Thatcher were both quite explicit about it.

So this really is nothing new. The Right is always going to back the powerful against the powerless, and will always come down hard on any person or group that challenges the "natural order".