The increased price is not the result of tariffs, neither for the games nor console. That’s pretty much confirmed by them costing the same amount (converted + sales tax) in Europe. The console is (was, before tariffs) fairly priced imo, it is comparable to the steam deck + dock.

Is 80$ Mario Kart price gouging? Eh. The edit maniac in the comments here is right that video games have become cheap, maybe even too cheap, and that a price increase at some point was inevitable. 60$ was set as the AAA price before the smartphone existed, and was not always profitable as we’ve seen with the recent lay-offs.

My own 2 cents: I’m glad some company broke that unspoken rule (we ignore skull and bones for obvious reasons), so big releases have more options in pricing, too long have we accepted 60$ games with 20$ DLC, I’m glad if this means devs can just charge 80$ for a full game. Oh, and it’s good for indie games too. People may actually buy the shorter games with worse graphics they wanted so badly a few months ago.

I will admit: I’m in this picture.

Game developers have to eat, too, so a (!) price hike at some point was expected, the price for AAA games was set to 60$ before smart phones existed. They only stayed at 60 so long because gaming got much more popular in that time, driving sales. IF (!) this increase would allow developers to pay their employees more and eliminated the crunch culture, I’d have no problem with it.

But we know this is just corporate greed. Pay extra to own your game physically, pay extra to play your old games, join our subscription program. Oh, you’re in Europe and your wages kept up with inflation? Forget the 33%, you can afford a 50% price increase instead.

With the Japanese-only model being the singular exception, you’d think the direct was lead by 3 new faces just so Nintendo could put the blame on them when the thing doesn’t sell well due to the price.

Oh, and Skull and Bones was dog shit, of course everyone hated it’s ludicrous price point.

Me misspelling salaries.

“Big small”, was that one rapper, right? Didn’t know he pushed minimalism on us, then again, he did sing “mo money mo problems”.

Nice try IRS, but you already know what I do: Unemployed, I only deliver newspapers to keep a day rhythm.

Per month 450€ for paper delivery, 600€ from the state (mostly rent assistance).

Lived half a year from my savings without any assistance and learned to cut back at everything unnecessary. Now I get more money and don’t need to pay into healthcare. Feels weird to be able to splurge again. Nothing contributes to my pension fund at the moment, but nobody believes in pensions here anyway.

CGPgrey’s AI and his self driving cars videos.

Definitely made some poor choices in life due to these that I could scream into a pillow. The future is always unpredictable, and while behind the scenes I’m sure a lot happened to improve both of these technologies, more than a decade later the use cases of both are still the same - grifting investors.

Why would you use Ukraine as the example word instead of uniform?

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard “the Ukraine” been pronounced both ways often enough.

I’ve seen a good 15 minute essay-video about this:

https://youtu.be/nCe7Fj8-ZnQ

TLDW: English speakers increasingly use the consonant versions of “a(n)”, “the” and “to” for anything in casual conversation, just with a glottal stop to separate vowel sounds. This is then found more and more in written and formal language.

I believe it is at least partially the same hatred for cosmetic surgery, just amped up because it’s more impactful and they don’t understand why being trans would make a difference.

It was socially acceptable to make fun of “fake” people for years. Everyone knew what a Botox face looked like. Celebrities are ridiculed for not ageing gracefully and clinging to an image with 21 surgeries a year. And now these people are changing their entire gender and pointing at these people for being fake is supposedly wrong? Because it’s “necessary”, the same as the cosmetic freaks claimed? Why should it?

In their mind, trans people just need a reality check the same way they dealt with cosmetic surgery addicts, but society seems to protect and pamper them instead of pointing out that they are loved in their natural look. And instead of trying to understand, they double down on what they’ve done for years. Sunk cost.

I personally designed and 3D printed a case to hold 4 rechargeable batteries, so I could charge them with 5 Volts from a USB cable, instead of buying a new charger.

Fun Fact: this ruins the batteries. Gave up on designing myself and downloaded a design for a battery-adapter (plastic shell + 1 screw that makes small battery fit in big devices). My stockpile of small batteries then lasted me 2 months before I finally bought a charger and new rechargeables.

The right to free speak can be compromised if it interferes with other, more important rights…

… like the right of shareholders to make money.

Smokers have the most opportunities to litter.

I imagine few people create garbage multiple times a day while outside. The people who do only litter if they can’t be bothered to find a bin, so they probably rarely visit that particular place. So smokers, teenagers and truckers just have more opportunities to litter, leaving butts, wrappers and cans.

And once you’re used to littering when there’s no bin, you do it when there are bins as well.

I am in no financial situation to need to think about kids.

Luckily, I don’t need to worry about stumbling into kids either.

Child pickiness and Brassicus-Cultivar appreciation aside, I have another:

There were those weird times when things just wouldn’t taste right. ~10 years ago I disliked cherries for tasting somewhat like alcohol, and more recently Orange juice tasted soapy to me for a time. Both of these things have since gone away and I’m back to eating just about anything.

“What do you mean you lost the funds? Go find them!”

Proteins and DNA and their mirrored counterparts behave like the Tetris L and ⅃ blocks, basically the same but you cannot rotate them to fit in a hole meant for the other. Fitting in holes is, somewhat literally, how most processes of life work on the sub-cellular level.

Processes like the immune system. And if an experimental microbe from mirrored DNA doesn’t fit in the holes your immune system uses to identify things, because all the proteins curve the wrong way, there’s no telling how it behaves, even if the unmirrored version is one of the most studied organisms. And it’s not just your immune system, it’s every living things’ one. And 1 microbe alone is a potential pandemic.

I am no expert, but I hope the horror is comprehensible now. If not, I imagine minuteEarth’s video on mirrored molecules is basically the same reasoning here, with the caveat that mirrored DNA tends to make more of itself.

Minorities.

“We take the high road” mfers when the low road people go after his son:

Collumn 1 is Percentage that voted for the Winner (Republican 2024/Democrat 2020), Column 2 the Loser, Column 3 is the percentage of the people polled.

So row Latino men: 55% voted for Trump, 43% Voted for Harris, and 6% of the exit poll said they were Latino men.