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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • That doesn’t help that he actually paid $635,000 for it and now it’s worthless.

    It’s as if he took half a million dollars and just set it on fire. Being able to claim a loss on his taxes, if that’s allowed (which I’m pretty sure it isn’t), doesn’t really help with that.




  • You should be. The system sucks. Even though it’s not Doctor Evil in a cave, it sucks that American oligarchs have the power they do. Even before Trump they were using their money to get people elected and lobby them to bend the laws in their favour. And now, with Trump, they’re just outright flattering and bribing him and getting what they want without even needing to hide them. But, they’re also symptoms of a problem. The values of the US are fucked up and this is really just a reflection of those values.


  • Mostly the AIs are built and controlled by public companies. Anthropic’s ownership is secret, but about 10% is owned by Google, and about 10% by Amazon. For OpenAI, 1/4 is owned by Microsoft, 1/4 is owned by their non-profit arm in some bullshit scheme, 1/4 is the employees (presumably including CEO, etc), and the remaining bits are early investors. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, nVidia, Oracle, and other public companies are owned by regular investors, pension funds, investment banks, etc.

    Billionaires are part of the problem, but so are pension funds, investment banks, and regular investors who own a bit of stock in their 401(k)s.

    This isn’t billionaires using their private money on private projects to fuck up the world like some kind of mad Bond villain. They’re not breaking any laws. They’re not doing anything in secret. They’re not doing it in order to kill people, or to try to take over the world.

    This is the whole system where these companies are following the laws and trying to generate profits for their investors. Killing all the billionaires would be easy and satisfying, but it wouldn’t fix the problem, because the problem is a systemic one.

    If it were Doctor Evil hiding in a cave, working on a doomsday machine, you’d need to send in Austin Powers to stop him. When it’s regular public companies doing it, you can stop it by just changing a law. The US system is so fucked up that it may be impossible to do that. But, in say France it’s probably much more likely that someone can just pass a simple law saying “you can’t do that”.



  • No, it’s a flop.

    It’s hard to believe that a company would spend hundreds of millions to develop a game, only for it to flop. But, that’s how it works with live-service PVP only games. They depend on network effects. People want to play what their friends are playing. If a company gets this right they can be like Minecraft or Fortnite and it’s the game everyone plays, bringing in billions of dollars. If they miss, it can be a complete flop that nobody plays.





  • Most people who sign up as an enlisted soldier are dumb, desperate or both. Many probably believed the idea that Trump wasn’t going to start any new wars. And, to be fair, maybe he wouldn’t if the Epstein stuff hadn’t been quite so devastating for him.

    I don’t think many signed up so that they could kill children to help distract from the Epstein stuff.


  • This might work for anybody who signed up for the military after Operation Epstein Fury started, but my guess is there aren’t going to be many of those.

    Most of the rest probably signed up while Biden was president, and thought at worst they’d be going to war to help keep the oil industry profitable.


  • Bernie isn’t far left by international standards, but I wouldn’t put him in the centre. Nobody in the centre is trying to make radical changes to things. What Bernie is proposing is pretty radical compared to where the US currently is. And, I think if those reforms actually passed, he’d still be trying to move things even more to the left.

    And Biden as “far right”? It has lost all meaning if you’re applying that label to him.




  • Yeah, he was huge. Stallone and Schwarzenegger were bigger names for purely action movies. But, Keanu and Tom Cruise were the action stars who the teenage girls wanted to watch.

    I think it’s all the years of Fresh Prince of Bel Air that makes me think of Will Smith as primarily a comedic actor at that point. Because, he and Keanu really had a similar path. They started with comedy and then proved they could do action. I guess Will Smith’s action movies were a bit more action comedy. Men in Black is definitely a sci fi action comedy. Bad Boys was an action comedy. Independence Day wasn’t really a sci fi action comedy, but he did punch out an alien. But, Will Smith did do Enemy of the State, and I don’t remember much comedy in that. For Keanu, Speed isn’t an action comedy, but there’s some light-hearted stuff in it. But, Point Break (from what I remember) was a more serious tone.

    But, I think by 1999 if you were hiring Keanu Reeves for a purely serious action role, that wouldn’t be seen as strange. And, if you were hiring Will Smith for a purely serious role, it would probably be seen as wasting his talent.


  • It would have been a very different movie. So, maybe people couldn’t picture Keanu in that forgettable action comedy called The Matrix. But, Keanu did show he could do comedy. His first big movie was Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. He’d also done Parenthood. In addition, he’d shown he could do action movies / thrillers with a bit of comedy when he did Speed, and fairly serious action movies with Point Break.

    Will Smith has done plenty of action movies, but all of them are at least somewhat comedic. He’s shown he can do serious roles too, like Happyness, 7 Pounds, etc. But, I don’t think you’d hire him for a science fiction action movie without having him do some comedy. I’m sure Will Smith could do a straight dramatic science fiction action movie with no comedy, but AFAIK he’s never done it.

    IMO Keanu is a much more limited actor than Will Smith. But, The Matrix played to his strengths.


  • merc@sh.itjust.workstoDad Jokes@lemmy.worldDadboats rule
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    8 days ago

    I guess you could also give it a Gen Alpha slang name that someone old enough to be a dad is too old to understand.

    Like, call the boat “Low Key Salty”. Simultaneously a play on words and Gen Alpha slang. Best if used for an ocean-going boat docked in the Florida keys.