What I learned about MAGA surfing MAGA forums

 So...I like to do opposition research once in a while Ya know, keep tabs on the political opposition. I've been out of the GOP and that sphere of politics for a while now, and honestly, I generally don't get it. Like, for me, my conservatism stopped with the likes of Mike Pence, and that entire wing of the party is gone now. I was driven out by the tea party being too insane for me, and the GOP has only gotten even crazier since, to the point I cant relate to this modern republican party outside of knowing that christian nationalists are fricking nuts.

So I surfed patriots.win for a few days just to get a feel for them. For reference, that website is basically "the_donald" from reddit after it got banned. They made their own reddit with blackjack and hookers, and that is their hive of scum and villainry. As such, I'd like to share my findings.

 1) These guys are VERY racist/sexist/homophobia/transphobic/islamophobic. Basically, they're a bunch of I'm imagining straight white males who hate everyone else. Slurs are common. Dehumanization of the other is common. They are obsessed with migrant crime, crime by minorities. They see islam as a threat to society, they think we're undergoing an epidemic of transgenderism. Like, that seems to be their big focus.

 2) They think that we are experiencing some unprecedented "invasion" of illegal immigrants and a crime wave. Like, these guys are REALLY obsessed with people with brown skin committing crimes. They'll talk about anecdotes and be like "gee how did i know what race they were?" They think we're in the midst of some national emergency and think Trump is doing what needs to be done to control that stuff.

 3) They aren't always on board with Trump. Despite it being a trump centric forum, some level of dissent seems tolerated. There was a thread on how they'd rate Trump's presidency so far. The responses were all over the place. Some criticized his cabinet picks like Pete Hegseth. Some thought he wasn't extreme enough and that he's selling out. Some were like "why hasn't he released the epstein files?", not seemingly understanding that that would likely implicate Trump.

 4) Some of these guys are conspiratorial and populist. They think that the elites are out to get them and screw society. They think trump is on their side and fighting for them. Seems wild to me given he's basically serving the ultra wealthy, but yeah. They think that. 

 5) Many are authoritarian. They seem to think Trump is the guy who needs to come in and hold people accountable and right this country. They see rule of law, checks and balances, etc. as obstacles to achieving that which they want to achieve and are very heavy handed in advocating for their goals.

 6) They see the democrats as corrupt. As far as they're concerned, democrats are corrupt as all hell. They want to let all the brown people into the country to vote for democrats and that's why they're opposed to deportations. While I personally don't deny that democrats cynically use minority voters to push their agenda, they definitely dont just let illegals vote, that's dumb.

 7) They justify their own extreme stances by pointing out that the democrats are willing to violate civil liberties and rule of law when given a chance, pointing out Obama's alleged overreach, or Biden's pardons, or some situation that was far more muted and justified but still technically a violation of a strict rule of law. They tend to be like "well it's okay when they do it, right?" when criticized for their own violations. 

8) They dont talk about the tariffs much. Seriously, for all the mainstream coverage they're avoiding the topic like the plague. When it does come up they mention that Biden tariffed things and it was fine, acting like the two things were anything the same. They also cherrypick information where they talk about other countries backing down and how they're "winning" as a result. 

And yeah. There's obviously more to it, but just quick observations, yeah, that's basically where MAGA seems to be at right now. For as much as I focus on the economic and how i see maga as driven by angst over factory jobs, the big thing that seems to really stand out for them is they hate anyone who isn't them. They think that we're being invaded by brown people who are committing crimes and that we need a strong authoritarian figure to fix it. In a word, they truly are irredeemable in a lot of ways. Now, obviously, again, I am painting with a broad brush here. There's more complexity to the situation than that, but that's basically the gist of it. Again, this is kind of the short, TLDR version of my findings. Obviously surfing a forum is going to be more complex in terms of discussion than just the above points, but the above seems to sum up the vibes. While there is some genuine economic populism in the movement, the majority of it really does seem driven by pure racism. Hate to say it, but that's what sums them up.

Ugh, can centrist democrats just go away?

 It seems like despite their ideas being repudiated by the public time and time again, centrist democrats just won't go away. They keep mutating like an antibiotics resistant disease. Any time they find themselves getting wiped out they just morph into something else, and it seems like we're finally starting to see the new party line that went silent after the election. 

 It's being represented by people like Elyssa Slotkin and Pete Buttigieg. Buttigieg I'm not surprised to see him pop up. He had some quote on some podcast where he was like, "I want good things for you and your family" that went viral and now everyone wants him for 2028. Um...how about NO. Seriously, he doesn't offer anything, and he's part of this new "abundence liberalism" zeitgeist. That's another issue I was gonna discuss, but to sum it up, Ezra Klein had some new book about "abundance" and how the core issue with capitalism is scarcity, and how we need to address the economics from the "supply side" to solve the problems.

Now...let me just make this clear. We want...supply side...economics. Gee, where did I ever hear about that before? Why are these democrats sounding like pre Trump republicans? I don't deny that as far as housing goes, we do need to address that from a supply perspective, but the core problem with capitalism is actually that capitalism creates artificial scarcity to force people to work for rich people, who then hoard all of the wealth for themselves. Why are we acting like that's not a problem? Because they're centrist democrats, duh. Anyway, Buttigieg is pushing these kinds of economics and resist libs are fawning over him for it and it makes me sick. These MFers are gonna shove themselves down our throats again in 2028, they'll probably win, and then another MAGA psycho will run in 2032 and win because GEE NO ONE ACTUALLY LIKES THOSE IDEAS! Really, we are in hell. The fascists are at the gates and the dems are trying to ratchet effect us further right to counter sanders/AOC and their narrative. THose guys are filling up stadiums and they're like "well we cant be like them, can't we just like billionaires instead?"

Which brings us to Elyssa Slotkin. We already covered her before where she was like "but we can't just be like Bernie, I live in a purple state!", yeah yeah yeah, shut up Reagan lover. Really, that was her SOTU response: DAE REAGAN GUD?!  Meanwhile, what are Michiganders actually pissed off about? Gee, losing all the factory jobs? That's why MAGA is popular? Duh? I mean, if you actually talk to MAGA people, a lot of them talk A LOT about how crooked the establishment is. I mean, a lot of them are like French in 1789 in terms of being up to here with this crap. They embrace Trump as some like avenging angel who will burn it all down. Seriously, do people not realize that the country is in a revolutionary mood where the reason all this crap is happening is because people are so sick of the status quo they wanna burn it all down? Seriously, they HATE you, democrats. They HATE your party. because you do F all for them and then lecture them about how much smarter you are. Even I can understand that. I dont agree with MAGA, I argue we need to counter them. But that's why we need a Bernie or AOC or Andrew Yang type figure, not this pro establishment DAE REAGAN GUD?! crap. Seriously, establishment dems sound more like economic conservatives than some MAGA do. i'm not saying MAGA is good, btw. My views on that should be apparent. Trump is a demagogue and his economic policies are EXTREMELY harmful. But we need to stop just having the dems be this weird conservative "return to normalcy" party after republicans screw up. 

Which brings us back to Slotkin. Today, she's like "we need to stop using terms like oligarchy, most Americans dont understand what that is."

No...YOU dont wanna talk about what it is. Because you "abundance liberals" are really just conservatives who ignore all the systemic problems of capitalism and act like the problems don't exist in the first place. Meanwhile, they do. You're ignoring them. People are pissed. ANd because we live in a two party system people would rather vote for this dangerous demagogue than this do nothing party that will do F all to make their lives better, that's why. Really. F the democrats. If it weren't for Trump being so dangerous he's a literal threat to democracy, I'd STILL be voting third party against these idiots.

Really, these guys are dooming us as a country. They're just as complicit in this crapshow as MAGA is as far as I'm concerned. Everyone loves to crap on the voters, but the voters are just given a choice between two bad options and end up choosing the one that seems like the lesser evil at the time, because BOTH OF THEM SUCK! That's why Trump won in 2016, that's why he won in 2024. For the love of god, democrats, gtfo of the way so actual people with actual ideas can step in and actually solve the problems. AOC 2028. That's where I'm at. Sure, I'd like Yang better if he runs, but I'm not sure he will run. AOC is the clear frontrunner right now, so that's where I'm at with this. 

PS, to the radfems who screamed I didnt wanna vote for a woman in 2016, yeah, no. I'll vote for a woman, just not a worthless neolib. AOC is the de facto successor of the Bernie movement, so that's where I'm going. And she's latina too. So guess what? Not very racist either, am I? Almost like race/gender make no difference to me, ideas and ideology do!

Why is Xbox failing?

 So, the infographics show had video on why the xbox brand is failing in recent years. I kind of thought that it was cringe, so I want to give my own take on the industry. 

Quite frankly, I think if not for the Xbox 360 generation, Xbox would've long since died off. They've generally been the weaker brand. Don't get me wrong, of consoles, I probably am more attracted to xbox in terms of games and the like, but my opinions are minority. In gen 6, the Xbox was a weak performing console. The whole premise behind xbox was to make a gaming PC as a console. The first xbox did not sell very well. It competed too closely with the PS2, and the only things it really had over playstation were exclusives like halo, and PC ports like Doom 3 and Morrowind. It was a nice console, but it sold like crap. Heck, Gen 6 was just a runaway success for the sony playstation. Not even nintendo's exclusives, and as we discussed recently, a cheaper price, persuaded consoles to it. That's why nintendo since rebranded with the DS and Wii to focus more on gimmcks and family friendly type stuff. They were getting eaten alive by playstation.

This brings us to gen 7, the Xbox 360. This was the one generation xbox did well. Why did it? Well, let's look at the environment. Xbox launched their console first. They continued their strategy of getting PC ports on their console. It made it SUPER attractive to me, and i went wih the Xbox 360 early. The PS3 and Wii came a year later. The PS3 was a hot mess. It was overpriced, it took longer to get games on it, and the performance was a bit worse than the Xbox. On the flip side it had free multiplayer (paying a premium for xbox live has always been something that turned me off fromm their model), but generally speaking, it was a stronger business model. Sony dropped the ball after the PS2. They launched late, they didnt have a strong game library, the console was grossly overpriced. It just wasn't a good value package. It didnt really reach parity with the 360 until its later years and yeah. And this time Nintendo outsold both. So let's not act like the xbox 360 was that successful. The wii had the largest user base of all 3, due to its low price point and console exclusives.

This brings us to gen 8. By this point, I mostly got out of the console business, mainly due to my introduction to PC. Quite frankly, PC was better than consoles. better graphics, better frame rates, free online play, etc. As such since 2010ish my xbox collected dust and I just poured my money into PC. However, i also understand this is a minority opinion, so let's focus on the console side here.

Here, nintendo got the first shot with the Wii U, but due to underpowered hardware and a high price point, it didn't sell well and it seemed the public was tiring on nintendo's gimmicks. The PS4 and the Xbox one came out a year later. And much like sony with the PS3, Xbox dropped the ball. The fact was, they had a weaker console, for one. For two, it was the same price as the sony one this time, rather than being 33% cheaper. Third, they forced a lot of gimmicks on people like kinect, they had always online requirements, lots of downloading, and it just didnt work for a lot of people. Sony was able to take advantage of this and blast microsoft hard for this. And much like with the PS2 era, the Xbox one was kinda relegated to a weaker option. And by this point, not even its exclusives could save it. All it had were gears of war and halo and halo...lost a lot of steam under 343. Halo 4 was divisive, halo 5, the console's only halo game, was considered an abject failure by fans. Honestly? If you liked microsoft, you were better with a PC. Component prices had dropped, you could score a relatively futureproof PC fairly cheaply. And yeah, sony just ended up being better. 

And this brings us to the new generation. Nintendo, again, they're off doing their own thing. They learned from their mistakes of the wii u and released the swiitch mid generation. It's still their current console, although switch 2 comes out in like a month. And now we're in the COVID era. 2020 was a bad time to launch consoles. There were shortages, scalpers made them unaffordable, the generation might as well have not started until 2022. And once again....why go xbox? Now, I admit, the video makes it sound like microsoft being consumer friendly with not walling everything into exclusives, but i like MS's business model. Rather than focus on being a console manufacturer, they're becoming a game service. Theyre on any platform, they offer a good service for consumers, and despite them buying up studios like crazy, they got a HUGE army of IPs now. If they wanted to play the console exclusive game, they could F everyone over, but they don't. 

Honestly, i do admit what they're doing makes buying an xbox less attractive. BUt is that a bad thing? I remember 20 years ago i thought it was the end of the world when sega stopped making consoles after the dreamcast, but now sega is everywhere, and you can buy their games on any platform. Xbox going that direction and focusing on games and not studios is a good thing. So...maybe xbox fails. Is that bad? Maybe its a winning move long term. I actually dont like consoles as a PC gamer. I dont like walled gardens. I like being able to play what i want, on what i want, when i want, where i want. 

So idk. In the grand scheme of things, microsoft is probably better as a games service than a console maker. Their consoles have almost always sucked and have been long behind sony. They were ahead with the 360, but keep in mind, sony F-ed up there. That's why they were successful. It was a one generation thing. Sony's "generation of humiliation" or whatever. The default trend over the past 20 years is people like sony better than microsoft. They're the nintendo to microsoft's sega. And I honestly think microsoft should learn from sega and go in that direction. Microsoft has a lot of solid IPs. Selling games is their strong suit. Selling hardware isn't. Just my opinion. 

Trump deporting citizens, and clarifying my stance on birthright citizenship

 So, Trump is doing it, he deported three US citizens without due process. Now, to be fair, these citizens were basically....young children whose parents were illegal immigrants, and I kind of recognize that in a moral sense, I can understand that being a special case, but I wanna be clear, this isn't good.

On paper, I do agree with the idea of changing birthright citizenship to exclude such people. I pointed this out when trump got elected again. HOWEVER, this requires a CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT. It's a nonstarter politically, but meh, I'm fine with expressing my preferences regardless of pragmatism here.

That doesnt mean, however, that I would endorse THIS though. Trump is just doing what he wants. He's not following laws, he's not listening to judges. He's just doing what he wants. And legally, that is NOT GOOD. If he starts doing this, he can escalate to just going after ALL citizens next. And then he can just deport anyone who he doesn't like. That's insane. I mean, that's the difference between doing things through LEGAL channels and doing what trump is doing. It's one thing to change policy and then to act according to the new law. Policy is subject to public approval, needs to pass congress. There are debates over it. And I get it, its hard to pass policy. It's gridlock in a modern environment. And when dealing with CONSTITUTIONAL issues, yeah you need supermajorities. So it's a nonstarter. But that's where you just virtue signal and then...dont do anything else. You dont start kidnapping citizens and deporting them without due process. Wtf? 

I keep comparing Trump to Hitler. I'm not doing it to be hyperbolic. Hitler didnt start with the concentration camps. He started with deporting people, often without due process like this. ICE is like the Gestapo in the modern environment. There are real historical parallels here. This is dangerous, and sets a dangerous precedent. 

Again, changing the law or having a constitutional amendment is one thing. Doing things through proper channels. Trump just does whatever he wants. That's not good. One is being a politician, the other, a dictator. Trump is acting like a dictator. 

Are the 2020s that bad for gaming? A more objective look

 So, previously I've analyzed what I believe the best years for gaming are in my lifetime. As we know, I generally believe that the tail end of gen 6 to about half way through gen 8 are the best in my lifetime, with gaming declining somewhat after 2016. The trend is most acute in the 2020s. However, let's face it, I havent played all of the games I would want to play of the 2020s, so I'm going to go through and look more objectively, not only considering games I've played, but also games I want to play. This should allow me to overcome any anti recency bias that comes from me not playing games that are currently expensive that I might touch in the future. I'll start with 2020 and go on from there. As I said, iconic or heavily played games are 2 points, other games are 1. Games I havent touched are probably gonna be half what they otherwise would be.

 2020

 Doom Eternal- 2

Cyberpunk 2077- 2

Call of Duty Warzone- 1

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War- 1

 Fall guys- 1

Valorant- 1

Genshin impact- 1

Resident evil 3 (haven't played)- 0.5

The Last of Us Part 2- (haven't played)- 0.5

Total- 10

 Eh, it's still not an amazing year, but it's better than the "5" I originally gave it. It had a few more releases I liked than I would have otherwise though. A lot of them are relatively forgettable though. Like valorant, fall guys, and genshin impact, yeah, i played them, yeah, they're okay, but meh, I could have easily just not included them. 

Still, at 10 points, it goes from D tier in my original review to B tier. It's okay.

2021

Halo Infinite- 2

Battlefield 2042- 2

Far Cry 6- 2

Call of Duty Vanguard- 1

 Deathloop- 1

Chivalry 2- 1

 Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl (haven't played)- 1

Super Mario 3D World & Bowser's Fury (haven't played)- 1

Ratchet and Clank: A Rift Apart (haven't played)- 0.5

 Total- 11.5 (12)

 This bumps it up from C tier to B tier too. Probably my favorite year of the decade so far if I had to be honest, with heavy hitters like Halo infinite, BF2042, and FC6 still being somewhat relevant for me. 

2022

 Call of Duty Modern Warfare II- 1

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands- 1

Callisto Protocol- 1

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet (haven't played)- 1

Sonic Frontiers (haven't played)- 0.5

Overwatch 2 (do I even count this?, it's just OW1 again)- 0

God of War PC (haven't played)- 0.5

 Total- 5

Yikes, this hasn't really improved much.  5 still puts it very much in D Tier as a bad year for me. It's not that there aren't games out there that are good, but there aren't any games out there that I would actually wanna play that are good. I'm just underwhelmed with this year in general. Even if 2020 and 2021 are kind of renovated to being okay years from being sub par ones, there's no beating around the bush that 2022 sucks for me.

2023

Starfield- 2

Call of Duty Modern Warfare III- 2 

Battlebit Remastered- 2

Resident Evil 4 Remake- 1

Dead Island 2- 1

Counter Strike 2 (do I even count this?)- 0

Super Mario Wonder (haven't played)- 1

Atomic Heart (haven't played)- 0.5 

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (haven't played)- 0.5

 Total- 10

Like 2020 and 2021, this year does get somewhat renovated. It's B Tier. It's okay. But even expanding the titles to my wish list, I'm kinda sorta meh on it. Honestly, of new games, I just find myself playing a handful of games and sticking to those and don't have a ton of interest in a lot of new titles.

2024

Delta Force- 2

Black Ops 6- 1

Balatro (haven't played)- 0.5

Helldivers (haven't played)- 0.5

Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2 (haven't played)- 0.5

 Total- 4.5

It has a few titles I've liked and a couple I would like to eventually play. But it's still D tier. 

I won't do 2025 fully as I haven't bought anything this year yet, but I will give half credit to possible games I'd like to play and buy at some point:

2025 (projected)

Doom: The Dark Ages- 1

Battlefield 6- 1

The Outer Worlds 2- 1

Splitgate 2- 0.5

GTA 6- 0.5

Mario Kart 9- 0.5

Call of Duty 2025- 0.5

Borderlands 4- 0.5

Sonic Rumble- 0.5

Gears of War: E Day- 0.5

 Mafia: The Old Country- 0.5

 Total- 7

So, keep in mind, this is speculative. A lot of the titles here might end up being good for me. it's a solid lineup and we might actually get up to like 14 here possibly. The potential is there. As it stands, C tier, but mainly because of its speculative nature. It could end up being the best year of the decade. Keep in mind all of these are half of what they'd be if I played them. I'm guessing 12-13 is realistic, so I'm gonna put this in B tier to be speculative.

What can we conclude?

 So the 2020s don't suck as hard as I originally rated them, but they still kinda suck. THe best years are average, the worst ones are among the worst ever. To update my tier list:

S tier- 2007, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2019

A tier- 1993, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2013, 2016

B tier- 1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2008, 2009, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2020, 2021, 2023, 2025 (speculative)

C tier- 1992, 1996, 2002, 2003, 2018

D tier- 1992, 1995, 2022, 2024

So yeah, 2020s are kinda mid. Better than I originally would have said, but still kinda underwhelming. We're well past the peak of gaming and most years that the 2020s are comparable too are kind of like, the most okay years of gaming ever. If they don't just bomb entirely. We'll see what the future brings, but yeah. That's where we're at.

Discussing Pope Francis's death

 So....Pope Francis has unfortunately died today. It's kind of surprising given he was sick recently but seemed to be recovering, but then he had a stroke and heart failure apparently so yeah, he's dead. 

Honestly, can we just be honest for a second? I know I'm not the guy to do this, being someone who is relatively "anti Christian" politically, but Pope Francis was one of the best. He was super progressive for a catholic and was so based he even repeatedly called for a UBI. He was relatively liberal on issues like LBGTQ+, and while he still was limited by his religion and institutions at times, he was basically the best we were gonna get out of the catholic church. And the world is gonna miss him. Let's send him out the proper way here (ignore video, focus on the song, although the video is a good one).

Coming the day after easter, and the day after he met JD Vance there's been some controversy surrounding this. Vance met with him yesterday, after it appeared that francis wouldnt meet him on saturday, and clearly, Francis wasn't happy with him, or his policies on immigration. And to be blunt, yeah, he deserved criticism given how what the US is doing is reminiscient of Nazi Germany. 

Some are joking that the pope "meeting the anti christ" right before his death was a bad omen and that vance killed him in a spiritual way, but eh, as someone who has my own spirituality and has researched into "how it goes" when you transition out of this world (through death), eh, I have my own theories.

Generally speaking, we're all gonna die some day. For many of us, our deaths are planned before hand. Our higher selves (basically us but in spirit form) work with our guides on the other side, and we generally have a planned point of exit. This isn't to say that people can't experience premature death from, say, murder, suicide, accidents, etc., but generally, I'm imagining that Francis's point of exit was around now. I mean, the guy's 88, after all. However, that's not to say there can't be flexibility around the exact date and method of the departure. Francis was in failing health just a couple weeks/months ago, and it looked like he was gonna die any minute, but then he recovered. He was able to go on and serve through easter, the holiest of holidays in the Christian religion. He also got to lecture Vance shortly before his death. I think that rather than "Vance killing him" spiritually, what actually happened was he was probably supposed to go from pneumonia but he was given an extension through easter, and an opportunity to criticize vance, who himself is a catholic of a more conservative variety (a lot of tradcaths don't like francis much). And with those goals being achieved, today was the day that it was time for him to go.

So no, the idea that Vance killed the Pope is kinda funny in a "he screws couches" kind of way, but just like he doesnt actually screw couches, nah, I suspect Francis's time was just...now, and if anything he was given extensions as he still had things to do. And with those things being concluded, now he can move on in peace. 

So yeah. That's my own take as a spiritual person these days who isn't Christian. 

A brief reaction to Lazerpig's long ### video on "cultural marxism"

 We have another one! Another person claiming the term cultural Marxism is anti semitic and that it doesn't actually exist and if you do you're on some nazi/alt right rabbit hole. This time, it's lazerpig. I normally respect lazerpig. I mean, hes normally just doing nerd crap with tanks but lately he's done more political advocacy, especially in support of nato/ukraine and against russia, which i respect, but now he's wading into culture wars. And it's a little more...cringe. 

Look, I've defended my actual views on this topic before. And I stand by that article. Social justice ideology is basically conflict theory, which is basically the sociological variation of marxism, applied to cultural issues. Rather than doing class analysis, they do critical analysis and think that the world is stacked against people of certain races/genders/sexualities, and that this needs to change. They're not even entirely wrong, which is where I kinda shift left. Sociologically, critical theory is a completely fair way of looking at the world, I just hate this weirdo class of political zealot who bases their ENTIRE WORLDVIEW around this specific kind of analysis, and makes it their entire personality. Such people are self righteous, annoying, and alienating. There's more to life than this stuff, and as a "privileged" person, I don't want to be lectured about these weird suffering olympics of who has it worse and these weird hierarchies of who is the most persecuted minority. I really don't. There's more to life like this. Like, if life is the FM band of radio, imagine ONLY listening to 98.5 ALL THE TIME, even though there are plenty of options from 88 to 108, some good, some bad, etc. That's SJWs to me. They are just pathologically obsessed with this one wavelength through which to view political issues, and they NEVER SHUT UP ABOUT IT. 

Even worse, when other people on different wavelengths point out how annoyingly obsessed they are, they gaslight people, and act like "no we're not, you're just imagining things." They are so indoctrinated into their specific worldview that to them, it is like a fish living in water. They know no better. They know no different. It's all they know. To us living on the outside, it's like "yeah, you're literally like a goldfish living in a bowl", but they're just like "no you're not, you're imagining things", while projecting onto other people that they're falling down some alr right rabbit hole. 

And that's another thing they do. In this sense, they remind me a lot of Christianity, and how if you aren't totally tuned into THEIR wavelength, that you're falling down the path to sin and being led astray by satan. Same energy. I mean, if you read my article and then watched his video, virtually everything i say about myself is what they view the alt right rabbit hole as being, like you start identifying as "center" or "center left" or "libertarian", which I do on cultural issues, and then the next thing you know, you're seig heiling. 

Except...I've been criticizing the SJW left for 10 years (longer if you count me being a literal conservative), and my views have not changed much since I started this blog. Sure, I've evolved in small ways, spent time digging into the weeds on certain things and fine tuning my ideas, but my core ideology is largely the same as it always was. I have not changed. I'm just what the left was pre wokeism. I never was into wokeism. I never liked it. If anything, my previous conservative affilitation is why. Because these guys fit the nails on a chalkboard screeching militant people stereotype i had of liberals and leftists so perfectly, that I cant help but cringe. I did not come over to the left to suffer these ninnies. I came over to actually oppose the right in MEANINGFUL ways. And that's the thing. You can be anti SJW and still hate the right. My entire ideology was designed from the ground up to counter the right and their christian nationalist BS. And while it's admittedly not as strong on the whole "anti racist" angle, quite frankly it's because I give lower priority to those issues. For me, most of the changes society needed to make were made in previous years and decades, and honestly, all we really need to do is preserve the pre trump status quo, go back where ground was lost, and probably do a little more on trans stuff. Beyond that, we're to the point of diminishing marginal utility, where large changes cause little change and the net trade off causes more harm then good. Id rather focus on solving the core issues directly and in a colorblind way, which given the systemic barriers that underprivileged people face, should help them in net anyway. 

I admit, in the age of trump and literal fascism, a more "woke" or "anti fascist" approach is needed. For example, on immigration, we need to stop the deportation of legal immigrants and crap like that, because what trump is doing is so beyond the pale that it is a blatant violation of constitutional rights and risks expanding to citizens. It really is as the left says of the nazis, first they came for the X but because i wasnt X i didnt speak out, and then they came for me and no one else was left. it's like being a herd of water buffalo on the african savanna. Lions circle us, looking for a weak member of the herd to attack, so the herd has to work together and say F no, you aint taking them, because it's the same thing. First they'll go for the weak but then as the herd thins out, then YOU are in danger too. When you deal with fascists, you gotta defend those who cannot defend themselves, because if you dont, any inch you give the fascists will cause them to take a mile. 

I already explained my theory of immigration deportations recently. I came up with a 1-10 scale, and basically, I'm at like "2/10 or less, yeah, no issues with deportation, 3/10, I'm iffy, 4/10+, no, hell no."

We're at like an 8 on that scale. If we hit 10, America is cooked. So we gotta stop this now to protect ALL of our freedoms. And that's not even taking into consideration CECOT. No one should be deported to an el salvadorian maximum security prison that's basically a modern concentration camp. The very idea is FRICKING INSANE. Like that's hitler crap. And that's why I'm coming down hard on Trump. Again, this is nazi stuff, and we need to take strong stands early because otherwise we're gonna have creeping normality to the point where WE ARE ALL UNDER THREAT OF DEPORTATION TO WEIRDO FASCIST CONCENTRATION CAMPS. Ya know? We had this happen before in nazi germany. This is repeating history, and we need to LEARN from that history, FAST, so that we dont repeat it. We failed the first test by electing the guy the second time. I can forgive the first time, but the second? Yeah, you failed the germany 1932 test if you didn't vote for harris, sorry, you did. I dont normally voter shame, but this is like 5 alarm fire level stuff here. But now our goal is to ensure that he doesnt dissolve our democratic government and doesnt violate our constitutional rights. And that's the thing. I'm anti woke, but I'm still saying this stuff. Because I'm on the left. Not the right. You can think that what the social justice people who literally fetishize identity politics and make them their entire personality and theory of everything are weirdo fringe extremists, and they are. if youre not tuned into their frequency, youre gonna think they're shrill, annoying, and weird. However, that doesnt mean that when our mutual housing complex is burning down that we don't both grab a pail of water and try to put out the fire. Ya know? You still gotta work with them against the bigger enemy, which is literal fascism. 

And that's where I guess I'll leave it. I just got irritated by lazerpig going on acting like if you think like me you're half way down some alt right rabbit hole. I dont deny that the rabbit hole exists and that others fall into it, but yeah, I haven't. And I'm still on the "right side" of things. So these people need to chill out and understand there's more to life than their own worldview and theory of everything. People are gonna think differently, and not everyone is gonna like your specific ideology or interpretation of left wing politics. And that's okay. If anything, it's healthy. As long as you dont actually go alt right, it's fine.

Why leftists hate liberals as much as conservatives

 So, I had a liberal ask this today, and as someone who is basically the enlightened centrist between liberals and leftists, I figured I'd explain it.

 It really comes down to ideological worldview. Leftism was an ideology created out of hatred of capitalism. It believes that capitalism is so fundamentally evil that we can only abolish it. Now, I don't go that far, and I dunk on leftists a lot, but as someone with a worldview to the left of the liberals, let me explain to you how liberalism looks for me.

 Conservatives embrace capitalism full stop. And if I had to summarize their worldview, it's giving the wealthy people all of the property in society so they can "create jobs" for poor people to do. So not only are poor people functionally forced to work for rich people, but we act like we're doing them a favor. Like they should want to spend all of their time doing work for the wealthy and should be grateful for the very "opportunity" to do so.

 Liberals....often only want a softer version of this. At best, a lot of liberals will support stuff like labor regulations, unions, conditional safety nets, etc to soften the blow, but at the same time, people are still functionally forced to work for rich people, it's just that they take the edge off the system. 

Of course, this is my framing. As I said, not really a leftist. I dont support the abolition of capitalism, but I am critical of wage slavery, and approach criticizing capitalism with the same fervor of leftists sometimes. I just have different solutions. For the leftists, they believe that capitalist relations are fundamentally wrong, and it doesn't matter how you dress it up, lipstick on a pig is still a pig. It is what it is. For me, I'm not opposed to capitalism in principle, I just don't believe people should be forced to work. I have a left libertarian approach that's compatible with capitalism that I call "social libertarianism", to differ from anticapitalist left libertarians. And yeah, in a lot of ways, liberalism is just...the same thing as conservatism on a purely ideological level. It's just less extreme, and it takes the hard edges off of it sometimes. But it doesn't go far enough. Not for me, and not for leftists. That's one thing I kinda agree with leftists on, and why I can explain the issue in the way that I do.

Liberals often seem dumbfounded by this. They think being the lesser evil makes it where we should flock to them. However, over the decades since FDR and the new deal coalition, they've shifted further and further right. In the modern era, they're worthless. They're to the right of some new deal conservatives like eisenhower and nixon on the economy. I mean, Nixon actually toyed with a UBI back in the 1970s. He also did things like the EPA. From the 90s on, the democrats run to the right and try to be conservative lites. And they reject solutions to improve capitalism, preferring to sit on their laurels of past accomplishments, and even help dismantle them when the conservatives demand it. 

I mean, why wouldn't anyone on the left, not even a "leftist", but even a social democrat, or a social libertarian like myself, not have absolute disdain for the democratic party? For all the talk about how bernie is a socialist, ideologically, he's just a new deal democrat or maybe just slightly left. And he's an old school jobist, which, for me, disqualifies him from perfectly representing me, but again, he actually wants to make the system work again. The "liberals" of the modern age treat him as a radical. They act as if "no one who works 40 hours a week should be in poverty" is a radical statement. It's not. It's the bare minimum of our social contract. Now, I'd go further and say "no one should be in poverty", hence the UBI comments, but yeah. Expecting people to work for a living and then expecting them to be able to live comfortably isn't a radical statement, it's literally how it's supposed to work. The fact that modern liberals have gotten so soft and so weak and so feckless is why we're at the gates of fascism. If people aren't happy, no one is happy. And I would say what brought us to this point is a failure of our system to actually address peoples' needs in more healthy ways. 

That's the thing. A lot of people hate the democrats, and the modern liberals, because they dont do anything, they don't try to do anything. And they thought trump would help their situation given how useless the left has become. So yeah, that's why people hate liberals. They need to be the ones proposing bold ideas and visions to improve society, and when they don't do that, what we get is what we get. The left starts saying it doesnt matter who is in charge because they're screwed either way, and assuming we dont go full fascist, they're not wrong. Of course, we are going full fascist so at this point, we kinda gotta rally behind the liberals and hope to get them in office again just to get relative stability and hope they do something the next time they're in power, but still, a lot of leftists are just so ideologically left that they see fascism as just another extension of capitalism and all of its evilness so many of them don't care. 

Really...it's the hitler situation. Germany was so screwed in the 1930s they voted for hitler just hoping it would make things better, given the failures of the left at the time. Instead, they lost democracy and got authoritarianism. We may be going down the same road now. And I really hope the liberals learn their lesson this time. Trump NEVER should have gotten elected again. The fact that he did is a sign of a sick society. If the left was strong, and had public trust, this never would've happened. Leftists (well, more of them) would've been motivated to support the democrats, and moderates wouldn't have been so desperate to vote for Trump. Really, I know people think it's in bad taste to blame the left for our modern predicament, but in my view, it was their job to stop this outcome from happening. The fact that we're here is a testament to how badly the democratic party has missed the moment. And it wasn't just one cycle. 2016, 2020, and 2024 were all connected. The same fundamental election, but with slightly different margins in 2020 allowing for a narrow win. 

If we want to actually win future elections, IF we have future elections, the left needs make sure this never happens again. It can only do that by running progressive candidates that are different enough from the right that they bring people in. I'm not expecting perfection here, and neither should socialists. I think a Bernie or an AOC is "good enough" for this. If anyone still refuses such a stark difference, well, you can't win everyone, but you can win enough. Some  segment of leftists are so far left they'll never be happy. Me, I'll throw shade at jobist progressives at times, but I'd still vote for them. My only major policy difference is UBI vs JG. But yeah.

I don't get people who are obsessed with trans issues (who aren't trans)

 So...A few days ago I posted on a subreddit in response to a question about trans women in sports asking why people care so much, and how the issue is irrelevant, stupid, and there are so many more things to argue about. I mean, remember that whole article I had last year about palestine and how low priority it is for me? Trans women in sports is even lower than that.

And yet, the right seems pathologically obsessed with it. They act as if it's a huge deal and there's trans people around any corner looking to screw biological women out of trophies or something. In reality, there's only like 10 trans athletes out there out of like 500k athletes. It's a ridiculously small fraction, and the issue doesn't really register for me as a concern.

If one wants my actual views, I'll say this. I'm ambivalent on it. On the one hand, I'm for inclusivity when it makes sense. On the others, if there's a demonstrable biological advantage for trans people, yeah, maybe don't let them compete. Although in all honesty, the issue is complicated scientifically. Testosterone does make trans women stronger in theory, and it does also change their bone structure before transitioning, which makes them larger. But at the same time, transitioning and losing that testosterone makes them weaker, which makes them slower as well. So yeah, it's complicated. Any time I delve into the issue, it seems like a hot mess. So I kinda just remain somewhat ignorant on the science while encouraging experts to formulate their own opinions, and to trust them. 

Either way, I don't really care. Because i aint trans, and most people aren't trans. Trans people are only like 0.6% of the population, and this hardly seems to be the issue of our time. I understand that the trans sports issue is inherently unpopular, as discussed recently with TYT's controversies, with supporters only being like 20% of the population, but at the same time, of all issues out there, trans issues are at the bottom, and if anyone is more motivated, it's probably the left due to all of the social justice stuff. Normies just don't care. And I don't blame them. If the issue doesn't affect me, why should I really be motivated either way?

Of course, some people get WAY too...hyper and militant over it. And I get weirdos who are like I HAVE A DAUGHTER. Well, congrats on reproducing, but i dont care. What is it with being a parent that makes people just become different people and even become conservative? I see it a lot in parents. it changes their brain structure where they go full "mama bear" and feel the need to restrict everyone's freedoms to protect their precious little angel, and quite frankly, being CF, that stuff just doesn't connect with me. Because often it's irrational. And just because you have a kid doesnt mean you have the right to restrict other peoples' freedom to "protect" them. Most conservative nonsense starts with "omg think of the children" and i really don't go for that. At all. It's just emotionally manipulative. And they act like it's an empathy like i dont understand when, yeah...i do, I probably have a better grasp of the issue than most people, which is why i can honestly say it's not a big deal. Your precious little angel isn't gonna be boxing trans michelle (mike) tyson any time soon. Okay. Chill out. Focus on real issues that matter. Like your daughter's future economic prospects in this hellscape. Her getting her abortion rights taken away. Hell, living in a fascist state. Because trump is trying to turn us into one. These issues all matter more than some stupid sports thing. Sorry, not sorry. 

Honestly, just let trans people live their life. It's that simple. If there's valid reason to restrict trans people in sports, that's fine. Restrict them. But...only if there's a valid reason like performing well out of the normal range for the gender they wanna play as. Otherwise, just let people be people. I don't understand why this is so controversial. 

Like, I get why most people oppose it, you kinda need to be educated on the issue to understand why trans people in sports isn't that big of a deal, and doing actual research is something americans seem woefully unprepared for, but yeah. I mean, i guess if it's an issue that does genuinely lose us elections, yeah, moderate on it. But at the same time, we should advocate for informing people and changing the narrative. Ya know? Cede ground where you have to, but don't just do it willy nilly, ya know?

Either way, it's a weird thing for any "normie" to be hung up on. Trans people, i get, it's their life and their rights. SJW types, i kinda get it given the whole solidarity culture. On the flip side, i get the religious nuts opposing it because religious nuts are authoritarian and believe their own special morality applies to everyone. But yeah, other than those fully entrenched in culture war BS, why do people care so much? Jesus, just life your life and focus on your own problems. It's not that hard. 

Joe Biden's speech reminds me why he didn't win the presidency

 Ya know, we got a nazi in the white house, and a lot of times, we're like "gee, how did we get here? were the democrats really that bad where the people legitimately voted for this psychopath over the admittedly crappy, bland, and mediocre option?" And then a democrat opens their mouth and it's like "oh yeah, this is why the country hates them." 

So...Biden gave a speech tonight. And it was cringe. And it reminds me....why I don't like Joe Biden. The topic was social security and defending it. And....the opening was weird, and kinda spoke of this weird out of touch propagandistic rhetoric I've come to associate with the modern democratic party. The guy opening for him started going on about the "dignity of work" and how Biden created so many jobs and how no one defends social security more than him (uh....FDR? he created it). And...yeah. It just came off as weird. Like, yeah, the dems keep touting his economic record like he's the best president we ever had on economics, and he's not. He's the least crappy one since the new deal era, but that's not saying much. Sure, he had a strong conventional economy. However, he did nothing to earn it. In 2021, the economy recovered from covid closures, quickly got "overheated" as they call it, and inflation happened. The inflation caused havoc, which Biden was blamed for, also unfairly. At the same time, Biden seemed to just kinda blow off inflation. People wanted more money, they wanted higher living standards, and Biden just never delivered. he failed on that. Biden's presidency shows that you can have a strong conventional economy but if people aren't feeling good about it, that people aren't gonna vote for you. This guy is like Jimmy Carter 2.0. He really is. presided over inflation, acts like he had the best economy ever, didn't actually have an economy people were happy with. The dems don't get it. They REALLY don't get it. And it's getting scary now. For all the blame being thrown at voters and the whole "the party can't fail it can only be failed" mentality at the democrats, ultimately, the democrats are to blame for their own mess. The voters werent happy with them. I wasn't even that happy with him. I just understood the alternative was fricking mental. But sometimes when you feel like things are just that hopeless, you vote for the change agent, even if he's destructive. Which is how we got here. 

But yeah. When I hear Biden talk, I can't help but think "old timey" joe. Somewhere, his mind still thinks it's 1955 or something. He talks about how jobs have dignity because that's what his old man said. He talks about how seniors work all of their life and when they get old and cant work any more, they should have an income they rely on, and yes, they should. But keep in mind, that's kinda the bare minimum. These kinds of democrats think work is part of the social contract. Like, you spend all your life working and THEN when you're old and beat up from a lifetime of working, THEN you get a check. I told you guys the other day that yeah, my parents are on social security at this point. They're old. My dad worked all of his life, got ditched by his industry as he got older, he developed back issues from working so ahrd and couldnt do it any more. He ended up going into lighter, but still demanding work, and eventually he retired.

And you know what? He can't even fully enjoy life because of the injuries he sustained from his job. He literally has back issues from his job. He hated that job. But it paid money we needed to survive. And yeah, he suffered the consequences for it. Joe Biden loves to talk about how work has dignity, but I never encounter people who talk like this IRL. Most people I know hate their jobs. or if they like them, they still hate their bosses, their leadership structures, etc. Either way they dont talk about work having dignity. Even if some of them think they'd be bored if they didn't work (and yes, I know people who say that), many of them aren't really happy working. And no one uses this weird "dignity of work" rhetoric. The left needs to stop talking like this. It's the most out of touch propagandistic nonsense they ever heard. It reminds me of the family guy and the amish going on about the joy of doing chores. No one in the real world thinks that, it's only these weird belief systems that brainwash people into that stuff. 

 Like, really, Biden and the dems are high on their own supply. They built up this weird north korea-esque belief system around themselves and how great they are and don't understand that MOST NORMIES DO NOT AGREE. Even if people tolerate dems, it's mostly to avoid the guy who we know to be a FRICKING NUTCASE. We are literally voting for this guy to avoid an open fascist in the white house at this point. And we are FAILING. WE FAILED. And watching the establishment dems flail around is one of the most frustrating things ever. How do you F up so badly that you open your mouth and our first thought it "gee, no wonder the other guy won"? Seriously. That's where we're at. 

Btw, what do i expect from them? Look at bernie and AOC on their stopping oligarchy tour. bernie is filling stadiums in as far away from an election year as we get. And AOC is clearly being groomed as a successor. Bernie is all might, AOC is midorya. And I have disagreements with AOC, just as i have disagreements with bernie. Including on "the dignity of work". I've expressed them on this blog before. And I think AOC still has a little of that jobist delusion. But at least she fights to make workers' lives better and does it in a convincing way.

I mean, to be fair, Biden did call out the stuff trump was doing pretty good, but other than that, his speech was as meh as it came. It wasn't as rambly as it could've been. He didn't have a major malfunction like he did on the campaign trail. But still, like, these guys clearly live in their own little world detached from the rest of us, and have weird beliefs most people dont in the real world. And it's kinda scary. Because these guys are the opposition. They WERE the opposition. And yeah, seeing them talk again really reminds me of how we got here. 

 I will post the maps again. Never forget.

Actual results:

My Biden prediction as of Biden dropping out:
 

What some polling suggests would've happened if Biden stayed in:

The apocalyptic 400+ electoral vote map:

 Never forget. I'm just sharing the maps again because we gotta remind ourselves how badly we shot ourselves in the foot with this guy.

Let's talk about the insanity of trump's deportations

 So...this is a mental exercise I thought of on the subject of trump's deportations. Like, I'm not a "no human is illegal" liberal. I'm not opposed to all deportations. I largely approved of Biden's shift to the center on immigration. But let's think, on a scale of 1-10, how insane trump's deportations are. Let's say 0/1 are basically "no, that's totally sane and justified", 5 is basically "well it's controversial but I can see an argument for it" and 10 is WTF?! No! That's insane! let's imagine scenarios on a scale from reasonable to not reasonable.

So...deporting someone who recently got caught coming over the border illegally and traffics drugs/people....0. This is as sane as it gets.

Deporting an illegal immigrant who robbed a bank or something. Once again. 0. 

Deporting an illegal who came over the border looking for a better life. Eh...1-2. Like, not as clear cut as just deporting deporting a criminal, but yeah, still pretty justifiable. 

Deporting an illegal immigrant who has been in the country for say, 5+ years, has a family here, and deporting people would split up the family. Like a 4, I'd say. Like this is where it starts getting a little hairy. Sure, the idea that they shouldnt be here is valid, but there's real humanitarian reasons why you shouldnt deport them.

Deporting a dreamer. 5. I mean, they're basically American culturally, they dont know a life outside of America. Sure, technically illegal but pretty much like "yeah let them stay."

Deporting a student who organized protests at columbia university that was legitimately anti semitic and pro Hamas, and they did illegal acts like occupy buildings. 3. I mean, they're legal. But...if you misuse your rights while you're here. I can see an argument here.

 Deporting a student who organized protests that were lawful. 6. I mean, while you can technically kick out any student you want, I'd probably say let their free speech stand. As long as they were lawful with it, it's like...let them stay and do what they want.

Deporting legal residents who commit serious crimes. 3. I mean, you can probably argue in favor of it. 

 Deporting legal residents who did nothing wrong. 8. No. Wtf. And bring maryland guy back. 

Deporting legal residents on their way to being sworn in as a citizen. 9. No. Wtf. That's mental. (btw, this happened today I think). 

 Deporting citizens who commit crimes. 10. No. Should be totally off the table.

 Deporting citizens who don't commit crimes. No. Also off the table. 

 We're currently at threshold 8-9 here. Meanwhile I'm kinda tapping out around, say 4, and saying at that point, uh, maybe we shouldnt do this. I'm not a "no human is illegal, let them all come in" type. I'm not a 0. And yeah if you fall into 2 and lower, yeah, I probably actively support such deportations. If you're at 3, that's where I get 50/50, and at 4 and above I'm kinda leaning toward no. When you're at 6, I'm HARD no.  And when you're at like 8+, that's...really REALLY concerning. That's mental. This guy is a fascist. We're literally at 8-9 and this guy is talking about a 10. 

Like, even if I were conservative still, like as right wing on deportations as I was as a right winger, I'd be tapping out at 6-7 on this scale. And that's when I was actively "deport all the illegals" like when I was a teenager. Growing up a bit, you got me down to like a 4. 0-2 is fully permissible, 3 is kinda controversial but i'd probably not make a huge stink if it stopped there. 4+ is like no for me.

To me, that's what a reasonable immigration policy is. 

And btw, no one should be deported to el salvador unless they're from there and they're being repatriated to their country of origin. If you wanna send literal MS13 people from el salvador back there where they go to CECOT as part of their justice system, fine, but no one else. What trump is doing is nazi stuff. This IS a concentration camp. An he was talking about building more to send "homegrowns" there (so basically he's toying with 10 on that scale at this point). This is mental. This is not okay. This is nazi crap. Trump is a nazi. This is not exaggerating. We are at a 10/10, five alarm fire here and EVERYONE should be concerned. If this blog ever gets nuked overnight, you know why at this point.

For the love of god, gamers, stop licking boot

 So, the amount of apologia I see toward nintendo, nvidia, etc. is just ridiculous sometimes. It's like some gamers will just defend any industry practice and call it justified. Now, I'm not saying all criticism of the industry is valid either, for example, I've been critical of halo infinite critics for complaining about paid cosmetics when the game and all of its actual content in terms of game play is free. Sometimes gamers are, shall we say, "entitled" and demand too much. But most of the time, I still stand by my stance that I largely hate that word, and think that consumers have a right to vote with their wallet and loudly complain.

The problem is, there's A TON of gaslighting on forums about how we should be willing to pay more for graphics cards, nintendo switch, video games, etc. And most of it is nonsense.  

Look, "inflation" is not an excuse for the recent price increases. Inflation just refers to a general sense that things slowly get more expensive over time. It doesnt even affect all goods, it's just an average. Tech, for example, tends to often go in the opposite direction, where over time, you get more processing power and better technology relatively cheap. The first TVs in the 1950s cost thousands of dollars, and dropped to being sub $100 for color 720p today. DVD players used to cost hundreds, now you can get one for, again, less than $100. Gaming consoles at launch start out kinda expensive but drop over time. If you go back to the 1980s and what they charged for some consoles, you can see that the prices were insane and that there's a reason most of these consoles failed as they cost north of $1k in today;s money. PC and tech stuff in the 80s and 90s was expensive, but then got cheaper in the 2000s and 2010s, and that was largely progress. Hell, I got into PC gaming in the first place because, as we saw, around gen 7, console prices went UP significantly, while the cost of PCs went down. Corporations got more greedy but PC hardware got cheaper. That caused me to shift from console gaming to PC gaming mid 7th gen. Games also got cheaper as access to platforms like steam drove the cost of digital games down. It was good for the consumer, and good for gaming as a whole IMO. 

But in the 2020s, something is happening, and that thing is called "inflation". Now, we know this modern inflationary wave isn't really like most inflation in the past. Most inflation in the past was driven by wages or by supply chain issues. But in the 2020s, we're seeing just unfettered corporate greed as businesses are charging more simply because they think they can get away with it. And for the most part, consumers just enable this. Sometimes there's no choice, but other times, yeah there IS a choice, and in tech and gaming, there IS a choice. 

The fact is, Nvidia is getting greedy. Before 2020 even they started raising prices. They did this in 2018 with their RTX 2000 series. Which is why i was put off from ray tracing and DLSS. I don't care how good these technologies are, if they price me out of the market, that's no bueno. And since then, your typical "60" card has been north of $300 and even $400. The "cheaper" model is now $300. Those cards used to be the bread and butter of mainstream gamers. And now they're becoming increasingly low end and we talk about the $200-400 market as the "budget" market now. The "budget" market used to be sub $200, with cards like the "50" series or even less. There used to be a real ultra budget market, but sadly those cards died off from lack of demand. I dont think anyone misses cards like the GT 210 or the 8400 GS or crap like that, those were ewaste. But honestly? The "real" market started around $100ish with 50 series cards, and even then I considered those "lower midrange" for a while. But yeah, this company, nvidia, they control 90% of the market and have IPs surrounding these new technologies reminiscient of physX and they're choking the market out. And that's the real reason prices went up. Yes, crypto enabled this, and AI is enabling this, but seriously, these companies are getting greedy, their market cap is insane, nvidia went from a relatively small company to this massive megacorporation in recent years because of this...and why do you think it is? Because they charge more and dont pass along savings to the customer. The GPU market has been starved for almost a decade now. The only meaningful improvement that we got was in 2022-2023 at the new "low end" (formerly known as "midrange"), when crypto fell out of style and we could finally afford GPUs again, and even then, AMD was the only one who actually lowered prices because their strategy of matching nvidia didn't sell due to not having the fancy tech nvidia had. So they could sell 6600s for $200 and 6650 XTs for $250.

Btw, in complaining about 5000 series prices, I recently got "well ackshullyed" by some idiot pointing out that originally the 6650 XT was a $400 card and...yeah...and it didn't sell at that price, and they lowered it to around $230ish. And the 7600 was around $250. That's progress. That's good. Full price for $400 never should've been a thing.  I also get told I spent too much on my CPU, which is a 12900k, and I understand that that's typically a very expensive CPU, microcenter had a killer deal on it where I functionally got it for $200, which is what your typical lower end i5 costs these days. And it also performs closer to an i5, or as they call them now, "ultra 5". Seriously, the 245k matches the 12900k in performance, and that normally costs $300. But I got it for $200.

Btw, speaking of which, if you really wanna see what stuff should cost, look at the CPU market. The CPU market and the GPU market used to cost the same. Your best midrange builds used to be $200 for a CPU like an i5 2500k and $200 for a GPU like a GTX 660. Now, inflation has happened, and has influenced both markets. i7s used to cost $300-350, now they cost $400. i5s kinda bufurcated from the lower end ones costing like $170-250 to the high end K model being $300. The i3s still cost $100ish. And that's what they should. The market is still accessible. if you wanna buy a i3 12100 for $100, you can even get a i5 12400 for slightly more, like $110 these days. The lower end i5s are $150ish, so you can get a 12600k or 13400 pretty affordable. 12700ks are $200ish. 13600ks and 14600ks are $230ish. If anything, CPUs have been cheap AF, and while yes, we now have this super high end "X3D" bracket on the AMD side with unrivaled performance, both companies are offering relatively decent options from $100ish all the way up to $500-700 on the premium end.

That's what the GPU market should look like. I mean, we should be seeing a 5050 for like $100-150. A 5050 ti for $150-200. 5060s should cost $200-300, including the Ti model. Like maybe at most $350 for a Ti if you wanna push it. 70 cards should cost $400-500. 80 cards around $600-700. 90 cards maybe up to $1k tops. Instead, we're charging $300-430 for a 60 card, which as people are pointing out, is actually what the 50 series should be. The real 60 cards are the 70 cards and they're charging like  $500-800. 80 cards now cost $1k+. And the 5090 currently goes for something like $3k with all the scalping. Even at MSRP it's what, $2k? That's INSANE. Look at the CPU market, where we see legitimate inflation, while still maintaining accessibility, vs the GPU market where prices are just so unreasonably high there's no way you can reasonably justify this. but then people continue to justify it and say "but but inflation." They even appeal to what stuff cost in the 80s and 90s when the stuff was unaffordable to most. Not gonna lie, I didn;t even own a computer until 1999. I couldnt afford it. It was $600 for literally the cheapest POS at best buy and it was woefully obsolete even like 2 years later. Again, PC gaming wasnt affordable to me until the late 2000s when console gaming got more expensive and PC gaming got cheaper. And now that trend of cheap PC parts is disappearing and I'm being priced out of the market.

The same applies to Nintendo and their shenanigans. $450 for the switch is the most expensive console in my lifetime. Even with "inflation", most consoles were sub $400. Games were expensive back in the 90s, sure, but again, that was a growing pain of the tech. Tech like this when it's new is very expensive and only appeals to the upper classes which can afford it. Even my above average middle class home only got me a few games a year and most at DEEP discounts. We rarely paid MSRP. 

And again, MSRP is one thing, but things used to get cheaper FAST. It used to be a game that released for $60 during the year, like say, a game released in april now? I'd get it for $20-40 by Christmas. If I got a 2-3 year old game, it would be like $15 in a bargain bin or my local equivalent of gamestop from when I was a kid. I almost never paid full price for anything. 

But here's nintendo pulling an nvidia. And let's face it, that's what they're doing. They're doing the business strategy of the day if just raising prices to see if they can get away with it, and the only thing we can do is say no and refuse to pay those prices. Which sucks, we're being priced out of the market, but what are we supposed to do, live beyond our means? I know theres a tendency to do that as consumerism has led to tons of debt in the past few decades where the middle class uses credit to compensate for declining living standards, but yeah, that's not healthy for the people involved or for society. Youre selling yourself into servitude just to play some crappy games. I love games, but say no to funding them with debt. But yeah, that's where we're heading. And we shouldnt want things to be like the 1990s again, when a lot of fledgling technologies were expensive and we didnt know what business models worked yet. When I was a kid, video games were luxuries only middle class people and above could afford. Nowadays, they're relatively cheap and accessible. Even literal working poor people can often get a last gen console and like games out of a bargain bin once in a while. Most of the poorest people I know often do that if they're gamers. They'll buy PS3s, or now, PS4s, and play f2p games or $10 games they get on sale. Again, it's good that that's available. But when nintendo is still charging $300 for an 8 year old about to be LAST GEN console, and $60 for games, that's BAD. That means that stuff will never become affordable. And once its out of production, it'll get worse. Old pokemon games on the game boys and DS sell for insane prices these days because they're literally out of production. It's crazy. But this is what nintendo wants. They're a crappy, greedy company these days, and they wanna take you for every cent they got. They are charging $450 for the switch 2 and $80 for games simply because they CAN. Everything about the switch 2, from the price, to the fact that "physical" games are now keycards attached to digital downloads, to paid online, and paid game chat, just SCREAMS anti consumer to me. It's anti consumer. Don't buy it. And stop defending this crap with the "but inflation" and "well ackshully if you account for what stuff cost in 1997" nonsense. As I pointed out, my own living standards havent kept up with inflation. It's a real problem. A huge part of the reason why people are so angry and there's so much populism is because we can tell our living standards have been in decline for a while. And these price hikes make it WORSE. I know not everyone is in my specific situation, but it's not exactly uncommon. Middle class people have seen their living standards hollowed out over the past 50 years or so, and we notice. Stop defending this stuff.

Heck, stop being market fundamentalists in general. I know that in gaming forums they're not supposed to be political, but this IS a political topic. And a lot of gamers just have this right wing "this is what the system is, adapt to it" mentality. No. Systems are created by human beings, they should adapt to US. And we have power to actually make them do so, if we actually advocate for our own interests and don't just start gaslighting people and defending this. Let's not act like these are impersonal forces beyond everyone's console. They are very personal forces of rational actors, and the other side often knows how to advance their interests, while consumers/workers are fricking stupid and defend getting screwed every time. In the working environment, we see it when we talk about how hard we work and how little money we get while gaslighting anyone who gets too "uppity" and demands better. And we see it in the consumer environment as people just continue to buy insanely priced nvidia cards and nintendo consoles while acting like those who don't are somehow irrational or entitled. No, they are now. 99% of the time, I hate the word entitled. Always remember that. Always advocate for your own interests. I aint saying some people are so kneejerk corporation they hate on even decent deals. Like, again, look no further than halo infinite and how people were complaining over a free game with paid cosmetics. People can overcorrect, but generally, they tend to just lick boot. And they should stop doing that. 

Discussing Trump's "concentration camp"

 So...yeah. I've seen a lot of Trumpers be in denial about this, and acting like "oh yeah, if Trump is hitler, where are the concentration camps?" Well, it's in el salvador. We already know about Trump deporting people to CECOT, a prison in el salvador intended for violent drug offenders, but for some reason, Trump is deporting innocent legal residents too. He even was court ordered to facilitate a deal to bring one back, but given that means trump doesnt have to actually bring him back, only try, the president of el salvador said no, so that's the bare minimum to legally comply with that order. He even talked today about wanting to deport Americans there. Like, wtf? This is blatantly unconstitutional, immoral, and uh, we saw this before.

Ya know, before hitler went all final solution on the Jews, it started like this. Hitler deported people he didn't like to neighboring countries, but then he's later invade those countries, take them over, and then want to kill them. I dont think trump is at the point of wanting to genocide anyone, but he IS gearing up for disappearing people to this place.

Even worse, this place might literally be a literal death camp. Conditions are known to be awful, but lately a certain picture on google earth is circulating the internet looking at it from the air. Feel free to look up "CECOT" on google earth (or variation thereof), but uh...there's a part of the compound that looks like it has blood on the ground and may be used for executions. Now, I'm not saying they're executing our guys, but...we don't know the context here. And uh...that's bad. 

I mean, it's one thing if you have the death penalty and use it on say, the most brutal cartel members or something, but uh...we're sending these people extrajudicially down to el salvador. For all we know they could be killing them. Even if there's a 1% chance of this happening, we should be very very concerned. 

I won't post pictures myself, but here's the prison on google earth, zoom in and find it. Hint. North central part. L shaped building. Yeah....

Okay, so...maybe I'm overreacting, I hope I'm overreacting, but as they say the path to fascism is full of people saying you're overreacting, and uh...this isn't good. Trump is kidnapping legal residents off the street and sending them HERE. Trump is talking about sending American cirizens HERE. One day, he might send YOU here. He might send ME here. He might send anyone here. And again, he's seemingly going off the rails and just doing whatever he wants. This isn't good. We are literally descending into a dictatorship right before our very eyes. The rule of law is being eroded. This is BAD. Let's call it what it is. This is a concentration camp. What Trump is doing here makes bush with guantanamo bay look like child's play. This is bad. This is VERY bad.

Thinking about life spans and not learning from history

 The GOP often has a saying that they repeat over. Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times. Hard times create strong men. Conservatives love to use this phrase as a cudgel for the left, claiming that people today are so weak and blah blah blah, you wouldnt be able to storm the beaches of normandy, blah blah blah. Back in my day we walked 3 miles in the snow to school, blah blah blah.

Well...looking at America today, I have to say, the phrase is right. However, the people who always go on about this are the weak men creating the hard times. 80 years ago, we won World War II. We had the so called greatest generation. The generation that lived through the great depression. The generation that stormed normandy. The generation that built America's empire. I was watching several commentators today, and a lot of them are now saying the American century is over, and there's no coming back from this. In a sense, this decline was not inevitable. While, in the long term, I guess it was, it seems to be happening prematurely because the current administration is so inept and so incompetent, as it did not learn from history, and is doomed to repeat it.

The people who could have told us trump's tariffs were a bad idea are now dead. The ones who could've told us that the america first whackos are basically nazis are now dead. The people who could have told us that isolationism and appeasement are bad strategies are now dead. I've said it before, political realignments happen every 40ish years and are a result of life cycles. In a sense, we're 80 years out from WWII and as such, a full 80 year lifespan away from it. And the people who lived through it are dead and dying, and the generations after mostly dominate everything. Those generations are the ones who are now in charge. And they're the weak men creating the hard times. In a sense, it's the boomers. Trump is a boomer. Chuck schumer is a boomer. Nancy pelosi a silent. THey're trying to replace the boomers with gen x and millennials with the same exact views, and it aint working. And our current political climate is creating hard times. 

The fact is, we're not learning from history. We're repeating it. Even worse, it's like no one even cares. Americans are so ignorant of things its ridiculous. I aint saying i dont have blind spots either too. But yeah. We're just sleepwalking ourselves into fascism, into a second great depression, into the decline of america on the world stage. And half the country doesnt care and is cheering it on. The other side is horrified but is unable to do anything about it. TO be fair, the time to do something would've been 2024. Hell, let's go back further, 2016 too. The root causes were there. We abandoned the new deal ideals that made our society prosperous and shared that prosperity down the income distribution, and decades of short term greed let to a decline in our living standards, with our political system refusing to bend in a way that would have allowed us to avoid this. So now we are feeling more..."revolutionary" and voting in people like trump to "burn it all down", and he's "burning it down" all right. And where is it getting us? Nowhere.

Honestly, sometimes this country feels screwed. Like, we're bringing all of this on ourselves, our political system is broken, our economic system is broken. We only allow the corporate approved options and now we're finding out as our corporate approved option is destroying the world economy and our relationships with the rest of the world. idiots, do we not realize that we need these things to prosper ourselves? I kinda understand, things arent great, we've needed a paradigm shift for a while. But THIS?! This aint it. 

I really hope the dems can come back in 2028, learn from their mistakes and win, but if I had to guess, they won't. They'll find some way to F it up, they always do. Even though this should be a lay up for the democratic party. *sigh*...

Do NOT buy the Nintendo Switch 2

 So, president of Nintendo America, Doug Bowser (an apt name, given Mario lore...), decided to chime in and defend Nintendo's pricing strategy. He confirmed that tariffs were not factored into the price, and that if people can't afford the switch 2, well, there is always the switch 1. As the article points out, the switch 1 never got a price drop, which, if we follow up to my last article on this, is ahistorical. As we have seen, these consoles would have a price at launch, and would very quickly get discounts, typically within 2 years. The nintendo switch, instead, got a cut down model for $200, which is the equivalent of a price drop, but it was a handheld only version of the console and as such, lacked features like the dock and being able to hook it up to a TV. neither of those models got price drops. And now, the switch 2 price is based on the fact that the switch 1 is still at its MSRP, and "well, we're not gonna sell it cheaper than the original switch, are we?"

...that's it guys. Just....let them cook. Don't buy their crap. Boycott the crap out of them. If this pricing logic is taken to its logical end, every generation is gonna be more expensive than the last, and old stuff never gets cheaper. They're pulling an nvidia. Remember how nuts the GPU market has gotten, where price/performance has come to a relative standstill for almost a decade now (to be fair its 2x what it was back in 2016-2017, but at the same time, 2x in a whole decade is terrible as that used to happen every 3 years). 

Tech is supposed to get CHEAPER. New stuff comes out. It's expensive at first, but due to the rate of progress, it gets cheap quickly, and then new stuff comes out that's at roughly the original price, which is better than the old stuff. What is high end one year might be midrange the next. The year after that, it's low end. The year after that, it's obsolete. Sure, if you insist on being on the bleeding edge, you'll pay tons of money, but there used to be tons of options at various price options. This has been my argument for why the GPU market is screwed and now Nintendo is doing the same thing.

Again, MSRPs of stuff like the N64, Game cube, Wii, etc seem high accounting for inflation, typically around $350-400 these days. But again, you wait a year, you get price drops. You wait another year, you get more price drops. By the end of a console's life cycle, it's a fraction of the price. I know my friend gave me an old 2DS he had. He paid $80 for it.  It cost $250 at launch. And that's just the last gen handheld before the switch. DS was $150, went down to $100. By the end of the wii's life cycle, it was $130, it launched at $250. The Game cube went down to $100 from $200 just 2 years after launch and by the end of its life cycle, it was going for $50. Like, this used to be the norm. 

The nintendo switch is 8 years old, and it still costs MSRP: $300. it should be literally like $100-150 by now. Switch lites should be on fire sale for like $80 by this point. It's OLD. It's literally the end of its lifecycle, and it's still MSRP. And now nintendo is pushing the boundaries by seeing what it can get away with with the switch 2, charging more than ever. Again, even the wii u, accounting for inflation, is still like $410. And that didn't sell very well. 

I'm gonna be honest, I never bought a switch 1. I'll tell you why: cost. It's not that I dont have an interest in nintendo's games. It's that I'm not willing to pay nintendo's prices for games. My best IRL friend is a huge nintendo fanboy. He's been trying to push me to get the switch since it came out. I never did. Again, because price. $300 for a console, $200 for the handheld version. Games that almost never go on sale and never get deep discounts. The business model sucks. Nintendo is trying to charge a premium for their stuff these days. They're trying to never lower prices in order to make it hold more value. But they fail to understand that the lower they charge price wise, the more people they bring in. ANd historically, their success is due to being the relatively cheap competitor. 

Again, nintendo is seeing what they can get away with. They're F-ing around. let them find out. DO NOT BUY THIS. DO NOT BUY $450 switch 2s, DO NOT BUY $80 games. Laugh them out of the room. Because if you dont, their next console will cost $600, and they'll charge $100 for games. And they'll keep doing this until they cant get away with it.

Heck, this might end up being $600-700. Again, tariffs arent included in these prices. With tariffs, this console might literally be $600+. Trump is giving us a double whammy. And I'll be blunt, you should punish the republicans electorally too. They're screwing up the economy. I normally say presidents do not influence the economy much. BUT...Trump is screwing up so bad, he's literally pulling a Herbert Hoover. Treat the GOP as you would hoover. Throw them out on their butts and get the democrats back in. I may not think the dems are amazing, but Biden was way better than this. 

Please shut up about inflation (also, a demonstration of the destruction of the middle class)

 So....in light of Nintendo's ridiculous prices, which are only going to be made worse by the Trump tariffs, there are a lot of pro corporate...you know what riders out there who are basically defending nintendo and arguing that we should be willing to pay high prices. Their argument is that if we go back to what consoles and games cost back in the good old days, and compared it to today, we would realize that we used to actually pay higher prices. For example, the Nintendo 64 had like $60-80 games back in the 1990s, when in reality, that was like $120-160 today or something. a $200 console costs like $500+ now, etc. etc. We get this too with the cost of PC parts, with people being like "well ackshully, you SHOULD pay more than GPUs than you did in the 2010-2016 era!" and stuff like that.

But, let's be honest, just because things cost more now, doesn't mean that people can afford more stuff. The living standards of people have declined over the years.  I know in my own life, my family has made roughly the same amount of money since like the 1990s in real dollars, and I don't think that's uncommon in a lot of eras. if anything, it sounds like the hollowing out of the middle class to me.

I mean, let's go back to like the 1990s. In the 90s, my family made somewhere around $40k a year to my knowledge. Not sure exactly, but that sounds about right. That would amount to around $100k today, which actually sounds like a lot. My dad did HVAC and it was brutal work though, and he was miserable doing it. But it did give me a good childhood and a good life. I guess we were on the higher end of middle class, ya know, right when my UBI stuff would start raising taxes on us. Not super rich but comfortable. And yeah, I got a new console for like $130 (never full price) like a year or two after release when they went on sale, and we'd get games. I'd occasionally get games I knew were full price, but most were discounted. My family has always been on the whole "dont pay full price for stuff, wait for sales" kind of people. Scrimping and saving is how you get ahead. As such, while I might get like 2-4 games for christmas, often on sale, a lot of the time, they'd be like $30-40, only occasionally getting a $60-70 one.  

Let's fast forward into the 2000s. my dad is now working a different job in the same field. He quit his old one after he was functionally forced out because he tried to join a union. He had his old one since he started in the 1970s, and ya know, that was the end of that golden era where you could get a job out of high school with a college education and be fine. But then in the 1980s and 1990s as neoliberalism became all the rage, working conditions gradually worsened, with his job being absolutely miserable by the 1990s. And then around 2000, he quit. he took a pay cut, but his next job was pretty easy in comparison. Rather than being a megacorp, it was owned by a small business owner. Pay was lower but things were less stressful. I remember we cut back on things we used to do, like eating out, although our christmases and stuff were still decent. He continued to make somewhere around $40k a year, rising to the 50s and maybe around $60k-ish by the recession. 

Game consoles got more expensive, but they also seemed to come out a lot less frequently, I remember getting a PS2 around 2002 for middle school graduation, having used a much cheaper dreamcast before that. I typically only got one console per generation, although the dreamcast's premature death meant that i got 2 for gen 6. Again, probably not launch price. Actually looking it up, there was a $100 price drop (1/3 of the price) when I got it. So it was a $200 console. And games went down to $50, with me often getting them for much less, like, say, $30 on average. Again, never pay full price for anything. Maybe hold off and get older games on sale and get the newer ones later on. 

Xbox 360, got that when I graduated high school. Was $400, it was less than a year post launch, but I got 3 games. 2 were old halo games from the OG xbox and were literally like $8 according to the sticker on them. Quake 4 was like $50-60, but yeah. Only got one of those. From there, again, mostly got games on sale, $20-40 is what we typically paid. While occasionally, you get something full price, most of the time, we don't.

Same with handhelds. I got into the game boy late in its life cycle after my dad had a game gear at launch. That one was probably pricey. Game boy was less than $100 by the late 90s. GBA was like $130 or $150 or something in 2001. Got that near launch. Games were $30 for it. 

DS, that was $150. Games were $40 max. 

Again, stuff was a lot cheaper. Let's talk about this stuff in line with inflation up to this point.

So, got a sega genesis in 1993 for like $130, that's $287 today. So around $300, that's not unreasonable in my mind for a console. Games generally cost around $30 on average I'd say. That's $66 today, so not that insane. Cheaper than mariokart. 

N64. Same $130 for that IIRC, got it on sale. In 1997 money, that's $258. 

Games were up to $60-70, say a $70 game is $140, that's insane, and you know what? This is why people only had a handful of games. Either way, most games I did get were often closer to $30-40. Let's go with $40, which is about $80 in 1997 money. So again, keeping up with "inflation." 

Of course in the 2000s things went down and things were more standardized. Got the dreamcast near launch, after all I was a huge sega fanboy. $200 in 1999 is $383 today, still cheaper than the switch. Got 2 games with it. Assuming $50, which was full price, that's $95, a bit steep, but again, we were making decent money back then. Keep reading to see how things end up going. Also, we rarely paid $50 and those games were like "yeah you're not getting that many at that price." So again, let's assume a median price of actually $30. $57, so closer to $60. Again, because $80 for games, even today, is kind of a lot of money. 

Lets go 2001. GBA at launch cost $100, looking it up. I guess the $130 figure was with a $30 game. That's $180 today. Not unreasonable, my latest razer edge handheld cost a little more than that. $30 game, that's $54.

2002. $200 PS2.  $354. So as much as some hoped the switch would cost. And again, while games were up to $50, i often got games much cheaper. Like $30. 

2004. $150 for DS. That's $253, not much more than the razer edge. I paid like $212.$40 games are $67 today, and again, I often paid $20-30 for them. That's $33-50.

2006. $400 back then was $633 today. A bit eyewatering but not much worse than the XBSX's price of $500. Also keep in mind other consoles. PS3 cost $600 which was $950 today, and was laughed out of the room. Nintendo wii, nintendo using weaker hardware and being more cost sensitive, $395. Still cheaper than the switch. 

And again, while games were $60, I rarely if ever paid $60. $20-40 was common. $30 is about normal. That's about $47 today, which makes sense, that's me buying a $70 game with a 33% sale. That should be about $40, but yeah. 

So yeah before I continue, let's go back to the story. So, 2008 onward, another big life style change. My dad starts getting laid off, is eventually let go. His small company got bought out by a large company that degraded the working conditions to squeeze every last bit of profit out of people. Laid him off permanently in 2011. Couldnt find a job in field, had to pursue work in another field as a maintenance guy. Goodbye $50-60k, welcome back $40k. 

 I tried to get a job out of college, but the only crap available paid like $8-10 an hour for 25 hours a week with no benefits. Quite frankly wasnt even worth the effort if you could afford to live without it. After all, that's only $11700. This is the difference between older gens and younger ones. Younger ones graduate into this economy and this is what greeted us. I was hoping to make at least $30k outside of school. I couldnt even get that. It was a joke. 

 This continued for most of the 2010s, welcome to the new normal.

Shortly before 2020 and COVID, my dad retired in 2019. Now on social security, goodbye say, $45k, hello $36k. Which is now like $40k. 

Okay so...as you can see, 30 years, still around $40k, back in the 1990s, was a respectable above average middle class income. In the 2000s, was pretty much THE average. In the 2010s, slightly below average, but still respectable. And now we're in the 2020s...

And actually, this is still average in my area. Median household income is actually $45k. Used to be like $30k, but yeah. Again, we're kinda poor. Prosperity in america isnt evenly distributed. Some areas have it really well, others don't. It's the war on normal people at work. For some, big cities and the like, you're making BANK. Others, like my area, you're basically poor AF. The prosperity leaves, your living standards are hollowing out, and you manage to tread water for a while, but every decade, it gets a little worse, a little worse. And now we got a cost of living crisis in the 2020s and it's pushing us over the edge. So with that said, let's go back to the gaming examples.

So, I graduate college in 2010. This is at the peak of our income in raw dollars, and my parents wanna do something really special for me. So I get a gaming PC. It cost $1100. Now, people might think that's WAY more expensive than the other stuff, and it is, BUT, let's look at the cost in context. Since 1999, we've bought PCs every 3-5 years. They cost $600. Consoles cost, on average, about $400 for a really butt kicking graphics powerhouse one like the xbox 360. Nintendo actually stayed cheaper, trying to appeal to more casual audiences and be more budget friendly. This is important for context on the switch 2 as well. Xbox also charged for online $60 a year, that adds up. Over 4 years, that's $240. So....I can either buy a PC which replaces not just a $400 console, but a $600 computer, and $240 in online play, AND you get cheaper games, or you pay for consoles and their nonsense. At this point it actually made more sense to buy a PC. 

So...ignoring the big things, let's focus on the main components. I got a phenom II X4 965 processor, which was $200 at the time. That's $292 today. The GPU was like $260. That's $380 today. Got a free upgrade to a GTX 580 which was RMAed after it died into a 760. Used that computer until around 2017. RIP, sweet prince. 

Games, games on PC are cheap AF, if I really want, I'll go nuts over a battlefield game. BFBC2 cost $50 at the time, that's $73 today. And most of the time I paid anywhere between $10 and $40. Again, sticking to that $30 standard, which is about $43 today. Am able to buy a lot of games, since I'm not regularly upgrading my hardware or buying new consoles. Seriously one year for christmas, we just spent like $200 on like 12 games, it was insane. But that's the power of early/mid 2010s steam sales for you.

Replaced the PC ship of theseus style over a few years. CPU. Upgraded to a 7700k. Spent a lot on it, $300, but also figured, okay, this is the only futureproof option i got, ryzen just dropped, it sucked at gaming, i didnt expect intel to launch a better product soon. But yeah. $390 in today's money. 

GPU. Got a 1060 6 GB for $270. This is $351 in today's money. And again, I used this until around 2022-2023 AND I didn't buy it all at once. Again, a piece here, a piece there. 

After that, you get GPUflation. Heck, GPUs were already inflated. Crypto happened before i bought, and then again after. Prices go up to insane amounts, but go back down. Nvidia launches the 2000 series with its fricking $350 GTX 2060. Again, insane. This was in 2019. That was like $335 in 2017 money. So not much changed. Inflation was very low for most of the 2010s. CPUs also went up more. i5s started costing $260-280, of course, after the 7700k, the i5 8600k offered the same performance for just slightly less so i didnt get that ripped off by that. I7s went up to $400, which is what they should cost post COVID inflation. 

2021, we get the RTX 3060 for $330. That's $300 in 2017 money. A bit high, given the MSRP of the 1060 was actually like $250. Which means $270-280 was more fair. Oh, and did we forget, the 1060 6 GB was basically the 1060 ti, the 1060 3 GB also existed for like $200. So that should've cost $220, which is what the base 1660 cost, not even the 1660 super/ti, which was $270, but yeah. Again, see how we're getting ripped off? 

So...post 2020. 2022 I get a RX 6650 XT for $230 on black friday, has 3060 like performance while they still wanted $340 for that (seriously, F you, nvidia). I got an i9 12900k in a bundle deal for what amounted to $200. Seriously, a FRICKING I9. I admit, raptor lake was out by this point in 2023, but yeah. Still similar to a i5 13600k ot i7 13700k. And the former cost like $280 or $300 or something and the i7 $400. So again, getting good deals. 

Games, they did get more expensive. Steam stopped making deals as good as they used to be so deals on a few year old games are back to $20-40. New games cost $70, I rarely pay more than the same old $50. I cant afford it, and I refuse to. Again, my budget basically amounts to what it always was back in like the 2000s. I'm price sensitive, and I wanna pay like 2000s prices. Because my income hasnt kept up with "inflation."

So yeah, you can go on about how much more expensive crap was back in the day. But jokes on you:

1) my family's income hasnt kept up with inflation

2)  I never paid full price on much anyway. I've always been a bargain hunter spending $30ish on games. I'm not gonna stop any time soon. Even adjusting that lifestyle for inflation, the $40-50 im willing to spend is...about all I can afford. I cant afford $70-80 games. 

And yeah. Lecturing me about what things used to cost and how I should be willing to pay more just pisses me off. First of all, stop licking boot. We should want cheap consumer prices.

Second of all. Quite frankly the only silver lining of the modern economy IS those low prices.

Third of all, I CAN'T FRICKING AFFORD IT. Seriously. Every decade I get bounced around the $40k mark so I still have the same amount of REAL DOLLARS that I always had. And I cant afford to pay more.

Hell, this is probably why trump won the election. Inflation is eating up our money, but WE'RE NOT SEEING A RAISE! And btw, to build on that asmongold thing, this is why people say "F your stocks, F your 401ks, let it all burn." Because the economy isn't working for us. For my generation, in my area, it's NEVER worked. It's a joke. Our entire economy is a joke. It's failing younger generations left and right. I'm only able to be as well off as i am since i live with my boomer parents. If i didn't, again, what's available to me? The same minimum wage jobs that are just as crappy and just as oppressive, that's about it.

people cant afford to live in this modern economy. And now the prices of everything is going up. So let's put this switch 2 thing in context. $450 PRE TARIFFS for the switch. GTFO of here. For a HANDHELD, this is GAME GEAR prices. Like, again, let's not ignore that the switch consoles are home console/handheld hybrids. If you're going desktop, let's look at what I paid for a cheap console over the course of my life:

Genesis- $287

N64- $258

Dreamcast- $383

PS2- $354

And let's look at nintendo prices of consoles since:

Gamecube (2001)-  $360

Gamecube (2003)- $173

Wii- $395

Wii U- $416

 Switch- $390

If anything, the price of HOME CONSOLES has GONE UP since around 2005. 

So yeah, $450 is NOT in line with ANYTHING cost wise. The closest is the Wii U, and that basically was a failure. 

But again, let's focus on handhelds from nintendo over the years:

 Game boy (1989)- $231

Game boy pocket (1996)- $142

Game boy color (1999)- $137

Game boy advance (2001)- $180

Nintendo DS (2004)- $253

3DS (2011)- $354

Switch Lite (2019)- $249

So, yeah, nintendo? You can shove your $450 switch 2. Like, this is what people who scream BUT INFLATION dont understand. Back in the day, the initial costs of these consoles was high, yes, but even waiting just a year or two, would get you better prices. For a home console, from nintendo, since nintendo never uses cutting edge hardware in the first place, I'd say $300ish is fair. 

For a handheld? Nah, maybe $200ish these days. Like to be fair their handhelds are beefy. And part of the reason the console is so expensive is it literally tried to compete with PC handhelds like the fricking steam deck, not understanding it's not in the same lane as a steam deck. Seriously, the thing packs graphics that is Xbox series S tier. But the thing is, THAT THING IS FRICKING $300. And they want $450 for this? Sure its portable, but it sounds like this thing is gonna basically be a steam deck. Limited portability and battery life, fricking huge, they're basically trying to do what sega did with the GAME GEAR, which was a commercial failure. WHy? because while it was amazing for its time and well ahead of the game boy in terms of tech, it also cost a metric crapton MORE! EVEN THEN. That thing cost $150 back in 1990, and it would cost $366 today! IT'S STILL CHEAPER THAN THE FRICKING SWITCH 2. 

And again, did I mention these consoles and games USED to go on sale? Like, the price of hardware and software used to drop like a brick. Here's the problem with nintendo these days, THEY NEVER PUT CRAP ON SALE. Even today, the switch is $300, which is its MSRP. The switch lite is $200, which is its MSRP. Even the fricking 3DS, which I mentioned, had variations that eventually dropped to like $80. The thing launched at $250 in 2011.

And games. Mario Kart 8 normally STILL goes for $60. I'm seeing a walmart deal for $47, but still, THAT GAME IS EIGHT YEARS OLD on the switch, and is even older given it originally launched on the Wii U. So it still holds like 75% of its value despite being over A DECADE OLD.

And this is why Nintendo is just massively screwing people. Now they want $450 for a console, when their competition, the PS5 and the Xbox Series X, cost $500, are 4x as powerful, and guess what? The xbox has a weaker version comparable to the switch 2 for $300. Even then, the xbox series X is $400 right now, The PS5 seems to go as low as $375. And nintendo wants to get away with $450 for this? GTFO nintendo.

Like, here's the thing. It's like this thing was made to compete with the Asus ROG Ally and the Steam Deck. Except....PC....has a massive library, spanning back decades. All of it is playable on the ally, a good chunk of it on the linux based steam deck. Steam deck is integrated with the steam store, which has regular sales of tons of cheap games. 

Even then I didnt buy a steam deck. Why? because it's too fricking expensive. I spent the last few years building up my PC into a PS5/Xbox Series X competing beast, and now I am done. I got a razer edge handheld for retro gaming and streaming. Spent half as much, more akin to GBA or DS prices at MSRP, and yeah. That's what I can afford these days.

Again, you can argue inflation if my income kept up with it, it hasn't for once. ANd for two, YES, WE ARE PAYING MORE THAN WE EVER DID FOR NINTENDO CONSOLES, AND NINTENDO HAS GOTTEN FAR GREEDIER IN RECENT YEARS SINCE THE SUCCESS OF THE SWITCH 1. 

Again, if nintendo lowered prices like 1-2 years after launch, that would be one thing. Because again, you can see the history of that. And that's normally how i bought consoles. I wasnt out there at launch day most of the time, it was like 1-2 years later, THEN i upgrade. And I'm paying like 2/3 of that price.

But you know what? If we fast forward to 2030 or 2033, when we're at the end of the life cycle of the switch 2, I bet it's still gonna be $450 or even higher due to whatever tariff nonsense trump is doing.

Also, can we talk about that? I posted an article the other day pointing out how the switch 2 would cost like $600 with tariffs. However, now people are looking more at $650-750 given the switch 2 is apparently made in vietnam and then trump put like a 46% tariff on them. So...we're ####ed. Trump, you just ruined the one decent thing about the economy. Cheap consumer goods and entertainment. Congrats. Hope you like whatever backlash comes from this. Seriously maybe we will see blexas and blorida before this is done. 

Also, to the bootlickers defending this. Yeah Im gonna join the asmongold people in saying F your stocks and 401ks, let them burn. Stop defending corporations and their greedy BS.