I dont understand how a UBI supporter can be an Elon Musk stan in 2026

 So...this is a brief one, but I actually encountered someone like this on the internet tonight, and it was a baffling experience to say the least. Yes, Elon Musk was a UBI supporter back in the day, like 10 years ago. However, it's become clear since then that the guy will NEVER support an actual functional version of it. The dude is a megalomaniac, he wouldn't wanna pay the taxes to fund it, he wouldn't want to put up with the loss in work ethic it might cause, given he is an employer himself. He's a chud. He's not supportive of liberating the working classes. He just wants to make robots to replace employing people without supporting any policies that would actually take care of the masses otherwise. 

The dude also had his shot. He had trump's ear. If anything it looked like he was the real president, not Trump for a while. And what did he do? he did DOGE. he tried to cut government programs from the bone, making up myths of 150 year olds on social security and tons of welfare fraud to cut spending. He's not a serious character. If he cared about UBI, he would've actively pushed for UBI. He didn't. He doesn't care. These billionaires dont. 

Musk is a lot like Joe Rogan. He kinda thought the idea was cool before he started thinking about the consequences of it, but in practice, once he started thinking through the negative impacts (on him) that such a program would cause, he backed away from supporting it. He's not a real ally to UBI and shouldnt be taken seriously. 

Explaining just how screwed Republicans are in Maine

 So...I had an interesting discussions last night. And....yeah, republicans still think they got a good shot in Maine. They still have this idea that Platner is a weak and vulnerable candidate and that republicans have this massive oppo research folder that they're waiting to spring on him after it's too late to pull him as a candidate. This is cope. It was arguably the republicans who pushed the recent smear pieces, with Platner's ex being a literal former (and possibly current) republican operative. 

And I know the "respectability politics" types are like "YOU CANT JUST NOT BELIEVE WOMEN BECAUSE THEY'RE REPUBLICAN!" Man...you dont know me very well. I'm very much NOT a "believe all women" type, and if there's an explicit conflict of interest, yeah I dont trust the women at all. This reminds me of that one german influencer who tried metooing Till Lindemann after the irish chick accused him herself, where the story is intended to make him look bad, without them actually accusing him of anything SUPER DUPER bad. I dont buy it.

 And yeah. The republicans pushed that before the primary because THEY wanted Platner out. Because they know they're gonna get their clocks cleaned by the guy. Platner is up 7.4% against Collins. In my model, that's a 97% chance of Platner winning. Mills, on the other hand, was down 0.2% vs collins. She only had a 48% chance. 

And yes, republicans do overperform in Maine. 2020's results were a staggering 14 points off, which is a ridiculously high amount. I had Gideon up by 5, Collins won by around 9. Looking into it, Maine is notoriously hard to poll because of ranked choice voting. Republicans tend to get undersampled, and the republican I was arguing against was talking about undecideds breaking hard for Collins. But here's the thing. 49% of people currently want Platner. 41% want Collins. The republicans would need to pick up around 90% of all undecideds just to break even. And even more so, say I did increased the margin of error to say, 7 points to allow for a 14 point shift and even ANTICIPATE a possible 14 point shift. Okay. Well...that still gives me a Z score of 1.06, and Collins only gets around a 15-16% chance. 

I mean, idk what you want me to say here. Collins prognosis isn't good. And republicans have a vested interest in ousting the guy. Any talk of some "secret oppo folder" comes off as bluffing. because if I were a republican, and I were in this situation, I'd try some weird psychological warfare to spook the dems out of supporting platner and destroying their "party unity" around the guy. I wouldnt be waving my hand around like "JUST YOU WAIT I HAVE TONS OF OPPO RESEARCH THATS FAR WORSE THAN WHAT WE'VE SEEN", this is bluffing. They're trying to get in our heads and push the democrats toward centrism, because as we know, "conventional knowledge" favors the narrative that "electable" means being "moderate", and being uncontroversial. Platner is neither, so that makes him a target with establishment dems freaking the fudge out because they think the guy is "unelectable." Never mind the fact that he literally has a 7 point polling advantage over his opposition. But thats the thing. Dems ignore polls when they dont favor them. We saw this with Bernie. They insisted that the republicans have a massive oppo research folder on bernie sanders and thats why clinton was more electable and polls dont matter. Meanwhile, same thing. Bernie's electoral fundamentals were WAY better than Clinton's. People LIKED bernie, they didnt like Hillary. It's the same thing here. People dont like Janet Mills. She's boring. She's old. She doesnt stand for anything. People like Platner. If anything, I saw a poll recently on kyle's show where they tried taking platner's comments in the lateast scandal out of context and it actually made him look cool and increased his support. So...that backfired. 

Here's the thing. Respectability politics are dead. I know the pearl clutchers can't accept that, but it's true. We live in a populist era. Scandals that used to sink candidates no longer matter. ANd if your candidate has a certain populist cool factor, they're teflon. And I know, the same people who are attacking platner nonstop HATE this. I see their comments, and how they DESPISE populism. Well, your boos mean nothing, we see what makes you cheer. people want someone who improves their lives. Platner does, Mill doesn't. Populism is here. And its relevant to both parties. Not everyone wants the democrats to be some boring ### whig party. 

With that said, can Platner still lose? Of course he can. My model's 97% chance of him winning is probably overstating it given the sheer unreliability of Maine's polling. But I can't give him less than 84-85% here even correcting for that. I mean, a 14 point swing is just WILD. In reality, I dont think we're safe unless he's up double digits, but he still has one hell of an advantage. And if you think mills is a better candidate, well, you don't know what you're talking about. 

November is gonna be fuuuunnnnnn!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 So, this isn't an election update per se, I just did one of those last week and my predictions havent changed much other than some texas and generic congressional vote margins, but I do wanna discuss november. 

Trump is crashing out HARD as president. And I've avoided making posts about this in particular, but I have been watching the situation closely for a while now, with the perspective of "let him cook." Because Trump is messing with the one sacred cow of the American people that no president dares mess with, and that's the economy. The economy is perpetually the #1 issue in voters minds, everything in politics is based on the metric "are you better off now than you were four years ago?", and that's one thing you absolutely dont wanna mess up. Because Americans will castigate you on it. 

If you wanna know what propelled the New Deal coalition to the complete and utter success they had from the 30s to 60s, it was the economy. We had the great depression under hoover, he didnt help things, and people elected FDR in a landslide. A generation later, we had stagflation. Jimmy Carter didnt do much wrong, but he was hated because it happened on his watch and then Reagan came in and "fixed" it. 

In 2008, Obama won in part because of the great recession. In 2016, Trump won, and Bernie Sanders arose to prominence, because people didn't believe democrats did a good enough job on it. Trump lost in 2020 because of COVID, but also, arguably, the economy. Then Biden ended up being mini Jimmy Carter again, dealing with inflation that wasnt really his fault and being unfairly blamed for it. And now Trump is doing the full carter and then some. Not only are his policies causing more inflation, but then he attacked Iran, basically recreating the 1970s oil crisis in the 2020s, the effects of which havent fully been realized yet, and basically creating a disaster. 

 And that's abnormal for presidents. As I normally say, presidents dont control the economy. They might make a few tweaks around the edges, but generally speaking, the economy is like so, the fed controls interest rates, attempts to balance full employment and inflation, jobs are created, people get jobs. Markets are gonna market. Yeah, you can argue some policies can help here and there, but again...market gonna market. The core fundamentals of the economy are generally self driven, with the fed doing most of the heavy lifting. This is why I lean LEFT. Because the way the left need to differentiate themselves is with state involvement in the market to make peoples' lives better. The right will balk that it hurts job creation, but a century of varying administrations under varying policies shows me that, the economy is gonna economy no matter what. The market is gonna market no matter what. You kind of need to be REALLY REALLY special to ACTUALLY mess up the economy in a meaningful way as president. And Donald Trump? Well, he's THAT kind of special. His tariffs are causing inflation, his war in Iran...BIG inflation, he's screwing up. BAD. Like, on a level not seen since Herbert Hoover bad. This guy is herbert hoover and jimmy carter combined at this point. I thought if Biden lost in 2024, given the carter comparisons and the apocalyptic polling that dems were getting, that if he lost, it would be one of those really bad generational losses you REALLY dont wanna be on the wrong side of. Because much like carter, Biden didn't do much wrong, but it didnt stop the public from blaming him anyway. All the republicans had to do was...govern relatively competently and they probably could've spun the next several decades as "remember the Biden economy?" and it would have dissuaded people from voting for democrats. 

But....Trump....MAN. This guy is messing things up hard. And the worst thing for the republicans? he literally doesn't care.  He's not thinking about peoples' finances given his hyperfixation on Iran. He's going on about how he wants a ball room and his name on everything, and all these golden monuments named after him. Ya know, real "let them eat cake" stuff there. And now today, he's like "I love the inflation!"

...

.....

........

As a progressive I'm just like HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!! Like, I get it, Americans are struggling, that part isn't funny, but as you guys know, I actually have answers for that. But...I really can't help but laugh as this guy implodes his political legacy in real time. Trump is gonna be that name no republican is gonna wanna be attached to after this presidency. 

But yeah, keep speaking like this Donald, you're just making us stronger, because the American people are gonna want you OUT after this one. I was gonna post approval numbers, including on the economy, but I seem to have some issues with RCP right now, but yeah, when that's working, look it up. He's probably at sub 40% approval right now, maybe 41-42% because his base is ride or die on him like he's Jim Jones or something. But the rest of the country HATES him. And even on the economy, last I looked his approval is like in the low 30s. He's COOKED. There's a reason my electoral maps have like 97% chance of dems taking the house and I even show them taking the senate despite an extremely hostile map toward democrats (assuming a relatively neutral year). I mean, the republicans are down in TEXAS, IOWA, NEBRASKA, and ALASKA FFS. And they're tied in OHIO last I looked. That's not a good look for them. You start losing THOSE states? That's like the dems losing Minnesota, Virginia, New Mexico, and stuff like that. Ya know...where Biden's numbers were going in 2024 before he dropped out. So....let's just say, this is a pleasantly surprising uno reverse card. Maybe we aren't cooked after all. If anything, maybe the GOP is. I honestly think when we're done with this, the name of Trump will go down in the history books along side the likes of James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, and Jimmy Carter, and nay, be possibly worse than any of them. Because at least the other guys TRIED to not suck. Trump is just by far the worst president this country has ever had. Replace any of the three in modern times with trump and you'd likely get sane governance. Replace any of those three with trump in their own times, and trump would do it worse. What a great way to close out the 6th party system (if the 2028 theory holds true). 

FLAWLESS VICTORY!

 So yeah, Platner won. I don't have much else to say. But I'm very happy about it. It was also a much larger blowout than expected. The results were expected to be like 61-28 or so. That's what was last reported when Mills dropped out and thats what some exit polls were saying today. We went 72-20 so far. Let's GO!!!!!!!!!!!! But yeah, I'm happy, can you tell?

And remember, establishment libs, vote blue no matter who...right? RIGHT?! Yeah, I'm gonna rub it in. 

Reevaluating Hillary Clinton 10 years on

 So...I had some die hard Clinton supporter bump some old thread on reddit with a helping of WELL ACKSHULLY HILLARY DID HAVE POLICIES when I pointed out she didn't run on much and her campaign mostly bullied supporters into voting for her. They then posted her campaign page with her platform on it, and I figured, what the heck. Let's regrade Hillary Clinton in a more objective way. Admittedly at the time I was more pissed at her being an obvious downgrade from Bernie Sanders, and given the dirty tricks she used against him and his supporters, I really wasn't buying what she as selling. But...let's be honest. At this point my standards are a bit lower and more forgiving. So let's dust off metric 1 and evaluate HRC. Btw, one change I'm making to metric 1. I was gonna save this for 2028, but basically, I wanna replace those 10 points I gave to dem candidates over greens with an "electability" metric. Obviously greens will get a 0 but otherwise I'll judge the candidates by how likely they are to win an election out of 10. Because we know HRC lost, I'll instead use her polling data before hand to rate her. 

With that said let's begin.

 Basic Income Support- 1/10

 So...back in 2016, my metrics were pretty simple. I wanted 3 policies. UBI, Medicare for all, and free college/student debt forgiveness. Sanders supported 2/3, Clinton at best maybe supported a watered down version of 1/3. I was pretty unforgiving. And yeah, she ain't a UBI stan. To be fair, most dems aren't, but yeah. I really felt like Clinton screwed us out of having someone who at least met some of my prioriries some of the way. 

I have to give her one point for a child tax credit expansion, but it was extremely mild. Like $2000? Even at the time I had a UBI plan of $12,000 with $4000 per child. So...this is like 1 point's worth of UBI. 

But yeah, most of what she talked about was job creation which basically sums up why i can't stand her so much. Because jobs arent the answer, they never were, and she was an establishment democrat running in a populist era where more change was, and is needed. 

EDIT: one point I failed to mention last night is how she mentioned in her book she was actually considering a form of UBI but dropped it because she "couldn't make the numbers work." Imagine how I would have recieved her had she actually thrown caution to the wind and embraced the policy. It's one of the most frustrating things about clinton. She avoided doing the cool thing because her political instincts were so bad that she went in the opposite direction instead. 

Medicare for All (Public Option)- 0/10

She didn't support medicare for all, she didn't support a public option, she didn't support much of anything. Just band aid fixes. Again, some centrist thinks linking her platform is an own like "look at these policies", yeah, it's all a bunch of incrementalist BS. And then she gloated about it on stage.

Other economics- 6/10

I mean, she supported a higher minimum wage and labor rights, but I remember that the $15 on her website wasnt her original proposal. She wanted $12 and had to be dragged kicking and screaming to $15. She had free college, but I recall her original proposal had arbitrary work requirements to avoid the appearance of giving "something for nothing." She still has some weird income limit because she "didn't want to pay for donald trump's kids" (if it's a public service, everyone should get it, besides, trump's kids wouldnt be caught dead going to a public university). Her student debt forgiveness plan was basically a slightly modified IBR plan incrementally better than the one that already existed at the time. I mean, let's face it. This is mid. It's mostly just a whole lot of job creation nonsense and job retraining that isn't gonna amount to anything, because anyone who follows my blog and understands the economy as I do understands that the whole job creation game is a bunch of nonsense that sounds good in conventional terms, but never fixes the root problems of the economy. Clinton was just a horribly out of touch candidate for the time. She wouldn't have been terrible, but she would've been rather middling. I guess I'll give her some credit for paid parental leave though. So some good stuff here and there, but it's mostly a whole bunch of "meh." 

Social issues- 8/10

Most of her platform is just...feminism. Women this, women that. I mean, sure, that's an important part of it, but she clearly had her own thing going here. I dont even see a mention of abortion ironically, although it is 2 AM and I'm kinda just skimming. I know she was kinda weak on that issue, given her christian faith seemed to contradict with abortion and gay marriage. Which irked me given I was peak New Atheist at the time. Still kinda does. Like, come on, if you can't commit and give a full throated endorsement and gotta do that public-private position crap, how can you be trusted to act for those issues in office? Her gun reform is refreshingly moderate, I'll give her that. Her immigration positions seemed reasonable. If anything, she seemed to lean hard into that stuff when as a white new atheist type...yeah, I just didn't connect to her at the time. Looking at it now, was she okay? Well, she was better than a republican. And yeah, SCOTUS WOULD have looked different if elected. But yeah, I still cant give her full points because I just don't feel like she connected to me and my own priorities here at the time.

Actually she was anti citizen's united at the time, so that will make me give her an extra point in itself. 

Foreign policy- 10/10

Let's face it, foreign policy wise, I basically am in line with the libs here. I might have mild disagreements on Israel now, but in 2016, that wouldn't have come up. She also had some protectionist impulses as she caved to political pressure there. I mean, yeah, she was qualified AF for the "commander in chief" part of the job. 

Worldview- 11/20

Clinton...was a centrist lib. Her worldview was informed by her liberal christianity (methodism) and it showed up in her economics all over the place. Everything had the work ethic shoehorned in, and given I'm the pro UBI anti work guy...I really didn't vibe with her economically. On social issues, her ideas are more informed by idpol and especially feminism, but also a lot of deference to racial minorities on stuff, which I found offputting at the time. Like, again, white guy who would be considered an ABAWD under her policies and was mostly animated by a secular humanist/new atheist worldview. I really didn't vibe with her at all, especially compared to bernie who offered more universal policies at the time. So I really didn't like her as the nominee.

Consistency- 2/10

So remember the whole Graham Platner "political adultery" thing I was going on about recently? Yeah. That's what I measure with this metric. Like Bernie? Loyal AF to his ideas, 10/10. HRC? Flip flopper, regularly changed positions over the course of her campaign, had a public position and a private position. She was like Forest Gump's box of chocolates, you never know what you were going to get. I even discussed that because I explicitly remember her platform evolving over time, and how she changed her positions on issues, seemed all over the place, and just came off as fundamentally untrustworthy. 

Experience/Competence- 10/10

Say what you want about Hillary, but one thing she had was competence. She was one of the most qualified people to run for the position and basically trained for the position her whole life. She clearly had her eyes on it since her husband was in office. But yeah, extremely seasoned, extremely long resume. That just doesn't matter if you're not what people want.

Electability- 6/10

Again, she lost, but putting that aside...she was winning almost the whole time she was running. She had a 56% chance on election day, which gets rounded up to 60%. Her numbers gave her the advantage, she just got unlucky. Or...alternatively, she just ended up somehow throwing away what should've been a sure thing because of hubris. Which...maybe that should tank her numbers, but even in my final forecast, she was still the favored winner. So...grading her objectively based on that, yeah. She should have been able to pull it off. She had slightly better odds in 2016 than trump did in 2024. And Trump's path to the white house in 2016 was extremely narrow. He basically pulled off the unthinkable. So....again, objectively? I'll give her a 6, if I knew nothing about the actual outcome on election day.

Overall- 54/100

Now, let me present a rubric for how these numbers should be judged.

80+- S tier candidate

70-79- A tier

60-69- B tier

50-59- C tier

40-49- D tier

<40- F tier

 At the time, i would have judged her as a D tier, somewhere in the 40s. But at this point, eh, yeah, I'm happy to rehabilitate her to the 50s. Which is still...unremarkably mid, but she's not bad. She was a mediocre candidate. And that was the problem. We needed an actually good one.

But yeah, to the weirdo centrists who throw her platform in my face and act like I don't know what Im talking about because I dislike(d) her so much...yeah no. I did read her platform. I even gave a bit of knowledge about my mindset at the time. her economic policy was mid, and kind of out of touch with progressive politics. Centrists always seem impressed by the most mediocre of policies and always seem to love to lecture people about what they should find acceptable. And I;m sorry, you have low standards, and your ideas kinda suck. And on social issues, we have very different ideas of what "progressive" means. For a white male "new atheist" (in 2016) like me, I'm mostly talking about being unmoored from religion and mostly being pro abortion and gay marriage. I'm actually pretty moderate on the idpol nonsense that clinton leaned pretty hard into. So she was kinda moderate where i was progressive and progressive where I was moderate, and yeah, ideological mismatch. Still, clinton was very qualified for president, very good on foreign policy, and would she have been better than Trump? Oh yeah, definitely, of course what does trump score? I mean, he's pretty close to a fricking 0 by this point. We're talking single digits, maybe low double digits at best (like 12). But she wasn't good. And she didnt connect. And considering she displaced sanders, a literal S tier candidate, and did so in some pretty bad faith ways, yeah, I hated her guts at the time and ended up voting green. Was Stein any better? Eh, given my last metric gave her a 45....probably not. But in 2016, I was obviously a lot harsher on clinton than i would have otherwise been given the bad blood with the democrats at the time. What really tipped me toward stein was just the fact that i couldnt stomach voting for a dem after they basically spent the past 2 years prior to that crapping on my own brand of politics, tanking my own candidate, and basically trying to bully me into voting for her (given how obnoxiously offputting her online outreach was). It really was a matter of principle for me. 

Anyway, that's why I wanted to go over this today. Someone brought it up, and I wanted to objectively evaluate her given I've had time to cool off a bit. And also because some obnoxious clinton supporter basically pushed her platform in my face as if it was actually impressive. It wasn't. And you guys just dont understand what I want. of course, given this same poster seemed to constantly crap on sanders supporters even now, yeah. Again, I dont ALWAYS agree with the sanders types, but at least sanders broke 80, the last time I evaluated this. I mean, he IS the bar for a good candidate. Clinton was just the mediocre slop the dems wanted to sell us, and given we already had 8 years of democratic party fatigue and she wasn't offering anything unique or special we didn't already hear out of the big O for the past 8 years (Obama),  it just didn't resonate. That's something both parties need to learn. After 8 years, people dont tend to want a third term of the same thing unless that thing is transformationally popular (see: FDR, Reagan). You gotta shake it up or you lose, and clinton just....lost because it was a red year, and she wasn't an inspiring candidate. Had she run in 2008, she would've won in a landslide just like Obama did. Had she run in 2020, she also would've won probably. But in 2016? No one wanted THAT. And as someone who was there, I don't blame them. We should have way higher standards.

But yeah. Still C tier, still okay. Biden/Harris were better, but had she not pissed me off so bad, I probably would've voted for her tbqh. She actively alienated me from wanting to do so. That's how bad her campaign actually was.  And that's why despite the 6/10 electability rating, she somehow lost. Because she was actually bad at this.  

No, the Sega Nomad didn't do it right years before the switch did

 So I found an interesting new youtube channel and they discussed the sega nomad, claiming it got the whole switch concept down back in 1995, and acted like they were right all along. Uh...no. Im old enough to remember the nomad. Never got one, because guess what, it was too expensive, and that's the huge reason it failed, but yeah, this guy's acting like the concept was good, they just got the year wrong. I guess I cant complain somewhat, but there are some caveats to that.

Sega's handheld philosophy

In retrospect, sega was always a hot mess. They had a good product with the genesis and arguably the dreamcast, but they also had a lot of experimental stuff that failed. Add ons like the Sega CD and 32x, the saturn, and....the nomad. 

Their original handheld was the game gear. I own one. it doesnt work any more because of the same capacitor issue that's killed all of these off sooner or later, but let's face it, I always discuss them in complaining about the current handheld market. it cost $150 at the time, which is like $400 today, it had limited battery life, and while it was very technologically advanced, the cost limited its ubiquity and its battery life was atrocious. If you did use 6 AAs for like 2-4 hours of game play (the same issue the nomad had mentioned in the video) you'd be eating through the things like crazy. You'd end up having to just use it plugged in a lot of the time. My parents did invest in a rechargeable battery pack, but yeah those lasted only a few years and died. All battery powered devices eventually become tethered to a wall, but some take longer than others. And the game gear didnt have much to work with.

The nomad, as discussed in the video had the same issues. The cost was insanely high, the battery pack was also expensive, and when I wanted one...I never got it. Because my parents took one look at the cost, said F that, and got me something cheaper instead. I loved the idea, but it was never a practical reality back in the 1990s. It cost too much and had way too many drawbacks. 

How this has relevance today

The handheld market has gone in a similar direction as the game gear today, and I'm not gonna lie, I low key hate it. The 3DS had the size but it did cut the battery life a bit to get the graphical advancements. Still, I can see, given the rampant piracy of the thing which this channel pointed out why nintendo were desperate to replace it. And yeah, keep in mind, even the 3DS suffered from low sales because $250 was too expensive for a handheld in 2011. You get close to that $400 mark today and a lot of people...dont wanna buy. So they had to cut it to $170 to make it work. But eventually the tech was cracked on that too, as this channel pointed out, and that's why they gave us the switch. 

The switch was a bit different than previous handhelds admittedly. It wasn't intended just as a 3DS replacement, but also a Wii U replacement, uniting the entire nintendo ecosystem under one system. Which sold for $300. High for a handheld, but given it also replaced the Wii U...not terrible. A bit high for me, but that's mainly because I'd rather fund my PC gaming hobby instead, and don't have the additional money to invest in an entirely different ecosystem. 

Still, the switch had compromises. 3-5 hour battery life, barely enough for a handheld to be portable. High cost, but again, it was also basically the main console as well. It was decent, but as you can tell by my own opinions on it over the years, I never really cared for it. 

The switch 2 just took it a step further, $450 and soon $500 for a console. I dont blame ALL of that $500 price tag on them given the state of the industry in general, but still do blame them for the original $450 price tag, and believe it sets a bad precedent for the rest of the market, which is coming true. They decided to compete directly with the steam deck, itself a niche "game gear" like device I've been deeply critical of. Sorry, I don't wanna spend $400 $550 $780 to play "dave the diver" on the go. I'd rather invest in an android tablet/handheld instead for like $200 and use that. Maybe I wont get to play all the new and fancy games on that, but it's not like I cant game on the thing. And it's not like it's my primary gaming device. Handhelds have always been less powerful secondary devices that cant play the same games as the core consoles or PCs at the time. Quite frankly, trying to play current gen games in that form factor isnt feasible without the same compromises you get with the game gear/nomad/steam deck/switch 2. You get a high entry level cost, poor battery life, and eventually the thing loses its appeal as a portable console and becomes a wall unit. I've seen enough of these things over the years I'm just like "yeah no, I'm good." And quite frankly, I wish new handheld console makers would stop making such premium devices. Cheap handhelds won for a reason. And they're BETTER.

How things have changed

Now, the video's argument is that the only thing wrong with the nomad was the year. I argue it's the business model. But to be fair, times have changed and maybe it is the year.

Back in the day, the appeal of consoles came from the fact that PCs were too expensive. If you bought a PC, you'd be spending $600+ for the crappiest office PC in best buy with decent gaming ones costing THOUSANDS of dollars, only to be obsolete in 2 years. A console....it cost around $200 for a home console, or if you bought a game boy, like $60-80, and youd have a dedicated gaming machine with tons of games for it. In a way, console gaming was BETTER than PC gaming in the 1990s. 

However, as consoles became more expensive, reaching $400-600 for the 360/PS3, and PCs became cheaper, with budget ones being as low as $600 and good ones around $1000 in the late 2000s and early 2010s, I very quickly found consoles less and less attractive and went to PCs.

In the 2010s, smartphones and tablets became a thing. And I was attracted to those over consoles because they could do more stuff. I could go on the internet on a tablet. i could game on a tablet, and yeah most mobile games are crappy shovelware, but hey, it's not like the DS didnt have its fair share of those as well. If anything that's kinda what killed the handheld console market. When the DS came out, I liked it because I wanted it to be a portable N64. But then very few games used its full power, we got tons of shovelware, and I quickly lost interest in it over time. 

But yeah...when I talk to people today about what I want in a handheld, I'm told "but smartphones do that, what separates a handheld a phone at this point?" In a way, consoles are adapting to becoming game gear like to differentiate themselves from phones and tablets, which everyone owns, and are capable of playing basic 3D games. If anything, smartphones are getting incredibly powerful these days, with budget ones being as powerful as like an early 2010s office PC with an i5 2500k, 4-8 GB RAM, and period relevant integrated graphics. More powerful ones are on par with cheaper laptops, today, which pack as much power as early 2010s gaming PCs. Everyone has basically an Xbox 360 or PS3 in their pocket power wise. And we see some decent games that many kids play on them. Roblox, minecraft, etc. You can play sonic games. You got engines out there that will run doom, quake, wolfenstein, etc. THey dont port many games to mobile because people are cheap and wont buy them, so its mostly casual gaming on them. But yeah. Consoles are trying to be different. 

But I just see them as an additional cost that we dont really need. I mean, $500 for a handheld is A LOT. And then the battery life aint great. And the games are $60+ and rarely go on sale (thanks nintendo), and yeah, you get a premium experience, but somewhere you just end up getting caught between my gaming PC and my android devices. I'd rather take an android device on the go because I get way better battery life, can even charge on the go with battery packs, and I can still game quite a bit if I want. And at home, my gaming PC plays everything I throw at it. Sure, it's tethered to a wall, but with portability like you get from these things, those things always end up being tethered to a wall after a few years anyway.

 Idk, I just think that these handhelds these days are niche, for wealthy enthusiasts, and kind of lack a well defined role in my life. If I want the good powerful gaming machine, I go for the PC. If I want a portable experience, I go for an android tablet like my razer edge. I like the idea of mobile PC gaming, but I dont like the reality of it, ESPECIALLY in 2026 where the steam deck now costs nearly twice its original price. And I havent really had a clear role for nintendo for a while now, since they keep sticking to this antiquated console model that doesnt work in the modern era.

I mean, back in the 90s, you got one console and stuck with it. I was a sega guy, but i did switch to nintendo when sega crapped the bed for gen 5. Got into game boys, N64, etc. Nowadays, these consoles are trying to fit in somewhere between my PC and my android devices, and they just don't fit. Still, what would help them fit is cheaper prices. These handhelds used to cost the equivalent of $200-250 today.  Not $400+. Games for them used to be $30-40, and I got a lot more of them than the $50-60 titles on the big consoles. I get that those game prices seem tame as the inflation contrarians will go WELL ACKSHULLY YOU SHOULD BE PAYING $140 FOR GAMES TODAY...yeah STFU, not gonna happen. Game prices remained low because consumers dont wanna pay that much. And the lower cost over time has been good for consumers. Maybe not so much for devs and the companies, but eh...they seem to be getting by okay. I know some will say we absolutely NEED these massive 100+ teams to put out games, but we don't. Youre wasting your money. And ours. Again, does gaming really need to be so premium these days? Its like the answer to the ubiquity of cheap hardware (until recently) has driven devs to push gaming in an unnecessarily PREMIUM direction, and I hate it. 

Then again, that's consumerism for you. And something I realize about consumerism is that these companies dont want you happy. Happy consumers dont buy anything. Unhappy ones are constantly upgrading, constantly paying for games. You dont get a reliable stream of cash from people like me who literally wanna be smart consumers and minimize how much we spend. You wanna go after the whales who will keep throwing money at you for the new thing even if the old thing is just fine. For a while, computing was such where year, the interests of consumers and producers aligned. New hardware could produce a markedly better experience for the end user. Nowadays, everyone has that baseline where again, your typical smartphone has more power than a fricking Xbox 360/PS3 these days and is quickly closing in on the PS4/Xbox One. ANd because most consumers arent looking at spending big money on stuff, they're just making things more niche and expensive to induce demand. Suddenly the bar does move to "yeah we need little console to do the same thing big console does". And in order to maintain relevance, they're going in that direction.

But it's also making the big machines EVEN MORE premium because what differentiates little console from big console? More power. And just because little console can do what big console does. Little console doesnt do it well. It's a basic 720p/30 FPS experience (if that, with FSR more a 360p/480p with upscaling experience), so in order for big console to hit 1080p/60 FPS or more, it needs to be even MORE expensive. And that's how we're getting to the point of $700+ consoles next gen. Gaming is basically becoming gentrified and pushing out the little guy because we're not as profitable. And yeah.

With that said, I guess the market really has changed. Cheap ubiquitous technology should lead to a gaming golden age, but because consumerism is literally designed around inciting new wants and needs in the population, gaming is going in a premium direction. Back in the day, middle class people bought consoles because they were cheap and could play lots of games relative to computers. But with computing now being so ubiquituous, consoles are now becoming more premium experiences, and trying to redefine themselves in ways where models that didnt used to be viable now are.

Still, despite that, I will disagree with the video. Call me old school, but I still think that game gear and nomad died for good reason, and dislike the new direction that gaming is going in today. In a day and age where everyone has a rather powerful handheld in their pocket that they take everywhere they go, console gaming is redefining itself as a more premium experience. And I just find the business model fundamentally unattractive.  

Discussing jobism and the military industrial complex

 So....hobbyists are still going on about that one youtuber's comments. The video was taken down, the creator apologized, but the debate about it still goes on.

Basically, the guy reviewed a gaming hardware product made by a tech bro billionaire who also does defense stuff, particularly drones. The guy is controversial and people dont like him. The youtuber is, by his own admission, not knowledgeable of politics and tried to address the elephant in the room with some comments about how the guy creates jobs and how he might get a job in the drone factory. Given our current foreign policy discussions, this did not go over well. 

Honestly, I kind of think the comments almost came off as parody, but from what I remember, no he was serious, which makes it more cringe. So I wanted to address the issue, given my own unique ideology.

So...job creation. Our society is obsessed with it, I hate it. It's peak "jobism", ie the idea that jobs are inherently good and the answer to all social problems. We tend to value work for its own sake, and this leads to a lot of cringe. I dont see jobs as inherently good. The social contract linking money to work is artificial, and jobism is an artifact of that. But rather than question it, we just insist we create as many jobs as possible and people work them, often while being uncritical of the work created. This can lead to a lot of "BS jobs", jobs that dont need to exist, or even jobs that actively do harm to others. And sadly,...not very informed people buy these arguments because youre not against jobs are you? Yay jobs! Imagine if we threw those people out of work, you wouldnt want that, would you? Yay jobs!

Btw, this is how the defense industry is often sold to Americans. We have the most bloated military budget in the world, and while we certainly do get our money's worth (see how Russia is doing with their budget), we clearly are spending way too much and a lot of it is wasteful. Even worse, due to existing foreign policy conflicts, we are basically using the weapons created to do harmful and even evil things in the world. Like bombing kids (Iran). And funding others who bomb kids (Israel). And a lot of people are against that, hence the controversy.

I have a more moderate approach. While I hate jobs for their own sake, I do understand we do need national defense. We just dont need to spend $1.5 trillion a year on it (yeah, that's roughly the number we're up to now....). Ive historically been for minor cuts, but at this point the 50% reduction the greens want is looking more and more attractive. But let's face it, we do need to fund a military. And having some military is good. ANd hell, drones are the current thing. And we need drones to fight modern wars. Ukraine has used them to insane effect, and yeah, I am all for us building drones and giving them to ukraine, for example. So I'm not even gonna say military stuff is even all bad. 

Really, it's just...the current face of our military, with ghouls like donald trump and pete hegseth in charge where we're just openly doing war crimes and supporting war criminals thats the problem. And fiscally, its a problem with the republican party. We cut peoples' healthcare but then we throw that money into tax cuts for rich people and foreign wars we shouldnt even be involved in. So...yeah. Again, if you dislike the current administration and get angry when someone talks about drone factories creating jobs, yeah I can see that. Everything current admin is doing is very distasteful and evil. And I'd like to see these guys tried for war crimes when democrats retake power.

This isnt the Bush era any more. People complained about that, arguing that he was a war criminal, but at least Bush explicitly stated that we werent at war with islam and that our goal is to help people. Trump? "Here's a high octane video of us bombing a girl's school bro, isn't this so cool?!" No, it's not, you're a fricking monster and you should be impeached. I could see why most people didnt wanna try bush for war crimes, even if the far left was screaming for it. These days though? Yeah, trump has broken that illusion of respectability so much he's just evil. He doesnt even try to make us look like the good guy, and he's acting like anyone who doesnt outright support his behavior is just unamerican or not patriotic. Make no mistake, I'm pro America, but like with Al Franken's idea of patriotism, we gotta have an honest discussion about the weird criminal behavior we've been engaging with lately and not just love the country like a 4 year old loves their mommy. 

So yeah. If you dislike our current foreign policy, i dont blame you. If you hate the defense industries openly making killing machines for this administration, and who get a bit too giddy over killing people, i dont blame you. At the same time, Im not categorically against defense. We do need a strong military. However, im more of a "speak softly but carry a big stick" kind of guy. We're currently a "speak loudly, swing the stick, and then scream more on social media at 3 AM on a golden toilet" kind of country. 

As for the jobs. Well....again, jobism is a mental disorder as I see it. Like, not an outright one, but like....something we're brainwashed into. Jobs arent good for their own sake. Theyre good for what they do. And if what we're doing is evil, then it's evil. People who defend drone factories because jobs are like the people who parody star wars and call the death star a work program or something. It's dumb. And we should rethink jobs as a concept. 

Anyway, that's my thought on that.