Why people mostly play esports games

 So, Daniel owen was told to lower his expectations for new GPUs because "people only play esports games" if they're buying the 5060. And he touched on something that I think is valid, and that I feel should be discussed as well.

First of all, let me just say that I agree with him, a new $300 GPU shouldn't ONLY play low system requirements esports games. It should run ALL games. Historically, the 60 series cards are mainstream gamers' bread and butter, and as he pointed out, this GPU is gonna be put into systems costing well over $1000. While savvy builders like me will know that you can build a rig for far cheaper than that, a lot of people just buy what they find in stores, and yeah, it's a reasonable expectation IMO that a $1000 rig with a $300 GPU should not only run today's games well, but run games well into the future. a new GPU released today should still be viable in 2030. By then it should be getting long in the tooth, but yes, a new GPU should probably run games acceptably for 4-6 years, and these new 8 GB GPUs probably won't, given that you're starting to need to run stuff on medium, if not low, to get acceptable framerates. 

And again, the answer to this is that most people who buy those only run esports games anyway. But as Daniel pointed out, yeah, they do, but that isn't all they play. The reason they spend most of their time on esports is because that's where most of the value is. And this touches on where I want to go into my own commentary. I've talked a lot about the value of games recently, and my distaste over the higher prices for crappier quality stuff that's been happening recently. I dont like this new era of $450 nintendo consoles, $700 xboxes and playstations, $300 entry level GPUs, and $80 games. Quite frankly, this is getting too expensive, and being an avid gamer myself, I'm feeling the pinch here and feel like I'm being priced out of the market, full stop. 

Which is why I wanted to discuss how I prioritize what games I buy given my limited budget, and why that will lead to me prioritizing esports games. 

Here's the thing. If you can only buy so many games, and you have to choose between a bunch of titles, only being able to buy some of what you want, you're gonna have to prioritize what you buy and don't buy. And one way to do this is by the sheer amount of content available, and the replay value of such games. 

Generally speaking, I look at gaming purchases from a perspective of hours per dollar. How many hours do i get of value for my dollars? And ideally, I would prefer to spend at least 1 hour per dollar, if not more.

This is why, when I showed my spending habits, multiplayer games got more leeway with the amount of money I was willing to spend on them. Because if I can buy the new battlefield for $40-50 on sale, and I get say, 200+ hours out of it, that's like 20-25c an hour. That's good value. Same with COD. I'm willing to pay $45-50 for COD every year because I know I'll be playing it for far longer than 45-50 hours.

But take doom the dark ages. It's what, a 10 hour game, maybe a 15 hour game if I'm being generous? Actually it seems to be 15-20 if I look it up on how long to beat. That's a little better than i thought. So we might be talking around $5 an hour or so. That's still a lot, compared to an esport. if I only spend $200 on games a year, do I really wanna put so much money in something that gives me so little value? I can get through 15-20 hours in like, a week of game play. What am I supposed to do the rest of the year, just replay the same levels? Again, this is why value buyers spend more time playing counter strike, or valorant, or split gate 2, or in my case, stuff like COD, delta force, battlefield, etc. There's simply more value to be had there. 

In a sense, single player games are becoming more of a luxury. They cost a ton at launch, and unless they get cheaper over time, their value proposition never increases. Most of my cheaper buys that bring down that average to like $20 or so are cheap single player games from years ago. But again, with game prices going up, and sales getting increasingly more shallow, I find myself buying less. Borderlands 4 at $80 is a little iffy. Even if it's a solid 40 hours of game play, do I really value it enough to spend $80 on it? Quite frankly, the only kinds of games I'd be comfortable putting that kind of value in are bethesda titles. For as much crap that starfield gets,  I put 160 hours into it while paying like $47 on sale. Fallout 4, I might have paid $60 for that back in the day, 472 hours in steam according to my account. Ya know? Some games are worth paying close to full price for and many...are not.

I just heard outer worlds 2 is gonna be like $80 on launch. Why? It's fallout lite. IIRC my first play through was 20 hours. It was a nice game, and given I paid $30 for it, it was worth it at the time for a fallout lite experience, especially given I've played it through multiple times. Even then, 83 hours, with DLC, and I probably replayed it like at least 3-4 times. It eventually got its value for $80 in, but only because I played through it like 3-4 times. But, you might say, you probably played through fallout 4 at least that many times. And indeed I did. I lost count of how many play throughs I did of that. However, I will say this. my first play through? It took 100 hours and it kept me busy for literally months. I got VALUE out of that game. 

But some of the games that are trying to charge $80...arent worth $80. a 40 hour borderlands game is ideally worth around $40 for me. If you wanna charge $80, you better be giving me 80 hours of content, and not just content, but GOOD content that actually keeps me engaged. SOme games offer way too much content but by the time the game ends, I'm just like ugh, can it be over? Looking at you, say, far cry 6. $45 game, it had 60 hours of content, but by the time you got to the end of it, it felt so repetitive i never touched it since. It was a good game, but it shouldve been like 20-30 hours like the others. At 60 it's just...too much, and it just felt drawn out. 

So that's a consideration too. Not all games necessarily can justify having more content either. More content isnt better if your game gets boring or repetitive.  So yeah. That's how we "poors" prioritize our game purchases. We decide, okay, which gives us the most value for the money, and most of the value is in multiplayer titles which are often, cheap, free, or even if expensive, will keep us occupied for a very long time. Single player games charge top dollar and then half the time its like 10 hours of content. Okay, so I blow through that, now what? Even if it's like 20 hours, or even 30, 40, or 50 hours, depending on the qaulity of those hours, the game might not be worth a purchase. Because then you gotta consider the quality of those hours. A series like halo or doom might be shorter but i might be more willing to invest in them simply because i REALLY like the game play and am willing to pay a higher price even if the game is short. Then some other games might offer more content, but if the content is generic, repetitive, or the core game play loop isnt that good, it still might not be justifiable. So it's not ALL content per hour here. The quality of the content matters somewhat too. 

Either way, that's how us value buyers think. We buy 60 cards because it's what we can afford, and I'm sorry, even $300 is a lot for a GPU. it is. I'm tired of pretending it isn't. We treat $300 GPUs like we treated my original $80 entry level GPU from 2008 that barely ran games. And it's sickening. Yes yes, inflation, but stuff hasnt inflated THAT much. And then we only buy a few games a year, and we spend most of our time on multiplayer games because that's where the value is. We need to stop acting like every gamer is a bottomless pit of consumption where we can spend an infinite amount of money on graphics cards and then buy every $80 title out there. No. We prioritize. We look for the best value. And when the market starts demanding more than we can give, we get angry and start writing angry comments and blog posts about it on the internet. Again, you're not getting more money out of me. You're encouraging me to be more choosy with what I do buy, and a lot of these companies are gonna have to learn the hard way that higher prices means I consume less. It's supply and demand. You cant just charge an infinite amount for stuff because then some consumers will be priced out of the market and won't buy. Charging more than people are willing to pay means you'll actually make less money. That's just how markets work. 

With the way things are going, something is gonna have to give, and for me, I'm simply gonna be buying less in response to the price of everything literally going up. That's just economics for you. 

Dumbing down Marxism and explaining it in a nutshell

 Okay, so I saw a discussion online claiming no proper dumbed down explanations of Marxism exist, and that the ideology only spreads through the use of massive academic speak that people don't understand, and as such, the ideas only remain accessible to an educated elite and not the masses. The libertarian capitalists also complained that the reason they hide behind complexity is because the ideas fall on their face when boiled down to their component parts. While I'm not a fan of Marxism myself, it does have philosophical value at least, and I'd like to at least take a crack at dumbing it down in a way that people understand.

So...a lot of capitalists see capitalism as nature. However, no, capitalism was designed and put into place around 200-250 years ago at the end of the age of monarchies and feudalism. The elites wanted another system to work in a more democratic age, and a new system of justifying most of the wealth going to them since they couldnt just point to the divine right of kings any more. 

Capitalism was the answer. Through the enclosure movement, capitalists privatized all of the land, and the serfs, as well as the middle class who worked in guilds, were displaced, forced to relocate to cities, and take jobs in factories.

Taking a job, ie, doing wage labor, involved being hired by an employer. While free markets claim to be fair and equal, in reality, they are not. For reasons I often explain in my own ideology, people are forced to take jobs to survive. The economy is a numbers game, enforced by "reserve army of labor", where the number of workers typically outnumbers the number of jobs. Think of it like a game of musical chairs. You got 10 people competing for 9 chairs. And we set up a system where everyone NEEDS a chair. The one guy who doesnt have a chair is basically screwed and forced to live in poverty, while the system blames them for being lazy or something. 

The fear of being the odd one out keeps the other 9 in line, because they can be replaced at any time, by the one guy without the chair, who is so desperate he will do anything to get a chair. Chairs being jobs here. 

This makes workers submit to hierarchical business arrangements in which bosses rule like dictators. Boss says what to do, workers do what they're told, for fear of losing their jobs (chairs) if they don't. Now, where Marx differs from me is that while I criticize the system of wage labor at its core, believing that forcing people to participate is an act of roundabout slavery that we don't call that, Marx's critique is a bit different. His problem isn't work itself, but "alienation". What's alienation? It's the idea of being stripped of all autonomy and decision making power in the work force, and being forced to live according to the commands of a dictator. For Marx, the problem isn't people being forced to work in the first place, he has a problem with the structure of work. He believed that workers should be in charge of their workplaces. 

He also believed that the only way to solve capitalism was to abolish it. This was because back then, capitalism was still so new and we were just after the period in which we had all these revolutions overthrowing monarchies and feudalism and establishing democracies and capitalism, and he believed that the workers should rise up and overthrow the ownership class who owns the means of production, ie, all the workplaces, since most companies are owned by the top 1-2% of the population or so. 

Marx also had problems with that system of ownership. Along side capitalism is a work ethic based in protestantism that typically links the right to property with work. I'm quite critical of this system in my own ideology, but again, with Marx the framing was a bit different. His problem isnt work. If anything, he believed more fiercely in the work ethic than a lot of capitalists do. He believed that the workers did all the work, and then the owners of the companies just sat on their laurels, collected all the profits, and paid workers the minimum. He's not necessarily wrong, but that's where his critique of the system stops as well. As such, he was more focused on overthrowing this ownership class of parasites who he called the "bourgeoisie", and handing over the ownership of the companies (means of production) to workers (proletariat). 

And again, he thought the way to do this was through a worker revolution where the workers rose up, overthrew the existing order, and handed everything over to the workers. Then the workers governed things democratically for a while and he believed eventually the state would wither away (because he saw its sole purpose of existing to protect the privileges of the ownership class) and then we'd be left with "communism" (which was a form of anarchist collectivism). 

I know this seems highly technical and academic, but that's the simple explanation.

To make it even simpler:

250 years ago we made a system where the rich own everything to replace another system where the rich owned everything.

We systemically deny people resources and force them to work.

They're forced to work out of desperation.

Most workplaces are owned by very few people. They control almost all wealth in society and rule over the workers with an iron fist. They also collect all the profits while leaving workers with almost nothing despite the workers making everything in the first place.

He believed workers should rise up and overthrow the system, putting all of the businesses in the hands of the workers who worked them, and then the state would eventually disappear. 

That's the TLDR. 

Obviously I dont agree with such a system. My own critiques and solutions are a bit different. My own criticism is that people are forced to work in the first place, and I'd rather redistribute wealth via a UBI and other social safety nets to fix that. I dont care as much about the means of production because I see the most workable forms of socialism as indistinguishable from liberal capitalism in effect, and believe the true way to emancipate the working class is to just give them enough resources to say no. In a sense, my own solutions are more moderate as I advocate working within capitalism to reform and fix it, rather than overthrow it (which has never worked). I also focus on liberating workers from the most coercive elements of the system, giving them more liberty within capitalism, whereas marxists still believed that property should be entirely linked to work, which creates tons of problems I have outlined in previous articles in the past. 

But yeah. That's the short version. Now no one can say this stuff is too hard to understand or that you need to be hyper educated to understand it. 

The one thing that I am salty about with the switch 2

 So...I know I just said last post that I'm not salty about not having a switch 2. I'm not. I dont think it's worth the money. BUT...apparently 3 million people did, which broke records by a massive margin for day 1 sales. 

And I AM salty about that. Why? Because it sets a bad precedent. it signals to the console makers, hardware makers, and software developers that it's okay for them to charge more and people will continue to buy it. We shouldnt buy this. Honestly, nintendo has had a bad, anti consumer business model for a while. The switch 1 was $300, they never lowered the price although released a $200 switch lite. They still charge MSRP for their launch games from 2017.

 As I said, in the past, stuff got cheaper fast. Even if console MSRP and new games cost a lot back in the day, stuff would get cheap FAST. And 8 years is a really long time. Imagine if the N64 and its games still cost full price in 2004, and then the game cube cost even more. That's what we're talking about here. Or imagine the game cube and its games were still full price in 2009. Or 360/PS3/Wii still costing full price in 2013-2014. 

That's the problem here. Nintendo isnt lowering prices, stuff still costs full price even at the end of life span, and THEN they're bumping up the price for the next gen. And its not just nintendo. Right after nintendo did this, xbox raised their 5 year old console up to $700....it launched at $500. Really, it's all price gouging. And its the same thing thats happening with the PC hardware market. GPUs went from costing $80-700 to now costing $200-2000. It's insane. We've had 100% inflation in the GPU market over the past decade and in some price brackets, especially at the low and high end, it's significantly more. 

Again, i feel like I'm getting priced out of the current market here. I'm not changing my spending habits, the market just decided to arbitrarily charge a lot more while my income situation hasn't kept up with inflation. And then we got inflation on everything else cutting into cost of living and ugh. 

And then 3 million people go out and buy this. Hope you have fun, you just justified them raising prices and never ever lowering them. That's one thing I will be salty about.  

Trump vs Musk: no matter who wins, we lose

 So....Trump and Musk are having a pretty open split. "The girls are fighting" is how its being framed, and in a sense, it's glorious. Musk is pissy over the spending bill, in part because he's an ancap who actually cares about the deficit and didnt like how bloated the "big beautiful bill" is, and in part because he may be losing some of his funding in it. Trump fired back, then Elon said Trump is in the Epstein files, and now Bannon is encouraging Trump to investigate Musk's immigration status, and yeah, this is a major schism. 

A lot of the MAGA base are acting like kids when their parents go through a divorce, saying they love both and stop fighting, but it's clearly "over." 

Some people are trying to pick sides even on the left, and I'm just gonna say, don't. No matter who wins, we lose.

Trump is an authoritarian. He's dangerous, he wants to suppress anyone who criticizes him, and he's fronting some serious dystopian crap. However, Musk, if he had his way, would basically turn us into like techno feudalism. He's a dark enlightenment type, and say Trump went down over legal troubles stemming from this or was 25th amendmented by his cabinet or something. Well...Vance is ALSO a dark enlightenment guy and then these guys could push such an ideology with more credibility. In a lot of ways trump weakens the right. In other ways, perhaps without trump the right would have zero charisma. On the substance, musk is probably correct on this issue as the BBB is just designed to give handouts to the rich while screwing the poor, and trump's tariffs are a threat to the economy, BUT...just because a terrible person makes a great point doesnt mean he's not terrible. 

You know that scene from halo 2 when master chief is on high charity and cortana tells him to "sit this one out" while the two factions of the covenant are killing each other? This is that kind of situation. Let them fight. Dont take sides. Let them implode their own movement. There's pros and cons to either side winning and i dont think either is necessarily better.

If I HAD to choose though, I'd choose trump simply because i think trump's loud incompetence actually does more damage to them over time. Trump himself is a weak leader. If vance took over, all of the same crap would be happening, it would just be done in more subtle ways. Give my own interest is in the right's failure, I'll side with whomever is weaker. And that is trump in a sense. 

Still, I dont formally endorse either of them. I'm just enjoying from the sidelines.  

Discussing my impressions of the switch 2 at launch

 So...the switch 2 launched, and I know, people are gonna push weird narratives that I'm focusing on it because "copium" or whatever, but I just wanted to give my impressions on it based on what I've seen so far. I never touched one, or seen one in person yet, I still have no intention of buying one, and honestly, now that it's here, I'm more underwhelmed than ever.

Game wise, the only thing that really calls out to me is mario kart world tour. Of course, that isn't much of a surprise. The only point of buying such a machine is to buy the nintendo first party titles. On third party titles, which are most launch games these days...just buy a steam deck. And yeah, I know i dump on steam deck too, but no, really. People are comparing the steam deck and rog ally to the switch 2 and quite frankly, the handheld PCs speak to me more here. You could have had most switch 2 launch games on handheld FROM STEAM, and paid a fraction of the price of a $70-80 launch title, for YEARS now. And the base steam deck is cheaper than the switch 2.

The battery life seems to be about 2 hours when playing cyberpunk 2077, which tracks with the steam deck's 1.5-2 hours based on the model. 

 And yeah. It doesnt seem that impressive. Most communities I hang out in, which focus on PC/mobile gaming seem to find this new machine underwhelming. Again, mariokart seems to be the only reason to buy it. otherwise you're overpaying for the same games you couldve gotten off of steam years ago with a steam deck.

Despite this, it allegedly sold 3 million units in the first 24 hours, which is insane, and that is the part where I'm gonna have to be like, full copium on that. Like...WHY?! It's expensive, its software library is weak, and in practice it literally doesnt offer anything a handheld PC doesnt other than first party titles. 

Then again, tons of people buy playstations and xboxes when gaming PCs exist so...yeah. Normies be normies. 

 You gotta keep in mind these are the same kinds of NPC type people who end up voting for like, biden or trump when better options exist. Ya know, their opinions are so bland and generic you have to wonder if such people actually exist, only to later realize that not only do they but they're somehow the majority. 

Anyway, the fact that the switch 2 is making me suddenly praise the steam deck in comparison when i normally trash handheld PCs too is something, but that's where we're at. Really. I just find this thing so underwhelming. And I know, I'm anti-hugboxing here, but whatever. My blog, my opinion.  

Your daily reminder that the right is literally EVIL

 So, Kyle covered Nick Fuentes today, and generally speaking, this guy isn't on my radar. While I do occasionally dive into the right in terms of commentators, and I have tried watching crowder and asmongold before, I never really watched Fuentes. I've heard Kyle refer to him as a "nazi" before, but wasnt sure how literal it was. Well, in the above clip, he finally showed us what we're dealing with here. And it's not good. 

The dude was the "my body my choice" guy, ya know, that psycho. He was saying rather than go back to 1999, let's go back to 1099. He wants to undo the enlightenment. He wants women to be breeding stock with no rights. He wants non christians to have the death penalty. He even said he admires Hitler in some ways. Like...this is messed up. This guy is EVIL. 

I keep saying it, the right is depraved. I've grappled with them a lot over the years. My original stance was simply that the right was devoid of good moral values, but as I've watched this evolve over the years, no, they're just evil. Straight up. It's not just that they're intellectually a bunch of idiots who dont know what good is. No, these guys WANT bad things. They WANT people to suffer. They will find some justification to be against good things and they will want the bad. And then they'll act like they're "owning the libs" in the process. It's not just a difference in opinion. These guys are genuinely depraved in my view. Full stop. We should stop trying to see shades of grey here since post 2016, they're just straight up as black as black can be. Heck, even before that with the tea party they were going that way. That's why i left the right. Like, I might have falling outs with the left, the democrats, disagreements over strategy, and sometimes I will say they are half evil...because they keep trying to meet the right and their straight up evil value system hald way. But generally speaking my values are left wing mostly. Unlike Nick Fuentes, when I talk about the good old days, I AM talking like 1999 or like 2009 culturally. Probably closer to 2009 since i like gay rights. Im not the most woke left extremist, I encourage some more moderation of those fronts, but the older i get, the more I sometimes realize that the "max left" or SJW left has a point about the right sometimes. Do I think they overdo it? Yeah. But the right is just...straight up evil. There's no point in compromising with them. We just gotta propose an alternate vision and defeat them. F the right. They're for bad things, we're for good things. It's literally just that simple. 

So yeah, let's discuss the NEETs playing video games thing...

 So, I know I'm citing Kyle a lot tonight, but he's the one inspiring these posts, but like the other one, I kinda wanna go in my own direction on this. So another video today discussed how MAGA hates young men. It especially focused on republicans demonizing young men in their 30s who live with their parents and play video games all day and don't work. Given, I fit the stereotype of this, I wanted to address the subject. 

Kyle approached this from the subject of MAGA actually being bad for young men if that's what they think of them. I have a different take. Yeah, we exist. Young men who dropped out of the work force? We exist. I think Yang pointed out theres actually a few million of us. it's not a ton, only like 2-3% of the population or something, but we exist. And yeah, a lot of us...have been voting MAGA because hey, guess what? WE DROPPED OUT BECAUSE THE ECONOMY ISN'T WORKING FOR US AND DEMOCRATS AREN'T HELPING!

I discussed this with Asmongold's clips. Hell, that's the only reason I find common ground with that guy. I'm not an alt righter. But I understand, when the democrats seem to abandon young men and seem to struggle to reach them, why many of us would go MAGA as an alternative. But MAGA is kind of...the antithesis of what we need. Because at the end of the day, the republicans will cut safety nets and tell us to get a job. And it's kinda funny, but a friend today sent me a link talking about how the republicans just cut "job corps", like how are we even supposed to get a job when they cut tools to get a job.

And let's go beyond that. MAGA. "Make America Great Again", isnt this whole movement originally based on "bringing back the jobs?" So it doesnt make sense that they'd also cut stuff to help people get a job, while telling us to get a job. It doesnt make any sense. Unless you're just some 19th century virtue signaller out of a charles dickens novel. Which...is basically what the republican party is. Let's face it. 

The point is, the economy doesnt work. As I said before, there are only so many jobs that can be made before the economy becomes inflationary, and we've already been at or near full employment, with the economy being relatively inflationary the past few years. The economy is the best it's gonna get, and it's still dogcrap for us. Because, again, our society is regressing to a 19th century charles dickens novel. 

Which brings us to one Mike Johnson, who was going on about how lazy men playing video games need to get a job and learn the "dignity of work." Kindly F off, mike. Keep your religious bullcrap to yourself. And yes, it's religious. This is protestant work ethic type crap. About how we need to be punished to learn the proper way of doing things, F right off with that, Mike. That kind of mentality just exists to punish the poor and to justify the rich owning the wealth. They're pushing the narrative of young men playing video games as a 2020s version of the "welfare queen" to drum up working class resentment against unemployed people, when in reality, we all should be resentful toward mike johnson, his brand of conservative politics, and the wealthy who control society. 

Seriously, the real problem with american capitalism is we give all of the money to the wealthy, expect them to create jobs with it, tell people the wealth will trickle down, blame the poor when it doesnt, and create narratives about how the real problem with society is lazy people. Like, we don't even do anything, literally. But the wealthy like to blame us, because, hey, it's not fair to joe working man that he has to work so hard while someone else just sits on the couch getting free healthcare, so let's punish that person and make them get a job too so we're all miserable!

Why don't we make a society where NO ONE is miserable? And in order to do that, we need to do the opposite. We need universal healthcare, we need basic income. And before the right starts coming in with their "oh yeah, well how are ya gonna pay for it?" I just wanna remind people, I do have funding plans for this stuff. And most working class people would actually be BETTER off, not worse off with it.  

Okay? So let's cut the crap about how people like me are the real problem with society. We're not. The real problem is all of these unhealthy attitudes we have toward work, and how we let these psycho republicans run things in the first place. Seriously, stop looking for people to hate on who aren't those at the top of the system who benefit from its current structure. It's just a distraction to drum up resentment, make people angry over nothing, and to cut social programs that not only should we have, we should expand. 

Again, I'm not saying that young unemployed men who only play video games don't exist. I'm just saying that rather than blame them and see them as the big problem with American society, we see the fact that they exist in the first place as a symptom of larger economic issues like Andrew Yang pointed out. Because again, I'm as stereotypical as we get with this, and let me just say, we don't get here for no reason. Something in American society isn't working for us to get into these situations. 

And beyond that, let's talk about employment in a real way here. Okay, so Kyle Kulinski, he's a political commentator. He doesnt have a traditional job. Making videos is his job. He has a patreon, he makes money off of it.

I don't have a job. But I'm also commenting on politics. But I don't make money off of it.

I'm also working on a book, which intersects with a lot of these subjects. Im not making money on it yet, but I might in the future. Am I unemployed? Technically. But I'm also trying to do something and "make it" in my own way. Who qualifies who has a job and is worthy and who doesn't? Does what really matter is who is successful? If kyle lost his career, would he be unemployed and be unable to get medicaid? What about a less successful content creator like me? 

Really. This is where we kinda get into the socialists and their work obsession, but honestly, we dont seem to have a problem with unemployed people as long as they're independently wealthy. We just hate them when it comes to redistribution of wealth, ie, paying taxes. And when we think about that, again, look at the links above, I brought receipts to this convo in terms of what policies I am for. On UBI, it would be a net benefit to the bottom 70% of the income distribution. On Medicare for all, if we implement a plan like I support, or bernie's plan, the employer contribution to healthcare is subject to a flat payroll tax of the same amount. The househouse tax is 4% in bernie's plan, 5% in mine. People currently pay 8% of their incomes on healthcare. So people are actually saving money. The only people who pay more would be relatively wealthy people. Like, this is why these narratives are dumb. Do the math. Think about your own interests here. Unless you're in the top, say, 20-30% of the income distribution, the kinds of universal ideas I am for would help you.

So for the love of god, stop blaming young men playing video games for your problems. We're the last thing you should be caring about. The republicans make up these narratives to justify insane cuts. And honestly, their cuts go further than just us. They wanna cut off many of the so called "deserving poor" off of medicaid too. people are screaming at republican town halls about how these cuts will kill them and we got ghouls like fricking Joni Ernst, the breadbag lady, going on about how "well we're all gonna die..." These people are evil. Literally evil. How many times do I have to say it? Stop listening to them. Stop supporting MAGA. The entire thing is a scam to enrich the already wealthy anyway.