HubertManne

I was actually the poor kid in a rich area so like my friend had a commodore and the game consoles as they came out (and his family was like average wealth for the area). Money was definitely not stopping most of the kids from being into video games. Arcades were very active to so nothing keeping kids from being into gaming by going to the arcades but again it was a crowd that had almost 100% overlap with the comic book shop.

worst witchhunt in history which is saying something since the last 100 worst witchhunts in history have taken place in the last 8 years /s

yeah. I guess is are they not having it because of anxiety about the future or the fact its a reality now and the future effects are just reality. Is facing reality anxiety?

Im starting to get it. the phrase just to me sounds like its more about a possibility but the replies make me get it. I definitely get anxiety from current circumstances although I guess both my wife and I were discussing that with our depression. Its not like it can be cured because it comes from our current circumstances and often you think about like diagnosis and medication and its like how is that going to help when there are external factors. We think of it as more anxiety/depression for no reason or for reasons that should not cause them.

wow. just wow. with the earlier articles I assumed what would actually pass would eliminate the crazy but:

During its state convention this past weekend, the Republican Party of Texas approved a platform that lays out a Christian nationalist vision for the state, which would be maintained through an anti-democratic elections process that would create a permanent, one-party system.

Party platforms are meant to give voters an impression of what that organization’s principles and goals are. While not binding, they provide a basic idea of the policies a party will pursue should its members win control of government in an upcoming election.

The 50-page platform from the Republican Party of Texas suggests that the party will seek to instill a number of far right policies, including:

Restricting in-person voting to just three days prior to an election day;
Adopting a so-called “parents’ rights” view of schooling, which would forbid any schools from teaching about “sexual choice or identity…in any grade whatsoever” and passing a law “even more comprehensive than the Florida [Don’t Say Gay] law,” effectively stamping out LGBTQ students’ right to feel safe in schools;
Restricting even further the right to obtain an abortion, and banning methods of birth control that the far right considers “abortifacients,” such as Plan B (“the morning after” pill);
And mandating that the state legislature and the state Board of Education “require instruction on the Bible” in all public schools throughout Texas.

The party platform also calls for vast changes to how statewide officials are elected, urging for the creation of a system that would be an extreme version of the federal Electoral College by giving equal voting weight to each county, regardless of population size.

In the proposal, candidates for statewide office would have to win a majority of counties in the state, rather than a direct majority of voters, to win the position they’re seeking. Per the platform:

The State Legislature shall cause to be enacted a State Constitutional Amendment to add the additional criteria for election to a statewide office to include the majority vote of the counties with each individual county being assigned one vote allocated to the popular majority vote winner of each individual county.

Democrats have not won a statewide office position in Texas for decades, but the proposal would almost guarantee that they could never win a position ever again.

The last presidential election provides an example of how extreme this plan would be. Former President Donald Trump won the state against President Joe Biden by a margin of 52 percent to 46 percent, respectively. But under the Texas GOP’s proposed changes, Trump would have won 91 percent of the total counties compared to Biden’s 9 percent.

Even if a Democratic candidate has a majority of voters supporting them — likely through obtaining large margins of victories in highly populated counties — they still wouldn’t win the election. In Dallas County, for example, where Biden won with 598,576 votes compared to Trump’s 307,076, the outcome would be canceled out under the GOP’s proposal by the outcome in Loving County, a sparsely populated jurisdiction where Trump won 60 votes total compared to Biden’s nine votes from people living there.

In short, the Republican Party would likely become the only party in the state under this scheme, although far right third parties could potentially do well under it, too.

On his Substack, historian Kevin Kruse described the proposal as a “throwback to the decidedly undemocratic systems that southern states had before the civil rights era.” Indeed, several states, Kruse noted, had similar voting systems in place that Republicans in Texas are now proposing to bring back; such systems served as a means to prevent Black voters from obtaining any real representation in the state legislature during the Jim Crow era.

Those systems were invalidated by a series of Supreme Court rulings that created the standard of “one person, one vote” in state elections. If Texas tries to reimplement the plan, however, it will likely return to the Court, which has taken a decidedly right-wing turn over the past two decades, and may give reconsideration to those past precedents.

I have said it before but I am blown away by what he has accomplished in one term with such an adversarial setup. I loved obama but he pretty much flushed his first term down the toilet trying to work with the rebulicans. Granted joe had that as a lesson learned by that time. There are to many lessons in recent history to ignore. How much better position would we be environment wise if the president after carter had not symbolically taken down the solar panels and had a deregulation emphasis and then put in gore whose main platform was global warming instead of bush jr. Then we have had 45 years of tax cuts (any time its been raised its by an insignificant amounts next to the cuts) and it has not been a good thing. As a matter of fact from my experience the time following tax increases have tended to be better right up to about when they cut them again.

Its a bit like the law that is on the books but not enforced. Until it is and the problem with using another credit card is now you are taking out of your regular savings when you specifically have saved for medical issues from a pool that is not being used for that. Its not great.

Its happening now though. Its like being anxious about walking down a dark alley because you might get the shit beat out of you as opposed to being anxious about the medical bills you will have while your getting the shit beat out of you.

Exactly. He should be doing something about student loan debt. Like blanket forgiving it and if they stop him in the courts then he should turn around and use the judgements to identify more narrow actions he should take. He should get rid of the bs of companies calling all their employees exempt and not paying overtime. Or do something about non compete clauses in contracts. Or fight the roe vs wade and get an over the counter birth control pill available. At least get passed a large budget bill that prioritizes encouraging energy efficiency and green energy. Maybe getting our aging infrstructure more healthy while your at it. How about do something about all these bs fees companies charge. Or hey given jan 6th how about revising the law to make it clear the vice president can't just choose the presidential electors. Maybe incentivize important production capacity for the country like microchips. Cancers been around for awhile. How bout putting more effort toward eliminating that. Or jeesh at least make the airlines not blow you off if they cancel a flight. I mean common. Show us something with the one term youve gotten. Anything at all. Something we can measure against trumps accomplishments in the term he got.

ok see that makes more sense. so it is a pattern but the idea its specific changing patterns that don't imitate tastey food patterns.

yeah but was it cool? Were most kids in high school gaming at your time? Im curious because im a bit over 50 so maybe 1989 or something was the floodgate year. I mean for 55+ to be such a large percentage it would mean a good percentage of the population itself must game in realtion to younger gen right. So I figure something close to 100% of teenagers game nowadays but when I was in high school it might have been under 10%

Our hospital used to reduce it by 20% if you paid it within a certain amount of time. I was trying my damndest to meet the deadline and certainly had them at the top of my bill paying pile. They got rid of it so they get date order now like all the rest.