This is just a genre of porno.

Crazy that all those bots have IPs in Northern Virginia

The Lich system was pretty close to the mark. Possible that developers gave the underlying features of SoM a wide berth out of caution, but so much of this seems to boil down to “we don’t want to risk the possibility of a lawsuit” rather than “we can’t just do our thing and see if WB’s lawyers care enough”.

So long as you’re not directly ripping off the code from another system, patent courts have been pretty generous in interpreting overlapping abstract concepts.

But any kind of suit is scary, particularly for studios that aren’t geared up to fight them.

Millions of fake IDs have been leaked.

Why would they?

California’s the 7th largest economy in the world. You can’t tell me that their domestic policies have no impact on their cost of living.

If people in a blue state are hurt by the tariffs, it’s still Trump’s fault.

Tariffs aren’t the only public policy on the table. Plenty of our inflation has come from chronically poor real estate policies, droughts brought in by climate change, energy shortages from data center consumption, and a contraction in the labor market caused by Boomer retirements.

States, blue and red, have experienced inflation going back to COVID and before it.

Liberals only seem to notice when it’s conservatives complaining under a Republican president. And their panacea - just vote Dem to fix it - never seems to deliver the promised relief.

Surely the Blue States with Dem governors and legislatures are suffering less, though, right?

Do Harris Voters in Urban America think their cost of living isn’t also rising?

Yeah, it might be, but MA has some of the most progressive social safety nets and policies in the USA.

Like, not to knock MA, but your mileage really varies based on which neighborhood you’re in. The closer you come to NH, the worse things get. And Boston varies heavily by zip code, based on the prevailing income bracket.

Is the state better than West Virginia or Idaho or South Dakota? Sure. But its not some kind of paradise. You’re still in a heavily privatized and financialized capitalist hell-hole. You just live closer to the money, and that’s where we put all our nice things.

But it’s just vanilla combats with predictable outcomes.

So they invented… the first dozen seasons of the Pokemon cartoon?

They patented a very specific algorithm for a very specific kind of game. You can still do knock-offs of the system in the same way you can make RTS games without asking Blizzard’s permission or platformers without asking Nintendo’s.

I would suspect that SoM’s system is complex enough that nobody’s been eager to try and replicate it. But they high level concept of randomized enemy generation isn’t something you can patent. Neither is randomizing story elements between NPCs.

Why did the Romans fail?

I remember learning that the Romans fell because they were too gay and debauched and woke, so they lost their manly vigors.

Nevermind, history doesn’t like copypasta

I suppose its worth noting that the Roman Empire lasted centuries (millennia, if you see the Byzantine/Ottoman Empire as a continuation of Roman history). The UK is more comparable than the US, which flourished after WW1 and made it barely a century before fumbling.

But also, the book is hardly closed on the US as an empire. China, India, Persia, Rome, France… they all had their ups and downs.

The US writes the history books, runs the universities, and manages the international media networks.

In fairness, this would be both a more accurate and more German style name.

The US is a liberal democracy dedicated to universal principles of personal freedom and civil justice.

Like tankie never really meant anything before

I mean, its historically described Soviet policy in Eastern Europe and Chinese domestic policing (Khrushchev putting down the Hungarian fascist revolt with armored infantry and Deng sending tanks into Tienanmen Square).

Now it just means whatever the opposite of neoconservative policy is, updated daily.

Being against tanks makes you a tankie at this point.

Everyone knows that if you’re against US tanks, you must be in favor of non-US tanks. You’re either with US or you’re with the Tankie-rists

Crazy to see people smile benignly while US Presidents shake hands with Saudi Kings and Egyptian Dictators, only to discover their love for democracy when a socialist they don’t like secures a 7-pt election lead.

If the J6ers had all been Venezuelan, I wonder if liberals would have stood back and let the US Congress get lynched?

It’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt.

Liberals will go on and on about how any defense of the Venezuelan government marks you out as a “Tankie”, then clap like seals as US tanks and helicopters obliterate homes, massacre civilians, and snatch people up as political extortion.

These are the same tactics used time and again by ICE Agents within the US’s own borders. They’re the tactics used abroad, to quell dissidents in The Philippines and Haiti and Gaza and Yemen. These are the actions of a fascist government for the purposes of genocide of native peoples, seizure of lands, and generating capitalist profits.

Anyone who endorses it has picked a side. Just a shame they can’t have these decisions carved into their foreheads for all the world to remember.

Costco tends to focus its locations in large municipalities with high throughput, while Walmart built its business model on rural monopolization of retail where it could be feast or famine any given week. Costco optimized around sales flow, while Walmart optimized around margin per unit sold.

Both have been incredibly profitable over their lifetimes. Both have benefited from cities and states effectively paying subsidies to attract Big Box retailers that would drive out their smaller competitors. Both are, fundamentally, capitalist enterprises fixated on maximizing profit surplus.

The “problems” Walmart faces are problems pushed onto staffers and shoppers in markets where retail sales have declined. The “solutions” that Costco landed on only seem to work in wealthier and denser neighborhoods, where retail sales jobs are still the bottom rung of the economy.