I mean, I played with people who would just scrawl the name of the card over the top of another card in sharpie. Some of them even had a real copy of a card (bricked up in some two inch thick display case), but others would just be - like - “This is a card I wish I had” and we’d have fun playing because it’s fun to be across the table from someone with Power Nine tech.
I mean, they joke but inertia is Microsoft’s mightest weapon.
Literally just “My computer works now, why would I want to change it?”
Incidentally, getting someone on Linux (or Apple for that matter) to switch to Microsoft is also like pulling teeth.
it was a matter of Chinese control outside of US government control
TikTok was controlled by a private company based out of Singapore, with investments from a host of international funds including both the US and China.
The “China is controlling our internet” narrative was always bullshit fear-mongering, fully disjoined from the actual business structure. What TikTok enjoyed that Facebook and YouTube and Reddit did not was a sufficient distance from US policymakers such that TikTok’s policies weren’t dictated by Western oligarchs.
not bringing it under US billionaires specifically
That’s exactly what Biden (and then Trump)'s forced sale intended. Bring the US branch of TikTok under American control by awarding it to exclusively American financial interests.
When you can attract large foreign investments, the order matters less. You’ll experience more pain by imposing tariffs first and building out infrastructure second. But we’re governed by a party that seems to relish in the pain of their constituents. So this might be more of a feature than a bug.
Talking budget decks and then quoting a budget format is misleading
The standard budget deck right now is 500$ (Izzet Lessons)
You can build Black/Red Blight Goblins for $21 or a Mono-Blue Towns deck for $20. Both play competitively.
Vivi cauldron led to a one deck standard and cost about 1000$
That’s because Vivi Ornitier runs $100/ea and Agatha’s Soul Cauldron runs another $130/ea. Don’t build a deck where a single card is going to run you three figures. Problem solved.
It’s why formats like Pioneer are basically dead and standard is nearly on life support at local most LGS.
Well, that and the online scene cutting into the physical game’s player base, sure.
Gavin Newsom was enthusiastically in favor of forcing the sale of TikTok to US-aligned billionaires under Joe Biden.
Wonder what changed.
There is little will to shave margins when industries and nations are broadly effected, insufficient margins to absorb much, and little reason even bother to do so save to preserve future business with the expectation that tariffs will be dropped.
There’s plenty of will when a commodity is fungible and margins are high. We can see this in retail prices relative to tariff rates.
Our observed average price increases — at 5.4% for imported goods and 3% for domestic goods — are moderate relative to the size of announced tariff rates, particularly on Chinese products. We find that roughly 14 to 20 percent of the tariff changes were reflected in retail prices within six months. These rates are higher and materialize faster than those observed during the 2018–2019 U.S.–China trade war, but remain well below full pass-through, reflecting gradual transmission and continuing uncertainty about policy persistence.
When profit margins on a product are high, the retailer is more comfortable absorbing the tariff rate through lower marginal profit. Its on products with lower margins that we’re seeing the highest inflation rates.
What’s more, as imports rise in price they raise the clearing rate for all products, which encourages domestically produced products to rise in price to match. So you’re “paying the tariff” on goods that aren’t even being tariffed, because they’re chasing rising prices of low margin imports.
How much actual work vs future commitments again?
More actual work with each month these tariffs linger. There’s other factors, of course. The declining value of the dollar is inducing demand for US capital and real estate from overseas, as well as cheapening the cost of US labor. And with three more years of Trump in office (plus the real possibility that we get more MAGA Republicans in years to come) business leadership is inclined to believe a high-tariff / low-tax economy is the future for America.
This makes the US an ideal tax haven. We’ve been a popular safe-harbor for Chinese, Japanese, English, German, and French billionaires to shield their own wealth from their home countries. And if the EU commits to a uniform income or wealth tax policy, this trend will only continue.
Ah, my mistake. They didn’t even do collector numbers until Exodus. God damn, that’s crazy in hindsight. Makes counterfeiting almost trivial.
But so much of the content is uncreative.
Enshittification, baby. Once people know where the feed bar is, they just keep slapping it until pellets stop falling out. The Algorithm rewards imitation, not invention.
A lot of these services really hinge on a tight-knit community of active content producers who fuel engagement and reap some kind of dividend on the back end.
Loops is a technology but it’s not much of a business. The company is literally run by just two guys. They’re not going to bring on prolific content producers without a much more aggressive marketing strategy.
That’s a very materialist approach to international trade. Unfortunately, we don’t have a government run by people with a materialist mindset.
People might have access to the best cards without spending copious amounts of money to middlemen!
I mean, you joke, but this isn’t an unreasonable critique. A big component of the MTG popularity boom was the regular distribution chain, necessitating a huge constellation of second-hand collectors and traders. Overproducing deck-specific cards that flood the market destroys the baseload of people buying cards from the retailer.
Hasbro is effectively eating its own seed corn. It’s fucking over the people who will buy a thousand boxes of crap looking for half a dozen copies of the card that sells secondhand for a profitable margin.
It’s very dangerous to the game if people can be good at it without it being rich!
Outside a few niche vintage and legacy tournaments, you can be very good at the game without needing to own the highest end cards. Plenty of people run pauper decks that can outperform the high end decks when played with a working knowledge of what those high end decks try to do (ie, The Meta). Mono-green elves and mono-red goblins have dominated the game space practically since its inception. You’ll rarely find a release year where you struggle to build one of these decks for less than $50. And that’s assuming you and a few friends don’t draft regularly and luck into the right cards, then trade among yourselves to build a winning board.
What Hasbro is doing is more akin to the Louvre coming out with identical print copies of high end auctioned paintings. I’d say the bigger complaint isn’t that they’re doing this so much as that they’re getting in on a game third-party forgers have been playing for decades.
You can go online and find an Unlimited series duplicate Mox Emerald for maybe $20. And it’ll pass muster at any game table in America that doesn’t have a professional on staff to check its print number.
We’ve further mechanized the process of sales and marketing in an industry that we’ve been at the forefront of since the turn of the 20th century.
Modern anti-AI guys would have been eating up Adbusters 'zines 30 years ago.
The propaganda on tariffs is that foreign imports are bad and domestic manufacturing is good. And plenty of the conservative community accepts this, because they aren’t trying to buy direct from overseas. This guy is an outlier - a MAGA dude who is attempting to import a $2000 widget from Spain for whatever reason - and not representative of the average American voter.
Trump’s statements on tariffs aren’t even strictly false. Businesses can and do shave their margins, eating some percentage of the cost of tariffs, in order to keep their bulk exports competitive. You’re just not going to see that happen on a one-off specialty import, because the guy in Spain isn’t trying to be competitive at scale with a rival US industry.
We’re already seeing more high value manufacturing happening within the US to evade Trump’s tariffs. US tariffs on Japanese imports during the 1987 trade war brought electronics and auto manufacturing into the country in the same way. That’s why we’ve been building Toyota Cars in Kentucky for decades.
Now we’re seeing Samsung and LG planning plants in the US. We’re seeing the same from BMW and Volkswagon. Is this smart trade policy? Feel free to inject your own economic orthodoxy below. But to say its not working as intended… No. The US has enormous influence in global trade. What Trump’s doing has absolutely reversed the flow of manufacturer outsourcing.
So much of the modern political landscape is just suburban white people waking up and realizing they aren’t exempt from the police state that’s been harassing everyone else since the nation’s founding.
Admittedly, this is how you get class consciousness. So it’s not bad, per say. Just a bit ironic that Trump’s War On Woke is radicalizing entire municipalities at a breakneck pace.
Everyone thinks they’re above it, that they can detect the bots or remain unmoved.
I’d say the bigger problem is that there’s nothing “to be done” at an individualist level. Bot swarms are going to exist and you’re going to be exposed to them either directly (via your social media diet) or indirectly (via traditional news, casual conversation with people who consume social media, and the public policies that inevitably emerge from these trends). Simply “being aware” isn’t a defense. You’re still going to have your priors chipped away by these tidal shifts in public discourse.
Look at the impact the High Protein diet fetish has had on every fucking food retailer. Seems like every product has to include a sticker telling you how many grams of protein is in it. We went through the same diet fad exposure with GMOs and saturated fats and fiber. We got deluged with crime statistics in news, entertainment, and politics at every angle to justify the War on Crime. We’re still eating tons of shit from the anti-vax trends of the Bush Era.
But that won’t stop society from imploding.
Society isn’t ending. It’s always doing this shit. When you were young, the baseline felt normal because its all you knew. Now its changing under your feet and you’re struggling to rectify your childhood awareness with an evolved landscape as an adult.
You’re the one imploding, as you try to reconcile the contradictions of your past and present.
If this was all they were doing, I’d agree
Reagan Republicans in 2005?
I guess Bush Republicans would be a better turn of phrase. But they all came out of the same White Flight that Reagan kicked off in the 1980s. The big Republican landslides of 1994, 2002, and 2010 either flipped or purged a bunch of the Kennedy Democrats from the Gulf Coast states and turned them into GOP strongholds.
The gerrymandering of the first Bush term also gave birth to a bunch of flipped House seats and state legislatures, ultimately paying off big in 2004 (and again in 2010 and 2014 and 2016 and 2022).
It takes an enormous amount of ultra pure water to make a micro chip
Israel has some of the most advanced desalination facilities in the world
It’s so funny to see this pushed out as a marketing campaign for DuckDuckGo AI and it totally flopped.