Airbnb has been squeezing the people renting properties for some time. So the only way to make money on the platform is to overcharge on fees. Naturally people have caught on to this and the fact that an Airbnb isn't cheaper than a hotel anymore if you account for those excess fees.

So they are trying to get the fees under control. It's not uncommon to be charged a cleaning fee that is hundreds of dollars.

Nintendo just focuses on making good games. Mario Wonder is a 2D platformer, but it's great. Nintendo is the platform for people who actually enjoy good games, not just flashy graphics and soft porn.

War department is Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth doing their fascist circle-jerk.

This reminds me of those sonic weapons that turned out to be a lot less safe than initially claimed.

Trump had a let them eat cake moment where he suggested that it was okay that the cost of living was out of control leading into Christmas 2025 because it was okay if a little girl we had two dolls.

It was an astonishingly tone deaf moment but as usual the media sane washed it.

Oh I'm sorry, sane washing is when the news media intentionally either covers up, ignores or downplays or apologizes for something insane that a right-wing politician or a member of the Epstein class does.

Because we live in a hellscape where in order to understand what the fuck is going on you need to understand multiple bits of insanity that are all happening at once

Richard Nixon set up our drug policy to attack the political enemies of the right wing and the Epstein class so those are basically right out the door. Moral panics around drugs are also a great way to get right-wing politicians elected while they destroy the economy.

Phone games are highly predatory and that's the only way they can make money. Because of that they aren't really sustainable as a hobby. It's not something you can unwind with and blow off stress and steam because it's constantly trying to push you into a state of stress so you will part with money. Every time you boot up a game on your phone you're basically booting up a casino.

Indie games will work short term but the hardware that you need to play them will become more expensive and unaffordable over time just like everything else.

Movies don't really work as a hobby except for a handful of hyper fixated people. They're only so many to go around and there is only so much TV to go around. You can get a little bit of vegging out though but it's not enough.

Modern double a and triple a games did a really good job of giving somebody who is otherwise hopeless something that relieves the stress briefly. Something to numb the pain in a way that I don't think there really is anything else quite equivalent.

I want to be clear video games aren't enough to solve the problem. But taking them away from people is going to exasperate things. For the portion of the population that can be numbed by them taking them away will take those people and add them to the portion of the population that is being mobilized by fascists to come for you and to drive us into a new series of wars.

When the Mormons did polygamy they would end up with a bunch of young men who couldn't get wives. So if you couldn't get a wife at a certain point they would kick you out of the community. That's because you would become frustrated and angry and dangerous.

We've known for a long long time that young men with no jobs and no girls aren't safe to be around. In small numbers you can deal with them but once you start getting 10 or 15 or even 20% of your population like that which we are absolutely getting to then somebody is going to come around and take their violent frustration and pointed at something. That somebody is going to be a fascist.

It's hardly a surprise that female companionship is a basic aspect of being an adult male and if you cut an adult man off from a basic aspect of life he's going to be upset. If you do that to a significant portion of your population you are going to have problems. While you're doing that you are probably also cutting them off from jobs that pay them enough to be functional in society.

We have millenia of History to know that we cannot keep that up but we're doing it anyway.

Every Boomer alive I've run into falls into two camps. The first thing that the cops are going to save them which is ridiculous because as the economy collapses the tax base is going to go with it and it won't be anyone to pay for the cops to protect you.

Then there are the idiots who think it'll be fun because they can shoot anyone who trespasses and they are just chomping at the bit to commit murder in self-defense.

That's why I like to remind them that you're going to run out of ammo before the world runs out of desperate young men with nothing to lose.

Oh and Boomer here generally means anyone over 55. Demographics are about shared experiences that result in shared behavior that can be used by politicians and marketers to take advantage of people. People over 55 generally have the same shared experience of receiving massive amounts of government assistance through the New deal and the Great society and then pretending that they made everything on their own.

I think they know that and I think that insecurity from knowing that they wouldn't have made it without the government help is what makes them turn to fantasies about killing home Invaders and whatnot... The Old dirty Harry and death wish bullshit. I thought those movies were pretty awesome when I was 12. In my 40s I revisited them and realized how incredibly fucked up they were.

It's between moderately ineffective centrists and literal fascists. And I don't think anyone paying attention can make a case against that.

You are massively underestimating just how enormous eBay is.

They have been buying out competitors and devouring markets for 30 years now. With the exception of Japan they dominate online auction and used retail sales. It's a miracle that they only have 12,000 employees given their global scope.

I think one of the problems we're having is a species is that our brains are not built to grasp the sides of the modern global corporation.

All Trump has to do is stop about 5 to 7% of Americans from voting and he can do anything he wants and I don't care who you are you just have to suck it down unless you're a part of the Epstein class.

One of the things I've never been able to get right wingers and Republicans to understand is once I've lost my ability to vote because the party you voted for took it away from me that party that you put in power no longer has to give a fuck what you say, do, think or want because the only opposition they had was guys like me and now your options are to get in line and do what they tell you or go to the same camps that I'm going to get sent to die in.

I mean seriously if you're Republican what do you think is going to happen when the Republican party can't lose elections anymore?

I keep seeing these people trying to stop data centers from destroying their communities and they're losing and their communities are being destroyed. These people spent the last 50 years undermining democracy so they could be mean and stick it to the libs and then when they wanted democracy to work for them it wasn't there anymore and they're confused and frightened because it didn't occur to them that you can't undermine democracy for some people and keep it for yourself.

Democracy is kind of an All or nothing thing.

Since when do Republicans let alone Donald Trump wait for something to be sexually mature?

And a no CEO is going to admit it so they're going to go on about streamlining and profitable businesses and sometimes they'll mention AI slop but they'll say anything except that we are in a deep deep procession because of the orange pedophile.

People know, but what's crazy is Trump's job approval is hovering around 32 to 34%, but people still love the guy on a deep personal level and they will still vote Republican because they don't want to disappoint Trump.

Parasocial relationships suck. I am so tired of getting dragged down by idiots and people that need more friend groups. We need to at least bring back third spaces so these people have some place to socialize.

The reading comprehension fail is you failing when reading the GP. They were talking about Falcon 9 replacements being two decades behind. The implication was that nobody will catch up to Starship any time soon.

It wasn't the social justice warriors coming for your video games.

As usual it was the finance Bros. And the tech Bros but they're really just finance Bros.

Nobody actually listens to the blue haired fat chick that runs the women's studies at your local Community College.

But when Mark Zuckerberg wants a Data Center built it gets built whether you want it to be or not.

Young men don't have jobs. We have 25% functional unemployment largely among young men. Google it if you doubt me.

Young men don't have women. Just Google the male loneliness epidemic. Women are not terribly interested in men who don't have jobs.

And now young men don't have video games. Because we have made them on affordable. They can kind of sort of afford video games right now buying old hardware but supply and demand will eventually drive those prices up.

So we're basically taking everything away from young men.

So we're going to have a bunch of frustrated, dead broke young men with no hope and no futures.

I've seen this movie, it was called world War I and the sequel was world War II. Sooner or later they get violent and somebody organizes that violence and off we go.

I know what you're thinking, I'm old so I'm not going to get drafted and I'll just shoot anyone who trespasses on my property.

You are going to run out of ammo before the world runs out of desperate people with nothing to lose.