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It is also good to remember that you could kill Gault originally, but people complained about thier actions having consequences, so Bioware took the decisions out of players hands.

Speaking of the NRA, there was a local case they were fighting in my home town. I guess the city council wanted to make it so you had to report stolen firearms within 48 hours instead of the state's rule of 5 days. The NRA fought it. Which I just don't get. I mean, I'm not entirely sure why our city needs to have a different requirement than the state, but I don't get what the NRA gains from fighting this. In my perfect world, the NRA should be the ones pushing responsible gun ownership. When your guns get stolen, it would seem to be the responsible thing to do to report that immediately. Who is the NRA defending by fighting this? https://morganhilltimes.com/judge-rules-in-favor-of-morgan-hill-gun-law/

Those minor league teams know what they are though. You don't really see any of them on TV. They tend to market themselves as a local product. It's a good bang for your buck versus the big leagues. Colleges rely on alumni and the local community as well. There is a whole school pride element, and college football thrives in areas where there is not a pro competitor. XFL doesn't seems to know what it is. They are in markets that already have pro teams. They are playing in stadiums that they can't fill and they want national TV viewers. I just don't see it. But then again, The Rock turns everything he touches into gold (Rampage made $428 million?!?) so who knows?

Well I'm not really defending it, but I left that guy on the ship for the rest of the story and barely noticed him. It was a pretty boring story after that though. It lost any real momentum after the Great Hunt.

I'm ok with traffic enforcement. I mean that is really the primary job of the highway patrol. I don't know if it is like this everywhere, but city police and sheriffs will rarely pull you over unless it is something blatant where I live. CHP, on the other hand, are looking to give out tickets. But yeah, we should invest in a more robust social worker program.

The trooper story line was a bit of silly fun. My soldier was delightfully arrogant about his special forces squad. That, the bounty hunter, and the Jedi Knight are the ones I played through all the way.

So a cartoonist was dropped from about 120 newspapers for a BLM comic because it generated a ton of complaints. At first I'm thinking, alright, I get that the comic page is not really the place for major political statements. But then I saw the comic and I was like, that's it? That's all it takes to get a bunch of complaints? So weird. The people complaining about this comic are probably the same complaining about the cancel culture.

Well, you could always pay the $10-15 a month to make that xp bonus permanent.

Yeah, you can be a goody two-shoes sith or a jerkface jedi.

I mean, a family vacation to Disneyland isn't exactly extreme. But yeah, they shouldn't be paying minimum wage. If you have a full time job at a profitable tech company, you should be making a decent salary.

Yeah, the Garmin attack was pretty massive. It seems a bit silly to hold a bunch of people's workout data hostage for $10 million, but people were freaking out. Why exercise if we aren't going to get our digital accolades?!?

I disagree. Trump has been a train wreck, and he has put terrible people in important positions. Personally, just replacing Betsy Davos will improve the trajectory of my profession in education. That will only happen under a new administration. We are still going to be dealing with a pandemic for the foreseeable future. I have a hard time believing Biden could do as badly as Trump in handling it. He certainly isn't going to threaten to withhold funding from schools if they don't open their doors. Biden also probably doesn't use some Federal police force in Portland. I'm not sure how anyone can get behind that action. That alone should be enough to say "This guy is worse than the alternative." edit: A year ago, I partially agreed with you. I would rather have 2 mediocre guys serving 4 year terms than 1 mediocre guy getting a full 8, but I was pretty bleh on both. But watching everything unfold in 2020 has been eye opening. A career politician is sadly an upgrade to the mess we have right now.

There are a number of countries with better models. We don't compare well with others: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2015/oct/us-health-care-global-perspective Right now you have a few mega-insurance companies running the show. There isn't much competition when they all are making a tremendous profit at the expense of their customers. There is also very little choice. Most people are at the mercy of their employer, and the employer is going to choose the best deal for their bottom line, not for their employees. I say tear it all down.

So apparently Amazon is launching their own game service, like Steam, GoG, Epic, etc. I mean, I rolled my eyes at first, but then it turns out my Prime account gets me a ton of free titles, and they look pretty good. So yeah, playing Treachery in Beatdown City now.

I think Peaky Blinders is the main character, but I've never watched the show.

The sad part there is that you know 3 people whose insurance refused to pay for their care. We all pay a bunch of money to insurance companies hoping they will cover our medical bills when it is in their best interest to cover as little as possible. Then we hope the hospital will cut us a deal if the insurance refuses to pay. It's a stupid system.

Imagine that, a social media platform that sucks up all your personal data! Unheard of!

Yep.

Well would you look at that, the one game I figured was never going to happen actually has a video up... It's been 8 years or so, and it looks terrible, but the intro made me smile a bit.

Every school district in my county is starting out in distance learning, so that is a relief from that perspective for me, my wife, and my kids. We have no real capacity to test, and the plans change almost daily. Stage 2 involves only having half the students attending school in person each day. That sounds nice, but it isn't actually cutting my class sizes in half, so that kind of defeats the purpose. I don't know, I report back to work on August 10th and I assume I will be teaching digitally as of the 13th, but it's going to be a bit of a mess. I've got to create a weird schedule where I teach online classes to 170 students and keep my 2 kids plus a neighbor's kid on task for a regular school day. It will be an adventure. Oh and we are adopting a new textbook curriculum, but that is low on my list of worries. My parents, sister, and her two young kids live in Georgia, so things could be much worse. Some states are set up for some serious issues.

Phoenix Point has come a long way since release and was pretty awesome when I played it recently, so I would recommend it.

It's humorous how often he tweets ridiculous things, but as he said, his voting base doesn't care about any of that stuff. They will stay loyal even if he shoots someone on main street in broad daylight, or whatever it was he claimed. Apparently he is going to try and use executive power to ban tik tok, which is something you would expect China to do to a foreign company, and not typically the other way around. Seems stupid.

LC, you might dig some of these new smart exercise machines. Everybody raves about the Peloton, and Zwift is basically an MMO for stationary bikes and treadmills. It's all a bit pricey to start, but might be worth looking into.

Relax, it was just poking fun at Volo with the train comment. I don't think it is as easy to separate violence and poverty as you are making it sound. Central American immigration is being driven by both. They may not be traditional war-torn areas like Syria or the DRC, but I'm not sure why that makes them any less desperate. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/18/trump-administration-threatened-cut-foreign-aid-if-central-american-countries-dont-stem-migration/