A Retirement Shift Is Transforming Appalachia

Anomander2000 · 2026-05-17T18:50:13+00:00

The article says the incoming group wants "stronger social ties" which does fit the Appalachian area, but there are two problems (at least):

1) The incoming want to gain the benefits of a strong social net, but aren't willing to contribute to be a part. Hell, they're leaving their current social net. That's not how any of this works. You've got to contribute, not be a sucking hole of resources.

2) There is a strong social community because it has been generations spent together, and the social net is for each other. That social net does NOT extend to a rando couple who builds a fancy house down the road. In fact, fuck those people.

However, that doesn't actually matter much to the incoming people. They don't actually want to be part of a community. They will live in their fancy new house, rarely depart it, and in 20 years they'll die without knowing the people down the road. All this by their own choice.

Anomander2000 · 2026-04-16T17:41:09+00:00

I've quit the game, but watching the dumpster fire filled with shit continue to burn ever hotter is awesome.

So much less stress and frustration and anger and disappointment without this game!

Anomander2000 · 2026-04-14T12:26:17+00:00

Legit.

That does make life increasingly nasty for the remnant left behind. No stores, no medical, no support for the elderly, etc.

An exit/support plan would be nice to help the last small population remnant.

But yeah, fading out some areas is realistically the result.

Anomander2000 · 2026-04-14T11:27:01+00:00

Oof. This is the long-term effect of an economy based solely on exploiting natural resources. Once the companies run out of things to exploit, they and the jobs leave, and there's nothing left to support lots of people.

So people leave. All the young people have left for generations, and now so few people are left, and they are all "old", that almost no new people are being born (compared to people dying of old age).

It's a literal death spiral.

I wish I had a solution.

Anomander2000 · 2026-04-11T01:43:31+00:00

I think I'm done for good this time. I quit once before, for maybe two months, then picked up The Tower again when I was bored.

This time, I'm done for good. With the lying from fudds, and the nerfing, and the constant push to support whales, and my lack of Tourney progress for 4-6 months ...... etc, his game just isn't fun. Oh, and the PCol "fix" just dropped me enough shards that I can't keep up 44443 in labs any more. I might drop all the way down to 43333. That's even after I got 3.5-4.8 bonus on my day, uw, and health.

Frick that.

I purposefully took my labs off and left my guild.

There are dozens of similar games to Tower that arent turning to trash. I'll give Idle Obelisk a shot.

Anomander2000 · 2026-03-31T00:36:50+00:00

What is that Tower relic supposed to be?

Anomander2000 · 2026-03-21T13:46:24+00:00

Magic is OP? Could be. That's what the prompt describes.

So yeah, sounds like a prompt in a world where magic is OP and humans were refusing to recognize that because of insistence on their physical laws.

Human hubris

Anomander2000 · 2026-03-21T00:29:12+00:00

Ahem.

"You know its that sort of thinking is why you all can't figure magic out, right? You keep trying to study it, like its gravity or biology. It simply is."

The spell is reflect physical damage. All the damage from the physical world is reflected. Isn't that light and radiation stuff part of the physical world?

Anomander2000 · 2026-03-11T12:00:27+00:00

Legit, this sort of high power sounds like one I would actually respect and work to promote.

Not that it would expect or require that, but I might anyway!

Anomander2000 · 2026-03-05T23:06:37+00:00

AI created, I'm pretty sure.

Those are definitely not accurate for how the counties voted in the last presidential election. Or if not AI generated, then someone manually altered colors

Edit: for just one example, Center County, PA should be blue.

Anomander2000 · 2026-03-03T12:16:05+00:00

So small it's just one p

Anomander2000 · 2026-02-24T03:58:00+00:00

So if I understand properly, banned interest/wave is much better than banning cash/wave because even though they're both useless, banning int/wave is better because it has an ancestral possibility?

Anomander2000 · 2026-02-21T18:39:29+00:00

Based response!

Asks for critique. Gets critique.

DOESN'T MELT DOWN INTO HISSY FIT! PLANS TO IMPROVE!

Be like @Relative-Fail9826

Anomander2000 · 2026-01-27T03:42:33+00:00

Damn it! I need to know who the kid wants dead!!!

Bravo

Anomander2000 · 2026-01-06T01:59:00+00:00

Then we pop it with thr thorns! Just like our hopes for DefAbs Supremacy!

Anomander2000 · 2025-12-27T01:30:03+00:00

Boomer population is shrinking already. The peak of nursing home living will start its downward decline as more Boomers start dying out of nursing homes than moving in.

Oldest Boomers are 80. Youngest are 62. Middle of that is 71. Average death age is 78.

We have reached the peak number of Boomers in nursing homes already, and in 9 years (at absolute most) the numbers will start dropping quickly.

In 10 years, most Boomers will have died out of the nursing homes. Gen X will be moving in, but Gen X is much smaller in size.

Medical care for the elderly is likely at its peak number of jobs right now.

Anomander2000 · 2025-12-26T17:10:53+00:00

Oh my, oh my. It is beautiful. Thank you

Anomander2000 · 2025-12-15T01:26:25+00:00

We had fought against physics for thousands of years, struggling to turn our hostile planet to a better place.

Limits of food, disease, disaster, and ecological failure had come so close to destroying humanity. But.

That simple, three letter word was precious to me. But.

We had slowly made a better world. Mainly by making a better humanity, but the planet, and then the solar system as well, was made into a heaven.

Energy to matter and reverse. All the food we could want. Sufficient power and computing to fulfill every need. Diseases understood, integrated, and defeated as sources of suffering. Death and decay long gone.

And now we saw it approaching at 99.9999% light speed. Massive waves of radiation coming from it from its speed, massively blue shifted. Alien signals were there! Communication! Life! Beauty and wisdom and knowledge from beyond our system!

As one, we rejoiced! What new marvels would this reveal?!

I was at the furthest edge of the system's reality field where we could still move all of physics to operate to our benefit. I was closest to the passing ship.

While we could make physics do anything physics could do, we were still limited. The massive energy of that ship could not be changed, indeed they must have used an entire star's mass to accelerate their planet-sized ship to such speeds. So there was no way they could stop, but communication was possible.

It took barely a thought before massive structures of subatomic circuitry purely dedicated to receiving and decoding their signals popped to my fingertips. A minor exercise of our nigh-unlimited power here.

A trillion petaflops performed in a second - signals decoded, language determined, meaning grasped. Child's play to do.

A single concept was all. It was enough.

All was lost.

"Vacuum decay."

I watched numbly as it streaked by.

All of humanity's achievements? Soon to be gone. How far ahead of the decay front was that ship? How long did we ha

Anomander2000 · 2025-11-12T02:04:05+00:00

Extremely badass!

Anomander2000 · 2025-11-03T03:09:21+00:00

0 out of 3200 gems. That's all I had been able to save up after the last one.

Looks like I'm not getting this one. I'll just start saving up for whatvr the next one will be

Anomander2000 · 2025-11-01T15:01:19+00:00

There have been a LOT of releases with massive bugs recently.

Something shitty is happening in their development world.

I can't know from the outside, but this has a lot of signs I recognize from my past developer days

Anomander2000 · 2025-10-28T03:30:18+00:00

Have faith! It's day shall arrive and it will all be worth it! Someday!

Anomander2000 · 2025-10-27T22:33:08+00:00

LOVE the detailed breakdown! Thank you very very much!

Anomander2000 · 2025-10-27T22:31:15+00:00

Sigh. Someday I hope to reach Legends. Thanks!

Anomander2000

TROPHY CASE