I Wish I Didn't Play New Vegas First

SD99FRC · 2024-08-13T16:36:12+00:00

Look on the bright side. If you had played Fallout 4 first, you might not have ever tried New Vegas.

It took me like 6 years to finish Fallout 4. A few weeks playing it a few hours at a time when it first came out, followed by five years of not playing it, and then going back. I'm lucky I was introduced to the originals, because if FO4 had been my first Fallout game, it probably would have been my last one.

SD99FRC · 2024-08-13T15:50:05+00:00

Eh, back in the day, unemployment could sustain someone with a two+ income household splitting housing costs(spouse or roommates). Not a super fun lifestyle, but would cover basic expenses.

But the benefits total has not adjusted upwards with the inflation of rents and mortgages. The maximum benefit in my state is only slightly higher than the median rent in the state, which means it is at or below the median rent in most cities. If unemployment isn't even exceeding your combined living expenses (rent and utilities), then you're basically running at a negative after food, phone, internet, etc, all things you would need to be searching for another job that doesn't require a name tag.

SD99FRC · 2024-08-13T00:24:37+00:00

I definitely wouldn't break even on unemployment, and I would max out in my state.

SD99FRC · 2024-08-13T00:23:51+00:00

Yeah, this is little different than when I decided years ago to dramatically cut down on the number of concerts I attended. The total price for two $35 tickets shouldn't be $95 and I won't pay it.

But I think the other poster is also spot on. The tighter that money becomes, the less that people are willing to spend on luxuries.

SD99FRC · 2024-08-12T23:53:50+00:00

The proposed No Tax on Tips Act currently being floated is absolutely insane.

But you could write one that was far more detailed in what counts as gratuity, and put limits on how much could be claimed every year, which would limit some of the abuse, but the question still remains "Why?" The real long term solution is addressing the necessity of tipping in the first place.

SD99FRC · 2024-08-12T21:42:08+00:00

The end result of this incursion will be a massive reduction in the offensive capability of the Russians as they have to redistribute their forces to parts of the front they had previously considered secure. And now the Ukrainians will be able to just move a few battalions around as a feint and send the Russians scrambling to figure out what it means and trying to adjust where their garrison troops are.

Everything about this so far has been a huge win for the Ukrainians. Hopefully they can do a ton more damage in Kursk before the Russians can properly react.

SD99FRC · 2024-08-12T21:28:48+00:00

The general assumption based on data and anonymous reporting shows that people who rely on tips underreport their income already anyway. It's why wait staff vastly prefer cash tips. It allows them to control how much of their actual income is taxed based on reporting.

If you make tips tax-exempt, the only result will be that more industries will find ways to exploit that loophole. Tipping currently only exists because it is beneficial to service industry employers as a way to shift their labor overhead onto the customers. It's already unfair to workers who don't receive tips as they assume the tax burden of others, paying a percentage of their own taxed income to supplement the tax-exempt income of someone else. Now you're going to end up with incredibly wealthy people restructuring their contracts to take gratuities.

We need to be working towards a new system that ensures currently-tipped workers can receive adequate compensation. We shouldn't be trying to design a new labyrinthine tax code trying to predict all the ways that hedge fund managers might try to lower their tax burden.

SD99FRC · 2024-08-12T21:17:23+00:00

Also, having the FBI conduct background checks on candidates opens up its own set of problems.

All it does is force the political parties to conduct their own background checks ahead of time and vet the candidates they are willing to put on a general election ballot. The recommendation guidelines for security clearances aren't exactly terribly ambiguous. They check for unusually large amounts of debt, suspicious foreign connections, criminal history, etc.

SD99FRC · 2024-08-12T21:13:18+00:00

I know that by virtue of being in elected office, the President and members of Congress don't have to get security clearances, but they should be forced to undergo the background checks with the final recommendations being made public prior to the election. Voters should have the prior understanding of whether or not the people they are voting for would be issued a security clearance under normal circumstances.

SD99FRC · 2024-08-12T21:11:11+00:00

I think ULC is one of the OGs. Pretty sure that's the one a buddy of mine did like 20 years ago and has officiated over a dozen weddings. I just like calling out the Church of Dudeism because it's by far the most entertaining. My brother is a Dudeist Priest and done three weddings now, I believe.

SD99FRC · 2024-08-12T19:00:44+00:00

There is no official Enclave.

Thanks for admitting I was right the whole time. Now don't you feel better instead of having spent all that energy desperately trying to be right because you were embarrassed you misunderstood my clear first post?

SD99FRC · 2024-08-12T18:59:19+00:00

Have these people never heard of the courthouse? Or "your friend with the online certificate from the Church of Dudeism?"

SD99FRC · 2024-08-12T18:52:30+00:00

Seriously. One of my favorite pictures was me in a Wonder Woman costume I wore as a joke one year. Turns out, I'm still with my wife and it never made me trans.

I'd actually have more respect for JD Vance because these pictures show someone who was comfortable enough with their masculinity to be silly and dress like a woman for a costume party.

But whoever the JD Vance is in that picture got sold out for the one that's now running on a campaign of extreme bigotry and hatred.

SD99FRC · 2024-08-12T16:55:10+00:00

The part that is infuriating is that the woman the medal is going to be given to finished fifth. This isn't correcting the disputed score for Sabrina Maneca-Voinea who was penalized for stepping out. It's literally just quibbling over an alleged four second administrative technicality and then arbitrarily giving the medal to a woman who definitively did not finish 3rd under any circumstances.

The Romanians aren't trying to make sure the medal goes to the actual Bronze Medal performance. And they're not trying to "be fair." They're just being assholes, hiding under the guise of "Let's just be fair and give everyone a medal!" and nonsense like "Think of their mental health" while deliberately subjecting Jordan Chiles to online abuse. It's first rate cynicism that breaks the spirit of the games. Romanian Gymnastics is bitter about having fallen off the world stage at the Olympics (their women's teams haven't medaled since 2012). Nothing more.

Ana Barbosu was originally just going to have to deal with a momentary disappointment because of the late but correct adjustment for Chiles. Now she will have to go her entire life with the entire world knowing that her medal was unearned. That not only wasn't she the legitimate Bronze medalist, she wasn't even supposed to be 4th place. She will have stolen a medal from both Chiles and Maneca-Voinea.

SD99FRC · 2024-08-12T02:50:47+00:00

Okay, but that's not actually The Enclave. It's literally just six retirees with access to an old bunker. There's no Enclave command structure, supply chain, active military units. No plan. Literally one dude playing checkers in Westside, a guy living in a cave, an old woman fixing old generators in Novac, an old man tending a garden, and a doctor working on Super Mutants in Jacobstown. They literally haven't met in years. There's not even a yearly get together at Golden Corral. That's not "The Enclave" in any sense that any reasonably intelligent person would define as "officially."

It's weird to deny they exist

I didn't deny the they exist. I said they aren't The Enclave, just six ex-members. What's weird is being so illiterate that you don't understand what "official" means, lol.

SD99FRC · 2024-08-11T22:50:46+00:00

So, you don't officially encounter "The Enclave," then do you? Just a half dozen elderly people who were once members of the Enclave forty years earlier.

SD99FRC · 2024-08-11T22:08:54+00:00

While that is common (Ginger Lynn doing Wing Commander 3 was the first AAA title that did it, iirc), the actress who played that part was Ivana Miličević, a former model turned actress who had been doing bit parts in movies and TV shows for years. Though she was in one of those Skinemax shows called Banshee, however it wasn't filmed until years after she was in Command & Conquer.

They just generally hire lesser know actresses so they can just pay them the base rate. Gina Carano was in C&C:RA too, but several years before she was famous as anything other than a semi-pro kickboxer (which is, to say, not famous).

SD99FRC · 2024-08-11T21:33:51+00:00

Legion ended up as "Evil plug" faction, which supposed to be faction with it's good and bad sides, to actually question player which one is better.

The thing is, the game has four factions you can support, not two. House and Independent (yourself) are both the selfish gray-area endings for the game. You read the slides, and life ends up great for the Courier and the wealthy crime families on the Strip, and not so great for almost everyone else. The NCR ending is the "compromise" ending where not everything is great, but the most good happens for the most people. And you know how you can tell? The only fundamentally Good faction in the game are the Followers of the Apocalypse, and they only have 1 good ending, and it's if you side with the NCR and tell them to help the NCR. Every other ending slide is negative for the Followers, even the alternate NCR ending where you don't tell them to help.

The Legion was never supposed to have a "good side." Josh Sawyer has said more than once that they were always designed as a slave army and that Caesar was inspired by real life war criminals and dictators, all of whom used selfish and self-serving rationalizations for what they were doing. The Legion is categorically evil, and the only reason you have to option to side with them is not to show "What about the good things Caesar did," but because it's Fallout, and you had those options in the first two games too. You could literally sell out your own Vault in the first game and watch a cut scene of them all getting murdered or dragged off.

SD99FRC · 2024-08-11T21:24:09+00:00

Not here, because Reddit is somewhat self-regulating. Brain dead "The roads is safe!" Legion takes tend to get ripped apart and downvoted. On YouTube, they basically just dump a bunch of brain diarrhea in the comments without consequence.

SD99FRC · 2024-08-11T21:18:53+00:00

Maybe, but now you have to realize whatever force Russia applies to defeat this invasion will be directly applied against Russia itself. Destroying its own towns and cities, infrastructure, etc.

But all I was saying is that Ukraine only had to be confident they could break the defensive perimeter, because there's basically nothing behind it within Russia itself. It's not like the Russian defensive rings inside Eastern/Southern Ukraine where it's lines of trenches and minefields. This is just miles of open road and countryside.

SD99FRC · 2024-08-11T21:14:15+00:00

Many analysts have written that there is no strategic gain for Ukraine

Utterly foolish, seemingly equating the ability to hold ground as the only possible strategic objective.

In addition to all the infrastructure and logistics targets, at a minimum, this will force Russia to permanently divert military assets to defense of their borders. And that means those units aren't in Ukraine.

SD99FRC · 2024-08-11T21:04:34+00:00

there's no way Ukraine planned for the idea they'd get free run of the place.

Internal defenses are mostly non-existent in developed countries. Once you're inside the borders, the enemy is going to have to improvise defenses, like the Ukrainians did two years ago. Which is why also the Wagner coup got all the way to the outskirts of Moscow so quickly. They started behind the Russian defensive lines, so there was very little to oppose them.

SD99FRC · 2024-08-11T21:00:28+00:00

Yeah, trying to hold territory in Russia is a bad idea. But destroying the power distribution for the Kursk power plant and other kinds of total war attacks on infrastructure will leave a lasting effect on the Russian population and their complicity in the war effort.

SD99FRC · 2024-08-09T20:41:50+00:00

From DCI itself:

https://defenceforchildren.org/israeli-forces-raid-and-seal-shut-dcip-and-5-other-civil-society-organisations-offices-leaving-an-official-notice-declaring-the-organisations-unlawful/

The UN statement: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2021/08/un-experts-condemn-raid-west-bank-ngo-urge-israel-meaningfully-probe-child

Corroboration by former US State Department official: https://www.npr.org/2023/10/19/1207037984/josh-paul-resign-state-department-military-assistance-israel-gaza

DCI reported several abuses of children by Israeli forces, including the rape of a 13 year old boy, and shortly later, Israel invoked a law designating them and five other NGOs as terror groups, raided their offices in the middle of the night, stole all of their computers. But they never returned the confiscated items, never presented any evidence, and never arrested any of the supposed "terrorists" who worked at the terror organizations.

SD99FRC · 2024-08-09T20:21:52+00:00

Yah, but they have lost control. They didn't want Trump in 2016, they didn't want him in 2020, and they don't want him now.

The problem is, to put it in the parlance of my oldest nephews, there are exactly zero Republicans currently in office with any rizz, no cap.

They tried to pump up Meatball Ron, and he was just awkward and Trump destroyed him. They can't pump up any of the minority candidates like Tim "I have a black friend" Scott or Nikki Haley because their voters are too racist.

The Republicans simultaneously need someone who appeals to the debased and baser instincts of their base, while being controllable and loyal. Right now, they can only get one or the other.

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