A big part of streaming company retention policy is promising things to people who are in the process of cancelling their accounts. So… why not cancel your account every couple of months?

If someone is going to send me a gift card or offer a free month of service every time I call, I’ve got a strong economic incentive to call early and often.

Fordism is dead. Sorry. Try again next Industrial Revolution.

Why bother when you’re using a parent’s credit card? Why bother when you’re flush? $20/mo on a $20k income versus a $200k income creates very different incentives.

Won’t Purchase Full-Price Video Games, New Study Finds

The only game I’ve ever seen sold at full price on a consistent basis was Factorio. Every other publisher seems sold on putting $60-80 on the label and then floating 10-30% discounts as the sales cycle permits.

It’s the Macy’s model for sales. “You’re getting a $20 discount on a $60 game” sells more titles than “Here’s a game for $40”.

It’s funny, because Trump could easily make the same claim.

First time I’ve ever heard of a social media app behaving like this, certainly.

I just have to assume its because Republicans make such good content. How else do you explain Ben Shapiro, Andrew Tate, and Joe Rogan blowing up my YouTube Recommends section? They’re just winning in the marketplace of ideas, clearly.

He released his presidential memoir in November of 2020.

Try again.

Bibliography of Barack Obama

But let’s not discount Bush and cheney during that presidency…

Of course not. They were corrupt af.

I would say the big difference between Bush/Cheney and Obama/Biden is that the Bush family was already in the high eight-figures when he ran for Texas Governor. Cheney was already a CEO and married into the Coors dynasty. Meanwhile, the Obamas had a million-and-change in retirement savings when he took office, only to balloon it 70x.

Obama was promoted to the aristocracy. Cheney clawed his way up through Wyoming state politics. Bush was born there.

releasing a book after you leave office

He released his books during his campaign for President and profited enormously of the residuals and subsequent compound return on investments.

funnel taxpayer money into your own businesses, your friends and family’s business, solicit blatant bribes from both corporations and foreign countries, manipulating the stock market to enable insider trading, and on top of all that making bets on your own actions…

The Untouchables: How the Obama administration protected Wall Street from prosecutions

I’ll spot you that Obama didn’t pocket nearly as much as he could have. But it is crazy to suggest a man who has become a fixture of the Wall Street speaking circuit didn’t profit from the bank bailouts he oversaw.

He didn’t do that stuff while president.

He absolutely did.

Clinton, the Democratic president who was in office for two terms between 1993 and 2001, started his presidency with a net worth of $1.3 million, and after leaving office, had accumulated a wealth of $120 million, according to celebritynetworth.com.

Per the outlet, it is also thought that Clinton and his wife Hillary have earned more than $250 million to date from speaking engagements, book advances and royalties, and through investment and consulting fees.

Barack Obama was the president who saw the second highest increase to his wealth coming out of office, at around 5,300 percent.

After the Democrat was in office for two terms between 2009 to 2017, he accumulated a net worth of $70 million, up from $1.3 million.

What’s the difference between $70M and $4B+?

It is crazy that the defense of a corrupt liberal oligarch boils down to “he didn’t sell out hard enough”

Reminds me of Joe Biden, shilling for Israel for pennies on the dollar compared to his Republican peers.

Didn’t Obama enjoy an enormous windfall both during and after his presidency, thanks to a series of book deals, speaking tours, and Netflix specials? My man’s got $70M to his name right now. He started 2005 as one of the brokest Senators in the country.

I just don’t think this is the guy to critique Trump for getting rich off the back of public office.

Vote Dillon Breeze 2028.

If Pete Buttigieg thought he could talk like this an become President, he’d do it in a New York Minute. If Ted Cruz thought he could win like this, he’d do it in a split second. If Bernie Sanders thought this would guarantee a win, he’d probably give it a shot. What does it prove, though?

What you’ve illustrated is the superficial nature of retail democratic campaigning. Is Dillon Breeze a good bureaucrat? A savvy diplomat? A patriot more interested in the interest of his fellows than himself? Fuck if I know. I just know he doesn’t talk like a Boomer, so he’s not going to win the GenX+ vote.

My guy could be the next FDR or the next Donald Trump. I have no useful information from your word salad. There’s nothing in this to actually make a political decision on, and yet I’m expected to… not like this guy, because he uses GenZ slang words, and that’s just about it.

Idk what I’m supposed to do with the advice of dozens of mental health experts. Anyone with the ego to run for President of the United States is arguably mentally unstable to begin with. Trump’s always been a degenerate little freak. And now he’s a senile degenerate freak.

But he’s hardly the first President in US history to suffer from Old Person Brain and get shepherded around by a gaggle of scheming viziers while the country crumbles around them. What is anyone going to do about it? The Senate is packed with people exactly as senile and corrupt and petty as Trump. And nothing in the next election cycle seems like it will change that.

Hell, Democrats were working kinda-sorta hard to put an 80-year-old woman into Susan Collin’s Senate seat barely more than a week ago. In NC, they’re running Roy Cooper at 68 years young. Meanwhile, 73 year old Sherrod Brown is looking to reclaim his Ohio seat for another six years. These are the Fresh New Faces we’re supposed to rally behind to defeat the Trump Gerontocracy?

I don’t bring up hylomorphism when I talk about physics

Psychology isn’t a question of physics. The complex machine that is the human brain isn’t some single-action lever with a discrete well-defined input/output relationship. Neither is the human brain some binary circuit governed by logic gates and trivially deterministic sequences.

At some point, you have to approach psychology experimentally. You can’t just wave your hands and assume you know how the black box of the mind is going to work. And you can’t dismiss the accumulated experimental data because you don’t like the person who spearheaded its compilation.

Freud would give you a long diatribe about the distinction between Id, Ego, and Superego.

You can believe a thing is wrong and still do it. Ask any smoker. You can do a thing and wrestle with the psychological consequences afterwards. Ask anyone who has ever felt guilty. You can plan to behave a certain way and become derailed by impulses or anxiety. Ask anyone who has ever succumbed to fear or pain.

Self-policing is a logical response to an illogical/immoral impulse. Tossing cookies out of the cabinet and ice cream out of the fridge is the first step towards dieting. Cancelling your credit card is a technique to curb impulsive spending. How is this any different?

We should get all of our advice from little kids.

These articles tend to lean on click-baity “One Neat Trick” headlines, while disguising the more practical hit-or-miss reality of facial recognition software. Sometimes you can outsmart the computer. Sometimes it just fouls the system and fails out. Sometimes the system works exactly as intended.

Little kids experiment around the edges of a system until they get bored or frustrated. In the aggregate, they can be very clever just through the number of permutations they try. Individually, your 12-year-old isn’t going to Hack The Internet reliably.

“Wait a minute, you’re not one of my students. You’re six laptops in a trenchcoat”

“The era of fossil fuels must come to an end. We should embrace solar, wind, and nukular energ- why is everyone laughing?”

I would argue that “aspiring to be a billionaire” is more of a fantasy than a fixation in the population at large. People don’t really get to choose whether they become billionaires, as they have very little control over the mass appeal of their business ventures.

I would counter that becoming a billionaire is what results in multiple mental illnesses, as the rapid elevation of social status, the alienation from your non-billionaire peers, and the functional immunity from legal censure drives you insane.

Like, JK Rowling didn’t set out to become a billionaire when she wrote Harry Potter. But once her net worth crested into the nine-figures, her mouth-brain barrier disintegrated along with any sense of humility or decency.