You’re absolutely on the right track. He was literally based on Trump, per the directors.

Here’s the version I have that I think is more accurate

Stop simping for Daddy Donald and fascism, he ain’t gonna let you suck his toes.

America has never addressed those issues and we’ve still regressed so much since Reagan was in office. Fuck the US and fuck the Flavor-Aid about “American Exceptionalism” they pour down our throats from the moment we first enter a school. I found the pledge of undying loyalty weird when I was in elementary school, and I don’t like it any more 30 years later with all the other things I now know they lied about or swept under the rug.

America has never been great and I have never been proud to be from this country.

One thing I will say about Obama is that he did try. Years ago, somebody put together a list of all his campaign promises and the only one he didn’t do anything about was closing Guantanamo Bay. Every other campaign promise said “blocked by Republicans” next to it. People forget that the rest of the government was controlled by a Republican party who said that even in the short time they didn’t have majority control that they’d rather burn the government to the ground than let a black man pass any laws. The Democrats capitulating at every like they always do didn’t help, of course, but it wasn’t like he didn’t try to do what he said he was going to.

All the other stuff he did, though? Yeah, that’s on him. There was plenty of “business as usual” during his terms when it came to things like drone strikes on civilians and deportation camps.

There have been numerous studies about this, and they have all shown that this doesn’t happen. Canada did a multi-year trial with one town in the 2000s (before the program was shut down and the records sealed/destroyed by the conservative administration once they gained power) that showed a drop in workers in only two groups: high-school kids and pregnant women. It also coincided with a general increase in economic activity as well as a sharp increase in both grades in school and the number of kids graduating and going on to college afterward- especially among poor households. The general theory was that the extra money created financial security in poorer households and high-school kids didn’t have to work/drop out and get a job to help put food on the table and could therefore focus more on school and have a better chance at going to college and better job prospects in the future, breaking the cycle of poverty.

Y2K is the perfect example of a crisis averted. There was a major problem that would’ve crashed computer systems all over the world, potentially bringing down power grids, financial institutions, hospital networks, etc. But the problem was identified well ahead of time and programmers and engineers spent like a full year working to ensure that the problem was fixed and wouldn’timpact anything, so it never became A Problem like the media said it was.

Did the Cold War ever really end? I feel like the names of the players may have changed, but the board is still there and the pieces are still moving.

Most of us have a roof over our heads and steady food in our bellies which is not historically how things have been.

I don’t have the outright stats to say so definitively, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is true for the smallest percent of the US population since the Great Depression. The average American has less than $300 in their bank account. Credit card debt is increasing as fast as it ever has, and people are defaulting on that debt at the highest rates of all time. Most people are living paycheck to paycheck (at least 60% of the population), and there is not a single county in the country where a person making the median wage in that county can afford the median cost of a home in that same county. We lost more money during the 2008 recession than during the Great Depression, and most people never recovered even though the economy recovered that money in about a year - 90% of it went to the wealthy, who had also lost the least. The homelessness crisis has become so bad that it’s called the homelessness epidemic, and the homeless population is also increasing at the fastest rate that it ever has. Wealth disparity is worse in the US today than during the French Revolution, where the price of a loaf of bread hit an all-time high of a day’s wage for the average worker.

The average American is one medical emergency away from going bankrupt, and diseases that we had thought were on the verge of eradication are making a comeback while we continue to ignore the ongoing COVID pandemic that we still don’t know how it truly affects us. COVID has been found in everything from the brain to the testicles and is linked to infertility and a million other issues that will cripple the size of the workforce in the years to come due to Long COVID symptoms preventing people from working.

These are hard times made by weak, greedy men who refuse to hand over the reins and want to make things even worse.

Things have always been worse if you weren’t a straight, white, able-bodied man, but I think it’s been a long time since it was this bad for such a large swath of the population on the basic metrics of food, shelter, and financial security - at least in the US.

Considering Biff was based on Trump in the 80s…

That was the implication. Somebody’s getting a blow job on my 65th birthday, and it sure as hell isn’t gonna be me.

I used to work with a guy who had a Tachoma that he loved and he only used it for offroading. He kept a pair of spare axles in the bed to swap out on the trail if he snapped one.

I think he means that the engine, transmission, and frame are the same, not necessarily the body.

Also, I don’t think you two really disagree with each other, as his first comment was:

The big one is a work truck and should not be driven as a commuter. It really shouldn’t be allowed on roads where cargo trucks aren’t allowed.

The horrible sightlines of modern pickups is a different issue, and I was actually going to post that same chart in this thread because I was thinking of it too. I will add that the pickup is about the same size as the tank, though, and has a worse view.

The average lifespan in the US has fallen 3 years in a row and is the same as the part of the UK with the worst average lifespan. With the destruction of the CDC and the removal of food safety inspections they keep attempting, I don’t think many of us will have to worry about it.

Besides, Berretas are cheap.

His speech patterns and dialogue match up surprisingly well with Jim Jones of the famous Jonestown Massacre. Once somebody like that has a following, it doesn’t matter how crazy he gets, the diehard believers will literally die hard for the guy.

The first campaign drew the cult together from a cult that was already there (a groomed voter base who will vote Republican no matter who) and the first term bonded them together against an enemy (everybody with common sense) while the Republican party and the entire media insulated them from how bad he is. There were some people who saw what he did and turned away - he got less votes this time around than he did last time, and that’s even with the questions of election interference that keep cropping up - but that just means that the people left are the crazies who would defend him even if he personally started shooting up schools.

American politics is so screwed up that most people have little clue of what exactly happens in this country. A coworker of mine just the other day was effectively saying that daddy Trump had to hurt us because big-meanie Biden ruined the government deficit.

I believe it’s a hormone thing because otherwise nobody would have a second kid. Apparently the hormones kick in and make you forget the pain while also giving you a big hit of dopamine so that you connect having a kid to being happy.

I saw somebody say that older rounds were designed to be used that way while newer rounds are meant to be aimed at center mass (both from at least a certain distance away to let the energy dissipate before it hits somebody/something), but cops have both kinds in their arsenal and fire them both directly at people from point-blank range - breaking all the rules for their use.

IIRC, rubber “bullets” are somewhere around 30mm, which isn’t that far off from the size of the rounds grenade launchers commonly use - I think those are usually 30-40mm. I saw somebody recently say that they’re the size of 8 or even 4-gauge shotgun slugs, and an 8-gauge is 25% larger than a 12-gauge.

They’re also not rubber like people think of when they hear the name. They’re a metal slug wrapped in a layer of rubber or foam.

Should’ve gone for the thermite, then at least we could call him a “hot” boomer.

I would disagree with this sentiment on a basic game design level. I don’t know about the Zelda games, I didn’t care enough about BotW to play more than a few hours, but designing a large map that incorporates multiple biomes in a believable way is much more difficult than creating a bunch of smaller levels that don’t have to have any relation to each other in the slightest. You can get away with a lot more in terms of map geometry and set pieces when you load into each level individually.

This is obviously different when you’re talking about Bethesda-style load into every building style environments vs Elden Ring “You see that castle in the distance? You’ll be going in there eventually” design, but the fact that Bethesda makes their interiors separate from the rest of the world is how they cheap out on their games. It’s less hardware intensive and you can cheat a lot more in your design. And on a gameplay level that goes for Ubisoft-style collectathon map objects (and Zelda shrines in this case), but that’s not unique to open-world games - it’s a lazy cop-out that game devs have used forever to pad out their games. Collecting all the secret skulls in Halo is the same thing, but because it’s implemented well and doesn’t drag on forever with no reward like most open-world collectibles, it feels totally different.

Honestly, probably both. The fact that stuff isn’t being deleted anymore and that they make carve-outs in the rules for hate against specific minorities would embolden people to post more hateful content.