WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
No bio...
User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
16hr ago
Fine, I'll show you where the bodies are buried.
The Obama administration was shaking down companies, and structuring the settlements to fund left wing NGOs So for example, Eric Holder as Attorney General sued Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank and others, and funneled the settlements through a structure that allowed these companies to pay less if instead of paying the government, they paid leftwing NGOs like ACORN, National Council of La Raza, National Urban League, National Community Reinvestment Coalition, etc.
Picking on the National Urban League, they took this money (or some of this money, money is fungible) and used it to fight Trump in court repeatedly. Here they are in 2020 suing Trump, again in 2025. Oh, and here they were in 2020 suing the administration over how the census was being conducted, resulting in immigration status being excluded from the census. That was pretty significant. Really changes the electoral map.
So you see, by shaking down big banks during the Obama administration, through a structured settlement program, Democrats were able to use federal resources to launder their policy goals beyond the mere 8 years of their administration. I want Republicans to do exactly this. Only instead of big banks, I want them to sue Universities, force them to settle exactly the same way Eric Holder did with malicious prosecution, and then structure those settlements such that they are forced to fund right wing NGOs that will continue to fight for those policy goals after Trump is out of office. Just the same way the National Urban League did for Obama even after he was out of office.
And if you still think this is all too vague, too wishy washy, not even the concepts of a plan, with all these specific, cited, historical examples, I don't know what to tell you.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
18hr ago
Enshittified doesn't mean "is shitty". It means "is shitty because now that you are locked in, they can exploit you". Just being shitty because they're cheapskates that can't spend the money on a good app doesn't count.
I see you are unfamiliar with the Healow app. Yes, it is shitty because they lock you in, and completely stop giving a fuck. It's more or less ubiquitous with Doctors offices, and if your Doctors office uses an app, it's probably Healow. I'm not even aware of another one. I think the Inova hospital system near me doesn't use it... yet. But virtually every other doctors office we had to use in Northern VA used it, although some were better about requiring it than others.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
18hr ago
Don't blame him. I already addressed the "sometimes the government is held by my opponents" problem, and when I said Republicans should do exactly what Democrats have done to harden their policy achievements, and listed specific means and methods they did of achieving this, you deployed tactical ignorance and said I hadn't laid out any plan at all, or even the concepts of a plan.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
19hr ago
Why wouldn't income history be enough to build confidence that I can pay shit back? Naturally, someone who gets paid in cash under the table can't provide one, but even in the land of Freedom such inconveniently physical dealings are rare in the year of 2025 on a high enough salary level... right?
I found out in a rather bizarre and mildly alarming way that income doesn't mean shit.
When I bought a house, they went over my finances with a colonoscopy camera. Credit score of course, but they wanted to know all my assets, all my debts, everything. When I cashed out a bunch of CDs to pay the down payment, they wanted to know why there was a $60 and change difference because of the 30 day interest penalty I paid for breaking them. I actually had zero debt, and enough assets to just buy the house outright. That was apparently enough for them to not even bother verifying my income. They just didn't give a fuck. I only know this because my company's accountant was shocked when she found out I bought a house, because she would have been the one to verify my income and they never contacted her.
The underwriter for the loan, Fannie Mae, also waived the appraisal and went "Fuck it, the house is worth whatever you say it's worth". This was a huge relief for us, even as it set off further red flags about the state of the mortgage industry, because if the appraisal didn't come up to the sale price, we'd be on the hook for the difference. Probably would have come out of reducing the 20% down we had.
This was circa 2021. I've heard some people tell me this story is impossible. My realtor had never see Fannie Mae waive an appraisal before. Apparently it was part of some sort of COVID measure if you had good enough credit.
Anyways, the moral of the story is, income means nothing. Everyone has an income, and yet most people struggle to service their debts.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
20hr ago
This hardware is legitimately too old for it to be that. Its a K6-2 system only a year removed from its release date.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
21hr ago
It used to be the case that you could always opt out by calling a place on the phone, or driving to their physical store, or paying someone in cash.
Oh man, I should have included this story, but I forgot.
I had to sign up for a fucking app for my daughter's pediatrician! They literally handled all test results, scheduling, messaging etc exclusively through the Healow app, which was dog shit. I installed it, and attempted to get the account set up and synced with the doctors office properly, in their fucking lobby, and the piece of shit refused to work. Even just handing them my god damned phone and asking them to do it for me, they couldn't fucking do it. Eventually it just fucking worked for reasons that are opaque to everyone after trying enough times, but then eventually the app refused to update and wouldn't work anymore because my phone was too old. Because when you aren't wrestling with dark patterns and enshittification, there is always planned obsolescence.
We have a different pediatrician now. They have an ongoing problem where our Nurse Practitioner which we see is lazy about getting her files submitted, so our billing is always messed up. Nothing major, sometimes they tell us we owe a copay several weeks after we thought we were caught up. But at least there are actual people there we can speak to reliably, and they don't force us to go through a god damned enshittified app.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
22hr ago
between 7 and 13mm
I. Said. Enthusiast.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
23hr ago
Well, during the Obama administration, their plan to harden the policy objectives against a hostile government was multi pronged.
Slightly in bounds, but still corrupt as hell, they began suing companies and structuring the settlements such that Democratic aligned NGOs were paid out exorbitant warchest. It was a naked shake down, and Bill Barr ended the practice, but then the Biden admin brought it right back. It allowed NGOs to have deep, deep pockets to fight in court everything Trump ever did.
Of course, they didn't stop there. They also fabricated a criminal conspiracy that the Trump administration had to spend virtually their entire presidency fighting in court.
The Biden administration of course emptied the government coffers, throwing money to NGOs as quickly as they could and left the incoming Trump administration right up against the debt ceiling. I think the Trump admin was able to claw some of this back, but it's also being used by leftist organizations to fight them in court.
Since these tactics are just so damned effective, I think Republicans should adopt them. I want to see more political prosecutions, and I want to see more naked corruption between republican governments and their aligned NGOs. Let Trump's DA start suing universities left and right, and structure the settlements so that they have to give some Elon headed NGO all the money, so he can sue them some more long after Trump is out of office. It's a strategy that clearly works since the D's have run it successfully for over 10 years now.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
23hr ago
Yes, but enforcement actions will likely cross from one administration into the next, in which case a friendly administration will just drop it. We've seen this repeatedly. All deeply embedded Democratic partisans need to do is run the clock out until one of their guys gets back in power, and then all is forgiven and things can ratchet another degree.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
Not op, but have a wife who suffers from a lot of anxiety and dysfunction around money.
There exists a huge swath of people that have their loss aversion with money cranked up to 11. They've had the same savings account since their parents signed them up for it as a child, and they aren't changing it. It took me 5 years to convince my wife to just change her savings account from a 0.02% interest account at a credit union she grew up with, to another FDIC insured high yield account that had 3%. She had tens of thousands of dollars in there, it was all the money she had ever saved in that one account rotting away to inflation. Getting the money moved over caused her so much anxiety it was a household event. She was terrified something would happen to it. What would happen? She didn't know, but the overwhelming undefined anxiety was real none the less.
5 years of carrot and stick badgering/showing off my brokerage account, she finally took some of that money and put it into some mutual funds I had selected for her, with a commitment to add more. Then the anxiety took hold again and the plan to move more stopped, because the stock market is scary. At least she left what she'd put in, in. What I convinced her to move over to stocks has now outgrown the balance she left in savings. That makes her happy. But she seems to have memory holed how much she dragged her feet, because she gives me shit for not having her do that sooner or with more money. But that's just marriage I guess.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
I don't know about thousand chapter webfics, but I've been reading Hajime no Ippo for nigh on 20 years, and it's over 1000 chapters. It's a particular relationship between reader and author, a long running manga like this. You get someone's idiosyncratic direct creative output, without the design by committee aspects of a lot of other media. You watch them grow and develop, not just in their craftsmanship, but in their perspective, which often comes through in how the story evolves. As you age with them, they continue telling a story that hits right at your mutually changing maturity level.
Hajime no Ippo and Berserk are more or less the only manga I still read anymore. Everything else either finished, or I lost interest. Now the question is if I live long enough to see anything resembling an ending to either.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
I mean, it largely comes down to just realizing that the "Doesn't completely fuck up your entire life" use case for credit cards is narrow, and the "Completely fucks up your entire life" use case for credit cards is unbounded. In theory a credit card could cover an income or a savings gap. You hear stories all the time of people having to put essential home repairs like a water heater or an HVAC system on a credit card because that's all they had. And yet, I have literally never heard that story end with "And then next month I scrounged up the money to pay it off". The story always goes "And that's why 5 years later I have high 5 low 6 figures in credit card debt". It's almost as if, much as it would have sucked, they'd have been better off without hot water or without central air until they scrounged, picked up hours, did gigs or begged until they had the money.
But who knows, maybe that's my emergency savings privilege talking.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
And yet, like you, tens of millions of responsible middle class people go their entire lives without ever deciding to blow their credit card limit, get a second mortgage and put it on the roulette table, or put their retirement savings into extreme out of the money options recommended on /r/wallstreetbets.
Hmmmmm, I wonder at that assumption. Not many people wear their net worth on their sleeve, and lots of people finance what on the surface looks like a stable middle class lifestyle. They might not take out a second mortgage on their house to bet it on black. But they do take out a variable rate HELOC to remodel the kitchen for a dubious increase in home value.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
As a beard enthusiast, I can assure you they get in the way and are suboptimal. I'm typing this between sets of military presses, and my fucking beard keeps getting caught in my grip between reps. To say nothing of the care I have to take when I'm in the wood shop around heavy machinery. If my daughter didn't break down in tears (and my wife grumbles a good bit too) I'd be at least attempting a clean shaven look these days.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
I've been increasingly wondering at what point you have an IQ low enough, that you develop paranoid delusions in response to a society you can't possibly comprehend. If you've ever interacted with a particularly stupid person, many of them have this obnoxious personality trait of treating everything they don't understand like a personal attack.
I wonder at what point the IQ required to participate in society hits such a threshold that maladaptive mental illness in response to it increases.
I especially wonder at what point the various dark patterns of our society cause this to happen to me.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
Well, so far as heat/ammo problems, I think I just need to commit to be ER LLaser sniper with lots of double heat sinks.
As for the others, who knows. One thing I did notice was that it appeared my mouse was only registering inputs sporadically. My working theory was that a click only registered if it occurred over the span of a frame. I'd noticed it in other games, but it finally annoyed me enough to start trying shit. So I uninstalled the Logitech Mouseware drivers I put on the system to get the mousewheel to work, and it went away. I'm curious if that had anything to do with the keyboard problems too, but we'll find out.
Old hardware, amiright?
MW2 will always have a special place in my heart. Something about the ambient music, the flat shaded graphics, and the utterly alien and somewhat abstract level design felt like a perfect encapsulation of how terrifyingly other the Clans are.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
I mean, sure, technically you aren't wrong.
But even with everything spelled out for them, few people appreciate the reality distorting effects of 30% interest. They don't appreciate how quickly it is to get in trouble, or how slow it is to get out. They either never learned, or never really appreciated the rule of 72. They never had pointed out to them that their credit card debt doubles every 2-3 years, while a gold standard S&P500 index fund earning the historical average of 10% takes 7 years to double. They have no grasp of the fact that everything they put on a credit card that is accruing interest is eating up 2.5x more of their precious life than the equivalent amount saved in an S&P500 index fund gives them back. Closer to 10x more than a run of the mill savings account.
Math, and especially interest rates, aren't real to most people. Even explained to them, it doesn't translate into years of their life like it should. It was certainly never taught to me that way, nor I suspect to you. It was only in retrospect, in my 30's, looking at my nest egg thinking "This represents 10 years of my life" did these realizations hit.
Now imagine you never have a nest egg.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
Credit cards are truly evil. I mean, I use them. I've used them for 20+ years and never had a single finance charge or fee ever, while accruing thousands of dollars in cash back rewards. They paid for my Switch 2 in fact.
But they're still evil. The yawning gaping pit they represent, which I have to balance on the edge of every time I run up their balance each month (within my budget) and then pay off in full is nightmarish. Because there is nothing stopping me, besides 20 years of inflexible habit and discipline, from just YOLOing with the nearly $40k of available credit they make available to me.
I watch some of these Financial Audits, and people's minimums on all their cards is over the amount I manage to save each month. I'll watch someone my same age, my same income, and they are looking at 5-10 years of aggressively budgeting and paying off debt to get back to zero. Meanwhile my assets appreciated more than my annual salary the last few years. But in another timeline, with only slightly different choices early on, I could have been them.
Half these people, when asked about a specific credit account, just go "I don't know, they just gave me that card when I bought X". X could be a car, a new roof, a large plumbing job, etc, etc. Like in my driveway story below, fucking everything is trying to get you to sign up for a new credit card now. People unthinkingly just take them. "Yeah, more free money" they think.
As I've gotten older, my arrogance at being part of the Credit Card Master Race has waned. Fuck them.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
A cursory search says Brave didn't get this feature until Nov 2022. But it's an AI generated answer, so trust but verify. The event at the museum occurred probably summer 2021.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
Watching just a few minutes of a recent episode, can you tell me what you like about it? Caleb seems extremely cruel in an obviously performative way, and frankly he comes off as almost evil to me.
Yes, he's a man after my own heart.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
I'm not sure my observations really correlate directly with "democracy only works with 130 IQ Anglos" and more, our entire society is developing pitfalls left and right in fundamental activities that everyone needs to navigate (getting a job, feeding yourself, managing your money) where the only winning move is to not engage in a whole swath of behavior.
I mean, to illustrate my point, maybe I'm getting old, or I am too paranoid about dark patterns, or what. But I got my driveway done. Dude who did it sends me an invoice. It's been generated in some off the shelf business solution, so I'm not mad at him about what comes next. But in the process of attempting to accept and pay for this invoice, it pitches me a credit card, with no obvious way to say "No I don't want a new credit card" without also shutting down the whole process. But after looking at the screen for a few minutes trying to find the hidden "I don't want a credit card, but I would like to pay this invoice button" and failing, I hit the "No Thank You" button and the whole process shut down, and it told the guy I had rejected his invoice.
I ended up paying him by check before he left.
Another example, I'm at a museum, and they have a CR Code you need to scan to take you to the page where you can reserve tickets for a particular exhibit. I have an old phone (because I refuse to upgrade perfectly good phones every 2-3 years just because), with a QR code reader that used to be reliable. I scan the code, and I now know but didn't at the time that after scanning the code, instead of displaying it's contents, it displayed an ad which looked like it's contents. I click the ad not knowing it's an ad, it takes me to a page asking for my credit card. I think this doesn't look right, so I show it to the attendant at the kiosk asking if this is the correct form to get tickets for the exhibit. They assure me it is. It wasn't. My credit card got stolen. I should have trusted my gut on that one. I didn't realize until after the fact that the QR Code reader I'd been using extremely sporadically over a decade had become enshittified with predatory ads. These days Brave on mobile has a QR Code reader built in, but I'm not sure that was the case at the time. Although I may just not have known. Regardless I'm irritated at the constant state of shifting sands under my feet revealing pit traps I'm expected to avoid.
Once upon a time, as a young teen on warez sites, there was always the game of virus roulette. You'd go to download a no-cd crack off GameCopyWorld.com, which still exists, and you were presented with 3-6 buttons that all said "Download" on them. All but one were predatory ads which caused you to install a virus. Only one was the actual download link to the no-cd crack.
The no-cd crack may also be a virus.
Now it feels like that's how everything works. Everything is an app, and every app has dark patterns trying to steal from you. I like to think I'm not a retard, but it's getting to the point where it tricks me from time to time. I can't imagine how normies fare. If Financial Audit is any indicator, not well.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
Modernity is complex and confusing, I think Moldbug makes the point that plenty of people who would have been quite capable in historical situations struggle to function in their interactions with the modern state, modern employment market, modern social customs, subtext.
I think about this a lot lately. I've been religiously watching Caleb Hammer's Financial Audit this year. Apparently this year in particular older fans of the show have complained that it's devolved into Caleb Springer, and all the dysfunction of humanity is paraded in front of the camera with a thin veneer of "Lets look at you finances" after 60 minutes of discovering what a low functioning member of society they are across the board.
That said, the same themes keep coming up again and again. Employment has gone totally fucky, and you need to SEO your resume and tailor it to each job application, probably using AI to save time. Because everyone is getting spammed with thousands of AI generated resumes for even entry level positions, so git gud. I'm not sure this is a state of affairs we should accept for mid-wit level career opportunities.
The second is that feeding yourself is fucked. Generational knowledge of how to make thrifty healthy meals has been lost, and low functioning individuals constantly struggle with the impulse to door dash poison, and finance it to boot. That said, cheap staples like beans, rice, etc are still widely available. So it's not totally impossible, and it helps if you were raised right.
The third is that there are arrays of predatory credit vehicles that would blow your damned mind. I knew about how terrible it was to run a credit card balance, and I knew payday loans were predatory to a point of exciting legal scrutiny. I had no idea there was a whole world of credit apps build directly into shopping apps. Pay in four, Klarna, other crap I'm probably not spelling correctly because somehow I've never actually been exposed to it personally. And seemingly the prevailing wisdom is at 18 you get a credit card, max it out because it's "free money" and then pay the minimums your entire life. Sounds like a fair trade, a few months of zero impulse control, followed by paying only a few hundred a month forever. I'd say it's just the show, but then I think back to my 20's and all the people I knew, even educated professionals, who did exactly that and were digging their way back out from it. Nobody balances a checkbook anymore, and cash isn't physical so that when you are out you are out. It's all imaginary numbers and notices you can ignore.
And I mean, that's a complexity disease that has hit the three main areas of your life, employment, feeding yourself, and money. It makes me think a lot about how the bar has risen to meet some minimum standard to meaningfully navigate society.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
Is this whole topic a can of worms best left unopened?
If you hold the lash, yes. If you are being lashed, no.
I saw North Carolina had a bail reform bill in response to Iryna's murder. The demographics of which representatives voted for it or against it are horribly depressing. You'd think such a display of the obvious failures of just instantly putting repeated violent offenders back on the streets has been made obvious to everyone, and yet the non-White legislators felt no impetus to change anything. Luckily they were outvoted, and so the pogrom hits a speed bump in NC.
In theory, I'm not against some sort of mental health red flag laws. But I also know my enemies consider my moral beliefs fundamentally insane. I know if they wanted to declare church attendance a risk factor to owning a gun, they could launder that premise through academia and friendly mid level bureaucrats in HHS or CDC, and suddenly I'm checking off a box on my back ground check asking me if I've ever attended church, under penalty of perjury if I lie about it.
Maybe the non-whites in North Carolina feel the same way about bail reform.
I don't expect the bodies to stop piling up as long as we're forced to live with each other.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2d ago
Creativity is so idiosyncratic, I'm not sure you can ever distill any method or approach as yielding superior results to any other, because it's all just so dependent on the creatives involved, and the times they existed in.
That said, something clearly went very, very wrong with independent studios in the 90's. There seems to be a reoccurring theme where success begets failure. Where then a bunch of 20-something (probably autistic) manchildren find themselves with millions of dollars, they go down some incredibly terrible rabbit holes. They turn their offices into playgrounds, they endlessly chase some perfect creative vision, many lose the will to do actual work entirely.
I don't think it's as bad as the lottery curse or NFL millionaires. I think many of them walked away from the industry never having to worry about money again. But their successful creative prospects more or less died after their first life changing hit.
I think Westwood, Blizzard, Maxis and id Software held out the longest. I'm not sure why honestly. Possibly the 20-somethings who won the lottery were better prepared to handle the success. Which is not to say the quality of their games never tapered off. But you didn't see these catastrophic collapses the way you saw with Origin, Bullfrog, and others. Technically id Software still exists, if in a nakedly Ship of Theseus kind of way.
Except it does. Look at my example. The Obama administration was able to launder federal resources into NGO's that could continue to pursue their policy goals long after a Democrat was out of the White House. That's how you do it. Instead of having the Trump administration sue Universities for being racist against white people, you fund right wing NGOs by any means nessecary, and then they can pursue your policy goals long after the government has changed hands back to the opposition. That way when Pete Buttigeig takes office in 2028, he can't just have the Attorney General drop all the cases the Trump administration had ongoing. It's no longer in his hands. It's being done by (for example) Turning Point USA with a 100B warchest funded by structured settlements Pam Bondi forced on universities.
I don't understand how you say this doesn't work. It obviously has worked in the recent past!
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