Bay 12 Games Forum

Pretty sure there's no soulless humans out there, by whichever religious standards

There's definitely various religious traditions that include soulless humans (or something equivalent to it) to varying degrees, actually. Iirc the general sentiment was used to (poorly) explain various sorts of mental illness (or stillbirths and such) at different points throughout history, but myths and whatnot of people having their soul stolen, or being born without, are just... that's old stuff.

100% agreement with the rest of the post, but if you take like 5 seconds to google the concept you'll find websites with complete seriousness listing out signs you've encountered someone without a soul, so... yeah.

It's one of those "eh, I'unno" things for me -- a lot of the problem is that innovations (and "innovations", that are horseshit barely existent changes given a fancy name to fleece the unaware with) from the private sector are largely wildly overblown and (particularly) inefficient. Much of the good shit (and especially the affordable good shit) is coming straight from gov't controlled or entirely/nearly entire funded labs and related efforts. Public sector is the fukkin' bomb when it comes to innovations the average person is actually going to get much use out of.

Some sort of not-directly-controlled innovation/R&D based sector to run concurrently with a largely/entirely gov't controlled one is probably a good thing, but... what we have now hasn't exactly covered itself in wonder or glory. Profit is actually a pretty shit driver for research and innovation, it turns out. It definitely incentivizes stuff (i.e. a great deal of marketing and management), but a lot of it is way less than ideal, and that's not getting into the ways it stifles such things, too.

Be fine with a small private sector that had to compete with a much larger government one, basically, especially if there were clauses to no-fuck-you anything particularly groundbreaking out of their hands, but the big shit we have now needs a hammer taken to its collective kneecaps until its head can be removed from its profit obsessed ass.

I'm not sure what else you'd call being unable to operate without express permission of the organization they're "competing" with. That ain't competition by the usual meaning of the word, either.

here you go

the short form is they do, but expressly in agreement with the USPS when it comes to what the USPS has an actual, more or less full throated, legislated monopoly over

[D][I][P]

You'll want the nobbc tag when doing that particular thing, probably, otherwise the I catches the italics thing and makes your post look funny :V

or just use paren instead of brackets, that works too

To burn memes, you must first burn yourself. -- Agni, probably, somewhere around 20,000 BCE

Eh, not really. Like, they both get from rich fucks and sometimes the same ones, but the ones that are GOP only tend to be particularly fucking odious.

Dem party got its problems on the funding front, but whenever you find yourself saying the dems are as bad as the GOP you've probably missed something 'cause that's pretty much fucking never true at this point.