Transport Fever 2, again. Still in the “where the f is my money” stage with this playthrough, dreaming of buying a whole entire train. Watching little horsecarts take 3 years to travel from A to B. I might be a bit too patient.

Sharks have flooded Shark Infested Waters with shark asshole stink but this time the asshole stink is AI generated and Taylor Swift has a billion dollars for lawyers.

Oh so sorry we misplaced your paperwork very badly for you Mr Navalny, I cannot say that we have a death certificate for you but I’m sure we could find one if necessary.

Gotta love running that bag full of money to the bank at the end of the night. They know you’ve got it, too. They know exactly when to expect the manager to leave for the bank. Late at night, after close, in some shit neighborhood.

That’s how you get this door.

Even an Atari 2600 was too expensive for the average family in 1982, about $1000 in today money. The 80s were not a great economy for most people, Reagan’s fuckery and I believe really high interest rates thanks to 70s inflation meant that even the cheapest home console was wildly unreasonable. It was 1982. Colecovision was on shelves. Television was still a very pricey home luxury in 1982, not a universal yet, so never mind the game console. The VCR wasn’t really a thing yet. People were still using radio a lot at home. You could afford radio.

Video games looked like they were always going to cost too much money to see really mainstream adoption. That thought isn’t even wrong, people just try harder to find the $1000 for a new console now, because it offers more. Sharon thought video games looked like shit, and she was right, they did. They didn’t look exciting, they just looked like a weird side technology.

For her, video games were a thing in a dark corner of the amusement park, they were literally Pong, and cost quarters to play, 80 cents today, for a five-minute experience or a lot less.

Pac-Man was the current gold standard of games in 82. Did kids like it? Sure. But remember Pogs? Fidget spinners? Those snap bands for your wrist? How many things have been wildly popular with children and then into the trash they go, forever? Did Pac-Man look like something that nobody would ever grow tired of, forever? Or did it look like an excuse to sell toys? Because it very much was, they sold a lot of Pac-Man toys and merch about it, just like the 80s cartoons that faded into obscurity once they were also done selling toys.

Sharon didn’t have a lot of evidence before her that would show any other outcome. She couldn’t see 2023 while staring down at the Pac-Man quarter muncher at the local pizza shop in 82. It’s miserable, because a proper fad and the wave of the future both look the same in the present.

Sharon was a “word processor” in 82, she was well ahead of the curve, working with computers - or at least their precursors - when most people hadn’t even seen one. Somebody shoves a mic in your face, asks for a quote, and you give them an opinion, which haunts your fuckin ghost decades later. Maybe five years later she thinks oh, I was wrong on that, but it’s too late now.

This is why we don’t try to predict the future any more than we have to. Today’s information is never good enough.

The Ford F650 is part of a platform that, as you can see, is heavy-duty enough that you can put a proper dump bed on the back. It can be built many different ways, and the way that Ford will sell the vast majority of these trucks is that it will sell a cab and empty frame to another company, who will then build something else around it, some sort of heavy-duty thing that will see quite a lot of professional use, probably off-road more often than not. The massive ground clearance will look a lot more appropriate when this truck ends up where it belongs.

These things end up with buckets on the back, and used for powerline maintenance, or the entire back end becomes a steel locker for a bunch of welding and fabrication equipment. Once it is specced out properly, the size of it will make sense.

This model of truck is large and serious enough to also come with a proper, grown up diesel engine comparable to other heavy equipment engines in both weight and general durability. That it is the true purpose of the Ford F650, it is big and heavy enough to accept a respectable diesel engine for a proper dump truck, not the little baby diesels in the F150s, but one that is probably not available in anything smaller, a diesel that will actually last for 1 million km if maintained. It won’t even be a Ford engine, it will probably be a Cummins or another brand common in American heavy equipment, not passenger cars.

I am not trying to flex when I say this thing isn’t a toy. The transmission for it probably isn’t available in any other Ford pickup. They’re too small. Most of them will not spend a lot of time in the commuter lane, they’ll be on job sites all day. Even Americans don’t really drive the truck in the picture. The thing is in a class by itself.

Ford may as well sell a civilian version in case any Texas oil boys want the biggest truck on the block, but that just means adding a pickup truck bed to it, which goes with the rest of the cab in front. It certainly looks ridiculous. But somebody will want it to pull a really long horse trailer, so the bed back there is just a place to install a fifth wheel, the attachment point for a goose neck trailer. The owner will probably be somebody with a successful contracting business, somebody who can justify this thing as a proper business expense, since their other vehicle will say Caterpillar on it somewhere and has to also be towed on a trailer from job site to job site.

That is what the Ford F650 is for, and can do, it tows other heavy equipment around on public roads. It looks a lot less ridiculous with a skid loader and heavy trailer behind it. Park it next to a piece of proper construction equipment and it looks like a baby toy. It is small by heavy equipment standards, so that makes it maneuverable on construction sites.

The size of the current F150, the truck meant for average office workers to buy, that is the problem. It is unreasonable and no longer even fit for its original utility purpose. The modern F150 is too big, too expensive, and too cushy to be a farm truck, or a work truck on a job site. It is extremely common, overtall, and perfect for killing pedestrians.

The size of this thing, the F650, is not actually an issue. It is huge for defensible reasons, and it just looks crazy when you try to spec it out for civilian pickup use, because that’s fuckng crazy. It looks striking in the marketing material, for sure. We’re discussing the beast right now. Victory achieved for the marketing guy who insisted on offering this spec. Now even the Germans are aware of the truck.

But, oops, I can only assume that this entire “fuck cars” community is just the online version of those Just Stop Oil pricks, it’s all the idea of some PR firm who want to make public transport advocacy look like a position for shitty assholes with no respect for the needs of others. So I assume you don’t care about a proper explanation. I didn’t realize I was here when I started typing. Too late now.

I wish Reddit would stay on Reddit, instead of growing into completely different websites like some sort of mold. But anyway, the F650 is not actually a problem.

And then he drew a picture of a huge woman with a huge ass and drew himself crawling up her leg like some kind of horny worm

Lemmy needs a community dedicated to pointless debate over which flashlight is best. I’m about to permanently borrow somebody’s ThruNite T1 but it’s too heavy, I miss the mini Maglite I used to carry. Phone flash is fine, yes, but I miss a flashlight/torch without a fucking login procedure involved for fuck sake.

Uh oh how was I to know that Thor High Heels was a minority opinion he said ironically

I’ve got a couple of Youtube channels I follow, ChristopherOdd and Splattercatgaming, who seem to mostly charge through a lot of indy content, giving it a whirl so you can check it out. So that helps to surface anything interesting happening outside AAA studios.

That and just waiting for recs to come from word of mouth.

Oh, yeah, that’s the new normal, I’m a bit surprised they gave you a whole 100MB to call your own.

The modern Dad pro-move for giving the kids a game console for Christmas is to sneak the box open, set it up, do all the ridiculous downloads and patches then sneak it all back into the box nice and tidy so that the kids can just open it and go on Christmas morning.

Bond fund here we come, that’s as ensured as you get now, moneybags.

Weird thumbnail vs headline. She looks like I just asked her if she wants to hit this joint and she does, which doesn’t go at the top of a story about atrocity.

Oh lets all land on the fuckin moon at once

It’s a good little week for the sciences, isn’t it?

Transport Fever 2, because I can ride da choo choos

It’s super chill and relaxing, you just have to ignore the rest of your empire falling into ruin

Fuck sake.

Yeah, Kenshi is pretty much the answer unless OP has already played Kenshi so much that they’re a god now and they’re hoping for the next thing.

The move by Fitch makes sense.

No, it does not help that the US has a very high level of national debt, but here comes somebody to scold me about how debt is different when you’re the government and yadda yadda, so never mind that angle.

No, this is a direct reaction to yet another game of fucking chicken with the debt ceiling. The finance world moves both fast and slow, second by second but also quarter by quarter; for every day trade where microseconds count, there is another action where it takes, oh, 3 months for the relevant body to react to what just happened. This is one of those actions. They’ve spent the last couple of months running their numbers, and now here we are. They have delivered their verdict for the current fiscal quarter, after much deliberation.

It does not make any sense at all to go around talking about US Fed bonds as if they are “zero risk”, or even “effectively zero risk”, if every 8 years there will come a game of chicken slash pissing contest where the hostages are everyone who has been foolish enough to buy US Federal debt under the expectation that the interest rate will be paid on time. If somebody in the US government does not blink in this game of chicken, then fuck you, the US will default on its “zero risk” debt.

And so here is Fitch quite reasonably questioning that status quo, that US debt is “zero risk”.

Keep in mind that the entire damn globe is holding US Treasury Bonds, the debt in question. Just as importantly, the biggest holder of US debt is US citizens. You, somehow. That’s where the yields on a CD come from, and your money market account. US Bonds.

Typically, 10 year US Treasury Bonds provide the highest guaranteed interest rate -ignoring recent rate inversions because COVID black swan shitshow- because obviously if you are going to lock up your money for a decade, you would expect the best return at maturity.

But this debt ceiling BS happens every 8 years. This means that every truly serious investor who holds a 10-year T-Bill, from Wall Street funds to the Chinese government, is heavily exposed to the threat of complete default on this debt thanks to that entire debt ceiling thing, to say absolutely nothing about the solvency of the US government, in general.

That’s not fucking zero risk. And Fitch is tired of pretending that it is.

Fuck sake, they aren’t even trying to have a debate upon whether the US can sustain its frankly obscene debt level. No, it’s just that AAA rating means “zero effective risk, barring nuclear war or alien invasion or some unforeseeable shit” and all that clownfuckery with the debt ceiling is NOT “zero risk”, nor is it unforeseeable.

Is that zero risk? When the person who owes you money can watch the due date tick down from 5 years out and wait until the last fucking minute of the last damn day to decide they’re going to pass the law that will allow them to pay you? No, the fuck it ain’t.

Did they appear to care about the creditors? The bondholders who they owed interest to? No, that whole song and dance was about, I don’t know, probably abortion. The Republicans have been using the debt ceiling as a hostage for a decade or more, so if you’re the French government, for example, and hold a bunch of US Treasury bills, you can’t call that shit zero risk with a straight face, come on. It doesn’t even matter if the US can pay the debt, the question is, will they?

I need you to understand that literally everyone in the world is investing in US Federal debt, it’s not just you, US person. It’s kind of frightening how US Federal debt is the cinder blocks that many other nations are building their economic foundation on. That’s what being the reserve currency is about.

Fitch knows that, and they know it back to front, so when they issue a rating, the weight of it is upon them. Can we call it zero risk? Like zero, zero??

If you have any money in your brokerage money market account, or a CD, anywhere, you’re in this boat, wondering if US Bonds are zero risk. The whole world is in this boat, wondering if US Treasury Bonds, especially the 10-year ones, are really zero risk guaranteed money on maturity. Like, really really, tho? Maybe there’s a smidge of risk? Even the 30 year bonds??? 30 fuckin years on the bond, my dude, zero risk on that?

We’ve all been on American social media, they all talk like they’re going to have another Civil War; probably not, but still. Zero risk on the 30-year US Treasury Bond? That’s a long time. Shit can go nuclear. Zero risk?

Could you look your best fucking friend in the face and say, “oh, yeah, buy a US 30 year Treasury Bond, there is absolutely no risk of any sort on that, you will get your interest even if Florida slips under the sea, taking Disney World with it.” Could you? No.

So pretend that there you are, some team of analysts at Fitch, knowing all of this, knowing more than I do because it’s your job, and looking at each other like, “Can we call this zero risk? Because that’s what AAA means. We all know that. So can we?” And nobody wants to, because it isn’t, and we’re all tired of pretending like it is.

And Fitch looks at the obvious, it downgrades US Treasury debt from AAA - perfect, the best possible - to AA+ - still near perfect, but room for improvement.

Fitch is right. Fitch is right to shoot up the warning flare. We’re lucky that China’s situation is still a bit of a mess, and the United States Federal Reserve needed the wakeup call, not that they want it. We’re lucky that buying a bond from the Chinese Federal Government doesn’t quite make sense, because if the state owns all things, then what is a bond? It doesn’t matter what the answer is, it only matters that we have to discuss it. We all know what a US Treasury Bond is, that’s beyond debate. That certainty elevates it.

It’s not like Fitch are acting up to get attention, fuck that. Every other respectable bond rating house should have done this first. It’s not fair that Fitch has to be the odd ones to call the obvious. Fitch is right. The US needs to get its shit together.

I suggest that patient gamers put Aliens: Dark Descent onto their wishlist and wait for a good sale. It already had a small sale but the game only came out in June.

They really nailed the vibe, just all around, check out some Youtube plays of it to see if you like the gameplay. It looks like XCOM in screenshots but plays in real-time. The story takes place in a Weiland-Yutani mining base, of course isolated in an unwanted corner of the universe. A mysterious infection has appeared on the planet! I wonder what it could be? Better send some soldiers from your crashed ship to check out the situation and look for survivors. The characters are all new.

I’d say that the game benefits from all the comics and other less-known canon that fleshes out the world, and has the flavor down pat. They haven’t forgotten that the original movie was about a conflict between two powerful women, one of whom really doesn’t want to fuckin be here, and the gameplay does a great job of being a balancing act between making you fuckin sweat at the mercy of xenomorphs while also feeling like a badass. It’s a lot of people’s Game of the Year already, so I’d look into it, even though it’s gotten kinda lost in the shuffle.