His presidency will end of old age, but right beforehand his make-a-wish will be to visit 5th avenue one more time. And he’ll do it. And all his fan girls will cheer and clap

I am Italian and I give everyone here a pass as long as they send me one meatball each and with a tape recording of them saying the phrase

I will then mail them back a hand written critique of their meatball with a laminated pass

Might be a hot take but I also loved and played the crap out of the original cod4 and mw2. Like a lot, and was really good at it with a great group of friends. Closest I got to that feel (and in some ways it even surpassed it) was the mw2 remake (not mw3 with OG mw2, but mw2 from a few years ago). The pace was much slower, maps were solid, and the gunplay and connection all felt like the originals I grew up on. And shotguns were actually viable but that’s just a thing I like

I put in as much time into that game as I did any of the original ones and it brought back a bunch of my friends too. We played for almost the whole year it was out and even met some new friends. It’s a bit of an older title but it’s under the cod umbrella game now and there’s still a player base. Was the highest peak player count cod ever had too, which goes to show how prevalent it was and how many people it probably brought back. There is mtx but it’s generally tame I think, just avoid buying skins

Oh yeah I agree I don’t think it will be avoided long term, I probably just think it will take longer than you probably think is all. And mainly I tie reserve currency to inflation, in that its current strongest property (due to the dollar slowly losing this status) is holding the floodgates of immense inflation back, not necessarily the insane trade leverage it once had

Well the reserve currency is the lynchpin in my opinion because it’s holding back a tidal wave of inflation, which would then cause the issues you’re describing to explode. Without the demand that status generates, the excess supply has nowhere to go. Our current crisis is a function of the massive printing during Covid that even the reserve currency status struggled to contain.

I feel like if Covid as a tipping point did not destroy this country im not sure what will. A lot of people are taking on debt, but there’s a lot farther they can fall. There are cheaper alternatives they will move to in terms of housing, food, etc. not everyone sits at the bottom but everyone can sit at the bottom and I think there’s still a lot to fall. Much poorer countries exist in much worse conditions. And the institutions whose value are based on that debt that won’t be paid back will just be bailed out like in 08 and during covid via printing. This is why the reserve currency is the lynchpin because they can only keep doing this if there’s external demand for dollars.

There already is a critical mass of people who are doing really poorly, but relatively. The issue is they’re not all entering that state at once, so the permanent crisis I describe in my prior comment is one of very many small crises happening, always. This both normalizes the situation but also prevents a large mass of people from being disenfranchised at once, making it hard for society to react as a mass unit. These smaller units will slip into conditions similar to poor countries, meaning they are still viable to live in even though they’re terrible, all driven by consistent inflation.

It’s a decentralized, slow and steady destruction that only affects small portions of the population at once. Unless inflation erupts at once it won’t ever effect enough people at the same time to cause a mass situation

I think the best marker of an imminent rapid decline is the middle-upper class/upper-class non elite. Like, think of people like doctors. These typically indicate the beginning of a revolution or a large change because they have enough money to live very well lives, but not enough to maintain them in the face of hard times, meaning their standard of living can shift the most out of any group of people, and they still represent a nominally large population. There are less of them than there once was but they still exist and I think are important to pay attention to

I mean this is all true but my point is it’s been happening since 08 non-stop. The house of cards is designed to function like this, and whenever there’s turbulence that might threaten it, the us govt prints their way out.

It feels like a perpetual crash is looming because they’ve designed the system to perfectly maintain a constant crash for ordinary people, and drip feed assets to the wealthy. I don’t see an event that stops this from happening until after the US loses the world reserve currency, which would necessitate a substantial decoupling between Europe and the US, which would necessitate more than just China as a competitive superpower

I would argue that we’ve been in the middle of a recession/crash for the last 2 years, so I’m not sure how much would change. A market crash is a different story. They may or may not print their way out of a crash they can’t control but based on how the market rebounded from the tariffs, I feel like the market is completely and utterly rigged at this point, which means it won’t ever really crash

Inflation is the biggest thing that could happen, and we’re already experiencing it. Stagflation really. Sure we might have another situation that causes the markets to crash that they will likely print their way out of, but most of that inflation gets caught in equities. I think the pace of inflation the ordinary person experiences can’t get much worse at this point, and most people are already priced out of a home without inheritance money/assets. This is the tightest squeeze I feel the American populace has felt since the Great Depression, and many metrics point it’s worse; the only reason it doesn’t feel worse is because the normal person isn’t starving due to the difference in agricultural setting. But we’ll see. I think America will just continue to experience inflation at too large a pace and our economy will slowly crumble over the next 10-20 years as we lose our world reserve currency status

Actually think it would be smart to look at the average age of this demographic’s parents. Even in this economic climate there will be economic improvement for people as they age, albeit slower and less than before, but it will also be tied to when their parents pass and leave them with stuff

The article kind of contradicts itself. Near the start I believe it mentioned how it wasn’t just a delay in births, but then when it gets down to the changes based on age, it very much indicates a delay, in that women below the age of 30 had a significant decline, but early 30s is the same and 35 and beyond is greater. Yes this is a decline since it’s harder to have a child past a certain age but it’s mostly a delay for now, although considering how our economy is also declining, this trend will increase

Civ 5. Been trying to work up to deity. Feel like I can reliably do immortal but I don’t think I’m practiced enough in the diplomacy of distraction and groveling to survive the next level. Hands down some of the chillest vibes a game can give though

Crop a picture enough and you can get anyone on their knees