That’s why I’m thinking the factory that made the official 1000 of them just made a bunch more to sell to the grey market and those are making their way out as “counterfeit” despite being exactly the same product from the same factory.

That’s exactly why Google Search has gone so far downhill that it’s pushing people elsewhere. Searches are supposed to be fast at giving you the answer you’re looking for. But that is antithetical to advertising. It’s why Google has been scraping data for years to build their own internal responses to easy queries like simple calculations, definitions, basic wiki results, etc. since you never even need to leave their site. Can’t get faster than that, until those results can no longer be trusted.

Now those quick results can’t be trusted, thanks largely to their blind AI fixation. That trust can never be earned back, it is lost permanently. Many users will instead start looking for alternatives that don’t feed them bullshit responses and instead just give them the links to good info, like Google used to.

Are these actually counterfeit, or just the extra produced past what is contractually required at the original factory?

Many Chinese factories will be contracted for say 18 hours of production, but stay open for 24 hours, and the extra is sold on the grey market. Or the product that doesn’t make it through contracted quality control will be sent to the grey market.

I can’t believe the actual market for these is large enough to actually justify a second factory spitting out duplicates when the original factory can just make extra beyond what’s contracted. More likely the original factory made like 5,000 pairs instead of the 1,000 Trump sold officially, and those are on the grey market as “counterfeits” despite being exactly the same, just not official.

I think it’s probably because she generally wasn’t publicly political during her husband’s Presidency, or after. She did what was expected of the First Lady, didn’t do anything too controversial, and that was about it. And there’s likely a lot of people that want Obama again, but he cannot run, but if she’s there obviously his counsel would be as well.

That’s an entirely different situation voters would be responding to, and they would only be doing it because they would have no other option. Even then, it 100% would end up being Kamala Harris and a running mate they scramble to find, only because they need the name recognition. Those are totally different circumstances, extremely obvious and avoidable, but still technically not under their direct control like the entire cycle up to now.

What we have now is the party’s unwillingness to accept that Biden needed to be told not to run again, so we could get a real primary and voters actually deciding. They are only now starting to question the shitty decision when it’s becoming glaringly obvious that an 80+ year old shouldn’t be running again and younger blood is needed.

The party is run by the old fucks though, and they don’t want to give up what they have to the younger generations. Look at AOC’s seat, it’s the perfect encapsulation of the DNC’s belief that the old fucks should be running everything.

AOC handily beat Joseph Crowley in the primary with 57% of the vote (against the #3 Dem at the time, a 20 year Congressional veteran, it’s unprecedented), and he still refused to drop out. Instead he stayed on the ballot under a third party where he again lost, with only 7% of the vote. 7% despite being the “safe” politician, with 20 years experience, #3 in the party, the incumbent with all the name recognition in the world, being challenged by an upstart young female “bartender”. The old fucks don’t want to give it up, and will do anything to prevent that, even losing the election entirely to the Republicans, because they aren’t doing it for the country, they’re running for themselves.

Of course. I’m not an idiot, clearly there are people affected.

But even if EVERY Helldivers 2 sale were affected, of the 1.85 BILLION estimated PC gamers in the world, we would be looking at around 0.6% people affected. It’s a tiny sliver, despite Helldivers having over 12 million sales (and that’s both PC and console).

The fact of the matter is this doesn’t mean shit in the grand scheme, and most people have likely never even heard of the game still even with the controversy. The industry is unfathomably massive and one game is tiny, even one with 12+ million sales.

All games like this have massive daily player drop offs a few months after release.

To be honest despite the publicity, most players don’t actually give a shit. Most players don’t read gaming news. And many players don’t care, either because they already have a PSN account, or they just don’t care about making another account to play the game.

I wouldn’t be surprised if over half the players had never even heard of the PSN controversy at all. The SteamDB player chart actually indicates when those shenanigans were compared to player numbers, and the daily player numbers had already been declining at that same pace for a month up to that point and continued at about the same rate after.

https://steamdb.info/app/553850/charts/#6m

There are too many sexist voters that would never vote for a woman. Look at Hilary, even ignoring how unlikeable she could be, a ton of people were very vocal about not voting for her only because she was female, including other women.

Besides, I’m fairly certain Kamala is making a lot of the current decisions anyway. Joe and her have been together a lot more than other VPs and Presidents in the past.

Of course not, they learned from another state (Utah I think) that didn’t make an exception for the Bible.

The time to switch candidates was 6-8 months ago. It’s too late at this point, at least for US politics. Too many “undecided” voters seem to think they need a year to get to know a candidate.

If they were to switch from Biden, Trump would win in a landslide without having to say a damned thing or remind anyone he existed between now and then.

This country is fucked.

The rule is there to prevent them from releasing info the NTSB hasn’t done a full analysis on, but that’s not the case here. However, the info was already made public by the NTSB, to the Senate nonetheless.

In what world does it make sense that Boeing can’t repeat the same thing when talking about it? Boeing isn’t even allowed to repeat what the NTSB as publicly said? That’s insane.

A judge would throw this out of court if it came before them, as a ridiculous waste of the court’s time.

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This, plus just how egregious was it?

No one is wanting to read these messages like they’re 50 Shades of Grey or anything like that. Well, there’s probably somebody but that’s not why most want to see it. Clearly it was not bad enough to get the police involved at the time, so we’re talking less than To Catch A Predator.

Ignoring the age difference for a second, because that part is not relevant to my specific point here… What some people consider flirty, others consider creepy. On a similar note, the same comment coming from a person someone considers attractive and from someone they find ugly often has a completely different reaction.

Doc says that it crossed a line, that’s not under debate by anyone at this point. He says there were no pictures, etc. exchanged, just messages and there was no intent to meet up or anything like that. On the other side one of the original tweets claimed they were sexting. Peoples definitions of sexting can vary dramatically as well.

So clearly the messages went over the line of being inappropriate, no argument there from anyone paying attention, but how far over that line was it? Were they truly explicit messages, or just inappropriate within the context of a 35 year old talking to a minor?

It’s an officially recognized spec, so Apple will ignore it as long as they can. Until they can find a way to make money from it or spin marketing as if it’s some miraculous new invention of theirs, for something that should just be how it’s done.

This exactly.

The fact the contractor is paying means somewhere along the line of subcontracting someone typed it in wrong. The contractor likely aren’t the ones making the sign, and there may even be another level of subcontractors each getting more specialized in there if the main contract is for the entire State.

I know. I already addressed that. That’s not where my issue is. My issue is they’re not only saying allegedly but also a possible hate crime when it is clearly a hate crime.

Instead after looking more, it looks like that’s because the DA has unofficially chosen not to prosecute it as a hate crime for whatever baffling reason. A month after the event and they’ve not filed charges for a hate crime. It doesn’t take a month to figure out whether a white person fighting with a Muslim in a headscarf about being American, then attacking their children and beating them with the scarf, constitutes a hate crime.

So instead it makes it look like a prosecutor that doesn’t want to prosecute a seemingly slam dunk hate crime as a hate crime, for whatever reason.

I never said they weren’t capable. I’m just saying that this prosecutor seems to be choosing to not prosecute something seemingly obvious, which just makes them look incompetent. If they want to appear that way to the public, that’s their choice.

Nothing prevents them from saying that they aren’t going to prosecute it as a hate crime due to exculpatory evidence, instead they seem to be intentionally leaving it in a grey area. Especially since this apparently happened a month ago according to the article. Plenty of time to figure out something so core to the issue. It just makes them look complicit in allowing hate crimes when the public evidence is so glaringly obvious for it.

Suburbs don’t prosecute, the county DA does. And this county voted for Biden in 2020.

You’re right, and Presidential elections don’t do a good job of showing anything about local matters. Gotta look at the local elections. Since you brought it up…

In the 2022 general election the County Clerk, Criminal District Attorney, Constable, District Clerk, and County Judge elected were all Republican. In fact, the only race not won by a Republican was one of 2 open County Commissioner seats, which a Dem barely won with 51.5% of the vote.

Notice that Criminal District Attorney, Phil Sorrells ®, was just elected in 2022. Prior to that, he was a Judge for Tarrant County Criminal Court Number 10 for 25 years. I’d be willing to bet if someone went back through his criminal sentencing over those 25 years it would show certain, shall we say, biases in those sentences, they almost always do. Sometimes that quack does come from a duck after all.

Can’t imagine what sort of exculpatory evidence there could be for someone asking where someone is from, then trying to drown their child, and beating them with their hijab. There is a pretty damned cut and dry racial motive there. Unless the white woman was secretly Muslim somehow it seems pretty straightforward.

Or… the simplest explanation is that it’s a smaller suburb of Dallas-Ft Worth where the largest ethnic group by far is white, in a district that went 62.2% Republican in the 2022 election, and the government officials don’t want to publicly denounce racism like that because that’s what the citizens in that area expect of their government.

“Possible” is what the DA might add to the charges.

If the DA hasn’t added that already based on even this limited public information, I question their ability to do their damned job. There’s nothing “possible” about this being racially motivated, which clearly makes it a hate crime. The initial charges should have been for a hate crime and adjusted to remove that if necessary.

But it’s Texas, they don’t want to prosecute white people for being racist against anyone brown, that sets a precedent with the public they don’t want.