Stage 2 generally means that the cancer hasn’t yet spread, except maybe to very nearby lymph nodes, meaning treatment can be very successful so long as its somewhere accessible by surgery and you don’t wait too long. Stage 2 treatment is very different from stage 4 treatment, but if you wait, that’s where it’ll get to.

Dang, I just started playing a couple weeks ago. But I guess that means I made it just in time to be one of the people who stop playing in solidarity!

I always liked the name Woodrow, but I hate the nickname Woody, so it’s a bit of a wash.

So… You cum here often?

Would you be arrested? Probably not, but you’re more likely to be than Trump. See, committing a crime isn’t the only factor that influences whether or not you get slapped with the punishment for that crime, even if it’s plainly obvious to everyone you committed it. Another major factor is whether or not someone is going to go through the effort of ensuring you get punished - if nobody does, or if they try, but can’t get to that finish line of getting a judge to declare you to be guilty in court, then you walk away scot-free.

So, the thing that’s keeping you from being arrested is your relative insignificance. You’re just some person, so it’s unlikely that anyone will go through the trouble of ensuring you receive the punishment for the crime you committed, even if it’s a relatively easy thing to do. Now, if you were to go on TV and say it, that would significantly increase your risk, since now more people are seeing you and someone who gives a shit might decide to go after you. That would be damning for you, since it would require very little effort to punish you - you clearly committed the crime, and you have no way to influence the court to make you harder to punish.

For Trump, his protection isn’t insignificance - there are plenty of people who would like to ensure he’s properly punished; instead, his protection comes from making it really difficult for someone who wants to punish him to be successful in that endeavor. He has a lot of money and influence, so he can hire good lawyers that can drag out the expensive legal process - something he can afford, but a lot of people who might try to go after him can’t. His lawyers are also good enough to find loopholes in the law to avoid punishment, so even if you can afford a cheap lawyer for a long time, he’ll likely still walk away unscathed. He’s also shown that he has the ability to influence what judge gets put on trials he’s a part of, which is another factor that influences whether or not he might get punished for the crime.

Ultimately, you’d have to have a rock-solid case presented by a team of very good lawyers working non-stop for months to years in order to bring Trump to justice, and the only people who reasonably have that power are almost exclusively on his side to begin with. Trump has knowingly committed multiple major crimes, and has shown that he has the ability to prevent them from hurting him, so he knows that he has virtually no chance to be punished for minor crimes, and commits them openly all the time.

Correct - every government eventually welcomes corruption that needs to be flushed out, and if it gets too strong of a hold on the country, it may need to be forced out. When the US was founded, it was prosperous for the wealthy and non-wealthy alike, and continued to be prosperous for a while. There were ups and downs, but it slowly got worse for the common citizen as the wealthy used their power to influence the country in their favor over time. It came to a head about 100 years ago, and we were able to get through it nonviolently back then.

It’s happening again now, and we might be able to pull through democratically again, but we might not. 100 years ago there was much more of a sense of solidarity against the rich and powerful, but now that we live in a world with a much better understanding of human emotion and motivation, a huge percentage of the country has been thoroughly convinced to fight for their own exploitation by the wealthy. Pair that with all of the war going on right now that we’re more aware of than ever given the technology that globally connects us, and we’re a lot more divided than we were back then.

I hope that we don’t need violence to solve our current political issues - democracy has certainly worked before - but it’s always been the backup plan when civility doesn’t get the job done.

Again, it’s not necessary, but it did work. I hope we can resolve the issues in our country democratically, but I’m mentally preparing myself for the violence that will inevitably follow if that doesn’t work. If our country falls to fascism, it’ll take a real fight to get it back.

I mean, our country was founded through a bunch of people getting really uncivil and violent. Sure, it still needed - and still needs - a lot of improvement to be fair for everyone who wasn’t part of the “in-group,” but the same could be said for most countries at the time ours was founded.

I certainly don’t believe that it’s necessary to be uncivil and violent to achieve a fair and civil society, but it has shown past success at ridding a country of leaders who don’t have the people’s best interests at heart.

Looks cool, but I worry that they’ve got so many different enemies pulling in different directions that they won’t really get into an interesting story for any of them. The reason I loved Origins was because it really focused on the darkspawn, both in terms of the lore surrounding them, and the effect their invasion has on society. Then the DLC came out and teased that the darkspawn are more than they appear to be, setting up for future games to delve into that even more. It was great, but then the next couple of games came out and didn’t seem to have that same feeling of depth, and I lost interest. If the game is just a checklist of different things to kill, I’m not really interested in playing it.

I like to think it’s just really long.

Ni.ce

It’s never been about what we want, not with EA, and not with any company ever. It’s always been about what raises the most amount of profits.

Usually making a profit means making a good product that people want to buy, but as we learn more about marketing and its influence on human behavior, companies can move more and more into a scenario where artificially inflated desire for the product through advertising impacts your decision to buy a product much more than its quality, making products cheaper to make and more profitable to sell.

It used to be that if EA didn’t make a good game for a fair price, they didn’t make money. But then they realized that they didn’t need to do that anymore, and stopped making games with the same level of quality. Then they realized that they can start charging for individual pieces of the game, and boy has that been a profitable decision for them.

Would you want to enter a legal battle with Nintendo? This system is broken in a lot of different ways, one of which is the incredible expense of legal fees even if you’re in such an open-and-shut case as someone clearly using your intellectual property without your consent. The one with deeper pockets wins regardless of what the law says.

But they DO have the exclusive right. People want to be told the world is different - that it’s better - but if we want to change it we need to see it for what it is. If we say “They don’t have the right!” before we’ve done the work necessary to strip them of the right, then we’ll never even understand how to start fixing this broken system.

Well yeah, as the owners they have the exclusive right to determine what’s okay. They’re just following the rules as they’ve been laid out by centuries of corporate lobbying for more exploitable copyright laws. Those are what we need to focus on if we want more fair use of intellectual property that the rights holder has already sufficiently profited from - the thing that such protections were initially meant to ensure to a much more reasonable extent.

I liked sneaking up on them and stabbing them before they even started getting up.

Maybe just this once, for old time’s sake.

They’re better than the OLD alternative, which was total boycotting at best, and torches and pitchforks at worst. The NEW alternative is complaining about it for a week or two, then continuing on without making any changes at all. They don’t mind the new alternative.

The point of whisleblower laws is to make people feel like a lack of whistleblowers means a lack of things to blow whistles over. Then all they have to do is silence any whistles before they’re heard by the general population and boom, public trust in the system is strengthened without actually needing to do anything drastic like actually fixing the system.

A lot of cops are so high strung that you essentially have to pretend you’re having the time of your life while interacting with them - any nervousness or annoyance is taken to mean that you’re potentially a violent criminal who could kill them at any moment.

Just the realization that a woman holding a pot of hot water could hypothetically use it as a weapon, however unlikely it was in this scenario, was enough to make him instinctively shoot with only minor notice that still did nothing to prevent him from killing her even as she began cowering and apologizing.

This is the culture we’ve allowed the police to build in this country; the job is dangerous, and they’re only human, so they believe they should be forgiven for being scared regardless of the situation, and should be forgiven for taking drastic measures while they’re scared.