Open Thread

Open Thread #174

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38 thoughts on “Open Thread #174

  1. There is a new Covid variant that is, according to the shill running the World Medical Association, more contagious than the “delta variant” and deadlier than ebola. Apparently, the WHO was already at the greek letter “nu”, so this would have been the “nu variant”. Yet, this probably sounded too ridiculous so now the technocrats call it the “omikron variant”. Funnily enough, the letter between “nu” and “omikron” is “xi”, and this is a no-go as well due Xi Jinping. I do not think that any of what I wrote is a joke. We really live in that kind of society.

    1. This doesn’t end until the pitch forks come out or the Great Reset happens. We’ll still be expected to wear muzzles in the year 2030.

    2. I am currently mulling over leaving Europe over this nonsense. On one hand I wonder how I will take to second or third-world living but on the other, the specter of forced vaxxes is looming ever larger. We are already at the point where numerous first-world countries exclude you from public life if you do not have a valid vaxx passport. The current push is to make life for the unvaxxed as unpleasant as possible. Up next are detention camps, like in Australia. Some countries have launched visas that target “digital nomads”, so that would be my way in. Obviously, I would give up some comforts. Yet, compared to the alternative (NSFW!), it is the more rational option.

    3. In regards to that video you linked to, I’ve heard that there have been an anomalous amount of stroke and CVA as of late. It seems a little odd, but I’m pretty sure this was always normal and I just never noticed. I know that now because history has been rewritten for me so that children having heart complications is a common occurrence and no cause for alarm. However, super scary Omicron should definitely alarm you because it is basically airborne ebola, and it’s floating through ether as well effectively infecting the spiritual realms so be sure to pray to the God of Science daily.

    4. @Aaron, gotta recommend Vietnam. it’s 3rd world, but you still get enough of the good life. Nowhere near the rustic experience of South America. Hard to predict what the COVID situation will be going forward, but the government has announced that they’ll be letting unvaxxxed people in as early as Q1/Q2 next year. Unvaxxed will have to do a 2 week quarantine if the current plan sticks.

      El Salvador seems appealing. 3rd world, but should ascend fast with their embracing of bitcoin.

    5. I should look into both Vietnam and, perhaps, El Salvador. My first choice would be countries with stable expat communities. In the case of South America, I should probably study some Spanish. Still, income inequality and gang criminality is a big issue, in my perception. Vietnam, and the other Asian countries I have been looking into are arguably safer.

    6. @Aaron

      I would not recommend Latin America, for a variety of reasons. Lots of political instability and potential for trouble looking to the future. El Salvador looks like a terrible choice, as is much of Central America (Costa Rica may be an exception) although its homicide rate has declined in recent years, is still has one of the highest murder rates in the world. And barely 5 years ago, it was 5 times higher! (that is not a typo).

      Granted, you can drastically lower your chances of dying by staying out of the drug trade and living your life within a bubble of upper-class privilege, but the background rate of social disorder is much higher than what you are used to in the first world.

      Have you looked into moving to a deep red US state? That would probably be my choice if I ever had to emigrate.

    7. It is almost impossible to move to the US as a Western immigrant. The most reliable way seems to get a job at a US tech company with an office in Canada, work there for a few years, and then get an internal transfer. Canada is happy to hand out visas to skilled immigrants, and the rationale is that once you have proven yourself at work, the company would be willing to do the paperwork to get you into the US legally.

    8. El Zonte is a small beach town in El Salvador, which is effectively hyperbitcoinized at this point. I haven’t been there yet, but I’d be surprised if El Zonte isn’t safe.

    9. I visited Costa Rica a few weeks ago.
      It’s a beautiful country. They want to impose a vaxx-only regime for access to restaurants, hotels, etc. But then again, it’s an inefficient country – they couldn’t pull off a simple passport control at the airport.
      Wonderful people, very friendly. The “pura vida” is a real thing there.
      Went to check out some properties: USD 200k for a 147’000 square metres piece of land in the mountains, not far from Rivas, close to San Isidro El General.
      Almost bought it, almost…

      A family of four can live on a 800 USD budget there. Bitcoin is kind of a thing there, btw. People use it.

      outlierlegal(dot)com are a great immigration lawyers firm. Ask for Laura Magnifico, she’s from Canada and gives you a Western-style experience in terms of doing business.

    10. We talked about immigration plans a few years ago, before the scamdemic. How has your position changed in the meantime?

    11. “We talked about immigration plans a few years ago, before the scamdemic. How has your position changed in the meantime?”

      Yes, we did.
      Well, what can I say… Switzerland is shitty, but not as shitty as other places in Europe. That being said it definitely is a totalitarian and efficient place.
      US went downhill pretty bad, but as you correctly stated, it’s a nightmare immigration wise anyway.

      Costa Rica is not without its challenges either, but I think it’s an option.
      Look, at the end, my girlfriend decides. These things are the decision of the woman. Happy wife, happy life. She’s getting pissed with the situation here, as well. Now it’s a question of timing.

      Good thing about Costa Rica is that I know a few locals there and some US expats. Homeschooling has its grey area, taxes are OK (assuming they don’t change their territorial tax regime) and gun laws are acceptable, assuming you are a permanent resident which might take up to 7 years (ignore the 3 years they say it takes, it’s an unrealistic number).

      So, the universe will force our hands at some point I guess.
      In the meantime I’m looking to move out of Zürich. Got a new job in a different canton and will open a company early January next year in addition to that.

      The winter in Europe is not really nice. I prefer the 12-24 degrees in the Perez Zeledon area at around 1300m altitude. And those clouds that sail across the green mountains, my God are they beautiful.

    12. Saw a funny comment about omicron (as it’s spelt in the news):

      “Omicron spells m o r o n i c. They are playing us.”

  2. I am not the biggest fan of the Metal Gear series, but I have played Metal Gear Solid 1 , 2, and 3. MGS 1 I played on the GameCube (“The Twin Snakes”), which was a not a 1:1 remake, if I am not mistaken. I thought it was okay, but I did not at all understand why this game got so hyped when it appeared on the PSX a few years prior. MGS 2 was really great. Graphics were mind-blowing for its time, and the themes this game touches were prescient. Kojima has his characters discuss the power of “memes” in a game that came out in 2001, a solid decade-and-a-half before the great meme war of 2016. MGS 3 struck a different tone, tying the game world to the cold war between the US and USSR. I thought that it was good, but when I played it, in 2007, I think, the graphics were a bit dated compared to games on the PS3 or Xbox 360. My favorite Metal Gear game is actually Revengeance.

    I rebought Metal Gear Solid 4 last year, and a few days ago I wanted to give it another go. The game is as tedious as I remembered it, and I only ever played the first one to two hours. There is too much narration and the gameplay is not engaging. However, before diving into MGS V, I wanted to be at least familiar with MGS 4, so I watched the game on YouTube:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEUtXH1cvkg

    I was able to watch almost the entire recording at 2x speed. From what I gather, the gameplay is absolutely horrible. MGS games are historically about stealth, and here I see Snake taking part in one shoot-out after another. The narration is also all over the place. Some parts are laughably bad, but I do not want to spoil much here. My takeaway is that if Kojima does not take the game seriously, then why should we as players? We have strong women bossing around men, potty humor, juvenile romance plots, a cameo of a character from a previous game that makes no sense (Psycho Mantis) for the plot, people just showing up randomly when they are needed for the plot, and so on.

    My ranking of the MGS games is as follows: 2 > 3 > 1 > 4, and MGS 4 is the worst by a wide margin, in my opinion. (In terms of gameplay, Revengeance is better than any of those, but the story is not very interesting.) Nonetheless, I am looking forward to Ground Zeroes and possibly MGS V as the gameplay seemed very well made, and the graphics are quite spectacular on PS3, making MGS 4 look like a last-gen game.

    1. Speaking of the prophetic outcome of MGS2, just wait until you complete Chapter 1 of MGSV:TPP. I would recommend that you get a good rundown of the entirety of Peace Walker before jumping into Ground Zeroes, or some of the characters and events will seem too foreign.

    2. Thanks for the heads-up! I saw that the playthrough of Peace Walker is quite short, about three hours, so at 1.5 or 2x speed this will be very quick to go through.

    3. I agree with you that MGS4 was the worst in the series. I was genuinely excited to play it for the first time about a year ago as I was enjoying going through the entire series in order. By the 3rd act (worst fucking chapter) I was getting burnt out pretty quickly. There was also way too much fan service and plenty of moments it seemed as if the characters were overacting. The ending should have been this huge emotional resolve, but I was wanting Big Boss to hurry up and die while instead his death was drawn out for several minutes, even having enough time to light up a cigar while suffering a heart attack. Tbh, I thought Drebin was one of the most interesting characters. Also, they packed way too many story threads and characters into this game. Did you cringe like I did when they introduced Big Mama?

      Even though MGSV is unfinished, it’s a way better experience. I think the story during the prologue and chapter 1 is solid enough for an open world game, and the gameplay is easily the best in the series. It’s chapter 2 where everything starts to fall apart and you may not be motivated enough to do the mission replays to get the “true ending”. The way they handled the second chapter is they give you a few new missions and a bunch of higher difficulty replays, then you’ll randomly be called back to base to get another cutscene to help tie up the story. It was supposed to be a full on chapter with new missions and integrated cutscenes, and there is even cut content alluding to a third chapter with an entirely new open area.

      My list is pretty similar to yours with the exception being PW ahead of 4 and 5 being pretty high up there just because it’s the most fun to play/has the highest replay value. I’m torn between which is better between 2 & 3. MGS2 has a lot of boring narrative and gameplay, I thought. For example, the whole deactivating bombs and listening to the bomb specialist guy go on and on about his life story. I didn’t particularly care too much about his character. Then there’s the escort mission and swimming section . MGS3 seemed to have a better story, atmosphere, engaging characters and villains, and overall gameplay, but the constant navigating to the menu screen to change camo and heal yourself didn’t age too well. I’d probably have to say my list is as follows (not counting Revengeance): 3/5, 2, 1, PW, & 4.

    4. Big Mama is a horribly bad character. I found not just her appearance cringe-worthy (50 y/o chick flashing her boobs) but her whole sub story: exposition dump, reveal of her having given birth to Snake and his twin as a surrogate, followed by the action-movie sequence where she rides a motorbike, with Snake holding onto her. Oh, and then she died.

      I do not understand why this game is held in such high regards. After watching the playthrough, I looked up opinions on this game online, and came across people who claimed that they keep holding on to their PS3 just for this game, or that they play through this game at least once a year, and other such outlandish claims.

  3. The dictator of Austria wants all his underlings to be vaxxed, and has threatened fines to the tune of thousands of euros, and mass dismissals. In response, the people are standing up:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_dOjb4VpRI
    There were big protests last week already. Finally, there is some push-back. There are also big protests going on in Australia. I guess once those pictures of the Covid concentration camps leaked, the average Aussie realized that this vaxx theater is really not about your health.

    1. At this point, I wonder why the crowds don’t just rush a parliament or the dictator’s building or something. The crowds are getting so big, that it’s literally physically impossible that anyone could stop them, even if they wanted to. And shooting at your own citizens wouldn’t exactly make for a good look.

      Someone mentioned this concept (can’t remember the name), but it was something about how there’s a threshold beyond which the people become ungovernable. It was in the context of australia. Apparently there’s a ratio where if the number of protests is xyz ratio compared to number of enlisted army/police officers, the system falls.

      Someone just has to tell these crowds that they can just take what they want. Like who’s going to stop them? Cops and army people aren’t cartoon villains, they can’t each take on 1000 citizens each.

    2. They will get away with forced vaccine mandates in Austria and I can tell you why: our gigantic nanny & welfare state.

      Many people depend on government money in some form, either they have a government job or they get welfare in some way or another (for example people with children get money from the government, and we have a gazillion different government subsidy programs).

      So if they won’t get the vaccine, government can just cut their payments. I think almost everyone will cave in eventually.

      Will people learn from this that a big nanny government that you depend on can turn against you anytime? LOL, nope, I don’t think they will learn anything from this.

      Our ex chancellor Sebastian Kurz just got dismissed in a big corruption scandal…. but do you think people learn anything from this? Normally you should think “wait so if all politicians are corrupt, maybe the solution is to give them less power?”. No. They just elect another person, and this new person certainly won’t be corrupt.

      Austrians (and most other Europeans as well, probably) are just government loving communists and they always want big daddy government to solve every problem.

  4. So, apparently 61% of the swiss voted to maintain covid passes. I won’t even go into why you can’t have 60% of people decide to take away right from 40% (basic ideas about constitutionals republics vs primitive democracy).

    I just wanted to comment from the perspective of what people have said here in the comments quite a few times. With more than 50% of people being vaccinated, those are now also the people who will vote that people who are vaccinated should be a higher-class of people.

    It doesn’t matter if they got tricked into it. Once they’re there, they are going to backwards rationalize that taking it was the right choice.

    I also wonder when these dumbasses voted, did they not realize that this doesn’t mean they’re grandfathered in. Like, they’re currently the class that can “pass” due to 2 doses, but it’s going to be 3 doses, 4 doses, install an app to track every move you make, etc etc…

    1. Today, a German politician jumped the gun and demanded not only a vaxx mandate, but also booster shots for four to five years, for starters. Probably he did not notice that he was only supposed to make those claims in a few weeks’ time, after the experts from Imperial College London have determined that we are all going to die from the “moronic” variant, and that boosters will help us in any case, despite the fact that they offer no protection against this variant. If you wonder when we slipped into medical tyranny, I would look for when politicians dropped any pretense of wanting to make sense.

    2. People don’t realize this is setting up a bad precedent irrespective of fact whether vaccine is safe or not. Government should perhaps be allowed to charge you extra for medical treatment if you get COVID after refusing to get vaccinated. Perhaps it should even be allowed to deny you treatment if hospital is full. But it definitely shouldn’t be allowed to force people to undergo medical procedures of any kind.

    3. If we do that then I would like to pay a lot less for my public health care contributions as I am also paying for every druggie, fat slob, and alcoholic in this country. Also, you are assuming that the vaxx works. Hint: it does not.

    4. 55% of the age group below age 35 voted no, by the way.
      Looking at the demographic pyramid here in Switzerland, you can see the old farts holding the youth hostage.

      Democracy has nothing to do with freedom.

      As if it makes a difference if my freedoms are killed by a dictator or by a 51% majority…

    5. As if it makes a difference if my freedoms are killed by a dictator or by a 51% majority…

      Exactly, well said. Functionally it’s the same shit. Whether a dictator takes away your rights, or a bunch of old farts vote to take away the rights of the young, it’s functionally identical.

  5. I’m pretty sure the vaxx does work. It seems to be somewhat effective and killing and maiming so far, and is super good at transferring more and more power to a group that’s already saturated with an unbalanced amount of influence in the world.

    1. From the perspective of the elites, the vaxx is working like a charm. The only problem they are having is that people are experiencing serious side effects, including death, too soon, which is why they are now panicking. The cracks in the narrative need to be painted over by vaxx mandates. Strange that a new, deadly strand that is worse than ebola shows up right when popular pushback against our tyrants is ramping up. The “moronic” variant appeared so quickly that not even the people in the country it originated from knew anything about it.

  6. According to science, it is a total coincidence that athletes are dropping like flies. It has absolutely nothing to do with Covid:
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/sportsnews/article-10244297/Leading-cardiologist-says-cluster-collapses-footballers-likely-coincidence.html
    Science is likewise certain that the recent high-profile on-air collapse of a soccer player during a Champions League has nothing to do with the vaxx. Science went on to slam anti-vaxxers but somehow forgot to provide an alternative explanation:
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/sportsnews/article-10249677/Scientists-confirm-John-Flecks-pitch-collapse-NOT-Covid-jab.html

  7. So… in Austria the authorities said they had an entire 1200 cops to control the protests from getting out of hand… not a typo, that’s like 1 thousand some. That’s fucking nothing.

    The only reason the state has power is because of massive hyphosis. If the people decide to take the power, they could, and 1200 other humans can’t stop them just because they have a uniform on.

    1. They have a uniform and guns.
      And when they start using the guns, then maybe, JUST FUCKING MAYBE, Austrians will remember what their fucking 30 guns per 100 civilians are for.

    2. Ive been thinking about that. If the authorities use guns, I think that will be the beginning of the end for them

      I think the solution is just the crowds rushing. The uniforms can choose to back down and no longer defend the state, or they might choose to bring out the guns.

      If they start shooting at civilians in the name of a cold… I think they’re done. They will lose all support and no amount of propaganda will salvage that.

    3. “I think the solution is just the crowds rushing.”

      This actually works. Saw a video recently how Austrians entered some locked up street with police officers guarding it. Then a group of 100+ (?) protesters just walked into the police officers. That was it.

      Same for Christmas market in Luxembourg. Just walk in. Ignore the the barricades.

    4. @Alek

      By the way, have you seen Ceaușescu’s last speach?
      Like, when he shout’s “Hello”, wanting to silence the crowds? How him and his wife were disconnected from what ordinary people really felt?

      I think with some of the current politicians, we’re getting close to a similar scene. We’re not there yet, most people haven’t realized that the emperors are naked. But it might just come. I think Omicron is the last scariant that they can somewhat credibly pull off.
      After that, they need a new thing. Cyperpandemic, internet shutdowns, vaccinating the internet, energy collapse or similar.

      I’m starting to think that there is something like “fear fatigue”. People just can’t bring up the energy to be afraid all the time. It’s too energy consuming. Maybe that’s the elite’s error. They went too slow, yet they could’t go much faster.

    5. This actually works. Saw a video recently how Austrians entered some locked up street with police officers guarding it. Then a group of 100+ (?) protesters just walked into the police officers. That was it.

      Exactly. And there were other protests I saw, where there was a barricade with like fucking 15 cops and one water cannon. And the people stand back… And I’m like you fucking idiots, there’s 8,000 of you, and there’s 15 of them. You can just keep walking and don’t fucking stop. It’ like hypnosis. It’s imagined power, just coz the cops are dressed like fucking storm-troopers.

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