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It’s legitimately embarrassing how many people can’t seem to grasp that this isn’t the “fuck you” they think it is.

They aren’t shocked or upset, they’re not panicking because you left, because it’s all the same to them either way. You either access the site while blocking the ads and they get no income from your views, or you go away and they don’t get income from your views. Exactly nothing has changed for them except now they don’t have you pulling bandwidth.

The point is not to get YOU to turn your ad blocker off, the point is it will get SOME people to turn it off who aren’t you. If you’re not willing to turn it off, then what you do matters very little because they appreciate there’s no way they’re getting income from you ever.

It’s got the same energy as “You expect me to pay admission to enter this theme park? Well now I’m not going in, don’t you feel stupid?”

Ever go hiking?

On a trail, where you are not subjected to anybody else’s noise for more than a second as they pass you by?

Skiing?

You’re skiing down a slope and a person is skiing next to you with a Bluetooth speaker?

Sit in a park?

Outdoors, where you can put some distance between yourself and them?

Maybe it’s hard to conceive of for some, but the world shouldn’t be shielded by headphones.

You’re right, it’s already shielded by air. The air that you can put between yourself and the other person.

The point was regardless of whatever they’re doing, you are only as subject to their poor behavior as you choose to be.

If you’re not going to do something about it (and please tell me what you would actually do about this beyond complaining on the internet), then your only other choice is mitigation, which involves just keeping headphones with you to block out other people’s noise or learn to find more peaceful spaces.

It’s normalized because it’s not a serious problem, it’s a minor, and extremely temporary annoyance the vast majority of the time.

Right, but they were suggesting it should be silenced at all times, by default, even for the very first notification.

Well they should silence it at that point because obviously they’re paying enough attention to it and expecting responses, so they should be waiting for the vibrate if not looking at it directly.

But people don’t need to have their phone silenced at all times while in public, they just need to be attentive enough to answer and silence it. I frequently don’t even feel the vibration.

Dragon Age’s drop in reputation had nothing to do with launchers, given many if not most players were on console.

“Simplicity” is arguably what killed it, because they had an excellent formula with Origins, and “simplified” it to the point it lost its identity as a true RPG.

combat was more fun I thought,

And this is the problem. The original game was made for people into RPGs (technically Real Time with Pause RPG).

The sequels gave a middle finger to those people by chasing simplistic, action focused combat with minimal RPG aspects. Hence why people despise them.

It’s always weird to me when people talk about video games as if story is the single most important aspect.

Personally I think 2’s biggest folly was abandoning the deep RPG in favor of overly-simplistic hack and slash. A mistake 3 somewhat attempted to correct, and for that, I’ll take its weaker story because I enjoy playing it much more. And if course 1 blows them both out of the water in terms of RPG gameplay.

Inquisition wasn’t quite as bad, I actually enjoyed it because it made an attempt to walk back some of the “streamlining” from 2, though obviously they both pale in comparison to Origins.

I was kind of hopeful they’d rediscovered their identity somewhat with Inquisition, but 4 looks like that hope was misplaced. They doubled down on abandoning the RPG in favor of the overly simplistic button masher with a smattering of RPG elements that are more or less meaningless.

It genuinely feels like the notion of a pure triple AAA RPG is slowly being torn down by publishers chasing the wide audience of action game fans who will ultimately not care that much for the end product.

The point is the client presumably paid for it for their users, who are their customers, but they have no idea what those users want.

I was gonna say, clients aren’t the only ones.

Feels like a lot of developers and especially UX designers have a bad habit of disappearing up their own asshole nowadays.

You’re talking about laws. They’re talking about the IRS.

The IRS doesn’t make the laws. They’re an agency like any other, and a very important one.

if you fuck it up, you go to jail

No, no you don’t. This is an actual child’s understanding of how it works.

If you fuck up they often don’t even notice unless it’s substantial, otherwise they just send you a notice. You have to be willfully refusing to pay taxes for a while, repeatedly, before you’re in trouble (tax evasion) or commiting actual tax fraud.

Why would the IRS send you to jail for making mistakes on your taxes? Where taxes are now paying for your incarceration, and you can’t work to make the income to pay taxes.

Strictly speaking, tax filling software, even the free ones, have simplified it all so much that for people who have a single source of income from work and not a lot of tax forms to collect (most Americans), it’s pretty trivial. Maybe 30-60 minutes, once a year.

Less than ideal but far from the grueling, soul sucking work I was told would plague my adult life when I was a kid.

That’s why the IRS is finally doing their own online filling system. No more making Americans shell out for software, so everyone gets a nice, simple tax season.

That’s just for free tax filling software, i.e. a government sponsored TurboTax alternative. And that was definitely needed.

What they’re talking about is not having to actually do the filling at all, or at least only having to file in certain cases. The government pays for employees that look at your stuff, says “that’s the amount”, and asks you to confirm.

Granted, with the way tax filing software has advanced, and how simple the vast majority of people’s filings are going to be, the difference is not very substantial anymore. The majority of people just need to click through the screens and answer the questions, so it takes a little time but it’s hardly a true hassle.

The reason it’s been like this in the US for so long is because of the heavy lobbying to keep software like that proprietary and the system complicated enough that people need to use it.

But it’s also been because of decades of conservative bullshit refusing to fund the IRS to the degree that they could provide the services that other countries get. IRS literally could not and cannot afford the manpower to handle the taxes of every American for us. Software lets them circumvent that.

Vote for people who will increase funding to the IRS so they can manage all this.

The reason it’s been like this for so long is because they don’t have the manpower or (until recently) the technology to handle the sheer numbers. Lobbying from TurboTax and shit also played a big part, but even without that, they straight up can’t afford to do all this when they’ve been strangled of funding from decades of conservative legislation.

They were supposed to destroy these when they closed the locations, to prevent exactly this.

Which is a tall order for minimum wage restaurant workers. The fuck they gonna do? Take it down to the local steel mill and T2 it?

This is a new thing that smaller towns are trying to do to take advantage of an increase in remote work.

The meme is also misleading because it’s implying that this is something they’re giving to everyone that moves there for a limited time, when it is only 10 people. It’s also implying that there’s not enough people there to pay taxes, which doesn’t actually make sense because that’s not how taxes work. There would definitely be enough tax income if they didn’t care about the future of the town. What they’re trying to do is revitalize the area and trigger growth, and they need more income to fund that revitalization.