Feel no guilt, ye who cast this soul into the maw of the mountain, for the volcano god is pleased and the great calamity is postponed once more.

So much for the right-wing talking point that gets parroted in every thread about how the top 1% earners pay 40% of all income tax. Yeah, they might actually pay 40% of all income tax if they actually paid it.

At $163 billion per year, wealthy tax cheats could have bankrolled the 20 year $2 trillion war in Afghanistan in just 13 years with change to spare.

If you pay taxes in America, you should be livid reading this story.

Having the MSR go up against the Razor is like a Round 1 bye. There's not even a contest there. Not that the MSR needs any help because it has this bizarre cult following.

Alright, I'll explain it, so bear with me.

In order to understand the difference between the effectiveness of vaccines for Smallpox/Polio and Coronavirus, you need to think about the life cycle of a virus. It's an entity that requires a living host to multiply itself. The immune system is a natural protection that helps us fight off infections from viruses, and it's incredibly effective at doing so. Our bodies fight infections daily, and rarely do we get sick, because our white blood cells catch the virus before it has a chance to spread to the point where we experience negative symptoms.

A virus wants to infect a host and go undetected as long as possible so that it can reproduce and spread itself to other host organisms. A virus that can last underneath the cover of an immunoresponse long enough to spread to at least one other organism is a successful virus. This is what viruses such as Rhinovirus (the common cold), Influenza (the Flu), and now the Coronavirus are exceptionally good at. The infected person is spreading the virus without even knowing it, because the virus is able to multiply quickly enough to spread to other hosts before it's detected and the immune system purges it from the body.

What vaccines do, whether it's an mRNA or a viral vector vaccine, the idea is still the same: We introduce our body to methods that help it fight the targeted virus more effectively. This lowers, but doesn't completely eliminate, the rate of infection among individuals who receive the vaccine. The Smallpox and Polio vaccines were incredibly effective at reducing infection rates, to the point where their respective viruses had difficulty finding new hosts because the rate of transmission was so low that the virus died out when it could no longer easily spread.

It's important to keep in mind that these diseases were not wiped out overnight, or in the case of Polio, not even entirely eliminated. We've had general access to the COVID-19 vaccine for less than a year, and it took decades for doctors to determine that Smallpox was eradicated because for a long time there were still new cases that popped up.

Not all viruses can be easily compared, though. Coronavirus presents new challenges for us that we haven't had to face before. Carriers can be asymptomatic, which facilitates rapid spread, and certain individuals develop severe respiratory complications when exposed making it far more deadly than common viral illnesses which means we can't simply ignore it and let our bodies handle it when we get sick - it frequently requires life saving medical intervention to keep people who have severe infections alive.

You might be wondering why bother getting a COVID vaccine if you can still get COVID? That's a perfectly valid question. Of the individuals who are vaccinated, vanishingly few of them develop symptoms severe enough to require hospitalization. Most of the deaths are among the population of unvaccinated. In essence, you are still being granted some protections from the virus even if you do get sick with it.

So why haven't we eliminated Coronavirus with the vaccine? Well, there are a few reasons, but the biggest one is that there haven't been enough people getting the vaccine for it to put a dent in it's ability to transmit itself, and so far the virus is mutating faster than we can develop countermeasures against it. That doesn't mean that the vaccine is ineffective or worthless, it means that we need to try harder to convince the unvaccinated to get their shot so that the virus has one less easy target to infect. Only then, time will tell if the virus dies out due to a lack of hosts or if we will continue to develop new vaccines that are more effective or specifically targeted against variants. In all likelyhood, we're going to be stuck with Coronavirus for a long time to come. Eradicating it or reducing it's virulency will be one of the major challenges of the 21st century.

Because it's not 100% effective.

Yeah, I get that. The game is very evolved from it's humble origin, no doubt about it. I'm slowly getting used to all the new stuff they've added since the days that I used to play competitively.

Also, I don't mean to say "cheats" in a pejorative sense. I'm more familiar now with Magic: The Gathering and in that game's vernacular it's quite common to use the term "cheat out" when talking about circumventing a cost or avoiding a drawback of some sort to get a tangible benefit. Still working within the game mechanics, but utilizing them in a way that is advantageous to the player.

I've always thought that Yu-Gi-Oh was a game that could benefit greatly from having a system of formats for structured play, especially when trying to mix a card pool from the very beginning of the game with a card pool from more modern sets that hardly resembles anything from that era, but that's just my own opinion.

True. I can't really think of a single piece of clothing that would be exclusively worn by men or is largely considered overtly masculine. The only difference between a garment made for men and the exact same garment made for women is the cut.

Meanwhile, there are tons of women's clothing choices that you would get a lot of sideways looks for wearing as a guy.

Their nectar is the blood of my foes on the field of battle!

Grinding out cash is really the only gameplay loop right now, so you just kind of passively earn income depending on what you choose to do. If you want to be efficient about it, do bounties around Crusader or Hurston. You can potentially earn a lot of money going that route and most small fighter-sized ships are 1-2 million aUEC which you can earn in a day or two with the help of a friend for VHRT/ERT missions.

PvP is not too bad. It's rare to encounter non-consensual PvP right now. Usually people in chat are asking for fights at certain locations. The last major update re-introduced severe desync which makes PvP extremely hard to enjoy right now.

While you're AFK, as long as your ship is stored in a hangar at a station, you're safe. The level of persistence is not quite that advanced yet, but persistent hangars are on the horizon. The ASOP terminals will be a thing of the past probably by next year unless the usual delays prevent it.

Alright so...

I just started playing a few days ago. I hadn't touched Yu-Gi-Oh in well over a decade, but I remembered how to play well enough and recognized most of the classic cards in Kaiba's starting deck.

I thought the level 1 AI was a bit stupid at first. They play weak shit in attack position and just let you beat on them. I did play against some that put up more of a fight, but those were unusually scarce. So then I played against ranked decks and it's like I went from a boxing match to a point-blank gunfight.

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like the balance of the game is way skewed in favor of explosive turn 1 combo summons when you have a 20 card minimum and 4000 life points.

So, I guess my question is this; is this game just grind gems for 200 hours and then look up the best meta deck online to build? Maybe I just don't "get" new Yu-Gi-Oh, but what's the point of having this incredible catalogue of cards that will never ever be useful because there's no beating an opponent who can cheat out a blue eyes or an xyz monster on turn 1 or 2 with an incredibly reliable combo engine? Are there are no board wipes like Dark Hole or Raigeki that are easily obtainable?

I didn't get mad, but okay.

Maybe don't get mad at me for reacting to stuff? Have you informed the OP about it? You know, the actual culprit who is deceiving people?

You are having a gut reaction to a clickbait article.

Well what the fuck else do I have to go on? It's not like the OP linked the article.

This is like if someone had to write a book report about Star Wars and when they googled it the first thing that came up was the Ralph McQuarrie concept art for Star Wars and they just made a bunch of shit up from there.

I used to have one of these! They were baller drink vessels. I think we lost the light up base for the one we had and then one day my parents decided to buy fancy-pants glassware and tossed out the cheap yet practical novelty stuff we were using all along.

Sponsor block is incredible. Everyone should use it. Your favorite content creator still gets paid for shilling out, and you don't get bombarded with yet another advertisement for a product you probably don't want.

I'm not even going to bother arguing with the idiots infesting this thread. Go ahead and buy ivermectin if you can. Take as much of it as you like. If you die a horrible and painful death, don't say we didn't warn you.

As an aside, parents who don't think or care about how a name is going to affect a child's social life are fucking shitty parents, and that's a hill I'm willing to die on.

A lot of my co-workers have kids with really stupid names and they never even considered that they would be hard to spell/pronounce or that their kids would get bullied over it (Yes, I know, kids are cruel and will bully you anyway, but there's no need to give them more ammunition to work with).

Now I tell people to do the Starbucks Litmus. Take your future baby's name-to-be and order a coffee at Starbucks, give the barista that name instead of your own. If they spell it correctly on the cup (without having to ask) and pronounce it correctly when they call out the order, you picked a good one. To get a good sample size, try this at multiple Starbucks/Petes/whatever so you can be sure it wasn't a fluke.

Who do I call to report my neighbor for committing an abortion thoughtcrime? I am a psychic, so I have plenty of evidence.

This angel has a face that only a mother could love.

I see the engineers at Drake are still mad about losing that contract with the UEE Navy.

Well who's laughing now?

If they talk over you constantly, even when you've made it clear that you have something to say and you've waited for a pause in the dialogue to chime in. Nope, they won't skip a beat and they'll just cut you off and continue talking like you didn't even say anything.

Such people aren't talking with you, they're talking at you. I find that most of the time they are actually just shitty people who use you as a living mannequin to dump their own frustrations and problems on to, but don't care to listen to you when you have something genuinely insightful or important to add.