Total net worth. No hidden assets or secret bank accounts. Every last cent that a person is worth. Also, it gets brighter/more noticeable whenever you’re advocating for something that increases your net worth.

I feel like this would be the only way to get a lot of people to connect the dots.

I have a bad feeling that apple is going to release a pair of smart glasses and all of the social momentum of discouraging wearing these things will be lost overnight.

I fantasize about keeping a power drill in my car and when the ad starts playing I’d just drill straight into the speaker and waggle the drill bit around until the noise stops.

I’ve got a typical Samsung, software-bloated smart TV, only I’ve never connected it to the internet so it’s effectively just a dumb TV. With modern smart TVs, the price is effectively subsidized by advertisers that expect to turn you into a recurring revenue stream. That’s why dumb TVs typically cost more (if you can find them anymore).

In my view, advertisers paid for part of my TV, which I happily connected to a mini PC that is ad-blocked to the fullest extent, and all of the shows/movies I watch come from my arr stack and Plex.

Only downside is the TV still has a ~10 second nag popup at the bottom telling me to connect to the internet every time I turn it on. In my book, that’s still less annoying than a TV powering on to a system menu instead of an input source.

I almost suggested that, but the story goes that the reason he chose “Forrest” as a pseudonym when writing the book was because of Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the Klan. People contain multitudes. I can’t claim to know why he did what he did, but nothing I’ve read about the man (admittedly little) indicates that he was sorry for what he’d done. Ashamed perhaps, but even that I’m just guessing based on the fact that he tried changing his identity and denied being Asa Carter.

Depends on the situation. I have an uncle who is, for his generation (boomer), fairly progressive-minded.

For years, he repeated that his favorite book was “The Education of Little Tree” which was published in 76, and to my understanding takes a pretty irreverent and sometimes satirical stance on much of society’s generally accepted social norms and formal institutions. It has an environmentalist tone and is critical of the prejudice that the indigenous protagonist faces.

The weird part is that the author, “Forrest Carter,” was actually Asa Earl Carter who was formerly a prominent Klan member and speech writer for George Wallace, one of the premiere racist ghoul politicians of the American South. Ever heard the speech that goes “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever”? Yeah, that’s a George Wallace speech that was written by Carter. It’s been known that they’re the same guy since the early 90’s, but my uncle still wasn’t aware of it in the 2010’s.

My Uncle’s a pretty reasonable guy and he’s capable of critical thinking. I don’t know why Carter went on to write a book that was critical of prejudice after spending his early life being super fucking turbo-racist, but the guy’s long dead and while it certainly recontextualizes his anti-prejudice work, it’s not like you can’t still like his books. When I shared the info with my uncle about Carter’s identity, I expected him to take it much the way I did like “Well that’s pretty weird. Wonder what the hell happened to have made the same man write such different things in his life. Sucks he was a racist,” but instead it really seemed like he took it personally. He got really defensive about something that has literally been settled fact since the 90s, suggesting it was all lies even though I was showing him the Wikipedia page for Carter. I even heard him mutter something under his breath after the conversation which is waaay more petty than I’ve ever seen him act.

If I don’t think the person I’m talking to is capable of critical thought and nuance, I’ll keep things like that to myself, but my uncle and I have had tons of interesting conversations. In my head this was just another one of those. It’s not like I was accusing my uncle of being racist. After all, he had no idea. I thought I was just sharing a bizarre detail about an author he liked.

Not defending this, but it did remind me of how nuts the monetization was on the original. I had a modded 360 at the time, and there used to be an old school forum style website that curated all available DLC. This game had exclusive content for GameStop, Walmart, Target, and I think a 4th and 5th retailer too. Not to mention the pre-order bonuses and other exclusives. I wanna say there were around 25 different pieces of content and to get 100% of what was available, youd’ve had to buy 5 retail copies of the same game… or have a modded 360 and an internet connection. Even unlocking the content was more of a hassle than most DLCs. You had to move your user profile to a USB stick, connect it to your PC, inject the entitlements to the exclusive costumes into your profile, then move the profile back to your console.