I absolutely understand the value of a country being able to produce its own materials, but one thing I’ve always question is how many people, man or woman is actually willing to work these positions once they get back to the US.
Most of why they were outsourced is because corporations can pay (or not pay) people in third world countries much less than they can Americans, but how do you convince companies to open these mines and factories in the US, and how do you convince these companies to actually play their employees first world wages? A lot of the regulations we have in place in terms of operating mines is because of corporations cutting corners, intentionally hiding the health risks until they were unavoidable and similar actions, so it’s just something I honestly can’t wait to see how it actually comes into action.
Watching at home until after halftime, but honestly I'm mostly interested in the ads, because it's very interesting to see the ads that companies prepare for the Super Bowl
For those who aren't aware: Miriam Adelson is the new owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, having bought Mark Cuban's majority share in June of last year. However, she was unable to take the seat of 'govenor' (essentially the person who represents team leadership at league meetings and CBA negotiations between owners and players, which is usually just the owner of the team), mostly because of virulent hatred of Palestine, as she is very proud to be a member of the Triple Parentheses Gang, and openly wants the West Bank to be annexed. She is also one of, if not the largest donor to Trump, having donated over $100 million to his campaign for 2024. Her money comes from her second marriage, being married to fellow member of the TGG, Sheldon Adelson, founder of Las Vegas Sands, a corporation that formerly owned several resorts and casinos in Vegas, and still owns multiple resorts and casinos in South East Asia.
The reason my sports fandom made me aware of her is because at midnight EST, a trade was finalized that sent Slovenian star player, Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers for what is essentially pennies on the dollar.
The trade itself isn't the point, although the trade itself is absurd, but what I learned about Miriam and her family is that apparently most of why they purchased the Dallas Mavericks is because they're trying to push legalization of gambling in Texas, which isn't illegal through a law, but through the state's constitution itself. The alleged main reason for this is because the lease for the American Airlines Center (the arena the Mavericks play in) is up in 2030, and the ownership wants to build a new arena attached to a casino. I'm curious about what Texans think about gambling and whether it should be made legal in the state, but what also surprised me as I was reading more and more about her is that she donates so much to the GOP instead of the Democrats, but owning casinos probably makes that make more sense.
What a lot of people are saying because the value of the trade itself is so absurd, is that the ownership of the Mavericks is trying to tank the fan attendance in order to justify moving to Las Vegas if trying to legalize gambling in Texas falls through, which makes sense but is utterly absurd. I'll keep it here because I'll answer more of the sport questions in the comments, but Miriam Adelson is someone to watch out for, as she has the ear of Trump and the money and influence to back it up.
Was just reading some articles and a lot of wealthy areas have lost a lot of the homes in them, which is honestly somewhat surprising, but fire does not descern between poor and wealthy after all. IIRC, environmentalists make controlled burns controversial in left-wing areas, so that's a lot of why wildfires happen in the first place, when they aren't done via arson anyways.
As many of you may or may not know, there is still a strike going on between SAG-AFTRA, the main actors union, and various studios over the use of said actors voices to train AI voice generation models.
The long and short of it is that voice actors see what the studios are trying to do, know that isn't in their contracts, and want no part of it. But because the strike is still ongoing and several studios haven't come to agreement on this subject, there are still shows and games that are being affected, such as Genshin Impact.
This came to mind, because I started playing Genshin Impact again, and am seeing through datamining that for the Lantern Rite event (the in-game annual event celebrating the Lunar New Year/Chinese New Year), there are over a dozen playable characters who will not be voiced, which includes of the playable cast from Liyue (the second nation you go to in Genshin, based off of pre-WWI China). I know how most of the people here feel about English voice actors, but I do hope the various studios come to an agreement with SAG-AFTRA at some point, because I didn't even realize the strike hadn't ended until now.
I was checking my bank account because I had family members who said they were going to send me money, and I saw that the IRS sent me over a thousand dollars and I had no idea why. Apparently, my mom told me that the IRS said on the news that they were finally going through the backlog of misfiled stimulus checks from COVID and sending them out, so I guess thank you IRS. Just curious if anyone else randomly got money from the IRS, because I saw that it showed up in my bank as a tax refund and got really confused because I already got my federal refund this year.
I'm currently trying to find the best deals for a domestic cross-country flight and forgot that some airlines still use Boeing planes, which I'd rather not fly on right now. The last time I flew on a plane, I went American Airlines and flew the longer flights on Airbus planes. I refuse to fly Spirit, but other than that, I'm just curious because another thing I didn't know is how much airlines struggle to stay profitable.
It's been a while since I made a V-Tuber news post, but the events of the past two days made it pretty clear that doing so now is necessary.
Sakamata Chloe, a member of Hololive JP's sixth generation, 'Secret Society holoX' (usually just called holoX), will be 'concluding her channel activities', similarly to Amelia Watson, on January 25th, 2025. Laplus Darkness, another member of holoX explains that she understands why Chloe is leaving, because even she says the amount of work that she expected from Hololive is a lot more than she previously expected, and that workload is a lot of why Chloe has chosen to leave.
The big news that got me to want to make this post today is that Ceres Fauna, a member of Hololive EN's second generation 'Council' (now 'Promise' with the graduation of Sana Tsukumo and addition of IryS to the group), will be graduating from Hololive on January 3rd, 2025. She isn't planning on leaving the door open with the affiliate status, like Amelia and Chloe are/have, once she leaves, that is the last that we will see of the Ceres Fauna persona. She specifically states that her reason for graduation is 'disagreement with management, and that she liked being an idol, that she was getting more comfortable with singing. This is notable because with Amelia and Minato Aqua, who have both left, Aqua choosing to graduate, their reasons for leaving were moreso for the sake of their creativity, as Amelia, now dooby3D, has an entire motion capture studio in her home that she mostly wasn't allowed to use in Hololive, and Aqua's problems were with the workload outside of streaming, which leads to something that I actually didn't know until last night.
Cover Corp went public this year, and Motoaki Tanigo, also known as Yagoo, was essentially forced to make Cover go public or be forced to sell the company. Cover was originally a tech company that only started the V-Tubing aspects of things because the person behind Tokino Sora wanted to become a virtual idol. This was done with the help of venture capital money, and because more people are learning this, a large portion of the viewerbase is blaming this new string of graduations and leaving on the investors pushing the girls to lean more and more into the idol aspects of being a vtuber, when a large portion of the fanbase mostly watches streams, and doesn't really care about the concerts. Who knows where this will take us, but Cover Corp going public, and Fauna graduating when there weren't any real signs that she was having problems is going to stain Cover for the foreseeable future. If the investors try to push Cover towards Nijisanji's route, I think everyone will simply be pissed out of their mind and the company will crash and burn for the sake of investors' short term gain.
I have seen conflicting reports of Sakamata Chloe's PL, but here are both of Fauna's channels. The non-ASMR channel has exploded in subscriber count within the past 18 hours since her announcement, as it started at 71k subscribers and has exploded to over 200k subscribers since the announcement of her graduation.
Asking this because that’s why the feds are doing this to Alex Jones and it’s been so long that I honestly only remembered that because of the posts from earlier.
