Hello. It's been one week since you've looked at me.
But stuff still happens.
So what's up?
The sun.
Is up and it's really pissed off.
The sun is losing its goddamn mind over the weekend.
There has been a G4 geomagnetic storm on the surface of the sun.
Wow.
What this means is that over the weekend, a lot of like sun
radiation hit the Earth's atmosphere and it got all hot and bothered.
And so the aurora happened more than usual.
Sometimes people ask me what kind of content I make and not infrequently.
I will say that I do current events, communications.
And I think I just realized I'm a fucking liar because that that certainly was not
communicating. I don't know what it was, but it wasn't communication.
Anyway, there's a geomagnetic storm on the surface of the sun at no location.
Three, six, six, four.
And I was surprised myself.
Now, this splotch on the surface of the sun is causing the aurora to be visible
far further south than usual, which is pretty neat.
It's neat because the aurora is pretty cool.
Taxes, according to recently published data from the New York Times,
the ultra rich are for the first time ever paying a lower effective tax rate
than the working class.
The 400 richest Americans are paying less in effective taxes
than the bottom half of earners in America.
This graph shows the change in the tax rate, the effective tax rate of the rich
over time. Notice how it only goes down.
And I wonder what happened in the in the 80s.
That huge dip, I guess we'll never know it was Reagan.
Thank fuck, he's dead.
So yeah, we've just been kind of cutting taxes for the rich.
For my entire life could be time to change up the strat.
What do you think?
I think it's really cool how I've been told for my entire life that if we just
keep cutting these taxes on the rich, things are going to get better.
And things get materially worse every year.
But it's because it's because we're still taxing the rich.
If we just got rid of those taxes, you could finally be happy.
It's pretty wild to think that like a small contingent of ultra rich people
have a vested interest in convincing a percentage of poor people
that it's in the poor people's best interest for the rich people to be rich.
They don't need to convince everyone just enough that it's harder for people
who don't want the world to work that way to change things.
That was my soapbox for the day.
Weird how this keeps happening.
A young black man was murdered by cops in his own home for doing nothing.
If this sounds familiar, it's because it keeps happening.
Robert Fortson was a 23 year old member of the US Air Force
and was recently murdered by a cop in his own home, not committing crime.
This is a reminder that committing crimes does not give the cops a pass to murder you.
I feel like we could use some reminders on that one
that cops are not judge, jury and executioner.
They're cops.
So a cop shows up to Roger's apartment, bangs on the door
and then sidesteps the peephole so they can't be seen.
Bangs on the door again after there's no response, kicks in the door,
sees Roger standing there and shoots him dead.
From inside the apartment, Roger was on the phone with a video call of someone
when he heard a knock at the door.
He went to go look through the peephole and didn't see anyone there.
He got a little nervous, so he went to go get his firearm that is legally owned.
And also, he's an active service member, but it doesn't matter, this is America.
There are literally more guns than there are people here,
and you can legally own guns.
So Roger goes to get his gun for self-defense in his home
from a mysterious knock at the door that he can't identify.
And then the cop kicks in his door, sees a man standing there, holding a gun
and immediately shoots him dead.
As a reminder, Roger wasn't doing anything.
Someone in the apartment complex had called the cops for a disturbance,
and then they showed up and murdered someone.
One moment, sitting on his couch, having a video call with someone.
The next moment, someone with a weapon is kicking in his door
and his instincts were to get something for self-defense.
His instincts were clearly correct, but it didn't matter.
Again, if this sounds familiar, it wasn't long ago that another cop
murdered another black man in his own apartment
after she walked into his apartment thinking it was hers.
But hey, maybe we should still do, you know, military training for our cops
and give them military equipment.
This is America.
Hands off our guns, unless you're black and a cop kills you,
in which case you shouldn't have gotten the gun
that you own legally for self-defense.
Shouldn't have done that. That's on you.
Tinder is out.
Hinge is in.
It doesn't matter, because they're owned by the same company.
Tinder, Hinge, and basically every dating app you've heard of
are all owned by Match Group.
They just are a big company that has a bunch of dating apps
that just try to cover all the different demographics.
Tinder has been shitting the bed recently,
and they keep rolling out features that people are like,
what the hell?
They rolled out a feature recently where you can pay
an exorbitant amount of money per month
to get their, like, ultra-premium subscription service.
It's like 500 bucks a month to get the best match?
Pay money to have access to the hot people, apparently.
Anyway, people are like, okay, I'm kind of tired of Tinder culture.
I kind of actually just want a relationship now.
So they're going to hinge, because that app is famously better.
But in the past year, we've seen a drop in Tinder usage
about 10%, and a growth in Hinge usage, like 30%.
Tinder is still far bigger than Hinge, mind you.
But if this trend continues, and if Tinder keeps shitting the bed,
then it might be on its way out.
That said, the thing I want to highlight here
is that basically every dating app is just the same company.
They just reskinned and slightly tweaked the algorithm
for more specific outcomes per app.
I feel like we're all kind of familiar with this whole
illusion of choice thing, like you go to the grocery store,
and basically every brand is owned by one of two or three brands,
which are then just owned by BlackRock.
We're seeing the same thing with apps now.
Oh, you want to do social networking?
Mark Zuckerberg's gotcha covered, and only Mark Zuckerberg.
Oh, well, I guess if I guess you could go on Twitter.
Gaming.
A Black Lotus Magic the Gathering card has sold for $3 million.
That can buy you, and this is true, a sack of potato.
You're self some shepherd's pie.
Nintendo has finally acknowledged that they're working on a Switch 2,
or more specifically, a successor to the Switch,
is what they're calling it.
It may not literally be a Switch 2.
It does sound like there's going to be a lot of backwards compatibility
with Switch games in your Nintendo account and whatnot.
Like they've already said that, but they're not saying Switch 2.
Knowing Nintendo, this can go one of two ways.
It's either going to be called the new Nintendo Switch XL 2DSI,
or it's going to be called like the swatch, the Nintendo swatch.
Oh, dear. It's not good today.
Speaking of Nintendo, they are also following in Stoney and Microsoft
footsteps in removing their integrations with Twitter.
They're X. I'm not going to call it X.
They removed their Twitter integration.
You used to be able to share screenshots and videos and whatnot
directly to your Twitter account.
They got rid of that because not worth it.
For a while, Warner Bros. were threatening to delist
like a couple dozen indie games from the Adult Swim Games Library
on Steam and other online stores.
They're not going to do that because that's dumb.
Stop delisting games.
Like it's a weird phenomenon in the era of digital game stores
that companies can be like, eh, this game just doesn't exist anymore.
Like it's just not for sale.
And there's not really a secondary market because it's all digital copies.
So get that.
In some cases, they can just remove the game from your library too.
So like if you didn't have it installed already and you purchased it,
it's just gone.
You will own nothing and be happy.
Last up for gaming news today, that whole Sony making people sign in
to PSN accounts in certain games.
The fallout from that is still going.
Ghost of Tsushima, which is an amazing game, is coming to PC,
but is now having its launch marred by the fact that Sony wants people to sign in
and you can't do that in every country.
And so Steam is like, well, if the game is not accessible
to certain people in certain countries,
because they can't make an account to access certain parts of the game,
then you can't sell it there.
And so they've been refunding people who purchased the game in certain countries.
I want to share a quick anecdote, which is that just like this past weekend,
I enabled cross saves on Baldur's Gate 3 between my Steam Deck and PS5.
Now, I did have to make a Larian account to enable cross saves,
but because they actually are just trying to facilitate ease of use of their product
and not just collect information on you,
all you do is make a Larian account and then connect any accounts
from the other places that you're playing the game.
You never have to log in after that.
You boot up the game on whatever platform you're playing on.
And if you've linked to that account already,
Larian's just like, oh, cool. Yeah, we know. We got you.
You can cross save. No problem.
No sign in here and accept our terms of agreements
and buy a subscription for your Larian Sync Pro account.
And lightning round.
Among all their other ongoing issues,
Boeing had to scrap a Starliner ship launch.
Boeing makes space ships apparently,
but they've got the Boeing Starliner and its launch was scrapped
because of a, you guessed it, faulty part.
Apple has a new iPad Pro with a new chip, the M4 chip,
and it's their fastest chip ever.
And they put it in an iPad and it's still an iPad.
The Boy Scouts of America are now just called Scouting America.
And apparently they're going to allow gay people and maybe girls.
TikTok is suing the US over the US's attempt to ban TikTok.
That lemonade that Panera put out that kills people is they're getting rid of it.
Elon Musk's brain implant company, Neuralink,
has implanted their first chip into a human brain
and it has like partially come back out like it's like detaching.
It worked for a little bit.
And then it detached. Researchers have used machine learning
to decode whale sound so we can potentially listen to whales talk to each other now.
Like, yo.
How are you?
I have concerns about the general movement of our society.
That's a bummer.
That's me being whales, so.
Critical Role is launching their own version of basically dropout called Beacon.
And apparently we're now just going to see every group of creators
make their own subscription service.
And finally for today, the US government has stated
that Israel's use of the weapons that we're giving them
is inconsistent with international law.
Dang, what can we possibly do about that?
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Stuff Keeps Happening.
Head to skh.news for sources, bonus content,
and a massive cache of lost documents from another world.
We're going to rebuild and we're going to learn the secrets from Beyond the Cosmos.
My name is Deverents. I'll be back on Monday.
Take care and be well.