You're there for moral support.
Those dumb phrases and your mere npc-like presence may seem dumb, but you may not be aware that you've got roughly a 3 meter AoE, 25% boost to her max stamina, as well as a -50% to her stamina loss rate going on.
Level up the companionship skill tree a bit more and those buffs might apply to you as well!
Counterpoint:
The reason they will be out of touch is that they will have better impulse control and better spending habits than kids raised on modern games with their FOMO MTX and gacha bullshit.
So basically, actual 'nerds' are rasing another generation of 'nerds', except this time, nerds 2.0 will probably actually be more socially intelligent than the brain dead zombies being raised on fornite, roblox and tiktok, who have negative attention spans and cannot fathom the concept of doing any actual thought-work, when chatgpt can just do their homework for them.
They'll also be more tech savvy, like being exposed to or having to learn at least some of how emulation works, which kinda de facto makes you understand things like a file structure, which an increasing number of kids (now adults too) raised on modern mobile UIs... have no clue about.
Oh, they'll also likely just be generally more literate.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SAF112
Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: Meats, Poultry, Fish, and Eggs in U.S. City Average (Seasonally Adjusted)
Entire Time Series (1967+) Normalized to '82-'84 =100:
Last 5 Years (2020+), Renormalized to 100 = Jan 2020:
So, yeah, thats about 35% increase in 5 years, if you specifically look at the Meat Poultry Fish Eggs component of the CPI.
The CPI numbers, the, '2.5%' inflation number... thats ~~month to month~~ the last 12 months, annualized, like an APR, ... and they are a weighted basket of many, many different subcomponents such as this.
Sort of analagous to how a say, 10% APR... well, thats annualized, so to get the monthly interest rate, you roughly divide by 12... but technically it is more complicated, because that monthly interest rate is actually compounding every month over month.
So the acutal monthly rate is:
MPR = [ ( 1 + APR ) ^ ( 1 / 12 ) ] - 1
If you treat an ~35% increase over almost 5 years with this kind of math, then you end up with an average, effective monthly inflation rate for meat and eggs of:
~~6.642%, since Jan 2020.~~
EDIT: I fucked up the math, goddamned javascript based web calculator on shitty mobile phone,.here's something more accurate:
4.984%, since July 2020.
(I'm basically just doing napkin math here, picking specifically July 2020 just because its the 5Y window, normally you'd use a longer period of stability to base this off of, but hopefully ya'll get the idea)
Also worth noting, the latest August numbers are of course backward looking, in time. So, if these price pics in the OP image are literally from today... they may not be reflected in the numbers untill next month.
... Assuming Trump has not destroyed the BLS/FRED by then, who fucking knows.
.........
Why doesn't this line up with broader inflation?
Well, lots of reasons, I'm going to pick probably the biggest one, as opposed to writing an entire PhD level dissertation...
The CPI, the big headline number... is based on an average basket of goods and services that, ie, a weighted index, and uh... that basket, those weights, represent the average, the mean... not the median.
Here's 2022.
Yep thats a household that makes $94k before taxes, $83k after taxes.
In 2022, the US Median after tax household income was... $64k.
So, the entire basket, and thus CPI, is thus weighted toward the spending patterns of people about 1 standard deviation higher than the median household income.
Rich people do not have the same spending basket as poorer people, poorer people disproportionally spend a lot more of their income on food, rent/mortgage, gas / car expenses...
... And as wealth disparity, and wealth transfer to the elites gets worse and worse, the reported CPI thus underreports actual inflation for more and more people.
........
Hope all these fun numbers help explain some things.
.........
EDIT 2:
Without having to doing a bunch of math yourself...
Probably look at the CPI-U series and components instead of the broader CPI... as the U refers to Urban, and something like 80% of Americans live in what is considered an Urban area.
So looking at the CPI-U is probably a relatively easy way to get a somewhay more realistic look at price levels that actual people pay... but the flipside is that the wealthy disparity is even more lopsided in Urban areas... uh, good luck, lol.
.........
The financial news and media still focus on the broader CPI... basically because of outdated tradition.
Much like how they almost never pay attention the BLS employment number revisions... unless they are very very bad.
You don't need to be very smart to have money, basically just lucky. Or ruthless.
.......
EDIT 3
Ok, using the actual numbers from OP Image... maybe this can demonsrate the power of compound interest.
Thats a 1y difference of +45.496%, in $/lb of beef.
All it takes to get that, in one year...
Is an average, compounding, 3.1742% price increase every month, for 12 months.
Exponential equations run away fast, and human brains tend to default to thinking of linear relationships... not exponential... and thats why credit card companies make so much money, lol.
Anyway, yeah, check this CPI U meat/eggs subcomponent next month to see august price levels, and if they do a massive jump, or if data is now considered a woke diversity hire and now banned shrug
I am still baffled that anyone thinks that Kernel AC is any kind of effective at stopping hacks, people have been literally making a living off of defeating it, and selling those hacks / methods for almost a decade now...
But nope, still got hordes of idiot gamers who think they work, think they're necessary, think they can't be spoofed.
For Americans who have the height mode of their brain stuck in "Freedom Units":
Anna Smrek is roughly 6' 9"
'Short King' is roughly 5' 3"
...
For data nerds:
Going by total data for the whole globe, all people:
https://www.gigacalculator.com/calculators/height-percentile-calculator.php
Anna is ... off the charts, one of if not the actual tallest adult women in the world, literally breaks the calculator.
Anna would be at... the 99.9(8/9)% percentile of men by height, which means that if you use 8.2 billion as a world population, there are at most approximately 1.6 million men as tall or taller than her.
EDIT: I forgor to divide by two, women vs men, so uh, 800k.
===
'Short King' is under the 1st percentile of men (0.77), he is shorter than 99.3%+ of adult men.
'Short King' would be at about the 25th percentile of women by height, which means he is actually still as tall or taller than 25% of women, approximately 2 billion.
EDIT: I did the same forgor /2, so, 1 billion, thanks to FundMECFSResearch for catching my error!
===
Average global male height ~= 178 cm / 5' 10"
Average global female height ~= 165 cm / 5' 5"
...
Possibly also relevant:
https://www.gotquestions.org/how-tall-was-Goliath.html
If you use a more reasonable and realistic measurement of cubits and spans, and go with the Septuagint version of the Old Testament/Torah...
Goliath, the mythical warrior felled by David and his sling, whose name is now just a common euphemism for 'giant'...
Yeah he was only about 6' 6", or about 198 cm.
So...Anna could probably roughly rest her nose on the top of Goliath's head, without bending her neck (or at least not much).
...
Another fun addendum, for I guess dating data nerds?:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886913000020
(If someone can find a more recent study that specifically looks into this, I'd appreciate it!)
Broadly speaking, women prefer taller men more strongly than men prefer shorter women, by a factor of roughly 2.625x.
Women prefer, on average, a larger height difference between themselves and their partner (i.e. males being much taller than themselves) than men do. This effect is even more pronounced when examining satisfaction with actual partner height: women are most satisfied when their partner was 21 cm taller, whereas men are most satisfied when they were 8 cm taller than their partner.
In Freedom Units, thats roughly women being most satisfied with a man 8 inches taller than them, men being most satisfied with a woman about 3 inches shorter than them.
This means a 5' 10" average guy will tend to be well satisfied with a 5' 7" woman's height, but she will tend to not be well satisfied with the man's height, herself on average, ideally, looking for a 6' 3" man.
Even if it was a 5' 10" man and an [EDIT: Whoops, too many numbers, too fast, this would actually be a somewhat shorter than] average 5' 3" woman, she'd still tend to ideally prefer a 5' 11" man, on average.
So, to more accurately assess 'Short King's realistic dating pool, we actually need to find women who are 8 inches shorter than him.
And that works out to women 4' 7" or shorter.
Which is the 0.02 percentile... meaning that 'Short King's realistic dating pool is at worst, just as small as the number of men who are as tall or taller than Anna.
Or, perhaps both Anna and Short King need to find partners who simply accept them and are satisfied by them via being uncommonly partner-height indifferent.
Good luck to both of them!
Whoo boy, looks like the .world mods are enforcing silent compliance with fascist brutality again, thats a lot of highly upvoted deleted comments.
One of these days they'll suck the boot so far down their throats they'll asphyxiatiate, but at least they'll pass with joyful tears in their eyes.
Shout out to all the Nat Guard and Marines currently 'defending our freedom' in LA!
... and of course their famously faithful wives they married 3 months before their first deployment!
The fucking clownshow continues.
This is you going in to your Professor's office hours to ostensibly turn in your final paper for a course, it is half your grade in the class, and you actually just sit down and explain you are 'still working on it' and 'can i get it to you maybe by the end of next academic quarter?'
I am honestly so, so relieved by this high level public idiocy.
I really am not kidding.
I've struggled with impostor syndrome much of my life.
All gone. Done. No more.
I am legitimately more competent than almost everyone in this administration at their own jobs, despite the fact that I hardly have any relevant credentials to most of their positions.
... This is unironically what all the rightwing conspiricists have been afraid of for two+ decades now.
This is what they thought Clinton, or Obama or somehow the UN or 'ZOG' would be able to use as the mechanism to instate tyranny.
... And now they are doing it themselves, so utterly deluded that they would short cicruit if you tried to explain this to them.
I grew up in a right wing nutjob household. This is what I was told my whole life, growing up. I was indoctrinated into it, and had to deconvert myself out of it similar how I had to deconvert out of christian extremism.
These people are perfect hypocrites.
Because no one else has yet commented this:
Fuck The Police.
Assuming you are serious:
Bluesky is ... arguably 'federated', but it is centralized, not decentralized.
https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20241128-bluesky-decentralization
Their model (AT Protocol) relies on a central, authoritative ... 'Relay', that all 'federated' users and posts on federated PDS (personal data servers) must go through, to actually reach the 'AppView', ie, what all other people/users can actually see.
So, this is not a many to many, tangled spider web of connections, the way lemmy, and other parts of the actual fediverse are.
It is a top down hierarchy, a pyramid.
And Bluesky runs the Relay, the chokepoint.
If Bluesky cuts off the PDS your account is on, everyone on it is now gone.
The actual fediverse, Mastadon, Lemmy, etc, runs on ActivityPub.
In that model... every instance is essentially self contained, and every instance that is federated communicates with every other instance that is federated.
Each instance can decide what other instances they want to federate with... and users on each instance can personally block even more other users, communities, or entire instances if they choose to, but that only effects what that particular user sees.
That is what you call decentralized, approaching, or also having elements of being 'distributed'.
To bring up an example without getting into the drama that led to it:
The 'Tankie Triad' of ml, lemmygrad and hexbear have had a number of other instances defederate from them.
But, there are also a good number of instances that have not done so.
So that means if your account is on hexbear... you can't see or post on an instamce that has blocked your instance.
But, if you (a hexbear...ian?), post on a neutral instance... users on that neutral instance will see the post.
But but, if a user from an instance that has defederated from hexbear goes to to the neutral instance... they will not see the hexbearian's post.
This sounds complicated, and it is, but ... thats the whole point of a decentralized system. It is more complex in the abstract... but the entire system ends up being more robust, more adaptable, more customizable... without a central authority in direct control of the entire system.
The average American is as literate as a 5th to 6th grader.
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics
5th to 6th graders are 10 to 12 years old, normally.
So uh... yep, mhm, the average American is about as stupid as a 12 year old, that's a bit on the optimistic side though.
Dude's theory isn't really wrong, Americans are dumb and immature as fuck, and yes the statistics exist to back that up.