CTF_Atrophy_b7 was the absolute worst shit I've ever been forced to play.

You can't roll most of the team out kitchen (but maybe you mean pantry/grundle/lower?). Way back in the day Puff used to have a pretty interesting mid where he, as demo, would go kitchen alone. Typically he wouldn't just die in there because it's easy to hit pipes in that doorway, and it's not SUPER hard to have somebody on the outside cover the door. That could be an interesting curveball if your demo can do anything from inside there (mainly spam over to house). Or if the other team is really stupid and decides to load a bunch of crap into your kitchen (they will be trapped in there).

In general though the left side mid just focuses on hanging out on the balcony until either A.) the other team decides to attack you and you are forced to fight, or B). You somehow deal a lot of damage to them, which is an ideal time to have your team go in as they are ceding position for a moment to take an arrow or get a healthpack. Once you decide to go the easiest way to do is it have a maincaller type count to 3, and then everybody just goes in by whichever way they can. It's a typical passive style mid. The only time you really modify that is if your demo just absolutely lights up their demo at the start of the mid.

As far as scouts go, I'm a big fan of always having at least one scout up top, in particular at divisions below upper invite, because you're almost *always* going to see a soldier bomb that comes over the top and that scout will end them almost every time.

I like to hike, garden, a mow my yard with a scythe, read a lot, watch wrestling and various serialized TV shows and movies too, though I've not been to a theater in a while as my local one is closed for renovations still :( I'm also thinking about getting into photography because I need to start documenting stuff for work, so I may as well have the pictures look nice.

That pretty well fills the time. There are also TONS of educational videos on youtube about soldering and various handicraft style hobbies that are great for learning where to go with things. If you really want to get into soldering the easiest and cheapest way is just to hit up your friends for all of their broken electronics: ear buds, headsets, controllers, etc, everybody has some. Then try to fix them.

Willing to learn, personable, and you're not going to find a more enthusiastic player.

Mine was 72 pages and I wrote it in a single evening with a bottle of wine and 340 note cards.

It then went through revision and I actually worked on it a bit and I cut it down to 68 pages. Having had 4 years to plan it I'd basically already written the thing in my head I just had to actually sit down and do it.

It sounds like you have short somewhere in the line likely exactly where the mute button meets the cable itself. That's not at all hard to fix if you have wire strippers and a soldering iron. If you don't you can acquire them for less than 25$ or so and fix em up. You can't fuck them up any more than they already are - and maybe you'll learn how to fix electronics.

It's also possible that something is wrong with the jack or the plug you're going into, at least cleaning them up a bit might help before you go full nuclear on the stuff. If replugging just fixes stuff chances are you're shaking some of the dust and other grime loose when you take out and plug stuff back in which allows a better connection.

This thread pops up periodically and it gives me hope for the future.

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Another possibility is that if you grind your teeth or clench your jaw while you sleep it can result in tinnitus in the morning for a while. If it starts to happen regularly you may want to look into sleeping with a mouth guard with some give to it so that you can bite down on it without building up as much tension.

Sometimes people ask me why I've kept at casting after nearly 14 seasons of doing it - it's games like these that do it.

I had a cleat go through my hand during a football game, continued to play.

Tore my rotator cuff in the youth olympics RIP baseball career.

- Half life 2, while being a good game, is directly responsible for the poor state of the FPS genre currently.
- Bethesda can't make a complete game
- Bugs aren't as big of a deal as people make them out to be, particularly in single player games
- TF2 was at its best circa 2011
- Goldrush is the best pub map in tf2
- Sleeping Dogs was the best of the "GTA" like games.

I have to admit I don't understand what you're getting at Kev, I also fail to see how "freedom" has any role to play. I suppose the question I should ask is freedom for whom?

1. The USSR "question" as it were is extremely complicated. On the one hand, you have a society whose GDP expanded at an incredible rate post civil war (over 1,500% in the space of 20 years) and a corresponding incredible reduction in illiteracy and poverty, and on the other hand you have the completely self-inflicted wounds of the failure to collectivize agriculture, what I like to call the Internyet problem (Soviet computer scientists - who dubbed themselves then Cybernetics technicians) plotted out how to create a network of computer systems using phone lines in the 1950s and set about working out how such a thing may be done - it actually caused a very real crisis within the CIA and NSA in trying to figure out a way to counter the untold amount of influence and productivity that such a thing would create - however the entire project was sabotaged by the Soviet military, from the stagnation and reliance on oil that came in the late 70s and 80s.

If one wanted to fix what the "main" problems for Soviet economic development were it was these as follows: truncated access to the international markets due to being an international pariah (outside pressure), failure on the part of the Soviet government to make *most* of the nomenclatura (government officials) accountable for misdeeds and failures, failure on the part of the Central Government to ameliorate conflict between government agencies (the conflicts between the statistical bureau TsSU and GOSPLAN are legendary and the repercussions were felt throughout Soviet society), and an over-centralized government in general.

The primary cause of the collapse of the USSR however, was the stagnation and lack of faith in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to continue leading. For example in today's China, while life isn't perfect, *most* people have at least some amount of faith that the Chinese Communist Party and its 7 subsidiary/fraternal parties that rule China have *some* idea what they're doing. As such it's unlikely that that government will collapse given that it's fairly easy to point out the improvements in Chinese living standards for a huge amount of people over the last several decades. The Soviet Union *was* able to do the same until the 1980s, when suddenly bread lines began to form, Chernobyl exploded, and the Soviet Army that had defeated Nazi Germany failed to achieve victory in Afghanistan. As such there was a massive and sudden loss of faith in the CPSU that lead to there being fertile ground for the staging of a coup that overthrew the Soviet government.

How that could've been "fixed" is mostly just a guessing game and hypotheticals that I don't really have much of a desire to get into because it's just pissing into the wind really. All there is to do is to understand what the failures/mistakes were.

2. Socialism "taking" from the rich

I fail to see how a redistribution of wealth isn't an engine for growth - increasing the wealth of the majority of one's economy causes a spike in demand (demand side economics) that fuels growth out of hand. Again though, the goal of Socialism/Communism is not a *completely* equal society where everybody makes the same - it's about *access* to the produce of society being equal, not necessarily having all the same stuff.

3. People do all sorts of stuff for all sorts of reasons. The Soviet Nuclear Program prior to 1937 (when they shifted from civilian power applications to weapons) was highly advanced, as were their RADAR, rocketry, and aero industries; not to mention other technological and scientific achievements. I should point out that *many* times in capitalist societies people who actually invent things aren't greatly rewarded for doing so, as the intellectual property is often retained by the company itself - granted you may receive a raise or perks - but the company will by and large maintain the lion's share of the profits from your invention - people make cool shit because they want to make cool shit, often without the motivation of becoming rich. Just look at all the things people have made and done for TF2 with minimal expectations (or none) of being paid back. I should also point out that *most* work environments the world over aren't exactly democratic - but still production and advancements are made, and entrepreneurial activity continues within them.

4. Supply and Demand still exist, but you simply ignore the prospect of making profit. See in a standard supply-demand graph you attempt to find "equilibrium" which is the point at which supply and demand meet at an optimal spot for an optimal rate of profit (if making a profit is possible to begin with). The *cost* of overproduction is that you take a net-loss on this production for the producer - but since states can gather money by taxation, borrowing, printing money, bonds, and myriad other means, they don't have to care whether or not they take a net-loss on production. This will in turn, on the monetary side, cause inflation (which is why most socialist economies have very high inflation rates). This isn't a problem so long as you carefully manage the situation so as not to cause hyper-inflation or come up with other effective means for distributing produce. Very large companies do the same by selling stock to temporarily raise their cash flow to enable them to sell goods at a net-loss to themselves, or once they corner a market they "take it back" by selling some related piece at an artificially high rate - Caterpillar machine parts (vs. the machine which is sold at a net loss) or an Xbox 1 (which is sold to the user at a net loss to Microsoft) and its games (which are inflated to a massive amount to make up for the loss on the console). A socialist state engages in the same behavior, but they use other means (for example in the USSR and contemporary Venezuela they used oil revenues to finance the net loss - which works just great until oil prices suddenly collapse). They key is to not get caught with your hand in the cookie jar - which is extremely hard to do, but not outside of the realm of possibility (for example Norway does much the same with its oil revenue but they diversified state interests enough to not wind up in an economic cataclysm when oil prices fell).

5. That's part and parcel of a trade oriented monetary policy. A "strong dollar" only helps if you intend to buy lots of stuff from other people - but "strong" sounds good. When you have a significant portion of the economy which is operating on the government's bill, or is being sold on the international market (at a higher price than could be sold at home) a weak currency has massive benefits because you obtain "stronger" currency that you can use on the international market with all of the benefits that it brings, while at the same time ensuring you sell more of your goods abroad. The only time it can hurt you is if your country is incapable of producing certain goods and can't obtain sufficient foreign currency reserves to compensate for this lack.

That situation played out in the USSR throughout its history - in particular post 1927, when the five year plans called for massive industrial projects, but the USSR itself didn't have the means or skilled tradesmen required for such industrialization, *nor* did it have foreign currency reserves to use to bring in skilled technicians and expensive foreign tech, so what they did instead was pay in gold bullion and national treasures. A tactic that becomes less and less effective with time, as gold flooding international markets reduces the price of gold, and a nation only has so many national treasures to pawn for foreign currency.

Again you could also print enough money (devaluing your currency) to cause hyper-inflation which is bad, but China doesn't appear to be anywhere near that their goal appears to simply make sure that their currency is weaker than the Euro and the Dollar.

@ghadillli

You ask a lot of complicated questions so I'll make my very best attempt at keeping this brief because there are better sources to get this sort of information than some dude on the internet who likes TF2 a lot.

1. Social Production

Many items are indeed produced to be sold to individuals (or individual entities), but the point is that they are consumed widely by huge masses of people. Take for example the number of companies that produce bread. Flowers Foods produce *most* of the commonly consumed types of bread from Wonder, Sunbeam, and Bunny to name the 3 most common. You don't have a guy baking bread for the people in his town to buy, you have absolutely massive corporations controlling companies top to bottom not to produce bread for sales to individuals but which are in fact producing bread for an entire society (that is in the example above, anybody who eats sandwich bread). The demand for bread is relatively inelastic, and as such you have a *pretty* good idea how much bread is going to be bought in a given year, and so you can produce bread regardless of which individuals may or may not buy it, because you know in advance how much you ought to make to maximize your profit. The individual consumer ultimately matters very little in this exchange. This already exists in a wide array of places - such as public roads. Yes, individuals certainly do use them, but the society as a whole has decided to lay down the road for its own benefit because it would be extraordinarily expensive for private individuals to lay down and maintain a road on their own - and then prevent other people from using it, as such we have *way* more roads than if roads were produced only for profit and *most* people would agree that's a good thing.

2. Post-Scarcity

For the Communist society the idea is to overproduce goods in such quantities that they are made without any real value, in essence to achieve post-scarcity. That is to say, to produce goods in such abundance that they have no value in trade, because you could just go and get more if you needed it. One's working or not doesn't matter because the goods *will* be produced one way or another by those who are so inclined to do so. This is achievable because many of the most advanced nations already have the capability to overproduce goods to such an extent that they lose most of their value - there is simply a choice being made not to do so because that prevents profit from being made. Then, once the "wow we produced *way* too much level" has been reached or extrapolated from study, you just produce some approximation to that maximum and call it a day.

3. "Wants" and Commodity Fetishism

"Wants' in capitalist society are heavily influenced by an ideological phenomena which Marx called "commodity fetishism" in that, for the purposes of selling certain commodities, they are imbued, both by the seller, and the buyer in his/her own mind, with special mystical qualities which they do not in reality posses. Everybody has experienced the joy of finally buying X item that you really wanted only to find out you've been hoodwinked or were misinformed; ultimately having imbued the commodity with properties it did not in fact have. Due to overproduction, commodity fetishism is greatly reduced because of the availability of the produce itself - there's nothing special about that coke you're about to drink because you can just go and have another later, etc. You can see this scenario play out daily in your own life - that which can easily be gotten does not elicit the same fetishistic excitement as those things which are consumed as special treats or only gotten rarely.

https://foodal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Miyabi-Kitchen-Shears.jpg These double as a bottle opener.