1 million Zephyrite Box drop data posted. Cost on Current Prices:72,682g 98s 32c Return on Current Prices:112,397g 71s 83c Profit on Current Prices:39,714g 73s 51c % Profit on Current Prices:54.64% 55% profit is insane for Four Winds and ectos have a lot of room to go up. reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comm… #guildwars2

Leave them bee.

Tapping in on the Twitch viewbotting discussion as an actual agency brand advertising executive. This Twitch post is unlikely to convince any advertisers or streamers that the issue is improving. Here's how to actually address this problem - Viewbotting is an engineering and incentives problem disguised as a cultural one. There is no solution to this problem that can ever be achieved via culture change or moderation. People are debating the efficacy of the solution in Twitch’s post when the entire implementation isn’t even relevant. Given Twitch’s track record, no one should believe Twitch will enforce this “viewer cap” change appropriately even if they did have the proper backend data (and I think they don’t.) They won’t even enforce against popular streamers who have viewbotting programs visible on their screen, streamers who roleplay bringing slaves on their broadcasts and feed them treats, or broadcasters who advocate blatent political violence, and so on. Many streamers are on their 8th or 9th temporary bans for various TOS-breaking content. No one believes Twitch's intervention via moderation will change anything. So again it’s a matter of engineering and incentives. I’ll break down each one. But first a productive question to ask. Why does Youtube Live - which now eclipses Twitch’s live viewership by 40% - have nearly no problems with bots and viewbotting? Well first the engineering problem. Viewbotting gets solved by better detection, pattern recognition, IVT analysis, device fingerprinting, IP patterns, watch-time anomalies, removing off-platform embedding, and other boring backend stuff. As Dan correctly noted, these are things you can’t be public about because they’ll quickly see counterplay from the viewbot services. You just have to lock in and fix it. Google has spent billions of dollars solving this because advertisers don’t like invalid traffic. Their IVT rate now sits at a healthy 11% or so, easily beating competing live services like Tiktok (24%) and Twitch (35% .) Twitch hasn’t taken this problem seriously. I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Twitch, and no team member has ever communicated to me or any of the agencies I work with about their IVT rates accurately. On the contrary it often feels like they throw raw viewership numbers around in pitch decks and presentations as the REASON to go advertise there. That used to work, but money is getting smarter in digital. Brands correctly care about return on spend and engagement with real people rather than just the perception that there are viewers around. You need both bravery and expertise in engineering to make massive changes. Twitch actually has phenomenal engineers, many who were brought on by the former CEO to develop the world’s most advanced CDN (content delivery network) from 2015-2022 before Youtube Live recently surpassed it. But I’m not sure the company has the bravery to make real, necessary changes that many commentators on this post have noted must happen. Successfully “fixing” this would represent a 30-35% global drop in viewership for a website already perceived as ailing against its competitors. To solve the engineering side you just have to apply more of the above technical solutions and spend money and time. Communicate with advertisers, refund us in high IVT events, keep improving your CDN, etc. It’s not a moderation issue, it’s not a viewer cap issue, that’s crowd pandering and will fix nothing. Both advertisers and the community begged for years for attention on this topic, while viewbotters bled us all and collected millions of dollars. Twitch has eroded trust and should just stop making these posts to the public. Users have lost tolerance for the platform and just need to see the actual changes. The second problem is the incentive problem. Every system to succeed on Twitch is set up based on the number of viewers you have. The entire Partnership/Affiliate pipeline is viewership based. The entire discovery funnel is viewership based. Sponsorships are calculated on CCV per $. And the entire culture of the website is “more viewers = better.” So of course everyone will do anything possible to get more viewers. This not only encourages viewerbotting but also toxic streamer culture (IRL nuisance streamers, etc) because, again, it’s all about the views. On Youtube Live monetization rewards sustained engagement and overall channel performance. Ads, super chats, channel memberships, etc. Discovery is pushed by an interest-based recommendation algorithm. Viewers will find you because of interest alignment - not because you have the most viewers. Barely anyone viewbots there because there’s no point. Adding viewers won’t help your channel, and Google’s AI/ML will instantly and automatically suppress your channel and shut off your ads. It is frustrating that the C-Level over at Twitch keep posting about viewbotting as if it’s going to get solved by human moderation. As if Twitch is going to magically have an amazing enforcement team with “the data” that goes after the serial offenders and returns everything to normalcy. This is all solvable, even from where Twitch is now. But you have to make the investments on the engineering/CDN side and just get to work. Everyone is waiting and hoping for these changes. Twitch’s viewbotting epidemic is a downstream effect of what every major streamer and industry professional told them would happen for years. They didn’t implement discovery engines, they didn’t change the incentive systems, they didn’t invest aggressively against obvious botting cases, and they didn’t communicate. Now they have an existential advertising and creator crisis. You reap what you sow.

The Billionaire Tax is actually an Everyone Tax. The Billionaire Tax is a new tax proposal written by four professors who don't believe in the American dream. Some of them aren’t even American…go figure. Despite its name, it applies to every California resident who currently has assets or ever will. The creators named it the Billionaire Tax so you would get into a froth andwouldn't look closely at what it actually does to you. On page twenty-six, it explains how the government can convert to an Everyone Tax without voter approval. They can also adjust the tax to be a yearly tax, not just one time…again, without your approval. Here's how the tax would work: As a voter, you're being asked to approve a tax that would require you to: 1. list all your assets and the value of each, then submit them to the California Franchise Tax Board. 2. authorize the tax board to appraise your assets and confirm the value of each. 3. pay a penalty of up to forty percent of your tax bill if the board determines your reported value was too low in their opinion. 4. allow the tax board to subpoena your financial records from every one of your financial institutions for auditing. This Everyone Tax runs 34 pages of shifty language describing how the government plans to take your assets. Read the fine print and decide for yourself. If this were truly a billionaire tax, it would be 3 pages. It’s 34 pages so that it can create the mechanisms to steal from all of you.

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The Virginia Beach Democrats own words. They support someone who fantasized about killing his political opponents. I hope Virginians get out and vote. In person early voting doesn't start for me until Oct 27. Everybody, get out and vote!

🚨 VIRGINIA'S DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE FOR ATTORNEY GENERAL WANTS YOUR CHILDREN TO DIE 🚨 If you haven't heard already ... then stop what you're doing and look at this. The Democratic nominee for Attorney General in Virginia, the favorite to win, said he wants the children of a Republican lawmaker to die. Not a misquote. His justification is... "Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy." This isn't some anonymous troll online. This is the person running to become the top law enforcement officer in Virginia. He is the fruit of George Soros' investment in left-wing extremists for law enforcement. And the Democratic Party's response is silence. Which tells you everything ... silence is agreement. This is the environment which caused Charlie Kirk to die, and millions to celebrate that death. If you think it can't get worse, if you think America can't fall further, this is your wake-up call. We need to stop handing power to people who believe political opponents, and their children, deserve death to make a point. Do not sleep on this. If we lose Virginia's AG race, we hand the law to people who believe in murdering the children of those they disagree with. Get out the vote for Jason Miyares.

(Warning: long rant) My liberal friends are completely oblivious about how radicalizing the last week has been for tens of millions of normal Americans. Zero clue. I’m not talking about people who are “online”; I mean regular, everyday Americans. “Normies.” People who scroll through Facebook posts and Instagram reels from the Dutch Bros drive thru line. Political moderates who have water cooler chats about Mahomes touchdowns and Bon Jovi concerts, not Twitter threads or Rachel Maddow monologues. Millions of them. Tens of millions. They’re logging on, they’re engaging, and they’re furious. And I’ll be candid: They blame you guys. They blame the left. Regardless of whether you believe it to be justified, they think you’re the bad guys here. And they are reacting accordingly. I can already hear some of you racing toward the comments to start screeching in moral indignation, so I’m going to be blunt: Shut up and listen to what I’m telling you. Your movement will lose any semblance of relevance if you don’t develop some small measure of self-awareness, and—absent someone force-feeding you bitter medicine—you guys collectively lack the humility to do this on your own. Here are the facts: Fact 1. Tens of millions of Americans started the week seeing a 23-year-old blonde woman—a young woman in whom virtually every parent watching pictured their own daughter—stabbed in the neck by a career criminal. These people then found out the murderer had been released from jail 14 times over. Fact 2. Two days later, tens of millions of Americans watched a video of Charlie Kirk get murdered speaking to college students. Millions of these people knew who Charlie was; millions of them didn’t. Upon seeing the video, however, these normal Americans from across the land and across the political spectrum agreed that he was the victim of a terrible, fundamentally unjustifiable crime, and their hearts broke in sympathy for his family. Good people who had never even heard the name Charlie Kirk before wept. Fact 3. Immediately after seeing the footage of a peaceful young man get shot in the neck, these same people logged onto Facebook and Instagram (remember, we are talking about regular Americans, not perpetually online Twitter or Bluesky users) and saw some of their local nurses, school teachers, college administrators, and retail workers celebrating this horrific crime. Not just defending it, but cheering it. These are all facts. You may not like the implications of these facts, and we can certainly debate the underlying causes thereof, but, indisputably, they are nevertheless factual statements. Here’s what it means for you, the Democrats reading this: These normal, middle-of-the-road, non-political citizens just become politically active. They realized that politics cares about them, even if they don’t particularly care about politics. After watching Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk both bleed out from the neck, they think their lives and the physical safety of their families—the bedrock of human society, the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—depend on political activation, whether they desire it or not. These people are now sprinting—not jogging, not walking, but racing—to the right. Because they blame you guys for everything that just happened. When they see footage of Decarlos Brown stabbing a Ukrainian refugee to death, they don’t see just one demon-possessed man. They picture every university administrator, HR bureaucrat, and DEI apparatchik that ever lectured them about systemic racism, the “carceral state,” or the need to release violent crime suspects without bail in the name of social justice. They then think back to conversations they’ve had with their cop friends—their buddy from high school who quit the force after getting tired of being called a racist, their friend at the local YMCA who vents about having to release career criminals because Soros-funded prosecutors aren’t willing to file charges—and they realize everything the left has told them over the last five years has been utter bullshit. And they blame you. Because, even if you count yourself as a moderate Democrat, your party supported the district attorneys, city council members, and mayors that let fictitious concerns about mental health and racial justice supersede very real concerns for their family’s safety. When these Americans see blood erupt from the side of Charlie Kirk’s neck, they don’t see just a martyred political activist. They think of every extreme leftist they’ve ever met who (1) calls anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton a fascist and (2) constantly jokes—“jokes”—about punching Nazis and “bashing the fash.” They realize that there really do exist people who wish to see them dead for their moderately conservative political beliefs, their Christian faith, and even the color of their skin. They ask themselves if the violence visited upon Charlie might one day show up on their own doorstep. And they blame you. Because, even if you’re just a center-of-the-road liberal, you lacked the courage to police your own ranks. You let modern-day Maoist red guards run loose across every facet of society, and what started with social-media struggle sessions has now turned to 30-06 bullet holes. When these Americans log onto social media and see their neighbors justifying, celebrating, glorifying murder, they realize that some who walk among them are soulless ghouls at best, literally demon-possessed at worst. These people—whether they faithfully attend church every Sunday or only attend with relatives once a year, on Christmas Eve—start talking about things like spiritual warfare. They implicitly understand that no normal human casually celebrates the mortal demise of a peaceful person. And they blame you. Because, even if you condemned Charlie Kirk’s murder, they probably haven’t seen you condemn those in your own movement who cheered it on. They view you as complicit in allowing heartless fellow travelers to celebrate death, and it repulses them. For all of these situations, what has your response been? Nothing but bullshit. In response to Iryna Zarutska bleeding out on the floor of a train, you post bullshit statistics about reductions in reported crime, when everyone who’s ever been to a major urban center in the last decade knows that actual crime has skyrocketed, only for victims not to waste their time reporting it to cops that don’t have the manpower to respond and prosecutors that seek to downgrade as many felonies as possible to misdemeanor citations. In response to a 31-year-old man taking a bullet to the neck in front of his family, you post nothing but bullshit whataboutism. > “What about January 6th?” (Honest answer: After you let Liz Cheney spend two years operating a star chamber in the House, combined with countless other failed attempts at “lawfare” against Trump, no one cares anymore.) > “What about Mike Lee making a dumb joke on Twitter about some guy in a mask in Minnesota?” (No one outside of Utah, DC, or Twitter knows who Mike Lee even is.) > “What about Paul Pelosi?” (That’s not comparable to Charlie Kirk getting shot, and we all know it. And, again, Paul who?) > “What about regulations on assault rifles?” (That’s not going to get you very far when one of these killers used a knife and the other one used a common hunting rifle.) In response to teachers, healthcare workers, and thousands of other liberals cheering on Charlie’s murder, it’s nothing but more bullshit and misdirection. > “It’s not THAT many people celebrating!” (Yes, it is. Everyone has seen it on their Facebook and Instagram feeds.) > “I thought you guys didn’t support cancel culture.” (We don’t cancel people over their opinions; we’re more than happy to see people lose their jobs—especially their taxpayer-funded jobs—for actively cheering on murder, though. If you can’t see the difference, that’s your own shortcoming.) All bullshit. Not even smart bullshit, but stale, mid-grade, low-IQ bullshit. Ordinary Americans see right through it, and they don’t like how it smells. You probably don’t like hearing this. But you need to hear it. Because I’m right, and, as you reflect on this, you know I’m right. The ranks of my political movement gained millions of righteously angry new members this week. We have a mandate to ensure these crimes never happen again, and that’s exactly what we are now going to do. If you want to keep a seat at the table as we do so, you’d better clean house and start policing your own.

Yeah. Charlie Kirk did say, "I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights." Here's the full quote: “Yeah, it's a great question. Thank you. So, I'm a big Second Amendment fan but I think most politicians are cowards when it comes to defending why we have a Second Amendment. This is why I would not be a good politician, or maybe I would, I don't know, because I actually speak my mind. The Second Amendment is not about hunting. I love hunting. The Second Amendment is not even about personal defense. That is important. The Second Amendment is there, God forbid, so that you can defend yourself against a tyrannical government. And if that talk scares you — "wow, that's radical, Charlie, I don't know about that" — well then, you have not really read any of the literature of our Founding Fathers. Number two, you've not read any 20th-century history. You're just living in Narnia. By the way, if you're actually living in Narnia, you would be wiser than wherever you're living, because C.S. Lewis was really smart. So I don't know what alternative universe you're living in. You just don't want to face reality that governments tend to get tyrannical and that if people need an ability to protect themselves and their communities and their families. Now, we must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty. Driving comes with a price. 50,000, 50,000, 50,000 people die on the road every year. That's a price. You get rid of driving, you'd have 50,000 less auto fatalities. But we have decided that the benefit of driving — speed, accessibility, mobility, having products, services — is worth the cost of 50,000 people dying on the road. So we need to be very clear that you're not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen. You could significantly reduce them through having more fathers in the home, by having more armed guards in front of schools. We should have a honest and clear reductionist view of gun violence, but we should not have a utopian one. You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won't have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It's drivel. But I am, I, I — I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe. So then, how do you reduce? Very simple. People say, oh, Charlie, how do you stop school shootings? I don't know. How did we stop shootings at baseball games? Because we have armed guards outside of baseball games. That's why. How did we stop all the shootings at airports? We have armed guards outside of airports. How do we stop all the shootings at banks? We have armed guards outside of banks. How did we stop all the shootings at gun shows? Notice there's not a lot of mass shootings at gun shows, there's all these guns. Because everyone's armed. If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don't our children?”

Results from the last 2 days for Zephyrite Boxes. 45% profit yesterday but -2% today. First day we're in the negative though it was close and didn't have great drops for infusions tonight. Overall for the event, I'm at 1.6 million boxes opened with an overall 31% profit. Another 400k to open tomorrow on stream! #GuildWars2

Finished the 1 Million! We got 3 chaks today. Four Winds pumping out the chaks this year. 58% profit overall for the 1 million. 42.3k gold profit. Looks like I'm going to do another 1 million before the festival is over! #GuildWars2

Day 2 results for 360k Zephyrite Boxes opened. 2 more Chaks, 1 Khan Ur, 1 Queen Bee, 3 Music Boxes, 2 Crystal Infusions and 1 Invisible Boot Box. Up 42% in profit again! Festival of the Four Winds for Guild Wars 2 going strong this year.

Day 1 results for 240k boxes opened. Got 2 Chak infusions, 1 Music box infusions, and 1 Ooze Tonic (first one ever!). With the prices of boxes from ectos being half of last year, it is very easy to get into profit. We are up 7915g with current TP prices!! #guildwars2

Time to convert into Zephyrite Supply Boxes. #GuildWars2

Festival of the Four Winds is live! Price spreadsheet updated and changes from last year shown. Current prices link: docs.google.com/spreadsheets… I had to put T6 dust on its own because its such an outlier it was messing up the color ranges. Why Anet changed it to 4 T6 dust per box is beyond me. Seems like a mistake when you look at the Ecto price. If I burn all of the ectos I have saved from last year, I can open 2,338,000 boxes. #GuildWars2

A Nintendo Switch owner has gone viral after sharing their budget bedtime gaming setup Placing the Switch face down on a transparent shelf installed above their bed allows them to play laying down

Kings Landing! Dubrovnik, Croatia

Launch day update. #Switch2