Dean
Flairless
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User ID: 430
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
Probably Stolen: The Cyberpunk Shopkeeper Simulator Of Trying To Side Hustle Up In A Low Trust Capitalist Society (Also- Papers, Please)
Just a short little review for an indie game that came out last week. I've spent more time watching and reflecting than playing while recovering.
TL;DR: Take a look if a sub-$20 indie game for a weekend and the following appeals to you. If you like economy engine games, you'll have something to work with. If you liked Papers, Please, you'll find thee vibes nostalgic. And if you like moodier fiction that's light on social commentary and allows a glimmer of hope, there's something here that's not epic, but human, to satisfy you.
Probably Stolen: Cyberpunk Shopkeeper Sim is a PC game about being a shopkeeper on a sci-fi space station trying to get out of your ever-increasing rent by buying your store outright. You're not a classy shopkeeper either, but a 'rummages in the dump to try and find drained scrap electronics to sell' sort. Your customer base is predominantly lower class, selling guns or rat meat are equally viable, and the janitor's union is why you dare not take out your own trash. Also, there's a brewing cyborg-assimilation uprising in the making, not to be confused with the perma-revolution, and both are some off your better customers. The later you can sell a lot of restricted goods, and the other you can shoot for a bounty and kudos from the cops.
Curious? Here we go.
Probably Stolen As A Game
Probably Stolen is a game with a very basic premise: you need to make rent. If you don't, you'll be kicked out and forced to haggle from the other side of the shop window. Your victory condition is to make enough profit to buy your shop outright so you don't pay rent, which isn't so easy since rent goes up by a compounding 20% per week. Your fail state is to fail to make rent. Or to piss of the wrong people too many times. Or to not shoot enough body-jacking cyborgs.
Your core gameplay is a day-night cycle of inventory management. During the day, business is open and customers come to your counter offering to buy or sell. You want to maximize margins by buying low and selling high. Modifiers are applied based on what a particular customer wants, station-wide economic issues like water shortages, or the five-finger discount of selling stolen goods. During the night, you can go to a few specialty stores, try to scavenge, or recover from previous wounds. At the end of every week you pay rent, which is always going up, so you need to make ever more money to stay afloat.
I called this an economic engine game. This is the sort off game where you spend money to make money, and the more you invest the more you can make. In the early game you might be selling scrap you scavenge from the dump, but sell enough you can buy a furnace too turn scrap metal into metal ingots worth more. Then you can use those ingots to buy or sell more at the storefront, or as inputs into even higher value goods.
It's also a build strategy game. The basic barter system you start out with can't keep up with rising rent. You need to specialize, and the better you do the better you get. A water farmer can become a fish farmer can sell caviar to the upper class. Investing in certain shop signs means you're more likely to get the customers who sell what you want and buy what you have. This becomes your outside-the-store side hustle. This is where the build diversity emerges. You'll probably not do one single thing, but gun-running and rat-farming specialists are equally viable. They also come with their own differences. In one, your customer base will often be rebels which might put you at odds with station security. In the other, you're more at risk if you become a public health hazard and poison the station in pursuit of profit.
Build diversity plays into character customization. The player character is a nameless faceless person, but at the start of each run you can pick perks with positive effects that cost perk points, or penalty perks that offer more perk points for positive perks. Sometimes these perks get you started on a specific build route a bit (lot) faster. Sometimes they come with penalties like alcohol addiction that worsens your margins unless you drink your own stock (which worsens margins). This system offers a lot of build diversity, so that while any given run is probably 4ish hours give or take, you have great replayability too try and master new builds.
There are other gameplay aspects. There is a memory-and-attention meta-game for recognizing the cyborg threat, a compare-and-contrast game for evaluating items based on a referenced guide of features to work for, and a crafting game. This is where the game slows down and may not be as fun. But at it's core- buy low, refine, sell high.
Probably Stolen As Low-Trust Storytelling
It's hard to talk about Probably Stolen without talking about Papers, Please. From the (admittedly superior) pixel art style, to the 'minor functionary in an uncaring system,' to the core mechanic of people walking up to your window and you choosing how to do with them. It's very obvious the game took very heavy inspiration from Papers, and a lot of the reasons it worked there works here.
Probably Stolen and Papers, Please are games where being an honest, incorruptible soul is a sucker's gambit, and probably end up with you starving. Papers, Please was not-soviet-block communism, and Probably Stolen is sci-fi cyberpunk capitalism, but both are about broadly uncaring systems that can reward you one day and turn on you the next. Corruption isn't just a crime, it's a survival strategy, and the only reasonable one. If you aren't willing to turn a blind eye to those five-finger discounts or make friends with unpleasant people, you won't have a good (or long) time.
And it's not just you. Everyone around you is corrupt. Everyone expects you to be corrupt. Thieves come to you to fence goods. The Revolution is at your window right after Security. The local protection racket comes with an offer you'll wish you had taken if you hadn't, even as you might try to figure out how to skip coverage days to save payments. You have a shotgun by your desk so that if you see a cyborg at your stall, you can shoot them... though not after taking advantage of their offerings, of course. Business is business, and rent is due.
Probably Stolen and Papers, Please don't have in-depth storytelling or grand oratory, but they do have vibes. Among the interchangeable customers you try to rip off as hard as you can are some reoccuring faces you'll start to recognize, like the scavenger who tells outrageous lies but charges accordingly. Some are wanted characters you can turn in for a profit. Others have short story arcs. They come to your window, they talk a bit, you you may or may not do them a favor. Or try to rip them off. Or give them a discount for your own selfish reasons of reputational concerns or inventory clearance. Business is business.
I might have a notalgia bias and feel Papers, Please had the stronger character writing (or at least characters who showed up more often in an shorter period of time), but Probably Stolen captures that vibe of having the side hustle. There is no comfortable lazy evenings after work. There is no paid vacation when you are self-employed.
You work for yourself, no one is looking out for you unless you've made it in their interest, and any time spent at home is time not spent scavenging or after-hour sales. Sometimes this is necessary, and you have to recover. But time is money, time not spent making money is falling behind, and rent is ever rising. Look thhe other way, take the five fingered discount when you can get away with it, but learn when it's too much.
Probably Stolen is good at that, in the gameplay-is-storytelling sort of way. It is a hard capitalist world, even if it is one with food stamps.
Probably Stolen As An Earn Your (Unglorious) Happy Ending Setting
What makes Probably Stolen, and Papers Please, work so well with me is conceptually is that it avoids the pitfalls of over-the-top grimdark or good-versus-evil moralizing.
Probably Stolen is a cyberpunk genre story, and the word you might hear most often after 'cyberpunk' is 'dystopia.' But Probably Stolen's station is not a socio-political dystopia, it's just a shitty place to live. But it's also the sort of place where you can- by grit or skill and even kindness- get or give very modest happy endings, without caveat. If you buy your shop, it's yours, and the profits that got you there are likely to see you comfortably into the neon sunset. You can help an idealist expose corruption and it's not simply ignored. You can take down Space Monsanto's GM crop business model. You can get away with a good feeling of satisfaction, and the game isn't going to try and rob you of it. If you stop the cyborg apocalypse outbreak, it's actually stopped.
I feel that's rare nowadays. I feel a lot of writers would just go for bitter-sweet-at-best storytelling, and this was a bit of a palate cleanser in that it didn't.
In a lot of dystopian (and cyberpunk) fiction, things have to suck because the narrative tone wouldn't work if it allowed people to have nice things. Warhammer has to have pyrhhic victories because the setting is five minutes from midnight. Cyberpunk 2077 can't change Night City's culture of corruption and psychotic cyborgs because without that the setting doesn't exist. In capitalist-critique fiction, it's often an anti-capitalism core premise that capitalism can't succeed, that success is exploitation, that the only victory allowed is the glorious and virtuous success of the revolution. So many writers could go into how the cycle of corruption and poverty and capitalism inevitably drags you down, that any happiness is fleeting, that someone bigger will just come up and steal it all from you and kick you back down. If there is a happy ending, it has to overwrite the whole setting.
Probably Stolen isn't that sort of game. It's a game about running a shop and trying to buy your own place. If you win, you will continue to be a shopkeeper. It's easier to win if you can get along with the local cops and revolutionaries alike, and you can. (Mostly.) Characterizations are light, but NPCs aren't merely caricatures. Yeah, the cops are corrupt, but they aren't all bastads, and they do goo after real crimes (including yours).
It's also a game where you can, in fact, build ties and positive relations for mutually beneficial relations, and where cartoonish corporate villainy doesn't pay. The game basically runs a factional reputation system with various core interest groups and social classes. Good relations get you good stuff, like warnings of future events (that you can profit-maximize around), or cops that will turn a blind eye in your favor rather than against you. Negative relations get you bad stuff, like getting lynched and thrown out the airlock if the lower classes hate you enough. Your biggest driver of relationships, beyond special requests, is how you conduct what sort of business.
I'm not saying its amazing or nuanced or the best thing since Fallout: New Vegas. I am saying that it strikes a balance, and that's appreciated.
The Less Pleasant Parts of Probably Stolen
This game has some things that I don't like, enough that I bounce off the gameplay even if I appreciate the premise. Consider this your forewarning.
First, the game has some tediuous busy work baked into that 5-hour run length. Your core game play is basically clicking and dragging items on a screen, which is menu management with a differennt UI. Factor in the crafting system, and you'll be dragging items to items to make / refine / harvest / store them. It's not so bad at first, but the game can grind in a way that's probably not meant as capitalist commentary.
Second, the game is rather meta-knowledge centric, but not necessarily hard. Your first run is learning how things work until you lose and are out of work. Later runs rely on the meta-knowledge, and the meta-analsysis, of what works best. As a game that's fundamentally about profit-maximizing, it's also a bit of a solved problem. Carefully consider how much outside analysis or wiki support you use.
Third, people most interested by the Papers, Please comparison are probably going to be more disappointed by the endings. Part of the replay value of Papers, Please was the variety of outcomes from your time at the window. You could side with the government as a loyalist tool, throw your lot in with the revolution, or flee the country. There is none of that here- you either buy your store or you lose, and most endings are different forms of losing. Replayability is almost entirely about build-flexibility, not narrative.
And that's about it.
Probably Stolen: Cyberpunk Shopkeeper Sim is on sale on Steam. It's currently got a 10% discount for an in introductory offer, so that roughly $20 USD price is currently $18.
Consider it if you're the sort of person who likes econ-engine games, the indie classic Papers, Please, or if you'd just like some balanced grim-grey where you can earn a happy ending without being hit over the head too much by hamfisted politics. You'll probably fail at first, but can beat it in a weekend, and can have a few afternoons of fun trying out different ways.
Cheers.
The post-ceasefire Strait of Hormuz ship-escorting was the window of opportunity for the 'civilized world' to shape the prospect of future maritime protection racket fees, because it was the chance for non-belligerents to credibly signal where they stood on the spectrum from sovereign defense of free maritime traffic through international waters to willingness to accept unilateral maritime boundary changes and corresponding extortion.
This might (or might not) have mattered because the Iranian strategy would have factored an international maritime escort coalition into their negotiating strategy differently than a US-only effort. Had, say, French and Indian vessels been escorting Qatari LNG and kept escorting despite the first few UAV attacks, then the Iranian strategic forecasts might have differed, seen it as a non-viable strategy, and shifted course month within a few months.
Instead, the Iranians (correctly) judged that the civilized world would rather pay protection racket fees than to defend their flagged shipping, would offset the blame of continued attacks onto the Americans, and so made the bet that they should prolong the conflict past the mid-terms to increase their negotiating leverage. Which is just as likely to be increased beyond 2029, since the midterms don't actually compel Trump to make a deal and in various ways make it less likely. Which could mean years more of the Strait of Hormuz disruption.
The civilized world's chance for a quicker off ramp to a world less likely to have tolls was back in April-May. The collective (non)decision since then has given the uncivilized world the better part of a year to start forming their own thoughts on further ways to get their own cut.
'If'? And only to Hormuz and Yemen?
Mate, the last year hasn't just shown the limits of the American ability to mitigate drone attacks on maritime shipping. It also included a demonstration that the Europeans and even Chinese could not or would not provide expeditionary security for the maritime commons they import substantial inelastic goods through.
On one hand, at the time this was a glorious success of european sovereignty in avoiding entrapment and resisting Trump. On the other, every relevant actor along the Asia-to-Europe maritime corridors has reason too look at how they can apply their own tax on European imports and Chinese exports, given how hard it is to prevent (and how few are willing to try). When it becomes apparent you'll keep paying regardless of the cost- and that is the nature of an inelastic good- then you should expect more people to try to become middlemen.
Most states won't go to outright state sponsors of piracy, but the actors that do? Somali pirates from the last decade will be quaint in retrospect.
A couple of years ago I wrote a post about how drones represented both a military revolution and a revolution in military affairs as a technology. The former is technology doing an established role better, and the later is technology that changes the relationship between societies and the conduct of war itself. In that post, which began with how I thought drones were going to be disruptive to the international order as many people thought AI will be, I included the following-
In other words, the drone revolution- both as a military revolution and revolution in military affairs- cuts both ways. It will drastically increase the cost of American adversaries trying to pursue revanchist invasions. It will also drastically increase the cost of American expeditionary adventures abroad, or even to US opponents in any given conflict who can send asymmetric forces to attack distant airbases elsewhere. It is going to lead to a lot of blood in parts of the world where things aren't so clear cut, whether it's already ongoing conflicts, sectarian divisions where both sides can credibly reach drone capabilities, and/or efforts by geopolitical actors to create drone-empowered insurgencies where they don't already exist. Costs and casualties will climb.
If you noticed that there was no reference to political candidates in this, that was the point- this is a foreign policy problem driven by dynamics beyond any candidate's ability to prevent. No matter what a candidate does, great harm and damages will occur around the world regardless- and thus everyone will 'fail.' Anyone with an interest in saying 'they didn't succeed' will have more than enough to fill the confirmation bias regardless of how well they do relatively, and there is unlikely to be any credible or plausible metric of what 'success' looks like going forward.
Congratulations- we're here. A multi-decade pre-existing conflict between a revolutionary-ideology state and its regional neighbors metasized into a broader conflict when regional players brought in external allies, and the combination of what was functionally an air raid campaign and the opposing drone insurgency into neighboring states broke anachronistic understandings of international commerce.
And as it turns out, a relatively poor state in economically dire straits has matched the ability to leverage their drone-defense advantage with trying to extort regional waterways. As it also turns out, as unpopular as naval extortion is globally, spending blood and treasure to protect shipping is even more unpopular. So it's going to be spending treasure instead.
This was always going to happen. This is a matter of emerging capabilities and pre-existing incentives, not personalities or specific polities.
Iran is not the only state to feel it needs money, nor is it the only one near a naval trade route, nor is it the only one with drones. It wasn't even the first. Ukraine had that distinction with the black sea campaign years ago. Complaining that the good times wouldn't have ended had Trump not pulled the trigger is like blaming WW1 on an assassination and not the web of alliances and German cult of the offense and the rise of nationalist identities within empires.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
And she'll be replaced in due time and the people replacing her will develop staffs who have experience in re-establishing governce.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
There's also a general ignorance on the scales involved. Many people can point to the 70k fatalities estimate. Almost no one cares to remember or cite the overall size of Hamas in Gaza pre-2022.
(Answer: ballpark 80k, around half of that being the militant wing and half the civil-administrative supporting the militant wing. This does not include other militant groups involved in the fighting.)
70k is a big five-digit number. However, the estimates of number of combatants killed also focus on the 5-digit number range.
Even if you lowball that to 10k combatants, a 1-to-6 militant-to-civilian ratio in dense urban warfare where the militants actively seek to leverage civilian cover isn't exactly breaking historical norms, even before bystander cover propaganda strats.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
Also a relatively good policy on government turnover in general. Governments that regularly and repeatedly fall are far better at picking up the pieces from unexpected failures than states that become brittle from electoral/already-dominant victory disease. Regular electoral turnover is a resilience exercise at the state level.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
For the next two years? Nothing. There's no point in removing it to pass legislation, because it's not the reason legislation won't be passed. The veto is
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
I find this amusing, and am adding 'NATO-consensus' to my list of pejoratives.
There used to be a much larger pro-ICC segment in US policy-thinking circles, specifically the institutionalist wing of the neoliberal movement that advocated for supranational organizations to provide, well, institutions to gradually regulate the anarchic international order.
Institutionalism was pushed especially heavily by the European Union, with the ICC specifically being a pre-requisite for various post-cold-war trade deals with the global south in africa and latin america. There used to be a non-trivial part of the US State Department sphere that publicly advocated for the US to join it.
It fell out of favor of the US establishment during the 2000s, particularly when it publicly opened a case against the UK over the Iraq Occupation that went nowhere. There was a perception that the investigation push, which is not as state-free as some would think, was part of the european establishment's retaliation against the UK for joining Bush's coalition of the willing, and as a proxy signal against the US. When the republicans lost the 2008 election, after Bush left office the ICC also closed the case against the UK in 2009. But while the europeans were happy to start off on a new foot with Obama, the American state department types were mostly the same, and even as Obama had a campaign promise to review joining the ICC, it quickly resolved not to do so.
Though I guess that was over a decade and a half ago, so old hat to some.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
...my most notable posts on the Iran War was that I was on a video game sabatical when it started and thought it was too toxic to be worth getting into later.
How on earth did you interpret that as 'the three months I thought I was winning the war and spent the whole time trying to convince you that Turkey is the new great satan?'
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
Gerrymander maps are always a bet against wave elections. The nature of gerrymanders is that to maximize the benefit, you have to lower the safety margin for an upset. So rather than have 3 districts with a +6 margin, you might have 5 districts of +3. That fine as long as variance is below 3, but if it hits 4 or 5, you take more losses than you otherwise would.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
What does 'permanent' as far as public opinion and culture goes' even mean, anyway?
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has barely made it 20 years and is mostly a punch line. The New Deal coalition more or less existed for a mere 50 before it was blown up by the neoliberals, who saw their globalization project start to reverse in about 30.
A generation may be a lifetime, but a lifetime is far from permanent.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
This is a measured take, and I approve of it.
I don't look forward to the catastrophizing takes that will distort this beyond reason, but I want to applaud the distinction (while I can).
Personally- I also think that democracy, as a system of governance, works better when more electoral areas are seen as in play. Mono-party political machines easily become less competent and more corrupt, and parties that write off entire regions are more likely to sacrifice their interests in fundamentally destabilizing ways. I suspect the Texas results will shake a fair deal of state party complacency, and if the Democrats actually want to remain in credible viability range, they'll need to allow policy divergences in the caucus, or just end up wasting resources trying to recreate a context-specific win.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
Oh, sure. The boomer demographic remains dominant in American politics, and the elderly are among the most sensitive to things that threaten their retirement prospects, such as inflation and energy prices.
That's also part of why I'm not inclined to read too much long-term into this particular election. Economic talisman voting is common, and the headwinds that worked against Trump this time are liable to get even stronger in the post-Trump election cycles. AI data centers aren't going to be dismantled, and will drive up energy costs and wipe out jobs. The middle eastern countries aren't going to go to the pre-2026 oil export methods, deglobalization will continue, and regional conflicts will provide ever-greater threat to inter-regional trade flows. And that's without the tripple-whammy of job-losing effects of AI, age-out retirements across the economic leader boards, and France-style welfare-budget crashes.
I think any premise, explicit or implicit, that MAGA will be held responsible for these forevermore is a bit silly. It'll a campaign accusation, sure, but economy-voting doesn't care about that.
This is the situation Western conservatives find themselves in now. The center-left have established a system where - because of the constitutional, legal and social systems and customs that they created or exploited in the 20th century - any conservative government or administration can play only in a small sandbox, limited in power and with the knowledge that anything they do can be washed away at the next election. Even lightly chipping away at one of the sandbox’s walls requires the legislative energy of an entire term, and all the while they can accomplish nothing else, must contend with moderates in their own faction, and any wider economic, geopolitical etc issues that any government has to manage, and then usually fail at repealing anything anyway.
This does not follow the last few years.
The crux of the argument of the dominance of left-of-center parties in the administrative apparatus is basically the mix of personnel-are-policy and the long-march-through-institutions. This was a decades-long process to establish, even under favorable conditions such as the American New Deal coalition and the European post-war center-left consensus parties. Not only did it implicitly rely on consistent political dominance to manage the selection pressures over time, it also required a general public trust in the political neutrality of the administrative state and the corresponding reluctance/opposition to politically-motivated removals during those right-of-center electoral wins. The left marched through institutions, and the right didn't actively try to weed them out because that Wasn't How Things Are Done.
As political trust in establishment parties and their bureaucratic states has crashed since the 2008 financial crisis and other policy blunders, the willingness of parties to conduct politically-motivated removals of not-so-apolitical bureaucratic obstacles has increased on both sides of the Atlantic, and so has the public acceptance/tolerance of it. This isn't even 'right only' thing, such as where DOGE was managed a blatantly choreographed frighten-and-buyout downsize plan, or Argentina where Javier took a chainsaw to the peronist welfare-patronage state. This is even on the nominal left, see the ongoing attempts in Poland by Tusk to purge the recaltrant remnants of the PIS, or UK Labor civil-war to purge the Corbynistas. Various have won or lost their various elections, but even yesterday the American election didn't hinge on the DOGE layoffs. Heck, the US Democrats have and probably will continue to publicly run on the prospect of packing the Supreme Court and professionally targeting people who worked with the Trump administration.
The premise of permanent political control of the bureaucracy when a party leaves is dissolving before our eyes. Bureaucrats can increasingly be fired on suspicion of political defiance rather than be left to coordinate cliques, and so can bureaucrats who generally wouldn't think of themselves as bureacrats. There are going to be certain categories of government workers who are harder to replace than others due to various established hiring or dismissal restrictions, but this is a matter of rate of change, not inability. Again, see the Democrats strategizing on how to capture the Supreme Court, and notice how most concepts of how to avoid the same tactics being reversed against them rely on some form of 'and then we never lose power again.' They are nowhere near the first political party in the western hemisphere to plot out how to capture the courts, and they are not going to be the first to overcome all the reasons why it's reversible.
And what that means is that the 'small sandbox tax,' as bounded and implied by the term-energy needed to counter institutional capture, is in the process of equalizing, not solidifying. Almost twenty years ago, a Democratic administration might inherit the DOJ Civil Rights Division. In two years, they will be purging it, just like how Tusk the Europhile is trying to purge the Euroskeptics in Poland, or the post-Meloni left will be undoing her appointees in the system.
Looking at initial results, one of the things that stick out to me is that the overall margin of loss is wide enough that I feel there's less credibility in various 'Trump/Republicans could have won the midterms if it weren't for [X]' arguments. People have (for as old as democracy) loved to point at their personal priority of [X] as the thing that should have been adhered to, be it Iran or Gaza or ICE, but I'm not seeing data yet to support any singular thing being the 'but for [X], Trump would have kept the Senate.' The closest might be 'but for [Inflation],' but there have been so many contributing causes for inflation in the US beyond the Iran War that trying to tie it to any one thing is often just going to be a revision of the 'if they just cared about the [X] the way I wanted' typical-minding.
One relevant aspect for that degree of loss is that it actually undercuts various political arguments for moderating in the name of electability. There's a constant tension between general viewpoints of 'you need to moderate in order to win power and do any of what you think is best,' and 'the point of winning power is to do what you think is best, even if you lose as a result.' Professional political establishments tend towards the former, but establishment outsiders and lame-duck politicians lean towards the later. If you're not up for election again, and you believe you can't get what you want/think best by running on it in a future election, then you're in a use-it-or-lose-it window of your chance to use institutional power.
Which is to say, I suspect these results make more volatility more likely, not less, over the next two years, especially via the sort of executive tools.
The stronger you read this as a rebuke to Trump/MAGA, the less incentive MAGA has to not-MAGA while in office, because the less viable any MAGA prospects for 2028 are the less reason there is to compromise what you could do now for electoral prospects later. If you have none, there is nothing left to salvage, and you might as well get what you can before you go into the political wilderness regardless. Especially since many of the macro-factors that already made it a back election cycle- inflation, global instability, political instability- are likely to disrupt the post-Trump administration as much as their pre-existance weakened the Biden/Harris administration.
Which actually brings a final note on Texas and some similar upsets. I'm not convinced these are as tectonic as they will no doubt be claimed to be, because on top of a rough year the Republican party was having its own internal civil war of sorts. This is most notable with Paxton, who was a truly bad candidate, but almost as importantly his primary opponent Cornyn, who was one of the vanishing breed of pre-Trump establishment republicans. They weren't the only two to fight eachother, and while maybe the party civil war wouldn't have mattered in a good year, it wasn't a good year. But it's also not liable to repeat next cycle- while the voters defeated MAGA this cycle, MAGA defeated a lot of the never-Trumper holdouts in the primaries, and one of those factions has a lot more ability to regenerate political support in the Republican party than the other. MAGA-Republicans are much less likely to face primary-revolt civil wars in 2/4/6 years, while anti-MAGA-never-Trumpers have less of an institutional toe-hold. I'm sure some will cause drama next cycle, but we're barely 5 years, and just the third election cycle, since Liz Cheney got kicked out of the Republican Party and broke the back of the never-Trumper movement in the Republican party structure. I think it's fair to say their influence has been and still is consistently decreasing, and infighting like the Paxton-Cornyn primaring is going to be less consequential due to fewer opportunities.
So, calling this a shellacking is perfectly fair. I'm sure much more will be made of it than the Obama analog, but we're very much in the same ballpark and the Obama-wing of the party neither died or become electorally irrelevant afterewards. Neutralizing MAGA? Not so much, though I'm sure people will carry forth arguments about how MAGA is permanently doomed and the Democrats will be on the cusp of a permanent majority once more by means fair or foul depending on the stance of the sayer.
Dean
Flairless
10d ago
Hanania-chan is a tsundere for rightwing attention. Whatever else one thinks of Rowling, she isn't tsundere about her interests.
I am amused that Malfoid is arguably the first western pop-culture cross-media hit that is almost purely AI generated in its cross-media forms. It might not have started that way, it and wasn't only that way, but fanart turned into concepts and videos solely because of AI, and people are accepting it.
I don't think I've ever said it because I find most AI talk boring, but part of my view of AI in culture is that the 'shun the AI enjoyers' position of the anti-AI-slop cohort was going to collapse when more people found themselves enjoying AI. In the same way it's harder to hold gender class hatred when you fraternize with the other side, or to hate a sin you relish enjoying, once you find something to enjoy from AI you are increasingly complicit. First it starts as an exception, then maybe the good ones, and then a passive acceptance.
For Malfoid itself, I do agree with the general 'beating Voldey with the power of love' line of 'it just makes sense!' I think you could have done it with other forms of love, but I think Harry Potter would have had to be a drastically different sort of story to be that. I think there was an AAQC nom from yesteryear about how Neville was the real boy-who-lived and Harry was a decoy protagonist, and that had a certain sort of fraternal love. Maybe if Draco and Harry were secret siblings stolen apart by the death eaters, they could have had a fraternal love-rivalry. But turning Malfoy into Malfoid doesnn't lose much, given Malfoy was a deliberately unlikable piece of shite who none the less gave us the Draco in Leather Pants trope, and I will never forgive the yaoi fangirls for that.
So tsundere Malfoid works, and yaoi Malfoy with leather pants is tainted by the human element, and ain't that a kick for AI?
Dean
Flairless
15d ago
If vibecoding is so easy that software companies can dump all their programmers, then why do we need software companies to begin with?
Legal liability, and the policy control to punish/exclude/extort the organizations that don't play along.
Certified regulated entities perform a variety of useful functions, among them being a legal entity to offset legal/monetary blame onto. This is one reason that legal personhood corporations overtook personal-liability ownership models in the first place. An extension of this is that the regulatory/legal superstructure that permits such legal constructs can also use failures to comply/submit as a basis to move against businesses that want to cut those legal-compliance department costs. Typically this is done for deterrence, but it can also be used for other government purposes, ranging from seizing assets (for profit) to strategic advantages (pretext for targeting foreign interests).
Dean
Flairless
15d ago
That was neither the claim nor the assumption, and entirely within the estimation.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'd dispute Dominic Cumming's framing as provided.
Political patronage networks are- and have remained- an integral part of the western political establishments over the last centuries, hence the political appointments for American cabinet ministries and why european parliamentary democracies negotiate coalitions on the basis of which party gets which postings. Those postings come with influence, not impartiality, and a large part of the influence comes from the power to appoint or promote personnel to key positions.
Similarly, it's not exactly hard to see partisan-by-proxy systems throughout the bureaucracies. Yes Prime Minister is more famous than FDR's opposition to public-sector unions, but they both point to a that nominally apolitical agencies do not necessarily remain apolitical or interested in enacting government policy. The main reason in the US that there haven't been multiple-centuries-old one-party political machines in various states is that there was a civil war less than two centuries about that reshaped the political map. Even then, urban-center political machines in the state capitals that dominate state politics aren't exactly new or novel.
But aside from that, one of the key points of meritocratic reforms is that they were only able to advance when the meritocrats were perceived as, well, non-partisan and honest. When they lose that honesty and start being perceived as partisan, they just get recategorized as 'special interests' in the same way that treason doth never prosper.
To return to a point about professions- one of the key distinctions of professions from a craft of trade is the autonomy and deference to the professional provided on the basis of public trust. The doctor gets deference from the patient, and the mayor, because they maintain a collective level of trust across the profession. They maintain that level of public trust as a consequence of not only their personal actions, but how they hold their fellow doctors to account for violations. Without it they lose the ability to be a profession.
Professional government workers- meritocratically selected administrators, if you prefer- are much the same. The ability to retain trust is a key merit for the professional, and thus something an honest meritocracy will prioritize exceptionally highly.
Shakes, I read this in the voice of William Spaniel, and he ever reads that acronym on his channel I will suspect the funniest.
You misunderstand. The primary argument isn't that the private sector is better social lining- that's the secondary/silver lining argument.
The primary argument is that many of the 'capable employees you don't want to lose' weren't considered 'capable' or 'not want to be lost,' because the people engineering the buyouts had a lived experience where many of the most 'capable' government employees- i.e. those most capable at playing the bureaucratic politics and subverting policy without being caught- had been trying to prevent the policy directives in various ways that were only clearer in retrospect.
Put another way- the people doing the layoffs had a strong, and occasionally warranted, distrust of many of the 'most capable government employees.'
The silver-lining argument comes in as a salve/rationalization that any 'innocents' lost in the buyouts aren't tragically or wrongly harmed, but rather took opportunities for good things even as dead wood was cut.
A successful DOGE push out would have to be one in which the bad employees who couldnt find new jobs or who thought they would get fired or who were in unproductive jobs outweigh the "bad" cuts.
This is confusing the goals of an market-motivated corporate downsizing with a political-control-motivated government downsizing. The metric of efficiency isn't employee performance or 'productive jobs'- it's whether the institution as a whole advances policy within a relevant time frame.
This is an extension of a common misconception about meritocratic employment systems. What would normally be dismissed pejoratively as 'political reliability' is actually an incredibly important merit in any system. A system staffed by hypercompetent people in productive jobs who use those positions of productive-power to foil you is not, in fact, a particularly meritorious system. An employee who isn't trusted to advance policy is a bad employee, regardless of how well they perform by traditional market performance metrics.
The general employee cohorts that DOGE engaged had already lost trust during the Trump 1.0 administration or before. Removing them was the 'good' cut that outweighs the 'bad' cuts from the policymaker's perspective, because it resulted in institutions (and employee cohorts) that the policy makers did trust to implement and advance policy. That trust in turn allows the policy makers to focus on other issues of policy, rather than prioritize internal HR evaluations.
Dean
Flairless
16d ago
What else am I supposed to call choosing to side with a child rapist fugitive and his enabler over a victim?
Contemptable? Detestable? There are certainly a large range of words to convey judgement, without making a false accusation.
Especially since a false accusation doesn't call 'choosing to side with a child rapist fugitive and his enabler over a victim' anything. It's a change of subject, not an adjective.
I think this better captures what I was trying to gesture at with the 'what I didn't like' section. I think I mentioned I bounced off the gameplay- I have a hard time with 'spot the difference' visual games in general and any game that makes me squint is a literal eye sore- and while I characterized it as light on the endings vis-a-vis Papers, Please, it does go further than that. I actually cut off a diatribe of why the moral ambiguity of PP works, which would have led to an longer reflection on story writing, but I wanted to keep it tighter (and didn't see easy-to-reference scripts to try and do any comparisons).
My... enjoyment? appreciation?... is much more at the abstract level. @Bombadil wrote a fair post of how while it uses the cyberpunk aesthetic it doesn't lean into the punk-ethos. To me this was a feature, not a bug, as I find settings where everything must oppress you because the setting demands it to be trite. A setting where life can be hard but winnable is a better ethos than 'you never had a chance' / 'the only chance is The Glorious Revolution.'
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