FlailingAce
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User ID: 1084
FlailingAce
12d ago
I'm partial to an Aviation. My friends have a Bartesian device that mixes drinks for you and makes a very respectable Aviation, so it's mostly what I drink when I'm visiting, which is the only time I really drink.
FlailingAce
15d ago
So if she'd survived then her hope would have been correct? That's post facto reasoning.
Hope is valuable in and of itself, because it is the counter to despair. This is something we should absolutely teach our children. What would you have preferred, that the Diary is just pages on pages of dwelling on the possibility of getting caught? Or perhaps rationally calculating and recalculating her chances of execution would be better?
FlailingAce
15d ago
The reason people like to read The Diary of Anne Frank and find meaning in it is because they empathize with the narrator. And the narrator in this book is likeable in part because of her hope in dark situations, which is a positive example for the reader. There's nothing offensive about that in the least.
The Diary of Anne Frank is a character story set against the background of the Holocaust. It's not a historical treatise. It's not about the Holocaust at all.
FlailingAce
15d ago
I think it's pretty explicit in the rest of his post that most people who make that gamble are big winners.
Kids aren't 'running the numbers', they're sitting on their phones waiting to be given stuff.
FlailingAce
23d ago
I appreciate your thoughts! I intended my original post as somewhat hyperbolic, I thought the last line made that pretty clear - that said, I do think the criticisms I leveled are valid reasons why basketball is comparatively worse than other sports in its fundamental design.
And the Finals MVP, from this years' championship team, is 6'2"
Fair enough, I didn't distinguish roles in my first post. Point guard is the one position where shorter guys can be successful (mostly because it's the position that doesn't take shots). Although apparently the average height of point guards has been increasing in the last few decades - they used to be able to be much shorter!
This "shooting baskets is stupid" (literally what you said) is taking a very specific item and stripping away all of the context around it as a means to paint the entire enterprise of Basketball as vapid.
I'm saying that shooting baskets is a far worse activity than shooting goals in other sports. It's interesting that you highlight "coordinating in real time with a group of peers" when practicing shooting baskets is largely a solo activity - again, in comparison with shooting goals in soccer (which you do against a goalie) or throwing a baseball around. In fact, have you ever seen basketball players get together and have fun practicing passing the ball? Of course not, instead they take turns shooting baskets, because that's the activity that requires the most practice. It's fundamentally less pro-social compared with other team sports.
But your position seems to be that we should turn a half-a-trillion-dollars into far, far less because you don't particularly like Basketball.
What are you even saying here? If basketball were replaced by indoor soccer then obviously soccer would make more money...
FlailingAce
23d ago
An amusing framing, no doubt! But the fundamental skill in kicking a soccer ball is not the propulsion of the ball, it's balance. Specifically, bilateral balance on a single leg under differing conditions and while under stress and perturbation. Ask a PT or OT and they'll likely confirm that this is one of, if not the most important physical skills to learn for lifelong health and injury prevention. It's what we train the elderly on to prevent falls.
Can't speak to hockey as much as I never played, but shooting a puck seems to involve whole body coordination in a similar way, and manipulating a stick with two hands is endlessly generalizable.
FlailingAce
24d ago
I'm not sure is it's talked about in current climate circles, but it's significant in modeling. Models (at least in the 2000s when I learned about this) had a multiplicative factor on climate forcing that was based on a positive reinforcement mechanism from water vapor - in other words, the calculated increase in temperature from CO2 was doubled or tripled because of the assumption of positive reinforcement. Notably, the models did not really model cloud albedo effects, which make water vapor arguably a negative feedback mechanism that stabilizes temperature instead.
Of course, the actual problem was that the models kept all this secret. They were considered proprietary (including the input parameters e.g. 'CO2 forcing' = 3x), so all we the public got to see was the predictions of catastrophe and runaway warming, without any visibility on how those predictions were made. Now that we have a better understanding, it's clear why the predictions of these models were simply wrong, but the trust is quite reasonably lost.
FlailingAce
25d ago
Learning to shoot a basketball has some utility, in the same way learning any skill has utility. But throwing a baseball or football is a much more translatable skill, and biomechanically what our shoulders are designed to do. The proper movement for shooting a basketball is almost unnatural in comparison, which is why most kids do it wrong until they're corrected and properly trained.
FlailingAce
25d ago
Let me bend your ear briefly on why modern basketball is the worst of all sports.
First, it is the only major sport with a freakish morphology requirement. The best predictor of success in basketball is your height - the average for pro players is the 99th percentile. The only other team sport where you see this is volleyball, which nobody cares about, so it's fine if it caters to a small group. But basketball is the sport for many demographics, and yet 98-99% of people can never go pro no matter how hard they work or how skilled they become.
Second, the rules are stupid. Running with the ball in your hands is not allowed, except you can take a few steps I guess? Especially if it leads to a cool dunk! (Pretty sure that's the actual reason, people like dunks so they bend the rules to allow them). On a more serious note, the modern style of play has devolved to take advantage of these silly rules. Many plays I see in modern games are just a big player bull rushing with the ball in their hands for three steps, then leaping through the air and tipping the ball up while in midair. There's no teamwork beyond setting picks, no finesse, just a big flying body that the defender is not allowed to do anything about. If the ball goes in great, but if the defender gets in the way it's usually a foul and free throw so just as good.
Third, shooting baskets is stupid. It requires kids to spend thousands of hours on a movement skill that has no application to anything else whatsoever. Seriously, can someone come up with any other action in life that is remotely like shooting baskets? How much of our kids' time is wasted on this junk?Also, there's relatively little interaction involved in shooting baskets. I should say, there is interaction if the defender is taller and can put their hands over you, in which case you simply can't succeed no matter how good you are (see point one), but most of the time it's just a skill check roll to see if you get the points or not. What, in every similar sport, is a battle of wits between offense and defense, in basketball is often just a roll of the dice. Player XY hits 3 pointers from this distance at 38% chance. What fun! (BTW, how are there professional players who can't hit free throws? What an embarrassing sport!) The result of this is that basketball is a highly statistical game - the opposite of soccer, upsets and comebacks in basketball rarely happen, because there are so many scoring plays, and scoring is so easy. By minute 5, you can already see which team is better, and the same ratio of points will likely continue for the rest of the game. Everything about basketball is boring.
All basketball arenas should be renovated into indoor soccer arenas.
FlailingAce
26d ago
That's actually a good question. My instinct was that this is mocking transgender people, but after thinking more there could be some sort of ironic meta-mockery as well, like associating people who think transgenders are gross with the aristocracy. I think if that was the intent, though, it's a pretty big miss, because people will make the basic association (trans == gross) more easily than the subtle one.
FlailingAce
26d ago
On a science fiction lark at the moment. Just finished A Deepness in the Sky - super interesting concept! Vernor Vinge's stories have such a different pacing from anything else I've read.
Now I'm part way through the newer James S. A. Corey book The Mercy of the Gods, which I'm also enjoying.
FlailingAce
26d ago
If you're not already aware, Deflock is pushing back against this issue specifically. There are also local groups in various areas, maybe there's one near you or you could start one yourself?
FlailingAce
26d ago
"My Lord, the peasants are revolting!" "Yes I know, I can smell them from here."
Classic joke. I can't see this as anything but mockery.
FlailingAce
26d ago
Just got Risk of Rain 2 on Steam sale. Was very glad to see it has aim assist built in! I liked the original Risk of Rain and was worried that this one would require more technical skill to play (the original didn't require any aiming).
Still learning the ropes but having a great time so far.
They're being published as comics. Take a look at Webtoons some time and you'll see that this is the plot of nearly half of the series they publish.
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