HalloweenSnarry
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User ID: 795
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
Presumably, GBRK is imagining something along the lines of straight-up unlicensed serious productions based on Western IP. Imagine a Chinese Batman that is functionally identical to the actual thing, but they just didn't pay Warner Bros. for any rights.
This source I found on China's options for retaliation only mentions banning the import of Hollywood films. Now, that will create a gap in their market, but they likely do have enough of their own industry to fill the void and won't need to resort to industrial-scale infringement to get their fix.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
but I swear to god if I see one more twitter account with a greek statue profile picture complaining about how degenerate the modern world is, with its homos and pedophiles, I'm going to have an aneurysm.
Worth remembering that some or all of those kinds of posters are secretly women (allegedly).
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
Requiring French, in this instance, presumably disallows English; ergo, this is a speech restriction.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
Huh, where was this?
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
Hell, I think a small genre of argument here on The Motte is "intelligence is no guard against foolishness; in fact, it only lets you rationalize your idiocy better."
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
Iran is not a very feminist place but it does the same thing with pushing more education than really needed.
At least in Iran's case, they have the excuses of "semi-isolated nation that has been building a nuclear program for decades" and "ran by an Islamic theocracy, which requires rigorous study of religious text."
That being said, I agree that it's...weird how much societies around the world have commoditized(?) education.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
Laptop cart? Is this literally just a cart with laptops piled onto it, and the teacher goes and hands them out to the students at the start of class?
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
That's probably the truth of it, yeah.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
What is this in reference to?
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
Russia has put in tons of work to bypass the sanctions and has constantly made it a major goal of theirs to get them lowered. If ending trade was so useful then we would expect countries to embrace the sanctions on them, a "Haha all you're doing is bolstering our local economy idiots" response, instead of trying to circumvent those restrictions.
If the pro-Russian posters here and the vatniks are to be believed, Russia's economy has in fact been pretty strengthened post-2022. I don't believe them, personally, but that is a claim that is often made.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
Hey, Self-Made Human would probably talk about the modal Indian child being raised in less-than-acceptably-hygenic conditions.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
I can acknowledge that, yes, obviously, it still really beats slavery, but I can see that it still seems unfair and quite uneven.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
The other parent presumably believes that going without butter will force the first parent to work towards actualizing responsibility instead of whinging when told to do what they need to do.
Do I think this is realistic or practical? Not really, but that is the framing you are fighting.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
I do like the odd RPG here and there, and I would like to play more, but I do find it hard to stick with some of those kinds of games for some reason. I must have like a half-dozen RPGs that I've picked up and never finished. I promise I love world-building and characters! I just don't consume every game that focuses on that, I guess.
I do like action games, but out of the ones you've listed, I've only really played Doom and Halo. My tastes tend towards more of the older generations of games of that ilk.
I think you're thinking of Generals for that voice line, but yeah.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
I think there is a sort of religious-revival component to Trump 2. Now, that sounds lazy and snide, I admit, but I don't mean for that to be the case. I've stated before that the new direction from the administration, the current motivation, seems to be from the values-aesthetics angle. The package offered by MAGA does indeed seem to be "America has grown soft and complacent, we must make it great again by reaffirming our values and rejecting the soft-power view of American greatness."
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
Destroying the prosperity rather than reinforcing those values is madness.
The dissidents already believe that half of the political spectrum has effectively forbade the American public from ever reinforcing those values, what is your solution to that?
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
If they can not support a semiconductor production chain, they shall not have computers.
We have already produced and imported so many electronics, there is most likely a decent amount of perfectly-good computing power that is just rotting away in landfills right now. If we lost the ability to make more microchips, it would certainly suck, but also, we're probably already drowning in chips that are powerful enough to run Half-Life 2. Your smartphone is powerful enough to run at least 50 copies of Microsoft Excel. It won't be the end of the world.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
After democrats have restricted demand and subsidized supply right into the toilet
Did you mean this the other way around?
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
I guess it's time to drop this take: did we accidentally end up reintroducing slavery?
I don't say this lightly. The archetype/stereotype of the immigrant worker is a man who has come over to America to work for an illegally-low wage (that is still more than he could earn by staying in the corrupt shithole he fled from), and faces challenges such as: he can't get the law on his side if his employer abuses him (because then he'd be caught and deported), his failure to meld with the local culture places him at odds with the native population, and his children are pseudo-orphans because their parents are only able to raise them for as long as they aren't caught and deported. And what do we, the natives, get out of the exploitation of this man's travails? Cheaper products as a result of cheaper labor.
"Cheap labor" is the motivating force for capitalism, and business owners have always sought it out wherever it could be found. First, it was slaves taken from Africa and the Native American population. After the Civil War, it was the native-born blacks and dirt-poor whites who helped build the industrial cities of the Eastern US. Towards the end of the Cold War, it was overseas countries where quality of life, wages, and cost of living were all low. At some point, immigrant labor also gained a share of labor power.
Now, to an extent, I like the world that the Neoliberal World Order built, but all those blue-haired Adbusters-reading leftists are directionally-correct that we are addicted to cheap labor and ignore all the externalities that come with it. Is it right to just shut off the supply like Trump is trying to do? Should we not wean ourselves off of it now that the world is so interconnected anyways? Is it fair to keep racing to the bottom for more-work-for-less-paychecks even as we speculate about the wonders of total automation that seem so tantalizingly closer with every passing day?
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
Maybe it is just me (I rarely ever replay games), but the Bioshock games do genuinely seem like they're the least-replayable ImSims ever.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
I would definitely be curious what your gamer motivation profile looks like.
I got Skirmisher and Slayer, huh.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
Exhibit A was The Matrix, there were so many neat elements of it and it's remained in the popular consciousness for that reason, but it had to go eerily spiritual in a film series about technology. Who the heck was that grandma, anyway? What does this chosen one nonesense have to do with robots using humans as batteries?
In mild fairness, I think some of this was an outgrowth of The Matrix starting out as an homage to Ghost in the Shell, which is a rather cerebral and philosophical story which also happens to be bracketed by gorgeously-rendered cyborg carnage.
Either pure "never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake," or "absorbed too much leftist radiation about economics." Or a bit of both. There was this tweet, for example.
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