Incognito
6mo ago
That said, I'm in no way familiar with how stuffed octpous is supposed to help with autism, and have no awareness if Thunberg has had it for long, and the chances of it popping up as set-dressing in yet another political stunt is rather low, so... I wouldn't be surprised if someone was aware and wanted it in either.
It turns inside out. There's a grumpy blue octopus to communicate that you're unhappy, and a smiling pink octopus to communicate that you're happy.
I'm unsure if Greta has ever needed the happy octopus...
Incognito
7mo ago
Nobody (YES or NO) wants to talk about ATSIC. But I think we should talk about ATSIC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_and_Torres_Strait_Islander_Commission
When ATSIC was established in 1990, it was billed as a formalisation of the Tent Embassy (formed in 1972). There's some memory holing around this, but I can say (at risk of some deanonymisation) that this is the story we were told in primary school as it was happening. It was much celebrated with all the same platitudes we have now arguing in favour of the Voice.
15 years later, ATSIC was shut down due to being horribly corrupt.
And then for 18 years we have had approximately.... nothing.
When other government departments are found to be horribly corrupt (eg the NSW police force) we don't just abolish them. We clean them out and try again.
I think that's the best argument for creating a constitutional amendment - not just creating another ATSIC-like entity, but committing to cleaning it up and trying again when it inevitably becomes corrupt.
Ideally, we could put the Voice in charge of those pseudo-religious "acknowledgement of country" ceremonies we now have at the start of every event. A new priesthood, providing a new source of legitimacy for our nation. A spirituality bound to the land itself. Something vaguely god-shaped to fill the hole left by Christianity's untimely demise.
Incognito
7mo ago
No. There's plenty of proper blackfellas in urban areas.
A new wave arrives with each well-intentioned but ham-fisted curtailment of civil liberties in an aboriginal community (eg alcohol bans, opal petrol, and don't get me started on the fucking Cashless Welfare Card)
Incognito
7mo ago
I'm about 10 hours in. I typically enjoy Bethesda games and really want to like it, but it is just not grabbing my interest. It feels like Fallout 4, but with the art deco charm ripped out and replaced with an overcomplicated fast travel system.
ok starting with the good, the level up system looks excellent - spending a skill point gives you a little challenge to complete before you can spend a skill point to level it up again. I like the lockpicking minigame. Boosting around with the jetpack is fun. Stability is probably the best of a Bethesda game at launch. Which is a low bar but y'know. Only 2 crashes so far, and 2 bugs that required loading an earlier save. OK let's move on.
Combat is frustrating. There's a combination of manual dexterity required to aim your gun, and then RNG on whether the shot hits. I'm bad at videogames (and playing on controller) so have trouble just with the first part. Desperately need something like VATS from Fallout. I've found the most effective method so far is to just run up and hit things with an axe, at least it doesn't run out of ammo! Maybe eventually I'll figure out how to buy or craft a proper sniper rifle, although "hold breath to stop the cursor randomly moving around" is bound to "hold in the stick you use for moving around", which combined with unsteady hands amounts to "Cursor still moves around randomly and also maybe you'll wander off a cliff".
Space combat is a chore, like, maybe I have a fundamental misunderstanding about how it's meant to work... but there is no feeling of movement, just moving your cursor around and holding down triggers until the bullet sponges explode. Docking your ship at a space station is so unintuitive and unexplained that crashing and blowing up on the first attempt is a rite of passage. (The answer is, don't try to fly up and manoeuvre your ship to dock - simply press A at a distance! With no prompt to do so on screen).
Navigation is awful. There is no mini map, and the ground map is just a bunch of blue elevation dots which are totally useless in a city. Sometimes the scanner gives you arrows on the ground, and sometimes these even lead you to your objective but there's no guarantee. The star map fast travel system is needlessly convoluted. Sometimes you get told you can't fast travel to places you haven't explored, but go up a level on the map and you can fast travel there anyway. It feels small and disjointed, like the endgame of an open world RPG when you're fast travelling to points to finish off quests, without the initial exploration of the map.
There's lots of underexplained systems to master down the track - research, planetary exploration, settlements, ship building, crafting, cooking etc. This game could keep me busy for a long time but it feels like doing chores. The whole game feels like a chore.
Well that was cathartic. Maybe I'll turn it down to super easy and see if the story gets any better.
Incognito
7mo ago
There's a surprising amount of evidence. The theory has been around for a long time. I first heard it around 2005, before the Prequels had finished airing.
Some more tidbits of evidence:
-
Ahmed Best gave interviews at the time Phantom Menace was released, saying Jar Jar would have a big role to play in the remaining movies and implying a twist. Sorry I can't provide a link, this just comes from my own memory of late night talk shows 20+ years ago
-
Count Dooku was not planned to be the villain of Ep 2. The original novelisation of Phantom Menace had Yoda as Qui-Gon's master. Reprints then inserted Dooku in the middle.
-
We see a character design for Darth Jar Jar in a Clone Wars episode (S1E8: Bombad Jedi).
The most convincing evidence for me, however, was reading Asimov's "Foundation and Empire" immediately before a rewatch of Phantom Menace (Jar Jar is the Mule).
Incognito
7mo ago
Fake meats are handy because they allow use of existing recipes with a simple substitution, rather than requiring a new cookbook.
Incognito
7mo ago
If we found that tidal power was slowing the rotation of the Earth, we could simply stop using it and switch to fusion.
The same way we've found coal power is causing problems and we can "simply" stop using it and switch to fission?
Incognito
7mo ago
This is an old trick. Exponential consumption growth is a killer.
Let's say someone invents the holy grail, a Total Conversion Engine. At a rate of E=MC^2, pour in 10 litres of water, get out about 900 Exajoules of energy (50% more than current yearly global energy consumption). There's about a sextillion (E+21) litres of water in the ocean. So we'd naively expect this TCE to power the earth for about 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. Factor in consumption growth, with a current usage of 600 Exajoules, and 2% growth per year - and we use up all the water on the planet in about 2350 years. I haven't double checked my maths, some of those numbers might be off by a few orders of magnitude- but increasing eg. the mass of water in the ocean by x1000 adds only 350 years. Decrease growth to 1% and we get 4700 years. The numbers barely matter, exponential growth dwarfs all.
This may seem like something insane to consider, but it does matter when it comes to super long term thinking. Consumption growth is real. The invention of a miraculous new energy source that makes energy incredibly cheap may make a growth rate of only 2% optimistic.
On a long enough timescale, Solar is the only form of energy that matters, and the only way to get more is to colonise the galaxy/universe.
Incognito
8mo ago
Wouldn’t this be like saying the incentives for a physical therapist is to keep you injured and thus coming back for treatment?
This is a perennial accusation against chiropractors.
Incognito
8mo ago
Why this method? Here's one possibility:
Prigozhin shot down Russian aircraft.
Therefore, Russia shoots down Prigozhin's aircraft.
Incognito
8mo ago
I doubt it. You don't have to be rich to Uber/Bolt everywhere. In fact by the time you can actively shape what the public is allowed/encouraged to vote for you can have a private driver.
In extremely dense cities like London and Tokyo, it is faster to catch an underground train, than it is to travel in a Taxi/Uber. The only option faster than train is "charter a private helicopter", which admittedly some do, but not in great numbers.
Incognito
8mo ago
I'm considering the "no communication" scenario. I don't know if my sister, brother-in-law or mother picked blue, they don't know if I picked blue. All I have to go on is whether I think they're the type of person who might pick blue, either by mistake or altruistically.
Me choosing blue doesn't impose a death sentence on anyone besides (potentially) myself. Me choosing red could impose a death sentence on others.
I guess you could argue that living a virtuous life such that others assume I would pick blue is imposing a death sentence on them, and therefore I should be a maximally selfish asshole at all times. Is that your strategy?
Incognito
8mo ago
It's a deceptively interesting hypothetical.
(I'm assuming this is a "no communication" scenario)
My initial feel was "Pick Red, obviously".
But then I remembered, my sister thinks that her husband is colorblind. (He denies this!). So that plants a seed of doubt, so it's possible that she would pick blue, to save him, just in case he accidentally picks blue. And then, my brother-in-law knows that his wife thinks that he is colorblind. So he would know that she would likely vote blue to save him, so he would likely pick the blue pill to save her. And my mother knows that my sister thinks her husband is colorblind. That would be enough of a doubt that she would vote blue without hesitation, to save her daughter. Even without that, she's a very self-sacrificing person (as grandmothers often are) likely to pick blue because she couldn't bear to live in a world where her decision contributed to her children's deaths. And I know all of the above, and I know other family members are following the same logic chain, this seed of doubt spreading... and hey colorblindness isn't that uncommon right, and what about regular blindness, and...
(This colorblindness concern is scenario specific, but I'm sure there would be some other niggling doubt leading to an altruism cascade for other hypotheticals too.)
I'm not sure I want to live in the sort of world where blue loses the vote. For a start, I suspect the blue vote to be higher amongst women. Losing some nontrivial chunk of the population is likely to lead to supply chain disruptions, famine, recriminations, war etc... and all the most pro-social people are gone. I'd be potentially living with the crippling guilt that most of my family is dead and it's my fault.
Yeah I think I've blue-pilled myself.
Incognito
8mo ago
Why?
Generically, because of the importance of personal liberty etc. Insert standard libertarian talking points here.
On a more personal level, I'm fat and not particularly bothered about it. The pleasure I derive from eating chocolate far outweighs my weight. I don't think it's something I can change - I can eat much worse than I do now and not gain any more weight, or I can try to starve myself and be hungry and grumpy until my willpower runs out and I walk to a 24 hour convenience store in the middle of the night to buy chocolate, and not lose any weight. Having a government agent step in to keep me perpetually hungry and grumpy sounds like a dystopian nightmare.
Incognito
8mo ago
There is nothing more disgusting than shoving cream cheese next to cold rice and raw salmon.
I think that fad started in Japan. "Japan has finally discovered cheese" as my friend put it 3 or 4 years ago. Possibly starting with a cheese flavoured Kitkat, of all things, and then they tried it in everything.
Personally I much prefer westernized smoked salmon and avocado nori roll, than authentic raw salmon nigiri. I was a big fan of westernized Japanese food, so was looking forward to trying the "real thing" and came away disappointed. (As opposed to Thailand, which exceeded my expectations). But yes this is all tangential to the point, there's surely enough unhealthy food in Japan that you could get fat if you wanted to.
There's no mystery to how Japan stays thin. Draconian government enforcement. Being fat in Japan is literally illegal. That's all there is to it. I... don't think that would work in the west (and sincerely hopes noone tries!).
Incognito
8mo ago
Japanese food is boring and unpleasant to eat. Most of it, most of the time anyway. Easily the worst culinary experience of any country I've visited. I'm just not into raw fish or weird fish parts. For vegetarians it's even worse. Westernised sushi is great but is only superficially similar to "real" sushi.
I don't think this explains why Japan is thin; that would be the society wide state-sponsored social shaming. Men with a waistline over 33.5" face penalties & are forced into counselling sessions. Companies with too many fat employees can be fined. This is not height or race adjusted. I know a tall white man living in Japan who would be considered exceptionally fit by Western standards, struggling to keep his waistline down to that level. He'll likely need to emigrate next year.
Incognito
9mo ago
Are you implying that because movies are filmed in our world, it must mean the universe was created?
No. I mean that the static film reel only appears to move when someone is watching it (and not when it's sitting on a shelf).
Incognito
9mo ago
Huh, that is NOT the character I thought it would be! I assumed Jacq, the home room/biology teacher.
Pokemon handles things well enough. During character creation you choose to be a boy or girl, but none of the hairstyles or clothing are gender locked. There's lots of NPC's who have a femme appearance and masc pronouns or vice-versa. NPC's commonly get gender-swapped between versions, I seem to recall one in a previous generation kept the same appearance but used different pronouns.
I don't think Penny is intended to be trans-coded, though.
Incognito
9mo ago
Listening to a news broadcast recently, I noticed the country Turkey is now called Turkiya
This didn't seem to be part of a broader trend of using non-anglicised forms (the same news report referred to Sweden and Germany, not Sverige and Deutschland). Why Turkiya, why now?
Incognito
1yr ago
There may be a viable but difficult business there anyways; you'd basically be doing the same work as an old folklorist gathering stories as cultures die. How do you craft the questions to know what to ask? How do you compile and digitize it effectively?
The AI can craft the questions. The AI can ask them too. It's already a more attentive and engaged listener than many humans (me included).
I know something the superintelligent AI doesn't? It would like to learn from me? What an ego boost!
Incognito
1yr ago
I am generally in favour of race-blind casting. I'd prefer characters that are genetically related to look related, as following the plot can get a little confusing when for example, three full-blooded sisters are portrayed by one white, one black and one asian actress, but it's no big deal. I dislike racial hyper-awareness around casting, eg the backlash against Gal Gadot playing Cleopatra.
Regarding Foundation, I accepted all the characters being turned into women - it's Current Year, whatever. But what I strongly disliked was pacifists being turned into violent killers.
Salvor "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" Hardin, skilled diplomat, is turned into a gun-toting warrior woman who shoots first and asks questions never. Her father recites the famous line instead, and is belittled for his pacifism.
Eto Demerzel, wyrmtounge-esque political manipulator, is now a neck-snapping killer fembot. Not all the robots in Foundation series are bound by "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm" - but Eto Demerzel sure was! (Yes yes, zeroth law, but that doesn't get a mention).
I realise the series as a whole was an almost entirely unrelated to Foundation aside from some character and place names, but taking the names of two devout pacifists and sticking them on a warmonger and an assassin droid was frankly offensive. It seems part of a wider trend of advocating violence for solving problems, and pooh-poohing diplomatic solutions.
AI makes no sense as a Great Filter. It just changes the question to "why haven't we met any alien robots?"
More options
Context Copy link