MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
16d ago
Aren’t most of us doing this now? I mean most people are assuming that this was negligent simply because a shooting occurred. But my contention is outside of buying a troubled teen a gun and taking him to gun ranges to practice with it (which is negligent) a lot of the things they did would not be that unusual for a family that owns guns. And I think that matters because you shouldn’t be able to convict someone of not taking extraordinary measures to prevent a crime.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
16d ago
It’s unreasonable to hold someone responsible for choices that other people make unless they’re knowingly making choices that a reasonable individual would see an enabling a crime. If I leave my keys on the counter, that’s not participating in the roommate using my car to drive to his girlfriend’s house and shoot her. If I know he’s going to get her in some way and I knowingly give him the keys, sure I get that. Any person watching would interpret that as me giving the guy the keys to go harm his girlfriend.
I think it has to go through that reasonable man test. If a reasonable person looks at the situation and says that the parents knew or reasonably should have known that he wanted to kill people, and they knowingly provide him a weapon and ammo and refuse to secure it, yes, they’re involved. But if it’s “there are guns in the house,” not really. And especially if the kid gets into a safe or something, at that point, they’ve done everything reasonably doable to keep the kid from getting a gun.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
16d ago
But at least in the case of a getaway driver, the driver absolutely knows and is an active participant in the murder. He knows he’s driving someone to a place where they fully intend to shoot someone, and they know after the fact they will be helping them escape. If an adult I share an apartment with takes my car keys and drives to someone’s house and shoots them, I’m not involved. I had no reason to think that a crime would result from me leaving the keys on the counter.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
16d ago
The problem of people no longer seeking treatment is to my mind one of the more serious problems with this ratchet. Managed properly, people with even serious mental illness can live somewhat normal lives. But untreated mental illness can easily become a time bomb in which the person muddles until they can’t anymore. And removing guns for mental illness or cars or knives doesn’t help when the people with those mental illnesses decide not to risk losing their guns or their car by talking about their anger issues or depression or bipolar. Then it goes off in an explosion when the person with anger issues takes them out on a room full of people.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
17d ago
I’ve often thought that a part of the issue is that there are so few cheap/free entertainment options. If you don’t want to just hang out and watch tv at a friends place, or play a tabletop game, you’re generally going to have to spend $30 a person to go out on the cheap.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
17d ago
I think we’re largely in agreement. It’s a weird part of American hobby culture where you do anything and the expectations are to somehow monetize the product. Don’t make videos or keep a blog for fun, don’t just paint or write for your buddies, even gaming is now turning into “get good, and twitch-stream it and try to be in esports.” I think it’s weird that almost everything has to be optimized and monetized as though “just have fun” isn’t a valid reason to do something.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
17d ago
I’ll agree that parents are responsible for their kids, and I’ll agree that in this case (as they bought the weapon and took him out target-shooting with it) they are responsible for enabling the shooting.
But I think as a blanket thing, I’m less convinced simply because preventing your kids, especially if they have ongoing mental health issues, from doing anything wrong is an impossible task. Once a kid has access to money and a vehicle, your ability to control them is pretty small. It would take an extreme level of helicopter parenting to prevent a teenager from doing this. He goes and steals a gun from somebody else, and you don’t know. He builds bombs out of household materials, and you don’t know. You’d have to track him to be sure, and watch his internet to be sure.
Worse, I fear that the looming threat of liability might make parents less likely to seek help. If you have your kid diagnosed with something like bipolar or borderline personality disorder or something that makes them more likely to be violent, you’ve now created a situation where you’re admitting possible guilt — you know your kid has issues, and if they act out, well, you knew about it. The best defense is that the child isn’t diagnosed with anything.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
18d ago
I’ll just answer for myself (not into the furry scene at all, but enjoy the process of writing). For me, I simply don’t have the excess funds to spend hundreds of dollars on a cover for a self-published book that won’t even break even. And I think that’s the rub. If I don’t have the ability to spend $300 for a cover on my book, on top of pro editing, then essentially I’m either starting a business that means that I need X sales. Most book on KDP sell less than 100 copies. As much as I want to support art, I don’t see the point of looking down on hobby writers for using AI art to cut down on expenses any more than I’d look down on a painter buying cheaper paper from Walmart. Or a musician for using electronic simulated instruments instead of hiring a band. Below a certain threshold of money, ability, and desire spending a lot of money on your hobby doesn’t make economic sense.
What I tend to dislike about a lot of writers communities is just how much they insist on essentially convincing hobbyists that they simply must spend lots of money on their novels, you simply must buy professional art and must build a web presence, and must pay $200 a word for professional editing. The vibe is “turn pro or bust”, and the way it’s sold is heavy on the bust unless you make a good income with your actual job. And I think for people who have a hobby but are mislead into thinking they have a career, this sort of thing can create financial problems for people who believe that they are the next big thing and spend money they can’t lose. And the other part is that most people are terrible judges of their own ability here. They more than likely believe they’re building a business, and that they will someday be able to quit their day job. And some of this is down to the same communities pushing the kind of “no FUD” culture in their spaces. You can’t tell someone that they’re not all that good. You can’t point out that they are breaking the rules of good form.
Time is essentially free. Webspace is cheap, and software to create pdf files is pretty cheap. If you are willing to put your expectations where the median writer ends up. Most people even if they’re traditional publishing aren’t going to make money. Most people buying covers aren’t really good enough to traditionally publish. And so, I think most people honestly shouldn’t be doing that unless they’re looking to sell enough to at least break even.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
18d ago
In what way? I don’t know of anyone who takes the idea literally in the sense that they think that there’s a literal perfect [object] in heaven that Al, similar things on Earth resemble. On the other hand the concept is used quite a lot in mathematics as mentioned below and in law. We have legal definitions of all sorts of things which is why tomatoes are vegetables in a legal sense. It probably happens in CS as well.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
18d ago
I think based on the COVID response, go with online services— instacart, Grubhub, online streaming, Zoom type online services, basically anything that replicates an in-person service at home. I would anticipate at least an attempt at a lockdown if the flu is bad enough.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
18d ago
I’m glad we agree. My point though is that this is a huge problem with trying to turn schools into one stop shopping for solving everything that affects kids. They’re daycares, cultural centers, therapists, art centers, sports leagues, enrichment activities, and when they can find the time and money, education centers. I don’t think it’s possible to have schools take over everything that other institutions and families drop and still perform their primary function as education simply because everything added takes time, energy and resources away from that purpose. And I think this is also a major factor in teacher burnout. They’re wearing so many hats, many of them contradictory, with little to no support and often forced to deal with serious mental health crises while trying to teach the other kids something.
My sister in law teaches elementary school. She had a kid in her class who was cutting herself as a way to get attention as well as acting out a lot. Because the resources are minimal she had to deal with this, and pretty well beg the school to get the kid more help than she could provide (parents didn’t seem to care). In the meantime, the class could get nothing else done. That’s the result of turning public schools into the Swiss Army Knife of society. Once it does everything, you no longer have time for teaching.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
19d ago
I’ll agree that the last semester of high school is coasting, and that the program is only a week or two. But we’re also considering the money factor which can add up quickly and take money from other important programs and issues. A room, food, transportation, and materials is probably in the realm of $2000 a kid. If you’re sending more than a couple of kids we’re probably talking about 60,000 a year on the program. Money that could be used for dozens of other programs or materials that could be used to educate kids in skills and knowledge they will need in their future lives.
Which will long term benefit Americans? Kids who understand science and math at high levels, or that they spend a week in a school in a red state (or blue depending on district)? That the majority of kids read on grade level, or that they go on a field trip? A robotics lab or science lab? And this is why I think even if it’s just a week in the last semester, unless it’s completely self funded, it’s really taking a lot of money from other very necessary programs that would benefit every student.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
19d ago
I agree that it was urban vs rural. But the biggest difference was in the effects of pretty standard policies. It was painfully obvious that most of the CDC had no idea how the rural economy works. Shutting down an office and going remote is no big deal. Those office workers didn’t lose their jobs, the owners of those companies were in no danger of losing their businesses. It frankly mattered so little that most office workers are fighting tooth and nail to not go back to the office. In rural areas, the exact same restrictions were absolutely devastating. If you worked in a factory, a small business store, a restaurant, a construction company, you got a layoff. If you owned those kinds of businesses, you had bills pilling up at a time when it was illegal to do business. At the same time, big businesses doing the same thing could often poach your customers by simply being allowed to do business. If you needed something, you went to Amazon or Walmart or Target, nobody else was open for business. And the cruelest part was that the owners of those businesses were basically forced to watch and forced to let it happen.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
19d ago
I don’t see why it has to be through schools particularly though. The general idea is good, traveling to places unlike the places you usually go (and that aren’t built to cater to people like you, aka tourist destinations) definitely grows you as a person. But to me, schools are already doing way more than they can possibly do: welfare office, therapy, socialization, and so on. This leaves too little time for the purpose of educating the children to know the basics of literacy, numeracy, and science literacy that they absolutely need. If the kids were doing well in those areas as compared to international standards, we could have the conversation about trying to do other things.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
19d ago
It’s not that I think “Boeing the bad guy” works better. I don’t think the morality of a country and its fate are nearly as intertwined as commonly believed. I put the concept in the same continuum as the idea that eclipses are signs from the gods. What works is smarts and tactics, and a large dose of willingness to take power. What I fear is that large swaths of people in the halls of western democracies tend to believe that the righteousness of a cause means it will eventually win. I think that’s a dangerous way to think because it creates a false sense of security. We’re defending Ukraine so we will eventually win (by the way, they’re short enough on fighters that they’re recruiting teens to fight) no matter what Russia has or does. We think it right that Ukraine get Donbas back along with Crimea. Except those are now considered under the Russian nuclear umbrella. Right has nothing to do with reality because we don’t exist in a Hollywood movie.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
20d ago
I’m personally of the school of thought that interventions should be minimal until at least the mid teens. Don’t make a fuss about their clothes, their hair, their activities. Give them a nickname if you must, but keep it somewhat gender neutral. At 16 or 18 if the child is still thinking they’re the wrong gender, then and only then is there a subject worth talking about. There are real trans people. They do exist, though I suspect they are much rarer than supposed. But I don’t think we need to go much beyond “don’t be mean to people who look weird or act weird” in a grade school classroom.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
20d ago
I’ve never understood that though. These people basically have a very expensive hobby and generally need to be told that. I would expect them of everyone else to be willing to economize especially on things that don’t matter much in the name of getting the actual writing out in public. Yet it’s exactly these people who seem the most upset by the prospect of AI covers and AI editing (I understand the pushback on AI story development and writing, as these are the point of being a writer, without which the “author” is reduced to prompter and unimportant to the work itself) when it would actually reduce their sunk costs. Having human cover art is in the hundreds of dollars range, and human editing is about $3000 for a novel-length work. AI reduces those costs to near zero which reduces the break even point for a self published book from $3500 to the cost of a maybe on the order of $300 or less for AI subscriptions. At $5 a book, we’re down from a break even of 700 books to a break even of 60 books.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
20d ago
I think the applications matter as well. When is the last time you cared about the artist who designed a package you bought? Or ad art or copy? Even as far as book covers go, I generally don’t pay that much attention to the person behind that art. In business, I really don’t think anyone particularly cares about who wrote the reports they get, the papers they sign, or the emails. Sure they’d notice if it were bad, but unless it stands out either positively or negatively, hundreds of pieces of art and lines of writing you see everyday would be seen without you caring about who wrote it.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
21d ago
I hadn’t heard this particular story, but it absolutely tracks with the naive way that modern western leaders approach global politics. There’s just a weird thought that all they need to do is “be the good guys” and they win by default. Couple this with the idea that bad actors wouldn’t use subterfuge to get what they want and it’s a system that’s not hard to either work around or subvert. We expected Russia to just collapse when we disconnected them from the global exchange. We sneered at them rushing western stores to get the last goods before they closed. What we never ever seemed to consider is that Russia might well have had contingency plans for the sanctions they knew the west would impose, that they’d already created BRICs and could do just fine without us. We expected a short war tha5 they would lose any day now. Annnnd guess which side is lowering their draft age.
We’re in some sense victims of our own success. We have been so dominant for so long that we don’t think about how vulnerable our systems are or what a determined nation can do.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
22d ago
I would tend to think the strictness is probably more of a long term help than the rather lax modern Christian practice, or the even more lax pagans. The reason is that the West is losing a sense of cohesion and shared mores. A religion with shared dogma and strict practices would seem like a way to get the structure that’s lacking in the modern secular system. Thus Saith The Lord has a finality to it that “because it’s current year” doesn’t. Having a practice that gives structure to the day or week would seem to give a much stronger shared community than a loose structure.
Q I think started life as a troll, but a lot of it seemed just to perfectly viral and too “addictive” to followers over too long of a period of time to have been simply a random troll. It was pretty sophisticated, having a lot of ARG elements (codes based on capitalization of certain words, date and time stamps having a meaning, phrases repeated, etc.) as well as the repeated phrase of “we go all” which interestingly enough stopped around Jan 6 2020. Some of the sex stuff and the child adenochrome stuff seemed pretty calculated to paint the elites in question as uniquely evil and depraved, and something that would absolutely make any believer willing to take some sort of action to stop the elites. Child sex slavery and child torture are obviously meant to be provocative, and the kind of accusation that denials don’t exactly make go away.
As to why conspiracy is attractive, I’ve often held it to be a form of political and social Gnosticism. Part of the attraction is that it provides a kind of Political and Social theodicy— things are not bad because of incompetence, or individual greed, or bad incentives producing bad policies that make people worse off. It’s deliberate, THEY (whoever they may be) are doing it all on purpose. And this not only gives the impression that the problems are being produced to harm us little people, and those doing it know what they’re doing. It also give the believer the feeling of being in the know, and thus part of a secret group that gets it. This in itself is empowering as it gives the believer the idea that since a lot f people get it, that there’s a resistance movement (or maybe they actually form one). They seem more common when things seem bad and are getting worse. There weren’t a lot of conspiracies in good times, or if there were, they weren’t taken seriously. In 1990, it was UFOs probing people, maybe the government was reading your emails, but nothing seemed serious. In 2020, the government pushed a “clot shot” to depopulate the planet, and stole an election and want to confine people to one section of their city. The difference is that 2020 was worse for the average citizen than 1990.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
23d ago
MBTI types are somewhat useful for this even if the theory is bunk. The descriptions are detailed enough that you can predict what people who share those traits will do in a given situation. It gives strengths and weaknesses for every type, which you can use to predict that your ESFP character might well do something stupid before he completely thinks it through, while your INTP will spend several hours studying a theory and not take any action.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
23d ago
I think you’re kinda overthinking it. Most of the advice (beyond the absolute basics) is written for people who want to be professional writers. I do believe in structure and planning, but if you’re just doing it for fun, a lot of the the advice is completely over the top where you need every detail exactly right and to have a twenty page description of your world building and the 15-point beat sheet and know what your characters eat for dinner every night is overkill. Even more so if what you’re writing is short fiction.
If you’re not going pro, I think that getting a blog and putting your stories on there is probably saner. Get a substack or a live journal or even a tumblr blog. Publish short stories there and see what happens. You can break that up with meta posts about your writing, thoughts about various topics, pictures or whatever you want. And because it’s just a blog, you’re not under the same pressure that everyone trying to become a serious author (a field that’s overcrowded even before you get to people who publish and can’t write in standard English let alone plot a story), and you can do whatever you actually want to do. Unless you’re really looking for a career, and willing to put full time into writing and promoting your writing, trying to publish or self publish isn’t going to work. Just have fun for now, and don’t worry so much about publishing unless you’re seeing a big following.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
23d ago
At risk of wildly extrapolating from my own experience with my peers, women generally don’t care that much about sports. They’ll watch if someone they know is on the team, or if the other members of their group want to watch or if their SO wants to watch, but they only rarely seek out sports on their own. They also don’t follow as closely even if they do watch. The male sports fans I know can name players, know stats, follow trades, know coaches, etc. so this also boosts the sports men like because it’s not just catching a weekend game, it’s following news about their team, it’s buying merch, attending in person (if one has the means).
I think the only way to get profitable as a women’s league is to do what women’s tennis does — make the players dress in cute outfits, push the players to be media personalities that women bond with, sell the kinds of merch that women buy because it makes them look cute. Have pinups for the men. The WNBA suffers because they can’t admit what their audience actually wants. The men want women’s sports to be hot pinups that look cute in short skirts. The women want to have pararelationships with successful women on social media. What they’ve done instead is treat the WNBA as a “men’s NBA, but with women,” which doesn’t work. Men follow men’s sports for the competition and women’s sports for the hotties.
I think it’s a self-preservation thing. Lots of people just have this odd need to believe that AI isn’t really going to take over the art scene, from movies to music to writing and painting and so on. And it will end those pursuits as a viable career simply because it will be orders of magnitude cheaper to have an AI write and make the next Star Wars movie than it will be for them to waste that money on human writing and acting and so on. Just a few humans to tweak the output is all you really need, and that’s essentially one guy doing the fixing.
It’s already getting hard to tell the difference between a human and a bot, and that’s tools that are pretty stable and probably were developed and trained 3-5 years ago. Give it five more years and the professional arts will be dying because they’re no longer different enough from AI to justify the price.
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