Spookykou
9mo ago
This is fair, but I highlighted the ten year obsolete job skills for a reason, blue-collar and menial jobs just do not change much on that time scale.
Spookykou
9mo ago
Not sure if this has been discussed elsewhere and I missed it, but Scott recently wrote an essay on prison and crime. I did not love the essay, it seemed very similar to his homelessness essay, where he presents an adversarial system where people have worked very hard to make it expensive/difficult for our society to do something, then he throws up his hands and says given the cost benefit analyses (at the current, inflated prices) it is impossible to do the solution that really sounds like it would work. So I guess we need to do something else (that I just happen to like more).
At least, that is what it felt like to me. I actually wanted to focus on something else though. In the essay he reviews three meta-analyses of the situation, and presents their biases. While it goes unstated (or I missed it), the impression I got was that he was also supposed to be a 'neutral' voice, just looking at the data. However, he got in a bit of an X spat with Cremieux over one aspect of the essay, and in the back and the forth, he said the following,
But also, aren't you supposed to be based and IQ-pilled? Have you met the average prisoner? They've got the IQ and self-restraint of like a ten-year old child. I don't really know who it benefits to keep creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society and then, when they fail to live in modern society, say "Yeah, they deserve to be tortured for that".
Which is interesting, because it is bringing in a component that goes totally unanalyzed in the original essay, and yet seems profoundly important to his moral and ethical understanding of the question. Am I reading this wrong, or does Scott think that putting people in prison is the moral equivalent of torturing children?
In the original essay he did drop something that sounded weird to me, but I mostly overlooked it on my first reading,
Whatever career skills you once had are ten years obsolete ... Your partner has long since filed for divorce and is happily remarried to someone else. Your kids have long since moved on; if they remember your name at all, it’s as “that guy who was never there for us”. All of your friends have drifted away, forgotten you, or have nothing in common with you anymore.
Which seems to present the modal criminal receiving a lengthy prison sentence as a married father of 2.5 children with a stable career in the tech industry who one day randomly tripped and fell into a ten year felony conviction. Not only does it seem wildly at odds with reality, it also seems at odds with the quote above, where he seems to be saying that the average prisoner is basically retarded.
Is he just saying whatever he thinks will be most convincing depending on the context to arrive at the conclusion he has already decided is morally correct?
I do not read ACX that frequently any more, but this and the homelessness essay, both feel like pieces that 2014 Scott would have torn apart, whither Tartaria indeed.
Spookykou
9mo ago
Sure but if you are already talking about a sweeping legislative change with the explicit goal of increasing the number of children born, it seems like the political will to say, no you can't adopt adults to get around it, should not be very hard to find, relative to the will needed to actually do all the other stuff in the first place.
Nah, they don't play MF because she is an adc. Sona is just as busty, and is probably the number one most played character for women playing league. You can just look at the games that women actually play, they only play games where they can play as a hot girl, and they more or less exclusively play as hot girls*. In fact, I would say Lux (and Zoe, specifically these two) preference, codes trans woman more than woman, as far as league players go. There is probably a line where your game goes too far into the male gaze, like, Nikke is in theory a waifu collector like Genshin, but with no husbandos and outfits that look like they came from a slutty Halloween shop, it has basically no women playing it.
Of course, this is all miles away from woke injections, which look like Ambessa (Buff Old Black Girl Boss Brusier), not Lux. If Concord was full of characters that looked like Mercy, nobody would have complained about how Woke the character design was.
*Edit, this is overstated, they will also play cute games, like Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, Pokémon, etc.
Spookykou
9mo ago
Agreed. Pop music seems to be in a really good place right now, and has a ton of variety.
I guess part of the problem with all discussions of music is, what genre are we talking about, does that count as pop, does this, etc. Does, I like the way you kiss me, by Artemas count as a 'pop' song? What about, I had some help, by post Malone? To me they are both pop songs, but I could see arguments for defining them (and all the other pop songs I like) out of the pop category and then maybe I too would think that 'pop' music is bad.
(Am I being overly literal and autistic when I define pop music as, popular music played on mainstream (none genre specific) radio stations?)
Spookykou
9mo ago
Women overwhelmingly play attractive female characters, the kind riot was always making. They are not champing at the bit to play Rek'Sai or Ambessa.
The pervasive myth that women want fat ugly characters in video games is so out of touch with the revealed preference of women who play games. If you want to know what kind of 'diverse' characters women want in games, look at the character designs coming out of Hoyoverse, not Firewalk Studios.
Spookykou
9mo ago
Spookykou
9mo ago
This seems exactly backwards. Solo indie devs with shitty art assets and buggy code are over night millionaires if they actually have a cool game idea, on the flip side, AAA games with polished performance and graphics flop left and right because the fundamental game play is shit.
Spookykou
9mo ago
Hogwarts Legacy. Is this a woke title?
Yes, JK Rowling is very progressive, and only differs from woke orthodoxy along a single axis.
I recall there was a furore around the announcement trailer because one of the main characters was a 'girlboss' in WW2.
LoL's character design branched out from big titty anime girls years ago, but are a handful of 'diverse' characters enough to deem it woke?
Rainbow Six Siege has get some shit recently because of a character in a wheelchair, and I believe the much criticized recent 2B design was a skin from that game. But again this is just a handful of characters available.
Yes, all of these seem like central examples of the kinds of things people are complaining about when they complain about woke in video games.
Spookykou
9mo ago
Is the average lifespan in 1935 one of those situations where its mostly just a higher rate of infant mortality?
Spookykou
10mo ago
I used to donate plasma, and they would refuse to do it if my blood pressure was too high (I was of average fitness but I had to walk a decent distance to get to the donation place so the often made me wait for ten minutes). Maybe I should do some blood letting at home for my hypertension, since i doubt they would let me donate.
Maybe I am missing something, but don't Airports already solve this problem? I feel like you could trade the 500 car parking structure for something like an arrivals/departures lane that could quickly and easily see 500 people into their cars and on their way. Apparently 60,000 people go through Dulles every day, and their arrivals area is four lanes for about a quarter of a mile (from eye-balling it).
Spookykou
10mo ago
If I came up to you and said 'your money, mine now' you would not assume that I meant if you broke a particular clause in a contract that you would be subject to financial penalties. I think the overwhelming interpretation would be 'i control your money in every way'.
If a libertarian, taxation is theft, guy just lost the presidential race after running on the slogan 'Your money, is yours' and then somebody tweeted 'your money, mine now', I think the overwhelming interpretation of the tweet would be that it is a joke about taxation being theft.
you instantly identify people with different politics than you as enemies
is very different from,
your policy is a threat to me, and so, I see you as an enemy
Failing to see this seems to be the core area of confusion. The assumption in your post, which is 'ridiculous', is that any political difference is threating. The idea that someone who is threatening you politically, could be viewed as an enemy, is far from ridiculous.
The idea that he might generalized the principle from the specific instance, is totally anodyne. It's just his conflict theory origin story.
Spookykou
10mo ago
people with different politics than you as enemies, and see their policies as threats?
SteveKirk is clearly talking about a specific policy, right?
every member of our society learns when they grow up that their mother once had the fully legitimized option to have them slaughtered
telling Mum "thanks for not aborting me", and her not being super-reassuring about it (I don't think she seriously considered it, but I'm damned sure that during my adolescence she often wished she had). It's a bit creepy.
I actually remember learning what abortion was in 5th grade and being so repulsed ... just an instant angry threat response: "this is an attack on us kids"
The policy in question, is abortion. The 'threat', is the 'threat' of being aborted.
The angry threat response and instant friend/enemy distinction
The directionality is clearly, your policy is a threat to me, and so, I see you as an enemy. Not, your policy is different from mine, so I see you as an enemy, and as such, your policies are threats.
I am honestly flabbergasted, can you include quotes from the rest of SteveKirk's comment and the rest of the comment chain, to help show how you arrived at the interpretation that you arrived at, I can't even imagine how you are parsing these comments to end up where you did.
Spookykou
10mo ago
I remember not too long ago, a bunch of conservatives got excited because the audience for whatever show Colbert hosts now, booed when the CNN affiliated host said something about them being impartial. It was amusing to me, because the conservatives took it to mean, even this progressive audience knows how biased (against Trump) CNN is. Of course, the reality was that they were booing CNN for being biased in favor of Trump, because this was within about a month of the debate and that was the normie progressive take, that CNN was basically in league with Trump.
Spookykou
10mo ago
Guam catching strays. Guam is way more American than Puerto Rico, hell, at least on Guam English is actually the primary language. I think Guam is at least as American as any Hawaiian island (except in a complicated pollical sense).
Spookykou
10mo ago
Totally off topic, but I am seeing this comment as 1d old and the comment it is replying to as 12h old, some sort of bug?
Spookykou
10mo ago
Can't they also criminalize it? I could have sworn it used to be a crime in a bunch of places.
Spookykou
10mo ago
As an armature artist, or hobbyist might be more accurate. AI art is vaguely depressing, I feel like my life is worse because it exists. That said, it is hard for me to call it 'evil' and I don't get overly upset about it. I used to have fun drawing everyone's characters in my D&D group. Now somebody produces AI art of all the characters and major events, within an hour of session wrap, so I don't bother to draw them anymore. I am sure the group enjoys them, they look nice, and it is not like random D&D art ever had a lot of meaning or artistic value in the first place. The group is almost certainly better off, even if I feel kinda shitty about it. Ultimately I never felt comfortable calling myself an 'artist', I have some technical ability but I never put much thought or 'soul' into my work, I thought of it more like illustration, viewed myself as more of a craftsman. Like so many craftsman before me, my craft has been automated and I have been made redundant. Life is suffering.
I mean, maybe that is true in your trade specifically? I was thinking of jobs that I have done, like working at a bar, or a restaurant, or working retail, or working at UPS loading trucks, even working at an auto-shop the loss of a couple years is basically nothing. I am not even sure what 'skill loss' looks like for most of the menial labor I have done such that it is a coherent concern.
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