TheDemonRazgriz
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User ID: 3577
TheDemonRazgriz
5d ago
like 1-3 numbers you rate on a scale from 1 to 10.
The problem is that most users would rate everyone they like “10” and everyone they dislike “1”, thus making the data very coarse and rather useless. Very few people actually have the inclination to rate basically anything on a meaningful scale.
TheDemonRazgriz
6d ago
I can believe underrepresentation (although some Asian overrepresentation in tech feels, frankly, pretty organic) but I don’t for a second believe that Big Tech is only 10% white. That seems like quite an exaggeration.
Although, my two personal friends who work in the FAANG world are an Indian guy (to be fair, he’s a citizen and a very patriotic rah-rah-USA kind of person) and a black guy, so hey, what do I know. Are there real stats on this out there?
TheDemonRazgriz
6d ago
As I understand it there really was some kind of irregularity with how VAR was used, I believe that they used slo-mo or still frames in a context where it isn’t allowed (because all contact looks worse slowed down) or something similar to that, but they’re not hiding that, it’s in the official FIFA statement. It also was an extremely harsh call, and Messi had done the exact same thing (worse, honestly) in a previous game and wasn’t even given a yellow. They all-but-never overturn decisions within a tournament though, so imho, that’s all probably the fig leaf and Trump contacting Infantino is the real reason. I think the only other time this has happened was way back in the 60s? They did wipe away a multi-game suspension for violent conduct for Ronaldo to let him play in this very tournament, but FWIW that red card happened before the tournament so it isn’t quite as egregious/comical.
I was texting with a friend about the overturned suspension earlier today, and literally during the act of sending him a meme about “Trump called up FIFA to make this happen lol” it was confirmed that, in fact, that was exactly what happened. What a time to be alive.
Anyway, culture-war-wise I haven’t seen any truly negative opinions about the decision from Americans, certainly not from American soccer fans. Everyone I’ve seen or talked to has been amused and/or happy. It is admittedly kinda dirty but, well, it’s FIFA. Even the liberal NYT commenters on an article I read seem to at most be saying “I wish it hadn’t happened like this but I’ll take it.” Hell, even my mom (who utterly despises Trump and doesn’t care that much about sports) isn’t too broken up about it. That red card was total BS anyway, so this is how it always should’ve been.
TheDemonRazgriz
8d ago
The good ol’ “half your age plus seven” rule of thumb still reins supreme, I think.
I do think the whole age-gap-discourse phenomenon has gone utterly off the rails, but it has always seemed to be a deeply internet-bound phenomenon with little impact on the vast majority of people’s daily lives, and I think it has just about nothing to do with the fertility crisis.
And for the record, some twitter rando’s opinion does not mean anything. “Some guy on twitter said it” approaches anti-endorsement.
TheDemonRazgriz
9d ago
Yes, it’s important to remember for these kind of conversations that active Reddit posters are a fairly small portion of users; most posts are made a small portion of super-active posters; and most of those people are genuinely insane. Over-indexing on what redditors are up to is basically selecting for the beliefs of a particularly deranged subculture of a subculture.
TheDemonRazgriz
11d ago
I think the legislature has abdicated its power to the court (and the executive), much more than the court seizing it.
TheDemonRazgriz
17d ago
A small but lovely part of watching the World Cup was seeing beautiful people from around the world representing the appearance and character of those countries. That's banned now,
FWIW, they’ve been subtly bringing this back. I’ve watched quite a few of this year’s World Cup matches so far, and pretty much all them have included at least one obvious “check out this hot girl” crowd shot for each country, usually more. Not as blatant as the gratuitous “zoom the camera directly in on her boobs” shots you’d see in the 2000s, but they’re clearly not sticking to the ostentatiously sexless #metoo-era posture either.
Fundamentally though I agree with you. It doesn’t matter much that most people don’t really care about woke-scolds’ pet issues, because woke-scold types are vastly overrepresented in positions of power; they will enthusiastically use that power to advance their positions; and normal people do remain terrified of upsetting them, because they are disproportionately common in positions of power. This is all true.
I will say, when I interact with people younger than myself, the age gap stuff seems to have few true believers. Zoomers seem to be stuck in a collective action problem where no one wants to be the first to break from the perceived consensus, and many (especially girls) feel the need to performatively enforce the perceived consensus lest they be shunned, but the consensus doesn’t really exist.
For example, a friend of mine was working for our college’s IT department after graduation and eventually started dating a sophomore who he basically met through that job. Based on what you see online, you might expect that this was somehow fraught or they’d have to defend their gasp 3-ish year age gap or the fact she was a student and he was staff. In reality common sense prevailed, and there was no such friction. Well, we did rib him a little at first (“you can’t even take her to a bar bro lol”). In fact they’re still together several years later and I suspect they’re going to end up married.
TheDemonRazgriz
17d ago
Seems like a big upgrade on “impotent terrorism and/or suicide by cop.”
TheDemonRazgriz
17d ago
The most charitable way I can think about this is that they feel a social obligation to speak in solidarity with their fellow travelers, and the fact that doing so requires them to spout obviously absurd bullshit is not an obstacle to this.
This is exactly what it is. If you pay attention, you’ll see it everywhere, from people of all political stripes. The median person just cares more about winning than truth or abstract values, simple as.
TheDemonRazgriz
18d ago
Yeah I agree with that. I was really just wondering why Britain, specifically, had this particular problem. Plenty of places with problematic migrant groups (France, Germany, Sweden) did not have this qualitative kind of problem or this degree of coverup. I do think their particular history likely plays a role. But it could also be down to something as simple as no other country having large-scale migration of the particular Pakistani subculture that forms these rape gangs, like how only Sweden has issues with migrant gangs regularly throwing bombs at each other.
TheDemonRazgriz
18d ago
The problem with the grooming gang seems to be instead that, for the Anglo to care about the White poor, they had to go against the minority community.
I agree that this is true, but (to my knowledge, I’m not British) there’s an additional element of class at play in Britain. It’s obviously true that western elites writ large “love to signal how much they care about minorities and the poor outside their household” but in the UK this attitude is standing on the back of a long history of especially stark class differences which persist to this day, such that the poor are not merely “the poor” but fully other, a separate and inferior culture. Today they deserve pity and perhaps charity but are still broadly contemptible. This differentiates the native lower-class from poor immigrants, who are now seen as Diverse and Enriching to the culture, where the native poor are seen as the same drag on the culture they’ve been seen as for centuries.
I suspect this cultural history is the secret sauce for how this problem became so much more pronounced in Britain than anywhere else: other countries have problems with migrant crime, including sexual violence, but not with mass-scale organized rape gangs.
TheDemonRazgriz
24d ago
A jew sabbath checking an intern
WTF is “Sabbath checking”? What are you talking about?
TheDemonRazgriz
24d ago
And I’m kinda surprised it doesn’t have a rape problem.
Burning Man says they don’t have a rape problem. I recall reading (or watching? not sure) somewhere that they have a bad relationship with the local sheriff/PD because the Burning Man security staff pressures sex assault victims into not reporting to the police, and even recanting after calling the police (“do you really want to get The Man involved? have some drugs and chill out”), thus keeping the statistics down.
I agree. I actually also agree with the main thrust of his post, but orbital datacenters make zero sense unless you’re wrongly thinking “space = cold” instead of “space = vacuum”. Power needs could theoretically be solved by using nuclear reactors instead of solar panels (which is still pretty impractical compared to just… building a reactor on Earth) but the absolutely ludicrous size of the necessary cooling radiators (and what happens if/when that radiator gets hit by a micrometeor or a piece of debris? how easy is it to repair? how long can you wait?) makes it a non-starter, barring some borderline-magitech advancement in cooling that would surely also make it easier to build on Earth. Cooling and especially power are the limiting factors of datacenter construction, above the raw land requirements.
Maybe there’s a future case for datacenters on the moon, using some sort of geothermal-esque cooling system with boreholes? I imagine the underground temperatures of the moon are pretty damn cold, I bet we could use it as a heat sink. But there a whole lot of steps to cover before there’s any benefit at all to doing that instead of just building a normal datacenter.
I think the only real economic case for what we’d recognize as sci-fi-level space development is mining, whether that’s helium on the Moon or rare earths from asteroids, etc. I think this would require launch economics to get vastly cheaper before anything could come of it, but it could potentially take off as both a sovereign and zero-pollution (on Earth anyway) means of acquiring certain resources. I think it’ll happen eventually. But not very soon. Near-future space development will be all about communications, GPS, and surveillance — perhaps with a bit of weaponization thrown in to deal with the surveillance.
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