ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
No bio...
User ID: 822
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
3mo ago
France outlawed slavery in the 14th century
...in France. Not in its colonial possessions, which is where it actually mattered, until well into the Steam Age.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
11mo ago
If you don't have an affirmative case for why gun rights are more valuable than X dead kids per year, I hate to tell you, but you're going to lose.
Progressives have zero affirmative case for why their policies permitting violent vagrants to kill people are more valuable than X stabbing victims per year; they have yet to lose.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
It's like he's isolated a number of areas where he thinks the company was failing, and re-building those areas from scratch in public view.
Yes; the operative phrase is "move fast and break things". Shoe's just on the other foot politically now; that faction is learning that actually yes, it does suck when the products you use are broken on a whim by organizations opposed to your goals.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
4mo ago
but maybe the country has just decided "joke's on you, I'm into that shit".
Or perhaps more charitably, the only effective way to defeat crocodile tears in the marketplace of ideas begins and ends with ignoring them. If you're being interrogated in bad faith- whether it's by the actual police or the moral police- engaging in that context is literally never a good move; you make your case directly to the judge(s) only.
Somehow he's only increased his support as he's been found to have committed sexual assault, fraud, and insurrection
As opposed to what his opponents have been up to the last few years, perpetrating institutional-level assault (sexual and otherwise) by intentionally refusing to prosecute crimes based on skin color, defrauding the public with respect to the seriousness of the uncommon cold (especially financially- that 20% reduction in nationwide life savings was definitely worth the 0.0001 QALY that reduction ended up buying), and burning, looting, and murdering their little hearts out in every major urban center a few years ago.
It seems natural that the political faction responsible for those things should face electoral consequences.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
8mo ago
The students in question are "out" to their teachers and peers
Yes; the whole problem is that the teachers will punish the peers of that student based on how seriously they take being "out". This is the "I'm forced to tell a lie" problem non-progressives have with trans folks except (from the peers' point of view) they're literally forced to tell the lie (children don't have the experience to simply disregard teachers' punishments, and parents' jobs generally get more difficult when they start telling their own children to use their own judgment when dealing with authority figures, so reinforcing a child's tendency to obey teachers is completely defensible).
Just avoiding interacting with the problem or moving away from it is simply not possible in kid jail; it's even policy that the teacher is forced to punish the peer that won't tell the lie! (regardless of that teacher's personal politics).
By ensuring that students can't invoke that power unilaterally, and have to get their parents to let them do it, it doesn't stop the student from actually being able to be trans (and it's still backed up with force of law- the conservatives are just driving the speed limit here, and progressive parents are still free to grant their child access to the State power their faction currently enjoys).
But it does prevent 2 things: first, it makes sure a 7 year old boy does not need to insist that My Name Is Not Odessa Yarker if he displays some GNC behaviors and a progressive teacher overfits that into "clearly, trans with stupid parents", and second, prevents a student in a conservative household from tasting the trappings of progressive power if their parents also think the only reason their kid wants to do that is to have an excuse to bully others (and since conservatives think, not unfairly, that 'excuse to bully others' and 'out as transgender' are synonyms...)
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
10mo ago
I guess you could also code by voice, per the video.
The reason people don't code by voice is that it sucks so many levels of hell. Siri (and other voice recognition agents) can't even get normal text 100% correct right now, what makes them think that shitty voice recognition is going to work properly when I tell it to open and close 5 levels of brackets, use a bunch of non-words like 'var', 'const', 'LazyVStack', 'NSString', and expressions that have non-letter characters in them like '@escaping' and '$0'? Imagine trying to make a regular expression in that and trying to read in "^(+\d{1,2}\s)?(?\d{3})?[\s.-]\d{3}[\s.-]\d{4}$" over voice, or trying to browse the method names in a file like you do with the arrow keys when you briefly forgot what that call and its arguments were (again). Fuck no.
Even that Talon example sounds as incomprehensible as the mouth noises a Vim user emits when they try to describe how having to make 10 different keystrokes is clearly better and so much faster than just selecting the text with the mouse.
Now, this isn't to say that you couldn't do an IDE in VR- in fact, having infinite screen real estate means that you can more easily trace a program's logic down 5 levels where with standard monitors you can only fit 2 or 3 at the same time and the Vision Pro's ability to actually display readable text (I still question that they've actually succeeded- all other headsets except maybe the PiMax just don't have the resolution to do this because a combination of head tilt + low resolution per eye means that text is fundamentally unreadable unless it's so large as to be pointless- so I'd have to see a physical demo of it to fully understand its liimtations).
But considering just how much Vision Pro depends on being a bigger screen with a couple of interesting telepresence applications baked in I really don't think this is going to be as transformative as some might otherwise think, but industry and military applications where you need to keep track of a bunch of interacting systems at once are going to be interested in where this goes since this is kind of just a better Hololens (and those customers are who MS was actually marketing that thing to). I could see a store using these things for "where's this item on the shelf?", an factory providing an auditable inspection pipeline for guaranteeing the condition of a product before it leaves (provided they're dirt cheap to make and replace), and so on and so forth.
Humorously, this is also going to be a test of how well AI does when it comes to adopting a new language- yeah, Swift has some existing support, but the toolkits for visionOS and its UI/UX paradigms sure don't! I guess developers will be learning this one the old fashioned way.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1mo ago
But the Focus is not sold in North America, and hasn't been for 6 years now.
Won't that lead to crackdowns on speech, and so forth?
Maybe, but maybe not. Non-progressives are basically going for something along the lines of the Fairness Doctrine or the Equal-Time Rule imposed on Big Tech, because over the past 10-15 years progressives have been quickly enclosing the commons (we didn't need a Fairness Doctrine in 1995 or 2005 because the liberals were still pretty firmly in control of Big Tech back then- the iPhone would ultimately break them). Once your enemies start saying "build your own broadcast spectrum" it's not a surprise there are calls to violently reclaim it (which politics is, by other means).
Of course, their being able to articulate that is another matter entirely. But the Supreme Court has overridden amendments before- indeed, that's why those two laws persisted- and I think a solid argument can be levied (at least against ISPs and services that offer DDOS protection) that the "spectrum" is scarce enough to warrant an overriding government interest.
Is that going to make non-progressives as safe as they hope to be? Well, no- there are several vulnerabilities in different places on the OSI model that could allow progressives to claw back control, especially when combined with appliance computing and the DMCA ("iPhones only talk to progressive-approved websites, and removing that restriction is illegal" is always a few months' work away from becoming reality- it already effectively is when you consider how bad the App Store already is- to say nothing of any number of other "please drink verification can" schemes). And it still doesn't affect AI, which is another thing entirely... though it would quite easily be possible to ban sales of high-performance GPUs to US companies that refuse to sell uncensored models much like the US already does with respect to China and doing that doesn't even run into 1A issues.
That's not to say anyone's actually thought about it this much and we're going to get a half-assed measure that still fucks up everything, but a Red congress could get it done.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
4mo ago
Refusing to censor an idea isn't the same thing as supporting it.
By Progressives' own standards (applied fairly), it absolutely is; I see no reason not to apply that bad-faith standard in kind when it's inconvenient for them.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
6mo ago
Kiwi farms was regularly facilitating actual crimes, though.
And Twitter was used to facilitate riots that caused billions of dollars in damage and a bunch of murders in the 2 weeks that passed between approximately May and November 2020.
I didn't see pre-Elon Twitter getting debanked, delisted from app stores, or facing advertiser boycotts.
Conservative normies doing conservative normie things don’t get debanked.
Controlled opposition is controlled.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
Focusing on radioactive waste is therefore special pleading
Doubly so when you consider there are already ticking time bombs for the assumed paleofuturistic tribes in the form of mining after-effects- there are lots of earthen dams holding back toxic waste that without maintenance will eventually let go (to say nothing of leach into groundwater) that are probably going to be more of an obstacle to future Fred Flintstone than a landfill inaccessible without a technology level capable of detecting radiological hazards in the first place.
It's partially nerd sniping, but this "what if" is so completely ludicrous that it isn't worth the time thinking about.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
Probably both.
definitely one of those subtle acts that can break a person out of paralysis and into meaningful action
It's worth noting that pushing the rifle forward was unequivocally the right answer; you don't want to engage a rifle with a pistol if you can help it.
but having a very high one is indicative of a bunch of other correlated factors.
Also, having specifically zero is positively correlated with belonging to a (sub)religion that takes "you don't divorce on a whim" seriously, and usually means your friends and family believe similarly. This is hidden in the discontinuity between 0 and 1, though the effect could be a minor one.
Oh, and the graphs don't necessarily separate one cycle of marriage/divorce from more than one, so women on their second, third, etc. marriages are pretty obviously going to have had more than one partner (unless that was why the marriage ended, but y'know).
I'm mildly more comfortable with him running it than the type that were running it before purely on who/whom grounds
Note that the same conditions were true on 4chan back when moot was running the show; ultimately, he retained the power to ban people or topics merely on a whim and did so on many occasions. ("Say whatever you want, but don't create [personal] problems for the King" who/whom actually can work if the list/implications of things that create said problems is sufficiently small; the problem is keeping it that way.)
That fact didn't (and doesn't) stop 4chan from being the freest place on the Internet to speak to a general audience; most of the splinter groups his actions created from time to time didn't fundamentally cost the site that many users (in the same way we see woke Mastodon users returning to Twitter- user movements to and from 4chan are publicly illegible because everyone on chan sites uses the same username).
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
2mo ago
You're missing 5.: we manage to cut the fat successfully and take out the people who are currently kept in power by a combination of Boomer social standards (education spiral is 100% their baby- remember, their parents were GI Bill recipients) and luxury (natural resource development). There's a lot of ruin in the nation, but there's also a lot of possible reform, provided the people currently profiting from the ruin aren't able to keep a grasp on that power. And being that the countries most affected by this are the US (too well-armed and too large for DC to maintain order) and Canada (Laurentian Elite too strategically isolated to prosecute a Canadian civil war + 25,000 active duty servicemen not from Western Canada) they, in my opinion, have the best chance of any nation to turn out OK. All the US has to do is not get too dramatically wrecked as far as its economic inputs go (like, for instance, losing a war over Taiwan).
Problem areas currently include:
- Lots of land, but illegal to develop it (and the resources under it) due to luxury beliefs (environmentalism), Boomers not wanting their houses to be devalued (which might get worse in an environment of old age pension collapse), and government has a hard time giving land away that it'll never get back (it can enforce that now, but what about it having to compromise in order to resist rebellion?)
- Overeducation and excessive spending thereon. Education becoming more intensive but ending at Grade 10 (like we used to- insert obligatory Kulak "you had to be as smart as a university graduate in 2023 to pass Grade 12 in 1923" graph here) combined with technologically advanced tutoring programs (we already know they scale, it's just illegal to take advantage of that) would allow us to fire a lot of sub-par teachers and save on their salaries- hell, that's probably half a million dollars per person in government money right there (especially if you include the money it's not making in income taxes from the 16-24 demographic).
- Insurance costs, liability law, and safetyism make it difficult to explore novel business opportunities.
- Social services for the underclass. They're going to get institutionalized again, and jails are going to become vastly worse places (or they'll be disappeared to a concentration camp in the middle of nowhere to make those social services more efficient, and nobody is going to care).
It's noteworthy that all of these things are progressive goals; fortunately, as far as a peaceful transition of power goes, that group generally has a very hard time raising legions to fight for them given their politics are literally "you're fighting for your own oppression, which is right and just" (rather than along ethnic or religious lines).
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
3mo ago
To date, Valve has never meaningfully iterated on their hardware.
First the Steam Link and Steam Machines, until they lost interest in that.
Then the Index, until they (mostly) lost interest in that.
Now the Steam Deck. It's only been out for a year and a bit and they replaced the screen- sure, faster than Nintendo did, but that's a really low bar.
Sure, the Switch 2 has absolutely sold a lot of units- far more than any other Valve hardware product has- but I can understand why a manufacturer wouldn't be interested in seriously developing the Gabe Gear with a track record of no repeat business- especially if they're now saying "there won't be a new one for a while", and when Valve says "a while"...
At least never releasing a second version of a thing prevents people from asking them when the third one's coming.
Sure, most of them might be on the older side and a bit scratched
It's not really that they're older, it's that they're worn out; local asking price is 7000 dollars for cars with 140,000 miles on the clock (it is unusual to see anything under 100,000 at that price). 10 years ago, 7000 dollars was the basic asking price, for a "normal" compact car, with a third to half of that mileage.
Of course, the supply of new cars dried up in around 2016 since the American manufacturers stopped making them entirely for a variety of reasons (a negative real interest rate encourages you to buy a massive truck instead), but the other automakers didn't suddenly start making more cars and just raised their prices for a slightly more complicated (but not necessarily better) car.
And then there's the "it will be illegal to make a normal car in 2035, affecting ~95% of cars sold new today" thing (to say nothing of the environmental regulations that are inherently harder for small cars to pass) that means that, unless you're a Japanese or maybe South Korean company, you aren't putting any new R&D or spinning up manufacturing capacity for compact or subcompact cars (electric cars have to be as large as SUVs, because if they aren't they only have 160 miles of reliable range, and probably aren't passing the crash tests either).
Of course, I'm sure you could just move closer to work, but conveniently there's also a housing shortage, brought to you by the same people who manufactured the car shortage. The streetcar conspiracy, but in reverse.
I think wokeness should be evaluated in its own practical terms of its inevitable end state, which would look more like Chinese state today.
Yes, that's called "corruption", the natural consequence of technological stagnation such that the multiplicative effects that should come from serving the population's needs and driving it forward are outweighed by any other factor (in China, this is complicated by raw population making any gains sufficiently seizable and replaceable; in the US, it's... other things).
When the woke say that more economically equal societies form a type of bulwark against this kind of corruption, they're right (and trivially so); it's just that literally everything they do is designed to create an unequal society that uniquely privileges that corruption with appeals to morality as its cover- and that should be predictable behavior from the more corrupt part of that society bifurcating into high and low because the ways to be middle (and thus having to compete on positive-sum merit rather than a zero-sum purity corruption spiral) have been enclosed or obsoleted.
The problem with the US is that, in its 250 year run, it's only ever had to deal with this once, and that was after the mass industrialization centered around 1900. If you think "citizen perceived stability and prosperity" has anything to deal with TFR, you'll notice that by 1920 TFR was down barely above replacement in a country that was still 50% agrarian (so if the rural areas were still averaging 3 kids, that means the urban areas were down to South Korean TFR).
Now, to be fair to the American public, the then-unnecessariat would get a massive amount of concession from Roosevelt in the 1930s, but those reforms were for a different time, in a different place, under different economic conditions- what needs to be tackled now is the corruption inherent in free-trade laws (that are, from a macroeconomic standpoint, indistinguishable from the legalization of slavery; the fact that you're allowed to violate American worker rights laws so long as those crimes aren't committed on shore has not gone unnoticed by the now-unnecessariat).
Interestingly enough, "massive influx of slave labor" is arguably the thing that destroyed the Roman Republic- slave labor from conquests pushed everyone into the city, and Caesar was able to take advantage of it before it died out. I could believe an argument that the current socioeconomic policies of the US are designed to stretch the tail of this population out and dilute it enough there won't be enough support for a Caesar- but this is probably just a convenient side-effect, and events could still transpire that makes him a reality (for instance, if AI shrinks the pie more).
Instead I think it’s that it’s a form of employment- and typically one of the bigger employers in any given area- which influences its employees to vote democrat.
There's another form of employment that has basically no accountability for results. It's called "welfare".
People on welfare tend to vote for parties that promise more welfare (expanding the education system and increasing administrative burden on companies being the two most common ways), and their interests follow naturally downstream from there (even though a good chunk of people- welfare recipients or not- don't realize that).
I don't think there's anything more complex than that going on, but it's also why you can't meaningfully reform these systems- if you went back to 1950s standards in these areas, you'd both cut welfare benefits off from a massive number of women and incinerate the 4-8 years of their lives they spent getting a useless degree certified to receive that welfare. The sociopolitical ramifications of this would be interesting, to say the least; the last time the economy contracted that hard it forced the New Deal.
Notably democrats don’t seem to think they’re very good at indoctrinating the youths through it even if they were trying.
D+30 for young women, and an even split for young men? It's only the men the teachers need to worry about indoctrinating into the "you're trash and deserve this" philosophy (and they're clearly doing that quite well, aided by parents who grew up in a milieu of "the sexes are co-operating" and try to enforce it blindly)- for the women, cashing the checks is good enough.
I see school shootings as a distinctly American byproduct of individualism and decayed positive social emotion.
It's probably worth noting that the more general term for mass violence, "running amok", was thought to be relatively unique to Malay culture at the time they coined the phrase.
If it's true that there was a rise in atomization/increase in negative social emotion in that culture, at that time period, relative to its neighboring cultures, this is a good point in this concept's favor, but Asia in the 16th-ish century wasn't exactly a bastion of individualism in general.
(Also, as a point of "pride": it's interesting that the rise of mass shooters generally tracks the elimination of pride as American social driving force. Guess the Reds really were good for something.)
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
Every commentator I've seen has raised their eyebrows at the promised 50k PSI (iirc) of this cartridge
It's 80,000 PSI. The upshot of this is that this pressure is above the failure point of brass casings; that's why the head has to be stainless steel. This also isn't new technology; Shellshock has been selling this exact thing for the last 5 years in their pistol cartridges at a price point that indicates it's actually quite a bit cheaper than brass is to make. You can even reload it, too, you just need to modify the sizing die so you don't rip the base off when trying to extract the case.
Most of the "but muh feasibility" people are the reason gun owners have the reputation for intellectual curiosity that they do. Even rifles produced 80 years ago and designed only to take 60,000 PSI are still capable of not turning into bombs at twice that pressure; making modern metallurgy take 10% more pressure on the regular is not a difficult challenge.
Barrel life is also not likely to be the issue people think it is, partly because they're using better steel and coatings, but also because of projectile choice. The tradeoff you make with the extremely long projectiles that 6.5CM in particular is famous for (and how it gets most of its performance at extreme distances) is that the projectile's bearing surface gets quite large- contributing to accelerated wear.
On the armor piercing capabilities, he acknowledges that defeating level IV plates "unassisted" (which I take to mean with lead core ball ammunition) is not in the spec, so from my perspective we should assume it doesn't exist.
But if it can't defeat Level IV with assistance (as in, the AP cartridge that nobody outside of the military has been able to take a look at yet), then what the fuck was the point of switching cartridges? The thing to remember is that .308 and 5.56 AP also fails to penetrate (if the armor can't stop that it's not Level IV), but outside of that its wounding potential is higher, the rifles that fire it last longer (and already exist), and it has more room inside the cartridge for incendiary material.
(The article is simply wrong on this point- .308 AP and 5.56 AP, despite their name, do not penetrate Level IV, and Level IV is what the US/Aus military is worried about a mass of Chinese troops showing up wearing. They were certain the Russians would have had it too but, well...)
I refuse to believe the US Army (and the Australian Army, for that matter- they're also considering adopting a rifle in this caliber) is that stupid. Sure, there's always a chance that they want to go back to muh One Shot One Kill and fighting the last war (where they wanted a rifle that could perform from 0.8m to 800m, hence their use of the SCAR and re-issuance of the M14, and a usecase where the LVPO XM157 has a tremendous advantage- this isn't the XM25 where you had to lase the target for it to work, it's a scope first, manual rangefinder second).
I have a personal conspiracy theory that government support for environmentalism is at least partially driven by a desire to preserve the natural resources of the USA for a potential war... but I digress
They should have waited for Textron's all-plastic casings. I remember it being mentioned that they might run out of brass, which is already an expensive material to make functionally one-time-use casings out of. Being able to extrude the casing is the future of ammunition (just as it was back in the 1950s with the Dardick Tround- the ammunition was solid, the gun was crap), we just haven't managed to develop a good rifle for it.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
So it is all about old school grudges?
Considering the current culture war lines are drawn on SomethingAwful vs. 4chan I'd be absolutely willing to say that yes, it is.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
It's called "condescension". The group who (claim to) hate it so much they invented another word for it are the people responsible for most of it.
And sure, the kids eventually pick up on it- nobody likes being treated as if they're beneath someone (which is partially why teen media is infamously edgy as well as the general trend of kids wanting to consume 'adult' media in general), but they're not even human beings so who gives a damn?
Plus, if you do it enough, you can even make some of them proud of this treatment so it's self-reinforcing after a while... exactly what one with power should want in order to retain that power forever.
The left wants the status quo ante of Roe v. Wade
By their revealed preferences, they do not; they knew it was going to get repealed in that leaked decision and they did nothing, and then it was repealed and they still did nothing.
If they cared that much, I would have expected a bill on the floor of the House the next day- but they didn't even bother to even do that. It's not like they're incapable of throwing together a law quickly; after all, they do that for assault weapons bans at every opportunity- so they must not value it that much. (That said, the ruling by and large didn't affect the people agitating for abortion rights.)
The right is the side making those into culture war issues, not the left.
There was nothing stopping a Blue state from making their abortion laws even more liberal than they were in the RvW times. You can certainly argue "the right is imposing its standards on us" in the context of, say, Bruen (imposing gun rights on Blue states), but not so much for this.
Every American automaker threw in the towel on compact cars around '18, around the time the market really got used to real interest rates being in the negatives. And sure, the Civic and Corolla survive, but they're much larger than they used to be and a far cry from what they were in the early 1990s (partially because people in the position to own cars are richer now and expect more, and partially because it's functionally illegal to make small cars as the work required to get them to pass crash testing isn't worth it for a market that small).
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