aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
10mo ago
This conclusion seems very excessive. China has a couple hits but the west has a large stable of bangers and continues to release. If we're going to say that the East is punching above it's weight class the example would be nintendo and it's a little late to be worried about that. The last mega hit was Balder's gate, a western studio making a game using a californian IP. The East is big in gacha games but that's partially because those aren't as popular in the west. You mentioned PUBG but you know who ate their lunch? Fortnite, western.
It doesn't really seem like the East is eclipsing a west that can no longer make games so much as china is actually for the first time making serious contributions. many of which are using western IPs like many of your examples.
aqouta
10mo ago
My bad, for some reason I had thought the eponymous coast in wotc was Californian.
aqouta
10mo ago
People don't like a loser, Trump's whole brand is winning and it's why he can't give up the last election. Two losses in a row and becoming even older is going to be enough to have people jump ship, even if his health doesn't decline biden style.
aqouta
10mo ago
2.92% inflation in the last 12 months. If you measure inflation as "absolute distance from 2% target" this is 54th percentile for all years since 1990 (a hair worse than average)
I'm usually on team "the economy isn't really hat bad actually" but I'm baffled how people can misread the sentiment like this. It's obvious that what people who think inflation was too high want is for prices to go back down. the inflation number is a second order leading indicator. The previous years were 3.4%, 6.5% and 7.0% so around 17% over 3 years. And spread unevenly among the indexes so there were items in the basket that stayed relatively flat and other items that saw much higher price hikes, human cognition is such that those price hikes are the main thing people notice and do feel like the kind of thing that ought to be able to be put back in the bottle.
The leading indicators of how the economy is going to feel in the future have done decently over the last 6 months is just not really a compelling argument.
aqouta
10mo ago
Name your odds, I'd put $200 up right now. Trump really comes off a uniquely bad for many reasons.
aqouta
10mo ago
A circular definition is just not useful. It breaks down and is only tethered to reality by the lingering remembrance of a rooted definition. A tether that will only fray and disintegrate over time like a plant pulled from it's soil.
There are ways to define trans that aren't circular, they just would cleave off one or another group of the trans coalition or make some asks carry less weight. My current model of trans(I'm going to give the MTF case but assume a symmetrical FTM case) is that it is a feature of some male brains that they are able to be in a state where they genuinely believe that would be happiest if they had as close as possible the experience of being female. This belief can be true or untrue, suppressible or unsuppressible those are their own questions. This belief is genuine and following the principles of freedom of form these people should be allowed to pursue body modifications and ask those around them to treat them as if they were female in whatever ways are reasonable to accommodate. Polite people should humor them and there should be a general understanding that this is an acceptable way to live. However we should not blind ourselves to the reality that this is fundamentally a truth about male brains, that there exist no gendered souls and that a brain cannot be in the wrong body.
I think this is basically the truth of the matter combined with the most reasonable course of action to take in response to it. A circular definition doesn't let us solve anything, it says nothing about the state of the world and is evidence of poor reasoning.
aqouta
10mo ago
The problem with Communism is that it's able to be packaged in such a simple appeal. It's like if there was a sexy way to sell flat earth. Most people really and truly can't understand the proofs for spherical earth. They have no hope at groking at any real level a critique of theoretical economic systems. They can handle memetic things like "communists are envious" but trying to explain the value of price signals or anything that would give them an actual feel for the fundamental disagreement is impossible. It's one of those areas where I'm sympathetic to the "platforming" argument by anti-free-speech people. Arguing with communists makes it seem like they have a competitive system that actually works and we could feasibly replace what we have with it. When in fact they don't. They don't have a system that has ever meaningfully been applied. The stuff they have actually accomplished in the real world amounts to "capitalism but with regulation" from which there has been a mixed bag of results but not one of them were evidence that communism is possible. And communists do their best to blur the lines. They'll call the 8 day work week a communist addition rather than an addition that communists lobbied for. These are silly points that any serious discussion instantly disregards but it's what the lay person is actually convinced by.
aqouta
10mo ago
There is a lot more to be gained from travel than just an album of Instagram thirst trap photos. I’ve found travel to be one of the most enriching experiences of my life, personally.
I genuinely don't understand this and I've tried to. Maybe it's just innate human variability and some people are like me and incapable of 'getting it'. I also feel this way about most poetry and a dancing so I may just be weird. But I just don't understand what I'm supposed to find compelling about going to some place that I could already get the gist of in picture. I feel invariably like either a burdensome tourist or a mark for scams whenever I travel. Events or meeting specific people I understand. But I can't shake the feeling that events and meeting people would be strictly better if they came to me without the travel element.
aqouta
10mo ago
My understanding is that I'm quite open in that sense. I'm really open to the idea that there is some there there which I'm not getting. But poetry for instance. Mostly it's trying to express views I already basically understand into compressed formats. Cool, I appreciate it in the way I appreciate that certain picture formats take up less space on my hard drive. Instrumentally useful and when communicating very large ideas I will make use of its techniques. I even find some poetry useful as short hand. But I've never really been moved by poetry. Although I often struggle to even define what poetry is.
aqouta
10mo ago
It seems pretty clear that the economics of it doesn't work out for modern states. In the very long term a negative fertility rate has a 100% chance of ending a society. I'm not sure what term length you're optimizing for that having a population that halves every few decades isn't a crisis.
aqouta
10mo ago
if it ends up out competing, isn't that ipso facto eugenic?)
It would be ipso facto selected for and evolutionarily sound But eugenics is the selection of genes that people find good, meaning literally good genes, not just another word for what gets selected for.
aqouta
10mo ago
There's nothing like it. I recommend everyone do it at least once, to spend an extended amount of time where you don't speak the language. Suddenly what is taken for granted falls away, and it's like rediscovering communication from first principles. What are the critical things, the meaningful things? What is helpful and useful, what is not? What is good - and not just good because I deem it so - what does this culture value, and how did they arrive at that belief?
This just isn't my experience with travel, but I also haven't had the opportunity to live somewhere totally foreign for extended periods of time. Unless you have some cause, like a job or exchange program, this just kind of isn't practical. What is practical are a week or two of being a tourist which I have zero interest in and also what people are actually talking about when they say they love travel.
The wife is on a copper IUD, is there a downside to that which I'm not aware of? I mean I feel it on occasion which isn't pleasant but compared to all the other options it is always seemed strange to me that this wasn't the default. edit: asked the wife last evening, it is apparently a hormonal iud and not copper, which has less bad symptoms.
aqouta
9mo ago
Turns out I was wrong and that it is a hormonal IUD which according to her has less of these problems. She had just referred to it as an IUD before and I incorrectly assumed copper. But I guess it has potentially serious side effects is the exact answer I was looking for so thanks for your anecdote.
aqouta
9mo ago
Why on earth would anyone believe that the way to attack a strategy that relies on a very specific step up basis policy was to invent an entirely new type of tax? This makes no sense at all. End the step up basis, I'm on board, why would you keep the strategy working and but then add another tax on top instead of actually fixing it?
aqouta
9mo ago
It seems like the state is doing a reasonably good job here, although it would be prudent to wait for more info. Though, of course if there's a bunch of info incriminating the pro-Israel guy then we probably wouldn't hear about it on this site, as the entire thing would just be ignored.
Consensus accusations are somehow even more obnoxious than consensus building. We have literal holocaust deniers here, the accusation that we don't allow or have anti-Israel takes or news posted is indefensible.
aqouta
9mo ago
Of course this is primarily a 2A discussion, there is no new angle on the PvI conflict out of this. We also have plenty of left of center people here, just not lot of progressives. Have you considered that the "pro Palestinian" position just isn't very strong?
aqouta
9mo ago
So I am seeing people like Elon Musk repeat stuff (tweet here) about Democrats deliberately offering some sort of citizenship-for-votes scheme. Laying aside that there are other reasons besides nefarious ones to want to give legal status at least (not even necessarily citizenship) to people who have lived here in some cases for decades, he had a pretty specific claim, that the 1986 amnesty law flipped California blue effectively forever.
This is not the main thrust of your post but I've been on Twitter myself a bit lately and Elon Musk really is not a high quality poster. Charitably I think he just doesn't really spend that much time on high quality political discussions and his political diet seems to be heavily weighted by low effort right wing shitposters. The guy is running several very large companies, I'm not knocking his intelligence or whatever, but his posting is very low quality. I wouldn't take anything he says that seriously. I don't think I've ever seen a political take by him that even reaches the median post, not even top level post, of this forum. I really would quite like to like musk, he's culturally on my side by being someone who builds impressive things, but he's definitely not pumping out impressive political takes.
aqouta
9mo ago
You missed the best one, The iconic Lake Shore Drive in chicago got renamed to Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable Lake Shore Drive during BLM. Dusable was a french black man who maybe discovered Chicago but probably didn't and has a half dozen other things in the city named after him.
aqouta
9mo ago
Yeah, LSD is too icon to actually change the name, it's just a trap for out of towners using voice gps navigation now when it suddenly interrupts their song for like 10 seconds while it says the fake name.
aqouta
9mo ago
I work in tax credits, amongst which are renewable energy tax credits(ITC/PTC) although I mostly work with the LIHTC group and in more of a build the investment management tools role than anything that gets real deep on the finances. I remember around when the IRA came out there were some pro-nuclear provisions and some excitement around maybe having that come up as a new product type but haven't heard much of it since. Although I will say the numbers were being run, if they come out right I do think investment is possible.
aqouta
9mo ago
Trump will declare that he rightfully won and Harris only won due to fraud (99.9%)
Elon Musk will say it's very concerning and suspicious how many irregularities there are, and use his platform to spread that sentiment as much as he can (95%)
Elon Musk will outright declare that Harris's victory was fraudulent and that Trump is the real winner (85%)
Most Trump voters will believe Harris only won due to fraud (98%)
These odds seem really badly calibrated. I'm not even directionally against these but putting a 0.1% chance on something Trump does being unsuspected strikes me as madness and I'm not sure what Musk stands to gain from supporting Trump once he's conclusively lost. I'd put up money on any of these rates if you're interested.
I don't buy the Hollywood scenario where a tyrant suddenly has tanks rolling down the streets from a bunker where they never interact with the common man. Trump's recent experience with American small arms should shatter any illusion that assassination is beyond us and fighting a full military occupation is a step I don't think anl properly armed population willing to fight gets to.
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