assman
1yr ago
Not sure if you’ve played an MMO before, but there’s “black market” websites that facilitate gold transactions. RuneScape gold goes for about $0.30-$0.50 per million gold (in-game currency) depending on the supply/demand. It’s not super difficult to make 5 million gold per hour (so call it ~$2/hr) which I guess is decent in Venezuela, especially when your job is just playing video games
assman
1yr ago
I have a Fantasy Football/Medical question, not sure if there are a lot of football fans here but I think it’d be hard to get anything insightful from this in a sports forum.
My question is regarding the concept of “mileage” on athletes, which mostly comes up in the context of NFL running backs but sometimes is used in other sports. The idea is that there’s a sort of limited number of times you can expect someone to run a football before the “wear and tear” leads to more accumulated injuries and thus a quick decline in athletic ability. This is trivially true in the sense that all players will decline in athletic ability with age eventually, and you can only carry the ball more times and accumulate more injuries, so these things will all be correlated to some extent. Running backs in particular seem to suddenly drop off a cliff in performance rather than gradually decline, and often when they are quite young. So when trying to predict the future value of a running back to a team (be it in Fantasy football or real life), people often use this concept to imply “Player A and Player B are both 23 years old with no major injury history, but Player A has carried the ball 1000 times while Player B has only carried it 500 times. Thus, I predict that Player B will be less likely to get injured and/or have a drop off in their athletic ability in the near future”.
But my argument is that “mileage” is actually irrelevant, or even positively predictive here. To me the relevant variables in predicting the future value of a running back (all else being equal) are 1) age, 2) actual injury history, and 3) some sort of immeasurable “durability” factor, which would be like how injury prone you are and how well your body ages. “Mileage” then would just a proxy for 1 and 2. So in the example of Player A and Player B above where these variables are equal, I think the fact that Player A carried the ball 1000 times without getting injured would be a positive as evidence of their durability.
I’m wondering if any fellow football nerds have thoughts on this or have seen any data about it? Or if any of the medical people think there is something to the concept of a sort of finite amount of high energy bursts of acceleration and collisions that your body can withstand before it deteriorates (ignoring head injuries)?
assman
1yr ago
Not exactly related to your point but have you thought about adding the slur filter that rdrama uses? I think it’d be a good idea to have it on for logged-out viewers, at least for certain words
assman
1yr ago
I don’t understand people making arguments about the inhumanity of all this. They are being sent to Martha’s Vineyard where people pay lots of money to go to, and apparently these people wanted to go to Massachusetts. Many (most?) countries would send you to jail for illegally crossing their border, in which case you have no input on where you get sent at all. I’m not some monster who is unable to sympathize with children who are completely innocent in all of this but it’s not like they are being sent to the gulags
assman
1yr ago
My instinctive thought is to agree with you that it’s none of their damn business, and I find the whole reasoning about “power imbalances” in these situations to be shaky at best. So I wish it wasn’t this way, but from the perspective of the organization, it is much better to strictly prohibit employee relationships for a number of reasons.
People have been using the phrase “don’t shit where you eat” for a long time before MeToo or anything in that same vein. There’s obvious conflicts of interest and bad situations that can come about from coworker relationships.
But aside from the normal drama of breakups and stuff, there’s major legal liability to the organization, especially in something as public as an NBA team. If the woman wanted to come out and say that she felt pressured to hook up with the head coach of the team, and the organization found out about it and didn’t do anything, it would 100% cause a massive media shitstorm. There’s no amount of evidence you could show about the relationship being consensual that would matter.
assman
1yr ago
I think he’s probably referring to Noah Smith (noahpinion on Twitter) or maybe eigenrobot
assman
1yr ago
I actually have no idea, I always thought it was the head of some mecha/gundam type of thing but haven’t really looked closely at it
assman
1yr ago
TLDR: College football. 4 Team playoff good. NIL bad. Conference expansion bad and we need to get congress to fix it.
Viewership is still great AFAIK, but it seems like there are a lot of problems and complaints from the fans about the direction of College Football and I personally find it worrisome. Wondering what other people’s thoughts are and potential ideas for how they could be solved.
Playoffs. Basically, I think the playoffs are pretty much perfect the way they are. The allure of college football to me has always been how different it is from American pro sports. There are ~130 teams vying for a tiny postseason, and there are no artificial methods of creating parity like a salary cap or the draft. This makes the regular season extremely high stakes since you can only have one bad week and still hope to make the playoffs. Every major upset has a ripple effect throughout the sport for the remainder of the season. This makes it so that the regular season is the playoffs. Ohio State might have all 5 star recruits but they have one brutal loss to Purdue or Iowa and their playoff hopes are gone. This makes it so the championship winner is always the actual best team, as you have to be nearly perfect to make it, there are no situations like the 9-7 Giants winning the Super Bowl. A lot of people disagree with this and don’t like that there’s not a clear path to playoff but I think that’s what makes the sport so much fun. Every game matters, and expanding the playoffs will only dilute that. I don’t think the committee is actually biased, and the constant dickriding of G5 teams on Reddit is ridiculous. If they actually show on the field that they are a top 4 team they will make it as we saw with Cincinnati last year. I don’t think merely going undefeated against a shitty schedule should be a guaranteed playoff spot, the same people who beg for undefeated UCF with the 100th ranked schedule to make the playoff complain when Alabama plays one FCS team or Clemson makes it after going undefeated in the ACC. If Alabama could somehow play an AAC schedule where they’d go undefeated, winning every game by 40, the same G5 dickriders would say their schedule was too weak. The 4 team playoff has not produced any truly controversial winners and out of the 3 playoff games every year at least 2 are blowouts. There are almost never more than 3 teams who are legitimate contenders and expanding to 12 teams won’t change that.
NIL/Recruiting/Transfers. I found the constant guilt-tripping about the poor players not getting paid to be really annoying, and generally I think the players benefit much more from the school than the school does the players. At the same time, it seems unfair that players weren’t allowed to sell their own autographs or anything so NIL seems fair enough to me in theory. But as literally everyone could’ve predicted, it provides a way for boosters to openly pay players in a way that was under the table before, and players are surely getting paid much more now than when it was in secret. Many people complain about the positive feedback loop that is college football recruiting. Many schools have natural advantages in location, resources, history of success, etc. but recently the most successful teams just keep stockpiling more and more talent. People see NIL as a way to mitigate that, where schools with a lot of wealthy boosters can improve their teams recruiting by paying for recruits. But why is that good? I think the fact that success begets success in college football is a good thing, it’s unique in American sports at least and rewards you for running a successful program and hiring good coaches. If the other schools are mad that Nick Saban is getting all the recruits then hire your own Nick Saban. It’s not like it’s impossible to break into the elite of recruiting, Dabo Swinney did it very recently during the Saban era. I don’t see how rewarding teams for having rich boosters is better than rewarding teams for being successful and investing in the program. With the free transfers and NIL, college football success gets even further removed from the on-field results. Even for the lower tier teams a school like Cincinnati could have been able to capitalize on their success in the recruiting market, but that only becomes harder when worse programs with more resources can just throw money at the players. I don’t know how this can be fixed since I don’t think the NCAA would be able to regulate what is “real” NIL vs pay-for-play, but I think it’s really bad for the sport.
Conference Realignment. Nobody seems to support it but the incentives are what they are and it seems that some sort of consolidation into a super-league is inevitable. It seems like this is the least controversial issue in that everyone hates it. Nobody wants to see UCLA in the Big Ten. My only hope is that the consolidation leads to fragmentation again, when the conferences become so geographically nonviable that we can see a “Big Ten Pacific Division” or something that’s basically the old Pac 12. But my radical solution that will never happen and probably isn’t feasible is to get congress involved! This could be the bipartisan issue that unites the country around a common goal. The red team loves college football and tradition, and doesn’t want to see the once-great regional conferences marginalized. The blue team can say why are we spending all this money to fly college athletes across the country when we had perfectly good regional conferences, and we can’t expect the USC women’s volleyball team to fly to Rutgers for a Wednesday night match.
Wondering what everyone’s thoughts/ideas/solutions are about the future of college football?
assman
1yr ago
Is there any update about the Canadian teacher with the giant prosthetics breasts? I’ve seen a bunch of 4chan screenshots claiming that the teacher is actually a right-winger and was intentionally trying to cause a media storm, but those are just unsourced rumors. Wondering if there has been any updates
assman
1yr ago
Regarding the serial killer part, I find it hard to believe there are 2000+ serial killers in the US. Does “serial killer” mean Ted Bundy types or like gang members who have been involved in a couple of drive bys?
assman
1yr ago
I also support the promotion/relegation idea but it will definitely never happen. Regarding the playoff though, I think that ESPN does play an outsized role in deciding the future of the sport, particularly in regards to the conference realignment as of late. But I just don’t see evidence that they are influencing the playoff committee at all. Ohio State is probably the single biggest viewership draw and they have been left out more than once despite being one-loss conference champions. On the other hand Clemson is a smaller viewership draw compared to other giants of the sport and they have made it 6? times. There really haven’t been any controversial selections that would greatly increase viewership
assman
1yr ago
I think there’s a difference between being interested in the sport one degree removed from the object level (knowing players, following trades/injuries/coach changes etc.) and the reality TV/drama aspect. The former is similar to any media-consumption type of hobby, even more highbrow ones. You are [viewing art/listening to music/reading a book/watching a movie] and if you are really interested you might read about the [artist/musician/author/actor] and read reviews or analysis of the [book/song/movie]. I don’t know what you would call this but I wouldn’t exactly call it drama.
On the other hand, you are right that there is a reality tv aspect that has become a lot more popular in the Twitter era, particular among the NBA fandom. Discussing what players tweeted, or discussing what media figures said about the players tweets. things like that are 100% reality TV for men and I can’t stand it.
assman
1yr ago
I get what you mean but isn’t this obviously not true? Maybe I’m misunderstanding what a dogwhistle is but if I wrote on here “the rootless cosmopolitan bankers are conspiring against white christians” everyone would understand it’s an antisemitic dogwhistle. If I said “no I’m just referring to the literal bankers guys, YOU’RE the antisemite for thinking bankers = jews!” nobody would/should believe that
assman
1yr ago
I don’t disagree with you or Hylnka that innocuous statements are called dogwhistles all the time even when they are actually innocuous statements. I agree that when politicians/mainstream media figures are called out for using dogwhistles it’s bad-faith partisan bullshit 99% of the time. My point is just that simply recognizing an obvious dog whistle doesn’t mean you are “the dog” if the statement is in fact a dog whistle. As in if you go on 4chan and see someone refer to (((bankers))) you’re not anti-semitic for recognizing what they are referring to
assman
1yr ago
I guess when it’s so obvious that it can no longer be called a dog whistle it becomes a euphemism?
assman
1yr ago
Everything you said is wrong, I use that example because I am a terminally online right winger and browse racist Twitter/forums where people post about (((bankers))) all the time. My point is that if you are an otherwise upstanding anti-racist progressive citizen who finds their way into dissident-right Twitter or /pol/ you’re not a “dog” for recognizing what people mean when they bring up wooden doors or “joggers” or whatever vague phrase is being used to avoid getting banned from normie internet spaces. Perhaps the confusion is that you wouldn’t consider those examples to be “dogwhistles” because they are so obvious? I agree with you entirely that the term “dogwhistle” 99% of the time is used as a political smear to associate politicians the left doesn’t like with ebil nazis even when it has no basis in reality.
assman
1yr ago
Are you fishing for someone to say your post about your client not understanding the non-binary woman with huge tits? Because that’s definitely my favorite
assman
1yr ago
What exactly is your point then? I agree I am a “dog” by whatever definition you’re using. Fair enough, but that was not your point. Your original point was that identifying a dogwhistle means you are the “dog”. You are on here enough that I assume you are at least passively familiar with various dogwhistles like “jogger” or the three parentheses thing. Because you understand that these are dogwhistles, does that mean that racism is an integral part of your worldview? Pick your favorite “real right winger” who doesn’t use the internet. If I told this person that certain people use the term “jogger” instead of black person, and then I show this person a 4chan post saying that joggers commit too much crime and should be sent back to Africa. Is he supposed to say “wow this guy really hates runners huh?” And if he doesn’t say that and correctly parses the 4chan post, does that mean that racism is an integral part of his worldview now?
assman
1yr ago
I’m not sure why everyone is focused on the specific example I used. I basically agree with Hlynka that accusations of dogwhistling are more damning of the accuser than the speaker most of the time. I’m just saying that if you concede that dogwhistles are a real thing and that sometimes people use them to obfuscate the meaning of a statement, I’m not sure how it would be at all reflective of someone’s character/worldview/etc. for correctly identifying that. I guess my example wasn’t obvious enough, pretend I used the (((rootless cosmopolitan bankers))) instead. I don’t think the reader being aware of what the parentheses mean here is reflective of anything but his awareness that people use them to (not so subtly) refer to Jews without explicitly saying so
assman
1yr ago
What exactly does it mean when people blame “capitalism” for something? I see this a lot on Reddit and I have never really understood what people mean by it. I see it most often in the context of people blaming capitalism for some sort of exploitative behavior by corporations or individuals, or that capitalism is the reason for all sorts of mental health issues and other struggles with modern life. But I don’t see how “capitalism” specifically can really be blamed for any issues. Anything related to exploitative behavior can easily be attributed to human nature and the inherent problems that result from competition for finite resources. And most of the distinctly modern problems of atomization and things of that nature seem to be a result of technological changes. Basically I find “moloch” to be the best explanation for what’s causing most people’s complaints about modern society but I’m wondering if there is something I’m missing when people attribute problems to capitalism itself
FWIW Elon posted a statement this morning
It seems like he wants to make it so that users themselves have more control over what they see rather than top-down moderation. I also think he is okay with moderation of “hate speech” to a certain extent, but he will stop moderating “misinformation” like Twitter has done for covid, the 2020 election, hunter biden story, etc. in the past. My prediction is that moderation of slurs, calling for violence, etc. will be handled much the same way it has been, but that opinions which don’t use no-no words will be allowed. I think most people won’t notice a difference but all he really has to do is not ban for “misinformation” and 99% of the controversy about twitter’s moderation policy is gone. Most people won’t care that you still can’t use slurs or whatever and journalists will get over the “misinformation” thing when crying about it stops being a useful tactic.
assman
1yr ago
Why don’t US cities have pickpockets? I’ve always heard (in the US) that if you’re traveling to a major city in Europe to be on the lookout for pickpockets, and I’ve heard stories from a few people who have had wallets/passports/phones stolen there. But despite the US having more crime in general I’ve never heard of this happening in any US city. You hear that there are certain parts of US cities to avoid, and I’ve heard stories of muggings or bikes being stolen, but nothing about pickpockets. Does anyone have a theory about why this is?
assman
1yr ago
There is definitely something upstream of politics that makes someone a Theater Kid, but I think the particular political inclinations of the Theater Kid are path dependent. What separates a Theater Kid from Someone Who Likes Theater is that the desire for attention is the number one priority at the expense of everything else, so I think any sort of ideology the theater kids hold is merely what’s useful at the time for gaining attention. I have basically no knowledge of art history but the idea of art being dominated by the left seems like it started no earlier than the late 18th century and possibly much later, and is downstream of the political and intellectual movements in that time. I think the Theater Kid archetypes in medieval Italy would be loudly proclaiming their piety to anyone who would listen, or boasting about how great their local Duke was or whatever would get them approval.
This is also why it seems like different artistic mediums in the modern world have different political splits. I think the artistic types who are drawn to theater specifically are at the right tail of the bell curve for “desire for attention”, followed by movies/tv, music, visual art, and writing. The majority of popular work in all of these mediums is “left coded”, but it seems like there is still at least somewhat of a market for conservative-leaning movies/TV, music, and writing, whereas the idea of a conservative broadway musical is laughable. The tendency for the conservative-ish versions of popular art (network cop shows, Michael bay films, country music, etc.) to be low-brow, while the prestigious versions (classical music, hbo shows, opera, art galleries) are overwhelmingly left wing is probably just a result of the rural-urban divide. I would think ~70 years ago when rich urban PMC types were WASPy republicans, things like classical music performances and art galleries were right-coded.
The “hostility” of the average red tribe person today towards art is also a result of the hostility that modern art has towards them. There’s definitely some sort of practical-mindedness more common to right leaning people as /u/hlynkacg mentioned that makes them appreciate art less, but I think in the past those types of people wouldn’t have been actively hostile towards art, but probably just apathetic or uninterested. The modern hostility of the average right winger towards art is from being told they are uncultured for not appreciating Jackson Pollock and piss Christ, being shown as villains in popular movies and tv, watching satanic themed live musical performances etc. Modern art as a whole is almost like a reactionary movement against the type of “objective beauty” that even more practical-minded people can appreciate. There isn’t an inherent distrust of art in right-wing thought, there’s just an inherent distrust towards art that is anti-right wing for obvious reasons, and as of now effectively all of the “important” art is anti-right wing.
assman
1yr ago
I second your definition of theater kid, it didn’t just mean anyone who was in the school play but the clique of people who were extremely into it, and it carries the negative connotations you mentioned. The same way you probably wouldn’t call someone on the cross country team a jock even though they play a sport. It’s also definitely what people mean when they say things like “theater kid occupied government” even if you think theater kid just means someone who did theater.
Play old school RuneScape and sell the gold, there are 1000s of Venezuelans who make a living this way
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