cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
11mo ago
There was a previous attempt to do this during the Reagan years. It was called the Grace Commission.The Report they generated was mostly about non-partisan ways to cut government spending. Things like saving money by using a single personnel management system (rather than unique personnel management systems for every agency). It mostly went unimplemented.
I do feel that you can get something out of trying to cut the costs of government. But the real issue is an underlying disconnect of incentives. So someone can put in a lot of effort to do all the cost fixing, and then a decade later its like they basically did nothing. Because no one in government fundamentally cares about saving money.
cjet79
11mo ago
Doubling up on Monday threads…What about Tinkering Tuesday? Standup Saturday?
Tinkering Tuesdays sounds good. I was thinking of empty days to post the thread, but for some reason didn't even think of the culture war roundup thread as one of the things that takes up a specific day.
cjet79
11mo ago
As I said they don't fit in some circumstances. But outside on the street is fine and that is also a place with a lot of crime. Buildings that are secure enough to prevent a dog from entering are also secure enough to prevent obvious trouble people from entering.
cjet79
11mo ago
I mentioned it in the last thread, but having a large protective dog breed with you will generally make you safer around anyone with a shred of rationality left in their brain.
Dogs of course aren't practical for all use cases. But I feel like they fill the most needed gap for some of these cities.
- Dogs are a more sympathetic victim. I don't know why but someone who assaults and nearly beats another person to death can get all sorts of excuses made for them, but that same person beats up a dog and everyone agrees they are scum.
- Dogs are more likely to injure someone in a fight. A gang of ten people can safely beat someone up without any of them getting hurt. With a dog though at least one of them is likely gonna get bit.
- Dogs have more plausible deniability for violence than all other weapons. You can still get in trouble, especially if you are irresponsible and get some kid bitten. But we treat dogs as having some degree of agency, so they will shoulder some of the blame for any incident.
I find it weird that I keep talking up owning a dog. I don't actually own one, and don't want to.
cjet79
11mo ago
For top level posts I usually suggest having three elements:
- Context
- Interpretation
- Opinion
You've got a bit of context. Though knowing how Tulsi knows this, what the quiet skies program is, and why the source you do have is covering it would all be helpful context.
Interpretation could be why you think she was placed on the list.
Opinion could be that this is further example of how far the deep state is willing to go.
cjet79
11mo ago
The castles forge? If you are asking about discord username, no, I am the same username on discord as I am here.
I also don't like to use discord much, but if we want easy voice and text chat together with some persistence it seems like one of the best options.
I can actually be available during work hours. The times I'm consistently unavailable are 5pm-9pm on weekdays, unavailable until midnight on Thursdays, and generally totally unavailable on weekends.
My sleep schedule is weird right now. Sometimes I'm up between 2am-4am. Other times I stay up until 2am.
cjet79
11mo ago
There is themotte discord, maybe we break out another channel on there "motte side projects". Plan to do a weekly meetup time through voice chat. People can join up from here if they want. Keep it unstructured unless it gets big and unwieldy and then we aggressively gatekeep like others do.
I'll tentatively suggest Wednesday night 9pm eastern. I'm open plenty of other times that is just plausibly a time I'm often available and when I'm available next this week. First meeting can be about how to do this.
I'm highly open to writing within a restricted set of circumstances. I brought up the xianxia stuff as a thing I've been thinking about. I'm often very head in the clouds type of writer. Getting me grounded is helpful. I think I've written some of my best stuff while under restrictive circumstances.
If I'm being humble I'm not a good writer but far from the worst. If I'm bragging I'm a good writer, but far from the best. I think I'm above average. I have a longform story that got popular on royalroad. I have some short stories that got accolades on small subreddits.
Mostly I can confidently say I like writing. I am a programmer by trade, but that's cuz it pays the bills. If I could pick between the two I'd choose writer.
I always need more motivation and more practice at writing. Especially since I don't have an active long form story going right now.
cjet79
11mo ago
I'd actually thought about you recently and volunteering as a slapper in chief. Not because I think you are lazy and haven't done enough. But because I'm lazy and have done far less than you on projects I might want to do.
I almost want a weekly standup session where you have to justify yourself to peers on what you've accomplished.
If that sounds like something you think would help I'll do it. I just request that I be held accountable to some of my own projects.
I'm also willing to do writing. I've been independently thinking of ways to incorporate xianxia cultivation and completely breaking physics into making a space epic rational story.
I think I've commented in most of these threads, but not done anything outside of them. I suck.
cjet79
11mo ago
He won't be banned for the comment I responded to
Disagree
nor should he be
Disagree
my response to that comment was still less banworthy.
Agree
Failing a ban, social censure is the next best response.
Agree, which is why I'm saying it was bad.
cjet79
11mo ago
Yah well he might be banned for his sneering, so do you want the same treatment that he gets?
cjet79
11mo ago
I've personally got a long history of banning people for sarcasm/satire. Back on the old forum I pulled the trigger on a long ish term ban on user lazygradstudent(?) for writing a long satire post that imitated the form of the most famous satire "the Irish should eat their babies".
I'm not currently involved in the mod discussions with @Amadan and others, because I'm on vacation. I feel like a routinely see the worst crap on this forum popping up when I'm on vacation. Or maybe it's just when I read here more often.
I think I recently spoke against giving burdensome a permanent ban because I thought he had been better lately. Not even a week later he responds to one of my comments with obvious culture war race war stuff and I give him a two day ban on the spot.
@BurdensomeCount comes back and his takeaway is that I just wanted him to spend more effort on his culture/race war posts.
So fucking frustrating. No dude, wtf is your problem? My whole point is don't just write stuff to kick off the culture/race war on this forum.
I don't do enough modding these days to be all that helpful. Other mods are way better in most ways. But it's moments like these that make me think I should step away completely.
I have a three year old and a five year old. The five year old seemingly has a better ability to behave and understand rules than some people on this forum. The three year old is worse behaved. So this seems like a skill that is learned between 4 and 5 years old.
I'm pretty sure I remember being more patient with misbehaving forum participants before I had toddlers to compare them against.
Two week ban is my recommendation. Which is basically my cutoff point where I start thinking of you as a toddler with the inability or aggressive unwillingness to control your behavior.
The whole Internet is available for trolling, and waging the race/culture war. Start a sub stack, post on Twitter, post on Facebook, go crazy. Just stop bringing it here.
cjet79
1yr ago
Some countries in Europe have made it basically impossible to fire people for periods of time. France is a notable example. How cautious would you be in hiring someone if it meant basically hiring them for multiple years past when you want to fire them?
cjet79
1yr ago
I would bet on over regulation being most of the cause of the unemployment rates. General over regulation for many decades slowing down their economy to make them overall poorer. And a generous welfare state for the high taxes.
cjet79
1yr ago
I had close to zero knowledge of game preservation efforts, but what you describe is exactly what I would expect given my history in software.
cjet79
1yr ago
Most regulations don't have obvious effects. But the cumulative effects are glaring. The living standards in Europe are lower than most US states. They have a permanent unemployment rate that is about double the US. European citizens that manage to move to the US can immediately get large increases in their effective base salaries. In addition to enjoying lower tax rates.
cjet79
1yr ago
For indie games, ya absolutely they'll stop doing business once a few of them get burned.
cjet79
1yr ago
Ya I got a few things mixed up. Bethesda released Arena and TES 2 as freeware, and I must have mixed that up with hearing about the open source projects for Morrowind and Oblivion.
cjet79
1yr ago
Search engines suck nowadays. Can't find source. Chatgpt agrees with me that they've released source code for TES 2, 3, and 4. I think they do so after they drop all support for the game.
I generally agree with the effort to preserve games. If you also agree I think you should do the following things:
- Buy games from companies with a reputation for preserving or releasing games.
Bethesda open sources their games after some amount of decades. - Don't buy games from companies that have a reputation for locking them or destroying them after some period. Review bomb any games that get locked.
- Go on patreon or other crowdfunding sites to pay money towards people that preserve games.
The thing is I strongly doubt legislation is going to get them what they want.
There are a few paths this goes down:
It immediately starts too harsh and too broad. Gaming market in Europe is generally destroyed except for the largest games. No one else can afford the compliance or lawyers for what is already a hard market to serve (non-english translations for small player base). It never gets fixed because gamers aren't a strong enough political entity, and mostly it just enshitified the market, so it screws over niche gamers in niche markets. And everyone else thinks it worked and any attempt to reverse it will be an uphill battle.
It starts too narrowly. The rules are easily dodged. This could be like some exception written for MMOs and then every game puts in a dumb feature that allows them to be an MMO by whatever standards the law has laid out.
It stays too narrow and continues to do nothing or it gets expanded into the first scenario.
At no point do I think the EU will be "too lenient". They'll use their regular fee structure which is % of global revenue or instantly crippling payments for a small business. Not that the size of the punishment for small businesses will ever matter. The legal hassle alone won't be worth it.
I'm also surprised from a programmer/coding perspective. Surely this guy must know what it's like messing with old code? Maybe I'm super ignorant or an absolutely shitty coder. But I'd say it's almost an order of magnitude harder to write code that can work in two decades then it is to just write code that works for two years.
I'm also pretty certain that any games with live services and large companies might be a mess of dependencies on external proprietary 3rd parties. Say a game company works with a hosting company for the online aspects of their game. The hosting company does a bunch of optimizations for the game company as both a service and lock in effect with that game company. The game is nearly unplayable without these improvements from the hosting company.
I basically see most programs that work for ten years as minor miracles. I'd compare them to buildings, but that they age way faster. A ten year old software program that does a significant amount is like a large fifty year old building. Probably with similar maintenance costs. The parts are no longer standard. The people that built it have long moved on. No one would build it the same way if they started today. And while the structure is still sturdy and fine, all the piping and internals that move stuff around is really starting to show it's age. If it wasn't built to last this long then its probably getting to the point where you could tear it all down and build it from scratch for cheaper.
If you aren't a programmer you are probably rolling your eyes and thinking "how does software wear out faster than copper piping". And I'm shouting "it's the demons!" with a crazed look in my eyes, cuz I don't fuckin know how it happens. Better people than me have written about how programming sucks.
The people at valve are top level geniuses in their field and they've written stuff that is still chugging along as some of the best modding software 20 years later. Maybe this petitioner got their start on valve related stuff, so my best explanation for him is that he is super spoiled. But if you wrote the perfect law that basically said "be like valve" it would still basically destroy the gaming industry, because no one can meet that standard. (Unless the valve devs released some super amazing software to make it easier for everyone, and they probably would if it meant saving Steam).
Sorry that rant got way longer than expected, also typed it on my phone, so it might have more spelling and grammar mistakes.
cjet79
1yr ago
I have generally two brains when thinking about policy. One is my libertarian brain that does indeed say "government is bad". But the other is my economics degree brain that mostly screams about tradeoffs, and tells my libertarian brain that some forms of "government bad" are worth it for the product they provide.
My libertarian brain is mostly not concerned with places where I don't live. In fact, if they have an awful government it can serve as an example of what not to do where I live.
My economics brain is still bothered though.
The existence of regulation can create tradeoffs but there is also sets of tradeoffs within regulations.
The rules can be clearly written and fail to cover all edge cases. Or the rules can be vaguely written and operate on vibes and feels at a court level.
Large entities mostly don't go for vibes. It rightfully scares the crap out of everyone, cuz outside of small communities vibes are not very legible.
So they've got to get super detailed legislation written by bureaucrats in Brussels that will somehow appropriately understand different game type and business models. And then craft a set of tradeoffs in the legislation that make the specific practice they don't like unprofitable.
It's a tight needle to thread. And my previous experience with EU legislation doesn't make me hopeful. They've added a minor annoyance to literally every website I visit with those annoying cookie popups. They've had like a decade to correct that ... and yet I still get the stupid popups.
And cookie tracking on websites is way simpler than any individual game preservation effort.
cjet79
1yr ago
Serious question: does Europe understand that regulations have costs?
I swear they come up with new consumer protection or worker protection laws all the time that make me think "I'm not sure those tradeoffs sound remotely worth it".
Here my immediate thought is: that is really going to discourage releasing MMO type games in Europe.
Sure I get that digital lockouts are annoying and this will likely work to prevent those (I generally choose to never buy those games in the first place).
But what is the cost of keeping all types of games running and in a playable state? Does that playable state require ongoing updates based on operating system or hardware changes? Does that playable state require servers that host large Gameworld to be permanently online? What happens if there is a severe outage with servers, are Euro regulators gonna start prosecuting if a game is offline for too long?
Lot of uncertainty, plus Europe tends to set fines at ruinously expensive levels. Usually millions of dollars or percentages of global revenue, whichever is higher.
cjet79
1yr ago
Canvas frameless pictures are some of my favorite:
- The colors pop
- They are light and easy to hang
- They are relatively cheap
cjet79
1yr ago
In which case they've attacked a sympathetic victim and opened themselves up to the justice system. They also won't necessarily escape unscathed in the altercation.
OP seemed willing to be a police officer or engage in vigilante justice. Raising a dog to do it in your place seems strictly safer from a personal perspective.
It also has a lot of plausible deniability, unlike shooting someone, or beating them up yourself.
That 25% drop is a 25% increase in the cost of the program as a burden on individual payers. If the program previously made up 40% of the budget then it would now make up 50% if nothing else changed. Seems like a big difference to me when that is basically a trillion dollars.
Its why small changes to social security basically make or break the US budget. Raising the retirement age is one way to help the ratio, and they've started doing that. They can also undercount inflation and then the program gets an effective paycut. They've been doing that.
More options
Context Copy link