cjet79

cjet79 1yr ago

I'm usually not big on platformers.

But Terraria, was a 2D co-op game I loved. It's a bit of a mix of a platformer, survival game, crafting game, builder, tower defense, and RPG.

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cjet79 1yr ago

The tangential companies were only vaguely responsible for the asbestos mess, sometimes just "I worked in a building that had asbestos" was enough to get the company in trouble. To sue them for the problem is wrong. If the government determined the victims should have been compensated above what the original companies were worth, then they should have done it out of a general fund. Not just allowed raiding of parties that weren't responsible.

My search abilities are failing me. But you can read between the lines on some of these stories. There was a major asbestos miner and manufacturer that declared bankruptcy in 1982. Most of the story of the lawsuits is about how terrible that company is. Then you can check out the second link and see the massive list of companies that have been sued for asbestos claims.

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/product-liability/mesothelioma-lawsuit/

https://www.simmonsfirm.com/mesothelioma/asbestos-exposure/companies/

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cjet79 1yr ago

I'm changing my mind about 3 again. Trial lawyers have occasionally been given the ability to completely raid and destroy sectors of the economy. Asbestos is on the big examples I remember learning about. The actual companies with direct responsibility were long ago sued out of existence. Someone also gave them the power to sue tangentially related companies. Which is why there were tons of commercials looking for these people. There were lots of targets, but finding victims was harder.

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cjet79 1yr ago

So let me start by saying why I do actually think it's very important to litigate whether such a discussion can be had and how it should be had. The reason being that I don't expect anyone on this forum to be the type of world-class expert who could invent an actually workable new system, nor to have the influence and following to get it implemented if they did. We can certainly discuss such thing for fun, but I wouldn't expect them to lead anywhere.

Its all for fun around here. We take the fun a little seriously though, and have discussion norms and rules.

And I think your response here does somewhat demonstrate the problem with the discussion that I'm trying to call out here. Any mention of government involvement gets rounded off to central planning, any questioning of the capitalist class gets rounded off to no private property, everything gets lumped into the category of communism, the whole thing is dismissed because communism never works in practice.

I am not trying to be dismissive. But I was only given so much to go off of. And what you wrote sounds explicitly like central planning. I think you'd be frustrated with me if I said we are going to talk about free markets and private ownership, but only as they theoretically exist, and that you bringing up real world examples of capitalism is just you being dismissive. I also believe I kept my criticisms generally theoretical. The one point where I dipped into the practical was to disagree with your claim that the system you proposed is new or novel.

There are people who say "communism sounds nice in theory, but it doesn't work in practice". I am not one of those people. I say communism fails in theory. Central planning fails in theory. The theory of how it fails was predicted before they were ever tried. The people who claimed it would fail in theory lost the intellectual debate in the early 1900's. And countries went on to try those things anyways. And then they failed in practice as well.

I am happy to stick purely to theoretical discussions. As you said and I agreed, this is a discussion for fun, and getting bogged down in historical fights is usually not as fun for me, and much more of a time sink.

I feel this is kind of unfair to my proposal: the proxy measure I suggest is people actually voluntarily using the thing, which is pretty much how markets work already.

Its similar, and the differences are subtle. But those subtle differences are very important.

Resource scarcity among consumers matters because it allows for niche uses that are highly valued by those users. I've found that there are often free programs that can do just about anything I want available online. However, there are also often paid software products that serve the same purpose, and I often find myself paying for the superior product when I need to save time and effort.
The quality of the product matters, and the wrong usage statistics will reward poor quality. If you went by "time spent using a program" you might create horror shows of programs that are intentionally slow, confusing, and hard to use.
Measurements can be gamed. Just like you discussed elsewhere with weaponzing download counters. Imagine devs were paid by the download or the hours used. They would have an incentive to artificially run up those counts (it would potentially require draconian levels of surveillance to prevent this abuse).

I agree that you can get into Goodhart's law problems if you distribute money based on how many people use/want a thing, but I think they're pretty much the exact same problems you have in current capitalist markets; see the Marvel supremacy, and other trash popular culture.

I'm not 100% sure I follow the point you are making here. But I would say to keep in mind that the system you proposed sounds like it might be a fixed allocation. Like collect $1 billion in taxes and distribute that among the software makers. But markets are not fixed allocation. Everyone could get sick of Marvel movies and stop going to watch them tomorrow, and they just spend their money on something completely different. People could get sick of computers and go outside to touch some grass.

My proposal here was that instead of using money as the scarce resource that people allocate among alternative, we use their time. Entertainment already works this way in practice: more is produced than anyone could ever consume, people decide what to spend their limited free time on. People deciding what to spend their scarce leisure time on is fairly isomorphic to people deciding what to spend their scarce money on; I think you would find the same types of price discovery in such a system.

And I don't think that's really anything like 'central planning'.

You are right, in the new digital world this proposal might not end up being central planning. This sort of thing was impossible before. So you had people whose job it was to figure out which products were needed, and then they'd go tell producers what was needed. These ended up being the central planners.

I think there are two scenarios where your proposal ends up being central planning anyways:

People don't want a draconian level of software surveillance on their machines to determine usage hours, and to make sure they aren't just artificially pumping up usage hours.
The political class does not like the distribution of goods, and steps in to "correct" it. For example, lets say no one produces any software that is usable by disabled people, because it is too much effort for too low of a reward from a small number of users. So central planners add boosts in payouts if it is also usable by disabled people.

And I didn't say no private ownership of anything, I said no capitalists. This was just a parenthetical not really related to my proposal, so I'll explain more:

I think price discovery through free and competitive markets is a great piece of social technology, which I've already said we should keep in place for all scarce resources.

I don't buy that such a market system requires a separate ruling class of capitalists who own the means of production, while everyone else has to sell their labor to those people to survive.

I have to let the real world for a minute. Most Americans are capitalists. About 53% own stocks in a corporation. Most Americans are also workers who sell their labor to someone else. Thinking of these as two separate classes often feels a little outdated to me. I suppose in Marx's time it might have made sense to have this division. It doesn't really make sense anymore.

Having to work to survive is the default state of humanity. Tribal people 10k years ago didn't just lay around all day and have food drop out of the sky onto their laps. They worked.

There is a small class of people that does not have to work to survive. That group has been growing as the total amount of wealth in our society has increased. I get the impulse to say 'thats not fair, distribute it so we all don't have to work'. But the raw numbers just don't work out. There isn't enough money among rich people. Even if you said "screw the rest of the world" there isn't even enough money among the American rich to lift the American poor permanently out of poverty. Probably at the point it is possible it won't be necessary.

I think you could have an equally efficient free market economy where everyone owned (individually or in partnerships) the means of production for whatever they produce, where they did not work for anyone else and their labor was not alienated, but where they still produced goods under their own direction to sell on the market.

I would personally hate this, for multiple reasons:

Its highly risky. There are capital investments that often need to be made into production. When the capital I own and the labor I produce are in the same industry its called "having all your eggs in one basket". Its a bad financial strategy. What makes sense is to work in one industry and have stock and savings invested in a different industry that has opposite reactions to shocks in the market. Its not easy to do, but that is the optimal strategy.
I've often disliked some my co-workers. I don't need to like someone to work with them. There is a whole social etiquette for being polite at work called "professionalism". I would absolutely not want to be in a situation where those people were also my boss in some capacity. Worker co-ops can have nasty in-fighting and politics going on. I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
I've had lazy co-workers. Shirking is an age old problem. (Real world alert: it was a major problem in soviet factories.) Why work hard when you can instead not work hard and still get paid well? You might say its because they own part of the endeavor, but you also included partnerships. My brother is currently in a business partnership with a guy, they each own 50% of the company. My brother's business partner spends most of his days on the golf course. My brother has a family to feed and can't afford to match the level of effort his business partner is putting in, he desperately needs the business to succeed. The problems with shirking become much worse when you don't have an easily legible way of determining someone's productivity.

The first and third reason are also reasons why a lot of people shouldn't like that kind of system. The second reason might really excite some and scare off others. Depends on how you feel when you hear the term "office politics". If it fills you with dread, then this system would be far worse.

I think the fact that we call competitive free markets (or sometimes, just any type of trading general!) 'capitalism' is basically the result of very successful propaganda efforts by the capitalists elites, intended to make us identify them personally with all our economic success. I think that's a motivated narrative that has much more to do with politics and power relations than it has to do with economics, and I don't think it's actually true. I think free markets are the powerhouse here, and the capitalist ruling class are basically riding its coattails and not contributing much.

Investing capital into useful and productive endeavors is not easy. If you think it is, you must be filthy rich from the stock market.

And the alternative to investing money is consuming it. I almost feel like we've pulled a giant con on the economic elite. We've convinced them that the number in their bank account matters more for their social standing than any kind of actual spending. With the kind of wealth that billionaires have to thrown around, they could be spending it on much more ridiculous things. Trump kinda makes the most sense to me. He had vanity projects, stuck his name on high class but low profitability things like golf courses, used his wealth to stroke his ego on TV, and then used it to run for office and acquire power that wasn't limited by what could merely be purchased. But Trump is not the norm for the ultra wealthy. Many of them hide away, live relatively modestly, and just quietly re-invest the money. And then they pass away leaving the money to their kids who don't have to work for one or two generations.

Again though, most Americans are capitalists and workers. It is ridiculously easy to be a capitalist in America. And it makes sense, capital markets are awesome. Instead of only getting to keep what I earn from work, I can be frugal and have my wealth grow itself. Yes, very people get access to it as well.

First of all, there was a time when feudalism was the best possible economic system, way more productive than anything else anyone had tried. We're not at the end of history yet, there's no reason to think the future can't come up with more improvements just like the past did. And I'm saying that all these appeals to past failures are slowing down that process.

I kinda get the point, but also its wrong. Feudalism was a stable political system in Europe, it wasn't necessarily super productive. But even within Europe the cities were the centers of productivity, and the cities weren't feudal. You are right that history isn't over yet. But I'd heavily bet that the near future is capitalist. And I'd avoid betting on the far future altogether.

Second, I'm talking about how to efficiently distribute digital goods. No kidding no countries in the 1600s or 1800s or 1950s came up with a good solution for that problem, it didn't exist at the time. Again, this demonstrates why I think the tendency to round everything off to communism gets in the way of actually discussing the topic at hand.

Economists have categorized goods for a while, and digital goods fit within these categories.

Rivalrous vs non-rivalrous. (does one person's consumption leave less for someone else. Digital goods are non-rivalrous. So are lighthouses.)

Excludable vs non-excludable. (Can the producer easily stop people from consuming the good. Example: A fireworks show in the sky isn't easily excludable.)

Rivalrous + excludable = private good (most things)

Rivalrous + non-excludable = Common good (the commons. Example: fish in the ocean)

Non-rivalrous + excludable = club good (example: a musical performance in a closed building. But also all digital goods)

Non-rivalrous + non-excludable = Public good (the justification economists give for government to exist is to provide public goods. Military defense is one of the old examples of this. My personal favorite example is asteroid defense.

Economics is an old discipline. Just because some new technology has come along, doesn't mean there isn't already a framework for thinking about it. I don't feel that digital goods are all that unique.

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cjet79 1yr ago

I have some feelings about these, and I think some should have caveats.

I wrote about the bombshell revelation during the Proud Boys trial of an FBI agent caught lying in her testimony. I included a prediction of sorts: "My assumption is that the prosecutor will dismiss charges against Nordean in a feeble attempt to make this go away." Gattsuru righteously pointed out that this did not happen; the trial continued and all defendants were found guilty.

Maybe they should have dropped the prosecution and your instinct was correct, but political pressure over came that.

In the same post above, I claimed that Qualified Immunity was "practically speaking, basically absolute immunity with a few extra steps". QI is definitely one of my hobby horses that I've written extensively about and yet, curiously, I never looked into how prevalent it is. Had I been asked at the time to predict how often QI is granted as a shield against §1983 civil lawsuits, I probably would have said around 80%. The real answer (thanks to Gdanning) is somewhere between 57% and 3.7%.

It could also be the case that Qualified Immunity squashes lawsuits before they ever happen. The more solid a particular defense is, the less it will be tested.

Its also possible for police lawyers to be incompetent and not always use the best defense, right?

I already wrote about this a while ago. I used to be a §230 devotee but reading Gilad Edelman's article changed my mind about whether the federal law is as necessary to the existence of the internet as I thought it was. There's no shortage of arguments in favor of §230 but one errant thought I completely failed to follow up on is investigating how exactly the rest of the world handled the issue. Presumably not every country in the world copied §230 verbatim and yet the world-wide web still exists.

Perhaps §230 or something like it is necessary for the existence of the internet within the united states. Of course not all countries can just copy and paste a law, they have their own legal systems that are different.

I do generally agree with your later point that people would probably respond in a way that allows the internet to keep on existing.

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cjet79 1yr ago

I watched as my brother married a woman that I thought was a bad idea. I tried to have a talk with him "are you really sure about this?"

They have three kids together. She spends them into financial problems constantly. She has driven drunk to pick up her kids.

Their marriage seems to be barely holding together. I think if divorce wasn't a complete financial non-starter she would have already tried to initiate it. She might do so anyways since she is financially illiterate.

In general I regret not being more forceful that "this is a bad idea". Plenty of marriages that look like good ideas don't even work out. I've never heard of a marriage that looked like a terrible idea turn out to be great. Marriage is hard and failure is more likely than success.

Do you think her prospects for finding a partner will improve if she becomes a single mother of 40 with a decade of stress spent trying to save a struggling marriage? If you believe that is likely to happen and you said nothing, can you count yourself as a friend of this woman?

My younger sister was engaged to a man while she was in medical school. She was doing her residency when he suddenly broke things off with her. Refused to even talk with her. Wedding was cancelled, people had to be told, some things returned. Some non-refundable deposits lost. Thank goodness it was called off though. The social embarrassment seems so minor compared to the suffering that might have taken place had she married that d-bag. He and his new girlfriend had a child about 8 months after he called off the wedding with my sister.

Here are some potential outcomes:

You say nothing. Marriage surprisingly turns out great. You still don't like the man. You see your friend very little because he is annoying to be around, and he probably doesn't like you either. Friend lost. (even when I am friends with both people in a married couple, them being married has always decreased the chances that I see them and hang out with them)
You say nothing. Marriage unsurprisingly turns out horrible. You failed to help your friend. Maybe she doesn't blame you for not telling her. But your friend absolutely suffers, and you live with the thought that you could have done something to help her. Potentially keep the friend, but you'll feel crappy.
You say something. She hates what you said, goes through with the Marriage. If the marriage works you permanently lose her as a friend. It happens much faster, but its the same thing as scenario one. If the marriage failes, she probably comes back to you, and she probably gets out of it sooner if she gets advice from people she trusts.
You say something. She realized you are right and calls off the wedding. You help her through the social embarrassment and sending back gifts. Friend retained, friend suffers a little short term to avoid a decade of pain and stress.
You say nothing, someone else says something. She will either force you to give advice on the same topic, or not trust you enough to ask. You will be forced into one of the "say something" scenarios, but the chance that she trusts you as much at the end of them is much lower.

I think you are likely to lose her as a friend as soon as this whole situation started. But I feel the best chances of retaining her as a friend and her not being miserable are the ones where you say something.

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cjet79 1yr ago

I'm ready and willing to have a conversation about alternative forms of economic organization. It doesn't mean I won't criticize those ideas. I think you are wasting energy complaining about how a conversation can't be had, when you could instead just be having the conversation you claim can't be had.

Here is as example of a new system that almost certainly wouldn't work, but shows the types of ideas you could discuss... The government measures how much people spend on all digital entertainment products today, and creates a new tax in that amount. Anyone in the country can download and enjoy any digital entertainment they want, for free, at any time. The revenue from the tax gets split among all digital creators proportionally to how many times their product was downloaded, with some type of pro-rating for how long the experience is or how long it should take to produce or etc., details to be worked out by hypothetical domain-expert philosopher kings.

Again, lots of obvious problems with that idea, it's not the one we'd end up on. But it might still be actually better than the current system of artificial scarcity plus rampant piracy, because I think that model is really really bad, and actually deadly when we look at things like medications that cost pennies to produce and billions to invent.

I know you admit there are problems with this, but there are a class of problems that are very important to point out. Practical and implementation issues can often be ignored at first. But one thing that can't be ignored are incentive issues.

When communism first came around everyone was very focused on the technical problems. Like "what is the best way to communally run a farm in the interests of the workers". But they ignored glaring incentive problems like "who gets rewarded for well run farms, and punished for poorly run farms?"

I think your proposal has an incentives disconnect. You are vaguely trying to connect the two through downloads and other proxy measurements. I know you are reluctant to bring up communism, but I have to because this type of proposal is exactly what communist Russia went through. We have historical examples of a country trying to run industries based on some measurements of what is useful about that industry. And the problem with this type of system is so common that it gets a name: GoodHart's Law "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

The other incentives disconnect is in thinking that philosopher kings exist. They don't. Real people will be involved in this system. And real people are subject to capture. What happens when the guy in charge of figuring out the measurements owes a favor to someone that would benefit from a change in how the measurements work? This kind of regulatory capture happens so often in the US government. Its not even explicitly corruption. Its just humans being humans. Former regulators get jobs at firms, and then talk with their regulator buddies still working at the regulatory body. It happened plenty in the Soviet System to the point where unless you were a well connected Communist Party insider you would get fucked over by all the other insiders changing the rules, or selectively applying the rules to benefit each other.

The best way to figure out how much someone values something is to ask them how much they want it relative to other resources. Money is a technology for accomplishing this calculation. If the "philsopher-kings" existed and were actually competent I believe they would just exactly recreate money and artificial scarcity. Would you consider the system a failure if it just exactly recreated what we currently have?

Ultimately what I'm really fighting here is capitalist realism - the cognitive bias that, because capitalism is what we do have and because it works better than some other systems we have examples of, it must be the only possible system that could be functional and good. I think capitalism (well, free markets, we don't really need the separate capitalist class) is pretty great, but I don't think it's the final form of human endeavor and I don't think it's teh best we can do across every domain and in every situation no matter what. I don't think it's bad, I just have loftier ambitions.

I don't think free markets work as well without ownership. I am familiar with many different kinds of economic systems. It is my area of interest and study. If there is a new idea about how economic distribution can work, I'd be very interested to hear. The vague outline of what you proposed is not new though. Its central economic planning. It is often associated with communism, but the Western "capitalist" nations experimented with it as well. It tends to fail outside of niche uses. For rather straightforward reasons, some of which I outlined above:

Differences in assigned goal/measurements for producers vs what consumers actually want. Typically results in overproduction of things that easily meet the measurements, and underproduction of things that don't easily meet the measurements. It also often results in poor quality.
Political capture of the planners / philosopher kings at the top.
Information problems and the loss of local knowledge. Central planning often create big plans, but then when local circumstances interrupted the plans there was little ability to adjust.

If you are looking for entirely new economic systems, reading Robin Hanson is your best bet. Most people I've talked with that don't like capitalism and try to come up with something else ultimately just reinvent some form of communism, socialism, or central planning. Capitalism is not the default because people like it. Almost everyone hates capitalism. Its the default because every other idea that seemed even slightly plausible has been tried, and many of them have failed horribly. Its the default because the country that sort of stuck with it and gave it some lip service, did way better than all the countries that said "lets try something else".

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cjet79 1yr ago

They make a living partly or entirely because there is some level of intellectual property protection. Pirating exists, but it is mostly done on an individual level in the Western World. In third world countries copyright infringement is often on an industrial scale. A lot of successful patreons gate their content, without copyright protection that gating would last all of a few minutes before someone scrapes their new content and posts it elsewhere.

I find it weird to be on the side of defending intellectual property as a thing. I have lots of reservations about it, and I think there is a decent chance I'd be willing to take the tradeoffs with killing off intellectual property as a thing. But I don't ever deny those tradeoffs. Far less art is going to be produced. On the margin some forms of art and artistry that were supported by moneymaking will be almost entirely gone.

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cjet79 1yr ago

Sound like you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Private ownership and free markets are great, and they work just fine in digital spaces.

The important part of those institutions is that they encourage useful forms of production (its not that there is zero waste in production, but of all the economic systems that have been tried, capitalism seems to kick ass at efficient allocation of scarce resources). And even though digital goods have very low or nearly zero marginal cost for production, that is not their total cost of production. If producers aren't getting paid for total cost of production than they aren't making things.

Communism gets labelled as killing a bunch of people, mainly because it was such a crappy economic system. I'm not sure if Stalin or Mao entirely meant to kill tens of millions of their own people. But the lack of productivity from their farming systems meant that was not enough food to feed everyone.

The problem with turning digital assets into communal property is you'd likely kill a bunch of incentives to create digital goods. And yes, right now there are plenty of open source projects where skilled developers contribute to projects for no monetary incentives. BUT many of these developers also have jobs at the companies that do sell software. The existence of a bunch of people with engineering and programming skills is probably directly attributable to the fact that a bunch of companies pay top dollar for this skillset. And they pay top dollar, because they can make top dollar on selling the products.

If you kill the incentive to make software products, you kill the companies that hire lots of developers, that kills the incentive to train and create new developers, that kills the open source software movement. We could probably coast for a generation on current levels of talent. But it would absolutely start falling apart. Especially all the boring software projects that make gobs of money but no one actually enjoys doing.

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cjet79 1yr ago

Again, just a bad analogy. Unlike police I don't care if someone gets away with a "crime" here. We let people get away all the time. I'm not here to punish. I'm here to cleanup. If you make a small mess and clean it up I don't really care. If you constantly crap everywhere then you make my job harder and I want to get rid of you. People call us jannies, not some imitation of police.

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cjet79 1yr ago

The police analogy doesn't fit very well. These "crimes" are committed in the open.

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cjet79 1yr ago

For them it would just be imagine that you paid their salary, and you already do. The cost of the police wasting time and money is partly accounted for. Also if you make a false police call they can fine you. There are lots of consequences for wasting police time. There are no consequences for wasting volunteer mod time.

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cjet79 1yr ago

Its even crazier to me that you would say this, you've blocked them for crying out loud. That is the biggest acknowledgement I can think of that someone is not worth dealing with. If everyone did what you did towards BurdensomeCount it would be the same as me banning them.

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cjet79 1yr ago

I was growing up with the internet in the early 2000's. And I did some objectively sketchy things.

I was in chatrooms sharing pictures with girls my age when we were both underage. Or I was sharing pictures with random old men who just happened to send me pictures of girls back. I don't know, I don't like to think about it too hard.

I joined a political movement that I found and learned about entirely online (libertarianism). I then went and met some of those people in person. That turned out well, but it could have gone worse depending on what movement I found.

I had access to (crappy) video pornography. I'm a little confused why everyone else seems to get into weirder and weirder stuff when they watch porn. I've gone the opposite direction, I mostly just like regular couples having sex. If they are laughing and having fun I enjoy it more. I dodged a bullet there I suppose, but I'm unsure how I dodged it.

I had facebook and myspace in highschool and college. It was prime time for posting things that would later get you fired. I did go back and scrub my facebook at one point, there was one embarrassing picture of a tasteless joke, and an embarrassing post I made about not liking a movie. I scrubbed it almost a decade ago though, and since then I have treated all my online stuff as semi-permanent. Or as semi-possibly something that could be linked to me.

Back before the internet I get the sense that these things just happened offline. Cults have been around a long time, charismatic sociopaths are as old as human society, and sexual degeneracy has a reputation for being one of the oldest professions.

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cjet79 1yr ago

I'm in favor of the ban and think way more banning should be done in general. I think way too many people treat warnings and bans like it's a fee they get to pay in exchange for getting to be rude to someone they disagree with. They know exactly what they're doing - they know it's against the rules when they submit their comment. They just don't care. They think the other guy deserves it, so they'll pay the ban tax and take a day off.

This is pretty close to my views on the subject. Out of all the active moderators I think I am usually the one that is most in favor of more bans, longer bans, and fewer warnings.

There are some people that try to follow the rules, if they get a warning they will correct and be more careful in the future. We have plenty of accounts with just one or two warnings, and then otherwise great behavior.

There are others that seem closer to what you describe, they will happily pay the ban tax (or evade it altogether through alts), and then come back and make trouble again. For all I know I might've been banning the same 5-10 people for my last decade of moderation.

When I see accounts with nine mod notes about bad behavior I feel like I know which category they fall into.

I think most of these people would bite their tongue if there were real, significant consequences.

This part I disagree with, from experience what happens is those people become crusaders for "the mods are terrible/evil oppressors". They just turn most of their rudeness on us, and put us in the position of having to ban people for attacking the moderators. Making us look like petty dictators.

Speaking of consequences, I am curious if the people against a ban would be willing to suffer any consequences for the behavior of BurdensomeCount. @TheDag @some @bolido_sentimental

Treat this fully as a hypothetical, but what if the next time BurdensomeCount got banned, you also received a one day ban? Would it still be worth it to keep them around?

I ask, because for the moderators there are consequences to keeping around troublesome users. This interaction takes up my time and energy. And for every mod action on a user, there are usually about 5 posts from that same user that were on the edge and we let slide. When I go through the mod queue I usually try and carefully read posts and their context. This is all work I've volunteered for, but I also don't have unlimited time in my day.

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cjet79 1yr ago

To be fair to my parents I think they just didn't know. They protected me from the dangers and bad decisions that they knew about. They saw me on the computer all the time and thought "well at least he isn't out doing drugs and drinking like we were at his age, or having sex and risking pregnancy".

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cjet79 1yr ago

I also realize that my reputation isn't strong enough for my words to count.

I guess I didn't make that part clear. I didn't want other troublemakers speaking up. But someone like you that has ~300 comments and no mod notes is someone with a good reputation in my mind. Having quality contributions is great, but not at all required for a good reputation. Contributing and not getting much mod attention is enough to make someone a net-positive in my book.

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cjet79 1yr ago

Done, I've changed the ban length.

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cjet79 1yr ago · Edited 1yr ago

Too much boo-outgroup. Too close to waging the culture war rather than discussing it.

You've had 9 Mod actions against you, and have been a consistently bad poster. I'm not sure there is any point in trying to "reform" your posting habits at this point. I'm gonna start with a perma ban, but if some quality posters or mods want to speak up on your behalf then I'm open to just making this a temp ban.

Edit: bolido_sentimental Spoke up in favor, changing to a twenty day ban.

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cjet79 1yr ago

Don't expect your daughter to thank you for trying to shield her from the culture that she is actually living in, though, any more than we thanked our parents for trying to stop us from playing Doom or listening to rap or w/e.

Some people grow up to be adults and do thank their parents for the limitations they had as children. My wife is one of them. Her parents stopped her from watching "vulgar" shows like the Simposons, and she still doesn't like those shows.

I had basically no limitations. I had access to the internet, and my parents mostly had no idea what I could get to on there. I don't think I would have appreciated any kinds of limitations.

I do have a sense of self that is separate from the culture I inhabit. I got that by exploring a bunch of culture and realizing that it was not me. My wife got that sense of self by having walls and barriers placed in front of the "bad" parts of culture.

Different approaches work for different personalities. I'd suggest seeing the personalities of your kids and not taking a blanket approach. But things that worked for the parents are probably more likely to work for their kids.

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Context

cjet79 1yr ago

Perusing Based Mods

I'm confused, is there some special browser I'm supposed to use to see this?

Silly thought: the based mods are using the wrong approach. You need to launder your political preferences through accepted victim groups.

To get the gay out, just call it a muslim friendly mod. Now the owners of Nexus have to choose to ban muslims, or keep banning the anti-gay stuff. For extra bonus points, try and make some of the anti-gay muslim nations aware of these games enough to ban them (and then the company will do the work for you and create the mod, like they did with spiderman).

To white wash the game, just call it a monument to the Ukrainian people. Put in some Ukraine flags, give everyone Ukrainian names, and make them all white. Then give options in the mod to switch out the flag, and to switch out the names.

More serious thought: this is all very tiresome. I always feel this way when I see politics intruding into hobby spaces. I very much blame the Woke for starting this fight within gaming specifically. I can't help but feel it was also their single largest strategic blunder (not that I think anyone is pushing a high level strategy for either side). It was probably the single greatest red-pilling of American youth. They created Trump's youth base. Or maybe this kind of fight was just destined to happen. If you believe the culture is rotten and you want to change it, then eventually you are going to find yourself in conflict with the people who enjoy the culture as it currently exists. I feel some sense of cosmic justice that in return for messing with the hobby I love they created their worst enemy.

My future goals:

I have slowly been volunteering to help out more organizations in my life. I've been a moderator on here for years. I'm on the board for a non-profit recreational sport in my area. I'm on the Parent-Teach-Association for my daughter's school. I do feel that the previous generation failed me. They neglected these side aspects of public and social life, and left them wide open to capture by leftists with an agenda.

I will generally be pushing a line of non-politics. As well as trying to be helpful. I do believe that most volunteer organizations will easily follow the incentive gradient. They will do whatever is easiest, and whatever their members are willing to do. I just intend to be a roadblock that makes the incentive gradient flow towards non-politics. If I was involved with Nexus mods, I would have advised them to take a non-politics approach. Let things happen on your platform, and only get involved in the legal stuff. If anyone makes a push for you to get involved, say "sorry, but we don't have the resources to deal with such and such, we are trying to make this a great platform"

The recreational sports league I'm in had a bit of drama recently. Some of you might have followed along in the Wednesday wellness threads. The situation has mostly resolved itself at this point. But one of the board members now wants to put in place a code of conduct agreement to our mailing list. I'll be fighting to change the "code of conduct" thing to basically be a waiver of liability for what our members say/do. And my simplest argument will be: none of you want to enforce a code of conduct.

Children's Culture:

My wife and I have a lot of discussions about what we'll expose our daughter to, and we've more or less decided the cut off is the 90's just to be safe. There were still normal shows, books or games that generally depicted normal cis hetero white families like ours positively. To subject her to modern media feels like child abuse. To the 90's it is.

I have two daughters myself. I do watch the content they consume. Most of it for toddlers has seemed to not have gay themes. Peppa pig is whimsical and nonsensical. Paw Patrol is full of action, and a bit of silliness. Daniel Tiger's neighborhood seems entirely composed of nuclear families. Bluey tends to stay away from politics, even though it is clearly made in mind with the parents watching alongside their kids. I might have missed things in any of these shows, but if I'm missing the things, I think my daughters are missing them too.

I've lately had my daughters singing along with me to a song that contains cuss words in it. Usually I feel weird when I hear cusswords in a song and I'll skip it rather than dealing with the discomfort. Looking back, that was probably unnecessary. There is a very clear "shit" in the song, and my oldest daughter just says the word "chick" instead, because "shit" is not in her vocabulary so she just latched onto the closest word she knew. The song is of course: Rich Men North of Richmond.