erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
11mo ago
The position of "official decider of truth" is just too powerful to let it remain non-partisan.
See also, Wikipedia.
Is there a way to Make Black Men Economically Viable Again?
Eliminate the minimum wage so that they can find work at their natural wage, eliminate zoning and build more housing so that they can afford to live at below minimum wage salaries, and eliminate welfare so that they don't have to compete with the government for the role of husbands to black women would be a good start.
Have you seen Britian lately? It is clear that the usa is a lot better of than the UK or canada or india or aus.
Britain and Canada are the way they are because they imported American wokeness without having any of the American cultural antibodies to wokeness like freedom of speech or the right to bear arms. If America never existed the point would be moot.
erwgv3g34
10mo ago
Both local FLUX models require 24 GB of VRAM uncompressed. You can buy a used 3090 with that much for $750 or a new one for $1,200. Or just rent time from an online GPU company like RunPod. And that's before you start getting into the quantized models; FLUX is really affordable.
Copyright law is truly insane and makes criminals of us all.
From "Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap" by John Tehranian (h/t: @naraburns):
To illustrate the unwitting infringement that has become quotidian for the average American, take an ordinary day in the life of a hypothetical law professor named John. For the purposes of this Gedankenexperiment, we assume the worst-case scenario of full enforcement of rights by copyright holders and an uncharitable, though perfectly plausible, reading of existing case law and the fair use doctrine. Fair use is, after all, notoriously fickle and the defense offers little ex ante refuge to users of copyrighted works.
In the morning, John checks his email, and, in so doing, begins to tally up the liability. Following common practice, he has set his mail browser to automatically reproduce the text to which he is responding in any email he drafts. Each unauthorized reproduction of someone else’s copyrighted text—their email—represents a separate act of brazen infringement, as does each instance of email forwarding. Within an hour, the twenty reply and forward emails sent by John have exposed him to $3 million in statutory damages.
After spending some time catching up on the latest news, John attends his Constitutional Law class, where he distributes copies of three just-published Internet articles presenting analyses of a Supreme Court decision handed down only hours ago. Unfortunately, despite his concern for his students’ edification, John has just engaged in the unauthorized reproduction of three literary works in violation of the Copyright Act.
Professor John then attends a faculty meeting that fails to capture his full attention. Doodling on his notepad provides an ideal escape. A fan of post-modern architecture, he finds himself thinking of Frank Gehry’s early sketches for the Bilbao Guggenheim as he draws a series of swirling lines that roughly approximate the design of the building. He has created an unauthorized derivative of a copyrighted architectural rendering.
Later that afternoon, John attends his Law and Literature class, where the focus of the day is on morality and duty. He has assigned e.e. cumming’s 1931 poem i sing of Olaf glad and big to the students. As a prelude to class discussion, he reads the poem in its entirety, thereby engaging in an unauthorized public performance of the copyrighted literary work.
Before leaving work, he remembers to email his family five photographs of the Utes football game he attended the previous Saturday. His friend had taken the photographs. And while she had given him the prints, ownership of the physical work and its underlying intellectual property are not tied together. Quite simply, the copyright to the photograph subsists in and remains with its author, John’s friend. As such, by copying, distributing, and publicly displaying the copyrighted photographs, John is once again piling up the infringements.
In the late afternoon, John takes his daily swim at the university pool. Before he jumps into the water, he discards his T-shirt, revealing a Captain Caveman tattoo on his right shoulder. Not only did he violate Hanna-Barbera’s copyright when he got the tattoo—after all, it is an unauthorized reproduction of a copyrighted work—he has now engaged in a unauthorized public display of the animated character. More ominously, the Copyright Act allows for the “impounding” and “destruction or other reasonable disposition” of any infringing work. Sporting the tattoo, John has become the infringing work. At best, therefore, he will have to undergo court-mandated laser tattoo removal. At worst, he faces imminent “destruction.”
That evening, John attends a restaurant dinner celebrating a friend’s birthday. At the end of the evening, he joins the other guests in singing “Happy Birthday.” The moment is captured on his cellphone camera. He has consequently infringed on the copyrighted musical composition by publicly performing the song and reproducing the song in the video recording without authorization. Additionally, his video footage captures not only his friend but clearly documents the art work hanging on the wall behind his friend—_Wives with Knives_—a print by renowned retro-themed painter Shag. John’s incidental and even accidental use of Wives with Knives in the video nevertheless constitutes an unauthorized reproduction of Shag’s work.
At the end of the day, John checks his mailbox, where he finds the latest issue of an artsy hipster rag to which he subscribes. The ’zine, named Found, is a nationally distributed quarterly that collects and catalogues curious notes, drawings, and other items of interest that readers find lying in city streets, public transportation, and other random places. In short, John has purchased a magazine containing the unauthorized reproduction, distribution, and public display of fifty copyrighted notes and drawings. His knowing, material contribution to Found's fifty acts of infringement subjects John to potential secondary liability in the amount of $7.5 million.
By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges). There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, barring last minute salvation from the notoriously ambiguous fair use defense, he would be liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file-sharing. Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer—a veritable grand larcenist—or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say. Something is clearly amiss. Moreover, the troublesome gap between copyright law and norms has grown only wider in recent years.
The appeal of 50 Shades of Grey and similar stories is that yeah, a lot of women really do get turned on by the idea of being dominated, and some part of them wants a 6/6/6 alpha the same way some part of most men want a barely-legal bikini model, even if they love their wives.
It is important to note that the female fantasy is to replace their husband with the 6/6/6 alpha, while the male fantasy is to add the barely-legal bikini model to a harem with their wives. Men are polygamous, women are serially monogamous, because a woman can only be pregnant by one man at a time, while a man can get multiple women pregnant at the same time.
Women's sexual desires are fundamentally evil in a way that men's sexual preferences aren't.
erwgv3g34
10mo ago
I have the intuition that adding a relationship is less bad than replacing a relationship. Like, if a married couple that already has a child decides to have a second child, or if a person who only has one friend one day manages to get another friend, that's a perfectly normal and positive development. Whereas if a couple has a second child and then throws out their first child into the streets because the second child is taller and stronger and smarter and they have decided that they want to invest all of their resources into one child, that would be evil.
Likewise, the desire of men to add a second woman to their marriage seems to me a lot more honest and healthy than that thing women do where they swear they will love you forever only to turn around and act like you never existed the second a better option comes long.
I think I would have preferred being the senior member of a harem to that.
erwgv3g34
10mo ago
I only ever played 6 because I thought these games weren't for me. I tried to backtrack to 5 but never really felt it - I hate going back and playing older games.
Civilization IV is usually considered the best in the series, for good reason. I strongly encourage you to try it. It's on Steam, and every once in a while it goes on sale for $6.
The global warming mechanic violates literally every principle of fun game design; it punishes rather than rewards, it's random so you never know when you will get hit, and it's based on global pollution rather than national pollution so that you can still lose tiles even if you go completely green.
It's clearly the result of ideological bias rather than an attempt to make a good game and the only reason it is bearable is because it comes so late in the game.
Same thing with nuclear power plants. Extremely safe IRL, in Civ they go off like firecrackers on New Year's Eve.
Alpha Centauri has the best story, but it is still plagued by gameplay issues that weren't resolved until III and IV. For example, unit support is local rather than global, resulting in incredibly annoying micromanagement of each unit's home base. ICS is a viable strategy. And having to fuck around with the slider to allocate resources between energy, labs, and pysch is a pain in the ass compared to making gold the default and asking you what percentage of your income you want to allocate to research, what percentage to culture, and the rest just goes into the treasury.
What a plot, though. I still remember the first time I completed the Voice of Planet. Truly on par with the best science fiction novels ever written.
"Eternity lies ahead of us and behind. Have you drunk your fill?"
~ Lady Deirdre Skye, "Conversations with Planet", Epilogue
erwgv3g34
10mo ago
Scott Alexander wrote a pretty good review of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, for what it's worth.
erwgv3g34
10mo ago
erwgv3g34
10mo ago
Perfectly true, but media aimed at women such Eat, Pray, Love continues to sell them the fantasy that they will do better after a divorce, lots of women believe it, and destroy their husband's lives, their children's lives, and their own lives chasing Chad, not realizing that if Chad didn't want to settle down with them when they were young and childness, he definitely is not going to want to settle down with them now that they are old single mothers.
Same. I would only ever use Tor to e.g. read The Great Replacement while I was in New Zealand, where I could leave it loading while I grabbed a sandwich. It's completely non-viable for something like Twitter or 4chan.
Sasuke stomps. Harry doesn't actually have many good combat feats throughout the series; he mostly dodges behind objects and throws out weaksauce spells like Expelliarmus. He wins the final battle of each book due to a dues ex machina power or artifact or a powerful ally (power of love, sword of Gryffindor + Fawkes, Time-Turner, Prior Incantato, Dumbledore, Elder Wand + wand loyalty). The Elder Wand changes little; in canon, it's just a more powerful wand than normal, not some kind of superweapon. Harry's most powerful offensive spell is Sectumsempra, which he wouldn't use unless bloodlusted (the only time he cast it he did not know what it did, and immediately regretted it), and that's basically just a long-ranged sword. His most powerful defensive spell is Protego (not counting the Patronus charm, which is useless against humans). Harry doesn't have the speed or reflexes to use these effectively against Sasuke.
Now, if it was Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres versus Sasuke, that would be more interesting. HJPEV can't lose as long as he is fighting with the Elder Wand, and that gives him a ton of options, even without prep time. Most obvious is to use his Time-Turner to go back in time and plant high explosives where Sasuke is going to be, but Sasuke has survived an attack like that before. HJPEV's best bet might be to talk to Sasuke to find out his motivations and then tell him that in the glorious transhumanist future he can make reconstructive uploads of his clan if he agrees to surrender.
(Actually, it's kind of weird that nobody in Naruto realizes that Impure World Reincarnation + White Zetsu Clones = Free Immortality For Everyone. I guess that's muggle plots for you).
erwgv3g34
10mo ago
Normies in Latin America keep voting for communists. Venezuelans elected Hugo Chavez. Nicaraguans elected Daniel Ortega. Peruvians elected Pedro Castillo.
Kant opposed lying under any circumstances.
Eliezer Yudkowsky's ex-wife wrote a cute story about that, "Attunements".
But being afraid of one's values and personality being altered by parenthood seems like a boy being afraid of having his values and personality altered by puberty; it's a fundamentally natural part of our lifecycle, and the alternative is to remain stunted forever.
I think we really need to grapple with the fact that the revealed preference of nearly every intelligent and high-quality woman is for having few if any children. And rather than bending over backwards and tying itself into knots to figure out how to psyop them out of this perfectly understandable risk-benefit calculation, perhaps a healthy 21st-century society just needs to put all of its eggs into the basket of figuring out how to have a successful low-TFR civilization. Whether that’s robots, or AI, or artificial wombs, I don’t know, but honestly I just don’t see a viable path forward for forcing a critical mass of women to do something that’s manifestly going to wreck the lives of so many of them.
Or, you know, we can just admit that this whole feminism thing is not working out and go back to what worked for the past 5,000 years.
All empirical evidence is that letting women control their own reproductive choices is literally suicidal on a civilizational level.
erwgv3g34
10mo ago
Would you, personally, prefer to take the status of the woman in this arrangement? Would you marry a woman if, under no uncertain terms, she told you she wanted to have a lot of kids but you would have to give up your career to stay home with them?
I literally fantasize about this.
And yet you don't see ghetto black women fighting over the passable black male with a fulltime job at McDonald's, you see them fighting over the edgy drug dealers and sexy fuckboys that eventually become their baby daddies.
There's a great comment on the communism thread about how an arbitrary but efficient procedure is better than a fair procedure that eats up arbitrary amounts of resources to calculate:
The first is a simple question about your morning commute. You come up to an intersection, and other cars come up to the same intersection at about the same time. Who should get to go first? Well, right now, you might think that it's just whatever the stoplight says or some local custom about how to deal with stop signs, but is that fair?! You're going to work, which you need to do to feed your family. Surely, you deserve to be able to pass through before some high school senior who's off on summer break and just picking up some coffee and donuts before spending his day just hanging out in the park, maybe playing some volleyball with his friends or something. At the same time, someone else may have more of a need. Their somewhat-senile elderly mother just called them, and they're worried that she's going to accidentally cause harm to herself with what she's up to. So, how do we figure out the fair way to make sure everyone in the intersection gets proper priority? We could have everyone get out of their car and have a little discussion about where they're going and why and then implement some group decision-making procedure in order to allocate priority fairly. Then repeat at the next intersection, and the next intersection, and the next intersection, all the way to work. Even normies can realize that this would be ridiculous. Really press them to make sure that they agree that they are willing to be "not fair", to make the guy going to his mother wait for the high school kid at the light, because the light system is vastly more efficient at moving everyone to their destinations, even if it's "not fair".
(A bonus here is if you can find a suitably shortened clip of a guy asking a commie prof if he can have a playstation in the prof's commie world. Commie prof was all like, "Well, we'd have to have a societal conversation..." and just point out that this is for everything. Stop and have a societal conversation when you want a playstation, when you want to buy a new game, when you want some DLC, when you stop at a traffic intersection, hell, even if you want to pick up some more charcoal for your grill, you're gonna need to stop and "have a societal conversation" about whether "society" is willing to let you have any of those things.)
Making everybody spend seventeen fucking years in the school system so that we can determine who most deserves the high paying, high status jobs is the meritocratic equivalent of having a societal conversation every time two cars arrive at an intersection instead of using traffic lights and stop signs. Literally reserving those positions for a hereditary aristocratic caste would be better than what we have now, because then people could know where they stand and get on with their damn lives instead of grinding themselves to the bone trying to compete with everyone else in the all-consuming zero-sum red queen's race.
If you got back everything you paid into social security, it would be a pittance, because the program has always been funded by stealing from the young to pay for the old, and reliant on the idea that there are a lot more young than there are old so that stealing a little bit from each young person doesn't hurt too bad but is still enough to pay for the old people.
The demographic transition wrecked that, and now we are just going deeper and deeper into debt while we try to figure out a solution (no, immigration is not a solution).
More options
Context Copy link