jericho
1yr ago
Honestly reminds me a bit of the debates around vaping, regarding how much it is substituting for smoking cigarettes vs getting people hooked on nicotine who otherwise wouldn't be.
I'd say the most obvious things that pot/porn/video games have replaced (in terms of being the go-to unhealthy coping mechanisms for young despondent males) are booze/whores/gambling. Of course, booze/whores/gambling are still on the table, so in addition to weighing pot/porn/video games substituting for those vs getting people who would otherwise be clear, you have to consider that now someone can go for all six.
jericho
2d ago
Galapagos Tortoises are apparently tasty enough that it was a real problem getting living specimens back because they kept getting eaten.
I'm sure their deliciousness was at least somewhat exaggerated due to hunger being the best sauce, but they were certainly praised highly.
The 17th-century English pirate, explorer, and naturalist William Dampier wrote, "They are so extraordinarily large and fat, and so sweet, that no pullet eats more pleasantly,"[136] while Captain James Colnett of the Royal Navy wrote of "the land tortoise which in whatever way it was dressed, was considered by all of us as the most delicious food we had ever tasted."[137] US Navy captain David Porter declared, "after once tasting the Galapagos tortoises, every other animal food fell off greatly in our estimation ... The meat of this animal is the easiest of digestion, and a quantity of it, exceeding that of any other food, can be eaten without experiencing the slightest of inconvenience."[102]
Not beyond what is covered in the document itself, but yes any survey like this is going to be biased because at the bare minimum the respondents are cooperative and capable enough to answer a survey instead of stabbing the person attempting to administer it or simply staring into space when asked questions.
Here is how they said they got responses:
Surveys were conducted by peer survey workers with lived homeless experience who were referred by local service providers. Training sessions were facilitated by ASR, City staff, and community partners. Potential interviewers were led through a comprehensive orientation that included project background information as well as detailed instruction on respondent eligibility, interviewing protocol, and confidentiality. Peer survey workers were compensated at a rate of $7 per completed survey. It was determined that survey data would be more easily obtained if an incentive gift was offered to respondents in appreciation for their time and participation. Socks were provided as an incentive for participating in the 2019 homeless survey. The socks were easy to distribute, had wide appeal, and could be provided within the project budget. The incentives proved to be widely accepted among survey respondents.
Based on a Point-in-Time Count estimate of 8,035 homeless persons, with a randomized survey sampling process, the 1,054 valid surveys represented a confidence interval of +/- 3% with a 95% confidence level when generalizing the results of the survey to the estimated population of individuals experiencing homelessness in San Francisco. The 2019 survey was administered in shelters, transitional housing facilities, and on the street. In order to ensure the representation of transitional housing residents, who can be underrepresented in a street- based survey, survey quotas were created to reach individuals and heads of family households living in these programs. Strategic attempts were also made to reach individuals in various geographic locations and of various subset groups such as homeless youth, minority ethnic groups, military veterans, domestic violence survivors, and families. One way to increase the participation of these groups was to recruit peer survey workers. Since 2009, the ASR survey methodology has prioritized a peer-to-peer approach to data collection by increasing the number of currently homeless surveyors. In order to increase randomization of sample respondents, survey workers were trained to employ an “every third encounter” survey approach. Survey workers were instructed to approach every third person they considered to be an eligible survey respondent. If the person declined to take the survey, the survey worker could approach the next eligible person they encountered. After completing a survey, the randomized approach was resumed.
And their self-admitted problems with their methodology:
The 2019 San Francisco Homeless Survey methodology relies heavily on self-reported data collected from peer surveyors and program staff. While self-report allows individuals to represent their own experiences, self-reported data are often more variable than clinically reported data. However, using a peer-to-peer interviewing methodology is believed to allow respondents to be more candid with their answers and to help reduce the uneasiness of revealing personal information. Further, service providers and City staff members recommended individuals who would be the best suited to conducting interviews and these individuals received comprehensive training about how to conduct interviews. Service providers and City staff also reviewed the surveys to ensure quality responses. Surveys that were considered incomplete or containing false responses were not accepted, the process for which included reviewing individual surveys submitted by surveyors and assessing patterns in survey responses for inconsistencies. It is important to recognize that variations between survey years may result from shifts in the demographic profiles of surveyors and accessibility to certain populations. Survey confidence intervals presented indicate the level of variability that may occur from year to year when interpreting findings. While every effort was made to collect surveys from a random and diverse sample of sheltered and unsheltered individuals, the hard-to-reach nature of the population experiencing homelessness prevents a true random sampling. Recruitment of diverse and geographically dispersed surveyors was prioritized. However, equal survey participation across all populations may be limited by the participation and adequate representation of subpopulations in planning and implementation processes. This includes persons living in vehicles, who are historically difficult to enumerate and survey.
Edit :To your point:
Is this a representative sample? I would survey most egregious cases first -- the zombies milling about the UN plaza in the open air drug market. The shitters, shooters, hitters, harassers, yellers. Maybe the ones with the most encounters with police.
I am not sure how this would be a more representative sample of the homeless population as a whole. I do think that for many matters involving the homeless it would be far more useful to drill into the disruptive + perennial homeless population rather than those who are unobtrusive or temporary. Though there are obvious difficulties in collecting data on those actively working against you doing so.
jericho
5mo ago
My understanding is that while there is not a shortage of prospective adoptive parents for babies, there is one for children.
jericho
10mo ago
While I played a bit of Minecraft early on, it was VERY early on, pre-nether.
During the summer of 2020 many of my friends and family, including those who hadn't played many video games in years, were stuck inside more for obvious reasons. So one of my friends spun up a Minecraft server for everyone to play on.
Between the new stuff added to the game in my long absence, the fresh world and people playing and building stuff at all hours (between furloughs, different shifts and different time zones) I was constantly discovering new things while playing and was often sharing that experience with people who I had not talked to as much as I'd have liked in recent years due to diverging paths in life.
Died down over time, once again for obvious reasons, but for a month or two it recaptured the feeling of playing games with friends back in elementary.
Didn't make up for all the stuff we couldn't do, but it definitely helped take the edge off.
Anyway, like I said. Your daughter isn't necessary in this scenario. We can keep the discussion entirely to the ethics of me doing this to you. Concerns of anonymity on the motte aside, how do you feel about sharing a photo of yourself with me after this comment?
Can't speak for them directly, but personally the daughter would be relevant because I would care significantly more if it were my daughter than me.
To answer further questions, if you sent it directly to my friends + family I would be very unhappy (though that's rather the whole point of the anonymity concerns).
If posted online with my name (so it would show up on Google etc, though once again rather the point of anonymity concerns) I'd be moderately unhappy since that means there's a decent chance friends, family or potential employers would stumble upon it.
Posted without my identifying info, I'd be a bit wigged out if people I knew personally happened to stumble upon it but its existence on the net to be used by strangers would not bother me much.
If kept on your hard drive for you and maybe a horny pc repair guy to find it I wouldn't mind at all, assuming no personally identifying info attached so the horny pc repair guy can't do scenarios 1 or 2.
If it were my child (thinking on it I would mind quite a bit if it were my son too), I would be distressed to a greater degree about all the above scenarios.
Hope that helps clear it up, that the degree of separation is being used because it is perceived as worse.
jericho
1yr ago
Opsec in this case was infinitely lax, since he was streaming his desktop with the tabs open.
jericho
1yr ago
That's fair! I will add another thought, once again trying to put in perspective why these differences between two large numbers matter due to how the macro impacts the micro.
There's a John Calvin quote about relics:
There is no abbey so poor as not to have a specimen [of the True Cross]. In some places there are large fragments, as at the Holy Chapel in Paris, at Poitiers, and at Rome, where a good-sized crucifix is said to have been made of it. In brief, if all the pieces that could be found were collected together, they would make a big ship-load. Yet the Gospel testifies that a single man was able to carry it.
So, if X churches claim to have Y amount of the True Cross, and X times Y is far greater than the possible dimensions of the True Cross, then obviously some of those churches are lying or have been taken in.
Similarly, at some point when the numbers go low enough (even with those numbers still being more than enough to be well into the realm of the truly monstrous/genocidal!) one is implicitly accusing living Jews of lying (or, at best, having been lied to by other relatives) about their relatives who died in the Holocaust. Does it make sense why that would be seen as at least in the same ballpark as denial?
jericho
1yr ago
My understanding is that various drug manufacturers have taken steps to avoid their drugs being used for executions (believe this happened for both pentobarbital and sodium thiopental), which has led to prisons needing to use compounding pharmacies to make the drugs for them, with varied quality.
I've also read that many doctors don't want to be involved in the testing or administering of lethal injection cocktails, so the state kind of has to take who it can get, leading to more varied quality there.
I'm guessing MAiD hasn't yet had the same degree of pushback from those groups, at least so far (though I would be very surprised if it hasn't had any). That could certainly change in the future.
Also, frankly- I think comfort is a much higher priority for doctor assisted suicide than it is for execution by lethal injection. I think screaming pain moves the popular support needle away from euthanasia much faster than from execution.
jericho
9d ago
It's interesting, the people I know who have had one night stands and have talked about it did in fact have them at either their or their partner's residence.
I think a major factor is that most of them were having these one night stands while young and/or broke, so getting a hotel for the night would not be a negligible expense.
I think another factor is that you maintain the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability that you're just going to hang out when inviting someone back to your place, whereas there's no reason to go to a hotel/motel with someone you met at a bar except to fuck.
jericho
1mo ago
I think there is something to your main thrust re: locus of control, but:
Good luck finding a successful woke person placing their hand on their heart and saying "I acknowledge that my success is partly a result of my dad buying me a house when I was 21 and getting me an internship in Lockheed Martin because the CEO is his golfing buddy."
I have multiple progressive friends who would absolutely say that they were given significant advantages due to their family connections. I do think it helps that in several of the cases it would be absolutely ridiculous for them to claim otherwise (probably a lot easier to disavow your dad being the golfing buddy of a CEO than your dad being a CEO or if your last name is on a building at the college you went to).
Though if anything that further supports your main argument.
jericho
8mo ago
since RtWP is a vastly superior mechanic for CRPGs than turn-based gameplay (because it allows one to fast-forward through trash encounters and to play at one's own pace).
Why have encounters that involve no real decision-making? At that point just cut those ones and have interesting encounters give better rewards. I get maybe having one or two an act just to embrace a power fantasy, but a system being better for grinding isn't much of an endorsement when you can just design the game without grinding.
Now, can be a completely separate issue that the encounters are poorly designed, but then it makes more sense to me to spend more time tuning the encounters rather than slapping in a fast forward button.
A big part of this is because of the direct translation of many 5e mechanics into a game, which is ridiculous since they were designed for abstraction to make tabletop play viable. The combat system has too many actions...
I feel the overall complaint is correct, but much of the issue of too many actions are a result of it NOT being a direct translation of 5e. Bonus action shoving, dipping as a thing at all, bonus action throwing things and all the short-rest weapon abilities etc were added on by Larian to basically give martials more stuff to do.
D&D itemization is fine for tabletop campaigns where you can carry a handful of items, your inventory is a box on a lined piece of paper and there are three combat encounters in a 4 hour session, but it works less well in a game where there are mountains of loot and players are used to more interesting itemization than +2 swords or things that provide a single-point increase in one stat.
The inventory management is absolutely trash, especially given separate inventories between characters and the extra steps to swap characters in and out to access their inventories.
That said, I'd say Larian did an OK job tackling half of this complaint (the loot in BG3 is generally a lot more interesting than base 5e), but made the other half far worse- the absolute deluge of magic items you run into is not standard 5e, it much more resembles Pathfinder. Looking at the table from the DMG for starting at higher levels makes it clear how absolutely loaded down with loot you are in BG3, before considering that without attunement slots you're also not only collecting but using a lot more.
This also makes the above issue with too many abilities worse, as many of the more interesting magic items are more interesting because they bestow yet more abilities.
This ought not to be taken as a defense of 5e, more showing that it can be hard to parse out issues with 5e, issues with Larian games in general (obsession with barrels, bottles and surfaces) and issues with BG3 as a result of Larian trying to fix issues with 5e.
jericho
1yr ago
Worth noting that out of the 4 legal states, Hawaii, Washington and Alaska also had a requirement of at least 30 days residency in state first. Only New York would have been a "road trip" option (though I suppose Hawaii was already ruled out of that regardless of the law).
jericho
1yr ago
Matt Colville did a D&D video on dead empires and quoted this bit from Elrond.
Then Elendil the Tall and his mighty sons, Isildur and Anarion, became great lords; and the North-realm they made in Arnor, and the South-realm in Gondor above the mouths of Anduin. But Sauron of Mordor assailed them, and they made the Last Alliance of Elves and Men, and the hosts of Gil-galad and Elendil were mustered in Arnor.
Thereupon Elrond paused a while and sighed. 'I remember well the splendour of their banners,' he said. 'It recalled to me the glory of the Elder Days and the hosts of Beleriand, so many great princes and captains were assembled. And yet not so many, nor so fair, as when Thangorodrim was broken, and the Elves deemed that evil was ended for ever, and it was not so.
Which really drives home that the world we see is a shadow of a shadow of what it once was.
jericho
1yr ago
Genuinely, a similar thought in my youth is why I started to study history + geography as a hobby. I realized that given I had an interest in learning place names, cultures, the course of different wars, the lineage of different monarchs, etc, I really ought to put that drive towards things that actually existed.
This certainly hasn't stopped me from being a "lore nerd" for different games and series, but it at least keeps a little voice in my head to spend at least as much time on reading about actual nations as I do about fictional ones.
jericho
1yr ago
I think the issue there is that theoretically you are doing this for the sake of the people using the system, and I don't know if most of them would be willing to pay 5x to 10x the current cost of the ticket.
Might be a work around where single tickets are much more expensive but an annual pass or something can be bought at a more reasonable rate. Could also do some kind of partnership with hotels and/or airlines to provide discounted tickets so that tourists could still utilize the system.
Though the biggest practical obstacle would still be that
(assuming enforcement of having a ticket)
Is a big assumption. I think if you could get policy in place to enforce that, you could probably just take the next step and get policy in place to get the people causing problems off the public transportation and not need to bother with too many pricing adjustments.
jericho
1yr ago
Even 40 something old millennials are now considered as dinosaurs, their experience of family, school, childhood or church and sexuality in their childhood let's say can be considered ancient and utterly outdated.
On this subject- I am unsure if it is a generational gap or a class one, but I noticed a strong trend when reading through the AmITheAsshole subreddit: a huge % of the questions on there are related to step- or half- family.
Obviously that place would be biased towards such questions (fair to say that familial obligations to a step-brother or half-brother are less defined than those to a full brother, so more likely to seek help defining them), but I was still rather shocked.
I'm firmly in the millennial age range, so I've always lived in a post-no-fault-divorce world, but the amount of step and half siblings among my peers was tiny.
jericho
1yr ago
At the bottom, or even the middle, race might serve as a better proxy for coarsely compatible genes than achievement. Because there isn't a lot of achievement to judge by.
The specific examples you gave reminded me of some of the (all white) parents on my mother's (lower middle class) side of the family.
I think there is much to be said about how the loss of "good" non-college jobs (especially in certain regions) in the US has led to a blending of the middle, working and underclass.
My cousins on that side had kids with people who, on paper, were very similar to them in terms of finances, education, race, religion, etc (often even meeting in their shared workplaces). But, if you went a generation or two back, the class differences would be apparent. And while they'd all fall under "red tribe", looking closer there would be clear cultural differences as well.
Obviously that still leaves open the % split between nature and nurture in terms of behavior, my point being the difficulty in distinguishing based on achievement may continue to become more difficult as automation marches on and class divides widen at the top and narrow near the middle and bottom.
jericho
1yr ago
Maybe that's true if we're talking about murdering one person versus murdering their whole family, but when we're working with a scale that is beyond emotional comprehension for most (all?) people, I don't think the distinction is important.
What do you think the cutoff is for emotional comprehension? I think it is higher than you suspect, if for no other reason than how that filters out to survivors.
For instance, on a raw level I don't think I can really process 300,000 deaths versus 6 million deaths. But using a hypothetical of something awful happening to my state, that's the difference between probably having a passing acquaintance die versus almost certainly losing multiple people close to me. Just because the quantities are more than I could reasonably handle on a direct basis doesn't mean there can't be a qualitative difference. The macro very much informs the micro.
Radical Feminism is (and especially was) primarily defined in contrast to Liberal Feminism and Marxist Feminism. While Liberal Feminism is primarily concerned with women gaining equality before the law and Marxist Feminism is primarily concerned with dismantling capitalism (as it sees oppression of women as downstream from exploitation of labor and the ownership of private property), Radical Feminism holds that the oppression of women is part of a broader system of patriarchy where women are dominated by men and that equality cannot be achieved by equality before the law or the dismantling of capitalism as the patriarchal social structures would still remain.
Most modern western Feminists who actually actively call themselves Feminists are in fact Radical Feminists, though they usually identify primarily with one of its offshoots. Think of like how a wide variety of different Christian denominations are still Nicene Christians, despite their other disagreements on matters of theology and identification. Someone specifically identifying themselves as "Nicene Christian" or refusing to get more specific than "Christian" probably tells you they have some theological disagreements with other people who would also be accurately described as "Nicene Christians", but they agree on some key elements.
Arguably a lot of Marxist Feminists are more "Radical" in their beliefs/methods than actual "Radical" Feminists, much like "Gay" Republicans are probably not that much happier (if at all happier) than straight ones.
jericho
5mo ago
jericho
7mo ago
I love the irony that baseball cards from your father's era are valuable because kids played with them (and ruined them) and Moms threw out the collection later, while baseball cards from my era are still totally worthless because everyone from my childhood saved them in archival quality protetive materials (I still remember kids arguing about the merits of various cardboard boxes and plastic pockets sheets) for long term storage.
The exact same thing happened to comic books, of course. At least that has the advantage of it not being too expensive to read old (but-not-too-old) series.
Using an asterisk to replace a letter in a word like that was originally used to censor slurs (think bleeping out parts of inappropriate words on tv), but has since been applied for humorous (your mileage may vary for if it is actually humorous) effect on words for groups of people which are not generally considered offensive.
Oh yeah, lots of streamers are incredibly lax about that kind of stuff. Plenty of cases of questionable stuff popping up on their search history or open tabs when streaming, to the point where some intentionally leave things up as a joke (like an Amazon tab for buying a shovel along with a Google tab of local nature reserves and a Quora about how deep to dig a grave, etc etc)
More options
Context Copy link