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kky


				

				

				
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User ID: 3570

kky


				
				
				

				
2 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2025 March 03 19:40:22 UTC

					

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User ID: 3570

Does he? I certainly didn’t find that when reading it. He certainly doesn’t present a compelling case that the US Constitution provides for any specific organization on the part of the states beyond assuming that they all must follow a familiar pattern. Well, now they don’t. So what now? Rule the very practice unconstitutional because it was not anticipated by the initial authors? He doesn’t make that claim ever. Why not?

His whole initial section on the definition has a particularly laughable moment where he undermines his whole argument, if he had been aware of it. Quoted in full:

Moreover, Dr. Johnson's first example of the usage of "legislature" is this: "Without the concurrent consent of all three parts of the legislature, no law is or can be made." 2 A Dictionary of the English Language (1st ed. 1755) (emphasis deleted). Johnson borrowed that sentence from Matthew Hale, who defined the "Three Parts of the Legislature" of England as the King and the two houses of Parliament. History of the Common Law of England 2 (1713). (The contrary notion that the people as a whole make the laws would have cost you your head in England in 1713.) Thus, even under the majority's preferred definition, "the Legislature" referred to an institutional body of representatives, not the people at large.

That is, in the initial definition of legislature, THE KING OF ENGLAND was a necessary component. We obviously don’t have that. The institutional body of representatives was ONE house of Parliament. The Lords Temporal and Spiritual were institutional, but not representative. The King was not a body in the sense he intends at all. Yet “the voting public when they select a ballot initiative” is somehow excluded from a definition of “legislature” that is obviously descriptive as to how the laws are passed in the country of concern? On the basis of THIS paragraph? Did this guy read what he was quoting?

Like I’m telling you, specious in its entirety. Come on, you can’t read this and tell me the guy doesn’t come off like Sotomayor.

Listen, man, Donald Trump the New York Democrat managed to convert the Republican Party (organization of “pretend to care about Christianity so we can deliver tax cuts for the rich”) into a bunch of bootlickers and imitators that are seriously if sometimes ineffectually trying to deliver the platform they were elected on. It’s patently possible to take advantage of deliberate sandbaggers and repurpose their organization to your own ends.

Not saying it’s easy, duh. But if it matters to you…

I still don’t get it. That sounds like regular silliness to me, not idiocy. Intelligence doesn’t preclude goofiness; good comics tend to be pretty bright, because they need to put their finger on the audience’s pulse.

But people seem to be talking, sometimes, about feeling attracted to “tee hee math is hard” kind of nonsense. And I don’t get it.

But college, reparations, and progressive values are the same package as hard work, family values, and Christianity- just with different components.

I’d disagree that these are comparable, in line with your 85 IQ observation. The urban intellectual model of advancement is through education and a high-skill career, which is simply not in the cards for people under 120ish IQ. That’s the equivalent to family values and hard work, respectively, which targets a different demographic. So what can those urban intellectuals offer blacks? In this case, I think it’s race-based action and reparations (welfare etc). The final item is what’s expected of each group once they’ve advanced - for the urbans, it’s progressive values, like you note, and I’d place patriotism (especially local) over Christ for the workers (of course the individual workers have their own priorities - but this appears to me to be what the system, the tribe, wants out of them). And from the blacks, the only thing needed is the vote. This is what consistently pisses me off about the Democratic plans for black Americans. It reduces them to a client class. They get treats, the party gets votes. This is intensely degrading. Shouldn’t they get something to be proud of in themselves, the power of their work, things they acc do beyond asking for more?

So that’s why I don’t think they’re comparable. The rule system that urban elites hold themselves to is different from the rules they require of others.

A fresh and youthful attitude is lovely and joyous. Is that what people mean by retarded, do you think? What, do you have to be jaded and brooding to be intelligent?

Well, whatever. I’m in agreement with you in any case.

I dunno, feels pretty fair as an opinion. The book-cookers get blocked from business, Trump gets a shorter-term injunction for orchestrating it, but because no real harm was done, the penalties are struck down as deranged and vindictive. I don’t see a better way of threading the needle between condoning fraud if you’re important enough and deciding on damages based on how much our feelings are hurt.

It’s a strange sentiment to me… I’ve never really thought it or felt it. Idiocy in a girl kind of gives me a sinking feeling, “oh no… ugh.” Intelligence is interesting and makes me want to stick around. I guess I’m the odd duck if people are stating it so confidently, though.

Yeah, I’m not very sympathetic to Roberts here. This precise case is, I believe, best read as a naked power struggle between the voters and the legislators. The latter had a privilege the former believed was being misused and wanted stripped from them. The defense of the legislature was best read as “you don’t have the right to tell us what to do, only we can decide whether we have this power (or Congress with an amendment), and we say no.”

Given this, what recourse would the voters have? They’d have to make this a single issue or else give up. And I’m really not sympathetic to the idea that a certain class - and politicians are by now definitely a class - deserves inalienable privileges over the rest.

Finally, his example of senator elections is trite. The question for senators was formally, how those elections should be operated. That obviously requires an amendment, since it’s changing a specific process. The point of the section on state elections is that the details are deferred to the state. Nothing more is specified beyond “the legislature.” Would Roberts have objected to a legislature voting for their own independent districting body on the basis that the Constitution forbids it? Or if you want something even wackier - the US Constitution does not specify the political structure of the states (beyond saying that the federal government will ensure they can have a republic, which was not defined as the American structure prior to America)! That is done by the state constitutions, individually. It is convention that they all resemble one another. But if a state rewrote its constitution to move the legislative power to something like, say, a series of elected bureaux, what in the Constitution would forbid this? Is this not a power delegated to the states? And then would “Legislature” in the Constitution refer to the legislating bodies, or to nothing at all, rendering the point moot? Or what if, oh, I don’t know, the state had rewritten its constitution to allow voters to legislate through the ballot? Does that include them in the legislating body? If not, then was the ballot initiative law unconstitutional? How can there be one without the other, when the Constitution does not state explicitly what structure it wants the states to have?

Roberts’ dissent is beyond specious. I rest my case.

Gerrymandering as a term dates to 1812. Some gerrymanders are more egregious than others, but the practice is very hard to expunge. It’s also limited by the fact that the canvas these districts are painted on, and the political parties themselves, are ever-shifting. A gerrymander can only ever be a temporary success. If a party gets too strong, and too unrepresentative, people will successfully organize to take it down a notch. That’s how it’s always been.

I’d relax about this particular problem. Unless your specific qualm is that you’re a Democrat in Texas and are worried about being disenfranchised. In that case I fully understand your concern and would recommend you view it as a personal issue (and move states) or a local issue (and organize with state Democrats to undermine Republican rule by adopting a more Texan-palatable local platform). I wouldn’t think of this as the end of Democracy in America. It’s just the usual political grift. Unpleasant but sustainable.

Amusingly, I disagree with pretty much all of your premises. But #1 is interesting as a jumping-off point, so I’ll address it.

There’s a broad concept that left-wing sentiment is pro-black and right-wing sentiment is anti-black, and the two forces battle over how nicely to treat blacks. I think this is a misconception. Neither side, from what I can tell, really likes blacks, and both surface their antipathy in different ways which wind up being one and the same larger system.

By blacks, I don’t strictly mean people of African heritage. What I’m pointing to here is a subculture in America that is descended from slavery and which exists substantially outside the main drive of society. It has its own norms, doesn’t intermarry too often, doesn’t economically interact that much, watches its own TV, listens to its own music, and so on. This is what is disliked in its actuality by the political wings, because it’s not really part of either of them. The reality is, of course, more nuanced than this, but this is a good overview.

The left nominally likes blacks, until it comes to the problems that really do exist in black communities. These can be broadly described as symptoms of poverty, or of an underclass. I'm talking crime, of course, but homophobia is a pretty serious repellent here. The left response to these is to pretend they don’t actually exist, or are somehow caused by systemic pressures, which of course is besides the point. The left loves blacks who have integrated thoroughly into their cultural milieu.

The right is simpler. They just don’t like ‘em. There are some good ones, but the rest are bad. Best to stay away as much as you can.

So, neither wanting to get deeply involved, a fairly predictable pattern emerges. First, the left tries to support the “black community,” or at least the image they have of them. This tends to be through charity and lenience towards crime. This generally does not go well, and without seeing any positive outcomes, the general public starts getting sick of crime. Then the right wing sweeps in, declares the problem in racial(-ly coded) language, and cracks down hard. It doesn’t take long to notice that this policy rests on practical elements of prejudice against blacks, and so the general public starts swinging the other way…

So you get this effect, where first the left comes in and says: listen, you don’t need to work, have these handouts, shoplifting isn’t that big a deal, neither are drugs, no we won’t stop the violent gangbangers, we believe in community justice… so black people take that at face value, huh, guess dissipation and petty crime aren’t a big deal, and if anyone disrespects me I’d better deal with it myself. Then the right comes in and says, HA! You idiots believed that? Nope, it’s prison for you. And we know you’re all like that. So now obviously a lot of blacks are in jail, but also the kids start to learn: this is what it means to be black, they all see you that way… and maybe start thinking it’s right.

So I see these two movements as the greater American ambivalence towards blacks. There was a great injustice done to them, and they are suffering from it generations later. This is felt on a wide scale. It makes people uncomfortable. So people aren’t willing to see blacks as other people, and instead hide their individuality under the label. When a white person does something, or feels something, it’s because of who they are, but when a black person does, it’s because of who blacks are. But if you want to change a group’s behavior, you need to change the behavior of the individuals in that group, one by one. There is no other way.

Any serious attempt to deal with the troubles afflicting black Americans, and those they inflict on others, has to start with this view on individuality. “Blacks” are not like you and me, but individual black people can be. Others might not, and they might be criminal, and if so they need to be dealt with, but this is a fact disconnected from the rest. Some might need more explicit inculturation. That will require generations, and the removal of any privileges for being black. The end result of this must be the destruction of a uniquely black culture in America. This is inevitable. If we’re all alike, then there will be nothing left to distinguish that unique culture, except in superficial and vague elements. Anyone know what it means to be Irish besides wearing green on St Paddy’s? Or Italian besides having prejudiced views of different brands of San Marzano tomatoes? Or German besides living in the Midwest? Neither do I. And with intermarriage the distinction breaks down further.

So the current Trump thing is more of the same… except that politics is becoming less racially split. A lot of black men voted T last time. This means they’re not voting as a bloc, that they’re not voting for historic reasons, that there’s something they want past their race. Class is up, comparatively. Maybe that’s the end of black America: in our workers, uniting against the Man. We’ll have to see, I guess.

Two small notes. First, you are almost certainly being heavily subsidized on that $20 plan. All the evidence points in that direction. You may be paying 1-2 orders of magnitude under cost. Second, the most interesting part of the METR paper was that the devs thought they were being sped up, but the opposite was true. Provably so. Intuitions on AI efficacy cannot be trusted prima facia. Many people find them enjoyable and interesting to use, which of course is their right, but we should not trust their estimates on the actual utility of the tool. Both of these facts seriously undermine the boosters’ case.

Depends on the contract, I guess. But at minimum you’d have to pay the difference. So if you’ve already sunk the money and your devs aren’t even bothering to use something you’ve spent a cool few million on… well, that’s a pretty natural time for a desperate VP to start the mandates.

Often AI deals require a promise to spend X tokens over Y time period. It’s like promises to spend a certain amount of money on a company’s services without specifying the services to be bought. So if the buyer is under the spend count, they encourage people to use more tokens.

Speaking briefly on ultimata.

The primary purpose of an ultimatum is to force the listener to accept the form of the argument: A or B. The argument then splits out along lines of A-support, B-support, A-opposition, B-opposition... etc. It begs the question on whether A and B are in fact linked.

Take your PATRIOT example. The post-9/11 question is: how can we protect ourselves from future attacks? Supporters of the PATRIOT Act alleged that the only effective method was curtailing the rights of Americans. But this is not obviously the only way to protect ourselves from these kinds of attacks. Suicide terror attacks are, and were, overwhelmingly favored by a certain type of extreme Muslim on the world stage. Governments and mafia (i.e. small governments) don't really like them, as they expend valuable trained human resources on frankly trivial strategic goals. (Unless they can convince a third-party stooge to do it, like Iran.) The only time people favor suicide terror attacks is when they kinda want to die (or have their people killed) as a side effect. Consider Japan's suicide bombers. They were very clearly a statement more than a strategy. So, taking this all into account, you could theoretically solve the problem by tightening the visas you give to foreign Arabs substantially, or some other form of discrimination against the highest-risk group. In practice, I think this is what we did. There were lots of racism complaints during the Bush admin. But as far as the PATRIOT debate went, it was about the ability to spy. It's not obvious that this had any bearing on the real problem, and was instead about the ability to spy itself. Call me cynical, but I think that if there were more guys in the White House with strong prejudices against Islam, we'd have been having a different Constitutional debate, one about outlawing a certain religion.

OK. Taking a look at the feminism/fertility debate, or the environmentalism/survival debate, and so on, I believe the not-so-subtle move is that the two are necessarily linked and we must "choose." I call bullshit. Around the world, patriarchal societies still have cratering birthrates. This is easy to find information. Similarly, a ruined environment has explicit costs to human survival, as we undermine our own productive capacity through poisoning ourselves, wrecking good farmland, denuding the seas, etc etc. The existence of those binaries can only be understood as a deliberate attempt to link these unrelated topics for the purpose of controlling the debate, steering it towards one's desired outcomes.

For feminism/fertility, I think the real move is getting attention off of fertility itself. Lots and lots of women want to have kids, and yet they don't, or put it off until the numbers just go down. Why? The feminist (or anti-feminist) answer is to hide it behind the "right to choose," but it's pretty obvious in context that it's only a (colloquially) feminist choice in one direction. (Not all feminists believe this, but it's what dominates the conversation.) I suspect the real reason is a confluence of factors, mostly cultural (lower respect or understanding for the importance of reproduction) and partially material (increased life expectancy screwing with wealth movement and life stages relative to fertile windows). But as long as it's about feminism, which everyone has already made up their minds on as a matter of principle, we don't have to think about maybe changing our individual values and cultural practices to reflect this new reality. Almost the same description can be applied to environmentalism with some mad-libs substitutions.

That's why I'm so skeptical of simply accepting the frame on these things. OP, for his part, didn't actually frame any of this as an ultimatum. He was actually just negating the antecedent, showing that (for him) the presented argument was insufficient. Sure, I happen to disagree with his stance quite fervently, but reading him closely - he doesn't say that he values certain things above the survival of the species, he says he does not value the survival of the species at all, one way or another. There's no ultimatum there, Therefore, one had to be provided for him.

(As far as the OP is concerned, all I can make is a value statement: that it is ugly and sad to have nothing to recommend one's time on Earth to posterity, be one's contributions ever so humble. We are all destined to die, and pleasures are fleeting, and the march of old age makes the immediate world increasingly bitter, it behooves one to seek value in something a little more distant and external. Say, the future in which one is invested. People who do this seem in my experience to die more comfortably.)

I’m not sold by your argument. It sounds like you’re begging the question by substituting the definition of “guy who reads porn about a busty 15-year-old” and “guy who is actually attracted to 15-year-olds.” The most obvious difference is words are just words, you can write whatever number you want down, reality isn’t keeping track. So the guy is attracted to the symbol which is 15, and the signs of an actually voluptuous woman. But then you have a different class which is actually interested in minors, and that tends to be for pretty nasty reasons.

OK, leave the latter group out. The former group is interested in a symbol. Almost always this is because the symbol itself has become a fetish that substitutes for something real so as to deprive it of its reality, to make it easier to digest. How nice are her tits is a complicated question, you have to really experience them to know, there are a lot of details and maybe not all of them are as attractive as the gestalt, and it takes serious concentration to focus on the gestalt and not get distracted, especially if you don’t have much experience actually enjoying tits. How big are they is safer, and you can put a number to it. Now you can enjoy yourself.

So what about age? It could be a symbol for a lot of things. Innocence, transgression, duh. But not a carefree sexual nature. That can be easily written onto a character of any age, and indeed is, in porn. It’s sufficient in itself, it doesn’t need to be laundered through a symbol, the whole point of it is how digestible and convenient it is. (Real sex with a real woman who isn’t infinitely carefree and convenient is great, but can’t really be condensed into a marketable fantasy.) No, what I think age is a symbol for is the reader’s own early feelings about sex. When he was 15 the girls were 15, and nothing can really compare to what they made him feel. Now he’s older and doesn’t really feel the same things, and even thinking about the feelings as themselves is a little much, so he wraps it all up in a symbol that he can find arousing instead. There’s no need to consider why the unmoored sexual energy of his teens has failed to find a mooring, or what that would even mean to him, so long as he has a symbol of his own desire to focus on. 15 means bottomless libidinous desire, to him. And to the people who don’t feel the same way, they can skip to the sections about how voluptuous she is and enjoy all the same.

As far as I can tell, the major art movements of the past 50ish years are Apple minimalism and anime. I’ll openly confess that it’s not too inspiring, but both have very definite ideas about the form and purpose of art which have insinuated themselves into the overall cultural moment.

Insofar as I don’t recall many people writing on these as art movements I suppose they could be interesting.

Yeah, I think we've seen this coming down the pipe for quite some time. The main limiting factor of the tech is that it relies on IVF, which is pretty unpleasant to use (from what I've heard) compared to the natural process, and is additionally quite expensive. For that reason I expect this particular enterprise to be a very slow burn. Perhaps costs come down over time, but I suspect that reduced costs will march right along with reduced quality, and the inevitable lawsuits for implanting the wrong couple's child are going to be very culture-warry.

That said, I'm of two minds on the overall concept of human genetic manipulation, or rather of one slightly more subtle mind that doesn't take a simple yes/no.

The great advantage of genetic manipulation is that it allows us to clean out bad mutations in the absolute gentlest way possible. For instance, Jews are absolutely loaded down with genetic disease, and currently have to do pre-mating genetic testing to find out if they're at risk. Nature's tender way of keeping the rates of the most serious disorders down is to kill the child, typically in a fairly slow and painful fashion. I would understand anyone who had a recessive gene for those disorders paying to make sure that their children carried none at all, to spare them the heartbreak of having to worry about their own children. To make it more personal, my own eyes are extremely bad and I am currently slowly going blind, although surgery should ameliorate the worst of it. If I could, with a wave of my hand, ensure that my eyes die with me and do not burden my children, then I would. Who would want to saddle their children with such burdens, save that they are (as of right now) unavoidable? Natural selection is a powerful force, but it is not a kind one, and one of man's duties is to rise above the worst of nature.

(For anyone personally opposed to IVF specifically on pro-life grounds, imagine that we develop superb gene-editing technology such that it's possible to replace selected genes in a naturally implanted embryo. Very sci-fi, I know, but I hope the thought experiment explains the above sentiment.)

On the other hand, what I expect the technology to be used for is stupid, arrogant decisions about who the child shall be. This seems to be what Nucleus is trying to offer: height, weight, and even down to eye color. These traits are obviously superficial, and reflect the desire of a parent for a "better" child while only looking at the very vague surface of what that means. But, as anyone here is likely to know, random traits are randomly distributed (often on a Gaussian scale), and the more you filter your results on one axis the more you'll have to tolerate imperfections on the others. So if you filter the child on height, BMI, eye color, you'll have to make some compromises on ADHD and IQ, most likely. Compounding this is the problem that extreme outliers in a given trait are increasingly likely to be compromised in other traits (as the height starts to undermine bodily integrity, say), and so anyone who just picks out the max IQ baby is likely to have some unfortunate genetic weaknesses. Personally, I also have my money on our understanding of many of these traits being much weaker than we think, and whatever we think we're getting is not going to be what we actually want, but that's a different argument.

My central objection to this kind of picking and choosing, however, is that much of the power of natural selection comes from its inherent randomness. Without prejudice (okay, maybe with a little prejudice in sexual selection and some genetic integrity mechanisms), a candidate is randomly assembled and evaluated. Their success is purely on the merits; there is no intelligent force with an axe to grind, there is no finger on the scales. Regardless of what anyone thinks, a given set of traits and genes does or does not work, and the next generation codifies that. When we step in, we are assuming knowledge over the entire enterprise. The feedback loop gets limited to what we think we want, not what works or doesn't. You see this time and time again in any situation where human guidance is put over some kind of development or evolution without external validation, where the decisions made get increasingly fashionable and decreasingly connected with real results. The classic example is military developments during peacetime, where illusions about (say) the efficacy of the bayonet charge or static artillery or the battleship get built up year over year until the actual test of war comes and shatters them. I suspect that human self-selection of traits is going to enter this same internal cycle of arrogance. The feedback cycle for success or failure is so slow that it exceeds the lives of the people responsible for the earlier decisions, and worse yet, the evaluative capacity of later generations is going to be shaped by those earlier generations. Don't get me wrong, feedback WILL come, nature WILL reassert herself, just as she will inevitably do for our current fertility crisis, but the longer the illusions hold the uglier it's going to get for everyone. And what's at the core of it, I believe, is the human intuition that we have reduced to a science a domain that is frankly beyond our analysis. We must be humble, and recognize that the best we have is heuristics, and that going further than that is arrogant and foolish.

This problem is, of course, only compounded by the fact that doctors will be regarded as the experts on human trait selection, when in fact they are only experts on identifying gene clusters and giving vague approximations of what they do. I hope people will not confuse the two, but based on how we confuse doctors' technical expertise for moral or strategic guidance already, I don't have high hopes for the future on that count.

I mean, the obvious confounder is that the kind of person who gets involved with a serious relationship as soon as able, progresses it aggressively, and takes responsibility for the natural consequences is different from the kind of person who doesn’t. In Rome those people were required to do their military service. Now they aren’t. But I think what’s actually at the heart of what you’re asking of people is not to make different decisions, but to be different people. Failing to recognize that is the source of most unhelpful advice. If a guy who is not really in the mindset of growing up, devoting energy, and so on has a kid, he will find it very unpleasant no matter his age. An older one might enjoy it regardless.

For your points… yep, childcare matters, and I preempted your point on women. The third point seems like a personal problem more than systemic. Happy parents, from what I see, just take it easy. I sympathize with point four similarly to point one (although the younger parents I know seem to spend an awful lot of time working…), and for point 5… I mean, I hate modernity as much as the next guy, but reading through some older memoirs or cultural histories I’m struck from time to time at how familiar the life of the mind can be. If anything is different, it’s a sense of personal responsibility. Those who blame their circumstances on external forces seem to have a hard time with acting, and boy do we have a lot of explanations for external forces these days.

My own experience is a little different from yours. I’ve got one kid, and am around 30, and am very happy with the situation and want more. If there’s anything I regret, it’s that my circumstances are NOT like my (then) 40-year-old father, who was financially better-established than I am and could spend much more time and energy doing cool things with me over working. But I hope to be in a more secure situation some years from now, and at that point, who knows? Could be a pretty comfortable circumstance. On the other hand, if I’m being frank, having a kid at 20 would likely have been a disaster, most importantly for the kid. I’ve changed a lot in the past decade. Would having a kid a couple years earlier than I did have worked? Sure, but there’s definitely a limit there, as far as my own self is concerned. It was only around 25ish that I really started to become the kind of person who could enjoy being a good father.

Of course, it’s your call whether you trust a word I’m saying. I don’t blame you if not.

A lot, and I mean a lot, of men had their first child around thirty, historically speaking. Bret Devereaux:

marriage-ages for men vary quite a lot, from societies where men’s age at first marriage is in the early 20s to societies like Roman and Greece where it is in the late 20s to mid-thirties.

This did not apparently prevent those fathers raising sons who conquered the Mediterranean. Concerns about women aside, this is pretty weak sauce to serve in arguing that men must have children young.

I’m not arguing that men SHOULD have children older. But history does not support your allegations of dire consequences, and that should give you serious pause about your whole line of reasoning.

The argument from @Gaashk stands, I think. We didn’t need slaves in the northern states since the founding, in the west since the early 19th, and the south since the mid-19th. Suddenly in the late 20th we discover slavery to be a necessary institution for agricultural work that was heretofore done even by so cushy an ethnicity as the English. Construction, same deal. What has changed? Does nobody sense something wrong in the fact that the Land of the Free is suddenly regressing so far as to demand a permanent underclass? This is why I don’t trust any of the economic statements on this matter. The whole argument has no sense of history to it.

Oh, is Asahi Select an actual thing? Whoops, my mistake. The point was that an actual market share would encourage actual importing.

Anyway, I’m not sure how the “completely different” clause is expected to fly. PDO works by obsessively dividing products that are actually quite similar, such that only a few dry sparkling whites are champagne. Something on the same level of granularity would be factory-by-factory, which to be honest would be fairly interesting to have printed on every product, although I suspect that this would be ignored by most consumers if there’s anything more recognizable. Substantive difference, on the other hand, sounds like a 10-year court case with expensive expert witnesses and piddling awards. I’m not sure there’s a convenient bright line there.

Your second point, about brand raiding, I would say is more about the modern high-liquidity stock market rewarding various pump-and-dump schemes. At that point I’d wonder whether allowing shareholders to sue executives for fraud following one of these events would move the needle any, or whether you need different financing plans altogether.

How would you accomplish this, per legality? Are trademarks only to be licensed to a single point of production? Otherwise how do you tell the difference between a knock-off factory and a simple expansion of the business?

The way a trademark is supposed to work is by tying a company’s reputation to a product. If the product doesn’t meet standards, the consumer learns to distrust the trademark. In this case it sounds like Asahi made the assumption that American audiences would be satisfied with Peroni and, present company excluded, were right on the mark. If people like you become a meaningful market share, then expect Asahi Select (or whatever name) to find its way from a Pacific tanker onto your grocery store at a significant mark-up from the regular.

I wound up using the golden halberd for my entire playthrough because there simply wasn’t anything better along strength/faith lines, except possibly magma sword. To be honest, it wasn’t the most pleasant experience, especially since I got the halberd immediately on starting the game. There was no real progression from then on, outside of some buffs. So I’m not sure I’d recommend it, even though it can certainly carry you through. Jumping heavy attacks are the key, fwiw. They knock the target down fast and give you free hits. I tried a couple of ranged options but never really liked them - the damage really wasn’t there compared to melee, especially considering that you have to drain your healing for the privilege.

If you’re really having trouble, use summons. I used them for the two bosses you mentioned, then tabooed them for myself because I got both of them on the first try and felt like I was missing out, then brought them back for a couple of the later bosses when I found I wasn’t particularly enjoying the game any longer and just wanted to hit the full clear.

All of them are within about 15 miles. The farm is regular produce for bourgeois consumption.

To college degree requirements? Presumably focused assessment with demonstrable applicability to the job at hand, relatively low-level starting positions with very rapid advancement, and so on.

I’ve worked at a place like that. It was nice.