netstack
Texas is freedom land
No bio...
User ID: 647
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
If I were writing to a public forum, asking for advice about my lurid love affair, I’d take any opsec I could get.
I should probably do more here.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2hr ago
Hmm. It might be possible to get trendlines for something like CS2. But then, I understand valve has a long history of detection vs ban waves. It’d be very hard to measure.
Perhaps survey companies that sell cheats to try and keep skin in the game? I seem to remember seeing a retrospective from, like WoW gold farmers or something. You might be able to measure revenue vs. player base for a common game.
Intuitively, I doubt that video game cheating is worse today than it was in the mid-2000s era of PC CoD hackers and the like. Or the golden age of Minecraft servers, maybe.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
8d ago
netstack
Texas is freedom land
20d ago
Sorry! I really underspecified. I should have asked more about emergent historicity.
Consider a spectrum between abstract and concrete strategy games. Chess is a pretty darn abstract form of dudes fighting. Miniature wargames add all sorts of extra rules to flesh it out. For the most part, they hold on to useful game abstractions, like dice, or alternating turns. Once we get to real-time games, though, even those can be stripped out or hidden in the pursuit of verisimilitude.
Slitherine-type games seem to go really far on this simulationist end, though with some pretty unusual focuses. It's bizarre seeing abstractions like "cards" in Shadow Empire, a game which also models planetary hydrology and the military procurement process. But so, so cool. I'm going to have to check out all three of your realist/authentic mentions just to salivate over things I don't plan on learning.
But these simulations, sometimes ridiculously complex, don't usually converge on historicity. The game conceits, or the epicycles which were added to disguise them, keep most games from getting too realistic (and, presumably, boring). So we get Warhammer games where one side can be effectively "tabled" in one "shooting phase," giving up their precious "victory points." Divinity, where my squad can spend all our "action points" beating the tar out of one guy while his friends wait their turn. Really, action economy has got to be one of the biggest sources of this kind of divergence, but it's not like actual economics are safer. Victoria 2 is kind of infamous for keeping its plates spinning with careful scripting and duct tape.
Sometimes you get more verisimilitude by reducing the level of detail. I'd say old X-COM is a good example. Oh, there's plenty of game-mechanics nonsense, but the fundamental "Time Units" system does an amazing job of implying simultaneity. Move, and you risk enemies reacting. Hold your fire, and you get a chance to spend it outside the confines of your "turn." You get interesting game choices which wouldn't be possible in a real-time combat simulation.
So when I asked the question, I was thinking something more like: "what are the simplest, most abstract games which punch above their weight in encouraging historical strategies?" Games which reward pike blocks not because someone programmed an explicit stat bonus, but because the rules of their game world imply the physics of ours.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
24d ago
Point taken.
But “related to sexuality” isn’t really load-bearing. A big chunk of the politics leans on comparison to paraphilias. If being trans looks statistically different from crossdressing, or BDSM, or whatever else has gotten more popular since 2000, then it makes less sense to assert that it should be treated like those things.
I think the rest of your comment deserves a full response, but for now:
Why wouldn't there be people out there who get off on cross-dressing or whatever;
Okay, but are there enough of them? If most trans people are crossdressing fetishists, then the prevalence of the latter should be a rough ceiling prevalence of trans people.
The first study I found with numbers on crossdressing prevalence was this one. 2.8% of men, 0.4% of women. Here is my choice for trans people, which suggests something like 0.2% of the population. Alright, there’s roughly 16x as many crossdressers as trans people. Sounds compatible with your model.
Except the gender ratios are pretty screwed up. This source talks about a 2:1 ratio. If being transgender is the extreme end of an incredibly skewed paraphilia, why does it show less of that skew?
(wait, this had better not be a regression-to-the-mean thing. I’ll check the math tomorrow.)
More importantly, the trend in that paper became less skewed over the last couple decades. Unless crossdressing has also become more egalitarian, that suggests something else is going on.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7d ago
There is a difference between men fighting one another (Hamas vs. IDF) and men fighting unarmed civilians (Hamas vs. Israelis; IDF vs. random Palestinians).
As much as I would prefer the former, it’s not on the table. Hamas can’t stop hiding behind civilians without getting slaughtered. Israel can’t stop killing civilians without giving Hamas opportunities to slaughter Israelis. Neither side is willing to let it “just be a fight.”
So yes, it’s teetering on the edge of ethnic cleansing. Not because of a psyop to claim righteousness, but because all the remaining options look an awful lot like killing noncombatants and driving them off.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
23d ago
How exactly does one “offer the mantle”? I can’t think of any historical examples where one party politely set its opponents’ agenda.
If you’re actually asking why people aren’t blaming Democrats for Trump’s indiscretions, I assure you that they are. On this very board, even! If this is a suggestion that Trump might secure peace in our time by looting a little bit harder, well, you can consider me unconvinced.
I think people—voters—react to situations based on vibes. Losing my job to a financial crisis is bad. Cheap gas is good. Paying for someone’s abortion is bad. Defending democracy is good. Stick enough of these reactions together, draw a rough, inconsistent set of principles around them, and you’ve got yourself a political movement. The agenda of that movement, then, is largely downstream of its members’ reactions to whatever situations are most salient.
When the towers fell, public opinion was firmly in favor of massive retaliation. W was quite willing to oblige, and most of the opposition fell in line. There was never a dignified, first-principles discussion over who got to lead the charge. Even once the public soured on it, Obama picked up the bag and kept at it. Right place, right time.
There’s a bizarro alternate universe where Trump’s foreign and economic policies dovetailed into a strong COVID response. It’s one where the doomsday preppers felt vindicated as suburban liberals insisted that lockdowns are just racism. That possibility faded away as Trump began to downplay the virus. Once relaxing measures was Trump-coded, there was no chance in hell that Democrats would give up on the issue. Wrong place, wrong time.
The only way parties adopt an issue is if they’re in the right place when the vibe shifts. The only way for us to see a vibe shift on entitlements is if they somehow become obsolete. I think that either means mass mortality or mass productivity. I don’t believe the Republican Party can “offer” either.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6d ago
I more or less agree, but I was trying to argue against @Mihow and @Primaprimaprima’s complaint about the term “ethnic cleansing.”
If Israel is fighting a just war, then it has a legal war goal which isn’t ethnic cleansing. Therefore activists who insist otherwise are being disingenuous.
If Israel isn’t fighting a just war, though, its war aims might include things like killing all Palestinians. This is verboten in the post-WW2 world. Naturally, Hamas has made it impossible for Israel to fight without killing some noncombatants and, in doing so, casting doubt on its war aims.
My point is that calling it ethnic cleansing isn’t a sign of mindkilled bad-faith partisanship. It is an intended outcome of Hamas’ strategy.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7d ago
there has been a palpable increase in the number of questions related to black writers and activists,
Given the trajectory of many, many programs which don’t involve Mr. Jennings, it’s likely not his doing. Correlation, causation. Not that he has any reason to fight it, but if it makes you feel any better, you can probably blame faceless executives and market research.
It’s especially disheartening to know that a man with his depth of knowledge and clearly impressive mental faculties isn’t able to see the nuance around these issues
There’s, uh, a few conclusions that you could take from that.
But I think the set of (knowledgeable & impressive faculties & nuanced opinion & wanting to talk about it & visible) is vanishingly small. Having a complicated, technical opinion on the Current Thing is inversely correlated with wanting to blast that opinion on social media. And with getting an audience when one does so. It’s probably worse when you’re competing for the attention of media executives with their own politics.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
18d ago
Didn’t complete college and can’t do manual labor. Unless the good doctor is rubber-stamping disability for healthy young farm boys?
What work are they able to do?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
13d ago
Does it encourage productivity? More than an existing background of competition, that is. I'm trying to think of toy scenarios.
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Case 1: You make widgets for $6 labor and $6 materials. You invest in a technology which doubles the productivity of that labor. Now you can make your widgets for $3 labor and $6 materials. Going from $12 to $9 is a 25% savings in your total costs.
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Case 2: You make widgets for $1 labor and $11 materials. You invest in the same technology. Going from $12 to $11.5 only improves your costs by like 4%, since labor costs were so small already.
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Case 3: You make widgets for $6 + $6 until the government comes in and forces you to spend $12 on labor. Now the same technology cuts your cost from $18 to $12, or 33%! Therefore, by making labor more expensive, the government has increased the benefit of investing.
Except...Your final cost with the technology is still $12. You've invested just to get back to where you would otherwise have been. Even if the government relaxes its edict, that just snaps you back to the first case. This is fine if the government has some strategic interest in adopting that technology--like with onshoring, or green new deal, or even corn subsidies--but I'm not convinced on the economic case.
if we (hypothetically) replaced all citizens with cheaper immigrants
Yes, if I was afraid of losing my job, getting the cheapest widgets would be a poor consolation prize. But that doesn't mean subsidizing me makes my labor more productive. It means that I'm asking to trade off some efficiency for other values, like security.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
That sounds either kickass or pornographic. I could believe both.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7d ago
Seconding the others’ interest. I want to say I agree with you but I suspect we have pretty different ideas of which movements are the central examples.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
19d ago
Okay, I admit it would be funny to make our 500k-character submission box contingent on filling out a 1k-character abstract. Only the abstract would start out visible, and users would have to click to expand the wall of text, preventing it from taking up attention by default…
But I am not convinced that this would help with the failure mode of, say, 100k-character AI Gish gallops. They’re still going to be slower to check than to create.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
21d ago
In the OKC area, I recommend both the American Pigeon Museum and the Museum of Osteology.
I keep seeing the latter show up in Wikipedia photos.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
11d ago
I would bet dollars to donuts that no SC justice is actually below average IQ, even among lawyers or judges. Maybe appellate courts, but I don’t think the bar is actually that high.
Partisan, yes. Political, obviously. But those are not always correlated against intelligence.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
15d ago
Hey, I’ve had a similar experience.
Not the nihilism, per se. The open tab with a strawman getting punched to thunderous applause. When it was fresh, I avoided responding cause I was at work and couldn’t do it justice. Then a week or two of waiting till the next Monday thread. After that, it felt awkward to bring it up like some sort of callout, and I quietly let it slip.
You’ve inspired me to actually put it in tomorrow’s thread.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7d ago
Sorry, I meant that in the general case of media selection pressure, not for Ken in particular. It’s just another filter.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7d ago
Some speculate all sorts of things. Please preemptively provide evidence, not speculation.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7d ago
Please elaborate a bit when you’re questioning someone.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
17d ago
I’m ready for the Pacifier sequel where Vin Diesel takes on his toughest parenting challenge yet: the opioid epidemic.
Is it a heavy read?
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