Advertising boycotts are a bit different, you don't need to convince consumers, you need to convince marketing departments. Who are staffed entirely with people who already want to believe Facebook is being hateful, and who are profoundly inside filter bubbles making them believe everyone agrees with them (if they weren't advertising wouldn't look like it currently does).
Zuck can call the bluff now (and couldn't before) because of the election. Marketing departments that try pushing their companies into the "woke" side of the culture war will probably be overruled by CEOs who have now recieved a very strong signal as to where the population stands with regards to this.
pigeonburger
5mo ago
"It wasn't working just because companies were doing it cynically for profit."
I wouldn't call Mark Cuban a true believer, but someone that panders to them. To the true believers their worldview implicitly or explicitly imagine capitalism as tainting ideals or progress as soon as it comes in contact with them, so it's easy to dismiss any negative result. It's not a proof through competition that their idea doesn't work, it's proof number 473935 that capitalism needs to go because it gets in the way of their ideas.
I don't know about OP, but the SNES version is good. SNES emulators are pretty much solved by now, so any emulator is good enough, but for puzzle games on the go I'd recommend looking at chinese portable emulation consoles. For low end emulators like you'd need for puzzles, the Miyoo consoles are cheap and impressively well built for the price; they'll easily emulate 16 bits consoles and below, plus the PSX. If you wanna go further there's a whole rabbit hole for emulation consoles. Look for handhelds from Anbernic, Retroid, Trimui, etc...
pigeonburger
5mo ago
What is your favorite puzzle game? Tetris? Puzzle League? Klondike? Minesweeper?
Tetris is evergreen for me. But sometimes I temporarily get into others (Puyo Puyo, Puzzle League, Columns, recently Cleopatra's Fortune). When I want to feel particularly angry I play the Tetris TGM games.
That's a good point regarding drugs. I don't know how much of a mess I might seem to others though. She died on saturday. I was back to work on monday, and I'm only planning on taking time off in so much as it would help for administrative tasks that result from her death. I loved my mother a lot, but I feel no impairment, no need to take a breather. Maybe it's a family trait, neither of my parents families are very performatively emotional. Within hours of it happening, my brother and I were calmly and casually discussing the logistics of the funeral, inheritance, etc... The only moments when I get choked up thinking about it is when I put myself into some else's shoes. Maybe it's also having internalized enough stoic philosophy that dampened my emotions. I don't know.
pigeonburger
5mo ago
Thanks for your kind words. I hope something like that would not scar you for life, because ultimately burying their parents is something most people have to go through (and it would be a much sadder world if the opposite were more common).
pigeonburger
5mo ago
I think it has hit me, it wasn't that much of a surprise that it happened so I've been preparing myself mentally for a while. She had metastasis all over and while for a year and a half medication kept it from progressing, we knew from the moment she had that diagnosis that she had years left, not decades.
I am not performatively emotional at all (that lack of outward emotion is a family trait) but I get the feeling maybe people might think I don't actually care just because I seem to be outwardly normal?
pigeonburger
5mo ago
At the risk of oversharing, I lost my mother over the weekend and while I give my wife the advice that she shouldn't feel guilty for not forcing herself to be somber and mournful every single moment, I myself can't escape feeling like people would think me callous or unfeeling if my actions and demeanor didn't match their perception of what someone mourning their mother should be, so I do ultimately force myself to act differently just to not cause any unease. Am I overthinking this?
pigeonburger
5mo ago
I could be traveling with a box full of lead bricks and nobody would tell me a word if it fits the carry-on size
Which, honestly, is kind of ridiculous because it seems much likelier someone gets injuried by a heavy pack falling on them opening the overhead bins than by checked luggage.
It only takes one contrarian sympathizer, if that sympathizer is the emperor. Constantine the Great converted and then started converting the empire.
*EDIT: As to how Christians converted Romans to subsist until that point; their attitude towards salvation was a big factor, as was the egalitarian nature of it all. That the lowliest of criminal could repent and accept salvation and be the equal of anyone else in Heaven is quite a revolutionary concept at the time. Romans and Greeks were making sacrifices and offerings to jockey for position in the Gods favors, only a few were going to be headed for paradise. As for the Jews, their texts were mostly concerned with what would happen to that specific people; what would happen to converts was not clear. But Jesus was clear; here is one God that only asks that you believe in Him and he immediately saves you, reserves a place in Heaven for you, and has you in as high a regard as anyone else who also accepted Him? Seems like a great deal! It's certainly a better chance at eternal life for the destitute and marginal than what they could hope for from the Roman and Greek polytheist worship.
pigeonburger
5mo ago
Did the average Roman of those days think that the Christians were insane? Did he think they were evil? Did he secretly sympathize with them?
Christians, like Jews before them, asserted quite strongly that the gods the average Roman of the day worshiped were false: non-existant and worthless at best, if not evil. This was unique to Jews and Christians, polytheist cultures in the region usually had an inclusive attitude towards foreign gods; not usually calling them "not real gods", but just ignoring them or sometimes adapting them within their own mythology.
This exclusive approach to God tended not to make monotheists very sympathetic to Romans.
pigeonburger
6mo ago
Elderly women should be offered accessible seats on a bus, for sure. But I think they need to either wait for people to offer these seats, or they should ask if other would mind if they went first. For an able young person, refusing to let an elderly person sit is itself antisocial. But them just taking for granted they are owed this is rude and antisocial, and I think most people (and most elderly women) know this.
pigeonburger
6mo ago
As for the reason elderly women are often taking antisocial actions, I would hasard the reason is the same as anyone else. People, but men especially, are quickly thaught in life that them taking antisocial actions will usually make people around them angry. Sometimes this anger will turn to confrontation, and rarely (but sometimes) that confrontation will turn to violence. Minorities in majority white countries know that they could potentially turn it around if confronted by a white person by claiming it's racism so some of them abuse that. And elderly women (of any race) are the most oblivious demographic of all, because they are completely insulated from the consequences of antisocial actions as anyone confronting them immediately looks like the bad guy in the situation. If they had the physical ability to jump turnstiles, I have no doubt they would.
pigeonburger
6mo ago
I find it sad because it means some demographics are going to have to shoulder blame. It would be much easier if the blame was diffused and we could blame and address society wide problems, but ones that are targeted are harder to solve because they elicit a defensive attitude.
It's also interesting to note that for the bus queues, the demographics at fault are not exclusively those you're probably thinking about. Yes, they are overrepresented, but some of the most frequently offending demographic I notice are elderly women (of all races).
So long as heterogenous outcomes are treated as failures requiring intervention, the meta will incentivize redefining heterogeneity to maximize resource capture.
Maybe the answer is the Tom Paris rebuttal.
The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher utilization rate of commuters when criminal vagrants are no longer an everpresent concern. The ROI of fare enforcement is the lower maintenance costs for repairs and cleanup when mentally ill homeless no longer defecate and trash the public space with the full expectation of someone else cleaning up their mess. The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher communal trust that the MTA will enjoy when it looks to be an organization that can steward its received resources with competence and clarity, instead of burying its head deeper in the sand about extant problems too inconvenient to address openly.
That's without counting the effects downstream from Broken Windows Theory. Which despite mainstream academia trying for decades to tarnish it, is so obvious from observation of humans and human nature that it still holds a quasi-tautological position in my thinking on this.
The Shopping Cart Theory is a great first-order test to determine prevalence of antisocial elements.
It is often a private choice, and it is harder to notice if this has any downstream effect because ressources are deployed to clean up, as you've mentionned. I've started to prefer bus queues to point out antisocial elements. Who, when coming up to wait at a bus stop that has an obvious, clear, nonambiguous line of people queueing up for the bus, decides to ignore the queue entirely, without any mitigating factors (joining a friend being barely acceptable). There's sadly patterns in what kind of neighborhood and people ignore bus queues.
pigeonburger
6mo ago
Have you read The Toxoplasma Of Rage? Things everyone agree on don't get much attention, it's just the way our societies are wired.
pigeonburger
6mo ago
But can those alcoholics down a hundred bottles in a night?
A hundred bottles in a night, and a hundred men in a day, are extremes for both. But apparently André the Giant could drink that much yes.
pigeonburger
6mo ago
Indeed, at object level they tend to just be unfalsifiable claims against the other side, but I think at least it offers a credible rebuttal to the idea that conspiracies cannot exist past a certain scale.
What would distinguish a distributed conspiracy from a political coalition for me is methods and goals that the conspirants would not willingly disclose in the open. Without secret communications, coordination on those would be based on ideas that emerge naturally, that are downstream of memes shared by the distributed conspiracy. In a way this is like encryption, people with the correct key (sequence of memes) will decode the coordination instructions correctly. The left often accuses the right of this in the form of dogwhistles. If you want, for instance, to get widespread cheating in an election but don't want to say it out loud because that has consequences, you push very loudly memes that would justify cheating ("the other side will end democracy", for instance), so that without having to organize (at least not in large conspiracies), susceptible people will naturally wink, nod and act in support when they see hints that another person might be cheating in the direction they support.
pigeonburger
6mo ago
So glad to hear your little bun buns is doing well!
Thanks, we're glad too. She's back to being her usual sassy self.
The great part about the price system is that this is never true, but it's totally fine. Consumers are not aware of what is efficient use of food resources. Or resources in automotive services. Or... or... or... In fact, believe it or not, many people even disagree as to whether something is an efficient use of resources!
That is true as as for allocation of ressources "to" healthcare; many of my friends seem to think we're crazy for the amount we did pay to have our bunny cared for, but to us it was worth it. But I think the issue is that allocation of ressources "within" healthcare is the issue. We had a certain amount of care we could pay for in our bunny's case. It was difficult to get from the veterinary what was the best use of that amount.
That's what I fear with human medicine; imagine how doctors could guilt trip people into paying way more by implying they're heartless cheakskates for not being willing to pay for low-likelihood tests and interventions. I do think in that case I would really like the service of someone knowledgeable who could argue on my behalf with the doctor.
pigeonburger
6mo ago
A bit less than 2 months ago, our beloved pet bunny got life-threateningly sick. We took her to the veterinary hospital where she had to stay for 2 days. There is no insurance for bunnies here (we checked), so all the costs were paid out of pocket. The vets gave us an idea of the costs of specific tests, hospitalization, etc... so that was good.
The "ideal" of how to care for our bunny could have been ruinously expensive; surgeries, x-rays, etc... But one part of the process I did not enjoy is that the vet seemed reluctant to give advice as to what would be the best use of the money we could put aside for this. We could have easily blown over 5000$ or more on care if we had left her in their care as long as they thought was necessary, if we had done every test they wanted. Once it was clear to them that we were budget limited they were talking about how much it would cost to have her discharged and brought back if euthanasia becomes necessary, etc... Thankfully, our bunny is doing fine now, and I do think they did a good job taking care of her. And I don't think it's necessarily from a desire to extract money from us they were recommending expensive care, but because they don't like animals dying either.
Taking this experience of dealing with (veterinary) medical costs and bringing it to human care, what I feel would cause issues letting people take on the costs of medical care directly is that they are not aware of what is efficient use of ressources and doctors tend by their position to prefer to use unlimited ressources. And administrators are either detached from costs concerns (government administrators) or incentivised to minimise costs (insurance). What we'd need is hireable healthcare negociators who work solely for the patients, to maximise utility for ressources.
pigeonburger
6mo ago
Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument.
This is the part that sticks out as what's broken in this otherwise reasonable and smart-enough sounding person. "This is a complicated problem that I can't say I fully understand but the answer is obviously violence." He keeps using adverbs like "simply, frankly, clearly", to try and drag violence within the realm of reasonable answers to a problem that is resistant to any other solutions. Violence is a reasonable answer when you are absolutely certain that it is the only way to resolve an issue with more severe consequences than the damage caused by the violence itself, which is why it's such a bad answer to complicated societal problems. But by his admission it IS a complicated societal problem that he doesn't feel like he has a good enough grasp on to explain himself.
pigeonburger
6mo ago
We're getting close to it though. In a couple of years, when military kamikaze drones have become ubiquitous in all military armories (and thus can disappear from military armories), when the people with the knowledge to make them at home, from places like Ukraine and the ME, have spread everywhere, then I think we'll have a whole new thing to worry about.
pigeonburger
6mo ago
Yeah, the victim surviving and appearing on TV with injuries won't garner the assassin much sympathy.
Trump did put a stop to the Bush dynasty by not only beating Jeb, but humiliating him so hard there is no possibility of a comeback. After Trump has his moment, Cruz can come back. DeSantis can come back. Even Little Marco can come back. Jeb is done and will never be president, ever. Jeb is the supposed big guy in the prison yard that Trump made his bitch upon arriving to send a message.
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