ulyssessword
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User ID: 308
ulyssessword
1mo ago
To mix my metaphors, War is a switch, not a dial. If you have (justly) declared war, then the restrictions on lethal force are much looser. If you haven't, then the original standards hold. You don't get to judge them as 70% enemies and therefore only deserving of 30% of the protections of civil society.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
When a right-winger does it, they get denounced by everyone. When the left does, not so much.
Do you think you could find even 1/100th the support for your two examples (or any other ones you care to use) compared to crowdfunding for the ICE attackers or a community dedicated to "Free Luigi [Mangione]"? The would-be Trump assassin got lauded for his attempt, though his death put a damper on any attempt to rally support.
To be clear: the threshold I'm looking for is $360 in public fundraising from at least five people, or a 400 member community dedicated to them.
It's the difference between one crazy person (who happened to be right-wing), and a notable fraction of the left wing as a whole (who are rallying around one crazy person who happened to be left-wing).
ulyssessword
1mo ago
Here's my recommendation: Stop treating political actors as neutral service providers. Newspapers, nowadays, are not apolitical stewards of information for the benefit of the public.
How about the opposite: I'll loudly and conspicuously complain about how they aren't meeting the standards of neutral service providers. I can't think of a better way to convince people that newspapers, nowadays, are not apolitical stewards of information for the benefit of the public.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
If it's bad for one story, and it should be consistent for every story, then...
I, for one, would be happy if they got rid of their racially-biased capitalization. I can't even point to this story as the basis of my opinion, as I thought it was bullshit politicization from the first time I heard of it.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
I don't think that cartels can benefit from capitalism nearly as much as normal corporations can, and that limits their ability to exploit profitable opportunities. It's not like they can just issue bonds to spend money before they make it. Same with the stock market, investors, and everything else. They also face a more challenging labor market, and have important internal constraints on their decisions.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
There used to be a time where I thought newspapers would be forced to either do something like:
... Of course if it were a white assailant murdering a black victim, then it would be front-page headlines everywhere.” [sic]
or:
... Of course if it were a white assailant murdering a [B]lack victim, then it would be front-page headlines everywhere.”
Of course, there's no enforcement mechanism. Only putting direct quotes between quotation marks isn't a fundamental law of the universe, after all, and nobody cares about those standards of precision.
fakeEdit: and if they were just correcting grammar, then they should have added a comma after "Of course...", so it's not an evenhanded application of their standards.
See also the CBC, here: They omitted "...of Alberta..." from their quote of the referendum question because it flows better and they don't care about precision.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
They'd probably lose subscribers and influence quite quickly. It's not a popular opinion, to say the least.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
Let's say the US has X amount of specialized talent and thus they can only do Y amount of productivity with in a year.
How close are you to reaching Y? Is a person's contribution to X fixed at birth (or shortly after), or can it increase through training, education, and experience?
Your argument relies on the idea that X is both largely fixed among the existing population and that it's a relevant near-term constraint on industry, while I'm not sure either is true. Underemployment is rampant, with only 56% of college grads working at a job that needs any degree. Still no perfect candidates? Just hire someone 80% qualified and train them up the rest of the way. Can't handle the last 20% of the job having no competent people? Hire them earlier and train them up before it becomes a critical constraint. Can't plan ahead that far? Sucks to suck, git gud.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
That's probably about right for the application processes. What is it for spot checks, which would (presumably) happen to immigrants with illegal coworkers? Also, it doesn't have to end with deportation. Just fighting through bureaucracy another time is annoying enough to merit mention.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
From context, it's pretty clearly a guess. However, it lines up with manual data entry error rates for general tasks, so it's probably around correct.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
Huh, so what you're saying is that the Jews really did have it coming?
Lol, nope. But I did check.
Cults are marginalized, criminals are jailed, and pedophiles are excluded from some jobs. Unproductive workers are fired (or at least not promoted), unpleasant people don't get invited to parties, and flaky people don't get trusted with responsibilities. I'm guessing I would agree with the consensus 90% of the time, but that last 10% is very important.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
Also conveniently forgetting that people got deverified for badthink. That kind of put the nail in the coffin for the claims of "objective notability" for verified status.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
Ingroup you mean? Why would it?
"[X] is persecuted because it's bad" should be the default assumption, despite what a lifetime of cultural conditioning tells me. Are they correct when they claim that those views have no place in a well-ordered society?
I think they're wrong to look down on those views, but I had to examine the object level to reach that conclusion. A different group of people imposing fear about a different set of opinions might be right.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
I've put dozens of hours into Noita, but I still don't know how to resolve the tension in its game design: It both requires and punishes experimentation. If you find a mystery late in a run (whatever "late" happens to be for you, personally), then you're faced with a choice: Test it, and have a 50/50 chance of dying or learning something, or leave it alone forever. I ended up installing a resurrection mod to deal with it.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
Latest Windows 11 insanity:
Windows locks the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. An application puts some UI buttons at the bottom of its window. The app automatically resizes its window to hide the buttons behind the taskbar if you try to make it full size.
I wouldn't mind using Windows 11 if they made it a feature-complete and reliable operating system. I don't think that'll happen before they kill Windows 10.
(Fun (unverified) Fact: If you pay extra, you can get delayed access to the latest Windows features, because being on the general upgrade path is a good way to crash your computer.)
ulyssessword
1mo ago
See also the Irish baby stabbings from a few years ago: The suspect was not, as a matter of simple fact, a foreigner. He had naturalized from Algeria(?) several decades before.
Naturally, the news reported the first half but not the second.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
Cite one example of a provider being sued because a bill was higher than an estimate.
I'm 99% sure that I've had work dropped from my bills because they wanted to stick to their estimate more than they wanted to charge for their actual efforts. This could be due to simple integrity or good customer service, but it could also be a legal strategy to avoid liability.
Heck, even the risk of being sued unsuccessfully by an irate customer might outweigh the value they get from attracting customers like OP.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
Just found Sea Shanty remix of Nickelback's Rockstar, via here, via here.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
The thing that blew my mind when learning programming was that functions could be held in variables. Like this is a perfectly valid (if bad) chunk of code:
def multiply(A, B):
return A * B
def add(A, B):
return A + B
def doMath(operation, A, B):
return operation(A, B)
doMath(multiply, 3, 4)
I'd say it's time for us to join the 20th century, but apparently Git was first released in 2005.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
Not sure it it counts, but Losing My Religion (Major Scaled) comes to mind.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
ulyssessword
1mo ago
They are so much worse in combination.
- Leaving your passed out friend behind is terrible.
- Making baseless accusations that someone's a groping pervert is terrible.
- Leaving your passed-out friend behind with a pervert who was groping her???? No shit she cut ties.
They say that ice is incompressible, but it's only 1/20th as incompressible as steel (9 GPa vs. 200 GPa elastic modulus). I'm not sure how well it would work given that difference.
(The "elastic modulus" of air isn't really a meaningful concept, but if you ignore that then the right number would be 0.0001 GPa, or 100000x as compressible as ice.)
but you repeat yourself: The first sentence is against "don't ever declare war", while the second is against "act like you haven't declared war".
Of course, just civil wars happen.
The criteria you posted upthread (competent authority, chance of success, just cause, last resort) is as good as any other, but I don't think the specifics are that important. If a rational group of responsible, representative leaders decides that war is the best option, then I don't think that any checklist could fully predict my reaction.
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