Corvos
17hr ago
Everyone is aware of that, that's the point. When you are holding a deadly weapon and the other guy isn't, then "We respect your sovereignty and would never do that" isn't a threat, "I'll use this if I have to" is absolutely 100% a threat.
All true, but I'm a simple man. I liked the original Dead Space and I wanted to see what they could do with modern lighting systems. And to be fair they made non-graphical improvements as well: Kendra's character is much improved, and the weapons feel better too. I preferred the old zero-grav sections though.
I loved that bit! Very much 'we're saved!' and then the slow realisation that you've really, really fucked up. Plus it makes total sense to me that
Dead Space Remake. I'm a wuss so I play on easy - the scares are enough excitement for me already, I don't need to be constantly fretting about ammo or surviving by the skin of my teeth at the same time.
In general I've been re-discovering easy mode lately. I love Dark Souls and similar soulslikes, and got very into the 'if it weren't so hard to get to the next area, it wouldn't have nearly the same emotional weight' way of thinking about games. It's a good philosophy but especially for games that aren't as tight as Miyazaki-san's stuff, it can really suck the fun out of what's supposed to be an enjoyable experience.
For example I was regretting buying Pacific Drive until I bumped the difficulty way down. Once I was getting new upgrades and story almost every trip, I got much more immersed in the story and started really enjoying it. Of course it was over soon but 13h of fun is way better than 40h of pain.
showing far too much leg in 34F temperatures
You get this in the UK for both men and women: Geordie of the Antarctic. (Geordie means someone from Newcastle up north.)
I would hope that if a couple is committing to a monogamous relationship i.e. to only ever taking sexual pleasure from each other from now on, then both sides would work hard to make sure that the other is feeling satisfied, which maybe sometimes means at least trying things. Partly out of obligation, partly because it would make someone who they hopefully care about happy. For the woman maybe sometimes it means blowjobs, for the man maybe it means roleplaying Mr. Darcy or Poldark or something else they find hideously embarrassing. And one would hope that equally each side would respect when their partner really doesn't want to do something. But a pre-emptive 'we're never doing that and don't you ask me again' seems a poor way to treat a partner.
Or to put it another way, sure, porn gives people more ideas of how to give their partner pleasure, some of which will turn out to be good in real life and some won't. This sounds like broadly a good thing to me if approached with care and affection, and I don't see what this has to do with promiscuity outside the relationship.
I'm trying to tease out the difference between a powerful, confident country deliberately deciding not to exert control over its provinces in a formal manner vs. failing to keep them in line, so no it doesn't count.
The former I think is almost unique to Anglo countries (America historically, Canada historically?, maybe devolution in the UK) and rare within those. I'm looking for examples proving that theory wrong. If the theory is right then you cannot get to more intensive federalism by integrating other countries into the USA as per @FiveHourMarathon's proposal, unless it weakens America so much that federal government collapses.
EDIT: the main counterexample is probably Switzerland. GPT suggests also modern Germany (which doesn't sound right to me, plus their constitution was heavily influenced by America rather than arising from native proclivities) and Austria.
Corvos
2d ago
Ha! I wrote Avril, then reread @MadMonzer's comment and 'corrected' mine :P
Corvos
3d ago
I hope to start reading actual native level news articles, mining every word I need to to be able to comprehend the article.
Me again but how would you feel about doubling up on this? Maybe having a mini discussion group or swapping points on a Google Doc or something? I've been meaning to read the newspaper more (I tried reading Yomiuri a couple of times) and it would be great to have a buddy.
Corvos
3d ago
Re: scales, make sure you use something does a rolling average e.g. Happy Scales app. The measurements jump around day by day due to changes in water + feces etc. and the only time I ever lost significant weight it was by being laser-focused on the downward progress of the average even when there were big day-by-day spikes.
Corvos
3d ago
What odds Greenland as a satrapy of the USA?
I admit to being very amused by British newspapers saying sternly (paraphrased), "We stand against imperialism. The future of Greenland is a matter for Denmark to decide."
Corvos
3d ago
Nasal saline rinse. Flush out any secondary infection hiding in your tubes.
(Not sure you can do much about the chest cough though).
I watched a Sabrina Carpenter video (Espress) and then an Avril Lavigne video (Complicated), to see the contrast. The thing that really stood out to me was that in the Sabrina Carpenter videos men are either servants (holding her up, massaging her, doing her feet), eye candy, or threats (handcuffing her, putting her in a police car while she rolls her eyes) while the April Lavigne video is full of her having fun with her male friends.
I'm reminded of a comment made here a while back that men like female characters who have a close relationship with at least one man who is not their love interest. A father, a friend, a brother, whatever. It's a strong signal that they like at least some men for their own sake, and that they wouldn't be a complete bitch to you if you ever met them just because they don't find you hot.
I'm not sure how far to extrapolate or reverse this. Women often go for sausage-fest cast shows like Sherlock, or the Avengers, where there are no women and/or the main character is actively hostile to any female characters. Likewise men go for cute girls doing cute things and magical girl genres which have no men at all.
I see your line of thought, but federalism has only decreased in the last century of high immigration, moving towards machine politics at first (gibs for specific ethnic groups, major jobs assigned by ethnicity, corruption) and then towards straightforward centralising absolutism. I think that you would be gambling big to assume the pattern wouldn't repeat itself.
How many federal countries are there / have there been in history when the federal element had the ability to control the states but refused to do so? (So excluding e.g. the Holy Roman Empire where control just wasn't practical).
Sir Humphrey Appleby: A tiny mistake. The sort that anyone can make.
Hacker: A tiny mistake?! [...] Give me an example of a big mistake.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Letting people find out about it.
Corvos
4d ago
Basically what @Bartender_Venator said. Integrating foreign polities into your empire means more than a few extra senators hanging around the place.
Corvos
4d ago
Point taken, though these are fake numbers in any case and 'properly classified' is not something you can judge with any refinement. More broadly, if you could put in place a program that 'properly' classified 3m more people but required everybody to be whipped every morning, one might conclude it probably wasn't worth it. There are tradeoffs here.
Corvos
4d ago
Yes, but that only works in refined circles. It still makes people snigger in public so they changed it in the UK.
Corvos
4d ago
But you realise that this also means adding their voters and dealing with their opinions/needs, right? At least, unless America goes full-hog imperial.
Corvos
4d ago
You're not wrong, but that's natural IMO.
Your job is perhaps the thing that determines most about your life. What job you have is very very important to you in the short, medium and long terms. The outputs of other people's jobs are only important in an indirect and long term manner.
The argument in the example is broadly that grinding tests for 10+ years is a terrible way to determine merit and rewards parental investment / the capacity of the child to suffer / capacity of the parent to make them suffer almost as much as intelligence.
The arguments are twofold:
-
If it were possible to do a meritocratic sort that was say 95% accurate instead of today’s method being 98% accurate, but this method took 30 minutes instead of 15 years, wouldn’t it be a straightforward improvement from a utilitarian POV in terms of efficiency and reduced suffering?
-
Explicit meritocracy’s emphasis on grinding, explicit competition and credentialism does not seem to produce maximally good results. Britain performed better, was more agentic, produced more science and engineering through 1750-1950 when universities were the playgrounds of gentlemen (albeit with rigorous marking), we had a large theoretically idle class, and jobs were largely got through patronage and the old boys’ network. This was unfair to many people, yes, but potentially worked better for reasons like (a) there was more slack in the system and fewer resources wasted grinding for maximum-status occupations, (b) talented people were distributed more evenly throughout the system so eg you would have the head nurse in a hospital being about as intelligent as the head doctor because women weren’t allowed to become doctors, which is unfair to the woman in question but makes hospitals run a lot better, and (c) those at the top were somewhat less selected to be grinders and hustlers. It's a bit like the way that hobbyist stuff can be a lot higher quality before something gets popular and all the big companies enshittify it.
There are other arguments against modern meritocracy but those have more to do with whether it makes people happy rather than whether it makes the country perform better, and I figure you’re more interested in the latter.
EDIT:
This forum is very focused on a particular political left/right culture war. However, there are other, deeper culture wars running through society that I find a lot more fascinating.
Keen to hear more of your thoughts.
Corvos
6d ago
I was being descriptive. The fuller quote is:
“She’s already been out of school enough,” one of the girl’s attorneys, Matt Ory, told the board on Nov. 5. “She is a victim.
“She,” he repeated, “is a victim.”
Martin, the superintendent, countered: “Sometimes in life we can be both victims and perpetrators.”
But the board was swayed. One member, Henry Lafont, said: “There are a lot of things in that video that I don’t like. But I’m also trying to put into perspective what she went through all day.” They allowed her to return to campus immediately. Her first day back at school was Nov. 7, although she will remain on probation until Jan. 29.
Do you work some US-government-adjacent job that comes with speech obligations, to the extent you would even be allowed to disclose that? That would make a lot of things about my reality model click into place, given the number of times I have been frustrated with you arguing for the "party line" in the past.
This has been a working theory of mine for some years now. On domestic stuff @Dean is somewhat idiosyncratic, on foreign affairs he always sticks very very close to the party line.
Firstly, beating somebody up i.e. violently assaulting them is not equivalent to calling them a bitch, and I cannot take seriously a frame that considers otherwise.
Secondly, re: gendered solutions, please see my response to @hydroacetylene. If you are willing to apply your 'gendered solutions' fairly, then fair enough. If, however, you advocate for maximum harshness against men while chickening out whenever it is time to apply your 'gendered solutions' to women, then from the recipient's POV that is ultimately indistinguishable from straight-up hatred of men and I'm not going along with it.
Noblesse oblige.
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