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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   3984 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 19, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Do you think that the 3d place match should be abolished? We got a farce this year and it is additional humiliation ritual for teams that are already pissed off at the universe.

No, I found it oddly satisfying that England won third place in a goal bonanza match where Mbappé was the eventual Golden Boot winner and still that didn't mean France won the World Cup.

I don't want football (soccer) to end up like some boring American sport where points are artificially inflated and the entertainment consists of getting out your slide rule for esoteric calculations on who has the best average whatever scoring ratio to three decimal points, not from the "take a break every ten minutes so we can sell TV ads and you need fifteen specialised positions where someone might only play five minutes in a game because they're the designated 'kick the ball from this particular spot on the field, now go back to the bench' player" type of play that I've seen in American football (football) matches.

It got Mbappe the golden boot and it’s consistently one of the better games of the tournament. This year was a really good game for watching.

More importantly it deprived Messi of the golden boot, which in turn muted all the pundits who had been falling over themselves in their race to beatify him.

Is this not the primary reason to get rid of it? Those awards should go to the person who earned it NOT the person running up stats in an exhibition game.

To be fair to Messi, he had an amazing cross in the final, nearly scoring from the corner of the pitch. I'd never actually seen a football turn a right-angle in midair before.

No. I think we should do everything we can to preserve rituals in sport that honor all competition and fighting for every single spot, rather than the "Championship or Bust" mentality that has destroyed the NBA and is eating away at the NFL and MLB.

Oh man, I laughed so hard at the "this is why black people were cheering against the Argentinians" article I read online, because it was by some "who the heck are you?" writer whose entire expertise seemed to be that once upon a time he played in basketball. Tell me you've all heard of Etan (no "h", sic) Thomas, the famous ex-basketball player? 😁

My admittedly unkind reaction was "you're just salty that globally even a yak herder up a Mongolian mountain knows who Messi is, while in the USA itself does anyone outside your own family know you used to play professional sports?"

That's one thing I really hate about what the playoff is doing to college football. As bad as the BCS system was, it meant that an awful lot of teams who weren’t the best could end a season on a massive high note.

This year's was wonderful, and not just because England won. We got a great, flowing game without the pressure, we got to see some beautiful goals, the story of the match (4 down, recovered, ended 6-4). Way better than England vs. Argentina or Spain vs. Argentina.

(Although I also think Argentina just play in a way that doesn't fit the spirit of the game.)

What are your views on Kimi? How seriously should we take benchmark claims, eg how rig-proof are the benchmark criteria which decide the performance comparisons of AI models?

I haven't been able to access the models on their free plan, which means I have no opinion. I've heard people I respect say it's a bit benchmark-maxxed, but the fuck would I know myself?

All I can say is that I don't see a particular use case for it. I have paid plans for ChatGPT and Max for Claude. Those have the bleeding edge models, and I always use the best I can get away with it. I rarely (but not never) need token-churning agentic work, where $/task is a strong constraint. I technically retain access to Gemini 3.1 Pro, but it is a sad model, and I'm not going to touch the family till they fix things with 3.5 Pro.

Chinese models are, in general, not very useful for me. I don't need them. I used R1 etc back when they did something useful for me, and I haven't been tempted back in the last half year.

A soccer thought. I think it’s fair to say soccer is an inferior sport and us Americans are correct to not play it. However since it’s an inferior sports that’s also why you can have a World Cup.

Tiny nations could not put up a fight in America’s sports even if they played them at the same rate. You need to be a rich country to compete in American sports. For American football it’s probably only America that is richest enough to play it. It requires a huge amount of resources and technology to play at the highest levels. Even if the European powers played American football at the same rates I have my doubts they could create a team that’s competitive with a NFL team and we have 30 of them.

Baseball is showing some ability to create a few competitive national teams but baseball can’t be played internationally because of how much we’ve perfected pitching to the point that a human arm has limits on how many pitches it can throw a year. Elite arms can handle about 150 innings per year so there is basically no ability to use them for an offseason tournament.

And since Soccer is a low event sports it means that inferior teams can actually pull out ties or wins against power house teams with the right luck.

This is just cope. Polo is a more expensive sport to play by any standard and is also more involved and I'd wager, a superior gentleman's sport compared to the hooligan sport that gridiron football is. And yet the US is nowhere to be seen in the polo rankings and would get bodied by multiple developing countries were a match between national teams to be held.

Baseball is showing some ability to create a few competitive national teams but baseball can’t be played internationally because of how much we’ve perfected pitching to the point that a human arm has limits on how many pitches it can throw a year. Elite arms can handle about 150 innings per year so there is basically no ability to use them for an offseason tournament.

Baseball is undoubtedly an inferior sport to cricket, and the US national cricket team I guess would likely lose to Zimbabwe. Perhaps even Hong Kong.

I thought baseball was just rounders (a girls' school sport where I come from) with some frills?

Polo is a fantastic sport that should get more press and coverage. It's incredibly entertaining, more effectively co-ed than any more legitimate sporting event, it has the crash-danger of NASCAR and the player-hotness of Italian soccer.

The patron (team owner) often plays on the team itself, which is achieved by the polo equivalent of a salary cap: the handicap system, by which players are rated in goal-value from -1 to 10, and then the team has a budget of handicaps it can spend. As a result, if a team has one of the Argentine star 10 handicaps on the team, you need to balance it by grabbing somebody who sucks with a 1 handicap. So you get a 55 year old investment banker trying to play a real professional sport on a team with real professionals.

Plus, in America at least, the tickets cost almost nothing and they encourage you to tailgate right on the side of the field! In Newport, $150 gets you 20 people, a tent set up for you, and a place to park your truck. Bring your own food, and the drinks there are strong and delicious and reasonably priced.

the US national cricket team I guess would likely lose to Zimbabwe. Perhaps even Hong Kong.

It made minor news a couple years ago (2024) when the US team beat Pakistan (generally one of the top teams). Of course, the usual suspects noted that most of the team was first or second generation South Asian immigrants.

Ah, that was an extremely embarassing thing and a one off black mark to be forgotten. Pakistan are known for being mercurial, one day they make easy pickings of the world champions and then a week later look like they're all on some drug and lose to a much worse team.

So last year I was at a town meeting for my little burgh. And the audience is full of Indians, like twenty or thirty Indian guys of all ages, when the typical public audience of people not involved is like me and two boomers. And I'm thinking, oh, there must be a motel or a gas station up for a zoning exception and his friends came in to support him. But they work through the agenda and the Indians don't stand up for anything. And I start thinking, oh no, they're all here together for the courtesy of the floor at the end, something bad must have happened, I bet something racist must have occurred and they're here to complain about it.

And the end of the meeting comes and the public comment, and sure enough their spokesman gets up and walks to the podium, and says: "We are all here as part of the [Region of PA] Cricket Club, and we are here to ask for a cricket field to be built in one of [municipality's] parks for the use of all the cricket players in [Region] who currently have to travel to New Jersey to play on a proper cricket field."

Inferior to what? Team sports do not excite me usually, especially very long team sports (I barely have patience for basketball, anything longer is a nope, maybe highlights only). But I assume by "American sports" you mean egghand, which Americans insist to calling "football" to piss off Europeans (a noble goal, but doesn't make it make sense) and baseball? The latter is so boring that it should come with a warning label "may cause prolonged coma, do not attempt without medical supervision", while the former is more exciting, to the point it looks like a bar brawl but without the fun parts like alcohol and singing. Of these three, football (which Americans in line with the Good Ole England tradition long abandoned by the English call "soccer") is the most entertaining, and this is very well confirmed by the experience. Games like baseball or rugby exist everywhere, and they have some popularity, but you would find orders of magnitude more kids (or amateur adults) playing football than any of them. The market has passed its verdict.

I don’t believe the market has passed its verdict. There is a first mover advantage in sports and soccer spread first so a lot of its popularity is because people grew up with soccer.

But part of my argument for soccer being inferior would still fit in under your market test. Other countries are in fact poorer than America and soccer is cheaper to play and be internationally competitive than Americas leading sports. You can reasonably say soccer is more popular elsewhere because they are poorer.

There is a first mover advantage in sports and soccer spread first

Modern football rules were finalized in mid-19th century. Rugby rules were finalized at the same time. Baseball became popular in US at the same time. There was no "first". Of course, all of those games had historical precursors reaching into the ancient times, but whatever criteria do you use, it is not possible to establish one was "first".

Other countries are in fact poorer than America

Assuming they are (though that would be highly dependent on definition of "poorer" - by GDP per capita both Norway and Switzerland beat the US) I am not sure what this has to do with anything. Rugby is not much cheaper to play than football (if you don't count medical bills of course).

You can reasonably say soccer is more popular elsewhere because they are poorer.

No, not reasonably, Vast majority of players do not play it as high-stakes competition, any they very well can afford the basic equipment and training, They just don't seem to want to. Netherlands may be slightly below US by the GDP per capita, but it doesn't mean they can't afford a baseball bat or an egg-shaped ball. So no, it's not popular because they don't want to play it, not because they can't afford to.

Modern football rules were finalized in mid-19th century. Rugby rules were finalized at the same time. Baseball became popular in US at the same time. There was no "first". Of course, all of those games had historical precursors reaching into the ancient times, but whatever criteria do you use, it is not possible to establish one was "first".

Cricket was formalised almost a century before any of the foot ball or base ball games, with the first printed law book appearing in 1755 and the MCC being founded in 1787. So it is clear which one was first, and it hasn't exactly won.

Actually soccer, rugby, and cricket spread out from England at about the same time, but soccer got the widest adoption and displaced the others, in both rich and poor countries alike. Rugby and its descendants(like American and Canadian football, or Australian rules football) are dominant in most anglosphere colonies, but not in Britain itself.

I think it's nice that the USA has its own little sports leagues where they can play with themselves and proudly announce they are World Champions in horseshoe pitching.

Everyone should have a hobby!

What's your question? Other than 'who will chomp down on my terrible bait'?

You may have noticed we had a soccer tournament that ended yesterday. So a lot of people on the internet - myself included - have been thinking about soccer versus American Sports.

So it’s not bait. It’s just me thinking on the subject. And it’s basically that soccer is in fact an inferior sport but it’s weaknesses are also why you can have an international tournament.

I mean, he's not wrong on soccer's inferiority...

But the real best sport that cannot become a real world cup sports because it's too advanced is hockey, and even then, there's 3 countries that can field an all-star team, and a few more that can field at least an NHL-level team, if not an all-star one.

Soccer is an awesome sport. It has rules that are simple enough that everyone can understand them- but at the same time, they don't let everyone get away with murder. It's not highly scripted. It isn't a sport that rewards sheer mass over athleticism. Anyone except the wheelchair bound can play, anywhere, anytime. It's the world's sport for a reason, it beat out rugby and cricket for a reason.

Tiny nations could not put up a fight in America’s sports even if they played them at the same rate.

Tiny nations do, however, do this. The rugby powers could field good American Football teams if they wanted to, probably quite quickly. Plenty of small european countries already field good basketball teams- Serbia actually pushed the US to the brink for olympic gold. And Latin American baseball players are extremely common.

Soccer is an awesome sport. It has rules that are simple enough that everyone can understand them- but at the same time, they don't let everyone get away with murder.

Except offsides, which will never be understood or make sense.

So why does nobody else care for American Football? Are the other nations so inferior that they don't even see its greatness?

(Is American exceptionalism going the way of Japan now, from "we are so great everyone wants to be us" to "we are so great nobody gets us"?)

I think it would fair to say that other countries don’t play American Football because they can’t afford to so I guess that could be considered as them being inferior.

Soccer is a solid middle income country game. It’s why Argentina can be very good. France had the most players in the World Cup and it’s largely because Africa appears to be too poor to train their players domestically.

What nationalities are the coaches? It could also be a coaching issue.

I think it would fair to say that other countries don’t play American Football because they can’t afford to so I guess that could be considered as them being inferior.

I am at least curious to see what happens with the inclusion of Olympic (flag) football for 2028. One of the benefits of being host country is influence over choosing demonstration sports -- baseball/softball is also coming back like it did in Tokyo. It looks like the NFL (and CFL) will allow their athletes to play in the games, but of course flag is a very different game: unclear if NFL players would dominate like the NBA Dream Team. IMO it is a variant more likely to sell as a viable sport internationally. It looks like cricket, squash, and lacrosse will also make an appearance, but breakdancing isn't coming back.

There are lots of countries that are wealthy enough to play American Football- but soccer got to Africa from France, not the other way around.

I think arguably Europe is too poor to compete in football. And it’s not just a pure GDP. You probably do need an entire region dominated by the sport let’s call it 50 million people minimally to start to have filters big enough to have professional leagues (college football is probably fair to call professional). To play top level football you may need to have integrated black populations for for wide receiver, cb, and rb positions. It’s the one area where diversity is our strength makes some sense.

And then you need the more direct wealth of being able to pay for 20 coaches per side since you need a lot of coaches because there are 4 types of players (throwers, fast guys, big guys, kickers) plus guys who are mixtures. Sporting equipment is expensive for the game. You likely need emergency medicine to a greater extent.

The counter on why some countries play certain sports is basically a network effect argument. It’s more fun to play games that a lot of other people play so nations tend to keep playing the same games even if its sub-optimal.

The American mind wants to think that it’s our black athletes that would take over soccer because of superior fast twitch muscles, but Kickers and punters are like 98% white and Internationally soccers best players are at a minimum half white.

There are more than a few European nations where rugby is reasonably popular, no? Why would American football be that different? And it already fills the "big guys colliding into each other" niche of team sports for a lot of folks, lessening the chances of American football being adopted in a major way.

American football is ludicrously more expensive and has more specialized players. But typically rugby(and Canadian football) players find more success slotting into American football teams than the reverse, and I struggle to believe that high income countries can’t afford to build NFL teams.

But the other thing to point out is that the NFL is not, primarily, a sporting organization, it’s an entertainment platform. A limited number of teams isn’t going to expand, because the NFL’s success formula is celebrities+tabloid fodder+a big show that’s easy to televise- and thats a lot harder to replicate. Hardcore sports fans in the US are pivoting away from the NFL and towards things like hockey and soccer(college football is also huge, but it’s a class/cultural phenomenon).

I think what really makes American Football expensive is a need to have multiple development platforms for training specialized position groups. You need to be rich, big population, and potentially even diverse. American Samoa and Hawaii can produce some interesting players likely due to some genetics that are good for American football but could they produce a full team. I’m not sure they could produce a higher end QB or kicker which would leave flaws on their roster.

American football is expensive but it’s within the realm of what Western Europe could afford- after all it took off in America when we were a lot poorer than they are now. Could Europeans fill out a full team? Probably, a number of those countries are very competitive across a range of different sports.

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Tua, for all his flaws and failures on the biggest stage, is pretty much a disproof that Samoans can't produce a QB. He might not have been able to stick around as a top-10 QB, but he played at the highest levels and lead the league in yards one season.

Ditto your theory that HBD dictates black players are necessary for RB/WR/CB, where some of the best players of the past decade are McCaffrey, Kupp, and Dejean.

It's not really American football vs soccer. The reality is that, if you haven't grown up watching either rugby or American football, and then you were exposed to both, you'd never choose the latter as a viewing experience. The rest of the world has their own version of American football, but more free-flowing, more naturally physical, and less advertisercucked. Even the Japanese play rugby.

Even Rugby Union is the superior sport to gridiron football (all variants).

What do you mean by "even"? Rugby Union is a fantastic sport.

Personally I prefer League (to watch, wouldn't want to personally play either) but yes I'd agree Rugby Union is still a very good sport to watch.

The Count hails from one of the few British colonies where rugby never took off. (Canadian rugby evolved into a game which is more like American football). So I expect he is comparing it unfavourably to cricket and (field) hockey.

If he is advocating Rugby League as the superior game, I will be surprised as he appears to be neither a chippy northerner nor an antipodean. I do think League would be a better gateway drug for converting gridiron fans to following a real sport.

Interestingly, a lot of the spread of Rugby Union beyond the Commonwealth is driven by a great many cultures having a traditional sport involving trying to advance a held "ball" over the try line while the opposition try to physically take it from you, and World Rugby is good at finding them and saying "this is the international version of the sport you are already playing - why don't you adjust your tactics to our rules so you can compete internationally".

League is the better sport to watch, as in union so much of the action happens underfoot.

Uh, isn’t non-commonwealth rugby Union mostly in countries with very heavy British influence to begin with?

American Football is a very different sport. This is important to the appeal! In my mind Rugby is just a shittier version of soccer, that's reductive but it is true that sports like Hockey, Rugby and Soccer scratch similar itches with free flowing gameplay as an example feature. Tennis, Golf, American Football - these are all very different experiences.

An example of what this means practically - Football is chess, in the sense that the pieces have abilities but really it's all about the person moving the pieces (the coach) making choices. Football is a coaching battle and a roster construction battle. Yes your coach and roster matters in the other team sports but football is a bunch of different players basically playing an entirely different game (on the level of the difference between a goalkeeper and everyone else) but for every different position on the field.

It's crazy intricate and complicated.

As much as I want to call soccer an inferior sport which I believe is true; I also like that it exists. And that it slot in somewhere around Sport 4 or 5 in America.

It has two greats features. The endurance test of soccer and players actually becoming tired is kind of cool. And while I think being a feet only sport is inferior since the upper body is a significant component of fitness that also allows it to select for athletes without the same emphasis on pure physical size.

The two are related. Almost every Big Guy soccer player is perennially injured - the torque that big muscles or even a big frame puts on your joints really adds up over the levels of sustained work that a soccer player's body is expected to put in just to be competitive. The only exception is the old-fashioned big striker who hangs out up front and doesn't run all that much except to try and score a goal, and those are only fielded by low-ranked teams.

I find them both beautiful, but for different ways!

I suppose so. Though there's a lot of coaching and player specialization involved in other sports, it's just the most extreme in American football because there isn't the need for players to fill other roles (even in cricket, you occasionally get the equivalent of your big guy needing to kick a field goal). Do you feel that the emphasis in ultra-specializing players physically is good or bad for that chess-style of watching?

Personally, I simply cannot understand the appeal of a sport where you sit around watching largely unimportant nonsense for almost all the time in the hope of catching 30 seconds of action - I already have my girlfriend for that.

Football is the most war simulator sport or in modern terms - Football is like Fire Emblem.

It's turn based. You go and then they go. Your units perform an action their units defend against that action. Your units have stamina, you rotate them throughout the game, some hero units need to be in for the whole game.

Understanding your units and the strategies that work well for them (and how they relate to the enemy units and their strategies) is critical.

Football more than most sports (with perhaps the exception of pitching in baseball) requires strategy, tactics, and "logistics" - roster building is fair and open (because of the salary cap) and unit selection and resource management is critical because even a dozen games at the tempo of one per week is too much for most human bodies. Basketball load management is trivial in comparison.

This complexity really rewards high level fan engagement, I know a guy who got a summer job out of emailing an essay on a bad game plan to one of the major NFL teams.

On the other hand without the higher level of knowledge it's pretty enjoyable, most partners I've had in my lifetime who are sports avoidant have gotten more into American Football - the attack and then defend structure makes it more understandable than a lot of Soccer for instance. I love watching the gradual grinding down of a defense or Spain midfield control but it isn't as enjoyable to casuals.

As you note the action is limited to a short span, but you know exactly when that span is, leaving the rest of the time for celebration, drinking, and chitchat. It's a much better on the background at a party sport, you can easily miss the only true action of a soccer game if you piss for thirty seconds.

Interesting, in my experience watching American football I'm basically unable to tell when the action will resume in a given space of milling around. I assume you pick that up fairly quickly.

In my experience, women go for soccer very quickly, but they only remember the good-looking players (I have an American friend who still occasionally asks about Olivier Giroud) or the villains of a given team. It's easier for sports-agnostic women to experience sports as personal drama between men - see also the explosion of F1 interest.

I think the connection to baseball is a meaningful one, even if cricket is probably closer than baseball to the abstract idea of American football you're portraying. American sports are, generally, optimized for ultra-intense fan engagement with lots of statistics, whereas old-world sports tend more towards "may the best man win, old chap" with relatively less structure around that. Personally, I sort of appreciate that the stats wonks in soccer aren't really that useful, but it also means that there's very little to actually think about beyond watching the games and scouting transfers. Tactics are incredibly important to a team, but you've discussed them to death by Monday.

I can see the Fire Emblem metaphor, though I think the "war simulator" thing has been tortured to death (I could also give a spiel on how soccer and rugby are closer to small-unit infantry tactics - let alone that soccer fans engage in much closer activities to war than any professional athlete...) and we should accept that the war-related psychological inheritances that sport activates in us have almost nothing to do with what happens on the pitch.

Yeah you get the tempo pretty quickly (and you have an actual play clock that tells you when you have to go by).

You'd think so but the major lesson from the World Cup was that bitches over here love Haaland (because he's goofy). America football players offer more of a variety of good looking men (because each position requires a different body type) and the outfits show off the gents butts more. Both have sex appeal lol.

I love Soccer's evasion of stats and rules loose nature. I also love American sports nitty gritty and optimizable nature. Just as I suggest to Americans to enjoy the looseness of Soccer I think Football also has some value for things in the other direction.

So it's interesting, I think American Football most resembles a war simulator, European Football most resembles an actual fight. The simulator makes some things clear and explicit. Things have to happen, ambiguity is artificially reduced. People take turns slugging each other in the face. In contrast you have a free flowing game where nobody wants to get punched in the face, you push and pull, ebb and flow until you can safely strike without cost - or something slips up and things happen quickly. Things are rarely clear. Sometimes it just ends when it ends vs. goes on forever etc etc.

I bring this up not to explain which most resembles the territory, but point to which map is on display. You can enjoy both stylized maps without ever having seen the territory.

Even the Japanese play rugby.

When I last visited Japan I took some pictures out of a Shinkansen of kids playing in a field, and only later realized they were playing American Football from the ball and formations (the train was moving too fast to tell at the time). The Internet tells me it is played there at least a bit, and there is even a professional league. I was surprised, but it's also possible I found the local American expat school.

I think it’s fair to say soccer is an inferior sport

I'll bite: how're you defining "inferior"?

I think I’ve seen three argument for why it’s inferior.

  1. The better team should win the game more consistently. I saw some data today that soccer has the lowest % chance of favored team winning the game. Upsets do make sports more enjoyable but in soccer the outcome is too heavily on random luck versus ability. You also see this with like Cape Verde being able to draw powerhouse teams which shouldn’t happen in a better game.

  2. The game doesn’t utilize the human upper body. A good game some how incorporates an athletes upper body. It’s literally half the human body.

  3. All sports some how mimic war. Soccer has the least application to war of any sport. We don’t have any weapons that involve kicking stuff. This is sort of similar to not using the upper body. But in war we throw stones, spears, arrows, etc which most other sports mimic in some way. War had a lot of hand to hand combat.

I agree. The perfect sport is one where both teams show up to the pitch, the computer decides who is better, and the victory is awarded to the superior team. You don't even need to get your cleats dirty.

I get your sarcasm but in sports there is a line between matchup decided between “random number generator” and “better team wins”. The ideal game has a balance between the two. Soccer I think is probably a little closer to “random number generator” chooses winner. I feel like Spain absolutely dominated that game and it was almost a tie. That’s not a good outcome.

In fairness, Spain had 12 goals blocked, which only happened because Argentina has the best keeper in the world.

In fairness too Spain did not shoot well. They had a lot of shots but I didn’t record Martinez making a great save. It felt like all the shots were right at him. But in general what’s the conversion rate from shot to goal - 15%? Which is an 11% chance the game draws. Maybe that’s too high?

Hockey and baseball have a similar issue and they deal with it by playing 7 game series.

And yet, after drawing with Cape Verde, Spain won the tournament, holding the world champions to a single shot. The nature of football is that it evens out over the course of a campaign, without being boringly predictable. (Also, with regard to your second point, football players use their upper bodies a ton when competing for the ball - to keep balance, hold space, know where the other player is, control their movements, etc. You don't notice it, because it only becomes really obvious to a new viewer when it turns into a foul. There's a reason the players don't look like cyclists).

Come to think of it, there's something somewhat anti-humanist about soccer's no hands rule. Being able to accurately throw things is kind of humanity's whole thing (beyond language/complex social structure). If we were a video game class, it would be our special racial skill. Kicking is beta prey animal shit.

(Soccer fans, please note this is tongue-in-cheek. I've enjoyed watching the world cup. I like your game)

If we were a video game class, it would be our special racial skill.

Not IQ?!!?!? What?!?!?? Or communication?!?!?!? Throwing things? Really?

I don't want to downplay how OP we are at throwing things but I'm not typing this comment on a thrown projectile lol

Imagine a video game where there are multiple sentient species, like a space opera.

In a space opera I'm really hoping we're leveraging our IQ and coordination abilities, not rock throwing at their laseguns

In a space opera everyone is presumably smart enough to have achieved interstellar spaceflight. And coordination? Humanity has famously never been united under a single government. If all other aliens come from "planets of hats", as is tradition, it will be hard to explain how humans are better at coordination than them.

There's other ways in which sports can suck though.

  1. Players do things that barely relate to one another. This is the reason Quiddich in Harry Potter is a stupid idea from someone who probably doesn't understand sports as a concept. But baseball also does it; the pitcher, the batter, the basemen, the fielders do things that outside of the direct level of ball itself, barely have anything to do with one another. Sure, the pitcher is is in direct opposition to the batter, but how does the pitcher affect the fielders?

  2. The sport is so optimized that large parts of the intended spectacle have become irrelevant. I don't know much about basketball but from what I hear people saying, that's its state now.

  3. Having so many players that are focussed on only one physical aspect because that's the only thing that's asked of them. Baseball and american football do that. In american football, you got your QB that's usually fairly well rounded, then you get a mix of big mofos and sprightly gazelles. In baseball it seems at this point all that people care about is pitchers (and star batters; I know, they play a position on defense, but that's just to keep them busy).

(3) is why I think NFL is the game of games. Sports are basically practicing war. Football is most like modern combined warfare where completely different weapons and systems need to work together to accomplish a goal and no one system can be as powerful as combining different systems working together.

Football has a lot of specialization that can fit the elites of different body types.

A country in war would not be good at war if they were really good at making tanks but didn’t know how to make a plane. Similar a country really good at producing fast gazelle running people but bad at producing big strong guys would lose to a country that can produce gazelles and strong guys.

Sure, the pitcher is is in direct opposition to the batter, but how does the pitcher affect the fielders?

By choosing his pitches to the batter in an attempt to get the batter to hit in such a way that it's easier to field or will lead to a double play.

This is the reason Quiddich in Harry Potter is a stupid idea from someone who probably doesn't understand sports as a concept.

I recall that JKR intended the snitch as a satire of this exact problem with penalties in Soccer, which have such outsize impacts on the game that you can play the entire game and have it all be irrelevant because of a single play.

And then people unfamiliar with sports tried to make quidditch real, giving ammunition to ‘JKR made a fictional sport, not a real one’.

College Quidditch teams are just the latest in a long line of "upper class white kids invent a new sport because they like playing sports but aren't very good at the existing ones." This is essentially the entire history of most modern organized sport, actually. Soccer, college football, marquess of quensbury boxing rules, BJJ, Rugby, marathon running. All originate in their modern form in the search by upper class white kids for an athletic outlet that isn't already dominated by the lower classes.

If they aren’t good at playing sports I don’t believe it’s because upper class kids are worse at playing sports than lower class kids. But you have a lot more lower class kids so even if the lower class on average produces half as many great athletes per capita their share numbers mean they will dominate.

I think it’s likely true that on average upper class kids are taller than lower class kids and intellect does matter more than people like to admit in sports so upper class kids should be producing at a higher % athletes.

But true elite athletes are still a small % of elites that you would still want to create new games you can be the best at.

It's not that upper class kids are, on an individual basis, bad at sports, that's neither necessary nor sufficient for the argument.

It's that people recognize, implicitly, the various advantages from playing sports, but individual kids aren't all good enough to play at a high level. Playing sports in an academic setting is good, has numerous social and physical and credentialist benefits. It's good for your body, your mind, your ego, your social life. But if you can't make the team in high school or college, you often don't even get to play, and even if you do play casually you're strictly inferior to the players on the varsity squad.

College quidditch (and rock climbing and historically lacrosse and ultimate frisbee etc...) is the lindy form of college athletics: a bunch of students forming a club and creating rules to hang out and play sports, and eventually organizing games against other schools until it builds enough to be a real tournament sport.

It's finding an outlet to express your athleticism when the ordinary forms of athletics that already exist are closed to you.

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This seems off. Both association football and rugby come from an attempt to write down the rules of the folk "football" games, which were played by boys and young men of all classes, to support organised inter-school play, and the The Marquess of Queensbury is obviously trying to do the same thing for a different pre-existing sport.

Marathon running was invented by a French academic in order to provide an on-theme marquee event for the first modern Olympics.

Both association football and rugby come from an attempt to write down the rules of the folk "football" games, which were played by boys and young men of all classes,

All the forms of football (Association, Rugby, Gridiron) were originally called "football" because they were played on foot rather than because you kick the ball. ((Hence the stupidity of the "handegg" sneer))

Prior to the emergence and dominance of the various Footballs, when we talked about sport and sportsmanship, we were largely talking about aristocratic pastimes: horses, hunting, hunting on horses. Football was played on foot, as opposed to the Sport of Kings, Polo. Horse sports require both a lot of money, for the horses, and access to a lot of land. They're unavailable to the urban professional class.

The urban professional classes had a rising sense of their own importance and wanted to demonstrate their athleticism, but they didn't have horse-and-land money, they needed something accessible. This shows us the contrast that they were part of building: the upper class students at British boarding schools or American colleges were upper class, but not Aristocrats, they weren't as capable of participating in the existing cultures of sportsmanship at the time, which were oriented around horsemanship and hunting. So they elevated these townsfolk games, codified them, and made them into something socially valuable in which they could participate.

For Soccer in America, the same dynamic actually recurs in the 90s, when Soccer emerges in America as an athletic alternative to the dominance of football and basketball. The "Soccer-mom" term of the 90s didn't just refer to a mom, it referred to a suburban upper-middle class white mom. Why did her kid play soccer and not football or basketball? Football was too violent, basketball too "urban," (I mean everyone knows white men can't jump). Soccer emerged as a youth sports alternative that was less violent, classier, more European, but most importantly it was just a sport that poor kids and black kids didn't play. This is reflected in the fan dynamic, being a fan of European soccer leagues has long been a blue-tribe coded kind of sports fandom, a sports hipsterdom that allowed not just the players but the fans could sneer at American sports. This dynamic is how we wound up with the "pay-to-play" model that everyone involved with American Soccer has been kvetching about since the World Cup, but people don't understand how it came to be.

Marathon running, long distance running, jogging, are all popular in America primarily as and because they are upper-middle class pastimes. It's got huge advantages as a status-class marker: no contact, solo, primarily about discipline and determination rather than talent, historically finishing is the primary status symbol rather than winning. No large law firm or investment bank lacks a Marathon-Guy since the jogging craze of the 80s; while historically few law firms have a powerlifter or a wrestler (though Crossfit and BJJ might have changed this by now). You can't walk through an office in Boston leading up to April and not hear about someone training for the Marathon, I've never walked through a law firm in Boston and heard about partners training for the Mass state USAPL. You can see this dynamic in long distance running continue as the popular distances have extended, ultramarathons are the new marathons, because the ultras are still competitive for upper-class white boys with discipline and character, rather than the province of professional Kenyans. Finishing an ultra is still worth more than comparing times because so few people run them at all. Sport exists, is popularized by upper-middle class whites, comes to be dominated by other groups as the prestige of the event grows, upper-middle class whites move on to a new sport to enjoy as a pastime.

Jogging craze among yuppies => NYC and Boston Marathons become prestige events => Kenyans come to dominate the major marathons because prestige means monetary reward => yuppies start talking about ultramarathons.

White kids at old Ivy League schools invent modern football(s) as an interscholastic pastime => football becomes a national professional sport with teams at every high school and a path to riches => poor kids dominate the sport because they see it as a path to scholarships and money => white kids at old ivy league schools discover Soccer, Lacrosse, etc and develop those into interscholastic pastimes

This is too long already, so I'll just cede that the Marquess of Queensbury was a slightly different dynamic and I'm a little wrong on that one.

College quidditch is also notable for being ridiculous and inane as a sport. They run around with brooms held between their legs, even.

Like ultimate frisbee is not that.

Yes but the inanity is what keeps athletic kids who can play a different sport out of it. It's similar to the comment I've seen that Juggalo culture is one of the last real subcultures remaining because it is so off-putting that it is difficult for the Sociopaths to push out the Geeks and the MOPs aren't interested.

Unfortunately the readers seemed not to notice, tried to implement it as literally as possible, and the grouching comes from HPMOR!Harry and his big flashing BUY A CLOCK sign.

In American football, you've got your quarterback that's usually fairly well rounded, then you get a mix of big mofos and sprightly gazelles.

Compare the old system of one-platoon/ironman football, under which substitutions were strictly limited and therefore all players had to be competent both on offense and on defense. Presumably, the replacement of this system with unlimited substitution and two or three totally separate platoons of players has contributed to the specialization of players in the modern day.

It's quite unclear how bat and racket sports mimic war, or why we should care either way.

Range weapons. The ability to control a projectile and maximize its speed to kill your enemy.

The purpose of sports is to practice war.

I'm not aware of any range weapons which work on projectiles thrown at you by the enemy. In fact, I'm not aware of any range weapons that are used with bat or racket like implements at all. Perhaps you can enlighten me.

The purpose of sports is to practice war.

Citation, uh, needed.

The fact that the team with the best stats can easily lose in soccer makes it more similar to war.

That's actually not true- the handful of sports whose ancestors were clearly documented functioned as a substitution for war. A lacrosse match substituted for a battle.

You also see this with like Cape Verde being able to draw powerhouse teams which shouldn’t happen in a better game.

If it were "too much luck in football compared to other sports" then they wouldn't be able to do it every damn game. Cape Verde fielded a good team, and their results reflect that.

Also, there just aren't sports where a single match selects the best team from two world-class teams with a reasonable degree of reliability. Pro baseball and basketball both use multi-game series in their playoffs, and the best-of-1 single-elimination format of the NCAA basketball playoffs produces so many upsets that you call it "March Madness".

All sports some how mimic war. Soccer has the least application to war of any sport.

You clearly haven't met European football fans.

There is a critical flaw that competitive games need to avoid: a competitor or team purposefully running out the clock rather than trying to play. Such as passing the ball back and forth with no serious attempt to advance or a combat sport in which one person constantly disengages and retreats. Most sports have rules contrived to prevent this boring lack of play. Combat sports have scoring penalizing "timidity" and allowing referees to stop the fight and forfeit someone who consistently refuses to engage. But the refs don't have to since no one would do that knowing the consequences.

Soccer lacks such wise game rules and reaps the expected outcome. It is a poorly designed game that allows and enables this sort of bad gameplay. You are ahead or tied and can't accept risking a loss due to how the tournament is structured? Then burn time passing the ball back and forth. Spend half an hour doing effectively nothing. Fans and interesting gameplay be damned.

Playing that way is a gamble though because you're surrendering the initiative to the other team. If you're unwilling to press your advantage they can bring their defenders forward to increase the pressure with little risk of an effective counterattack, use the extra men to more easily dispossess you and then take their time probing for an opening because you're too afraid to proactively tackle them, and any clearances immediately fall back into their possession to repeat the process. That leads to a barrage of goal attempts, and the longer that continues the likelier it is that one succeeds. It's frustrating for supporters of the defending team, but it's not boring or uneventful.

What makes matches boring is when both teams play conservative, possession focussed tactics where they retreat deep into their own half the moment they encounter any resistance to their advance, instead relying on a series of mistakes from the opponent to grant them an easy opportunity. That's what leads to a dearth of attempts and corresponding lack of intensity.

Soccer is inferior because 98% of possessions do not advance the game state.

In American football, every play advances the game state. Even if nothing happens, 2nd and 10 is meaningfully different from 1st and 10. 3rd and 10 from the 20 is a very different game state from 1st and 10 from the 20.

In basketball, about half of all plays end in a score (arguably this is too much).

Let me bend your ear briefly on why modern basketball is the worst of all sports.

First, it is the only major sport with a freakish morphology requirement. The best predictor of success in basketball is your height - the average for pro players is the 99th percentile. The only other team sport where you see this is volleyball, which nobody cares about, so it's fine if it caters to a small group. But basketball is the sport for many demographics, and yet 98-99% of people can never go pro no matter how hard they work or how skilled they become.

Second, the rules are stupid. Running with the ball in your hands is not allowed, except you can take a few steps I guess? Especially if it leads to a cool dunk! (Pretty sure that's the actual reason, people like dunks so they bend the rules to allow them). On a more serious note, the modern style of play has devolved to take advantage of these silly rules. Many plays I see in modern games are just a big player bull rushing with the ball in their hands for three steps, then leaping through the air and tipping the ball up while in midair. There's no teamwork beyond setting picks, no finesse, just a big flying body that the defender is not allowed to do anything about. If the ball goes in great, but if the defender gets in the way it's usually a foul and free throw so just as good.

Third, shooting baskets is stupid. It requires kids to spend thousands of hours on a movement skill that has no application to anything else whatsoever. Seriously, can someone come up with any other action in life that is remotely like shooting baskets? How much of our kids' time is wasted on this junk?Also, there's relatively little interaction involved in shooting baskets. I should say, there is interaction if the defender is taller and can put their hands over you, in which case you simply can't succeed no matter how good you are (see point one), but most of the time it's just a skill check roll to see if you get the points or not. What, in every similar sport, is a battle of wits between offense and defense, in basketball is often just a roll of the dice. Player XY hits 3 pointers from this distance at 38% chance. What fun! (BTW, how are there professional players who can't hit free throws? What an embarrassing sport!) The result of this is that basketball is a highly statistical game - the opposite of soccer, upsets and comebacks in basketball rarely happen, because there are so many scoring plays, and scoring is so easy. By minute 5, you can already see which team is better, and the same ratio of points will likely continue for the rest of the game. Everything about basketball is boring.

All basketball arenas should be renovated into indoor soccer arenas.

spend thousands of hours on a movement skill that has no application to anything else whatsoever.

Unlike hockey, where the skill of using a shaped stick to throw things will pay dividends over their lifetime lol

I used to play soccer as a kid, and I now kick stuff around my apartment with precision to clean up, so that was good.

An amusing framing, no doubt! But the fundamental skill in kicking a soccer ball is not the propulsion of the ball, it's balance. Specifically, bilateral balance on a single leg under differing conditions and while under stress and perturbation. Ask a PT or OT and they'll likely confirm that this is one of, if not the most important physical skills to learn for lifelong health and injury prevention. It's what we train the elderly on to prevent falls.

Can't speak to hockey as much as I never played, but shooting a puck seems to involve whole body coordination in a similar way, and manipulating a stick with two hands is endlessly generalizable.

I agree with you on all of this. I just think it applies to basketball too via similar mechanisms of action.

I strongly dislike basketball and, especially, the NBA.

And - you are wrong on almost all of your points and have betrayed the fact that you don't watch much basketball.

Let's start with the whopper:

he result of this is that basketball is a highly statistical game - the opposite of soccer, upsets and comebacks in basketball rarely happen, because there are so many scoring plays, and scoring is so easy. By minute 5, you can already see which team is better, and the same ratio of points will likely continue for the rest of the game.

(Link) Literally the most recent NBA championship included the largest comeback in finals' history.

This is an embarrassingly cliche level of "truth nuke" as the kids say. Basketball is not "highlight statistical" (what does that mean?) and there's a ton of randomness. You can tell because of the length of the season. They need 80+ games to feel confident that one or more teams didn't just hit a statistical (there's that word again) improbability for a 10 game stretch.

the average for pro players is the 99th percentile.

(Link) And the Finals MVP, from this years' championship team, is 6'2"

Again. Big yikes. Sure, 6'2" isn't manlet territory, but, in relative sense in the NBA, in actually is! Brunson's whole "vibe" is that he is undersized and also not a giga-autist shooting specialist. He works his ass off and mostly focuses on ball movement and causing defense schemes to falter and break so he can exploit it. It's actually quite cerebral.

and yet 98-99% of people can never go pro no matter how hard they work or how skilled they become.

How is this not literally exactly true for MLB, NHL, NFL, UFC, Pro Soccer, Olympic Wrestling, Professional Musician, Professional Actor etc. etc. etc.

On a more serious note, the modern style of play has devolved to take advantage of these silly rules. Many plays I see in modern games are just a big player bull rushing with the ball in their hands for three steps, then leaping through the air and tipping the ball up while in midair.

(Link) Again, literally the opposite of what is happening

Mid 2000s NBA? Maybe. That's back when the typical (white) boomer Dad joke was "NBA, more like WWF!" But Steph Curry et al changed the game on such a fundamental level that a Shaq-like player wouldn't make it out of the D League today. You might be pointing to Lebron as this "bull in the China shop" And it's also true that LeBron has always received favorable foul treatment. He's also a 5x 1st-Team Defensive player and noted for his assists. Much like Brunson, interestingly enough, LeBron is so good because he makes other players on his team so good that the opposing team has to make a lose-lose choice to double up on LeBron and leave someone else open, or single cover LeBron and open themselves up to his penetration game (...hehe).

There's no teamwork beyond setting picks, no finesse, just a big flying body that the defender is not allowed to do anything about.

See above. Teamwork has never been more important. The pace at which defense (and offenses, frankly) adapt in game is so fast that incomplete team play is how you get blowouts.

it's usually a foul and free throw so just as good.

Okay, but later on you say:

(BTW, how are there professional players who can't hit free throws? What an embarrassing sport!)

So, free throws aren't "just" as good as making the basket. Hmm.

Third, shooting baskets is stupid.

There it is.

Seriously, can someone come up with any other action in life that is remotely like shooting baskets? How much of our kids' time is wasted on this junk?Also, there's relatively little interaction involved in shooting baskets.

This is perhaps the strangest argument. Practice one's shot is absolutely a necessary part of training, but it's not the only thing you do. And eventually, you know, you're playing or practicing with other people. Specifically, you are coordinating in real time with a group of peers to accomplish a competitive goal against a common opponent. This is what makes all "sports dumb lol" arguments so tedious. Sports are one of the most effective ways to build real pro-social capability. There's a reason why college athletes have such better life outcomes (in general, across the distribution) than college non-athletes. This "shooting baskets is stupid" (literally what you said) is taking a very specific item and stripping away all of the context around it as a means to paint the entire enterprise of Basketball as vapid. It's almost a .... Motte and Bailey.

All basketball arenas should be renovated into indoor soccer arenas.

Even if I shared your potentially homoerotic inclinations for indoor soccer, I couldn't get past the fact that this is an insane de-growth position. The 30 NBA teams are worth, on average, $5.4bn each. That's About $150bn in just team value right off the top. Add in the various marketing, promotions, adverts etc. and The NBA (like the other Big 4 sports) is probably close to a half-a-trillion-dollar-per-year economic impact across the US.

Indoor soccer is not. It's not a tenth of that value. It may be a hundredth, but I don't know (nor do I care). But your position seems to be that we should turn a half-a-trillion-dollars into far, far less because you don't particularly like Basketball. But literally millions and millions of other people do and are willing to pay for it. You must make a stronger case.

Here's The Stronger Case for Why Basketball - Specifically, the NBA - Sucks

All of these are common knowledge problems. I've done enough citations above for the day. If you want to look these up on your own, you can. They are all valid.

  1. Tanking. Because of how the NBA draft works, teams towards the bottom of the league, at the end of the season, will lose on purpose to secure a higher draft pick for the next season. One player can really be that important (LeBron in Cleveland being the canonical example). This means that the end of the regular season is a fucking travesty.

  2. Sports Betting. In the past few years, several players (including major names and, oddly, retired superstars) have been indicted for fixing games, point shaving etc. This corrupts the game, of course, and creates is own gravity because it helps the mobile sports books make money and set better lines. It's become so ubiquitous that, IIRC, the NBA league office is hiring Cybersecurity teams to monitor and secure player devices around game times. There's probably a lawsuit in there somewhere. But the larger point is that guys making seven figures a year still think it's a smart move to get paid $50k to shave points. Which leads to point number 3....

  3. Culture War (Hey, we made it!). The NBA is the most "culturally" aware of the Big 4. Baseball, Football, and Hockey dudes tend just to want to score points, win, and go home (and / or party). The Colin Kapernick saga in the NFL showed that if you really want to get hyperpolitical, you can Resist (TM) your way out of a contract (Also, side note, Kapernick really did suck as a QB, but that's a different thread). In the NBA, being "cultural" seems to be par for the course. It starts at draft night where guys are wearing the most retarded suits in the world. It extends to post game interviews where they discuss, with the media, the scientific merits of flat earth theory (look it up, seriously). And eventually you get the fuckery that is smile posing with Jay-Z while wearing comic sans "I can't breathe" t-shirts.

The issue isn't that the NBA has gone too woke (ask them how they feel about gay players!), it's that the league has become a hyperslop live action TikTok. This is the league of "dabbing each other up" before games (look it up). If Gen-Z wanted to ironically-vibe-code a sports league, it wouldn't be surprising if the "app" turned out to be today's NBA.

I appreciate your thoughts! I intended my original post as somewhat hyperbolic, I thought the last line made that pretty clear - that said, I do think the criticisms I leveled are valid reasons why basketball is comparatively worse than other sports in its fundamental design.

And the Finals MVP, from this years' championship team, is 6'2"

Fair enough, I didn't distinguish roles in my first post. Point guard is the one position where shorter guys can be successful (mostly because it's the position that doesn't take shots). Although apparently the average height of point guards has been increasing in the last few decades - they used to be able to be much shorter!

This "shooting baskets is stupid" (literally what you said) is taking a very specific item and stripping away all of the context around it as a means to paint the entire enterprise of Basketball as vapid.

I'm saying that shooting baskets is a far worse activity than shooting goals in other sports. It's interesting that you highlight "coordinating in real time with a group of peers" when practicing shooting baskets is largely a solo activity - again, in comparison with shooting goals in soccer (which you do against a goalie) or throwing a baseball around. In fact, have you ever seen basketball players get together and have fun practicing passing the ball? Of course not, instead they take turns shooting baskets, because that's the activity that requires the most practice. It's fundamentally less pro-social compared with other team sports.

But your position seems to be that we should turn a half-a-trillion-dollars into far, far less because you don't particularly like Basketball.

What are you even saying here? If basketball were replaced by indoor soccer then obviously soccer would make more money...

I broadly agree that elite level basketball is boring to watch and stupid because solving for the game at that level is too heavily controlled by height.

I would have to disagree that shooting basketballs lacks usefulness outside of basketball. It’s hand-eye coordination which seems important for a lot of things in life. Perhaps it’s over optimized in some ways for shooting but in general sports that promote hand eye coordination seem to be good.

I will admit it's not a particularly useful skill, but I use a basketball throw to toss things in the trash/some other receptacle while yelling "Kobe!" significantly more often then I do anything resembling a football pass, swinging a baseball bat, or kicking a soccer ball.

Tossing a thing into another thing is 100% a widely applicable skill. (Ignoring, for the moment, that basketball players knowingly use biomechanically inferior technique for free throws for aesthetic reasons, and that playing basketball isn't actually teaching you the best and easiest way to do it's central skill)

Learning to shoot a basketball has some utility, in the same way learning any skill has utility. But throwing a baseball or football is a much more translatable skill, and biomechanically what our shoulders are designed to do. The proper movement for shooting a basketball is almost unnatural in comparison, which is why most kids do it wrong until they're corrected and properly trained.

Would turning the hoop sideways fix the sport?

All basketball arenas should be renovated into indoor-soccer arenas.

Don't forget that indoor American football also exists.

The only other team sport where you see this is volleyball, which nobody cares about, so it's fine if it caters to a small group.

Volleyball even innovated the Libero to provide a jobs program for shorter players.

Any bass players here?

I'm making some progress on a project bass and I'm about to put some new strings on. I've always used Labella Deep Talkin' Flats, but for this bass, I'm going to do a BEAD tuning and the DTF B string is terrible.

I've been looking at some of the more exotic options like TIs or Dunlops, but I'm not sure if I want to drop $100 on an experiment. If anybody has tried them, I'd like to know your opinions.

I'm mainly a guitarist, but whenever I have to record bass I usually go for Ernie Ball.

If your problem is tone or slack feel of the low B string, changing string brand is unlikely to help as any such problems in tone come from basic physics: the combination of string thickness, scale length and tuning.

I think the specific issue is that the DTFs are stiff, hexagonal core strings. It makes it hard to get the intonation right. I'm wondering if the round core flats would help with that, since they tend to be more flexible.

I doubt it has anything to do with "flexibility" unless the strings get physically caught in the bridge / nut slots (in which case the slots may need repair work). Bass strings just don't work all that well if the tension is too low. Have you tried recording a single note and checking the spectrum?

Here is what quick googling returned as one possible cause for issues that might be perceived as intonation problems: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42452-020-2391-2 (string inharmonicity).

See if you can buy a regular cheaper non-hex core bass string and try if that also suffers from intonation issues. That is at least a cheap test and being flatwound vs roundwound should make no difference to that (at least I can’t come up with any physical basis for one).

Why are 55+ communities allowed? What are the perceived benefits of 55+ communities? https://x.com/LeahRain77/status/2079094767233745170 has blown up on X and I know I've seen 55+ communities when searching for houses. They usually come up on searches as less expensive and I guess I assumed they were assisted living facilities but looking at today's drama that's not the case.

It's weird to me that people are getting so offended at the idea of an almost-30 year old woman can continue living in the same home she lived in before her father passed away. What is at stake here to these people that is worth the expense of suing a woman out of her house?

The time I've heard the most complaints about these was from a friend (grad student) trying to find housing in a college town and complaining that lots of the (good) places were 55+ and obviously not available to students. Honestly, in-context I can imagine older adults appreciating some guarantee that the neighbors won't throw a kegger and loudly play beer pong into the wee hours of the morning.

I'm less content with, but maybe understand, not wanting young families adjacent. We should really do better about making most spaces more family-friendly.

Honestly, in-context I can imagine older adults appreciating some guarantee that the neighbors won't throw a kegger and loudly play beer pong into the wee hours of the morning.

This makes some sense, but could be enforced with some noise ordinances instead of age discrimination?

Noise ordnances can only be enforces after the noise is made. And, to be honest, what the enforcement can do? In the best case, police would come and tell them to shut it down. For today. And they'll also hate you forever if they learn who called it. And will repeat the same next week. More likely though, police wouldn't even come because they have better things to do (and if it's a university city, as likely as not they voted to give them as little funding as possible anyway) so they'd just register the complaint and be done with it.

If an HOA has a rule about noise after a certain time of day, then if someone violated it they would have to pay fees and potentially lose their home. It's basically the same thing as this tiktok girl being forced from her home, but with less discrimination over something she can't control.

they would have to pay fees and potentially lose their home.

I haven't heard of any case that HOA evicted someone from their house for unpaid fines. In any case, that would likely be a multi-year very expensive lawsuit. And the students would likely be renters, so they couldn't care less about that. Given that renter evictions in places where there are a lot of students usually are also a long and expensive process, the only real threat to the noise makers would be not extending their lease at the end of it - which may be up to a year ahead - and police arresting them (which probably wouldn't happen but at least they could threaten and intimidate them - if they show up at all).

And even if the deterrent works, a college student rarely lives in the same place for more than a year or two. By the time enforcement starts to stick with one set of residents, they're replaced with a new crop and the cycle begins anew.

Age discrimination is probably less of a hassle to enforce than a noise ordinance (hear the loud party late at night when you're trying to sleep, call the police, wait for the police to show up and tell your neighbors to turn the music down, rinse repeat if they decide to turn the music up again once the police have left).

lots of the (good) places were 55+ and obviously not available to students.

and if there was student housing on that magic dirt, I'm sure the neighborhood would be just as good. (neighborhoods can be geographically advantaged, but that generally isn't the determining factor.)

Yeah, living in an off-campus apartment really made me understand why homeowners fight student housing tooth and nail. Students are young, transient, and generally not personally responsible for their own finances, which is a triple whammy red flag for "will absolutely destroy the neighborhood."

Plus, beyond drunken destruction, the presence of student housing is inversely related to how responsive the local government is to community issues. Students don't pay property taxes and are often still legally domiciled (and therfore are registered to vote) at their parents' home, and will be gone within a couple of years anyway. So nobody at city hall cares about their complaints and the infrastructure all goes to shit. Landlords don't bother keeping up with capital maintenance and don't care as much about the quality of public infrastructure since they have a guaranteed renewing pool of cost-insensitive and naive tenants who tend to be unreasonably tolerant of conditions more established tenants would demand be fixed.

College students make terrible neighbors, even when they're well-behaved teetotalers, because they're fundamentally foreign tourists with no long-term stake in the community.

lots of the (good) places were 55+ and obviously not available to students.

Remembering myself as a student, I am thinking maybe that's exactly the point. I mean, I wasn't particularly wild and rowdy, but there was certain amounts or drinking, listening to loud musing and various behaviors that could be considered obnoxious by 50+ year old me involved. If you want peaceful, quiet, respectful neighbors, the students kinda carry a high risk profile on this one. I know not students are like that, and not all the time, but why take the chance?

listening to loud musing

A philosopy student, I see...

The existentialists are the worst!

Why are 55+ communities allowed?

A cursory search indicates that 55+ communities are specifically exempted from federal law's ban on age/race/etc. discrimination in housing.

What are the perceived benefits of 55+ communities? It's weird to me that people are getting so offended at the idea of an almost-30-year-old woman can continue living in the same home she lived in before her father passed away.

In the vein of the famous comic: (1) You signed a contract. (2) Obey the contract. Whining that the contract is "weird" and (in the linked tweet) "HOAs have too much power" will not garner any sympathy when you agreed to the contract's provisions and you are free to just live somewhere else.

In the vein of the famous comic: (1) You signed a contract. (2) Obey the contract. Whining that the contract is "weird" and (in the linked tweet) "HOAs have too much power" will not garner any sympathy when you agreed to the contract's provisions and you are free to just live somewhere else.

Did the daughter ever agree to the contract's provisions?

I assume her father did, and her father violated the contract with his will. If the daughter is now the executor of his estate, she has an obligation to fulfill the contracts her father signed as much as possible. If I understand correctly.

It doesn’t matter whether she or her father agreed to the HOA, it comes with the house. Most HOAs are covered by restrictive covenants that are written into the title of the property and must ybe conveyed in perpetuity when ownership is transferred by sale, inheritance or other means.

In this case, she can own the property, but she can’t reside in it without a waiver from the HOA.

Such covenants are not so solid depending on the covenant in question.

A cursory search indicates that 55+ communities are specifically exempted from federal law's ban on age/race/etc. discrimination in housing.

My question is more geared towards "What is the reasoning behind allowing this?" What is the massive benefit to society that justifies creating this carve-out?

Power of HOA is not inherent - it usually resides on city codes, state laws and such. It is not weird to argue for changing those to curtail powers that can be given to HOA. Regulations that make certain contract provisions - either inherent or implied - void by law are not unheard of. And most HOAs use template contracts, so arguing for changing those is valid too. I had an HOA and I didn't feel its power is too big, but I also heard horror stories too, so I think one can't just dismiss it so easily.

Enforceability of covenants in property titles (which is what the power of an HOA is based on) would be a function of state land law. City codes have very little to do with it.

In both England and Scotland (separately), the process of transitioning from a regime where most land was owned by aristocratic families who would never dream of selling the freehold, and wanted to make contractual arrangements among family members and tenants which reflected that, to a regime where land was freely tradeable in both theory and practice involved a lot of statutory reform, with a lot of contentious debates about precisely which restrictions on land could be made legally enforceable. Scotland didn't abolish feudalism until 2000 because the only legally bulletproof way of creating a condo or HOA-like arrangement under traditional Scots law was to make the association the feudal overlord of the individual homeowners.

I don't know about the US equivalent, except that it varies a lot by state.

That thread is not exactly good for one's blood pressure. The majority of logic used in excusing it just further cements my personal opinion that people as a whole will gleefully be discriminatory as long as they have the power of the state behind thier actions to excuse it without any self awareness.

And, no, personally, I don't view it as fair. No special exemptions. Either people get the option to discriminate for anything, or no one does.

further cements my personal opinion that people as a whole will gleefully be discriminatory as long as they have the power of the state behind thier actions to excuse it without any self awareness.

This isn't your "personal opinion" it's literally human nature and you are 100% correct as it's the truth of the universe

This and this and this are all low-effort and you've been warned about this before.

You are beginning to look like a low-effort shitposter, and if you don't stop you are going to start earning bans.

We should probably allow more forms of HOA segregation and not less. Keeping a community 55+ means you get to live around people who are all likewise retired who can come over and play at 1 pm on a Tuesday. It means the community can focus on building infrastructure that is specifically beneficial to your age group. The pickleball court doesn’t have any young people dominating games. When you were in college would you want a 40 year old guy who works for Deloitte living in your dorm? No.

Should we have Catholic only neighborhoods? Cultural goods can be rivalrous. If a neighborhood is only Catholic then you can build your Church a 5 min walk from everyone’s house. The local restaurants can have very good fried fish because their neighborhood is loaded with people who eat only fish on Fridays.

From first principles segregation can have a lot of beneficial effects. If Chicago could ban black people from a specific neighborhood then the public school in that neighborhood would become very good and no one would feel pressure to pay for private schools. And then no risks of gun violence.

So yes I am a big believer that people should have a right to associate with whoever they want to. And this includes entering contracts to exclude outsiders.

This is getting into why this might have been a culture war topic instead of small scale questions, but I am curious. Why did this exception make it through the Fair Housing Act but not others?

I don't think this story would upset me much if it was fairly applied, so that I could join a Catholic HOA, like you said. Would be really cool to live in a community where a church and Catholic School were within walking distance and we had Corpus Christi processions and Christmas Caroling right outside my house. But, we don't' live in that world, we live in the Fair Housing world. So, why did old (not even that old) people get an exception?

Any small question can usually be merged into a larger more culture war question and in this case it’s legally allowing segregation…..is good?

My guess is old people doesn’t cut racial lines at all and every race has old people. A Catholic HOA would essentially be excluding blacks. There is an Islamic group I believe attempting this is Texas but then Trump heard about it and shut it down. In America Islamic enclaves are definitely not popular and even a Catholic enclave feels a little un-American.

I was watching a video on Twitter of a Muslim complaining that the Halal section was tiny compared to the rest of the meat section. Cultural goods in a community are rivals. There is only so much shelf space and built environment. If you want to live in your culture then you kind of do need segregation and exclude other cultures from the built environment.

Segregation reinvented thru first principles.

My guess is old people doesn’t cut racial lines at all and every race has old people.

Not really. Old people are far whiter than the US as a whole and even the median black American is 12 years younger than their white counterpart. For Hispanics, that median is 19 years younger. One would expect the whiteness of 55+ communities to face DEI's ire, but then there's the argument that Boomer and Gen X whites were mostly exempted from DEI in the first place in exchange for cooperation.

Old people get everything. Legal discrimination in their favor, government paid health care, recent proposals to cut their property taxes. Whatever they want.

At least until the Boomers die, at which point the Millennials and Zoomers will probably screw over Gen X.

Why did this exception make it through the Fair Housing Act but not others?

Other categories are protected from discrimination by the 14th amendment and interpretations thereof. Age isn't one of those protected classes, so Congress was able to carve out the exception where it wouldn't be able to do so for religion. Historically AARP had some good lobbying muscle, which is how I imagine Congress was persuaded to create the 55+ exception.

You have the purpose of allowing old people complexes reversed. The reason to allow them is to concentrate Boomers who are interested in HOA busybody lifestyles away from the rest of us. I don't want to live in a place where the old lady next door is going to call the police because there are kids playing in the street. By allowing old people complexes, it gives them the opportunity to live out their dream of being in everyone else's business without directly being in my business.

My daughter (7) wants to do chores for money. I have been putting it off, because I don't want to commit myself to something that I will later regret. Has anyone else offered paid chores? Any suggestions about it? For reference, I am an extremely bad housekeeper with a toddler at home, so everything just keeps getting messy again immediately, and I have turned down her suggestion that she could clean up a space whenever it seems messy, since that's basicially immediately after tidying.

I would almost rather pay her to do slow concentration tasks, like crafts and reading, since that is what I actually want her to start doing more of. An artist I talked to, for instance, said she paid her daughter to read books like Harry Potter aloud while she painted.

The British paying for dead Pythons conundrum at the individual household scale

I have no answers for you

It's a tricky thing paying people to do stuff. I remember reading studies decades ago about how it lowered motivation for many tasks to add a paid component.

You could give a fixed allowance predicated on some amount of chore completion so she acquires money but it isn't 1:1 related to the task

My concern is less chores, and more of any unintended blowback by accidentally making her dislike crafts because her parents monetized it and it killed the vibe (I can't remember the mechanism of action in the studies lol)

It's called overjustification.

I'd be careful about that "for" in "do chores for money".

She should do chores because it's part of maintaining a household. She should have money because it teaches planning and responsibility (including responsibility for creating her own fun). I don't think you could create something employment-like enough to give those benefits, which is why I'm opposed to linking them together.

This is pocket money and how you earn it, unless things have drastically changed since I was young. Do you pay her an allowance otherwise? I started asking to be paid pocket money when I was seven, because I was already doing small chores around the house and I had no money of my own to buy things like comics (my parents did not pay allowances etc. because this was not a thing).

If your daughter wants to help around the house, and she's capable of doing simple tasks like "put the toys away", "pick up the clothes", and even "sweep the kitchen floor" then let her. Agree an amount of pocket money you will pay her weekly and then she can do a list of simple tasks and/or things you ask her to do (e.g. "play with your little sibling and keep an eye on them while Mommy washes her hair").

So, what are you reading?

Reread Campbell's Dauntless. The writing could use a lot of work, but the basic idea works: the legendary Black Jack Geary wakes up to a universe where military discipline has been forgotten, and he has to work to restore it while saving the fleet. Despite the many problems with the writing, it has a quality that makes one want to read it again. Perhaps it is the authenticity of the military aspects combined with Geary's leadership style.

Not much progress on Taylor's A Secular Age.

Ivan and Phoebe by Oksana Lutsysyna

On my wife and my anniversary date night we go to a book store pick out three books for the other and then pick one that we'll read. Ivan and Phoebe came out of that. I'm liking it better than I expected. An initial thought I had is that Ivan feels like a man written by a women, but then I started thinking that maybe that is how men with one foot in the university revolutionary/art scene behave. He lashes out in some weird - what I would consider feminine - ways and and then furthers what could be called Eastern European patriarchy.

Another interesting thing is how poor post Soviet states were. There's a joke about how Party members don't spreads butter on their breads but put chunks of butter on it instead.

The Shooting Party by Isabel Colegate. The kind of shit (late Victorian, Edwardian, or interwar England) I want injected straight into my veins. The author was born in 1931, so at best she heard about the era from her parents and other members of the prior generation, but still well-written and captivating. I have a few of her works lined up and I'm greatly looking forward to them.

Interesting Times. One of the few main-series Discworlds I haven’t read! The humor was hit or miss at first, but it didn’t take long before a mugger-in-training gag caught me by surprise. Now I’m in for the ride.

Dauntless sounds…painful. Despite being a huge mil sci fi nerd, I’ve never had much tolerance for that subgenre. Columbus Day was underwhelming. What are some other standouts?

Hoping to have finished de la Rochefoucald's maxims by lunchtime.

Reading Dad Brain. liking it so far.

On a science fiction lark at the moment. Just finished A Deepness in the Sky - super interesting concept! Vernor Vinge's stories have such a different pacing from anything else I've read.

Now I'm part way through the newer James S. A. Corey book The Mercy of the Gods, which I'm also enjoying.

Caugh up to Reverend Insanity. @self_made_human might be interested in this.

Biggest hangup (aside from things like bad prose, which I've reached the stage of acceptance with):

I think Fang Yuan's clones' alignment ought to have been addressed more. Do they not want eternal life, and if they do, are they not afraid that the original will not share? If they don't want it, why? Did Fang Yuan prune their will on creation so that they were effectively enslaved to the goals of the original? Is he simply substrate-agnostic enough to not care which one of him reaches eternal life? Are split souls magically loyal to each other and the original? There is no way he had not considered that he might betray himself, but there's nothing in the text regarding it.

And this is why you don't use/make Forks, kids.

Split souls are generally well aligned to their original. It's practically unheard of for them to act knowingly against the interests of the person who made them. It's a generic property of the process, though Fang Yuan, is, IIRC, willing to use them as backups if his main soul is KIA. They instinctively trust and coordinate with each other according to their shared understanding of their best interests.

But, there are exceptions. I'm not sure where this becomes relevant, and I suspect you've already reached this section if you're in the last third of the book:

Bo Qing was the most successful of Spectral Soul's split souls. He was entirely above board with the project to rescue the original from death, until he was love bombed by Love Hu, as used by Mo Yao. Then he lost his way, or gained independence.

I've reached the extent of what's currently written FWIW.

Understanding one's best interests doesn't mean they're aligned though! If only one body can achieve Fang Yuan's goal, then the best interest only goes as far as "cooperate until we must betray each other to gain eternal life, or merge if possible", which works well enough until all enemies are defeated and eternal life is in reach, yet at no point does FY or any of his clones seem to consider what is to be done at such a juncture. The problem of sharing non-fungible resources is so innate to any clone story in my opinion that it's a travesty for such an otherwise thoughtful author writing such a cynical story to ignore it and just treat the clones as free powerups.

Just cracked open (electronically) LIght on the Other Side of Divorce: Discovering the New You by Dr. Elizabeth Cohen.

No reason.

It's nice to know I was right, but I sure wish I wasn't. I'm sorry to hear that bro.

Thanks, fellow Mottizen, I appreciate it. It's really been inevitable the whole time, I've just spent most of the last five years struggling to accept that. I had hoped that after our last separation that she'd be ready to try and make things work but she flat-out told me recently that she didn't want to deal with her issues, she hated them, and wanted them to go away. I seem to have done more soul-searching and changing than I gave myself credit for, because surprisingly enough, I'd actually rather build a new life and figure out what to do with myself now, rather than stay in a failed marriage which had been my entire identity for all those years. And as good as it could feel to play the White Knight, the uglier truth is that I've just been enabling her behavior by being overly empathetic and not setting boundaries and enforcing my limits because, of course, to do so would have threatened or even ended the marriage. Being on the other side of that, wanting to divorce before things get any worse after all this time and all that's happened, is a strange thing, but hardly the worst of things.

It sounds like you're in about as good a place mentally as you could hope for in these circumstances. If you don't mind my asking, do you have children?

I don't mind and no, we don't. Kids are a whole separate story, but tl;dr, my wife wasn't supposed to be able to have children but she nevertheless got pregnant early in our relationship and miscarried 20 weeks into the pregnancy, probably due to a partially detached placenta. She blames herself for the loss of our son and I'm sure that the trauma from that has had a significant negative impact on our relationship. Regardless, we tried off and on again to have another child for the next few years before she decided that the uncertainty was too much and opted for the copper IUD.

Is there anything I as an individual can do to push back against Flock cameras or broader mass surveillance in the US?

Reading 1984 as a sixth grader I was horrified by Big Brother and the authoritarianism illustrated in the book and always felt that if those things came to life it would be right and imperative to fight against them, and every year I’ve seen more and more authoritarian overreach that disturbs me.

I do not vote as I believe it’s a massive waste of time at best. I am not fond of solutions such as “call your congressperson” or “show up to your local council and demand change” because these are similarly time wasting activities in my opinion.

I am frustrated by the acceptance of the public for these technologies with terrible implications for the present and the future. I don’t want to break the law in order to fight them and don’t want to become more of a target, which seems inevitable if you want to speak against it publicly. I feel very disappointed in people around me and the modern west when I realize the state of mass surveillance today.

Is there anything I as an individual can do to push back against Flock cameras or broader mass surveillance in the US?

As individual, fully legally (we are all law abiding citizens here)?

The effective altruist way: if you have high paying job, grind extra hard and donate the money to some trustworthy and effective organization fighting for privacy rights (no idea if there are any).

The less effective but more altruist way: drop your job and other obligations and become full time agitator for the cause. In modern world, it means shitpost on the internets (so far, AI will soon replace these jobs).

donate the money to some trustworthy and effective organization fighting for privacy rights

Ah, this is a good idea, I don't know why I didn't think of that myself. I'd love to know if anyone here who knows of any good places to donate for this sort of thing. The other night I did a little research on the topic and the ACLU had a long screed against Flock cameras but I know the right generally dislikes this organization. I'd be happier donating to a neutral or bipartisan org instead if anyone can recommend one.

The Institute for Justice filed a federal lawsuit that I believe is currently on appeal, and likely has more in the pipeline. They're basically a libertarian ACLU focusing on property rights and economic freedom. They probably also have a way to donate directly to their Fourth Amendment/surveillance work if you want to laser-focus your contribution, but I think they're pretty unobjectionable from a conservative perspective in general. They mostly go after governments for making it hard to start small businesses.

always felt that if those things came to life it would be right and imperative to fight against them

Now you're realizing there will be no fight. Good and kind citizens would just vote everything in, to protect the children, preserve the peace and fight the terrorists. And people who warn about the dangers are just insane fearmongering extremists. Who you're going to fight - a concerned father that thinks his teenage daughter spends too much time on tiktok? How are you going to fight him? And when he votes in the regime that can disconnect you from the internet if they don't like what you say, how your fight is going to look then? Are you going to murder all those kindly cat ladies from Kids Guardianship Bureau that would disconnect your account for exposing children to dangerous ideas? Reading 1984 as an adult is much more scarier, when you understand how this actually works...

Flock is pretty expensive for cities and seems to have trouble clearly showing an impact on violent crime reduction. It is often hard to beat the financial argument, with equity/privacy being a great excuse. Without ceding the privacy grounds, I would suggest critiques based primarily on efficacy/cost.

That argument only works until it doesn't though. An efficient surveillance state is worse than an expensive one, and I'm wary that any argument fronting cost will merely incentivize companies to figure out how to do it cheaper. Then, even if you haven't technically ceded the privacy argument, the balance of interests on the thing you were primarily talking about has now flipped and it looks like you've lost the argument. Never lead with the point that's standing on a shaky foundation that might collapse out from under you at any moment. Even if it's not technically load-bearing, it will be publicly seen as such.

You can shift public opinion to get other people to vote/go to council meetings/become elected officials by using techniques from public relations/propaganda. That is how Edward Bernays shifted the public perception around smoking to increase the amount of people that smoked.

Locally, I noticed that people seem to be able to stir up the issue on social media to get enough people to show-up to the council meetings to get the Flock contract not-renewed, but it kind of seems like a shell game where the government will quietly shift to a similar provider when the public pressure cools back down again when people inevitably switch their attention/efforts to other things.

You should vote.

The cost is not actually that high: a few hours a year, right?

The benefit is, of course, abysmal. It gets better for local elections. I suspect you could push it further by spending more time and effort signaling your single-issue status. But on its own your vote is near worthless.

More importantly, it is a good categorical imperative. You should vote because people similar to you should vote.

I mean, you should vote. But if you want something higher impact, volunteer with local campaigns that oppose flock cameras. Many local elections are nonpartisan and people are simply lost as to who to vote for; a door knock or a phone call can replace the all important (R) or (D).

More importantly, if the politicians are aware of your campaign and it size and influence they'll be more likely to sway on that issue. Even if you don't swing the election, the threat that you could maybe nudge the polls a bit will make both candidates more likely to want to curry favor with you on your issue.

Is there anything I as an individual can do to push back against Flock cameras or broader mass surveillance in the US?

The most effective thing you could do is advocate for massive increases in human policing. A cop on every corner, with DA's willing to charge all plausible cases, and judges willing to seriously hold people accountable, even juveniles and minorities. Reopen the asylums and confine the mentally ill who serially refuse to take their meds.

Flock cameras are tolerated or even desired almost entirely due to the (often accurate) perception that too much crime goes unpunished. Once we're all living in a low-crime high-trust society again, people will be much less willing to trade their public anonymity for security.

That's by design. High-trust society does not need overlords. Low-trust society does, because it's the only hope peaceful people have against random violence and petty warlords. It all works towards the same goal.

If you're not already aware, Deflock is pushing back against this issue specifically. There are also local groups in various areas, maybe there's one near you or you could start one yourself?

Flock's strategy specifically revolves around grooming political candidates and running through executive branch work, so there's not a ton you can do on that side short of making their candidate contributions more visible and highlighting some of the company's sketchier spends. Rossman's been doing that a bit, albeit to mixed result, but that's a lot better than most. And destroying the physical cameras is less than useless; in some cases Flock ends up paid twice, but regardless they've got to have a replacement budget, just because building deployed cameras to be resilient is a loser's game.

The more... esoteric versions require looking at past successes, and with the caveat that I'm operating solely from public discussion:

Baltimore has a massive distributed camera and recording system, first in its class, combined with a massive shotspotter deployment, and... it's completely useless, and that's a policy decision. Video isn't stored for long to start with, the camera selection went heavy on PTZs and then set them up in an intentionally unfocused (literally and figuratively) sense, the privacy and compliance training means no one who's actually trying to solve serious crimes can get into the system, a few dozen other problems. Downside: it's only a past-facing decision: making it into the privacy nightmare opponents paint it as is a sub-million USD and sub-year project. But you can't undelete data (in this case). But you're stuck with Baltimore mayors to do it.

Carpenter and progeny, and courts willing to draw it to its most maximal ends. It's an ad-hoc general free-floating right to privacy, it's only really useful for the guilty, even its successful cases have a 'first hit's free' problem, and it's not exactly principled, but it covers any privacy question you want so long as it's nontrivial, and it has some bipartisan support.

And destroying the physical cameras is less than useless; in some cases Flock ends up paid twice

Sure, but on the limit some level of destruction will work. Will your city council replace the cameras 4 times each? 10? At some point it will be untenable. Flock is happy to replace the cameras and bill the city according to the "Camera Protection Plan". The city has some limit on what they will spend.

At the limit where the city will go bankrupt from it sure, but below that level you're unlikely to convince the city not to put cameras to protect from crime by going on a property crime spree. Your actions will likely justify putting more cameras to try and catch you vandalizing the cameras.

Not bankrupt but merely feeling the fiscal burden of replacing cameras. And yes, they'd try to crack down on camera breaking.

I saw this while renting a car in Greece. There are speed cameras everywhere, like literally every couple of miles on some stretches, but apparently repeated mass sabotage of the cameras eventually made the program too expensive to operate, so only a handful of thr boxes around the country ever actually have cameras in them at any one time, and they have to be moved frequently to stay ahead of the good samaritans. You're generally safe to ignore all the "cameras" you see, because 99% of them are just empty boxes.

Though this might say more about Greek state capacity and Mediterranean laxity than anything else.

Can anyone steel-man the Argentinian position re: the Falklands (Malvinas)? I got into a few heated arguments with an Argentinian women during my course about them, and the Argentinian position doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Argentine never actually had sovereignty over the islands, nor does the local population want them there.

It's pointless barely-justified jingoism of the sort that is very common in Latin America. But because the Argentines are white people behaving like Slavs and the counterparty is Britain, it's newsworthy.

You can't hold any ideology other than Rationalism if you believe only opinions that are justified by rationality. To hold any other ideology you must be willing to hold stupid, irrational opinions that might actively hurt you. Only an irrational opinion can be a costly signal that you hold the ideology, and being willing to look irrational is a relatively low cost symbol.

To be an Argentine Patriot one doesn't worry about the Steelman of the Malvinas, the Malvinas are Argentine because to be an Argentine Patriot is to believe the Malvinas are Argentine.

Otherwise one would run into the situation where another Argentine claims the Malvinas and you are there saying, well rationally according to international law it's a nuanced issue. Which isn't very patriotic of you.

The Argentine claim further functions as a signal that they, as Argentines, are allowed to make the claim even if they have no intention of following up on it. No one can stop them from saying it. This is a petty form of pride, but a valuable one. What kind of cuck refuses to insult his opponent because it is "irrational?"

Well geographically it seems to make sense. The current population of the island is 3k-ish English-speaking people who consider themselves to be British, so it's a non-starter politically.

What I don't get is, why doesn't Argentina send over a couple of poor struggling families with their adorable kids who just want to work as fishermen or ranchers or something instead of warships and soldiers. Just a couple get established, then a few more families come over, and they bring their extended families over too. Call anyone who objects racist. Next thing you know, presto, a simple majority of the population now wants to be Argentinian, and they can make a good case to take over the island without a shot fired. Even if you think the whole Great Replacement stuff is a "baseless conspiracy theory", what's to stop any interested party from doing it on purpose? At such a low population, it wouldn't take all that many people.

The Brits are wise to that strategy and there are significant restrictions to immigrate into the Falklands.

Insert obvious crack about the British being wise to that strategy on small islands across the Atlantic, but blind to it at home?

I didn't want to be glib, but yes.

IMO I think a lot of it is just that the Malvinas are basically the only war Argentina has ever fought. The early wars for Independence etc were when there were few people in Argentina and barely skirmishes. It’s the only war they’ve fought posts mass migration to Argentina so it’s basically the only thing they can talk about in their military history.

Geographically though it is there’s. And within 50 years it probably will be Argentinas because England is declining. Though this may depend on Trumpism and Milei’s long-term alliance. Their claim to it on geography is probably stronger than a bunch of Italians to Israel.

Argentina fought in multiple wars, but the Falklands/Malvinas are just the only recent one- they fought in the triple alliance, for example(the South American world war).

Yea but Argentina was tiny then. 1.8 million people. That was before any semblance of modern Argentina. Wikipedia does say 18k? Argentina casualties which is a semi-real conflict.

I think it’s seem fair to say real Argentina didn’t occur until the late 19th-early 20th century immigration waves. It’s even more extreme than pre-post Ellis Wave migration in America.

You're right that Argentina doesn't have a legitimate claim to the islands under standard liberal international relations theory, but there are other theories of international sovereignty. The Argentinian position is straightforward: Look at a map. They consider the Southwest Atlantic Ocean to be Argentinian. They also claim the Antarctic Peninsula.

The anticolonial aspect shouldn't be underestimated either. Under a strict interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, the United States should have opposed British recapture of the islands.

Ah, the pretty borders theory of international relations, never to be underestimated.

It's impossible. Argentina loves pointless territorial claims. I present to you the Beagle conflict, in which Argentina demanded three worthless frozen islands in the Beagle Channel from Chile. First the two countries agreed to ask Queen Liz 2 to decide. She gave them to Chile and Argentina threw a hissy fit. Then they agreed to ask the fucking Pope. John Paul 2 gave them to Chile and Argentina threw a hissy fit again. Then finally Argentina got trounced by the British and finally decided having a mortal enemy across the Andes wasn't worth it.

International law wise, I don't think there is a case. The political reason is part sovereignty (not wanting a stronghold of a foreign power near your shores, kind of like Cuba in the times of the Soviet Union) and economic (by having the island, Britain gets a chunk of fishing rights and offshore drilling that would've been Argentinian otherwise).

The emotive reason (the one that really matters to most people) is sort of a sunk cost fallacy: we fought for them, and our people died for it, so it's sort of a disrespect to their memory to give up the claim, nevermind that the war was started by an illegitimate and unpopular military government.

It's also gotten more salient recently due to a couple of reasons:

  • The football team took up the cause as a part of their rallying cry, and since they won the world cup they're basically heroes.
  • The left wing is very third worldist, so a faction that would be anti-conflict instead took up the cause as anti imperialistic.
  • The right wing has become a lot more online, and there is a sense that the UK no longer deserves to hold the islands (due to their ongoing political crises)

So while before you could reasonably claim to not care about the islands and not be laughed out of the room, nowadays Milei gets flak for having expressed his admiration for Margaret Thatcher a decade ago.

That being said, I don't think anything will come out of it in the short term, and in the long one it'll be settled with some sort of shared ownership deal, that maybe phases the UK out eventually, if anything.


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New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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