domain:web.law.duke.edu
hydroacetylene
16m ago
This is happening in a society that is so culturally different as to make comparisons of that nature meaningless.
Amorphous Plus (downloadable as part of the Flashpoint Archive)
Onystri
33m ago
Anyone knows good games with top-down action gameplay like Last Stand Aftermath, Ruiner or The Ascent?
Onystri
38m ago
My first introduction to Soulslike games was Bloodborne. And it was a very short introduction due to me selecting the cane starting weapon and trying to make sense of it for several hours. Cane is an ASS of a starting weapon for someone not familiar with the gameplay. I was very pissed that day. Especially when I complained to a friend and he basically said "Yeah, everyone knows the saw is way better starting weapon, DUH".
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
55m ago
Knock it off with "shitlibs." This isn't that kind of place even if the majority sentiment agrees with you.
aiislove
1hr ago
I think that "hard status" is a terrible name for that axis. "physical status" and "body-inferred status" might be better.
I had a really hard time naming the two axes. First I had "male power" and "female power" but it became so conflated when I began to imagine two different charts. Then I thought of calling "hard status" "power" and "soft status" "status" but it wasn't exactly right either. I kept changing it, ended up with "hard status" and "soft status" and thought it worked well enough to illustrate the point and just went with it.
And social status is obviously contingent on the society you are considering. Plenty of cultures value Mohammed a lot more than Buddha.
I said as much in another comment here, I wasn't really claiming and omniscient point of view in my ranking, things are highly subjective in general even as I try to disentangle something universal
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1hr ago
Why are LLMs so bad at wordplay? I asked them "What is the favorite sex toy of Linda Load and Diana Doll?", explicitly stating that it's a wordplay riddle, and none of them got it right.
TowardsPanna
1hr ago
The western shitlibs are the only group in the world who don't favor their own group. Their favorite victim group, American blacks, have more ingroup/anti outgroup bias than anyone tested, if I remember correctly.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1hr ago
They are first conditioned not to notice ANY physical advantages of black people over whites
The progressive is trained to have a phobia reaction to intellectual or moral differences only. He is perfectly fine saying white people can’t dance or white people have no rhythm, but if you ask if this is genetic he will say no. And while it’s easy to train someone into believing that everyone has the same baseline genetic intelligence / morality, it’s next to impossible to persuade a human that athletic power doesn’t matter, because that’s a primal indicator of power that goes back millions of years to pre-human ancestors. And we live in a world that valorizes the athletic from the middle school level on. The big adolescence coming of age ritual for Americans revolves around sportsball homecoming. I’m not saying this on top of your theory, but just from an evpsych understanding: men are biased to respect men who are physically stronger and better at performing an athletic activity. Especially if they represent your school tribe. This is one of the reasons that we have an ingrained bias toward height. Culture can find ways to reduce this inclination, but in the West we don’t have that kind of culture, as even our Christians worship sports (they used to be banned). In China, where grades are so much more important and where academic success is honored in society-wide festivals, like doing well on the Gaonkao exam (definitely misspelling but won’t be googling), this bias is probably reduced.
this only strengthens their conviction that the poor blacks are ONLY victims in ANY circumstance because they do worse in every single category of soft status that they (the progressives) value- test scores, iq tests, academic achievement, wage payments, career advancement, you name it
The average progressive isn’t doing a 200iq/eq Magnus Carlson-think on the chess board of sociopolitics. They have been taught that everyone is genetically the same, and have been taught that Blacks are oppressed, and this works to induce the closely-guarded assumption that Blacks cannot be blamed for their intellectual or moral failings. A random teenager from the whitest town of Maine will think this just as much as a hyper-educated Ivy graduate who lives in gentrified Harlem. They are doing the same amount of thinking / unthinking.
If you believe in blank slate you believe that whites are exactly the same as blacks
Progressives retain a belief in free will. Everyone starts with the same genetic resources, but some people are good and some are bad. White people only have themselves to blame for their failure to do well in sports and rap. Especially when they have all the riches that they willingly and evilly stole from the rest of the world. This is approximately their belief.
I think white progressives only hold their beliefs out of a deep sense of arrogance and certainty in their own superiority
There are some studies showing that white progressives have a negative in-group preference, whereas white conservatives and blacks do not. They genuinely don’t like themselves and instead like minorities.
anon_
1hr ago
I should have trusted my gut on that one. I didn't realize until after the fact that the QR Code reader I'd been using extremely sporadically over a decade had become enshittified with predatory ads.
Well yes. You didn't pay for a QR code reader or buy a phone where someone is paid to write it as a native/bundled app. So the only incentive structure remaining is for someone to write a free one with the hopes of monetizing it later.
You'd go to download a no-cd crack off GameCopyWorld.com, which still exists, and you were presented with 3-6 buttons that all said "Download" on them. All but one were predatory ads which caused you to install a virus. Only one was the actual download link to the no-cd crack.
Or you could have just paid $50 for the game. Steam doesn't distribute malware and their website is pristine.
Now it feels like that's how everything works. Everything is an app, and every app has dark patterns trying to steal from you.
No, everything is an app and every app needs a business model. Sometimes the business model is clear (you pay us $90/yr, we give you app). Sometimes it's less clear but still approximately benign (you use Reddit, they sell the ability to mass-train on their content to AI company). Sometimes it's clear it's ad supported (Facebook, Chrome) with varying degrees of scrupulosity on their origins. Some are indeed funded philanthropically like Brave or Signal. Some are fundamentally scammy.
Soteriologian
2hr ago
Yeah, the Dark Souls game mechanics are very counterintuitive. In fact, arguably much of the games' difficulty is rooted in the fact that players don't know how the games work. In Elden Ring, you can one-shot (up to phase transitions, which are often hardcoded) every boss in the game by doing the correct buff incantations, which basically renders the entire game trivial. And it's not like this is some glitch or exploit -- it just falls out of basic understanding how buffs stack and doing the obvious thing.
Then again, this is hardly unique to Dark Souls. Basically every single-player game is like this, in the sense that actually knowing how the mechanics work is a game-breaking superpower, rather than the baseline expectation.
aiislove
2hr ago
Oooooooh this comment is so far away from my personal suspicions and understanding of things that I'm fascinated to see it written out like this. Apparently you are anti blank slatism and I am very anti blank slate as well but we seem to have completely opposite assumptions and terminal end goals in this.
the blank slate progressive is influenced to believe in the superiority of African Americans.
I don't see this at all. In my views, blank slate progressives are the ones who absolutely prioritize the "Soft Status" of my original theory over any kind of hard status. They are first conditioned not to notice ANY physical advantages of black people over whites, and this only strengthens their conviction that the poor blacks are ONLY victims in ANY circumstance because they do worse in every single category of soft status that they (the progressives) value- test scores, iq tests, academic achievement, wage payments, career advancement, you name it. This is what gives the progressive stack its power- to paint the minorities as the eternal victim. Instead what I propose is that black people have their own strengths, which are not the strengths of the PMC class, and that this is actually completely dignified on its own terms, and to try to prop up the academic achievements of a people not predisposed to these strengths is firstly humiliating toward black people, secondarily dehumanizing toward them, thirdly a waste of time, and fourthly demeaning to the rest of humanity as well. Indeed the arrogance of the white progressive that it takes to even imagine doing this makes me queazy and begin to imagine them all as Icarus circling ever closer toward the sun without an ounce of suspicion that their wings are about to melt.
An internalized ideology of genetic blank-slatism will always lead to an intuitively-held belief in the inferiority of Whites, who are historically evil
This doesn't make sense at all to me... If you believe in blank slate you believe that whites are exactly the same as blacks. On the other hand I believe white people, and indeed Asian people, intuitively hold the belief in their inferiority when they find themselves as victims of black crime or feel anxiety when black people are around, because they are bigger scarier and more aggressive etc than smaller weaker people. My family has lived in the midwest for generations and the ones who kept living in increasingly black areas were buying more and more guns and becoming increasingly paranoid of black crime because they lived with its effects every day, meanwhile my family members who have moved out of those areas simply don't live with that fear and paranoia to the same degree.
So, that variety of white progressive who loves hip hop and considers Blacks oppressed is all but forced to consider his own group inherently inferior
I can imagine becoming this person only if I was absolutely positive that my group (whites) was superior to black people. If there was a 1000000% superior race out there and I was running around telling people how much I loved them, that would be so crazy. If there was a group that I saw as inferior and I ran around telling people how much I loved them, I would be getting so many brownie points from everybody. Which describes progressivism more accurately? I think white progressives only hold their beliefs out of a deep sense of arrogance and certainty in their own superiority, and of the inferiority of blacks. Anything that would truly point to an axis of power that holds blacks as more powerful (say in sports achievement) can only shake the foundations of the progressive worldview. They need to have a perpetual victim.
This worldview can only be corrected with the science of genetics and the belief in the superiority of civilization.
That worldview can only be corrected with more real world experience, acceptance of nature, respect for humanity and differences, and less ridiculous hubris, rather than a thin veneer of science and shallow morals that teach us something outside the realm of physical experience and history.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2hr ago
The best thing about Fusion is the prescient Onion article.
name
3hr ago
potentially yes if she can take solace in having very attractive children even though perhaps set back a bit by the age impaired sperm? I would like to be forcibly married to an old toothless rich woman, go ahead and do it to me if we need to run the experiment.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
3hr ago
I don’t find your schema of status too useful, but an adjacent point here is that the blank slate progressive is influenced to believe in the superiority of African Americans. If everyone is totally equal in terms of cognition and moral nature, but one group is more athletic, then that group is superior, and you will intuit and internalize this even if you nominally claim that no group is better than another, because athleticism is a very primal value that humans consider in other humans. So, that variety of white progressive who loves hip hop and considers Blacks oppressed is all but forced to consider his own group inherently inferior: Blacks are the unjustly harmed member of the perceived community (thus demanding extra empathetic concern and love and resources, even primates do this), harmed by someone like himself (thus demanding shame and punishment and ostracization on himself), all while being more musically and athletically dominant. This is a very poisonous worldview. I’ve never bought into the idea that “white progressives are so racist that they actually dehumanize Blacks and that’s why they treat them with lower standards”. I think it’s the exact opposite. An internalized ideology of genetic blank-slatism will always lead to an intuitively-held belief in the inferiority of Whites, who are historically evil (thus likely predisposed to evil according to progressive anachronistic history), can’t rap, and can’t play sportsball. This worldview can only be corrected with the science of genetics and the belief in the superiority of civilization. And perhaps better taste in music.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5hr ago
be me, Dark Souls 2 fan (though I haven't played it in several years)
enjoy using Heide Spear, which has innate lightning damage, on a character whose dump stats are attunement, intelligence, and faith (which are useful only for magic)
notice that a new wiki has been created for the game
idly check out the page on scaling
mfw lightning damage scales with faith
mfw the meta tryhards say that there are "low returns on melee weapon scaling", so you're supposed to go for weapon upgrades and temporary buffs instead
Maybe I'll start a new playthrough with a character for whom faith is not a dump stat.
Lonely_Varelse
5hr ago
I regret pumping up the ticket numbers. I’m planning on waiting till it’s on streaming for that reason (obv that still counts, but it’s diffuse enough that I can lie to myself).
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
5hr ago
Vidya thread.
49.4% of players have the "Defeat the Paintress" achievement. 49.0% of players have the "Go back to Lumiere" achievement.
0.4% of players have quit the game mid-cutscene and never launched it again.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
6hr ago
Have you at least joined the Ostbayerischer Bart- un Schnauzerclub?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6hr ago
[Citation needed]
Blue culture has been winning for centuries.
I know you just look at raw birth rates and assume inevitable victory, but that's… well, I'll be charitable, and say "naïve." Because you ignore retention rates. It doesn't matter if some YEC Fundamentalist "quiverfull" family has a dozen kids, if only one stays with the church while the other eleven all apostatize and become Blue Tribe liberals. Then they're still shrinking — and birthing the future Blue Tribers the current Blue Tribers aren't as they go.
And the data I've seen all shows such poor retention rates pretty much across the board. All the "high fertility" Protestant denominations? Shrinking rapidly due to such effects. Even the Mormons are shrinking once you factor that in, with their above-replacement birthrates going toward producing more Tyler Robinsons.
Even the Amish, who do have high enough retention rates to still be growing, have been moderating. They're running out of available farmland for their farming methods, and are having to economically diversify, which is driving both greater contact with the "English" world and relaxing of tech restrictions — computer and cellphone use are both going up. And those high youth retention rates? Last I saw, they were going down.
And this is all without Blues taking even more active measures to suppress Red birthrates and increase Red-to-Blue assimilation. Expect the latter to go up when homeschooling is banned and Wisconsin v Yoder is overturned. Let alone doing like one of my therapists once argued for, and declaring raising children with "far-right beliefs" to be child abuse (remember the SSC comments comparing the Amish taking their kids out of school early to literally chopping their legs off?), and deploying CFS accordingly. It doesn't matter how many kids you have, once the government just takes them all from you and sends them off to be adopted by a polyamorous gay "throuple". (And then there's what they can do with mass migration from high-fertility parts of Africa.)
Master's tools, master's house. Set a thief to catch a thief. The Blues weaponized demography as a tool long before Reds ever could. They're more experienced at it, and better at it. Which also means they're better at preparing against it. (Is there any better cybersecurity expert than a former "black-hat" hacker? Who knows better how to secure his valuables than the world's greatest thief?)
We agree on a lot of things, but this is one of our biggest differences: you think outbreeding them will work. I don't.
P-Necromancer
7hr ago
Credit cards do not fail us; it is we who fail credit cards.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
It's been a while since I read the books; Captain Samuel Vimes does not, I presume, live in a world that extends easy credit to the working class. Because if he did, he'd just buy the $50 dollar boots with his (terrible) 30% APR credit card, keep his debt payments to the recommended 10% of his income ($3.80 a month) and have them paid off in 1 year and 5 months at a total cost of $61.39.
As a rule, money now is worth more than money later. It's not generally worth 30% more now than it will be in a year -- most of that is to cover the risk of nonpayment, a little overhead, plus some profit for the bank -- but if you're in a situation where it is -- not at all uncommon, especially for people who are struggling financially -- having the option of borrowing at that rate can be extremely helpful.
If you're treading water and your car breaks down and needs a $700 repair, going $700 in debt certainly isn't good, but it's a lot better than losing your job because you can't get to work. If your new job got things mixed up and sends your check to the wrong address, you're much better off if you can cover rent and groceries for the week or two that might take to get figured out -- if the timing's right, you might not pay any interest at all.
Much is made of how long and how much money it takes to pay off a credit card if you only pay the minimum. The bank could very easily solve this problem by raising the minimum payment such that the payoff time is at most two years (so, at most 170% of the principal)... but of course they'd rather you pay less each month for far, far longer. ... But you can counter this devious ploy by just deciding yourself to pay that much!
And if you're not in that situation? Well, you can just not borrow money! It's not impossible for you to be worse off for having another option available to you, but there's a reason that result is unintuitive: it's hardly ever the case in real life. And it certainly isn't here. All you have to do is not be an impulsive idiot!
... Which, of course, is the whole problem. Lots and lots of people are impulsive idiots. I haven't watched these audits, but I've got no doubt you're characterizing them accurately.
I hate the idea of denying responsible, thoughtful people every opportunity to better their circumstances in order to protect irresponsible fools, but I'm very doubtful that works from a Utilitarian perspective. I suppose limiting total credit to a more reasonable percentage of income might be a bearable compromise?
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
7hr ago
The social justice decentralised meme labs work shockingly fast - when they went all-out during COVID, three days was slow. This is a fool's errand; you cannot switch terminology fast enough to outflank them, and you'll look like you've something to hide by trying.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
7hr ago
In my view what Scott Alexander calls "conflict theorists" is basically woke ideology.
It was written to refer to Marxists, actually.
SJ is almost definitionally conflict theorist, but white supremacists are generally conflict theorists as well. Your mistake is that you assumed "conflict theory vs. mistake theory" was isomorphic to the two sides of the culture war; it's not.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
8hr ago
I don't. Have completely given up just about when the "pandemic" came and the world ended. Told myself I'd start shaving again when things get back to normal, but they never did. Not to that normal anyways. Thus caveman.
Yeah, this kind of game design annoys me (although I'm not entirely sure what to do about it). On the one hand, Souls games show you numeric stats -- in fact, you quite literally select which number to increase when you level up, which is a huge amount of freedom in control over numbers. So it looks like you're supposed to care about numbers. But on the other hand, the numbers often behave counterintuitively, and further, the games often hide numbers from you where the value of the number is the only thing of any relevance: e.g., you get an item that "boots fire damage". Ok, boosts by how much? Is it a 5% boost? A 50% boost? Double? It's like the game wants the player to think this is irrelevant, yet even 2 seconds of thought shows it cannot possibly be irrelevant: whether the item is good or not is entirely determined by how big that damn number is!
The especially silly thing is Souls gameplay in particular would be fine with all of this drastically simplified, or even eliminated. The fun part of Souls is learning boss routines and experimenting with new weapons and skills. You could almost get rid of the numbers entirely and still retain what makes the games fun.
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