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anti_dan
4m ago
Page me when such cuts actually happen. Will continue to put money on fiscal hawks rolling snakeyes.
ControlsFreak
6m ago
and the one proposing it again doesn't seem to have any actionable ideas to make it more palatable this time
This is where I'm just going to bow out and say, "Not playing this silly game." As I wrote:
This sort of demand is basically trying to set up an impossible task, as no one here is going to be able to just apply magic to accomplish intermediate steps, and any proposed intermediate steps will be responded to with, "...then why haven't you already done that?"
But yeah, "genies" have "gone back into bottles" before (what a shitty, loaded metaphor). I made a long list in my last comment and everything.
Yes, views rise and fall with the era but not all are equal. If someone wanted to bring slavery back they are going to have a very uphill battle.
True enough. It just so happens to be that we don't see a world where the lack of slavery is causing all sorts of real world problems for individuals and societies. Plus all the good moral arguments and everything. Funny that, both those factors cut the other way for the instant question. As I wrote:
Sometimes it's hard to tell whether it's an issue that will shift, won't shift, will stay perpetually divisive (e.g. abortion), or whatever.
Hadad
12m ago
I agree it's pretty fucked up that our representatives believe insane things. There's many I'd like to be rid of, too! Alas, we cannot police their inner hearts and minds, and we can no more punish them for being religious than we can thinking we live in a patriarchy, or that communism is good, or anything else.
bonsaii
15m ago
18C, slightly overcast, moderate humidity, occasional light breeze.
I like wearing long pants with a long sleeve T-shirt. 18C is right at the transition point where I can roll the sleeves up or down to get optimal temperature regulation so I'm not sweating with light physical activity.
A clear sky is too harsh on my eyes, I end up needing to squint everywhere and my phone loses battery faster because it needs max brightness to be read.
Hadad
15m ago
The median Republican likely doesn't share my belief that we're rich enough to afford most any program we want, and so is concerned with the budget. They also don't want to fund left-wing pet projects, or else they'd be Democrats. It's not hypocritical at all to think spending on bad causes is frivolous.
jkf
15m ago
So you're avoiding a vaccine which stopped a global pandemic that killed millions because four out of every million (that is, 0.0004%) people who get the vaccine develop a heart condition because of it?
It was more like 4/10k if you happened to be in the susceptible group (young males) that we know of -- it's absolutely a possibility that low-grade heart damage was quite widespread, as only the severe cases would have been noticed/recorded.
And assuming that he's in that group (and doesn't also have cancer or something) his odds of dying from covid were essentially zero -- so the behaviour was pretty rational, really -- unlike your popping out of the woodwork to criticize his personal decisions.
Hadad
16m ago
When someone misrepresents me, I'm going to tell them not to. It's not antagonistic to object to mischaracterization of my stand.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
59m ago
I'm not even going bald yet! Even from a purely internal notion of aesthetics, I think I'd look better with a full head of hair rather than being bald or shaved.
Crowstep
1hr ago
we don't have a counterfactual Earth to compare against
No, but we have a counterfactual population to compare against, the population who chose not to get vaccinated. The comparison is gigantic and unambiguous, vaccines saved lives. And that's with the unvaccinated population benefitting from the partial herd immunity provided by the vaccinated population.
the distinct impression I got from the public medical establishment during the pandemic is that if it were happening they would not have been honest about it because of how they took a mortage on their reputations to push the vaccines
If they weren't being honest about side effects, why did you quote an article about them describing side effects and how common they are as a reason for not getting the vaccine? How does that not count as honesty?
There was no scientific curiosity
If that were true, they would have just released the vaccines instead of spending months and months doing exhaustive trials to see whether and to what extent the vaccines reduced infection, and what side effects there were. If scientific curiosity means anything, it means testing your hypotheses with studies. What exactly did you expect them to do beyond that?
but I have no data either way that I would personally trust about this
You have a massive population of vaccinated people, living among a massive population of unvaccinated people. The unvaccinated population had death rates from COVID that an order of magnitude higher than the vaccinated population. What more evidence could you ask for?
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Man I don’t care. I will discuss getting the vaccine on a risk/benefit basis when 1) Dr Fauci is publicly executed and 2) the lockdowns receive Holocaust-level treatment in broader society. Til then, don’t care, my stance is that the chink virus isn’t real, was never real, and is just the government killing people and lying about the cause as an excuse to take away our freedom.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
Respectful but enthusiastic request for more anecdotes from your experience.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
WHOOOAAAAA WHAT?
You're going to pair "tweedle-dee-tweedle-dum municipal incompetence" with serial kid impregnator? Damn, homie.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
I'm a Fallen Soldier main. That's my guy. Fewer but better units, less micromanagement from that alone but then you also needn't have them spend as much time sitting tight to heal? Yes please. All the other factions can pack up and go home.
Overall I feel like the writing of Zephon (ignoring the race angle for now because I really don't think that's the game's chiefest problem) is just about skin-deep. Maybe evocative of the eerie eldritch sci-fi theme it tries to go for, but in the end it's just empty and highly generic gesticulation that leaves it to the player to fill in the blanks, which are most of it. It's superficial, simultaneously pretentious and not even trying all that hard, and with all that said it's still slightly above average for game writing. Yes, the bar is that low.
Gameplay-wise the game is alright. An improvement upon Gladius for sure, but how good was Gladius? Solidly OK, I'd say. Nothing revolutionary at all, but it works well enough. Zephon is that, somewhat more polished and set in a slightly less used-up setting.
Then there's 'practical romantic' (not actually romantic anymore) - the most normal human faction out there. Special power- get resources from defeated enemies, can buff morale with influence. Looks Iranian I guess.
I chuckled a little when I saw that guy, thinking of the Mottizen of the same name.
He's Algerian ingame, IIRC.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
1hr ago
Funnily enough, I think I misunderstood and thought you were talking about the Loomerite-Tuckerist wars going on in the right at the moment, as various factions spar for influence by threatening to take their rubber ducky and go home.
Hanania is definitely some kind of weird op effort, you’re right about that. He is also not the elite human capital he likes to see himself as.
LiberalRetvrn
1hr ago
I agree, human rights are arbitrary in a sense, but I think there are certain rights that enlightened humans converge upon as being worthy of protection. They are much less arbitrary than borders, which are the result of random initial conditions, geography, lines drawn randomly on maps by politicians, etc. Borders could be very different and society would still work fine.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
Serious and genuine question:
Why not just shave your head? I ask because I've been balding since 26-27. I took the "plunge" and shaved it at 28 and ... everyone says I look better, I don't stress about going bald whatsoever, and I can get a dirtcheap haircut from anywhere because nobody can fuck up a zero buzz cut.
Summer days 18-22 degrees and occasional clouds. Nights 10-15 with maybe light rain. Best is when there are only patchy very high clouds so the sun lights them up through the (very short) midsummer night.
LiberalRetvrn
1hr ago
No, liberalism is an opinion about how things should work. A fairy tale is a story with supernatural elements, usually with simplistic moral themes designed to teach people life lessons. The Bible, the Quran, Harry Potter, and Hansel and Gretel are examples of fairy tales. There's nothing wrong with them, but they shouldn't be the basis for government decision-making.
LiberalRetvrn
1hr ago
I think there should be some restrictions on politicians being religiously motivated. In the same way that people objected to Biden being in office with cognitive impairments, I think it's a problem to let government officials base their decision making on religious delusions.
SkoomaDentist
1hr ago
30 degrees is heat wave where the elderly and sick start dying. 35 is close to record temperature (and would be a new record if it happened in June or August). Most apartments don’t have real air conditioning.
Yeah, I live in Finland.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
See for me neither the combat nor the gambits really grabbed me. The fact that you spend most of the game without having to make decisions about fighting just sort of removes the fun. You cruise through most of the game that way — once you figure out the correct balance of auto commands to get the AI to not be stupid, you could put down the controller and grab a sandwich while the game fought itself. Which then turned the gameplay into moving around the game zones and solving puzzles.which aren’t bad, but are really pretty simple and don’t add much replay to the game. I felt like the entire experience was on rails to some degree. X was extremely linear, but at least you had to play the game yourself.
Yes – JDAMs will have much more payload (a small 500 pound bomb will have nearly 200 pounds of explosive filler, while a M107 155mm shell will have around 15 pounds) and be considerably more accurate (a CEP of 10 meters versus, according to Google's AI overview, perhaps up to 250 meters at max range for an unguided 155mm shell). Not only do the bombs deliver more payload, they deliver it much more precisely. There's a reason that the Russians fielded glide bomb kids in Ukraine very quickly.
Yeah, the US would likely use tactical aircraft to fly most sorties with smaller weapons such as JDAMs – the Air Force has more than 400 F-35s (if stealthier aircraft are needed and if they present an advantage – which they may not, particularly if Iran is relying on IR guidance systems) and more than 200 F-15E Strike Eagles. (The Israelis have accomplished what they've done so far with less than 70 F-15s, and about 45 F-35s, plus nearly 200 F-16s. Of course in any real war the US Navy with their 400+ Super Hornets would also contribute).
As for the rest of it, I was responding to your claim that the USAF wasn't capable of "mass destruction." I agree with your point that applying that destruction profitably would be an issue. But a single F-15E can a larger bomb load than B-17 or Lancaster strategic bombers in World War Two (more than 20,000 pounds). If we use the Anglo-American bombing of Dresden as our benchmark for "mass destruction," we will note that it was accomplished over four days in 1945, used about 1200 Lancasters and B-17s over the course of four raids (so 300 aircraft/raid on average), delivering around 4,000 tons of bombs. Even if each JDAM in the US inventory was a 500 pounder (unlikely, the largest JDAM is a 2000-pound bomb) the US could plausibly accomplish Dresden 2.0 again over the course of a week with its F-15E fleet alone and still have leftover JDAMs.
Not that it would need to, because guided munitions are much more effective than mass carpet bombing (Wikipedia reports that PGMs were 35% more likely to destroy their targets than unguided bombs and made 3/4ths of all successful strikes on targets despite being less than 10% of all munitions dropped in the Persian Gulf War).
I'm not saying we should bomb Iran! On balance I am against it! I'm saying the US Air Force has a lot of bombs. I think this is considerably under-appreciated, people are (rightfully) concerned about American procurement but "haha tail bomb kits go brrr" is actually a thing.
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