domain:papyrusrampant.substack.com
Agreed that this makes districting quite the tough nut to crack.
I had a thought that I should learn more about the history behind the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment, which was ratified by the very people that it took power away from. I did a little bit of reading, but there are competing historical perspectives that I'll have to ruminate on further.
There are definitely parallels in terms of national/state-level dynamics, impinging on one another. It also seems unlikely to me to propose that people at that time were simply naive to the possibility that such a rule change would be likely to advantage/disadvantage them. Some explanations try to argue that some of the main implications had already effectively come about via other means, so it wasn't a terribly sharp break. I don't know.
In any event, perhaps worth ruminating on and reading more history. It seems not entirely impossible to come up with something, but perhaps it is the case that nationalized interests are too entrenched and 'smart' to the scene that even minor steps will be more effectively blocked. In that case, we'd probably need to be more clever to messy up the predictive capabilities.
I haven't totally given up on toying with various schemes, but it is a difficult problem that is seriously resistant to most flippant proposals.
TowardsPanna
8hr ago
It's annoying to hold BTC and no ETH at all right now. Could have tripled my money with ETH this year. It wasn't so much in terminal decline after all.
Rate cuts announced: ETH goes up 10% and keeps its gains. BTC goes up a few percent and starts to give back its gains, as usual. Fucking whales thinking this is a good enough price and unloading their bags, always a little too hard.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
All congressional districts are A: contiguous and B: have very roughly the same number of people- the number of Americans divided by the number of representatives. Google says this is 747,000, but grain of salt. The one caveat to (B) is that every state gets at least one representative, even if- like Wyoming- it has less than 747,000 people.
You can just google congressional district maps- by state probably gives a more detailed view- to see the twisting contortions involved.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
One party states also hand out gibs constantly and force influential stakeholders into using their platforms to support the ruling party.
DelendaEst
8hr ago
I strongly agree with this, especially for someone with the cultural attitudes of the median motizan. The gatekeepers to the existing paths to success are largely all held by people who are actively looking for NOT YOU and view keeping you out as an active good, and while alternatives such as Baen exist they are but one port and that is just a different tournament model of which of the legions of authors applying to them get picked.
Kindle Unlimited and other self published routes have a bad rap in a lot of places because the lack of gatekeepers means the quality can be pretty low, but there are a lot of people who have been a success who would not have been able to make it otherwise. You probably don't want to do this because it seems low status and sends a signal that your book isn't good enough for traditional publishing, but try to be Larry Correia. He self published his first book, marketing it primarily by sharing it on the gun enthusiast forums he participated it, and now is very successful in the trad publishing world (largely through Baen, but still) on the basis of that success. If you self publish and make a follow up post with the link here I will pre-commit to at least giving it a look.
deluxev2
9hr ago
So far that has been the only AI propaganda. Definitely thematic parallels in other places and the story isn't over so still have to wait and see if it full tilts into it or something. I've been enjoying my time with it, there is definitely some cringey spots but better than the state of most media.
hydroacetylene
9hr ago
The party which won the last popular vote must provide two bulls between four and six years of age, white and without blemish, sharing a sire. The party which lost the last popular vote must pick their bull first; the party which won will then get to slaughter, eat, and enclose their lands to offset this advantage of picking the slightly larger bull.
hydroacetylene
9hr ago
It's just literally straightforwardly true that blue states tend to have bluer congressional delegations compared to popular vote than red states have redder congressional delegations compared to popular vote. Texas had actually come closest in proportionality among big states before redistricting.
hydroacetylene
9hr ago
This raises the question of- can you name mass-market popculture franchises which are more popular among men?
philosoraptor
9hr ago
Read the OP and judge for yourself. Based on my own read of same, I wouldn't go so far as "retarded" but "unexceptional" fails at doing her justice in the other direction.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
9hr ago
My mom used to watch Star Wars because she was a Harrison Ford fangirl. When she'd gush, I used to groan and tell her that was TMI. To be fair, he's a handsome man, and I get the appeal.
She also, uncritically, enjoys the second trilogy, which I can't excuse on any level except the second film, which I will defend as decent.
naughtynn
9hr ago
If you look at the Star Wars sequels, what male character can boys look up to? Can any of them be considered heroes? Look at Indiana Jones. They wheel him out, make him useless and is replaced by a woman. Marvel is the same. Robert Downey Junior retires, and they replace Iron Man with a sassy black lady.
In modern media, white men cannot be the hero, cannot do anything heroic. This fundamentally is why these boy brands are dying. They take these properties and then the only thing the creatives want to do is tear down the characters that people like.
Boys don't enjoy literature/films with female protagonists, while girls are okay with media with male protagonists. This has been demonstrated in numerous studies:
A 2022 analysis based on PIRLS data found that elementary school boys were significantly less interested in texts with female protagonists—even when the text was otherwise identical—while girls showed consistent interest regardless of protagonist gender - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959475222001013
A 2008 British study of about 4,000 children aged 4–16 found that only 5% of boys preferred books with a girl protagonist, while 22% of girls were comfortable with male protagonists. Boys were as interested in protagonists like robots or monsters as other boys, suggesting the issue isn't solely the female gender but perhaps relatable content or format - https://lisamartinbooks.com/articles/2016/11/26/where-the-boys-are
A long-standing pattern noted by children's literature professionals is the belief that “girls will read books with boy heroes, whereas boys won’t read books with girl heroes” - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/may/06/gender-imbalance-children-s-literature
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
9hr ago
I should have been more specific:
- Her dad is a successful businessman, but not so rich that they have fuck you money.
- Brother is a programmer? I think? Anyway, he lives abroad, works for an MNC and makes big money.
- Mom's a housewife.
From what I could gather, the rest of her family are reasonably well off.
Anyway. Marrying someone below average in intelligence is close to a deal-breaker for me. I strongly value intelligence, at least for the sake of my future kids. I'm the kind of guy who intends to at least try and talk my future spouse into opting for embryo selection for IQ and overall disease risk. Now, if the girl in question was gorgeous and had enough money that we wouldn't have any financial concerns for life, I'd be right on that.
And, to put it bluntly, I genuinely believe I can do better. That might come across as conceited, but I still think it's true! I'm an okay looking guy, who makes decent money, live in the West (which is a big deal for Indian women), a doctor etc. I got into training relatively young, so I'll be a mid-level psychiatrist when I'm in my very early 30s, and hopefully done with career advancement by my mid 30s. As far as I can tell, I'll only get more attractive and appealing with time, my uncle, a senior shrink in his 50s, still has women all over him.
Indian women tend to at least have a kernel of pragmatism. They look at this and are almost always keen. Even right now, if I decided I wanted to get hitched, all it would take is coming home for a few weeks and hitting the apps, or just asking my family to put out feelers on my behalf.
I'm late 20s, and would likely be at my best-by mid 30s. However, I think it's better to be a dad younger than that, raising kids in the West is hard fucking work, and the more energy and health I have in me, the better. As of right now, the plan is to look for someone here (easier said than done the dating market is abysmal), and if that's not successful, consider going the arranged marriage route with semi-seriousness when I'm done with the my current stage of training.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
10hr ago
How large does said district have to be? A city block? An apartment complex? Ten thousand people?
In the other reply, @VoxelVexillologist says that it's not well defined, except by litigation and negative examples, but a rough ballpark would be something I'm interested to know.
No_one
10hr ago
I've recently found X-Com Files a so-called 'megamod' for OpenXcom - a fan re-implementation & polishing of one of the first squad based tactical turn based games ever. Ufo: Enemy Unknown, which came out in 1993, back when 1999 was still in the future and was re-made into a slick but profoundly soulless if somewhat competently made corporate product lately.
Better, I've found 'Brutal OpenXcom' which is a fork of OpenXcom with a completely re-written and pretty good AI that doesn't cheat (unlike original) and is massively challenging because it's basically fine and competent and can (if the mod makers were feeling nasty) use the same brutal tactics of lobbing satchel charges 15 m ahead where it suspects the enemy is. Luckily, it's not that common at the start that the enemy has large amounts of explosives on hand. O
Very comfy game. The setting is sort of like X-Files: all the major conspiracies are true. Name a major one , probably true in the setting. You have been appointed to investigate 'weird shit' on behalf of one of the more pro-social ones. Of course you don't know anything about that yet bc you're just some sort of capable security bureaucrat, and you have a shiny permit from UNSC to go around and black-bag people all around the world whenever sufficiently weird crap is happening. And boy, is there a lot of it!
Anyway the gaming loop of classic Xcom and also this is still the same: build base-> respond to weird shit -> black bag or kill said weird ..beings, loot the corpses->autopsy or interrogate -> find out more about said weird shit -> use this to improve your capability -> SHUT IT DOWN (whatever 'it' is, and 'shut' sometimes involves diplomacy and sometimes travelling to space, other universes and being very kinetic).
Ordinary Xcom had the alien invasion. XCom Files starts out earlier: you don't have jet fighters and intercontinental ranged VTOL troop transports, you have airline tickets and vans. You go around, abduct farmers, tussle with Men in Black (well, you are technically MiB too, but there's the not-so-prosocial ones), tussle with cultists, fight alien tech smuggling organised crime (most lucrative part of the game really) and so on.
It's a long mod, I'd say 6x-10x longer than the original game, and quite difficult, but you can save & load until you figure out how to do things. Or that you need to fight that particular battle another day.
OpenXcom looks dated, but the battles can be ran at increased resolutions which makes it look somewhat better. There's a lot of extra keyboard only controls for convenience which are nicely documented in the controls menu.
Anyway, except for some sometimes uneven and mildly bad writing in a few reports, I really like it and rate it higher than Xenonauts, which looked a bit nicer but felt somewhat soulless. If any game deserves a proper remake, it's the original Xcom. And no, I don't mind the cringe one they made. Proper scale, no stupid constraints on squad size, actual sloped hills. I can't believe it but forests in the old one look less artificial than in the new one, which doesn't have slopes.)
FlailingAce
10hr ago
Thank goodness the government is finally diversifying its investment holdings. Do you know that most of our money is in low yield Treasury bonds? It's no wonder USG is nearly bankrupt. As a stakeholder myself I'm a big fan of this move, though I would still prefer a more balanced portfolio.
No_one
10hr ago
No_one
10hr ago
male who would choose to hire a 51-year-old prostitute also has a severe mental disability that warrants special sentencing treatment.
There are certain groups, and drunk people often are in one of them that don't seem to care much about the age. E.g. will rape old people etc. Any appropriately sized warm hole will do.
functor
10hr ago
Libertarianism as the only right wing ideology is a flawed view of the left/right spectrum. Most right wing governments have historically been involved in the economy and securing essential resources for the nation. Mercantilism, fascism, monarchy etc are completely compatible with a nationalistic economic policy. If anything the liberal factions have often been aligned with leftist groups against nationalists and traditionalists.
Do you have any numbers on that? Like I said, from what I remember the Disney Star Wars merch didn't move at all. Star Trek had the same problem. Was it actually enough to cover the movie shortfalls, or were they making money with the legacy merch, or something?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
11hr ago
Does this represent a leftist turn in the Republican Party's view on the state's role in the economy, leaning more towards a nationalist democratic socialism?
I mean, Trump representing a turn from free markets was something talked about since his first term. If I remember correctly all the Blues were mocking the very idea, even endorsing Rainbow Capitalism, starting with Clinton's "will breaking banks up stop sexism?".
Gundam? Pokemon? Dragonball Z? Half a dozen other major Japanese IPs?
Even if we limit to within the Anglosphere, I'm fairly sure that- various efforts to the contrary- franchises like D&D, Warhammer 40k, and most fighting/strategy genre video games are more popular among men than women. Each of these have had merchandising, novels, movies/TV series, comics, spinoffs and emulators, and so on.
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