domain:natesilver.net
self_made_human
C'est la vie
19m 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
21m 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
22m 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.
28m ago
Respectful but enthusiastic request for more anecdotes from your experience.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
32m 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.
34m 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
39m 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
49m 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.
50m 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
51m 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
57m 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.
faceh
1hr ago
He and Fishtank got mentioned on Rogan recently which probably helped too.
I do think Sam wants to be perceived as this inscrutable, unpredictable character, rather than his true self. I think he lets his true convictions come out and play pretty often (like the Elon vid), but he's made it effectively impossible to know what his 'authentic' personality is. This is what I believe the closest example is, that I've seen.
Then there's the interesting theory that he may literally be a cryptid.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
1hr ago
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1hr ago
You're being antagonistic and obnoxious. Stop it.
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
You know, that is true, but also, when you watch Sam & IDubbz competing documentaries, one of the things that jumps out in IDubbz trying to encourage Sam to be more genuine and less of a character. Sam, understandably, believes if he ever did that he'd get deleted off the internet and unpersoned entirely.
One 'uge election victory later, and Sam does appear to be letting his true self come out at least a little bit more. His open letter to Elon was probably as close to an unironic manifesto for what he actually believes as we've ever seen, and is arguably responsible for his resurgence in fame/notoriety/attention.
So, not only did Sam try to pull IDubbz off the path, and IDubbz has proceeded to ignore all his advice and ruin his life, but Sam may have taken IDubbz advice and prospered enormously?
I don't think it's anywhere near a open and shut case that the vaccines stopped the pandemic, we don't have a counterfactual Earth to compare against, but as people got vaccinated we also saw the rise of less deadly variants. And of course, as more people still got infected they would build natural immunity. As for the prevalence of side effects, again we don't have much information to compare against, but 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. There was no scientific curiosity, anyone trying to raise any alarms was not taken with even a slight grain of seriousness but immediately the public health establishments were looking for ways to discredit them. While that does not increase the trustworthiness of those making the claims, it does negatively affect the trustworthiness of those dismissing them without even looking at them.
Note, I'm not saying that the vaccines did nothing but caused deadly side effects, personally I think it probably had a mild effect in lowering the seriousness of infection for people who encountered COVID for the first time after the vaccine, and was probably generally safe and side effects no more prevalent or serious than other similar drugs, but I have no data either way that I would personally trust about this, so I wouldn't judge someone for coming to a different conclusion.
No_one
1hr ago
Exactly. While there's something mildly pleasant about hot weather, working in it is sucks and it's only really good for going swimming.
But around 15°C is just the best. If you're inactive and outside, a jacket and trousers will keep you comfortably warm... if it's near freezing you need an entire elaborate set of clothes to feel comfortable being out there and if it's >22°C doing anything more strenuous than walking will lead to sweating a lot.
It took a 35°C heatwave for me to understand what sweatbands are for. The only good thing about summer is that working outside and sweating like a horse is the perfect excuse to keep drinking cold beer to replace lost calories, water and electrolytes. Also the beer tastes much better then. I barely drink any in winter myself..
Mushguffler
1hr ago
He's an insane Frenchman with an addiction to tea.
The interesting thing about Sam's resurgence is how, simultaneously, a number of people who were opposed to him are crashing and burning, notably IDubbbz, where Sam legitimately tried to pull him off the path he was on during their dueling documentaries (goddamn that was 3 years ago).
Despite how he portrays himself in his comedy and public persona, he's clearly got his life far more put-together and on a better trajectory than most influencers/youtube celebs.
Factions:
There's eight of them in the base game, some of them share a particular native type of tech (so far, three with ~8 units each) but each has different leader and faction abilities. You can in theory mix & match, but as the production facility for each unit type is unique, the gigantic opportunity cost definitely prevents mixing units of the same tier (so 2 infantry types etc, not to mention, in the crucial early game the other faction's units are an era behind) and some resources differ.
Native tech types:
Middle Americans (dudes with body armor & guns, tanks, SPAA, guided missiles, big artillery, nukes, even bigger tanks, brutal air power and of course space marines with antimatter sprinkled blades that cut anything as pinnacle of infantry). Will nuke you if given a chance. Each faction type has several 'operations', basically a sort of spell of some sort.
Silicon Valley Americans (cyborg under-armed infantry, hover-servitors with plasma guns, purely mechanical spider snipers, some time-cheating floating beam weapon using AI drone etc). Will cause a small pseudo black hole to appear over your city or army and stay being horrible for a month.
And the very definitely illegal aliens who introduced themselves by gigadeaths and now claim it was all a misunderstanding or necessary or something along those lines and the various humans who've developed an affinity for said alien's ..deity? Not at all clear what the they do, don't feel like playing them.
The 'Silicon Valley' tech tree is natively had by three factions: 'Emulated Mind'- a partly failed upload who is good at logistics and sort of good with some of the cringiest writing(survived death and cancer and won't let the apocalypse stop her), and 'heartless artificer' who is a strictly 'ends justifies the means' type of person and implausibly represented by a pretty indefinable mocha woman with a slight spanish accent.
Whereas, we know it'd be some extremely intense white or asian autist-psychopath IRL. The special traits for the two are: emulated mind can only build two cities but gets more from random facilities around the map, and the 'heartless artificer' is good at cloning and can also improve production through a 'performance review' called 'fountain of blood' where the lowest performers get the bullet to motivate the rest to work up to 34% harder.
Then there's 'Rogue Operative', undoubtedly an Asian trans cybercriminal who social engineered a little too much and ended up running the remains of a company she was attempting to steal from when the end of the world came. I say trans because it's the 22nd century so I'm assuming gender-affirming surgery has been perfected by then but affinities towards hacking have likely not changed much.
The middle American tech tree is had by three base factions: 'Fallen Soldier' -a robust looking hispanic guy who just won't die, kind of a like a WH40k perpetual. His faction's special power is just rigorously training their units and also healing charms-pieces of his flesh somehow prevent those who bear them from dying. Also somehow fix damaged hardware but I'm going to overlook that for now. Naturally, people love not dying of common wounds and diseases. He doesn't know why he rose from the dead, but if you wear a piece of his flesh as a talisman you're going to heal much faster.
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.
Then there's the most seemingly implausible human faction, led by a fat German aristocrat (monocled, too) who spent a few decades in a bunker before getting out and becoming useful. A good administrator(can rush production) and diplomat/trader. German aristocracy, whatever is left of it is led by people who are almost invariably tanned jocks, and if not that, reasonably fit and very good skiers. Although, maybe in the late 21st century being a fat foodie will once more be a status mark? Perhaps it's good writing.
And then everyone clapped
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