DradisPing
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User ID: 1102
DradisPing
2d ago
The culprit is overprofessionalization. Writters are now expected to go to film school then try to break into Hollywood.
Back when things were less competitive it was common for writers to serve in the military, travel around the US or overseas, and read a lot of random books.
Now they do professional schooling and then spend years dealing with obnoxious people in LA.
This is especially noticable in sci fi genre writting. The writers of new Star Wars and Star Trek have seen all the space battle movies but don't have any relatives with military experience and haven't watch many war documentaries. So all the commanding officers come off as a mix of incompetent and unbeliveable.
Writing engaging characters requires a broad mix of lived experience and reading.
Of course studio executives are similarly isolated from big chunks of human experience. They spent their lives viciously clawing their way to the top.
DradisPing
2d ago
If you want more influence from me, you need to explain what it is you are trying to accomplish.
Now, to be fair, I don't see myself as likely to be convinced in any case
EDIT: Why is this getting downvoted so much?
Here's the situation. You're making demands without being in a position to demand anything. They don't care about your influence, and you aren't really offering it.
You're just standing there and screaming that you will define the null hypothesis and they are obligated to debate you according to your rules.
Have a look at this article, and notice the bit on "floating signifiers" https://status451.com/2017/07/11/radical-book-club-the-decentralized-left/
If you want to have any hope of advancing your argument, you do need to work out some of these details. Some other extremists, like anarcho-capitalists for example, I find to be actually quite good at working out these details.
AnCaps aren't anyone's example of a successful movement.
DradisPing
2d ago
"Jews" tends to be a proxy for big city businessmen with no connection to the community. A lot of scams and white collar crimes take time to prosecute. Someone from the city can swoop in, do negative things, and be gone before they be stopped or prosecuted. Small town lawyers find themselves having to move against a legal entity that was dissolved before they could make their case.
DradisPing
2d ago
Another point is that the girlfriend likely moved to Minnesota to be with him and doesn't have a strong local support network. If she had a mother, sisters, and best friends since childhood in the city it would be less of an issue.
DradisPing
3d ago
Looking at the calendar there were no games Sunday - Friday last week. So they could have induced then or flown her out to Denver. Looks like people didn't think Gobert was critical enough to do either.
I'm not a big sports fan but I'd guess that NBA players have missed games for much less important reasons.
DradisPing
6d ago
This is the platonic form of the argument: https://imgur.com/a/QPHPxrJ
There were some great twitter threads on the subject that I'm currently unable to find.
But essentially, women view the question as an opportunity to shame & put down men. Men take the question literally.
So when women state their answer men assume that they are lacking in bear facts and try to explain them.
DradisPing
6d ago
The recording industry managed to spread the idea that non-professionals singing is lame and embarassing. So gathering around the campfire or a piano and singing as a group is pretty unusual for adults, at least in the US & CAN.
So there's not much of an opportunity for people to spread grassroots parodies.
DradisPing
6d ago
You've never seen anything like this?
Where each of those signs is a departure point for a different bus route. I didn't realize it was unusual.
DradisPing
6d ago
Bus stops are merciless. I've regularly lost my spot at the front of the queue because I was 30 inches to the left of where the bus actually stops and the next person decided to start a new queue.
Of course it's regional. England is legendary for strict queue etiquette. I have no helpful insights if you're in the UK.
DradisPing
7d ago
They're more analogous than you think.
The English rulers wanted to increase the number of domestic supporters so they imported supporters from England and seized land to give it to them.
The Irish left wants to increase it's number of domestic supporters so they bring in politically loyal but violent foreigners. They lavish them in tax dollars and pay them to live in local neighbourhoods. The imports commit violence against locals, but it's a hate crime to fight back. Eventually the locals flee.
So their goal is essentially the same result with a few more steps.
DradisPing
9d ago
The Irish left wing open borders position alway confused me. Isn't being upset about British immigration 300 years ago their whole thing?
DradisPing
9d ago
StackOverflow has been going downhill for a long time. Goodhart's Law, "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
It's now full of thirsty newbie coders who are desperate to get answers in the hope that their StackOverflow profile will and them a job. Unfortunately being eager to help isn't useful it you're looking for specific domain knowledge.
DradisPing
9d ago
There are professional social media botting firms that also do political posts either for money or just in their spare time. The people who work there support the cause and they can use it to sell clients on their work.
DradisPing
9d ago
What Abbott is doing is a little different. He and a few other Governors are challenging the rule change in court and telling their states not to make any changes while the lawsuits are on going.
Keep in mind that this is a re-interpretation of existing laws, not any new law. So the Executive Branch is on shakier ground.
The SCOTUS is re-examining Chevron deference and is about to make a ruling. So the Governors are on pretty strong legal ground to delay things until that ruling comes down and they've had their day in court under whatever the new standards are.
So really it's much less brazen than what blue states have been doing, where they've been ignoring specific that have been upheld as valid. Also there was that situation in 2020 where Antifa kept trying to burn down a federal courthouse in Portland and the city / state refused to defend it.
DradisPing
10d ago
Actually doing it would probably be illegal, yeah. But I'm not a lawyer.
Joking about stealing the PM's semen isn't the sort of thing that you gets you in trouble in Canada. The RCMP doesn't have nearly the resources the Secret Service does and they really don't have time for something like that. Plus it'd be hard for them to get a judge to take the charges seriously. What with me giggling in the court room and all.
I am 100% certain that I am already on lists in Canada. If anything, my comment is more likely to get my presence on those lists reviewed and removed as a waste of time.
DradisPing
10d ago
Realistically you wouldn't need Castro DNA. We know enough about Trudeau and Castro ancestry.
Given the breakup of Justin's marriage, the best way to proceed would be to recruit an attractive young woman to collect DNA. You could get sequencing done and upload the results to Ancestry.com and 23andMe.
It'd be pretty obvious who the real father is by looking at regions and relatives.
DradisPing
11d ago
The big problem is that Young Pierre Trudeau and Young Castro could easily pass for brothers. So it's hard to tell if there's any funny business from looking at Justin. Justin looks like his brothers in family photos.
DradisPing
14d ago
It's not Christianity in general. The key people are New England Puritans. Their followers and institutions (eg Harvard, Yale) became dominant in the US, then after WW2 became highly influential in Europe.
DradisPing
16d ago
Is Expeditionary Force Craig Alanson?
Yes, Craig Alanson. The first book is Columbus Day.
DradisPing
16d ago
One of WoW's features was that it was a place to hang out online. You could gather friends and have an epic adventure together going through a rich open world. But it moved away from that. They couldn't solve the latency issues from having too many people in big outdoor battles. They couldn't solve the zone resource scaling issues where zones are either empty or too crowded.
Instead they decided that the open world wasn't important and switched to building mechanically complex battles in instances.
Now you can gather all of your friends in discord voice chat without having to play the same game. There's less need of a hang out game with a bunch of stuff to do in it.
Perhaps the future of MMOs is for small groups of people to use AI tools to develop elaborate Minecraft mods & worlds that other players can enjoy.
DradisPing
16d ago
Allow me to bring down the intellectual quality with the various sci fi audio book series I've listened to recently. Light spoilers ahead, but I tried not to include anything too major.
The Murderbot Diaries.
The protagonist is a Sentry Bot. Made out of cloned tissue and cybernetics, he's born into servitude as corporate property rented out for security on planetary survey missions. He has recently managed to hack his governor module and has freed himself from control. With his newfound freedom he quietly does his job but spends all of his free time binge watching serials.
A mission goes awry and adventure ensues. 7 books, I listened to them all. Some fun characters. The later books seem a bit padded, there was an arc over the last few books so the endings of each weren't as satisfying. I probably just needed a break from the series.
Bobiverse
In 2016 a Silicon Valley CEO of a mid-sized company signs up to have his head frozen in case of death. He dies. The cryogenic company promised to use his funds to build him a new body, but that didn't work out so well. In 2133 his mind is brought back online as a digital replicant because his personality is seen as a good match for becoming a von Neumann probe.
4 books, I made it through them all. Some very imaginative world building and explorative sci fi. There's some Reddit tier atheism stuff at the beginning but it quickly moves on to more interesting things.
Expeditionary Force
In 2030 bipedal hamster-like aliens launch a surprise assault on Earth. The protagonist, Joe, helps defend a small town at the initial invasion site. Later, some lizard-like aliens recruit them to launch a counterattack. Joe ends up as part of an occupying force on one of the hamster worlds. Joe is a blue collar grunt, and bit boring. The early parts drag. He later discovers an ancient alien AI housed in something similar to a talking beer can. Things pick up after that.
I listened to 3 books of 16. It initially had promise but the alien world building was a bit weak. Skippy's origin is the most interesting plot thread but apparently there's not much progress on that until book 9. It had its moments but I gave up on it.
Starship's Mage
This one was interesting because I didn't think I'd like it. It's essentially hard sci-fi with magic.
A brutal eugenics program on Mars led to the creation of Magi. They are the key to FTL travel and the galaxy opened up to colonization. Some alien ruins have been discovered, but no sign of living aliens. The Mage King controls FTL and thus all trade and travel between worlds.
I really enjoyed the first few books. I made it through 7 of 14. The sci-fi magic just being magic meant that everything not involving a wizard is easy to understand. There are Newtonian space battles similar to the Expanse.
For me, it peaked at book 4, Alien Arcana. The first 4 books had more investigation and mystery. After that the series shifted more to fleet space battles and interstellar politics with anti-mage separatists. The author doesn't have the grasp he needs on things like large scale military production and what the military advisors would be saying for those plotlines to work well.
DradisPing
16d ago
Can you post an update if it picks up? I couldn't get through it and gave up on the series. It'd be good to know if it's worth the slog.
DradisPing
17d ago
From about 2015 until Merkel's retirement people were regularly calling Poland WN or worse. I'm not exactly sure when it stopped, but from the Trump impeachment to covid it wasn't a priority and after the Ukraine invasion internationalist types weren't badmouthing it anymore.
DradisPing
17d ago
You can practice by working on some github issues on some repo like this random one: https://github.com/themotte/rDrama/issues
https://codecrafters.io/ is a bit pricey but fun. You should be able to burn through the "build your own http server" in python one pretty quickly.
I like to manage all of my language versions with asdf since it's one tool for versioning python/go/javascript/elixir/whatever.
Burning through a bunch of leetcode easy problems is a good way to get comfortable with a new language. Or if you've done a bunch of problems already try to translate those into python.
I think you're missing key info on the legal fight here. You're presuming the courts are some neutral arbiter here, but there was major forum shopping. All three versions were before the same judge in Hawaii who issued injunctions blocking all three. The judge was a personal friend of Obama an Obama flew out and had lunch with him after he was assigned the case. The 9th wasn't going to overturn so it was blocked until it got to the SCOTUS.
Immigration hawks noticed this and decided that they could forum shop too. So the lawsuits against Biden's policies were all filed in Red friendly districts.
Which goes back to a key point of the bill you left out. All lawsuits would need to be filed in the notoriously politically corrupt DC courts. Future Republican Presidents would likely be blocked from ever using the Border Emergency Authority. All new asylum requirements would be watered down as too strict.
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