No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
No_one
1yr ago
Those Who Walk Away from Omelas
I've seen a take that particular story was sort of ...very thinly allegorical.
That is, that it was about the attitude of SF fandom in its day to child abuse.
It was a pretty interesting community, as there was a huge controversy when angry fans tried to get child molester* excluded from a con.
No_one
1yr ago
It wasn't a peanut allergy, it was some fairly crippling gut related autoimmune disease.
No_one
1yr ago
They aren't exactly stupid over there. Take /u/shitgenstein, for example. It's more like a forum for devout members of the faith that dares not name itself.
No_one
1yr ago
I have played MMOs and know people who made thousands of euros selling crap to stupid mid easterners*. But it was all in newer games. I'm enough people are playing it so that the Venezuelans can make the money..
*It's not a needless insult, the people were known for grossly overpaying and squandering what they kept buying. Most other player types spent far less or bought thinks for in-game items in barter.
No_one
1yr ago
Why would anyone design a community based on such a principle? It rounds back again to: they are fucking stupid lol. Is it basic retardation or some advanced form of idiocy that affects high IQ people is kinda irrelevant.
Why do people believe false things ?
Maybe it's related to social desirability. Sneerclub beliefs are laudable in polite society, hanging around with like-minded people and inventing dunks on the chuds is something that might help.
No_one
1yr ago
This is just . . . something I don't get? The data's going to follow a random curve; how can you tell whether a surge is really a surge or just noise?
Look, just couple weeks back the US president declared most Republicans to be a 'national security threat'. Obviously a prelude to re-starting the war on Terror but this time against domestic political enemies.
If credit card companies know who buys guns, when things start getting spicy and a gun buyback / ban comes into effect, credit card companies can just start freezing accounts of people who look like they're harboring illegal guns.
No_one
1yr ago
Meanwhile, the US president has recently decreed that he believes most Republican voters to be 'threats to democracy' and 'national security threats'. He is also apparently moving to have the obvious Republican candidate banned from running for next presidential elections.
This is not at all ominous, and no grief will come out of this.
Sure, you can posit some good outcome out of this if e.g. Trump gets banned but then de Santis wins and nothing happens, but between the tone of the debate and the absolutely bugfuck bonkers election procedures US has, I expect the elections to be deemed illegitimate by whomever loses and fun times to commence.
China still needs us more than we need them
Does it ? They're getting their own electronics now, just a few years behind the bleeding edge. They are biggest trading partner for almost the entire world. Do they really need you that much ? For what.. credit ?
No_one
1yr ago
'Anglo power block' is laughable. The entire world has known and been laughing at Britain as America's lapdog since Tony Blair. It became that obvious. Brits have been relegated to America's sinister lackeys in the eyes of non-westerns.
No_one
1yr ago
but they aren't really the preferred way for American troops to call in precision bombardment like JDAMS or cruise missiles from high-flying bombers.
High flying bombers and strategic level anti-air missiles: a match made in heaven.
Note that there hasn't been much of an actual conflict involving those, what happens is pretty much unknown unless you are a very canny air defense / air force officer in respective militaries.
No_one
1yr ago
So, you think it's all a big nothingburger, all the prosecutions, all the extra IRS agents, the new rules on credit card gun payment related data.
Nobody is going to tighten the screws and start kicking the dog till it bites, right, so he can shoot it then.
No_one
1yr ago
No_one
1yr ago
Political polarisation is way, way higher than it was in either of these eras.
No_one
1yr ago
I don't know why so many right-wing Zoomers are obsessed with the evils of porn. I don't think porn is necessarily a great thing, in the same way that watching loads of TV isn't ideal for you, but I've yet to see anyone blow up their life with (legal) porn,
Because people 'blowing up their life with porn' doesn't look like what you think it looks like.
It's not telegenic, interesting, doesn't get into the crime blotter, it's just sad and boring. Quite often they don't have a life to blow up in the first place. You think you have any reason to know or be friends with guys who apart from work spend 2-3 hours daily on porn? You think you can tell which guy at work has little drive because his reward system is completely screwed from superstimuli ?
For some unclear reason, serious porn use makes men even less sociable than can be ascribed to their solitary 'hobby'.
Have you counted the amount of men you encounter who fit that pattern, and compared it to how it was before mass internet ?
You do know people are more solitary and friendless today than ever before, right ?
I feel like this pattern is borne out among my friends and acquaintances too. I'm in my 30s, and I know quite a few women who have had serious mental health crises (usually associated with high stress jobs, especially in combination with parenting), whereas my male friends have mostly thrived, and now are happily ensconced in their careers and having kids.
You are aware of 'survivorship bias' right ?
psychodrama-seeking wife who is treating her husband's porn use as an existential threat to the relationship
Are we really supposed to think you'd be perfectly okay with your wife neglecting ..everything else and locking herself away for 60-90 minutes daily to masturbate over things that you are scared to contemplate as 'no biggie', right ?
No_one
1yr ago
Make men that don't want to have sex with real women anymore?
Porn addicts can't have sex with real women. Erectile dysfunction, eventually even the drugs won't work.
And for those men, does it create severe unhappiness,
That's the nice thing about porn, serious use causes emotional blunting - flattens the highs and lows of emotions. Of course, eventually the reality of having one choice only, and that choice is being a perpetually single loser sinks in. I say 'loser' because it's really unlikely for porn addicts to maintain ambitions or a drive to succeed.
It's a dysfunction of the reward system, the entire thing gets out of whack because a basic drive is getting oversatiated.
No_one
1yr ago
It's not even that. And it's not 'performance anxiety' either! People with performance anxiety get morning wood.
Pornography addicts do not get morning wood despite not having any of the conditions associated with that, such as severe heart disease or diabetes.
No_one
1yr ago
Seriously- mass shootings are pretty much all young males with no male role to fill.
It's almost always narcissism and rage, not lack of a role.
People who don't know what to do just stagnate, they don't lash out and kill random people.
No_one
1yr ago
I concur, although I've always enjoyed combative computer games I never knew how much more satisfying boxing was.
Only dipped my toe into it, at the urging of a therapist at an addiction clinic.
Sadly because of a prior injury I had to give it up after cca 10 lessons.
The aerobic training was punishing but I didn't mind it that much.
Sparring was fun, except against women*.
Still, those half a dozen sparring sessions against 6' to 6'5" teenage guys were.. quite something. One of those things you don't know you have missed your entire life or something like that.
*at times the class of 10-12 young men had 1-2 women in it, and it was always awkward as fuck. Neither of them was either big or aggressive enough to make a credible sparring partner, and it was just .. awkward, I imagine for all concerned.
No idea.
In many case unless we're talking psychotics like e.g. Jared Loughner, perpetrators of mass killings of random people are narcissists who hate society and feel justified to do so.
It's not something any reasonably normal person would do. Absolute majority of aimless young men settle for at worst drugs & petty crime. To murder-suicide complete strangers you need a pathological personality or something driving you crazy. There's a suggestion that some school shootings are related to very rare SSRI side effects.
As piece of entertainment, it wasn't bad. My major niggle, apart from the core conceit was the awkward diverse casting attempts - having a woman play a boy, shoehorning in a fat old black guy as a software dev..
Neat take on the clockwork universe idea, but we now know better.
No_one
1yr ago
Is it a good game? Not really, it's a waste of time. I frequently have sat, playing on my phone, for 20 minutes waiting for a crafting meter to fill while I cook 160 soups or what-have-you. Vendors have limited funds, so you spend time each season selling your goods, only to become rich quickly and easily. If you're OCD like me, constantly trying to manage where your stuff is versus where your villages put it is aggravating. The game is quite easy, the only real challenge is optimising your day to be the most efficient. The main gameplay loop in that sense is the list of to-do tasks: "first, I'll cook as many of these as I can. Then I must repair my buildings. Oh look, the hunters need new knives, which means I need to go mining - I can stop at the town and sell on the way. I need to harvest before end of season, don't forget, which means I won't have time for this quest".
Yet the game is compelling; I've yet to put it down, with my plans of what to do next in the game frequently being my top thought.
I find the combination of simple, tedious and compelling to be far more worrisome than e.g. infinitely complex, aggravating and compelling.
E.g. as an underemployed adult I spent maybe 6k hours playing Ark: Survival, but at the very least I had to learn to get along with people, improved my English tremendously and learned to "not do it again".
I had read bad things about MMORPGs- people wasting their time on them. "It's not an RPG, it's an FPS and looks cool. Try it out".
Turns out, even if a game is inadvertently designed to be absolutely repulsive to almost everyone (think Valheim, except you are getting randomly invaded by other human players 24x7), it can still be immensely interesting once you find your people in there and start playing as a team.
No_one
1yr ago
Was this what it was like in 2002-2003 when Afghanistan and Iraq were starting? Did every remotely public intellectual drop their standards this quickly? I remember the Anti-war movement being more prominent at the time... Was that only after the fact?
There were very big or even huge (500k+) anti-war rallies, especially outside of the US before the war started, notably in Uk and Italy.
But inside US, very few pundits were openly against the war. Largest demo was cca 100k.
Exiled Online did an accounting of pundits, it turned out practically everyone who was wrong either nothing happened or got promoted, pundits who called it correctly were mostly fired.
Not sure about public intellectuals at the time. I'd be that it was similar though to a lesser degree. After all, that was a war against brown people, a totem. Now we're talking war against Russia, which symbolises hateful white man's past in many ways. I believe it's worse now - everything is aligned in favor cheerleading.
No_one
1yr ago
Are they worth it financially? Do they work well without tons of annoying maintenance? What about if your state offers financial incentives for moving to heat pumps, are they worth it then?
Maintenance isn't a problem from what I've heard. But they can be noisy, and they have a lifetime of 15-20 years.
People in EU use them, but we have very well insulated homes, and high natural gas prices.
Probably not worth if you live in the US and can use natural gas. I don't think you can be in the EU and use oil heat, lol.
If you live somewhere rural that does't have natgas, maybe look into wood (pellet) gasifiers. Some of them can run for multiple days, and it should be cheaper. Definitely going to get cheaper once EU stops shipping in wood pellets to burn in thermal power plants.
Well, maybe for the 40% of men who are into BDSM.
Competence porn is probably a bigger offender.
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