pigeonburger
2hr ago
You'd need to reach extremes of harshness of enforcement of the anti-flow position to counteract the powerful flow incentives of being pro-stock. I'm talking about shooting illegal border crossers, or at least long prison sentences, because if the message is that "once you get there you are almost guaranteed to have a pathway to citizenship", why wouldn't all of latin america try? After all, all they have to lose is the right to visit the US legally as tourists, which most of them probably never would do anyway.
pigeonburger
20hr ago
Ok, but are big city newspaper held responsible for the content they publish?
Social media sites are not, they are considered, in the jurisdiction that matters (US), protected by Section 230 as utilities are. Someone can say something completely illegal on Facebook and Facebook does not get in trouble. The reason why social media sites are given this protection is because forcing them to moderate content would have been, when the decision was made technically difficult , and out of concern that it would have a chilling effect on lawful speech.
Now since then they have demonstrated that they are both able to moderate, and also moderate in a way that chills some lawful speech, why do they need or deserve this protection? Of course, stripping them of this protection will make them very vulnerable to lawsuits, which they will probably want to avoid. So it's likely they will change their moderation policies (reducing the amount or kind of speech that is moderated) to maintain the protections.
pigeonburger
21hr ago
Yeah, but I can't decide if that's more or less impressive
pigeonburger
22hr ago
Bro makes Leo in Catch Me If You Can look like a punk.
If you're trying to point out that reality is stranger than fiction, then you might be interested to know that Frank Abagnale Jr. was a real person, so it's more like reality being stranger than another reality.
pigeonburger
1d ago
It is notorious, yes. It's an example of terrible design in a game that's otherwise a masterpiece, because up to that point the game gave you both the ability to solve problems creatively and to go back and grind some more if you find yourself out of your depth. But here it suddenly took both from you without warning in a save setup that can easily lead to a doomed save game. I'm not sure but I think the PSP remaster added a warning to rotate saves before you locked yourself in.
pigeonburger
1d ago
I usually rotate between 3 saves nowadays, but of the few times I didn't bother making one than one save I dearly regretted it. It was playing the PS1 version of Final Fantasy Tactics. The game is great and allows you to be very flexible with your team and characters, building them how you want and fighting how you want with them. But there's a fight at some point, which you're not told about in advance, before which you save but that does not give you the ability to go and grind to respec, that forces you to play as your MC in a duel with a very strong enemy.
So if you built that character in a way that is unable to beat that duel, like if you built him as a support class, as pretty much anything but a melee fighter, as a spellcaster, or as anything too squishy, go and load back a previous save game. Hope that you have one far back enough that you have the opportunity to respec the MC into something that can. I lost like 40 hours of game maybe because of that? Apparently it was made a bit easier in the PSP version, and then given a way to back out and go respec in the 2025 re-release. But the PS1 original was a harsh lesson in save game rotation, considering how late it happened in a long game like this.
pigeonburger
3d ago
Slipping into dry socks after walking in wet ones.
pigeonburger
5d ago
Yes, Carpenter is a smart man who knows he doesn't need to go and make a new cut to answer the question because the work stands on its own, and the question is, ultimately irrelevant to the point of the movie so it needs no clarification.
The mere suggestion that Deckard is a replicant pisses me off honestly because it reeks of "midwit twist" and directly plays against the very theme of the movie and of the book it's based on. The point is Deckard is an asshole. He's a shitty person, and the replicants show more genuine emotion, more humanity than Deckard does. The whole keeping animals thing, the Voigt-Kampf test, it's performative, it's technical, it's irrelevant. Which is a great point, a poignant message, and is completely fucking ruined if Deckard is a replicant himself. Ridley Scott is an infuriating director to enjoy the works of. He seems to be an accidental genius, but as soon as he's self aware of having made something significant, he just fucks with it until it's ruined. Remember Prometheus?
Carpenter deserves respect, here's a director who's smart enough to resist the lure of fucking with something good. No matter how much midwits (and dumbers) cared about "but wha happen to Michael?" at the end of Halloween, Carpenter was smart enough to know that it's not important and if you really need to know then another director can make that stupid schlock for you.
pigeonburger
5d ago
I can't speak for every Canadian, but I feel confident I've met probably an order of magnitude or two more than you.
My friend. I am Canadian.
Perhaps the repeated jokes from the POTUS about Canada being the 51st state and the tariffs had something to do with that. This isn't exactly an unprovoked response, so I'm a bit confused as to why you're surprised?
In my experience, Canadians felt like that before Trump ran. It's less often expressed when a Democrat is president, but my impression is that Canadians feel like that all the time about Americans.
America might be respected abroad, but after the last 25 years of warmongering, there's a lot of people who dislike them.
With all due respect, that is exactly the kind of attitude that disgusts me from other Canadians.
Canadians will never be blamed if Iran gets a nuclear weapon and starts blasting everyone. If Saddam actually had WMDs and detonated them, I dunno, in Europe. Or if China seizes Taiwan and stops exporting chips to the rest of the world. We can sit pretty and always condemn "war" or "agression" or those silly Americans that put so much of their budget on their military instead of universal healthcare or whatever else we feel better than them about that day, safe in the knowledge that no one actually expects us to bear any responsability for the state of the world. The day Canadians will actually matter, then their complains about "warmongering" on the part of Americans will actually be deserving of more than a spit in the face.
but even the most self-hating Canadian usually believes Canada is internationally respected
For me at least, and I think a non-trivial amount of people, recent years have actually laid bare what that actually means. It doesn't mean Canada or Canadians do or did things that are particularly worthy of respect, it means that Canadians reliably vote for politicians that mouth things that the kind of people who end up reporting on international affairs in newsrooms all over the western world like to hear. Nothing more. Because the vast majority of people don't really have any kind of informed opinion on anything Canada does, they just respond to the applause light on their TV set.
*EDIT: But as for my opinion of Canada in the realm of foreign affairs, as a nominal Canadian (Quebec separatist), my opinion is that Canada is much like European Union nations, benefitting greatly from the current world order and our relative irrelevance allows us the decadent luxury of never really having to take consequential hard decisions for the world. The attitude sickens and disgusts me, not that I believe my people, the Québecois, would be much better about it, and I believe we are much deserving the "fuck you, respect us you freeloader" from the Americans we're currently getting, for the smug attitude if nothing else.
pigeonburger
7d ago
Canada imposes tariffs and other barriers on American goods, often in violation of our agreements. Trump retaliated. I really don't think it's deeper than that.
Let's be fair here, America also had its own share of unfair trade practices that Canada tolerated. I don't begrudge Trump for playing the game, and I find silly how politicians here act like his actions are unprompted aggression (it plays well to the population, who loves a good reason to feel offended or to act morally superior to americans), but putting fingers on the scales with regards to trade is a game everyone, including the US, has been playing.
pigeonburger
7d ago
The article you still linked reminded me of how a similar issue affects submarine designs. Even when the Soviets knew all the science they needed to know to build submarines as quiet as the Americans, they were unable to match them because the desired quality, quietness, was directly corelated with the precision of the manufacturing, which is a capability that is not built on knowledge that you can steal by copying someone else's answer sheet, but on decades of expertise up and down the whole manufacturing chain.
Of course, the danger though is that the west might currently be in the process of losing that edge entirely, as decades of overemphasising academic and cultural pursuits for young people leads to no one being left to carry industrial knowledge forward as the baby boomers retire and die.
And I have no idea how COVID has caused any problem for woke academia.
It was a reputational hit to the expert class, which is the main product sold by academia.
I don't think it's rare to have noticed that the reaction to COVID from the expert class was, charitably, akin to flailing around. Now some people will still cut them some slack that they were acting with best intentions, or did the best with that they had, but it doesn't address that they did not seem to know what they were doing ultimately, which people will remember. Prior to that, the prevailing thought regarding the expert class was that any visible failure was a result of not following enough the suggestions of the expert class.
Why does making faces and doing silly walks make a conventionally attractive woman even more attractive?
Some hypotheses:
I'll reach for Occam's Razor, maybe seeing her having fun (or at least making a convincing impression of having fun) makes her seem like a fun person to be around?
*EDIT: I'll add another simple hypothesis. It's the novelty effect. Mass media over exposed us to conventionally attractive women to the point we're numb to it. Seeing images or videos conventionally attractive woman, in all sorts of states of dress or undress, in all sorts of scenarios that emphasise their attractiveness is so easy that there's nothing special to it anymore. Computers can now trivially generate an infinite amount of convincing images of those. However, seeing a conventionally attractive woman doing an unbridled dance routine that doesn't emphasise her conventional attractiveness (ie: neither graceful like ballet or ballroom dancing, nor erotic like cabaret/pole-dancing/striptease/lapdance) is not something you see as often, so you're not over exposed to that specific thing so it still affects you.
pigeonburger
8d ago
07mk upthread mentionned the French Revolution as something people sometimes mistakenly compare to woke, but I think there's definitely significant parallels; a liberation movement (so a "noble" cause, har har har) that devolved into purity spirals and witch hunts. You have the same obsession with redefining the language to erase the traces of the past. I, of course, don't need to be told, I'm just a decent human being who celebrates "holidays" in early Nivôse.
pigeonburger
8d ago
Did you play that IO Interactive James Bond games that came out a couple months ago?
Because it is essentially James Bond vs LLMs.
Don't forget that the whole school is open-carry and it's mostly the bad guys are in favor of "Common Sense Wand Control".
I wrote about it at length before, but it's interesting that Rowling wrote a fictional universe that made sense to her, a liberated late-boomer/early gen X feminist, and it ended up enshrining values that are diametrically opposed to her stated world view.
It's as if writing a universe from scratch requires thinking about the values in it from first principles, and that this can lead you to very different conclusions than those you would get if you just stuck to the values that were imprinted on you by your environment.
pigeonburger
13d ago
Tends to play roles that men project themselves as rather than women swoon over; demonstrates a good understanding of the way men feel and express emotional vulnerability. Good at playing autistic or autism-coded characters. Good looking, cleans up very very well but not ethereally so, like a top 10%-5%, not a top 2% looker. I've looked at lists of currently popular actresses and maybe Maika Monroe would fit the bill. I saw her recently in Longlegs and she did a great autistic-coded pseudo-Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs detective. A couple decades ago, Jodie Foster would have been my choice.
pigeonburger
13d ago
Yes, if you try to waltz in looking like you're homeless, they'll figure you're probably not planning to pay a hotel in NYC to see the statue of liberty. Another thing to consider is that if you've tried the first method and got deported, you are unlikely to be allowed back ever again on a tourist visa. Or even just a single refusal at the border once makes entry a lot harder.
pigeonburger
13d ago
Yeah, considering my wife is foreign and I had to sponsor her to come to Canada, I am obviously in favor of that remaining an option, but I don't see why not pick the obvious low hanging fruit that would dramatically slow down or stop chain migration: increase the delay between sponsorships, increase the delay between citizenship and first sponsorship. Sponsoring a family member or spouse for immigration is not a right, it's a privilege, even for natives-born citizens, let alone naturalized ones, and it's perfectly proper for a country that feels that this privilege is being abused to change the parameters of it.
The sponsorship process took, for us, about a year and a half. Here it takes 3-5 years from residence to citizenship, that means that within 5 years of securing their way here, someone could be sponsoring another migrant (and their dependants). If there were a 10 year delay period from citizenship to being able to sponsor a family member, the whole process would be 15 years; I think that would discourage a lot of it. It would probably redirect a lot of chain migration towards countries that allow it faster. Even if they still plan to do it, you've reduced by a factor of three the speed at which it happens. Of course, if I could trust the bureaucrats doing the filtering, exceptions on humanitarian grounds could be allowed, but as of now I don't trust them, so I would rather not allow it.
pigeonburger
13d ago
swear off lifehacks from the internet.
Which, long term, saves you money!
Great lifehack!
pigeonburger
13d ago
I'm not sure exactly how the difference is made. It's the experience I had and most people I know had. Maybe I'm in a bubble. Maybe people went out socially more often? My local Wendy's, the closest fast food to me, seems to be surprised and unprepared whenever I decided to go there in person. They have a normal sized for a fast food restaurant dining area, but it's always empty. Even the drive through seems underutilized. The staff is mostly just fulfilling doordash/uber eats orders non-stop.
In general the cost of ingredients and food has gone down compared to wages, so I would imagine we've invented new ways of making fast food more expensive to compensate. Having everything delivered would be one.
Indeed, to go with the carrot/stick analogy, pro-stock anti-flow is being pro carrot and pro stick... for the same behavior. At best, you're being confusing, at worst needlessly cruel.
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