DradisPing
No bio...
User ID: 1102
DradisPing
9hr ago
Opening games with a boring tutorial and giant infodump is unfortunately very common. I think it is so common because reviewers and people who paid full price will give it at least five hours before they decide they don't like it. Crippling you character for the intro is also weirdly common. RDR2 had you wading through snow slowly, MGSV had you limping around a hospital.
I don't really understand where it comes from. I think the art directors are trying to be "cinematic" while not grasping that movies don't make you hold up for ten minutes while the intro credits play.
DradisPing
1d ago
Yarvin is basically a historian and has a lot of interesting insights on the past. He also turns his analysis on the present and comes up with interesting ideas there as well.
However he often veers into recommendations on how to fix things, and I think he's less qualified on that point.
He also grew up as a State Department brat, which gives him a lot of knowledge about how things actually operate in high level government.
I think that "castes of the united states" and "the bdh-ov conflict" represent a decent model for understanding the current political conflicts in the US. In a better world undergrad polsci students would be expected to read them.
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/castes-of-united-states/
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/bdh-ov-conflict_07/
Also he's much less verbose in interviews. I'd suggest watching his interviews with Michael Malice, but that's a decent time commitment.
DradisPing
2d ago
Technically the Archivist of the United States has the final, non-reviewable, say on validity of amendments, and she came forward last December and said it wasn't valid.
https://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2025/nr25-004
This is more an attempt to acclimate the public to a future Archivist declaring it valid. It's interesting because the Archivist traditionally avoids doing anything controversial. There would be a whole lot of legitimacy questions if it happened.
DradisPing
5d ago
Solo dining is more of a city thing, and I think it's largely due to small apartments and a decline in public spaces.
If you live in a 300 square foot unit, you're going to want to get out of the house to eat. Cooking and eating alone in a tiny space is depressing. The "me time" response is just a poor classification of the problem. Trying to schedule things with friends every time you leave the house is a huge amount of work. No one ever did that all the time. Prior to cell phones it was basically impossible.
Due to the difficulty in scheduling everything, striking up conversations with random people was way more socially acceptable.
Also people would pick up location based hobbies like bird watching and just chat with the other bird watchers.
I suspect that packing a meal and eating it in the park was more common in the past. People in the park were able to beat up anyone harassing picnickers without the police getting upset. Police carried batons and used them to deal with small problems without the courts getting involved.
Old homes have front porches because prior to TV people would just sit there in the evenings. Watch their kids play, chat with neighbours.
DradisPing
5d ago
Firstly, those examples which I just listed were examples in which the forces of capital were neutral (CFCs, gay rights)
For an even more cynical interpretation I'd like to point out that CFC ozone damage was first discovered in a research paper in 1974. The CFC patent expired in 1978. Things didn't get rolling on a CFC ban until the 80s.
Sure these things take time, but I think the forces of capital saw the introduction of new patentable refrigerants as an opportunity.
DradisPing
7d ago
Christian Scientists make more sense when you look at the state of medicine in the 19th century when it was founded.
Bedrest and avoiding any concoction doctors tried to sell you wasn't a bad idea.
Things changed obviously. But heroin was being sold as a cough suppressant up until 1910. Penicillin was first mass produced for the invasion of Normandy in 1944.
Effective medicine is fairly recent.
DradisPing
10d ago
His skin also looks unusually smooth.
Presuming this is more how he looks normally: https://youtube.com/watch?v=YnvZto0do5o
I'd guess that he had particularly bad bags under his eyes that day and is either using a beauty filter to try to cover them up or he had a friend apply some studio makeup.
DradisPing
11d ago
California passed a constitutional amendment decades ago where property taxes can only be increased on an home with the same owner by 1% a year. So some of those people bought their homes back in 1990 and only pay like $2000 a year. Made up numbers, but it's directionally true.
From what I've seen wealthy Californians spend their lives in a dreamy utopian state where the only evil is Republicans.
Their usual system of blame is to look at the various levels of government, City, State, Federal, and put the blame on the first Republican they find.
When they can't find one, they blame institutional racism or climate change.
Thus, I predict they will all blame it on climate change and nothing will happen.
Now this one is going to be particularly bad because California passed laws a few years ago restricting fire insurance premiums and most insurers left the state. So a lot of these homes are uninsured.
California has had problems with electricity for the past 20 years and has been dealing with it with things like rolling brownouts. Their wildfires are worse than they should be because environment groups sue to stop brush management to reduce fire spread. They have continual water problems because they refuse to build additional reservoirs to keep up with their growing populations.
There is not much hope of things changing. Their elections have major problems, ballots from ballot harvesters keep coming in for weeks after election day.
DradisPing
13d ago
Harper faced significant legal battles over his attempts to reform immigration an asylum claims.
One major case was "Canadian Doctors for Refugee Care v. Canada" where the Government tried to cancel extended prescription drug coverages rejected refugee claimants received while appealing their rulings. Keep in mind that Canadian citizens didn't get drug coverage.
The judge ruled that cutting the program was "cruel and unusual treatment" and thus a charter violation. The Supreme Court of Canada upheld that.
Things are a little more interesting if you look at immigration by year by country,
https://x.com/AmazingZoltan/status/1875985574429184020
There were prior trends, but Trudeau vastly increased immigration from India and Pakistan.
Instead of total number of immigrants, the key fight is really "how many poor Muslims?".
The left sees bringing in poor Muslims as key to their political success. They end up dependent on government programs and are loyal voters, or at least were before the split over October 7 in the US.
Harper did various things to tilt the balance towards economically viable immigrants. He upset a lot of Liberals by resetting the immigration backlog queue. I could go on but it was really mostly minor things that he could do with out the left going to the courts.
Trudeau tried to flip that around. Early on he brought in large numbers of refugees from Syria and Afghanistan without giving any thought about how to house them. He ended up paying for hotels and upper-middle class homes in some cases. Per head spending was enormous.
Ultimately Trudeau's problem was that he's one of those people who believes leftist academics have everything figured out and we just need to what they say. Mass immigration is always good. New housing construction is bad. So Canada has an incredible housing crisis. Also infrastructure wasn't expanded to support the additional population, so there are problems everywhere.
At least previous Prime Ministers could muster up a better response to "we need more housing for this immigration" than "shut up you racist".
DradisPing
24d ago
The current culture in cities is to just push and see what you get away with. Right now stores have trained their employees not to push back on the general public in most cases.
So if a dog owner needs to go for a quick walk to grab something from a store then bringing the dog is convenient for them. Tying up the dog outside is seen ask risky. So they will try to bring the dog in the store.
The store doesn't see much value in using their employees to get their customers to follow norms and by laws.
The city will be on their side if it's something like smoking. A lot of blue cities will not be on their side if it's something like shoplifting. Where do dogs fall? Why should the stores risk it?
DradisPing
24d ago
It'll get better once normies finish with their holidays. Right now it's the maladjusted who don't visit family arguing with non-christians who don't celebrate Christmas.
DradisPing
24d ago
66% of Infosys h1bs make less than 100k.
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=infosys&job=&city=&year=2024
I think it's fair to say that Infosys doesn't actually believe any of those will perform well at a high skill job.
It's just trivially easy to spot h1b body shops. A salary floor and a ban on companies who have been exploiting them from getting more would be simple and effective.
DradisPing
27d ago
or does already being in poverty cause the bad behaviors/poor schooling
We know it's the former. "Dignified poverty" where there a low incomes but still good behaviour has existed at various times. It tends not to last as children move to other cities. Plus the feds always see those spots as the perfect place to put a bunch of Somalis.
As for helping your children, teaching them to enjoy reading is very good. But the most important thing is their friends. Teens copy their peers. Childhood friendships often last for life.
So if you have infinite choice, I'd recommend sending them to Cupertino High School. The connections they make will carry them through life. They'll grow up imitating and internalizing the behaviours of high functioning white collar workers.
But fundamentally "one bad apple spoils the whole barrel" is true. Make sure your child has a friend group who is on the right track.
DradisPing
30d ago
My favourite part of the expansion was how war crimes against the aliens suffered no diplomatic penalties.
So you could play as a respected democratic society that upheld human rights, and still load up your units with chemical weapons and gas alien cities.
DradisPing
1mo ago
Interested in mid-late 20s Anglophones of East Asian descent, of similar class and educational background
You've got to hunt where the ducks are. Clubs are a bad bet, it's just the wrong crew. Most of the women there won't match your profile and the few that do will be in a defensive mode.
You should probably start attending charity galas. I'm not sure what the right ones are, but there should be a lot to choose from in NYC. There should be some charity events particularly popular with wealthy East Asians but I have no idea what those would be. Don't be too on the prowl at these events, it's more about integrating yourself into the upperclass community.
Given that it's winter try taking up skiing. Buy boots, rent the skis and poles at the hill. Spend some weekends at the ski resort.
DradisPing
1mo ago
what is it with libertarians being such normal boring business savvy centrists recently?
Liking smaller government and being concerned about massive domestic surveillance operations should be considered normie Republican positions. Yet somehow that's not how the DC Republican establishment view them.
DradisPing
1mo ago
Their default is to not tell anyone anything and they aren't getting enough political pressure from the Biden admin to be more open.
DradisPing
1mo ago
Originally I disliked him because his debate style involved tossing random assertions out with absolute certainty. Any time I imagined myself discussing anything with him I could only picture getting drawn into numerous side arguments.
He's gotten more unhinged lately. I think he's been abusing adderall for a while now and it's catching up with him.
DradisPing
1mo ago
Given how unconcerned the US government is, I think it's clear that that belong to some branch of the US government.
DradisPing
1mo ago
What translation are you reading for Nietzsche?
DradisPing
1mo ago
Compared to the moon, Mars is farther away and has a deeper gravity well.
This means that the craft has to be more substantial since the astronauts will be in there for quite a while. Also the lander needs to be more substantial since it has to escape more gravity.
The lightweight ship and small lander might not cut it.
SpaceX hasn't really explained the mars plan. They might be planning to assemble something in orbit and use a Starship as the lander.
DradisPing
1mo ago
One issue is that the US is unusually strict about recording babies who took one breath as live births. Other countries are much less strict and record babies that died a few ours after birth as stillborn. Or even a few days.
Making a game that takes months for a child to complete when you only have 128kiB of rom space to work with necessitates some very annoying game design. This ended up working to Nintendo's favour because kids on the playground would discuss the game and trade secrets.
I remember A Link to the Past being pretty straightforward. But I haven't played it since I was a kid.
The big problem with early N64 games is that they expect you to be so wowed by the 3d graphics that you'd try things a modern gamer would never think of trying. Ocarina of Time gives you fire arrows when you try shooting your bow at the sun. Mario 64 has a level that you enter by turning to see where a light effect is coming from.
Oh and Zelda 2 the Adventure of Link is just completely unfair.
DradisPing
1mo ago
I think they have a lot of faith in democracy solving problems, and the new state more accurately reflects the makeup of the people.
They are good for anything you want to reheat that will get soggy in the microwave. If there is oil in the surface layer of the food you'll get more of a frying affect. Otherwise it ends up as more of a dry bake.
More options
Context Copy link