Tophattingson
No bio...
User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
3mo ago
Yes. Fixed.
Mike Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain were co-defendents in a high-profile fraud case in the US. They were acquitted in June. Chamberlain has died, and Lynch is missing presumed dead, after two separate incidents on the same weekend. So understandably, this has raised some suspicion.
Brief background on the fraud case. Mike Lynch founded Autonomy. Later sold it to HP for $11bn in 2011. Was accused of fraud to inflate the value of the company before it's sale. In a civil trial in the UK, damages were set to be awarded to HP. But he also faced extradition to the US for criminal fraud charges. Eventually in May 2023, after much wrangling about whether he could be extradited, he was sent to the US to face trial alongside Chamberlain. Trial began in March. Acquitted on all charges in June.
Stephen Chamberlain died after being hit by a car while out for a walk in Cambridgeshire on the morning of the 17th. Then, Lynch's ship capsized in Sicily on the morning of the 19th. One dead, six missing including Lynch.
If you don't vote, and you have a free and open ballot, you're saying you're fine with any option that wins.
The UK does not have a free and open ballot if what you want to vote for runs into restrictions on speech. It makes it very difficult for candidates to legally advertise their political position, or for you to campaign for it. In the past, it was possible to get elected from prison, but the Representation of the People Act 1981 put a stop to that. Liberal Democracy depends on a tightly interlocking system of rights to enable free elections. You don't get to pick and choose what parts you have. Removing one element can break a whole lot more.
Spoiling your secret ballot is an option. That's what I did back when de facto suppression of anti-lockdown dissidents meant I had no anti-lockdown candidates to vote for. But those weren't free and open elections, since public assembly by those expressing my favoured political views was criminalized.
Tophattingson
3mo ago
Critically, there is a recognition that free expression carries with it a duty of responsibility. The UK law requires that such free speech is not used to incite criminality or spread hatred.
UK law doesn't require that speech isn't used to spread hatred. I am, for now, permitted to spread my hatred of onions as far and wide as I want. Their texture is disgusting and they make everything you put them in taste the same. But also, the UK does not have free speech regardless. The law is asymmetrical. Those to the right of the mainstream are prohibited from voicing their hatreds, while those to the left of the mainstream are allowed to rant about "zionists" and the like all they want.
Which is the inherent problem with the idea of criminalizing spreading hatred. Which hatreds? Hatred of Russia, for daring to invade Ukraine? Hatred of the unvaccinated and so-called granny killers? Hatred of the Far-Right? These are all forms of hatred that have been deliberately spread by the government over the last few years. Why are these forms of hatred not just allowed but endorsed? That's a rhetorical question, because the answer is too obvious.
The result is that restrictions on spreading hatred are always used to promote certain political views while suppressing others. That's not a slight tweak to make freedom of speech all nice and cuddly. Restrictions on hate speech instead directly attack free speech's common purposes: Democratic participation, truth-seeking, and checking power.
The error is motivated reasoning due to being unwilling to criticize heavy-handed covid-excused policy. The downside is that this is hard to cash in on because it's not a bet on just inflation, but also on how deranged the government is - predicting higher inflation also means predicting a more insane government, which reduces the value of any rewards of predicting correctly.
For the sake of example to illustrate that government insanity matters for economic bets, consider 2 people betting on whether the government will rob them and take half their money. The actual chance of this happening is 50%. But if the bet is even, the payoff matrix looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/HQ1PibN.png. Therefore it's actually beneficial to bet that the government will do nothing.
Edit: It now occurs to me that this might be a novel contribution to game theory and therefore is a bit too much of a reach to be a point of evidence here.
Tophattingson
3mo ago
In reality, there is a wide range of opinions in macroeconomics on the relationship between fiscal and monetary theory and price levels, all held by PhDs genuinely trying to figure out what's going on. All those people in 2021 calling inflation “transitory” genuinely had thought hard about their predictions and genuinely were wrong.
Between the end of 2019 and the end of 2023, the money supply M2 grew 40%. The economy grew 19%. There was no reason to believe there was some long-term change in the velocity of money. Just from these numbers alone you can expect about 18% inflation. And, sure enough, the price level increased by about 20%.
You can repeat this for other countries. The UK money supply M2 grew 24%. The economy did not grow at all. Expectation: 24% increase in price level. Reality: 24% increase in price level.
Denying that increasing the money supply as was done in 2020 would cause inflation, or that it would be "transitory", comes from the same motivated reasoning that applied to the entire era of covid policy. Criticizing a heavy-handed response made you persona non grata in professional circles, so you didn't. As for placing bets on it to make money, the risk is not the existing consequences of government policy, but that you're betting on how deranged your local government is. Inflation is not the only consideration in such a circumstance, so it's no surprise that even people putting their money where there mouth is were bad sources of predictions.
Tophattingson
3mo ago
You are right, but you asked for the Steelman argument. That isn't the political turing test argument for it, which is that two-tier policing in any form doesn't exist.
Tophattingson
3mo ago
The steelman to there being no two-tier policing is that the difference in police response to different demographics is motivated not by racism, but instead by a desire to prevent escalation to violence. The police know that if they break up a BLM riot, the next day half of London will be aflame, so they don't touch it. But milquetoast anti-lockdown protesters, who are maybe protesting for the first time in their life? There's no risk to baton charging them, so they get baton charged. Repeat for Hamas vs Israeli marches. If they start arresting tens of thousands of Islamists for terrorism offences, as the letter of the law would demand, they'd face retaliatory terror attacks. Peaceful Jewish counter-protesters might similarly provoke the violent Islamists, however, and need to be stopped.
This steelman is the mainstream response to arguments of two-tier policing (when not simply ignored). The police are biased because they're pragmatic, rather than because they are racist or serving as the paramilitary wing of the Labour party.
It has two problems
- It means that those who dislike being on the receiving end of two-tier policing are instructed to be more violent if they want it to stop
- As is being demonstrated now, being more violent doesn't actually get it to stop, because the argument is wrong.
Response on that occasion was the police in full retreat and the later total capitulation of the state in handing back the children in question. Others still remember now-PM Kier Starmer's response to the BLM riots of 2020, in which he knelt in supplication to the rioters and pledged fealty to their cause.
This has earned him the moniker of "Two-Tier Kier", with many calling out that a two tier justice system exists in the country; when minorities riot over facing justice, the state bends over backwards to appease them, but when native whites riot over the stabbing of children, the full force of the state comes out to crush them.
Further context on this is that criticism of Two-Tier policing began with the difference in how anti-Lockdown protesters were treated by the police compared to BLM protesters in 2020. To summarise, the handful of arrests at BLM protests were for sporadic violence. Other left-wing omnicause protests went unchallenged. Meanwhile, the smaller and less violent anti-Lockdown protests faced blanket arrests for violating lockdowns, which de jure criminalized all protest but de facto criminalized only anti-Lockdown protests.
There have been a number of smaller incidents over the next few years which further enflamed this criticism. The light-touch treatment of JSO, XR, and other environmentalist protesters who sought to commit vandalism, often getting justified in the mainstream on the basis that "climate emergency" justifies unrestrained criminality, was compared to how government media and politicians treated anti-ULEZ protesters. Another was buffer zones around abortion centres outlawing forms of protest as mild as silently praying.
Then then escalated in 2023, where the Israel-Gaza conflict meant that there were constant protests that, in theory, violated the UK's extremely broad anti-terrorism laws, but were met with milquetoast police response. When a counter-protest to these was organised in November 2023, and met by a violent police response, the charge of two-tier policing escalated to the point where a minister was sacked for criticising the police over it. Further incidents, like police going after a Jewish man for being "Visibly Jewish" near protesters, only made it worse.
Edit: And this all takes place in a context that the police have increasingly failed to police crime in general..
The "moderate" explanation for why these events keep happening is that the police are trying to placate a violent mob over permitting peaceful protesters because their goal is to keep the peace, and keeping the peace takes precedent over fairness even when it means arresting innocent bystanders instead of violent mobs. The lesson some people will take from this is that the most violent group wins. Therefore, they should become more violent so that they become the mob that the police have to placate instead. Unfortunately, this lesson is wrong, because the actual explanation for these events is that being left-wing puts you above the law and being right-wing puts you beneath it.
Today, the counter-protesters and the police will argue that they are standing against racism. They are wrong. For the last 9 months, they have either participated in, or been complicit in, their own forms of racism. Forms that the current British government finds more acceptable to it's tastes
Tophattingson
3mo ago
GW still does smaller box games that are sold through Target, but you are right that they're no longer aiming for a younger audience with those. But if we take the strongest possible interpretation of this, then contrary to the comment I was responding to, GW has actually narrowed the demographic it sells to, not broadened it.
Tophattingson
3mo ago
De facto criminalizing all sexualities also means criminalizing homosexuality. Equal treatment cannot be the basis for LGBT rights, because it offers the opportunity to equally give everyone no rights. The demand of LGBT rights when it comes to homosexuality being legal is that what two consenting adults get up to in the bedroom is none of the state's business. I believe that principle should hold even when a spicy cold exists. Anything less, and we risk specific criminalization of homosexuality in response to a future pandemic.
To be more specific about the restrictions that were actually imposed, they criminalized having sex with people who are not from your household because they criminalized meeting other households indoors, regardless of heterosexual or homosexual. There are reasons this might disproportionately impact LGBT people.
Yes, the actual problem with the Confederacy was that they didn't enslave enough whites, and the actual problem with Nazis is that they didn't gas enough Germans. If only they did that, they'd have been goodies. Hurrah equality!
Rights can't work from a basis of equality. Was the solution to gay marriage was actually to prohibit all marriage, and sodomy to instead criminalise all sex? No. To be even more flippant, gay people were already legally allowed to have straight marriage, and straight people were already prohibited from gay marriage.
You do realise that I am a LGBT person who was pissed off at the government de facto recriminalizing homosexuality with lockdowns? The bracketed hello might have been too subtle... Leftists are okay with certain forms of bans on homosexuality, but that's because the aesthetics of LGBT rights takes priority over actually giving us any rights, because it turns out that they in fact do want the government to care about what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedroom. Hence it's okay to violate our rights as long as it "doesn't stem from decrying them", whatever that's supposed to mean (though really it still is decrying us because it's about reducing humans to disease vectors on a spreadsheet in general).
And to get out from the weeds and back to the point: It's trivially incorrect that nerdy political purges are based around some sort of propensity to make the lives of their friends worse, or damage the relevant hobby. The target prioritization is totally wrong for that to be the motive. Lockdowns actively criminalized in-person Boardgaming, Dungeons and Dragons, Magic the Gathering (last I checked, lockdowns killed paper Standard), Wargaming, Conventions, and all other nerdy face-to-face activities. And politically, those were supported more by the left than the right. Therefore, if you're going to use attacking friends and their ability to participate in any particular nerdy activity to justify nerdy political purges, there's your actual target. Anything else would be ad-hoc excuses to disguise an ulterior motive for purges.
I'd be way more comfortable playing with a social conservative than a mask addict, even if because of demographics this is very unlikely to actually happen. At least I could trust they'd still be interested in playing when ligma 28 rolls around, and they wouldn't be motivated to call the police on me for suggesting it.
Tophattingson
4mo ago
For reddit, I'm pretty confident it is something akin to an astroturf campaign. Just done by a few unpaid, obsessive to the point of would probably get diagnosed with something power users, rather than people being paid to do it. It's surprisingly easy to manipulate something to the top of reddit by ensuring it gets a few early upvotes because of how the algorithm works. The way in which reddit was taken over by the Katie Johnson/Jane Doe case, immediately after the debate, followed by a lot of users being confused at why it was news on Reddit and not elsewhere (the answer is because the case is from 2016 and was almost certainly nonsense), looked suspiciously like someone firing up a specific campaign though.
On the other hand in 2024, the left-leaning person is far more likely to have non-white people, LGBT, or other groups that are effected by conservative policies, so it's not a shock that now they have a closer relationship with those folks, they're less likely to be seen as just arguments.
Like, why do I want to be personally friendly with people who want to make the lives of my other friends worse?
This flows both ways. Politics was interested in me personally in 2020 in a way that it wasn't before, and also in a way that disproportionately affected nerdy activities like board gaming. Why would I want to be friends with people who want to make the lives of myself and my other friends worse by supporting lockdowns, which were far more egregious than the average social conservative's demands not least because it also involves partially criminalizing homosexuality anyway? Well, it turns out that I don't really have a choice, because 90% of the people around me want to make my life worse, and the option to join a gaming community with a consensus that opposes lockdowns doesn't exist.
Am I'm banging my usual drum again? Yes. But there's a point: You've given no reason why board games should have gone left to protect LGBT friends who suffered from conservative policies, instead of going right to protect the LGBT friends (hello) who suffered from progressive policies. To go even further, the entire nerdy ecosystem depends on capitalism, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly to function. It also has a bit of an obsession with everything military. All things that have (for one reason or another) clustered into Conservatism. If nerdiness is going to have a political slant, why is that slant not for it's natural ally? If anyone's going to get politically purged, then why not the Communists whose political ambitions are mostly incompatible with the continued existence of these nerdy activities?
Tophattingson
4mo ago
I think I was a bit unclear. In this case I was asking about computer games, not board games. Though I'll definitely look at some of these anyway.
Tophattingson
4mo ago
Go back far enough and the screens of concern would have indeed meant TV. But by the 'awokening', phone and computer screen time would be the concern. Either way, pg-13 was already a Warhammer thing long before 2014.
Tophattingson
4mo ago
CrowdStrike going from nothing to having such a large influence in a decade, and the background of it's founders, is enough of a weird smell that it makes me suspect regulatory capture rather than merely regulation. But I don't have anything concrete to base that hunch on.
The vaccine mandates weren't meant to do anything about covid. They were meant to punish political dissidents.
Tophattingson
4mo ago
Although I'm a dirty hex-and-counter wargamer
I've recently played some hex and counter wargames, albeit computer ones. Unity of Command 2, to be specific. But I am looking for something a little less like an elaborate chess puzzle, and not weirdly AAA-game expensive. Do you have anything you'd recommend?
Maybe it's different in the UK where GW is based and Warhammer stores themselves have a notable retail presence alongside independent stores that sell it, but I'm pretty sure Warhammer has always been PG-13, if not marketed even younger. Sure, it's stuck in a weird place where it has to combine an ultra-violent and occasionally horny setting with that, but the sales pitch to parents has always been something like: Here's a hobby that appeals to boys which is indoors, quiet, creative, doesn't involve screens, and requires some mathematics. Loiter in one of their stores for long enough and you will hear something like that pitch being given to some parents by the staff. Maybe even "like cooler airfix" (though that's so old a reference that it might only work for grandparents now). More formally, there's also this.
As an aside, I think their failure to offer brush-on primer even though it would be worse than spray primer is a mistake in this context. Sales of aerosol paints are age-restricted here. Sure, their parents can buy it, but I think some fraction of them will refuse because of the association with graffiti and hooliganism.
Tophattingson
4mo ago
I read it as adding sugar-free snacks and drinks on top her usual diet, rather than substituting for it.
Tophattingson
5mo ago
I think there's a soft plateau, where progress slows dramatically but doesn't hit zero. There are diminishing returns where putting in more processing power extracts increasingly small gains in neural network performance. For about a decade, processing power has been scaled up by both exponentially improving hardware, and exponentially chucking more resources at the problem. We can't do that forever. The latter has ran out first, as AI investment has been dropping (inevitably, it would have had to stop, it was growing faster than GDP was). Hardware will continue to get better, but now lacking the second exponent, gains will be slower. Rock's law will later slow hardware gains to a crawl for basically the same reason.
Tophattingson
5mo ago
what are you all using AI for?
After experimenting with using it to generate various forms of game content, like encounters for D&D, character backgrounds, placeholder art, all of which ended up being kinda trash... I've settled into using it as a sounding board for decision-making, because occasionally it throws out ideas that are worth investigating. This doesn't end up being much better than just asking random people, but it also means I don't have to annoy anyone by asking random people about whatever dumb idea pops into my head.
Tophattingson
5mo ago
There's about 8 years between the initial invasion and the escalation. The Winter Olympics would only be a factor for a small proportion of that period. And the main country responsible for disrupting them was China itself, with it's continued use of covid restrictions.
Tophattingson
5mo ago
I think there are parts of the war in Ukraine that are attributable to the US but they are far more near-term than the expansion of NATO. Russia was already de facto at war with Ukraine. That needs to be considered in any question, because Russia didn't start a new war in 2022, just massively escalate an existing one. Why did Russia choose that moment, instead of any other, to escalate? The most probable explanation to justify the timing is the spike in oil prices. It has since been weirdly memory-holed that the oil and gas price spike predates the escalation of the war in favour of the claim that the war triggered the spike. The cause for the spike was a long-term consequence of low investment in fossil fuel extraction due to environmental policies, and the medium-term consequence of the oil and gas glut that happened in 2020, which reduced production, slamming into the rise in consumption as economies got un-shuttered. The US, in part, is responsible for shuttering global economies in 2020. High oil and gas prices motivate Russia to make a move in two ways. First, by making sanctions more expensive to implement. Second, by providing the government a big budget surplus that might be put to use. However, judging by the initial invasion strategy (Russia basically trying to win in 3 days) that this was less intended to outright fund a war of attrition, and more intended to soothe over the costs of integrating captured territory into a victorious Russia while deterring sanctions long enough to make Russia's victory a fait accompli.
Apart from the minutia of the search and rescue efforts for the capsized ship, there's not much additional detail in any English Language reporting I could find. Apart from that, there's a lot of conspiratorial speculation about the timings of both deaths, but again without adding any more information. The added stuff about the legal background below helps.
More options
Context Copy link