Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
The low growth low interest rate, low increase in government spending situation we had before wasn't great, but it was sustainable. After spaffing trillions up the wall on lockdowns, however, the economic situation is no longer sustainable. You can project every NHS worship, pension worship, build-nothing worship and debt interest trend out and by the end of the century it results in demands for government spending exceeding 100% of GDP.
If Labour blows another hole in the budget with another 20% increase in healthcare spending that doesn't actually improve healthcare at all, and voters get mad at this for the same reason they were mad at the Tories for doing the same thing (even if they can't identify why it didn't work), who do they vote for next? The NHS Uber Alles Party?
Tophattingson
6mo ago
It remains to be seen to what extent voters understand that development being illegal is the problem though.
Not at all.
In my experience, the average Labour voter (and thus the average voter) thinks that the cause of the UK's economic malaise is that Tories are channelling all the money to their mates, though they cannot name or identify any specific examples of this occurring. Unless "channelling" means pensions, and "mates" means all pensioners in the country, this doesn't explain the UK's budget problems. They just see a government taking in endless amounts of tax, no more services being produced, and assume MPs are personally pocketing the difference.
Tophattingson
6mo ago
A few years under Starmer might have people realise Labour have no policy for fixing housing.
It's this depressing feeling that I was never really friends with a person who existed, just a living chatbot that had a new gpt lobotomy update.
That was my 2020 experience with lockdowns, but add all of society to it. And even worse because at least the Hezbollah fans generally fall short of demanding everyone wave the Hezbollah flag, whereas lockdown fans made their political symbols into legal obligations. Because of this, afterwards, I tend to be rather unfazed whenever the latest lobotomy balance patch is released. My expectations are rock bottom so if anything other than everyone around me being as stupid and awful as possible happens, I get to be pleasantly surprised instead. And sure, maybe it's egotistical to think everyone around me is a lobotomite, but so what? If they're not, it's on them to demonstrate otherwise.
Tophattingson
6mo ago
Via conversations with the people who are most affected by this, those who use sites like Pixiv commercially, they seem to believe that there's a cabal of anti-porn American Evangelicals behind payment processing restrictions. This seems to be approximately a consensus. When I tried to question them on alternative hypotheses involving a Visa/Mastercard Duopoly, even the "moderate" suggestion that excess chargebacks is the primary motive for not wanting to deal with adult content, there was a lot of pushback. Didn't even risk discussing right-wing hypotheses involving debanking or Operation Chokepoint. My impression was that they pattern match all politics they dislike to political groups they dislike regardless of whether there's actually a link.
Tophattingson
6mo ago
(i.e. the same thing that made Pornhub pull out of Texas).
Pornhub loves the kind of regulations that Texas are doing. They just dislike that they don't get to be in control of them and use them to eliminate the competition.
Of course, this will not happen because the current state of affairs is not an accident. Remember Wikileaks?
If you look at the history of Apartheid South Africa, they still had a lot of support from the WH right up until the end
The end of Apartheid coincides with the collapse of the USSR, not some sudden shift in external political pressure on behalf of activists. That there was relative certainty that South Africa would not immediately turn into a Soviet satellite regime because the USSR was too busy collapsing was what enabled a consensus on ending Apartheid. That they'd later turn into vaguely anti-western, mixed political system basket case anyway wasn't really a concern.
Tophattingson
7mo ago
Policies for the one don’t work for and aren’t wanted by the other.
There is no particular reason to think that urban policies worked in urban areas either.
By false-centrism, I mean that taking the middle ground between an utterly unreasonable position and a reasonable position is not, in itself, inherently reasonable or centrist. For instance, the centrist position on self-nuking is the same as the ardent anti self-nuking position, not that you should compromise by only nuking yourself with half the number of bombs. Similarly, the centrist position on lockdowns isn't that you should do 'kind' lockdowns, or short lockdowns, but instead that there should be no lockdowns, the same position as was held by all German political parties until 2020. The FDPs position on the coronavirus response is still extreme, even if it's not as extreme as the SDP.
On the AFD, the FDP is explicitly on the record as being against the Verbotsverfahren.
I find myself questioning further why the FDP tolerates being in it's current coalition. Still, I prefer to look at what a party actually does as opposed to what it says, and being in a coalition government that is carrying out political repression is more important than their statements against that repression.
Tophattingson
7mo ago
Britain's a deeply broken country IMO, drowning in decline. Scotland has effectively permanent SNP leftist-progressive govt. Traditional heavy industry left, north sea oil is depleted. There's not much growing of the pie, only taking someone else's share - SNP policies lean in that direction.
Real GDP per capita: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locations=GB
This is indeed the crux of the issue, but it's also true for most of Europe. Britain's main difference here is we don't have bad unemployment figures to go with it. Instead, we have the peculiar combination of US very low unemployment but EU bad wage growth.
I know Dominic Cummings is a contested figure here but he did work in the British govt for some time and I think he was driven a bit mad by the cosmic horror of it all, he wrote these essays about how everything was broken and the leaders were clowns:
Dominic Cummings is not some outside figure diagnosing the problem. He, being pro-lockdown, was a contributor to it.
The FDPs milquetoast false-centrism position on the coronavirus response, and it's involvement in the current German coalition as that government seeks to disrupt, harass, or even outlaw political opposition in the AFD, makes me skeptical that they'd be a good match for your claimed political goals.
Of course, the centre-right refusing to ally with the right pretty much defines the entire current German political climate, not just you in particular.
See, this is why center-left people don't feel like allying with the right, despite our increasing frustration with the regressive far-left. I dislike their attitude of wanting to define reality and outlaw disagreement, but I just know that if the right gets into power they'll do the same, but harder.
I tend to regard actually existing, present threats as more relevant than an equivalent but hypothetical threat.
I have several friends who are as frustrated with the far-left as me, but who support palestine. I disagree with them about this, but I don't thing they should lose their job over it! And nor are they just getting what they're dishing out, no, now we have to take punches from both sides.
This is quite relevant to the UK. Our existing terrorism laws are so broad that throwing the book at Palestinian protesters would lead to tens of thousands of arrests and lengthy prison sentences. To say nothing of England's not-quite-as-strict but still menacing speech laws. But this hasn't happened. When vexatious edge-case imprisonments for terrorism happen, they happen to far-right non-terrorists. Similarly, the only time the police have chosen to start cracking skulls for our current wave of Hamas-related protesting is when there were right-wing counter-protesters. And this is to say nothing of the experience in 2020-21, where lockdowns de jure criminalized all protest, but de facto only criminalized anti-lockdown protests and one specific anti-police protest. As for our counter-terrorism efforts, Prevent is more interested in browns under the bed, hallucinating right-wing extremism where it doesn't exist while doing its best to ignore Islamism.
The threat that the right will fall down a slippery slope is not as strong an argument as the observation that the left already fell down it and hit the spike pit at the bottom.
Tophattingson
7mo ago
That's true for you, and people like you. IE, male gamers with good reaction speeds and visual logic skills.
Yes, and a game that's an 8 or 9 on the scale is still even harder than dark souls for journalists too. There's no point cramming most of gaming into the top 3 points on 10 point scale just because the average Journalist is performing at a 3/10 level.
Also, for what it's worth, my visual reaction speeds aren't particularly great. I am terrible at fighting games and fast-paced shooters. Sim Racing is something I'm good at because reaction speeds matter a lot less than you'd expect, precision and repetition is more important, and we get the advantage of force feedback.
I was watching a livestreamer recently, and she was trying to beat one of the old mario games. And just was dying, over and over again
I have previously heard a variety streamer describe why they sometimes seem like inattentive amateurs on stream even if they're good at their go-to games. Their mental capacity is focused more on audience interaction than getting to grips with a new game.
Tophattingson
7mo ago
Battletoads (which I mentioned) and Ninja Gaiden are the exceptions that prove the rule. And still, if you were to task someone with completing Battletoads and completing Guitar Hero III, I know which one I'm betting on being finished first.
Tophattingson
7mo ago
I find NES and SNES era Mario games just as difficult as I always did.
NES and SNES era Mario games had something most of their contemporaries lacked. They actually controlled well and had good visual clarity, setting the standards for pretty much all later platformers with the degree of momentum and mid-air control offered. This lets the gameplay itself be the challenge, instead of wresting with controls.
While some of the games given as examples, like Dark Souls and Dwarf Fortress, are memed as being hard, they're really not that hard.
I played Dark Souls after dealing with the far harder Monster Hunter games (the newer games have eased the difficulty curve but get even harder towards the end) before, so it never really felt all that difficult. Nioh also scales up the hurt to far higher levels than Dark Souls, but also gives you the tools necessary to do those fights if you get gud, which is where Elden Ring's last few bosses fall apart. Most Fromsoft Soulsborne games tend to have several mechanics that allow you to trivialize most of the content even if the standard guy swinging big stick will struggle. Usually something involving magic, blocking or parrying.
Dwarf Fortress is not hard. It's just convoluted. You can stick 7 dwarfs in a hole with a tiny patch to grow food and they'll live in happy mediocrity forever. Any difficulty comes from the player trying to do a 'stupid dwarf trick' or RNG sometimes sending an indestructible syndrome-spreader your way.
Stephen's Sausage Roll is by far the hardest puzzle game I played. Nothing else warrants mention in that genre.
And to highlight something in a genre that interests me, the Codemasters F1 games are both the most "mainstream" sim racing titles, but also by far the hardest. Sure, you could whack on all the assists and drop the difficulty to 0 and cruise your way to victory, but the baseline car without assists is one of the the most difficult cars to drive in all of sim racing. So difficult, in fact, that actual F1 drivers criticized it as being unreasonably difficult to drive and unrealistically prone to spinning out of corners. The AI is also extremely aggressive relative to most older racing games. Driving the same car in any other series, even more "hardcore" simulators, is a far more relaxed experience. I believe the 2023 version of the game improved, however this. Similarly, their contemporary "Dirt Rally" games are so much harder than the old "Colin McRae" titles that they might as well be a separate genre. Sim Racing has long had a bit of a problem with a hard=realistic perception, and generally improved simulation has lead to easier driving, not harder.
Dark Souls is like a 6 or 7 on the hardness scale out of 10. It's sometimes challenging but doesn't scale up too far once you've figured out whatever particular gimmicks are useful in the exact title. Monster Hunter and Nioh are more like an 8 because they do in fact keep scaling up in difficulty. Dwarf fortress is maybe a 3 or 4 once you've gotten around the controls because, aside from deliberately challenging yourself, the core gameplay is easier than most city/colony builders. I'll give Stephen's Sausage Roll and the racing games I mentioned 9, because they hit hard and never stop hitting. And the hardest mainstream games tend to be rhythm games on their highest difficulties for the sheer level of mechanical execution they expect. You cannot fire up Through the Fire and Flames on expert and clear it without at least 100 hours of prior practice in either Guitar Hero or in very similar games.
Old games are rarely hard. Contemporary gaming is harder at a baseline for at least some of these reasons:
- The controls are better and thus the difficulty has gradually shifted from wrestling with controls to actually making the game hard.
- There's more competitive multiplayer. It is impossible for the average competitive multiplayer game to give the average player a win rate greater than 50% in the long run, making it inherently difficult compared to single-player games.
- Developers are free to add more difficulty because they know players have access to better online resources on how to overcome said difficulty.
- There are more layers of conventions that developers expect you to understand. Even relatively handholdy games often have broad swaths of unexplained mechanics due to being more complicated.
- You were just younger. Go back, play them, smash them over your knee.
Whenever I have played an older game that I thought at the time was difficult, I soon learned it was not. I was just younger. To give an example of something I recently replayed, Pikmin's 30 day time limit sounds like a challenge, and my memory of the game was that it was a serious threat. When I replayed it, I beat the game in 11 days, and the time limit was totally irrelevant. Roller Coaster Tycoon is another old game I recently played, and is utterly trivialized by using high ride prices (often 10x the default) and advertising, something the game doesn't clearly explain the impact of but once you know about them it's GG. There are exceptions, like Battletoads and Ghosts 'n' Goblins still being difficult, but these were the exception then just as very hard games remain the exception now.
Tophattingson
7mo ago
I can confirm this is definitely the case for Touhou. Not just normal, but also only 1 credit clears of the game are considered "real completion". I have done 1cc on some of the games but only on easy.
Tophattingson
7mo ago
There's no consistent pattern here. It all reverses for vaccine mandates, where elevating personal choice quickly becomes somewhere between "get the jab chud" and supporting concentration camps for the unvaccinated.
Tophattingson
7mo ago
For some time now I’ve been feeling like I live in a different world than most people I know. It has come to a point where I have to face an awkward alternative: Either most people I know are wrong (including learned men and experts) or I am insane. As I don’t believe I have lost my sanity, and as I believe that I have very strong arguments to hold my ideas against all reasonable counterarguments;
This is really less significant than you seem to be making it out to be, or beating yourself up over. The majority of people disagree with the majority of everyone else, including learned men and experts, on the most profound question possible. Religion.. No matter what religion you are, you're disagreeing with at least about 70% of people immediately due to not sharing a religion, and if you drill into the different denominations and sects that number grows larger. Add in ideologies akin to a religion and the number grows yet further. Are you an Atheist? Communist China has obligatory support for Communism, and unless you too believe in Xi Jinping Thought, then you still disagree with the majority of Atheists.
Anyway...
This is what psychopathology really is: It is not a science of mental pathology, it is the art of distributing psychiatric drugs and psychological treatments.
There used to be psychopathology. Classic psychiatrists wrote impressive treaties on the subject, with thousands of pages explaining in detail and classifying the behavior of their patients. The mountains really were in labour, alas, only a mouse was born: No progress was made regarding the causes, and most importantly the treatment of such behaviors.
A layman's explanation for how science works is that you make up a theory about how something works, you test it, try to disprove it, and then if you can't disprove it, you incorporate it into The Science. But this isn't quite true. It is a mistake to believe that science requires theoretical mechanisms to be explained before it can describe the world. Sometimes, things just are, and you can do science on that even if you don't understand why they are. Quantum physics makes incredibly good predictions about the behaviour of what it seeks to describe, yet it provides no theoretical explanation of why physics behaves that way, leading to several competing explanations.
A more apt comparison for medicine, however, would be general anaesthesia. A weird and miraculous phenomena where, upon breathing certain gasses or being injected with certain chemicals, your body enters a coma where it forgets everything that happens and stops experiencing pain. And when they are no longer administered, the coma reverses, and if the process is controlled correctly, you wake up unharmed! What function could this possibly serve? Why would the human body evolve to be capable of this feat in the absence of naturally occurring anaesthetics? But oh how useful it ended up being. It's a process we can predictably control and we even have a good idea about what sorts of molecules can cause it.
So what's the mechanism for anaesthesia? Why does it work? Nobody really knows. There's a few competing hypotheses but nothing to settle the question. But for the sake of using anaesthesia in millions of surgeries, that doesn't matter. Still works. We can still do it without having that explanation.
The same applies for mental illness. You don't necessarily have to understand it to treat it, though it could certainly help.
Tophattingson
7mo ago
If the government is powerful enough to stop people talking about shoplifting, it's powerful enough to stop the shoplifting itself. Just do the latter. For an analogy where society is already rife with pro crime messages that can't be censored, consider all use of illegal drugs and their widespread promotion in various forms of media. That's the test case. Should the government get social media to censor discussion of that?
We've already seen the risks of government control of speech. 2020 happened. Hypothetical risks are not a good reason to grant license for 2020 to keep happening in the unlikely chance it prevents some other nebulous problem that could already be dealt with within the bounds of the law.
Tophattingson
7mo ago
That's likely a contributing factor to why tech is seeing far more innovation, far faster, than finance, manufacturing, international trade and nuclear energy. Everything before it is already stuck under a pile of stupid regulation.
Tophattingson
7mo ago
I would suspect that >0.01% of people running unrecognized code can be accounted for just in people messing about with minecraft mods.
Tophattingson
7mo ago
It seems there is a box on a form that you check if the person is pregnant, and they have been counting every single death of a pregnant person as a maternal death. Shoot, they included a lot of men in those stats too apparently. Even if the death didn't have anything to do with being pregnant or delivering a baby.
This is also how covid deaths work in most places. In the UK, it was 28 days within a positive test (initially, it was anyone who ever died after getting covid, which would have given covid a 100% mortality rate) . Given that some % of people will die within 28 days regardless, this will overestimate covid deaths. During the height of mass testing mania, so many people were testing positive for covid, and so few dying, that it implied that up to 40% of published deaths were just a quirk of counting people who tested positive before being hit by a bus. My own calculation of this.
This is about the standard level of death statistics you should expect. Covid dashboards may have cultivated the impression that orgs like the CDC have ultra-precise data about the cause of every single death ever, but besides that not being true for covid, it's also not true for much else either.
Take for instance the flu. Supposedly covid is far less deadly than the flu. Probably so, but this claim depends on two things. First, covid data. Second, flu data. Do we have the data on the latter? Yes, but it's not very good. Covid monomania left us with far better data about covid even by mid-2020. The CDC has moderately confident data about how many people die of flu, very weak data about how many people get flu, and therefore only a weak idea of what the mortality rate of flu is.
Sunak's current political strategy is an ambitious plan known as Net Zero Seats, where he tries to secure an overwhelming defeat in the next election.
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