cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
2mo ago
I think two new game modes since you last played. A horde mode, and a hive extermination. I don't think I like either of those very much. I've drifted towards liking advance and secure. Because it is time limited and slightly less insane than the other game modes.
There is supposed to be a single player campaign in a month or so when the game releases.
The progression system has been changed up, 6 classes instead of 3.
Weapon progression is a thing.
I'm still trying to figure out which class I like best.
cjet79
2mo ago
Vidya thread
Im back to playing Starship Troopers. Still thoroughly enjoy the game. Only downside is low player counts. One of the recent additions that has made a dramatic atmospheric improvance is that corpses do not automatically despawn. And corpses can be climbed over. So you end up with situations like in the movies when stacks of bugs outside of the walls form a smooth ramp up to your poor troopers. Flamethrowers are more important for cleanup now.
cjet79
2mo ago
I have a neighbor I like that is running for city council, so I feel obligated to go vote. Usually I prefer to stay home. There is a weird civic pride and happiness at polling places that I stridently hate. Old people handing out "I voted" stickers. Kids waving flags and handing out pamphlets. People smiling. Ugh.
I'm usually not a party pooper in my day to day life. But I'm libertarian, so when it comes to politics I absolutely am a party pooper.
Every time I go to the polls I am reminded that I strongly want a "none of the above" option, or more accurately "I hate all of these people". Something that just consistently says I disapprove of this circus. I don't care too much what they do in case a "none of the above" wins. Endless re-elections, a term with no one taking the position, etc. As it is I mostly just vote libertarian ticket if there is one available, since that feels like the closest option to me saying "none of the above".
I don't want to have to care about these elections. In some sense they kind of matter. They give a sort of mandate that pushes things one direction for a few years. In other important senses they don't matter, bother major parties seem equally capable of implementing policies that fuck my life up with me barely being aware that they've done it. Latest example is a Trump era tax cut and a change to how software development is amortized that has basically tanked the software dev job market and left me stuck at a job that is boring.
My hope is for deadlocked and unproductive government.
cjet79
2mo ago
This is one of those things where my real life observations don't match up with what everyone is saying online.
My wife is pregnant with our third kid. I live in a single family home neighborhood but the bus stop right outside my house has about three dozen kids spread over 5 busses. (For some reason the neighborhood is split between two school districts for elementary and middle school).
Over the five years I've been in the neighborhood I've made friends with many other parents that have young children. Most of them just two kids. But quite a few with more than two, including two families with five kids.
My older brother has three kids. My younger sister only has one, but that kid is less than a year old and she has spoken about having three.
I had Bryan Caplan as a professor in college when he was collecting information and anecdotes for his "have more kids" book. I met his kids when they were young, because Caplan was willing to invite people to his house for a big Caplacon board gaming event.
My wife's cousin's are all having kids, the ones that aren't are having trouble conceiving, not choosing to abstain. My cousin's are mostly not old enough to be married, but the few that are only one of the three married ones is choosing to not have kids.
Most of my older coworkers have kids. Most of my wife's older coworkers ha e kids.
Basically my life is filled with being around families with kids.
I know its possible to be in a social bubble, but in so many other ways I straddle social bubbles. Of all the people I've described their living situation ranges from dense urban to no one within miles rural. Their political views are all over the map, all types of conservatives, liberals, and libertarians.
It takes me a while to come upon the problem. Its a problem of margins. Each family with kids is slightly smaller than they used to be. And there are slightly more people not having kids. And it's fully possible that most of these changes are happening with people outside of my large social bubble.
So I have no real intuition on why fertility rates are a problem. My wife and I like having kids. I find them generally less restrictive on my social life than a pet. In fact most of my social life is because I have kids. I meet new dads at the park and the pool where my kids play. There is a wine tasting I'm going to tomorrow with a bunch of neighborhood parents at the neighborhood pool.
Yah childbirth is objectively not a fun time. My wife is a geriatric pregnancy and the first trimester has been filled with her not feeling good. Mostly she jokes with other moms about how they seemingly totally forget the annoying parts of child birth. She has maintained a career through it all, and has more of an active job than I do.
I think there is a general neuroticism in the population that makes them worry too much about things. A lot of people kind of freak out about parenthood. My inside take is that it's not that hard and not that big of a deal. If you are placed into a situation you tend to figure things out. But if you spend all your time freaking out about the thing and avoiding it then yah you'll prove yourself right and not be able to do it.
cjet79
2mo ago
Would be funny if that was made explicit in the law:
"Any Chinese National spying for China in a foreign country may have their citizenship status revoked temporarily as a cover. But if they make it back to China safely we will reinstate their citizenship."
cjet79
2mo ago
The End of Homeless encampments?
My consumption of mainstream or traditional news is always a little slow and awkward. I mostly just read headlines, and I barely trust the headlines half the time. Local news is at least often verifiable by me directly or directly by someone I know in person.
One of the items I have been seeing more of is "homeless encampment in [local park / forest] cleared by city". I mostly just read these with a tentative mental "yay?" and moved on. Well once of those news headlines referred to a homeless encampment that is just down the street from where I live, so I've gotten more curious about what is actually going on with these stories.
I have a couple theories but I'm not sure where the truth lies:
- Cynical take: These stories are like "drug busts" a sort of photo opportunity for politicians. The policy does have real consequences, but mostly its an unsolvable problem so they like to just loudly "do something" about it on occasion near elections.
- Supreme court ruling: The supreme court recently had a ruling about homelessness and the ability of cities to criminalize 'camping'. So perhaps the legal landscape shifted at the city level, and their hands were no longer tied when trying to address this.
- Voter preference shift: The preferences of voters on this issue shifted enough that the former general sentiment was "be nice to people that are down on their luck" and has now become something like "eww, get these drug addicts out of my sight"
cjet79
2mo ago
There is also the funny phenomenon that plenty of academics don't have to interact with each other at all, so they can all independently look down down on all other fields and hold their own up as superior.
cjet79
2mo ago
Their writing is better than most here, according to them:
https://www.themotte.org/post/1087/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/234268?context=8#context
Given that you seem to think highly of your own writing ability
I do, but I've never said that here, as nobody pays me enough (that is, anything) to write all that well here (nor have I received a single response from anyone at least very recently containing enough new and novel information to stimulate my thoughts enough to think I should communicate even better myself to hopefully receive more new and novel information back). (Though I do write well enough, and better than many/most here granting that they're also not getting paid, including many moderators.)
cjet79
2mo ago
Despite the state of government I'm not that pessimistic about the results. I think without either movement we would be in a much worse spot.
Are they winning? No, of course not. But they do impact the discourse and the Overton window.
I consider the classical liberals a sort of permanent opposition elite. They are fully capable of using academia and the courts to fight their battles, and they are probably more represented in those institutions than run of the mill religious conservatives.
cjet79
2mo ago
This doesn't give me a lot of hope for you. You are basically doing the same thing again, and I'm not even here to argue about the object level disagreement.
cjet79
2mo ago
to a Isreali woman's right to choose not to be raped
What about European women's right not to be raped by the migrants IsraAID is bringing into Europe? What about the christians in the middle east that are being destroyed by the hostile nation of Israel?
....
I have no issue with them delivering death to people who are trying to infect the Middle East with gender studies and push millions of migrants into Europe.
...
wars for wokeness in the Middle East
Most of your participation in this thread has been unimpressive. You are generally just stating that you don't like certain groups. And then describing things in ways that sound more like waging the culture war than sharing any useful information.
This needs to not be how you engage. Its obnoxious. If you can be replaced by a button that just responds every time with "I hate [my outgroup]" then you are failing to participate and engage in a valuable way.
This is a warning. Next time will be temp bans.
cjet79
2mo ago
Suppose communism is bad. How do you teach normies this?
This has been a goal of the libertarian and classical liberal movements for the last century.
I'll try and create a basic walk-through of the general argument. Every single part of it has been greatly elaborated on.
Step 1: The golden rule. Treat others how you'd like to be treated. Establish this first to create some basic level of empathy, and to expand into the idea of rights.
Step 2: Self-Ownership. All humans own three things: their life, their actions, and their body. Taking control of these things from them without their consent is murder, slavery, or rape. Hopefully whoever you are talking with is on board with this.
Step 3: Property-ownership. Humans like to possess things. This is mostly a practical matter. Start small with something the person you know likes to possess, their phone, their car, their clothes, etc. Dyed in the wool communists will generally try to make a distinction between "possession" and "ownership". Don't let them, the distinction is mostly meaningless. Possession is just about how immediately visible your ownership is. Just slowly expand the physical distance between them and their possessions to help them get the point. "You dropped your phone, do you no longer possess it? You left your phone somewhere, should whoever finds it get to keep it?"
Step 4: Examples. You have enough at this point to tear down any communist system. (even just step 1 and 2 might be enough, but step 3 makes it easy). Ask them to provide examples of a communist system or setup, and then show how it violates one of the things they already agreed on. Be aware that communist systems lean heavily into slavery and forced work, so if they don't want to provide examples ask them how a communist system will deal with lazy people / bad jobs / difficult jobs.
cjet79
2mo ago
Lol ya I was way off. Sorry got you mixed up in a different tab. I'll fix it above
gattsuru has 18 AAQCs.
naraburns has 14.
Urquan has 13
Walterodim has 8.
self_made_human has 7.
IGI-111 has 4.
functor, raakaa, and DTulpa each have 1.
Stevekirk and ABigGuy4U have none yet.
Overall seems like a lot of user overlap with the AAQCs, but matches what some people notice that it can feel a bit like a crapshoot which of their comments make it into the AAQC roundup.
cjet79
2mo ago
"I believe you are stupid" has never been an ok thing to say on this forum. Even if it is entirely true and you definitely believe it. The first bullet point on the rules sidebar is "Courtesy" that ordering is intentional.
If you are asking how to be discourteous to people you don't like and follow the rules around here it is quite simple:
- Close themotte tab in your browser.
- Open X, facebook, or some other social media account
- Be as discourteous as you want over there.
cjet79
2mo ago
I think the solution for most (nearly all?) of these scenarios is for the cyclists to go slower.
If you are a car in a crowded city you should not expect to be able to travel very fast, and certainly no where near the maximum capabilities of your vehicle and personal reaction times. Some cyclists seems to have this expectation.
I rode a bicycle on a university campus for 3 semesters until it got stolen. Its basically nothing but super crowded sidewalks constantly, with occasional glimpses of open space where you can go a little faster. I never hit anyone during this time. I also wasn't trying to go ~18mph.
If cyclists want safety they should go slower and stay on sidewalks. Safety is what I want when I'm on a bicycle so that is what I do.
If cyclists want speed they can go on the road, but they need to accept that what they are doing is incredibly dangerous and they are risking life and limb every time.
It probably won't be their fault if they get hurt. But the world sucks, and you sometimes need to treat it like its out to get you.
cjet79
2mo ago
cyclists are suicidal, law-breaking, moving hazards and that most of them are far too stupid and/or arrogant to be allowed on the road. Ever.
This is overly antagonistic. Don't do this.
cjet79
2mo ago
I think having something in between would be good. There are still some determinations that need to be made.
Are you gonna take street space or sidewalk space to make the in-between area?
What kind of general rules are they going to follow when they cross or interact with the streets or sidewalks?
I think they should generally be place in the sidewalk side of things, because the capabilities of these light vehicles is closer to pedestrians than it is to cars and trucks.
It is certainly going to be slower for the cyclists, scooters, e-bikes etc. But in a crowded city I don't see why anyone gets the right to complain they can't go as fast as they'd like. If they are currently getting in a lot of collisions at speeds that cause injuries to them, then that suggests slowing them down would have safety benefits.
cjet79
2mo ago
Yes, speed is exactly the problem.
If the posted speed limit is higher than a vehicle's maximum speed than it is dangerous for that vehicle to be there. Most vehicles in most circumstances travel much slower than their maximum speed.
I think bicycles should be expected to slow down on dangerous areas of a sidewalk, just like cars are expected to slow down in dangerous areas or when the speed limit is reduced.
Speed limit signs on sidewalks would be much cheaper to implement than bike lanes.
cjet79
2mo ago
Where I live it is an objectively better experience than being on the roads if you care at all about personal safety.
What are your specific objections to sidewalks? And could either of those objections be solved by:
- Money spent on bike lanes instead being spent on sidewalk maintenance.
- Driving slower on the bicycle.
Until someone else pointed it out I had no idea just how fast cyclists expected to be able to go on their preferred pathway. I'll admit I have little tolerance for this complaint since they would happily have all drivers significantly slow down to accommodate them.
cjet79
2mo ago
I don't live in a dense urban area. There are dedicated bike and pedestrian paths in my area. When traveling between the pedestrian paths I'm generally taking it slow on sidewalks that are mostly unused by pedestrians, because the area is otherwise dominated by cars. The few pedestrians around are often the homeless.
My other main experience with cycling is on a university campus. Which is full of people and obstacles.
I'm not a super cyclist, and I've never done it as a commute, but my experience is not zero.
Complaining that you can't go over 15mph is like people complaining they can't drive 40mph in a neighborhood. The solution is to drive slower and more cautiously.
In general there are going to be tradeoffs with various solutions. I have a personal strong preference for safety in all parts of my life. If I was forced to ride a bicycle everywhere I'd generally choose to ride slowly on the sidewalk.
Since I'm not forced to do that I instead drive in a car, and I will never ride a motorcycle.
Two wheeled vehicles are just inherently dangerous, and I sometimes think it's insane that any of them are allowed on roadways with how much the government and culture profess to value safety over peoples personal preferences.
Sarcasm?
From memory:
Ive played all but the engineer and ranger. Different game modes fit best for each one. Medic is what I play if no one else has jumped into the match yet, or if there are less than three medics already.
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