bonsaii
23hr ago
Is the burden of proof not on the plaintiff? I thought it was almost always intrinsically harder to prosecute a patent case than to defend. Broadly, aren't differences usually easier to spot than similarities?
Of course, kick-backs of any sort would have to be heavily regulated and harshly punished.
bonsaii
1d ago
How about as long as materials are shared in full (i.e., not cherry picked) to the opposing party, the relevant expenses do not need to be matched? Seems about as enforceable as insider trading rules?
bonsaii
1d ago
You'd need a set of ancillary rules for these kinds of loopholes with additional regulations on lawyers to maintain papertrail records "showing their work" and some sort of audit system in place. Indeed it may be that no effective system to prevent this kind of activity exists, but I'd hope the core rule at least makes it marginally more difficult to just overwhelm someone by outspending?
bonsaii
1d ago
Doesn't the plaintiff need to hire lawyers to draw up and file the case? I fully admit to ignorance here, but I imagined the plaintiff as first-mover, so they would pay an amount for a legal team to create a suit and deposit the equivalent amount for the defendant to hire a team an create a response? Any extra the defendant spends must be declared and must be matched for the plaintiff to spend, then this repeats iteratively?
bonsaii
1d ago
I was having a conversation with someone about how rich people or large corporations being able to afford the best lawyers gives them a massive advantage in leveraging the legal system as a weapon against smaller actors. My instinctive naive solution was to enact a rule that any legal expenses must be matched by an equal donation to the opponent’s legal fund. The idea being that if you genuinely believe the law is on your side, you shouldn’t have to outspent the opposing side by X million dollars to prove it. Supposing this rule magically came to be, would this actually solve the issue and are there any major flaws/unintended consequences I've overlooked?
Alternatively, suppose the US had a true two-party state (instead of just a de facto one, since it gets more complicated with more than two opposing factions). Would an analogous rule for campaign contributions (any contribution to Democrats must be matched by an equal donation to Republicans and vice versa) work to reduce big-money influence in politics?
Forgive my ignorance: if globalization suppressed the wages of blue collar manufacturing/farming workers, why didn't it then commensurately suppress their cost of living? Naively, if the cost of labor inputs to everything made by those workers goes down, the prices of all relevant end products should go down. I get that a significant part of the cost of living crisis is housing, healthcare, and education, which are all affected by various forms of natural and artificial scarcity, but have most other goods actually gotten any more affordable than pre-globalization?
If not, where did all of the savings and productivity gains of globalization go?
If so, then is the "cost of living" crisis more accurately just a "cost of specifically housing, healthcare, and education" crisis?
bonsaii
1mo ago
If I could digitally project my consciousness on and off by choice to free myself from neck/back pain so I can just read/think without concern for posture, hunger, etc. I would probably do it for >70% of my day.
But if it had to be a permanent one-time decision then no (at least not unless my physical condition deteriorates much further). There are too many real-world physical sensations that I can't imagine giving up: snowboarding down a powdery mountain, making perfect contact on a full-force tennis swing and knowing you set your feet in position perfectly and watching the ball go exactly where you willed it, cutting through the water with a well-executed freestyle rhythm.
I felt similarly to you about many things before trying out the above. I would say try out some physical activities that have that sort of instant and unique tactile feedback if you haven't. Rock climbing is another that seems popular for it, though I never really felt drawn by it. People talk about runner's high, or a sense of relief after an intense lifting session, but I absolutely hate running and weight-lifting. It'll be different for everyone.
bonsaii
1mo ago
It seems the real issue is letting people make decisions when they aren't (or don't realize they are) the ones to face the consequences.
bonsaii
2mo ago
So I’ve been asked to take an MBTI for a work activity and was told that we would be assigned to teams based on our results. Mildly surprised to see it used this way since I’m in a STEM field, but whatever. It’s not a significant project by any means (a few hours per week at most) and I self-reported my results honestly (INTJ).
They likely want to mix personality types. I don’t buy into MBTI, but I think the I-E and T-F axes are at least somewhat consistent. Based on the quiz they sent us, EXFX types appear to be people uninterested in logical thinking, impenetrable to reasoned argument, and less organized (literally had questions like "I tend to miss deadlines" and "I go with my emotions over logical thinking").
So if this were actually an important project for your career progression, how would you self-report to get the best potential team?
bonsaii
2mo ago
I have great contempt for most so-called ethicists, and as far as I'm concerned, mutually positive sum transactions between consenting individuals should be accepted, if not celebrated.
Would you say the same about the sale of heroin between a dealer and a buyer?
If your answer is anything but yes, doesn't that suggest there are at least some cases where making the option of something available is a net negative to at least one of the individuals in question, even when they are able to consent?
bonsaii
2mo ago
It still seems like a miracle to me that Smash Melee, through what is mostly accident, ended up with 4-5 relatively balanced viable characters with wildly different movesets.
bonsaii
2mo ago
This is pretty similar to a suggestion I've heard floated around for tennis to move the service line closer to the net. The serve-return dynamic in tennis is probably the closest sports analogue to the pitch-bat dynamic in baseball. Tennis is always dealing with a similar issue where serves have become incredibly powerful. Tennis has attempted to "solve" this issue by increasing the friction and bounce of court surfaces to slow the ball with some success, but at the cost of killing much of the variety of playing styles (higher and slower bounces favor players who swing hard from the baseline).
I don't know much about baseball, but I've superficially heard that a lot of strategy goes into what kinds of pitchers you send out (fast vs curve vs knuckle; lefty vs righty). Sure, your proposal will weaken the fast ball, but it might end up weakening everything else by more in a way that flattens the game overall. Maybe it's a worthwhile tradeoff to you, but I can say that the changes mentioned above for tennis have significantly diminished my interest.
bonsaii
2mo ago
Pinyin makes more sense than English orthography (likely among the worst in the world). At least it's almost 100% regular so taking a few hours to learn the rules will serve you faithfully for almost every case.
Also, "ch" already represents a different consonant sound.
bonsaii
2mo ago
It's funny that you mention the "punchiness" of Japanese prose, because I think it's actually a rather un-punchy language.
I'd overall agree with you here. I mainly meant that, when it is punchy (by which I meant vaguely emotionally resonant), the way it does so is more often translatable to English in a way that I don't find to be the case for many Chinese texts.
My hot take is that the Japanese language is not quite as exotic as English-speaking Japanese learners make it out to be. It's still >4x as much work as picking up a Germanic or Romance language, but a lot of that additional work is front-loaded (hence an overwhelming number of people who never made it past the beginner stage and can only talk about how hard it is).
Yes, there is a lot of culturally-determined social subtext, but most of it is just using set phrases to express something you're already conveying with rather universal body, vocal tone, or facial expression cues. Also, a lot of this exists to an extent in English as well. "How are you?" is usually not an invitation to give a detailed update. "Next time, for sure" more often than not precedes a ghosting. We're plenty equipped to pick up on the analogous cues for Japanese with a little exposure or the right finessing of the translation wording.
The honorifics seem exotic and they give indications of the social dynamics in a conversation, but they are definitionally quite regular and rigid. Translations inevitably lose a lot of this, but you're just losing that particular feature uniformly across every text. If I were to hypothesize about why this isn't a huge impediment to foreign enjoyment, I'd posit that it has minimal role in the types of Japanese stories that foreigners find engaging, with most involving interactions between characters of shared social status. Japanese workplace dramas where these things may be more important have nearly zero attention from Western audiences. Shonen anime, one of the larger cultural exports, essentially throws honorifics out of the window. You don't need the specific Japanese first person pronoun used by an anime character to know if that person is fussy or tomboyish or rash or timid. 99/100 you'd guess correctly from their character design alone.
Regardless, a decent chunk of the features that make a given piece of Japanese prose "punchy" still seem to carry over into English. This seems less true for Mandarin. If I were to vaguely gesture at why, it would involve the idea that a larger percentage of Chinese speech feels idiomatic. After all, idioms are the extreme of densely-packed connotation. To explain the ways that hearing a character say "He kicked the bucket." differs from just "He died." would take an essay. To me, Chinese seems to use a greater variety and frequency of such idiomatic phrases in way that affects the visceral impact of more of its sentences, which cumulatively impacts the perception of a given work as a whole.
bonsaii
2mo ago
Every country's entertainment sub-industries will naturally have variations. Most Japanese live-action acting performances are unwatchable to me. I find the Korean music scene (and I'm not just talking about K-pop here) to be a barren wasteland ranging from awful to uninspired. On the other hand, Japanese rock is my favorite genre of music right now and Korean movies are frequently among my favorites.
I would also just add a possible contributing factor from my experience studying multiple languages: I find that Mandarin translates particularly poorly to other languages. None of the East Asian languages translate well to European ones, but works translated from Chinese feel especially uncanny valley to the point I can sometimes recognize them as such just by reading them in English. It feels like a language where a comparatively smaller proportion of meaning is expressed literally, such that connotations don't carry over properly. The structure of the language also means that these things get packed quite densely, so you can either try to awkwardly unpack them and become overly verbose or stay succinct and lose the meaning.
bonsaii
2mo ago
- Polearms (e.g., most depictions of Guan Yu or Wu Kong): I just find spinning/twirling moves aesthetically pleasing
- Dual-wielding small weapons (e.g., Chaos Blades Kratos or Talim): usually involves fun acrobatics, bonus style points for reverse grips
- Weapon + Shield (e.g., Link from Zelda): a bit too generic for my taste, doesn't feel like there's a lot of room to get creative
- Heavy weapon (e.g., two-handed axe or claymore): usually slow and cumbersome, rarely cinematic
- Shields without weapons: aside from Captain America, I've just never seen this in media
bonsaii
2mo ago
US residents, I want to check if I'm stingy. What's your current baseline tip percent (pre-tax) for:
- Take-out, via online order
- Take-out, via self-service kiosk
- Take-out, via human cashier (no other services besides taking order/payment and calling you when it's ready)
- Dine-in, via self-service kiosk
- Dine-in, via human cashier (no other services besides taking order/payment and calling you when it's ready)
- Dine-in, waiter for your table
- Delivery
My current policy is:
- 0%
- 0%
- 0%
- 0%
- varies 0-15% based on my mood (always 0% if the default tip option is >=20% out of spite)
- 20%
- 20%
bonsaii
2mo ago
My (admittedly superficial and possibly outdated) understanding is that liberalism has never been a significant ideological force in East Asia. Mainland China and North Korea are overtly single party states. Japan (LDP, ironically not particularly liberal nor democratic) and Singapore (PAP) are de facto single party states. South Korea and Taiwan each have two major parties at any given point, but their core disagreements are mainly on how to navigate dealing with their respective existential threats (for South Korea, whether to align closely with the US and Japan vs being more conciliatory towards North Korea; for Taiwan, whether to be more hardline vs conciliatory regarding the PRC), with economic and social policy disagreements having a much narrower Overton window than in Western countries.
bonsaii
3mo ago
What characteristics distinguish your definitions of "engineer-brain" and "scientist-brain"?
bonsaii
3mo ago
Think of some cuisines you've rarely/never had. With few exceptions (Mexican probably the most notable one), the best available in the US will likely be somewhere in NYC.
You could do the standard sightseeing, but if you're limited to outside normal working hours anything outdoors will be dark and cold and really not all that impressive. If you're into art, you could hit the museums.
If you have any specific hobbies, there are a lot of specialty stores for them that might have eclectic offerings.
Otherwise, the US is sufficiently homogenized that there isn't too much that you could only find in NYC.
To the extent that more expensive lawyers are actually better at winning cases, it reduces the role of raw monetary advantage in deciding who wins.
To the extent that the costs of defending a suit are comparable to the costs of prosecuting one, it reduces the effectiveness of intimidation suits.
A 'loser pays' system still allows the rich to apply significant stress simply by suing someone without the resources to mount a proper defense and in some situations would even doubly screw over the defense if they lose more due to weaker representation rather than by the merits of the case.
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