Understanding video games or not, you’d hope they’d at least understand the basic economic reality that addictive products make more money than non-addictive products. That’s why it was banned: it encourages unhealthy usage habits.

Oh I’d absolutely prefer somebody going all in something like that to the exasperating hack. My point is that if your goal is to avoid getting “owned” or whatever you want to call it, the only way to do that is to never actually enjoy something. I guess I’m trying to get across that I think a lot of the cringe discourse is less about what people think is embarrassing and more about avoiding ever feeling embarrassed, which is simply not a realistic thing unless you make yourself miserable.

Surprising that they’re not making money on the game directly. I didn’t really pick the TrueAnon crew as big board game people. I get that they still make money on it indirectly from the attention it’ll bring to the show, but that’s honestly not a huge payoff.

IMO S2 is the peak. It’s the one that feels most like a globe-spanning adventure, which was super cool. S3 is also good in that regard, but Jotaro just isn’t as good as Joseph imo.

My copium take is that there’s no way that the government wouldn’t understand banning “”“player retention mechanics”“” would cause a big divestment. They’re used because they make shittons of reliable money! Did they think it was just because devs are too lazy to come up with actual games? That seems like a pretty basic idea that would come across with even cursory investigation into what’s being regulated. Under this hopeful line of thought, it’d probably be a firing for messaging failure rather than a lack of will to follow through.

At the end of the day one person’s cringe is another person’s cool. There’s an impulse to try to avoid being seen as cringe by anybody and that can only lead to being layered in an unsatisfying ironic detachment. That’s the only way to avoid ever being cringe: avoid being genuine. Understand that this watch is definitely not for everybody, but nothing is. If it doesn’t put off the people you actually respect, who cares?

I would say that, under a strong implementation of democratic centralism, assassination is not a significant issue. Previous democratic centralist implementations have a history of being heavy on the centralism, light on the democratic, but if the party line really does come from the bottom up, the leader is only the most effective organizer. They do not need to be a visionary so much as a logistics nerd.

I feel safe on this website. I know there’s no point to all of you being feds because they already have microphones in my walls.

The Dark Age, a time of backwardness, illiteracy, and decline. Also, when books were invented.

If there’s arguments that solar is better, sure, I’m sympathetic to those. I can understand if nuclear technology is not safe enough yet for widespread use. I think that arguments about nuclear being inherently unsafe are not convincing, though. As long as each reactor is safer than the last, we can minimize that inherent unsafeness. To take an example from programming: the only bug-free program you’ll ever write is a hello world program. Introducing complexity naturally increases the amount of unaccounted for states. Cutting-edge medical technology is invariably going to have an astronomical amount of unaccounted for states and the bugs that come with them. That doesn’t mean computing has nothing to offer medicine, only that its use must be weighed against alternatives. Fusion might be less inherently unsafe but AFAIK it’s not on the table right now, and we need energy today. China’s investing in nuclear technology, but it hasn’t been neglecting wind and solar, either. Putting feelers around each solution just seems like the no-brainer thing to do.

I’m a fan of the Matt Christman take. I may be roughing this up pretty badly but: it’s got a lot to do with European geography having enough natural borders to create small individual states, but not sturdy enough natural borders to prevent conflict. You end up with a shitton of small-ish states in a perpetual arms race, which means they’ll be looking for every advantage possible. Even if it comes at a cost to the stability of the existing order writ large, they’ll take it because losing in the arms race is a much more immediate existential threat to the individual states. China had those warring states, but the natural borders were weak enough that they eventually settled into a single state. There’s a thousand other factors, too, but I hadn’t seen this mentioned from skimming the top few comments in this thread.

Adding on to this: why is there not some sort of QC on postings at most job sites? I tick the box on Indeed that says “entry level” and the first three positions that pop up are fucking senior dev/team lead positions.

I don’t know what it was like before, but I can’t help but think it’s different than what it used to be. I’m a recent grad in computer science and I’ve been job hunting for a few months now. My resume isn’t stellar, sure, but it’s not abysmal either. I stopped bothering to keep track of how many resumes I’ve sent once I passed ~300ish two or so months ago. All to entry level positions, but otherwise across all sorts of things. I’ve tried remote and in-person across the country, lowered my salary expectations $10k/yr under the bottom quartile of starting salaries in my field, made it clear I’m willing to relocate, and had friends at a few different companies try to get me an in. I’ve yet to hear back from anywhere.

Gotta think that one of the big downsides of everything being remote in CS is that now everybody everywhere can apply for every job. If I find a posting on LinkedIn with less than 400 applicants on the first day, I consider it unusual. Seems logical that if 100x more people are applying for each post, you’d have to apply to 100x more places. Some very nice people on here offered to throw me in their referral system, but I chickened out last second. That probably wasn’t the smartest move, honestly.

Anyways, didn’t mean to turn a reply into a personal vent session, but yeah, I can’t imagine that it’s always been like this. It’s completely maddening. The very reason I went into CS instead of fucking physics or philosophy was specifically because nobody shut the fuck up about how much demand there is for coders and I was too naive to really understand that when you hear that, it’s usually more about collapsing wages than filling positions.

MOST human beings aren’t super smart good boys, but I sure am!

Justice systems shouldn’t be about revenge, it should be about reformation. That’s contingent on the stability of a revolution, ofc. Some reactionary hardline militants might simply be too much of a risk to keep around before a governing body could really find its feet.

Also everything’s assumed to work around car infrastructure.

Wasn’t it City: Skylines that had an extremely realistic simulation of traffic flow that showed what a fucking shitshow car infrastructure is? IIRC they had to add a mechanic where cars magically disappeared if they got stuck for too long because making a car-centric city was miserable and inefficient.

I will finally save scum hard enough to pass the 782,469 consecutive skill checks required to instantiate True Communism™, of which this is roll #8.

If you think liberals are capable of being on the “extreme left” and can’t think of anybody to the right of you, you may be a Nazi.

By the same record of the Sword Coast, it’ll probably turn out fine anyways.

I watched it when it was first getting big, so my memory might be kind of fuzzy, but my copium thought-deeper-than-thought reading of it was:

This story is David’s happy ending under capitalism. It sucks a fuckton, but that’s because every other ending sucks a fuckton. One guy on his own was not going to start the revolution. But you know what he got? He didn’t have to bow his head as deeply to the shitty and abusive system as everybody else. He got to hit it back, even. He got to keep his humanity right up until the end. He got to live as part of a (small) community in a real and meaningful way. He got friends who put their lives on the line for him and who he put his life on the line for. The dream he wanted to grant to Lucy was essentially what she convinced herself she wanted rather than what she actually wanted, marketing having told her it would fill the hole in her self. That doesn’t matter to David, though. He got to give the 10/10 knockout girl he was crazy over her dream. Compare his life to most anybody else around him. You think the guy hooked up to the vacuum blowjob fleshlight drooling out of his slacked jaw next to the train station has a better life? The rich corpo kids who will live without ever feeling a genuine connection to something greater than themselves in their whole lives, driven insane by the unjustified violence their class position demands that they inflict? David died a painful, awful death. So did most of his friends. But it’s the only real end that could come from a life lived to the fullest under his circumstances.