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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Conversations on a public platform aren’t just for those who speak; they’re also for those who listen. Many people are simply reading these exchanges without engaging in them. I think this discourse is most valuable for them, far more valuable than for someone whose opinion is so ingrained that they’re the one arguing about it.






  • I assume one of the only scenarios in which you’d need to use this full Lagrangian is when developing a virtual universe whose laws mirror the Standard Model of Particle Physics. We’re nowhere near even close to being able to do that in any genuine capacity, at least not until our quantum computing gets up off the ground and properly developed.






  • Definitely agree with a lot of the listed games but wanted to add some I haven’t seen yet:

    • Monster Hunter: Rise. The Monster Hunter series’ most recent main series instalment sees you playing as a Hunter of massive creatures, carving them up and using the parts to craft stronger and better equipment. Multiplayer only available with multiple switches, but is still a very rewarding solo game.

    • Cadence of Hyrule. A Zelda and Crypt of the NecroDancer mashup that sees you play as Link or Zelda in a musical world where everything moves at the speed of the beat of the music. Very novel and interesting game, but relatively short.

    • Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX. This is a true roguelike and a remake of the first game in the offshoot Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series made by the same creators of the Shiren the Wanderer series. Gameplay is turn-based and grid-based, with randomly generated dungeons for you to conquer, and you play as a human who’s been turned into Pokémon alongside many others you can befriend.


  • There are two ways to think about rights: there are legal rights and then there are human rights. Legal rights are conferred by some piece of legal document (legislation, constitution or common law) that a person is able to seek legal redress if their right has been revoked or diminished. Then there are human rights - what we as individual humans believe that each humans should expect as a basic right. The two are not always aligned, predominately because human rights vary greatly from one person’s interpretation to the next.

    I think what the company is probably (accurately) arguing is that there is no legal right to swim in the UK, as no specific document states this with any specificity, so the complainant isn’t due compensation or redress of behaviour under the law. This is what the courts will examine as they are the interpreters of law but not the creators of law.

    Now, does she have a human right to swim there free of sewage? I damn well think so, and I don’t think that would be a controversial opinion either. The problem is that what we think the law should be and what it is are often different, because legislation can’t represent every view simultaneously. There’s no law that could be drafted that makes forced birthers and pro choice people agree - someone will always lose out.

    All of this is to say that while fighting this in court is a shitty thing to do (pun very much intended), it makes sense based upon the way our legal system is set up. There is no incentive for private business to respect rights that are not legally conferred, but there is a financial incentive to do the ‘cheaper and technically legal’ thing. Until we overhaul our legal systems to be inherently protective rather than inherently exploitative, this behaviour will continue.


  • Not all rights are won through violence. In Australia, the union movement has managed to secure the following through peaceful means, specifically through lobbying, striking and peaceful protest:

    • 40 hour work week; overtime for hours worked beyond this
    • sick leave and annual leave
    • maternity and paternity leave
    • Medicare, our semi-universal public healthcare
    • enforceable safety standards at work
    • compensation for injury at work
    • our ‘award’-based system of minimum pay and conditions per field
    • federally mandated superannuation (forced retirement saving paid by your employer, tax free)
    • protections against unfair dismissal

    While not all rights are gained through violence all rights are limited and revoked by violence, in particular state-sponsored violence.




  • I’m not sure that your two categories of gamers are necessarily mutually exclusive. I’d consider myself somewhere in both of those camps. For instance, I have hundreds of hours logged each on a range of open world games like Skyrim, BotW, WoW etc. but I also love to play incremental games which satisfies my mathy brain. I’m generally a min/maxer and completionist and in RPGs this often means exploring every location, killing every enemy and collecting every item before progressing the main story, so as to be maxed out at all points in time. I’m not a big PvP fan, but when I do engage in PvP I tend to find some balance between whatever the meta is and whatever my personal playstyle ‘feels’ is right.


  • The US needs a a legitimate grassroots movement that is well-funded (fucked if I know how to be honest, hopefully it’s just a lot of small donations from regular people) that consistently lobbies for voting reform. The following changes should be up for debate:

    • Replacing FPTP voting with ranked choice voting
    • Instituting proportional representative voting where appropriate, particularly for state senates
    • Referendum on changing the number of federal senators per state to better represent population
    • Referendum on abolishing the Electoral College and instituting a simple, ranked choice popular vote for president
    • Systematic review of every single electorate by an independent organisation to unwind gerrymandered districts; this organisation then sets the districts on an ongoing basis in an apolitical way
    • Expanding ease of access to voting by every sensible measure possible (much of what AG Garland is doing now) and then considering mandatory voting
    • Real-time full disclosure of all political donations to all political bodies (especially PACs)
    • Sensible caps on political donations
    • Truth in political advertising laws

    I’m sure there are plenty of others but if all of those things were managed to be achieved, the body politic’s state and Overton Window of the US would shift dramatically.




  • What you say also seems extremely unlikely to me, given that humans who have sufficiently advanced to the state we live in now will be unwilling to accept subsistence lifestyle.

    I didn’t predict anything; you’ll note I said that this is what I would hope happens.

    I’m not talking about a market failure; I’m talking about trying to take away the whole concept of a ‘market’ applying to residential real estate altogether. Because it’s so intertwined with the value of our economies, taking it away will cause a significant, permanent shrinking of GDP and other economic measures, and I think that’s appropriate given the circumstances we’re in now.

    It’s a big and bold move, and as I’ve said before none of us can be exactly sure how it would pan out, but nothing is gained in life if nothing is ventured. We need to try something. I say this as someone who is lucky enough to be able to have a mortgage: it’s inherently unfair that my fellow citizens have to miss out on that opportunity.