Better yet from the same fashion writer at the same paper
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#cw ethics in journalism #cw election 2016More you might like
Blind’s take on the gebru situation
She’s Right About Her Criticisms And She Should Say It
(ok not the clothes one, shopping for the right presentation should be crucial to the game, but the fact that she can get away with not doing it is still on the game, not on her)
I love that they’re playing mocking music over her as she mentions she never engaged with the crafting system or weapons upgrading, meanwhile I remember the first gameplay trailer coming out and immediately making me decide to hold off on this game because it looked like the kind of game that would have crafting and weapon upgrades, things that absolutely don’t belong in cyberpunk.
Here’s the gun you use in cyberpunk if you’re street level: The biggest one you can steal and smuggle with you
Here’s the gun you use in cyberpunk if you’re a beat cop: The biggest one of (the biggest one you can confiscate off a perp | the biggest one your department armory issues to you)
Here’s the gun you use in cyberpunk if you’re a megacorp operator: The biggest one your armory can provide and hide inside you dread cyberbody.
Hey do you guys remember my old post on how loot drops are bad game design for bad game designers who can’t hold your interest without putting in a skinner box?
Yeah same here.
Back then I compared with Subnautica which is a much better role playing game than whatever I was mad at at the time (you roleplay as a crash landed person so there’s no conversation trees) and I’m going to do that again. Subnautica has crafting, is that bad then? No because Subnautica has you roleplay as a crash landed person. You craft in character.
Some of you already live in corporate dystopias (hello dear American followers!) if I wanted to roleplay as you guys, how often would you say I should be crafting to get the real American experience? Is it zero times a month? Yeah that’s what I thought!
It makes sense in Subnautica (you are crashed; there are no stores) and it makes sense in Horizon: Zero Dawn and in Fallout (you’re in the aftermath of the apocalypse; there are few stores).
Imagine a reviewer saying, after an FO4 review, “there was a crafting system but I never really engaged with it” - that would be totally legitimate, it’s not that important to the game!
And if you tell me they can’t write a legitimate review of CP2077 without interacting heavily with the crafting system, that’s actually evidence that they can write a legitimate review of CP2077 without interacting heavily with the crafting system, because “you must interact with crafting to play this game” is all they need to say about it.
In Regular America not so much. But in 2nd Amendment Libertarian Subculture bump stocks, 3d printed guns, and the classic sawed off shotgun are all a big deal even if they aren’t monthly crafts.
Here you can see some of that energy in the wild: https://www.ar15.com/forums/armory/GSG-Mods-Firing-Pin-Mags-Buffer-Stop-Screw-Replacement-Fake-Can-Laser-Lowers/41-244302/?
Is there some weird galaxybrained hail mary moldbug+ssc solution to the mediocrity and general awfulness of democratically elected politicians? Like, I know moldbug is basically a monarchist, but a king just varies about the mean more than our current leaders. How do you get rid of him when he does something incredibly stupid that kills hundreds of thousands of people? I just mean moldbug and ssc levels of left-fieldedness argued for pages.
Like, maybe candidates could be pulled by lottery from professions that don’t strongly select for shittiness? E.g. every 4 years 50 veterinarians, 50 farmers, 50 public schoolteachers, etc. end up on a huge ranked choice ballot, determined by using the numerical change in the positions of 10 major river systems (or maybe you could sample sunspots) plus some rounded modular arithmetic to grab names off an alphabetized list. The number would have to be low enough, relative to the source population, to discourage psychopaths from joining just for the shot. And you’d probably need to force people to campaign if selected, with few exceptions.
Yeah, no, that wouldn’t work. Or, there are more failure modes than the current dumpster fire.
If the king is incredibly stupid, you murder him.
One of the problems with the democratic-regulatory state and its academic-industrial complex is, to put it in shitpostese, that there’s nobody you can murder. Nobody has “responsibility” in the sense of owning a decision. Almost no program can be made to go away by murdering either the people who set it up or the people who are maintaining it, because they’re all replaceable.
I’m sure this was done for the very good cause of discouraging political murder and encouraging nicer methods of feedback. But then the system turned around and started manufacturing consent so it didn’t have to listen to those nicer methods, either. “My fire alarm kept making this annoying noise so I turned it off.”
If every Congresscritter keeled over a heart attack tomorrow, I expect a new set of Congresscritters would get elected and go on doing mostly the same shit, because so very little power resides in Congress as such. It’s regulations and subcommittees and precedents and jurisdictions and gerrymandering-to-ensure-minority-representation and political dynasties and name recognition.
Moldbug is not exactly a monarchist, he’s more of an “authoritarian” (imprecise term) in that his proposed solution is to concentrate authority in some person, so that person can make decisions. Might be a hereditary monarch. Might be an elected dictator. Might be a military officer or CEO or some other structure. But for the love of God, let there be a person with final authority, who can say “Yes” and “No”, instead of having to get the approval of seven separate planning committees and the HOA.
—
And extending a response from the comments:
> Public schoolteacher is a profession that selects for shittiness though.
> I remember it was a mixed bag. There were some that were great, and some that were only there because they liked emotionally damaging children.
Public schoolteacher is a profession that selects for, among other things, people who like emotionally damaging children, also people who want to be dealing from a position of absolute superiority all day as children cannot fight back either socially or physically, and people who want to be very difficult to fire. Also there are some good aspects like people who want to pass on knowledge.
In my experience, with few exceptions, every single person makes at least a few incredibly bad decisions (this includes Scott Alexander, Moldbug, obviously me, and yes, even Greg Cochran). So, while the idea of concentrating power is appealing if you want to get a bunch of stuff done, it’s a lot less appealing if you want to survive as a citizen without being forced to, like, make a metal forge in your backyard because Mao is rapidly developing dementia.
I think part of the reason the internet robot libertarian crowd often backed Trump, besides the whole “no more stupid neocon wars” thing (which I fully support, and which arguably outweighs his numerous bad decisions pre-2020) is just that there was this idea bouncing around in dorms and comedy clubs that the president doesn’t actually have much power, or something like that. This is actually related to a widely held misconception that Taleb brings up a lot (in fact it’s almost his central thesis). The president doesn’t have much power in mediocristan. This is by design, because people generally prefer to stay for as long as possible in mediocristan where there are no pandemics, nukes, floods, famines, and carrington events. Authoritarian leaders who go a bit cooky (the way humans often do) have a habit of dragging us into an extremistan that wasn’t even inevitable/environmental. But, regardless of the calm behavior of your committees during quiet times, all mediocristans are still fundamentally bounded by extremistans, in both time and space. That’s when the president is required to act like a king, and we all have to hope that he’s not, at that moment, a complete fucktard.
Joe Rogan got pissy and moved out of California during the lockdown back in March, mostly because he was convinced that the governor wasn’t supposed to exercise so much power, I guess even if the aliens invade or the nukes go off or whatever. This is an understandable response, because Joe doesn’t know much history beyond Dan Carlin’s podcasts, and the borders of the US have contained mostly mediocristan (punctuated by little extremistans, both negative and positive, e.g. Detroit and pre-2000 silicon valley) since the end of WWII. So “governor” appeared to be this weird state-wide office that was getting phased out by faster communications or something. And then suddenly New Mexico ran out of ICU beds and someone had to make the decision to remove legal liability from hospitals for rationing care (because the alternative is business as usual, but in extremistan, which would be incredibly bad).
Recall, the president can deploy the entire US military with zero congressional approval. He doesn’t do this on a whim, and if he had a stroke and decided to nuke Canada we all hope someone nearby would hit him with a brick (more likely the chain of command would simply break down) but there’s not actually anything explicitly legally stopping that (with a few exceptions, e.g. a decision by his physician, if the VP approves, which would get complicated quickly).
Also, don’t get bogged down in the schoolteacher thing. I was trying to think of professions that most people could agree on. Maybe you could just start by blacklisting lawyers.
Recall, the president can deploy the entire US military with zero congressional approval. He doesn’t do this on a whim, and if he had a stroke and decided to nuke Canada we all hope someone nearby would hit him with a brick (more likely the chain of command would simply break down) but there’s not actually anything explicitly legally stopping that (with a few exceptions, e.g. a decision by his physician, if the VP approves, which would get complicated quickly).
While in 2020, I’m much more open to the president mattering more than I had thought, I still have doubts about unilateral Presidential Prerogative on the core Commander in Chief role.
Nixon was famous for getting drunk and trying to let loose the nukes. And Jim Jeffery was able to avoid being over ruled by the president by just lying about the facts on the ground. Obama claimed congressional restrictions stopped him from fully closing Gitmo (though maybe that was a convenient excuse for President Obama to walkback promises from Senator Obama that he no longer believed after the National Security State got his ear).
I never knew that about Nixon.
Unexpected heroics from a famous lizard person:
“George Carver, a CIA Vietnam specialist at the time of the EC-121 shootdown, is reported to have said that Nixon became “incensed” when he found out about the EC-121. The President got on the phone with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ordered plans for a tactical nuclear strike and recommendations for targets.
Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor for Nixon at the time, also got on the phone to the Joint Chiefs and got them to agree to stand down on that order until Nixon woke up sober the next morning.”
Remember when he appeared on Colbert’s final show next to Captain Picard, Frodo Baggins, and James Franco?:
They were singing Vera Lynn’s existential-wartime-chipper-tune “We’ll Meet Again”:
Lynn’s 1953 recording is featured in the final scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove – with a bitter irony, as the song accompanies a nuclear holocaust that wipes out humanity.
Rob Ager (the film analysis guru behind “Collative Learning”) has noted some interesting parallels between Kissinger’s career and the movie Dr. Strangelove:
If you don’t like watching videos, here’s a passage from his accompanying PDF:
Another character who has been suspected by some film reviewers as being satirized in the Strangelove character is Henry Kissinger. Kissinger was a publicly prominent figure in US defense and nuclear policy, so much that in 1958 he was the subject of a lengthy televised interviewed with journalist Mike Wallace, who questioned him at length on his opinions of nuclear war. Kissinger’s answers included statements to the effect that crisis can be used to get the public to back policies that would be otherwise unpopular, and an interesting determination to keep his own views entirely separate from party politics. He is asked repeatedly to name drop up and coming politicians who he thinks might be good at running the country, but refuses to do so. These traits of Kissinger’s are not unlike those of Dr Strangelove.
The name Kissinger, according to his Wikipedia profile, which cites a German language document, was adopted by his great-great Grandfather, after the town Bad Kissengen in Bavaria. Historical accounts cite him as a Bavarian born German Jew who fled the Nazis, moving to New York. During his promising early college progress he was drafted by the US Army, who recognized his potential both intellectually and in respect of his fluent German (he still has the accent today). He was assigned to a variety of intelligence and counter-intelligence positions, quickly taking on roles of increasing responsibility. After the war, in which his academic credentials had been increased militarily, he returned to academia in the US. His involvement with defense policy during this time was considerable. His biography at nobelprize.org adds that he was “Director of the Special Studies Project for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund from 1956 to 1958; Director of the Harvard International Seminar from 1951 to 1971, and Director of the Harvard Defense Studies Program from 1958 to 1971.”
In 1957, after a two year stint working for the Council on Foreign Relations (A Rockerfeller founded research institute that has exerted influence over many US Presidents) as Study Director in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Kissinger published his book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. It’s very likely that Kubrick read Kissinger’s book and would have taken at least a passive interest in the author himself.
Kissinger would become incredibly influential in US politics post Dr Strangelove and his ethics are open to question considering his long-term close affiliations with the Rockerfeller and Bush families. It wouldn’t have been difficult for Kubrick to anticipate the power house role Kissinger was headed for. And at this point it’s worth reciting the initial idea for the film that Kubrick told New York Times editor and critic A. H. Weiler. He said he was producing “Dr Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”, the story of “… an American college professor who rises to power in sex and politics by becoming a nuclear wise man.” This metaphor wouldn’t apply to Wernher Von Braun, who was educated in Nazi Germany, but it applies very well to Henry Kissinger. He has a German accent, glasses and, as the Dr Strangelove novel explains, “He was of course familiar with the jargon of the nuclear strategists. Indeed, he himself had created a great deal of it.” P48
In 1951 Kissinger was a consultant for the Psychological Strategy Board and its successor, the Operations Coordinating Board. Psychological Warfare was an integral task of these organisations. But Kissinger’s sphere of influence is most illustrated by the membership of his 1982 founded think tank group Kissinger Associates. It has included representatives from banks (including the Federal Reserve), government, corporations, intelligence agencies and even NATO. He was even made head of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (a.k.a. 9/11 Commission), assigned by George W. Bush, but after some criticism regarding conflict of interest he stepped down.
Amusingly, Kissinger also seems to have enthusiastically supported Theranos. Sort of a mini Trump vs. Covid fuckup. Apparently even the lizards still bleed when faced with intractability.
The Theranos board was stacked with National Security State insiders:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos#Management
In July 2011, Holmes was introduced to former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who joined the Theranos board of directors that month.[122] Over the next three years, Shultz helped to introduce almost all the outside directors on the “all-star board”, which included William Perry (former U.S. Secretary of Defense), Henry Kissinger (former U.S. Secretary of State), Sam Nunn (former U.S. Senator), Bill Frist (former U.S. Senator, senate majority leader and heart-transplant surgeon), Gary Roughead (Admiral, USN, retired), James Mattis (General, USMC), Richard Kovacevich (former Wells Fargo Chairman and CEO) and Riley Bechtel (chairman of the board and former CEO at Bechtel Group).[122][123][124] The board was criticized for consisting “mainly of directors with diplomatic or military backgrounds”.[25]
Also David Boies (of US v. Microsoft, Bush v. Gore, Hollingsworth v. Perry) was on the board too.
Interestingly Shultz’s grandson was one of the first Theranos whistleblowers.
The new App Store Small Business Program is designed to accelerate innovation and help propel your small business forward with the next generation of groundbreaking apps on the App Store. It features a reduced commission rate of 15% on paid apps and in-app purchases, so you can invest more resources into your business to continue building quality apps that customers love.
What? This seems ass backwards. Shouldn’t Apple’s handling of popular apps from big businesses have fixed overhead costs that amortize over more units?
I guess this is probably part PR and part reducing barriers to entry to their ecosystem, but if anything this move makes more more convinced that they are abusing their position over a captive market that they control.
“A virgin with a sack of gold, bragged Genghis Khan, could stroll alone from one end of Asia to the other. Say what you want about Genghis Khan—security is an ethos. When you need it, there is nothing you need more. While our virgin might not even make it to the Caldecott Tunnel, is security really Columbia’s biggest problem?”
Why’s his route take the Caldecott Tunnel? NY is a straight shot down I-80.
It took me embarrassingly long to realize that 4chan’s contempt for the Jannies was not about the Ottoman Janissaries.