Mnemnosyne @ Mnemnosyne @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

It's not the heat but the pressure that does it. The heat in a star is the byproduct of the pressure, it's not what causes the gold to form. And even then I think metals as heavy as gold only form in a supernova.

And people have been playing with third party nonsense since the beginning of the country pretty much. It doesn't work because of our voting system, it's never worked. In the history of the country, no third party candidate for president has ever come close to getting enough electoral votes to win. The highest ever was Theodore Roosevelt, and he got 88 out of a necessary 256 to win, barely a third of the needed number.

More notably, the most successful third parties overall, with Roosevelt's Progressive (Bull Moose) party excluded, have largely been regressive, such as the American Independents with George Wallace, the Dixiecrats with Strom Thurmond, th Constitutional Union AND Lecompton Democratic in the 1860 election... Progressive third parties do not have a good track record, probably because it's a lot easier to get people to vote for a lost cause if they're doing it out of hate than it is if they actually want to improve things.

Bernie and AOC and others are being a fuckton more successful than third party candidates have been for the entire history of the nation.

They definitely need more support to overcome the entrenched forces against them, though. That's why they need people like us to support progressive candidates in primaries, and we need more people like them willing to do the hard work of getting into the democratic party and changing it from within.

Now, in a small election in a district where another party has a realistic chance, great! Vote that way. But most places aren't like that.

And don't forget voting third party when they have no chance can cause great harm. I would have thought the election of 2000 would've been enough to sear that into all our minds forever.

They might if they joined a real party instead of a troupe cosplaying as politicians.

You want change, you join one of the real parties and fight to become a candidate in that party and gain enough influence to shift party policy.

If everyone that did the third party nonsense did that, there might be enough support in a real party to start changing things and maybe eventually make third parties viable instead of just a performative game.

As others have said, invisibility versus teleportation is way too lopsided in favor of teleportation. Even if we're talking perfect 'you cannot be detected unless you bump into something or otherwise reveal your own presence' invisibility, it's still not good enough to compete with teleportation. Especially with S-tier teleportation like described there.

You'd have to really beef up the invisibility side to make it more fair. Maybe instead of just invisibility, go full incorporeal, with the ability to have gravity affect you (or not affect you) however you want, relative to whatever reference frame you want (be very careful with this) and the ability to make any part of yourself incorporeal or corporeal without it being all of you. Even then, I'd have a bit of a hard time picking this over teleporting.

Or go with the Invisible Woman's powerset, that'd be a pretty solid other option versus that teleportation. At that point I would actually have a hard time choosing, cause that is some nice teleportation, but Sue Storm's powers are pretty high tier as well.

Most likely, in my opinion:

Hold you for 24 hours to see if anyone reports a crime and describes you as the perpetrator.

When no one does, find a crime which seems plausible for you, and where they've gotten a description that could possibly fit you.

Interrogate you about it, giving you your lawyer of course. Assuming you do not have a solid alibi for that particular crime, there's a real chance you'll be charged and eventually convicted.

If you do have a solid alibi, they might keep looking for other crimes to charge you with, or they might give up.

If they give up, they're likely to charge you with something related to wasting their time, for which you will at minimum have to pay a fine.

There's a huge difference with the Prime Directive - although I think it can be horrible too.

The Federation doesn't go around leaving super advanced technology to be found and abused by primitives everywhere. When the Ancients ascended, they just left everything behind, for good or ill, and then refused to interfere when others found their old stuff and used it.

The Ancients meanwhile not only did that, but also abandoned friends and allies, like the Asgard. They could've fixed the Asgard genetic problem, and pre-ascension, they'd been allies, but despite that they were just 'nah, fuck y'all, we're out.'

'Nobody would create anything' is an absolute lie that we've been fed, simply another part of the capitalist brainwashing propaganda.

The truth is people love to create stuff for the sake of it, and many people will create things even when it costs them time and money, because they enjoy it. The only thing that would be necessary for them to create things prolifically would be to ensure their ability to live and work without having to worry about 'making a living' or having to 'earn' enough money to live, and people would be producing tons of content.

If you doubt this, you're not paying enough attention. People create amazing stuff without even hope of being paid. I have read hundreds of fanfics - some poorly written, some very well written - that never made money and never could make money. They were written because the writer wanted to tell a story with characters they loved. I have seen vast amounts of fanart, again, made with no hope of obtaining money. Especially before things like Patreon - these days you can make some money making fanart, which artists resort to because they have to, but every artist I've ever talked to hates the part of their life they have to devote to the 'business' side of things. Most early webcomics had no way of making money. Even today, most webcomics do not make money - most are simply made by creators that want to share their story and art.

In the gaming world, mods - free, unpaid mods - have been around for ages, and many of them are as amazing or even moreso than professionally made games. A very tiny minority of mod creators manage to turn a successful mod creation into a job in the industry, but the vast majority do this simply because they want to and enjoy making a thing people will appreciate.

Movies are about the only field I haven't seen a plethora of freely made stuff in, and that's probably a personal experience thing. I know there's some.

Overall, I guarantee we would not see less things created as long as we allow creative people to use whatever they want and do not force them to toil for their survival, to have to monetize everything or else lose their standard of living. We would see rather an explosion of new creations, just like we saw when the internet rose to prominence and people started doing this kind of thing and posting it publicly. Only we would see it at an even greater scale.

I've put in 2000+ hours on Civilization IV, Stellaris, and Skyrim, and 1000+ on several other titles. So, since I could quite happily never purchase another game again, and simply play those games until I die, let's use them as our baseline for what the cost should be, shall we? Assuming they cost $120 each (maybe a little low on Stellaris when you count all the DLC, and definitely high on Civ IV) I've played each of them for about 2,000 hours...that means I should expect to pay $0.06 per hour. Heck, let's be generous! Let's count Stellaris, with ALL of its DLC, at the price it currently is, without being on sale (except for one that's at 10% off. I've bought most of the DLC on various sales of at least 30% off, but let's try pricing all games as though they cost this much. That's about $335. Which still comes out to $0.16 an hour. Not bad, I'll take it!

Granted, since most games don't hold me for 2,000 hours, most games aren't going to get that much out of me. I sometimes buy new games at a $60 to $70 price point. So, the average game would have to hold me for 375 hours in order to make the same amount I pay for it now. Which means in my entire Steam library, there are a mere 12 games that would reach that threshold of getting equal or greater than the $60 I'm willing to occasionally pay these days.

I'm all for it! Most of my games would drop considerably in price, even at $0.16 an hour!

To be fair, for most games which you actually choose to continue playing, enjoyment per hour must be at or above a certain threshold otherwise you'd stop playing.

A test of your reflexes!

It can only produce models that we tune on datasets. Those datasets being copywritten content.

That's called learning. You learn by taking in information, then you use that information to produce something new.

The way I see it, if training on copyrighted content is forbidden, then that should apply universally.

Since all people mix together ideas they've learned from their own input to create new things, just like AI does, then all people-produced content should also be inherently uncopyrightable, unless produced by a person who has never been exposed to copyrighted content.

Oh, also all copyrighted content should lose its copyright. The only copyrighted content should be the original cave paintings by the first cavemen to develop art, since all art since then uses its influence.

And if this sounds ridiculous, then it's no less so than arguments that AI shouldn't be allowed to learn.

The President is the Commander in Chief - he could override all those decisions on who to promote, theoretically. At least that's how I understand it.

If they have a smart group that is actually planning this, that group could then vet a bunch of other people that their data suggests would be more amenable to their agenda and present a list of alternate promotions to the Republican president, which he could then order the military to make happen.

These days I imagine a database of ads can be built up. Every time a new ad appears, it could well be in the database within a day. Then within 5 or 10 frames, the ad could be detected and the database would know exactly how long to skip forward.

There is one other thing that could be done...but won't be.

Qui tacet consentire videtur ubi loqui debuit ac potuit. "He who is silent, when he ought to have spoken and was able to, is taken to agree."

If they simply decided to adopt a silence gives consent rule for the Senate's role of advice and consent for all appointments, they would no longer be able to obstruct by simply holding off on things. The senate could still deny consent by voting against a candidate and explicitly not confirming them, but doing nothing would automatically become consent and pass unopposed.

This is what Obama should have done with Merrick Garland, not to mention all those other federal judge appointments. Simply go 'okay, you're not voting on it, which means you're silent, which means you consent. All appointments approved!'

Edit: Although truthfully the idea that the Senate needs to confirm every military promotion is so insanely stupid that I can't understand how it's ever become the standard. The only reason Tuberville can do this is because these promotions are usually passed behind the scenes with unanimous consent - he can't actually block them...he can just make them be voted on. And yet, the volume of promotions means that simply voting on them would take up all of the Senate's time. The Senate really should only need to confirm the highest levels, not every single promotion in the entire military.

It's like Civ Gandhi with nuclear weapons. Aggression goes negative and wraps around to the max.

This is absolutely untrue. Trump doesn't deserve his trial delayed, but it is absolutely the case that sometimes people who are actually innocent need more time for their defense to be prepared, and this idea shouldn't be perpetuated in general as it can bias potential jurors.

Yep, good explanation; but to add to this...

The important factor here as far as what an individual uses is the tracked metrics. When a browser looks at a website, it identifies itself and its engine. Therefore actually using an engine other than Chromium is important because it goes into use stats across all websites the individual visits.

And like with all collective endeavors, while an individual contribution is insignificant, the whole is made up of those individual contributions. It also only takes a few percentage points of users for a business to in theory want to avoid excluding those users and thus keep them developing for multiple browsers.

Well if one of the forms is going to become the neutral, how about making the feminine form the default neutral instead, eh?

Or they could lower their corporate profit margin so neither is necessary. Don't make excuses for them and act like there's not a huge amount of money being hoovered up by profit.