UnderpantsWeevil @ UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

you just really want me to be racist

I don't think you're racist. I think you're clinging to this idea of the Transatlantic slave trade as some kind of necessary evil.

It wouldn’t have gotten as popular in the USA and Europe if all the early blues and jazz musicians were in Africa.

Cultural traditions have cross-pollunated without mass migrations on plenty of prior occasions. The Silk Road didn't need to move legions of displaced people in order to bring food, clothing, and music into the Mediterranean. Neither did Dutch traders need to flood into Japan in order to convey their art and technology.

The idea that you need a mass resettlement in order to mix musical traditions doesn't bare out in practice.

Cool, I never made that claim.

How do you think Africans came to be in the New World?

They probably needed to immigrate to a western country to invent it

Brits didn't need to immigrate to the US in order to learn about American rock music.

Scams all the way down.

there’s little chance that immigration wouldn’t have been involved somehow in your scenario(s)

Immigrants approaching the US from a position of common interest, a la French foreign investors or Chinese manufacturing interests or Saudi oil companies. You won't just have people crossing the Atlantic to (be made to) make music, you'd have them coming over to distribute it under home-grown record labels and on contractual terms that favored their domestic interests.

They might have invented interesting musical genres, but I really doubt any of them would have invented something that closely resembles 1950s-1960s era black music.

Maybe they'd have made something just as compelling, but different. Maybe they'd have made something better. It's very hard to say. But the claim that you have to whip people and chain them up to synthesize European folk melodies with African base rhythms seems at once absurd and sadistic.

If music history has proven anything, it is that great art flourishes when people have more leisure and more material resources. The Blues and Jazz traditions that eventually gave birth to modern Rock were the consequence of a rapidly expanding middle class. And that came out of unionization, urbanization, the modern entertainment industry, and the eight-hour work day.

Absent prior centuries of pre-industrial slavery and emiseration, we may have achieved this musical tradition sooner and developed it more fully, before the 21st century flattened and assembly-lined its production.

Texas won’t need to go blue for this to backfire

The GOP has a lot of techniques to drive down voter participation and soften up democratic opposition. Rewriting the districts just lets them define the terms of engagement.

This is as close as I get to optimism about state politics though.

Until we get a Wisconsin-style full-state flip and some replacements at the state level, or a Federal DOJ willing to drop the hammer on all the little parasites skittering around the state, there's very little the state-level Dem Party can do to resist this kind of malfeasance.

Abbott's been consolidating more and more power in Austin as the various municipal and county level seats have flipped to Democrat. With Trump at his back, the state is increasingly feeling like a single-party dictatorship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistricting_in_Texas#History

Rigging the districts is a long-standing Texas tradition, running straight back to the state's founding. Under the current map, the State Senate is so meticulously drawn that Texas would need a 60/40 Dem voting majority to have a prayer of flipping it.

Abbott is trying to squeeze yet another ounce of tomato juice from a crushed can.

I don't think that logically follows.

Music genres that came out of poor black sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta could have just as easily come from middle class black manufacturing workers in Congo or Nigeria, if the continent had been integrated with the industrial west back in the 19th century rather than raided and plundered for 400 years.

Hell, maybe it would have come from middle class American Natives in the Mississippi Delta. Or Chinese rice farmers in a country not ravaged by opium. Or Iranians not ground under by the Shah's dictatorship. Or Austro-Hungarians who weren't cannibalized to fight the Napoleonic Wars or the 30 Years War that caused the Caucasian Exodus across the Atlantic.

The Peace Dividend reaped across the Gulf Coast and the Mountain West that gave us modern western music could have been collected anywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_United_States#Use_of_instant-runoff_voting_at_local_levels

In NYC? This is heavy (D) turf. Blue municipality. Blue state. Overwhelmingly Blue House Delegation. Two Blue Senators. Most of the legislature from the area is DSA, ffs.

Trump might make noise, but the tip of the spear is going to have to come from the establishment Democratic Party, at least until the election is over. If anything, Trump wants Zohran to win the general, so that he can pull the institutional Dems in next to him when he announces his plan to take over the city, like he's done with LA.

It's so funny to see institutional democrats turning on Zohran and institutional republicans turning on Silwa.

Democracy means absolutely nothing to these people.

I have been told to Vote Blue No Matter Who and I am a loyal democrat. Zohran has my vote.

Unless you work in this sector and have detailed knowledge, youd be delusional to believe to be able to answer that question

The decision by Intel to forgo investment in next-generation chip fabrication for over a decade and coast on a spec that capped out at 7nm was something techies and investors had been ringing bells about for a long while. Similarly, the swell in demand for future high performance chips has been ongoing since the pre-COVID days. You can read the briefs on Intel and make an informed guess as to whether they will be able to outperform a company like TMSC, which is hedged in both politically and geographically, but riding the cutting edge of chip fabrication.

The great thing about making investment decisions is that you don't have to be exactly right every time. You can be marginally right, or even wrong, and still see your portfolio grow. The baseline you're competing against is the index returns. And - especially with Blue Chips in a heavily monopolized environment - the difference between the index and the individual business isn't particularly large most of the time.

Also i’d say Palantir isnt as much of a secret tip but rather capitalizing on wanting to live under Fascism.

That's not investing, that's wishcasting. If you think betting for or against Palantir is the difference between Liberty and Tyranny, you've got bigger problems with your portfolio than diversification.

DnD has often been portrayed as appealing to the kind of nerdy rules-lawyers that like to argue

Not a totally unfair critique, but also not unique to D&D.

I'd say the bigger issue tends to be around certain players feeling creative or desperate and trying to lean into the plot/setting with less respect for the rules. So, for instance, "If I can't move the big rock with a Strength check alone, can I get some ropes and set up a pulley system?"

<throws a bunch of math at the table>

But more broadly, I'd say the problem with D&D is that it's inevitably the same Medieval High Fantasy setting in one way or another. The format of the game is geared towards the classic Journey to Mordor, with challenges and story beats and pacing to match. It doesn't play well with modern settings, because modern and futuristic technology tends to trivialize magic (especially under the Vancian system). It doesn't play well with the Horror genre, because the game rewards "winning" rather than "survival". It doesn't play well with PC antagonists/betrayers as the class system puts you at a huge disadvantage when you're not working as a team, so heel-turns and dramatic reveals can leave players with a sour taste in their mouths in a way a game more explicitly geared towards Finding The Traitor does not.

But DnD is in the unique position of already having proven with 4e that it can nail down a rigorous set of principles and a style guide that leaves ambiguity behind, courting a whole section of RPG players who desire that, and then retreating from that position with a new, fuzzier, system document.

As I understood it, 4e was an attempt to bridge the gap between the strategic tabletop genre and the D&D style of play. It was a kind-of Return To Chainmail, with this whole vision of the game really going back to these very grandious geographical set-pieces and large army combats, with the heroes playing as champions of great armies rather than rag-tag murder hobos. Very much inspired by Warhammer and Warcraft.

5e was more of a back-to-basics dungeon crawling game, keeping the streamlining of 4e but reintroducing a lot of the customization and flavor of 3e/2e/1e.

But they were still ultimately board games in practice. Positioning your models to flank or ambush or avoid a fireball remained a pivotal part of the game. Hell, the very act of flinging a fireball or swinging a sword to resolve a conflict was a fundamental cornerstone of the game.

Compare that to a game of Vampire or Call of Cthulhu, where a lot of the story is about investigating a conspiracy and surviving when you are surrounded by people who want to kill (and very likely eat) you, who you cannot trivially club to death in response. That's the real bridge that you have to get people over. This idea that you're not going into the spooky old house to simply loot it and bludgeon to death everything you find inside. The idea that you're not playing in a world where Good Guys and Bad Guys are these equal-but-opposite forces clashing together along a territorial border. The idea that magic isn't natural and meddling with these kinds of arcane forces comes at a terrible price.

Nevermind how the character sheets are all topsy turvy and new players - especially players coming from D&D - simply do not know how to build/play a character that isn't geared to punch every problem directly in the face.

Why is this a “problem” for DnD specifically?

It's a problem with any game that abstracts away reality in favor of dice and event tables, but still expects the players to Theater of the Mind their way through the abstractions.

“Well, fuck them then”

Isn't what I said. But if that's what you've heard, you're illustrating my point.

Avoid individual stocks.

If you're a new retail investor, sure. Putting all your chips on the S&P is probably the safest bet. But these indexes are, themselves, often overweighted by the MAG7 anyway. So you're still heavily exposed to certain sectors and even individual firms. Tesla, for instance, is explicitly 3% of the NASDAQ composite. And because of the way it is interconnected with NVIDIA and Toyota and a few other large cap companies, a sudden downturn in Tesla value can drag down the rest of the index quickly.

Don’t try to time the market, in or out. DCA. Don’t touch the money.

That's fine from a very rudimentary savings strategy. But as you learn more about individual equities, you'll see opportunities. Palantir is a great example. It was trading at $10/share a year ago, despite Thiel having a direct line to national security spending budgets and a very friendly relationship with both Trump and Harris. Severely undervalued in the security sector in a way that a simple S&P or NASDAQ investment can't take advantage of. Meanwhile, domestic natural gas is severely hindered by the US trade relations with China - which is the fastest growing market for petrochemicals. Simply having a chunk of the DOW won't yield growth consistent with specific areas of the international market.

Watch P/E ratios. Watch EBITDA. Watch what the economy is doing, generally speaking. Fuck day-trading and options plays. But you can absolutely find opportunities in the market long term with a conservative buy-and-hold strategy, if you can pick out equities that are undervalued and positioned for future growth.

Solar is a great growth sector atm, as energy prices rise and O&G supply chains become overexposed to international conflicts. Bank stocks are enjoying a new wave of deregulation that promise high growth potential. Meanwhile, certain sectors in the MIC are stumbling - Boeing and Raytheon, for instance - because they can't actually produce units to meet global demand for killing machines. There's an arbitrage opportunity in smaller competitive startup firms - particularly in drone and electronic warfare.

If you're serious about investing, it's worth asking the question "Is Intel in a position to compete with TMSC?" rather than just dumping all your money into an index.

D&D isn’t just a game anymore, it’s an identity signifier

Which is part of the problem. Like talking to someone who only drinks Coca-Cola about trying a new bag of tea you brought over.

attacking their identity

If you've wedded yourself so deeply to the brand that you feel attacked whenever someone levels a critique, you're probably not mature enough to be at my table.

Chinese Century, baby.

They're doing everything IRL that Elon Musk is tweeting about in between Ketamine binges.

You should have really looked into it while the 30% fed discount existed. I

The real return on renewables is in the industrial facilities. Your house isn't going to have the location or the hardware to optimize sunlight collection like a multi million dollar facility.

Economies of scale can get the price of generating solar down into the low single digits. And then there's industrial batteries/transmission.

That's what is boosting utility. Not home units.

Same thing happened in Texas. ERCOT's sky high wholesale electricity rate cap was an enormous windfall for gas power, but also for Wind and Solar which just got to draft behind.

And since there's not variable cost to Solar/Wind and you can just keep rolling your profits into new capital, we get more and more infrastructure rolled out year after year.

If you lead with “Thing you like is actually bad”

Why would you assume the critiques are of things they like? 5e has plenty of widely recognized flaws.

To get through to people, find common ground and build off that.

Often, simply catering to people's priors means never leaving their comfort zone.