Folstar
@Folstar@lemmus.org
- Comment on Finally an explanation 2 weeks ago:
It turns out there are more than zero options between “do nothing” and “become what you hate”. Many in fact.
- Comment on Finally an explanation 2 weeks ago:
Also, just a plain old idiot. Imagine having the magical power to kill anyone undetected and you’re like “hooray, I can go after local crooks!”. Had Light ever seen a newspaper? Did he know the world outside his city existed? If you aren’t starting with and primarily focusing on people globally known are you even trying?
- Comment on Finally an explanation 2 weeks ago:
Exactly. A person can want every nazi dead and hope that nobody has to die while being completely logically and morally covered.
- Comment on Finally an explanation 2 weeks ago:
“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” -Gandhi
- Comment on 🤔 Interesting 2 weeks ago:
But reading and learning from a library, then writing and selling your own book based on that is NOT stealing. It’s the wrong argument.
A powerful argument if one cannot tell the difference between a person and a product.
- Comment on Why is leadership valued so much over expertise? 3 weeks ago:
It’s a lot easier, more reliable to promote your son to VP than Senior [blank] Engineer. Also, for some weird reason we could never have predicted if we wanted to create a more efficient and equitable system, the people who decide salary decided they should have the biggest salary by a lot.
- Comment on What do you do if you lose an argument, but it turns out that you were actually right? 3 weeks ago:
Avoid arguments as 9/10 they mean nothing.
If you find yourself in an argument, or what you think is an argument, caring about winning/losing is the wrong mindset. This isn’t Debate Camp and there isn’t a trophy waiting for you. Listening, testing your knowledge and convictions, and maintaining your integrity are all much, much more important than “winning”.
If you “lose” an argument, especially if you “lost” to style, tactics, rhetorical devices, etc… then see Rule 1 above.
- Comment on Fafo 3 weeks ago:
Sadly, no. It probably will actually cost around $1B to drive screwworms back to the Darien Gap again and that’s assuming the people in charge are planning that (they’re probably not- why help poor countries?!) and capable of following a plan that already worked once (they’re not). This number will balloon out of control and their nonsense plan to hold the line at Texas will be a disaster IF it ever even comes online as it’s planned for late 2027. A preview of the planning genius.
- Comment on Fafo 3 weeks ago:
That success is part of what caused the problem. Complacency set in, and capacity eroded.
This part is sort of glossed over. There was a report in 2018 that the Panama facility was in dire need of updates. We were talking about a one time $50M investment and an extra $10-15M a year to hold screwworms at the Darien Gap as they had been for decades. Trump did nothing. It’s easy to blame COVID, but there is a very, very avoidable problem and yes, the blame lies squarely with Trump.
- Comment on most perverted men are actually very vanilla and run away when faced with a perverted woman 3 weeks ago:
I would agree that kink is a spectrum, or axis. Specifically, it’s the Z-axis to the masculine/feminine attraction (“gay-straight” but generalized) X-axis and sexual intensity (aka, horniness level) Y-axis. That’s right, we’re going 3D.
- Comment on The 1996 experience 3 weeks ago:
Me in 2026 to myself: Be careful about burn in.
Also me in 2026 back to myself: Engineers solved that with hardware and software a long time ago. Burn in is incredibly rare now.
Me again: Remember how mad dad got about the Cartoon Network logo in the corner?
Me, frustrated: Dude, we haven’t watched network TV in 20 years.
My final stand: Dad was really mad, bro.
- Comment on WOMEN. 4 weeks ago:
In Kasparov’s eventual defense, he did say this after losing to Polgar:
“I was wrong about women playing chess. I gave an opinion a long time ago that I no longer believe.”
and later in his book wrote:
‘I won’t hide from the fact that I did make regrettably sexist remarks about women in chess around this time. In that 1989 Playboy interview I said men were better at chess because “women are weaker fighters” and that “probably the answer is in the genes”. The possibility of gender brain differences aside, I find it almost hard to believe I said this considering that my mother is the toughest fighter I know.’
- Comment on WOMEN. 4 weeks ago:
Wait until you learn about “generations”.
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
It really is the roaring 20s all over again! Hell yes! Even have Republicans in charge of everything again! Party like it’s 1928!!! /s
- Comment on I still can't get over Skyrim. Are there any games that can replace it? 4 weeks ago:
You never know when you might need them.
Have you considered going meta and hoarding games you might play about hoarding consumables in perpetuity?
- Comment on I still can't get over Skyrim. Are there any games that can replace it? 4 weeks ago:
Sorry, nothing can match the glory of Post Mudcrabs, especially when paired with samuel L jackson mudcrabs in SKYRIM.
- Comment on I still can't get over Skyrim. Are there any games that can replace it? 4 weeks ago:
Telling people what in particular you like about Skyrim is going to get you much better feedback as there are many, many games that are similar in some ways but not others.
- Comment on Rather than go cold turkey you can quit smoking by restricting the times that you can have a cigarette 5 weeks ago:
People focus entirely too much on method instead of motive. There’s lots of methods to quit that have worked for some and failed for legions more.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
I look forward to playing 5 years after release once ANET has changed their mind about core design choices a few times, fluctuated between unique classes and homogenization, and exhaust their thesaurus to be different than other MMOs. I know that sounds sarcastic, but I really do like GW2. I actually have it open on the other monitor right now- I’m in Mistlock smelting mithril ingots. I’m not sure why ANET has such a difficult time sticking to design choices, but eventually it seems to work out.
- Comment on DOGE cut 20% of APHIS the agency that protects U.S. agriculture and now the screwworm parasite that wipes out livestock has returned to the U.S 5 weeks ago:
Also incorrect. USDA has a great deal of discretionary funding. The new $750M facility being build in Texas (several thousand km from the Darian Gap = great plan!) was approved internally at USDA. There was nothing stopping the funding in '21 other than not recognizing how dire the problem could become in just a few years.
- Comment on DOGE cut 20% of APHIS the agency that protects U.S. agriculture and now the screwworm parasite that wipes out livestock has returned to the U.S 5 weeks ago:
Sadly, no. That response in 2018-2021 would have been urgent, appropriate. By waiting until 2023 when reports were coming out in '21 that the Darian Gap was failing and '22 that it had failed, Biden did in fact drop the ball. The administration chose to try to work with/through Central American governments who, frankly, hadn’t dealt with screwworms in over a generation and were poorly equipped or completely clueless. Also, it’s worth noting, this facility was relatively inexpensive to operate at less than $20M/year. We had a beautiful system in place but Republican ignorance and Democrat pussyfooting has put us in a terrible position. The sunbelt population boom of the last 50 years was not just about AC.
- Comment on DOGE cut 20% of APHIS the agency that protects U.S. agriculture and now the screwworm parasite that wipes out livestock has returned to the U.S 5 weeks ago:
At no point did the eradication program end. In 23-24 Biden’s USDA quadrupled funding to the Panama facility producing sterile flies. The facility had been underfunded for years (/wave Trump1) and at some point during Covid lost contain of the Darian Gap, officially reaching “we fucked up” thresholds in 2022.
- Comment on Be The Sunshine ☀️ 5 weeks ago:
Putting a sign for the car infront of you to read on the back of your vehicle is incredibly on brand for Pavement Princesses.
- Comment on Flipper!! 5 weeks ago:
Wildly better list. One of the failings of liberal/left minded people in recent decades has been to become list makers. “We will stand up for the rights of women [pause for applause], blacks [pause for applause], the elderly [pause for applause], etc…” sounds real nice until someone listening says “what about me?” It’s a losing political strategy in a world where the words “All Americans” and “everyone” exist. At the absolute least, tag those words on the end.
To be clear since this keeps coming up from people who like to put words in other people’s mouths then tell them those words are wrong, I am not saying laws can’t protect/benefit marginalized groups. This is about communication.
- Comment on He's an arborist 5 weeks ago:
Often times two.
- Comment on Music just isn't good anymore 5 weeks ago:
Sauce: www.jstor.org/stable/48812575
This study builds on decades of work that makes less and less sense every minute of the digital age. Each year we’re further from a semi-homogenous group listening to Casey Kasem’s Top 40 (or whatever). Most people have a fairly clear, shared concept of 60s/70s/80s/90s music, but ask ten people about the 10s/20s and you’ll probably get eleven different answers.
In addition to changing mass listening habits, the digital age untethers us from time and wildly diversifies “new” music. You can hop on Youtube/Spotify/etc and listen to the Glenn Miller Orchesta as easily as the newest Drake singles, which with radio/MTV/etc was historically not the case. Those platforms also have allowed a world of music diversity and access that completely changes the paradigm. For example, some of the best “80s Music” was released in the past few years.
- Comment on Conservative values 5 weeks ago:
I like that if you start at “Sanctity of marriage”, something the radical right clearly does not actually value, and work counterclockwise the terms get increasingly vague and meaningless until they completely phone it in with “Etc”. What values.
“If robosexual marriage becomes legal, imagine the horrible things that will happen to our children, then imagine we said those things, since we couldn’t think of any. As a mother, those things worry me.” -Futurama
- Comment on The Matrix 1 month ago:
Yeah, humans would never destroy natural resources in favor of some tech fix or just kinda assume that the planet would fix itself… /s
My headcannon on the human battery thing is that the machines have core programming to make reasonable efforts to preserve human life. Designing power reactors (look how thick the cores are on the towers) with humans slapped to the side technically aligns with the core programming while allowing them to stick it to us apes. It’s also why the attack on Zion was one tentacle abductor machine for each human instead of dumping super plague down the hole and calling it a day.
- Comment on Unknown Worlds Earns $250M Performance Bonus After Stellar Subnautica 2 Launch 1 month ago:
Good summary. What’s wild to me is reading through this and pondering the frequency of these events. “Someone made an arrogant/stupid business decision” multiple times a day every day. “Someone tried to weasel out and was told that was stupid” also every day. “Went ahead with the plan anyway” - very frequent. “Tried to burn it all down” - all too often. Then we get to the turn where the wronged actually got a fair day in court- far, far less often. Then the villain of our story with $250M on the line somehow didn’t lawyer up enough to get the best justice money can buy - almost seems like fiction at this point and beyond.
- Comment on The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily 1 month ago:
Pretending businesses exist in a vacuum is a very weird take. The government spends a considerable amount of time and cost in maintaining business interests. Maintaining the legal framework for business to operate so we’re not Mad Maxxing for more petrol is, on it’s own, justification. Then there’s the intellectual property side of things. Law enforcement. Military action. Foreign relations. The SEC and similar agencies that exist solely to facilitate business.