jj4211
@jj4211@lemmy.world
- Comment on What character is the king of plot armor? 6 days ago:
Daniel Jackson
He may die a fair bit, but he won’t stay dead for long.
- Comment on Ermm Actchually 1 week ago:
But what about monster HDMI cables?
- Comment on Lesbian sheep 1 week ago:
I suppose he should have said “gay ewes would be hobbled” and lesbian sheep *would be incapable of coupling up".
His quote shows that people say there’s no way of knowing one way or another, like you say, but Doctorow changed the language to be a bit more suggestive of certainty that the phenomenon exists.
- Comment on Immaculate 2 weeks ago:
my pp gets hard
The way a lot of them are, they probably wish it still did that.
- Comment on Unstoppable 2 weeks ago:
Yep, evolution always ends in crabs.
If you are already there, why bother?
- Comment on The Future is Now! 5 weeks ago:
To be fair, this may be about as well as a run would go for me if I tried.
- Comment on AAA Dominance Is Eroding: 56% of PC Gaming Revenue Now Goes to Games Outside the Top 20 5 weeks ago:
True, but it’s at least a rough indicator, and having intact concrete pricing from back then was a bit challenging, and sears catalog came to me as a very well preserved source of vaguely appropriate pricing.
- Comment on AAA Dominance Is Eroding: 56% of PC Gaming Revenue Now Goes to Games Outside the Top 20 5 weeks ago:
To provide a relatively decent source: …musetechnical.com/…/1997-Sears-Christmas-Book
Around page 286. So 1997 christmas season, Starfox and Goldeneye going for $80… FFVII for $60…
N64 had the challenge that every single game was a circuitboard, so that inflated costs. Nowadays the price is for just the right to download a copy.
- Comment on AAA Dominance Is Eroding: 56% of PC Gaming Revenue Now Goes to Games Outside the Top 20 5 weeks ago:
Yeah, AAA productions:
- Must be multiplayer, ostensibly because people ‘demand’ it, but a narrative easy to believe when you know players are stuck with your servers and you can effectively shut down the game when it no longer makes money for you.
- Relatively fewer games to be made, no chances may be taken. Conventional wisdom tells them that people got over turn-based in the 90s, so even the FFVII remake refused to do real turn-based, while Clair Obscur showed that it was still absolutely welcome gameplay.
- Comment on Confirms to Marxist theories regarding the proletariat. 1 month ago:
Makes sense, but what about your shoes?
- Comment on insider trading as a service 1 month ago:
Problem is that is what the insider traders are counting on. They know it is going to happen, it’s planned to happen and the odds reflect that. So a few million folks toss in a couple of bucks and the insiders cash in.
Outsiders can’t be 100% sure that it’s a planned event so they don’t take the terrible odds and the insiders don’t have to split things.
- Comment on Some things were better in the good old days 1 month ago:
Yep, when I was a kid I remember people grousing about how stuff used to last forever and now it doesn’t. 20 years later, I got to hear people talk about how stuff made when I was a kid used to last forever but now it doesn’t. Now I get to hear how stuff made 20 years ago used to last forever but now it doesn’t.
Every time something breaks, someone points to something 20 years old that didn’t break and forget all the stuff that did break.
- Comment on Some things were better in the good old days 1 month ago:
Of course, the practice of repair was different when the appliance costed relatively a lot more.
E.g. a TV was more likely to be repaired, but also costed about 10x as much relatively speaking.
So if it would have cost you 25% of the price of a TV to get it repaired, you would have got it repaired. If it’s just as easy to repair now, then the repair would still be over twice the price of just buying new.
- Comment on it's a matter of motivation 1 month ago:
It said right in your quote that people do work that “no one volunteers to do”. If they aren’t volunteering, then something is providing the impetus.
Broadly the writing avoids the more difficult nuance of how the community gets unplesant work to be “shared” when no one volunteers. This suggests enforcement one way or another.
At small scale of a commune, some pretty human interactions can probably serve to drive this in a pretty reasonable way, by instilling sense of duty and comradery and potentially shame inherent to everyone knowing everyone else in a nuanced way. As you scale up, when inevitably people start losing track of each other, those soft mechanisms deteriorate, and the systems start to develop cracks for exploitation. Capitalism breaks in some ways, other systems break down in others. Fundamentally human behavior when interaction becomes diluted at scale tends to suck.
- Comment on it's a matter of motivation 1 month ago:
allocating a few days a month to all fit members of a community to do work which no one volunteers to do. Ok, this basically sums up the answer: the community forces labor one way or another. What is the enforcement, carrot vs. stick for making people do their fair share. How do you reward people for doing unwanted work? How do you deal with someone refusing to do it, or “maliciously complying” and doing it terribly to make the job easier and/or get out of doing it again in the future?
So the agreement is that there is work that needs some external impetus to happen, because not every job has enough people intrinsically interested or civic minded to make it happen. The question becomes which solutions manage to be more fair than others? For unskilled and unwanted jobs, the current answer has a lower class overworked because they are the most desperate, and that’s bad. A forced labor system might manage to distribute the burden more fairly, though thanks to people being crap it’s likely for a system set up to do that to be abused to overwork some demonized demographic, ending in a similar outcome a different way.
Whatever the case is, it’s not as rosy as “people freely work on wikipedia and programming, therefore people will freely work on anything society may want or need”
- Comment on it's a matter of motivation 1 month ago:
This is unfortunately a bit naive, that for every problem no one wants to do there’s a solution that people both want and can create.
If you want to dismiss excessive waste as a failing of society, we can speak of work like line men who repair power infrastructure. It’s not super engaging work.
- Comment on it's a matter of motivation 1 month ago:
Problem being the jobs that don’t inspire passion, curiosity, and purpose, but we still need them to get done.
- Comment on it's a matter of motivation 1 month ago:
Alternative motivation may be viable and in fact drive better results when feasible. You find the right person with the right passion who wants to do the job.
Problem is not every sort of job can pull that off. You aren’t going to find enough sewage treatment enthusiasts to handle that demand. You aren’t going to have enough line men to keep the grid going reliably and safely.
- Comment on it's a matter of motivation 1 month ago:
Now let’s discuss all the people eager to volunteer to work sewage treatment plants.
The proportion of people with more innate motivation versus need for a job to be done varies wildly between jobs.
But when someone approaches work with innate motivation, amazingly better stuff happens compared to people in it just for the paycheck.
- Comment on holy moley 1 month ago:
I think you are on to something, but I’d say it actually largely deflates the ‘people didn’t vote and if they had, maybe the outcome would have been different’ narrative.
“Did not vote” rules in non-swing states. I wager that, for example, most people didn’t vote in california not because they see their candidate as a lost cause, but because they know “their” candidate has carried the state for sure.
So in a shift to proportional electoral vote or popular vote, you’d probably get a lot more voters engaged in California, Hawaii, NY, and pick up democrat votes but you’d also get more red voters from Alaska, Texas, Utah, Kansan, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabamba, Tennesse… etc… I’m not sure which group manages to bring out more non-voters in that scenario…
- Comment on Strange are afoot at the Walter Reed 1 month ago:
“I’ve delayed the deadline to let the very promising peace talks that are definitely real and not at all made up proceed”
- Comment on Iran attacks Oracle as retribution for sacked employees 1 month ago:
You know it’s bad when the last message is essentially “we are just going to stop talking publicly about it”
- Comment on How do you feel about a 25 year old dating a 46 year old? 1 month ago:
Dating fine, but if going for a long term commitment, it may be rough to be in your 60s with a partner in their 80s. They have to understand if they are theoretically on that path and that their relationship will transform into elder care at some point. Also before that the older one will stop keeping up sexually.
If both see it as a short term fling, probably ok. The 46 year can probably keep up with a 25 year old in the ways that matter, and may have enough money for some interesting experiences to share.
- Comment on It works better if you put it in your mouth first. 1 month ago:
RTGs aren’t as limited by technological investment as they are constrained by fundamental physics.
- Comment on It works better if you put it in your mouth first. 1 month ago:
They can, but when you have any alternative, Agrivoltaics aren’t very appealing.
You frequently end up deliberately setting up solar panels in suboptimal ways to let the plants get the light. So you end up having fewer panels and those panels not able to be used to their full potential at a given site.
So I absolutely vote for parking lots and rooftops to be the first order of business. Yes, Agrivoltaics as it comes to it if the alternative is losing cropland, but it seems like we have a long way to go before we have to make such compromises.
- Comment on meow 1 month ago:
Giving us the ow for now, later it’s going to give us the d.
- Comment on It's sad that people completely misunderstand what Star Trek is about. 1 month ago:
Which is one of the reasons why Discovery and Picard at least are problematic (I haven’t seen Academy).
As you say, a lot of the old stories aren’t really that good. What happens when they had a bad story, or maybe less ‘bad’ and just didn’t engage with you? New one next week.
With Discovery and Picard? Well the whole season is the story, so if it doesn’t engage with you, you are pretty much out for the season.
Personally, I never felt there was really enough narrative “meat” in their stories to warrant a season long arc, and so it felt a bit stretched for time for the perceived “a story needs to fill a binge” market.
Strange New Worlds primary win was returning to episodic, to give a story a chance to shine or fail in a digestable amount of time and move on. Was at its weakest when Season 3 kind of devolved to a weird arc.
- Comment on It's sad that people completely misunderstand what Star Trek is about. 1 month ago:
Pretty much. And maybe in the off-screen bragging about it, at least say first main character or first crew member (someone argued about Dax, but I’d say that character was gendered, just fluid over the long term), not ‘first character ever’, since you had a number of instances, and pretty much dead-on a whole species dedicated to exploring gendered versus non-binary in TNG. That’s one habit of Discovery was leaving people wondering if they even watched the shows that preceeded them…
There should have been no good reason for Adira to only tell Gray despite their clear desire to be recognized as non-binary.
Or, alternatively, they could have established that 32nd century Earth cut off from the federation had backslid to MAGA-sensibilities to explain why far future human feels the need to tiptoe around their identity until they come to terms with the culture of the federation that might have been lost to Earth.
- Comment on It's sad that people completely misunderstand what Star Trek is about. 1 month ago:
I quoted the show. Season 3, episode 8. After several episodes of going by “she” did Adira actually say anything, after spending their entire life only telling Gray.
Why else would they withhold this their whole life except for anxiety. Is not like they had an awakening, they said they never felt that way and had already confided in the person they were closest to.
They made it very clear that asserting a non binary identity was just uncomfortable enough in society in the 32nd century that Adira felt a need to keep it to themselves.
- Comment on It's sad that people completely misunderstand what Star Trek is about. 1 month ago:
Ugh, fine.
“Adira, who joined us from Earth, may be able to guide sto Federation headquarters one she regains her own memoris”
“Is there any way the symbiont was joined with Adira against her will?”
Basically, Adira spends episodes 3 through 8 rolling with feminine pronouns, keeping their non-binary nature a secret.
Adira doesn’t come out until Episode 8: ADIRA: Um, “they.” Not… not “she.” I’ve never felt like a “she” or or a “her,” so… I would prefer “they” or “them” from now on.
STAMETS: Okay.
ADIRA: Um, and I’ve never told anyone but Gray.
Adira kept their non-binary identity secret and took them 5 episodes to work up the nerve to declare to the first person other than Gray. I think the traditional trek move would have been from episode 3, right out the gate, first reference to this new character would use non-gendered pronouns because, well, why would they feel they need to keep it a secret?