Ⓐ+$

There really is nowhere online to just chill that doesn’t demand you spend money huh

that's because it's expensive to run that kinda thing

I think folks don’t fully appreciate how low interest rates let venture capital prop up a lot of ideas and sites without any idea of sustainability but they had to try to make themselves profitable eventually. Ad revenue drying up just made things worse.

It would have been more accurate to reality if the girl wasn’t white.

The girl was called Marta Cabrera and played by a Cuban-Spanish actress, so I don’t think she was as white as you remember.

People just see non-black POC and go “WHITE!” Don’t they

Wasn’t there a whole running Thing where all the rich people thought she was from a different country in Latin America. How do you watch that and think the character is white

I don’t think they watched the movie if they think Marta is White.

yes, this family of people who are all blood related because they are a family of people descended from the father who just died, they definitely are aligned with each other because of class interest. there’s just no other reason for a family of people who are all related to each other to view others as outsiders not entitled to the inheritance they believed they would get by virtue of the fact they were family.

Also, the ‘remember in fictional thing? Yeah that proves my worldview’ is very, very common. Its extra dumb here.

They had unboxing videos up on their youtube channel and then took them down and said that was the reason they did so, so signs point to yes, but we don't have an official statement from WotC saying they sent the Pinkertons

the signs are one guy saying so, and his story was weird, “they sent these big intimidating dudes to force me to give up the product, which I did, but then I talked to them and they were very nice and it was all just a misunderstanding” like I am not saying it is impossible but I don’t think the odds are above 50%

The guy really did have unboxing videos on his youtube channel that showed the cards, and those videos really did get taken down. If he faked all the cards he showed on screen I guess we'll know in two weeks when it officially gets released?

I never said he didn’t have the cards I said I find the part where they hire the Pinkertons and said Pinkertons stole it from him unlikely. 

WotC has now confirmed the involvement of the Pinkertons: https://www.polygon.com/23695923/mtg-aftermath-pinkerton-raid-leaked-cards >Wizards confirmed to Polygon the Pinkertons were involved in the incident.

so apparently it's not uncommon to hire PIs to deal with this sort of thing, which makes sense

I guess the real question is why would you hire the Pinkertons, who have a reputation for Just This Sort Of Thing?

Honestly, maybe they hired the pinkertons BECAUSE they have that reputation.

If you want the kind of services that the Pinkertons are well known for, who would you go for?

except Wizards didn't want the services Pinkertons are known for, given that they were apparently nice to the guy, agreed his shit wasn't stolen, and want to repay him? they appear not to be in the market for This Kind Of Thing

Security and PIs aren’t actually a big field cus the current environment favors absorbing companies. I work for Allied Universal. I have never actually applied. I worked for a company, which got bought out by Allied. Then left, and joined another one. They also got bought by Allied.

So, my point is if you need PIs/Security you’re going to a small group of companies, of which the Pinkertons are one. Guessing that they either a. Had a local presence in the jurisdiction and/or b. Had a preexisting contract with WotC or the like, and so it just made sense.

oh that won't help

that's what test flights are for

if your test rockets don't ever explode you're not testing anything

They found out the launch works but the separation was an issue. Good data.

Paleocons, preppers, libertarian rugged-individualists and others in their general orbit disliking electric cars is one of the most salient illustrations of "politics is 90% aesthetics" to me. Because here's the thing: gasoline goes bad. It only takes a couple months for it to degrade into non-usability. And extracting new gas out of the ground is hard—it requires massive, organized, often international industry. It requires society. You can't really dig it out of the ground yourself, as a rugged-individualist. And you can't stockpile it either, because as I said, it goes bad. Gasoline makes no sense as a fuel from an ultra-localist rugged-individualist prepper blah blah perspective. You basically have to rely on others to continually produce and provide it for you, from far away, in order for your machinery to run.

Electricity on the other hand? Anyone can generate electricity, it's fantastically simple to do. You can do it with a water wheel, you can do it by burning coal, basically if you have a way to make a thing spin you can generate electricity. And, hell, if you do happen to have some gasoline you can run a generator with it! Electrically powered devices in general are going to be far more portable, far more versatile, and far easier to actually run in the apocalypse or on your homestead when the fed collapses or whatever than gasoline powered ones.

But, well. Gas is old-school, it's manly, it smells like shit, and most importantly—the damn liberals hate it. Electricity is new-fangled, effeminate. Electric cars are for hippies and silicon valley weirdoes.

Pure aesthetics.

Now obviously electric cars as they exist right now have a lot of disadvantages, being relatively new technology and all. But you'd think it would be the preppers and the homesteaders and whatnot who would be most enthusiastic about seeing the technology develop. I mean, you would think that if you were ridiculously naive. But of course they aren't, that's not how the world works.

no comment on most of this because it is about arguing with people I've never seen and cannot assess if these are accurate depictions of their arguments

but

tell me you've never mowed lawns without telling me you've never mowed lawns

I’ve never mowed lawns. Elaborate?

anyone who owns or regularly uses a lawnmower has put it away for the last time in the fall, then gone through 6-8 months depending on local climate before the grass got tall enough to have to mow again, pulled the mower out of the shed, and started it up with 6-8 month old gas.

people who have snowblowers have gone longer, because you don't need a snowblower every year; when you start up a snowblower you didn't use last year it doesn't start right up and it's not happy about it but you will (with difficulty) be able to clear a path to get the car out to go to the gas station.

again I can't speak to the larger argument and it is true that gas will go bad after some time, but recently this idea has started spreading that gas ages like milk and it's really just not true

This also ignores the other issues of electric vehicles, the biggest one being batteries are far less efficient as a store of energy than gas. A battery will weight 1.5 times as much as its equivalent in gas and is far more sensitive to temperature and the like. Its harder to manufacture and thus to replace or fix. The weight also means reduced hauling or towing capacity. This is why electric big rigs are a pipe dream.

Preppers, actual smart ones, are more likely using diesel because, relatively, biodiesel is easy to make. In a doomsday scenario you’d be far better off with biodiesel, alcohol, ethanol, or any number of liquid fuels as they are infinitely more viable than electricity, because mechanical systems are easier to obtain and maintain in such a scenario.

From a practical standpoint, EVs are silly as they require new, dedicated infrastructure. That we skipped over Hybrids so fast tells me its just a dumb meme, supported only by government subsidy and still failing.

Maybe politics is 90% aesthetics, but I doubt it. Form follows function; if you think something is aesthetic, you’re probably missing or ignoring the actual root causes.

Its similar to any discussion of things like slavery or imperialism, where it is taken as granted these are why places are currently rich and developed. In begging that question, they never consider a. Maybe places were able to do those things because they were already rich and developed and b. Did those things actually make them richer and more developed, or actually hold them back.

always funny to see European leftists instantly become capitalist at the mere thought of leaving a decent tip after an expensive meal in America.

Anyway, here's your reminder that if you can't afford the tip, you can't afford the food.

Americans are deranged and op is correct

one person leaving a 140 dollar tip is crazy, that is an hourly wage higher than you get at your job

one person eating $700 of food is also fucking crazy and not happening

ten people eating $70 or twenty people eating $35 is much more likely. a table of 10 or 20 people leaving a tip of 7-14 dollars each is not at all unreasonable. 

Tipping and the Roma are the areas that best reveal that European smugness is just cope and they’re honestly worse than any American.

I get why folks make the arguments using points about it not making sense or the hospital being gross or the Fireflies being utterly incompetent, but, like… folks say Druckman said it would work, so we can say thats just extra dumb but ok…

So what?

Murdering a girl still wouldn’t be justified, and Joel would be for stopping them.

I mean on a certain level it’s supposed to be the trolley problem, kill one person to save everyone. if you’re a utilitarian it’s supposed to be easy, and most people think they are utilitarians when they aren’t personally affected

except every single thing the Fireflies did was the most hostile and impatient way they could have possibly done it, if they were actively trying to get Joel to kill them it would have been hard to do a better job. the math on the trolley problem changes when the five people on the track just betrayed you and are actively trying to kill you.

incidentally this kind of scenario and how people talk about it is an illustration of why utilitarianism fails. the utilitarian argument is “compare the math of one person dying versus every future person who gets infected dying, and the math is obvious.” the rejoinder is “that’s not actually what is going to happen, that’s not what the math is, you’re taking the word of people who cannot be trusted to tell the truth and cannot be trusted to have accurate assessments”

"Utilitarianism" is not the same as "Trust whoever shows up at your doorstep to be honest about the tradeoffs", anymore than "Deontology" means "Don't murder, but if someone tells you to stab an innocent with a knife, so long as they claim it a magic nonlethal knife".

Every ethical system breaks down if you're stupid about it. Good ethics means balancing when you should guard against your own stupidity versus over-binding yourself to inflexible rules.

the problem with utilitarianism is that it only works with absolutely perfect information and you never ever ever ever have perfect information; every single situation I have ever seen someone try to apply utilitarianism to is a situation where they do not have perfect information and there is a one hundred percent chance that everyone is lying to make their argument look more compelling

while they’re not as severe as this, the dichotomy of “think about one life versus a million” vs “that’s not what this is, the people who think this is about that choice are wrong” is a simple encapsulation of the whole thing

Sure, but turning that around: "Your Deonotoloigical Rules (or Virtues, etc.) only work when they were designed to cover every situation perfectly, what happens when you face a situation where breaking the rules actually does get a better outcome?"

And there is a solid counterargument to that, which is "The Times where it's actually better to break the rules are much less common than the times where it only looks like it's a good idea to do that, so it's better just to stick with the rules. And that only gets worse as you get in the habit of breaking rules, because it easier to talk yourself into doing bad things."

But, I mean, outside of math problems almost all of the decisions I've had to make have been via imperfect information, and I still have to make decisions. Ethics isn't that different, really, in terms of having to somehow make decisions. It's important, very important, to keep track of how you are making decisions when using Utilitarianism, and I agree that a lot of the time you should have bright red lines you don't cross because past them is dangerous places where evil looks better than good. It's why I lean towards Rule Utilitarianism. But you do have to make decisions on incomplete data anyways.

And, well, what happens if you have a virtue like "Be a Man (Hugging your children is for wimps)" or a rule like "Obey your Elders (You will marry who they say and deal with it)" that straightforwardly leads you off an ethical cliff? A lot of history has people who talked themselves into bad decisions. It also has a lot of points where people didn't listen to that nagging voice saying they were doing a bad thing, because following a code became more important than actual good outcomes.

Define “better outcome?”

Cus I’m willing to accept the asteroid hitting rather than murder a child.

I suppose I'm a preference utilitarian, and "everyone on earth dying" seems worse than "one person dying"

Right, my point is more that saying deontology doesn’t work cus it leads to a ‘worse outcome’ sorta misses why deontologists are deontological.

Basically we value different things is all.

I get why folks make the arguments using points about it not making sense or the hospital being gross or the Fireflies being utterly incompetent, but, like… folks say Druckman said it would work, so we can say thats just extra dumb but ok…

So what?

Murdering a girl still wouldn’t be justified, and Joel would be for stopping them.

I mean on a certain level it’s supposed to be the trolley problem, kill one person to save everyone. if you’re a utilitarian it’s supposed to be easy, and most people think they are utilitarians when they aren’t personally affected

except every single thing the Fireflies did was the most hostile and impatient way they could have possibly done it, if they were actively trying to get Joel to kill them it would have been hard to do a better job. the math on the trolley problem changes when the five people on the track just betrayed you and are actively trying to kill you.

incidentally this kind of scenario and how people talk about it is an illustration of why utilitarianism fails. the utilitarian argument is “compare the math of one person dying versus every future person who gets infected dying, and the math is obvious.” the rejoinder is “that’s not actually what is going to happen, that’s not what the math is, you’re taking the word of people who cannot be trusted to tell the truth and cannot be trusted to have accurate assessments”

"Utilitarianism" is not the same as "Trust whoever shows up at your doorstep to be honest about the tradeoffs", anymore than "Deontology" means "Don't murder, but if someone tells you to stab an innocent with a knife, so long as they claim it a magic nonlethal knife".

Every ethical system breaks down if you're stupid about it. Good ethics means balancing when you should guard against your own stupidity versus over-binding yourself to inflexible rules.

the problem with utilitarianism is that it only works with absolutely perfect information and you never ever ever ever have perfect information; every single situation I have ever seen someone try to apply utilitarianism to is a situation where they do not have perfect information and there is a one hundred percent chance that everyone is lying to make their argument look more compelling

while they’re not as severe as this, the dichotomy of “think about one life versus a million” vs “that’s not what this is, the people who think this is about that choice are wrong” is a simple encapsulation of the whole thing

Sure, but turning that around: "Your Deonotoloigical Rules (or Virtues, etc.) only work when they were designed to cover every situation perfectly, what happens when you face a situation where breaking the rules actually does get a better outcome?"

And there is a solid counterargument to that, which is "The Times where it's actually better to break the rules are much less common than the times where it only looks like it's a good idea to do that, so it's better just to stick with the rules. And that only gets worse as you get in the habit of breaking rules, because it easier to talk yourself into doing bad things."

But, I mean, outside of math problems almost all of the decisions I've had to make have been via imperfect information, and I still have to make decisions. Ethics isn't that different, really, in terms of having to somehow make decisions. It's important, very important, to keep track of how you are making decisions when using Utilitarianism, and I agree that a lot of the time you should have bright red lines you don't cross because past them is dangerous places where evil looks better than good. It's why I lean towards Rule Utilitarianism. But you do have to make decisions on incomplete data anyways.

And, well, what happens if you have a virtue like "Be a Man (Hugging your children is for wimps)" or a rule like "Obey your Elders (You will marry who they say and deal with it)" that straightforwardly leads you off an ethical cliff? A lot of history has people who talked themselves into bad decisions. It also has a lot of points where people didn't listen to that nagging voice saying they were doing a bad thing, because following a code became more important than actual good outcomes.

Define “better outcome?”

Cus I’m willing to accept the asteroid hitting rather than murder a child.

I get why folks make the arguments using points about it not making sense or the hospital being gross or the Fireflies being utterly incompetent, but, like… folks say Druckman said it would work, so we can say thats just extra dumb but ok…

So what?

Murdering a girl still wouldn’t be justified, and Joel would be for stopping them.

I was going to say I’d watch a Marvel-style edit of Lord of the Rings for laughs but maybe that’s just The Hobbit 😔

femmenietzsche said: They have oliphaunts now?

haha fuck you!

Gollum: they fly now?!

Samwise: they fly now!

fits perfectly in the scene where they first encounter the Nazgûl on their new flying mounts!

people complaining about the dialogue in Marvel movies have no idea what the dialogue in Marvel movies sounds like you’re quoting Star Wars that’s what the writing in Rise of Skywalker is like

More accurate would be Pippin telling Denethor to ‘stop being an asshole.’

mtg standard (at least in arena) sucks to play so bad right now. there are four kinds of decks that people play:

much less frequently seen: kinds of decks that absolutely suck to play against but at least kind of involve playing magic against your opponent:

that's it. i haven't seen anyone play any other decks. it's just those ones. my normal-ass Good Value Engine decks only ever win after playing really nasty boardwipes. i think i'm going to just, stop playing magic (or at least standard) for a while until a couple standard rotations come around, because none of the past forty-odd games i've played have been remotely fun.

I remember they talked about how important it was back when designing Scars of Mirrodin that you only be able to give the first poison to someone by actually connecting with them, because then once you’re able to proliferate there’s nothing they can actually do to stop it

they didn’t mention this philosophy when they started previewing the ONE cards

I won a FNM at my at the time local during New Phyrexia with a red/black infect deck that used the phyrexian mana firebreather, furnace scamp, goblin tunneler, and spells that gave infect. It worked largely by catching someone by surprise and sacrificing my life to swing for a ton of infect all at once. That was neat, lotta risk/reward.

Sad to see where we’ve got now.

You can also stop pretending that capitalism is voluntarism.

okay, and now square this with how you feel about police unions

Capitalism is when the government bans strikes. The more strikes they ban the more capitalister it is

I really liked Puss In Boots: The Last Wish… especially this part.

Ok there killer just calm down, that gun can't go off unless someone pulls the trigger and you were the one holding it,

X

The thing is, while I can’t exactly discount the fact that it was the prop guy’s job to make sure it wasn’t a hot gun, it’s still gonna really suck if/when he inevitably goes away for this while Alec “lol I’m rich and famous AF” Baldwin walks free with probably some kinda payout or fine.

I mean

yeah that’s probably what should happen?

it was the prop guy’s job to make sure it wasn’t a hot gun and instead of that he gave Baldwin a hot gun and specifically said “cold gun.” there is a person responsible for gun safety checks and that person was not Baldwin and that person did the opposite of what he was supposed to be doing

the prop guy handed Baldwin a button and specifically said “don’t worry, this is not the button that kills someone when you press it,” Baldwin trusted him because his job is literally to determine which of the buttons are the Twilight Zone button that kills someone when you press it, he pressed the button, and it killed someone. like that’s pretty clearly not Baldwin’s fault

Ah, but the issue is it wasn’t the prop guy that handed it to him, it was someone else who should not have been handling the guns, they shouldn’t have been using those ones for rehearsal, and Baldwin was not merely actor but also Executive Producer, giving him liability for much if the negligent behavior of the crew he ultimately is responsible for being hired.

Among other things, its pretty clear he has some liability here.

Incidentally, Anon, Star Wars has had cloaking devices since the Thrawn Trilogy, the greatest of all Star Wars books. He put them on asteroids in highly energetic orbits around Coruscant, making it extremely risky to leave or approach the planet and therefore beheading the New Republic without any actual combat.

yeah but those books aren't canon any more also WHY WAS ZAHN NOT PUT IN CHARGE OF THE FRANCHISE HE BROUGHT STAR WARS BACK

ESB mentions cloaking devices too, as a note, in reference to the Millennium Falcon being too small to have one.

EDH/Commander is the absolute worst Magic: the Gathering format

it's the cardboard equivalent of a YouTube party, where everyone's just waiting around to play their special sparkly thing and anything anyone else is doing is rendered a time-consuming annoyance instead of an actual game

and it's absolutely baffling to me when folks say it's "good for new players." how??? i've been playing mtg for two decades and every EDH game I've ever played gives me a fucking migraine from having to keep track of 287 stupid triggers from extremely frequent game actions just because no one's dropped a wog in the past 1.8 turns. that cannot be fun when you're just learning the ropes, jfc

like, sure the flavor is great! but even the best flavor is not worth the gameplay equivalent of wading desperately through the 1919 Boston Molasses Flood

and to top it all off, half the games I've sat down to play don't even finish because they last so fucking long people get bored and quit rather than sit through one more fucking turn

garbo format. plz tiktok generation make a fast and fun new multiplayer format go viral, you're our last hope

Maybe the worst game I've played for triggers was with my mill deck a year ago. An opponent stole part of my combo while I had the other half in play. They went on to win because they were Going Off and I was stuck for 3-4 helpless turns for want of a boardwipe.

if you can't bang out at least 3-4 games in a night then you guys need to seriously evaluate power levels, shit like this is seldom my experience

step y'all's game up

EDH is best played as if you are a minor Yu-Gi-Oh villain with a gimmick, and with folks who play like that too.

LOOK BUDDY. I can do a lava moat. I can do a moat composed entirely of boiling acid. With certain provisions for the animal welfare act, I can even do a piranha infested moat! But I cannot. provide. all three services simultaneously in the same godsdamned moat. You call any contractor in this industry they will tell you the same!!!!!!!

What if it was three concentric moats?

oh that, sure, heck we can have that installed by tuesday

I need you all to understand that this is, in fact, exactly what working in construction is like.

Except it then goes on to the customer losing a gasket over the price of three concentric moats. 

soooooo... harem anime protag, then

Bespoke: Expansionist clique of sex slaves and child soldiers