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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Having just looked up a bit of detail on the truancy law (and living outside the US, so I’m coming at this not having heard much of anything about it), that sounds horrific. The rationale Harris gave, that it was designed to connect parents to resources, doesn’t mesh with the fact that threatening people with jail time isn’t how you help them.

    I also ran into the fact that she argued in favour of the death penalty. Again, not exactly something that’s going to make her appealing to anyone even remotely progressive.



  • The problem with that argument is that there’s value in something being not Facebook/Meta (or Twitter, or another corporate owned and run mega service), but that value isn’t as easy to demonstrate as “here’s a bunch of shiny features”, and once people are locked in, the focus shifts from improving the service to monetizing the service, making it rapidly worse for everyone.

    People largely don’t think about how the services they use are structured, until any inherent structural issues come back to bite them. Twitter’s an obvious example, with people who were dependent on it for their livelihood from a networking/advertisement perspective ending up in trouble when the service went south. Reddit’s another example, although how that ends up is still TBD.



  • I’d suggest you look into some of what’s possible in Minecraft before dismissing it. The basics are simplistic, but the moment you start dipping into redstone builds you’re opening up an entirely different, entirely more complicated can of worms. Some of the mods available also expand that complexity greatly - Create, for example. It’s a different genre of difficulty than what’s offered by puzzle-based games, but I don’t think it’s possible to argue that there isn’t depth to it. Factorio’s another one which I’d name as offering significant complexity in the same vein.

    I’d also note that Myst is almost generation defining in terms of its complexity. I’d be hard pressed to point towards many other games that were on par with it from its time (and I’m intentionally excluding some of the classic text adventures here, which were difficult in ways unfair to the player).




  • I think there’s a difference between choosing whose lives have value and choosing who to empathize with. I’m not celebrating their deaths, but aside from the teen who was on there, I can’t say I feel much about it one way or another. They knowingly chose to take the risk, signing waivers saying that they knew the trip could result in death, and it ended badly.

    Looking at it from a different angle, I can also see why people would be frustrated that an incredible amount of attention and resources are being spent on people who intentionally put themselves at risk for a pleasure jaunt, while if a fraction of that (on a per capita level) was spent on everyone who was at risk of dying from issues brought on or exacerbated by poverty, we’d be saving a lot of lives.



  • I think before an AU like you’re suggesting could work, the US would need to get its house in order. Just from a Canadian perspective, the States already have a strong influence on us culturally/socially and economically. Tying ourselves even more closely to the US while one of the major parties is actively flirting with fascism is (I hope) pretty well out of the question.