finally, actual political analysis. on this website it’s like finding a drop of water on the moon, or something, hoo lee.

FUCKING VOTE ANYWAY.

the really makes me feel like voting, y’know? that really makes me feel like I should go out and vote. that seems like a good strategy

Wasn’t this not really true, historically? Didn’t most societies have a bunch of alcoholism specifically because it was one of the only forms of clean water available, or am I mistaken?

too dumb to read

checks out

Most sensible comment in the thread, thread shoulda probably ended here.

Most greens are very wierd. They claim to be against malnutrition and vitamin deficiency, but when it comes to solutions, they are against them(see golden rice). They are also mostly vegans, but when it comes to insulin, they would rather kill lots of pigs instead of scary-scary GMO yeast. Or when it comes to energy production, they rather would choose one with guaranteed dangers(coal has very nasty byproducts of burning) instead of potential.

I think this is probably because they represent a more dangerous and legitimate opposition to the powers that be, and, as a result, tend to be one of the most astroturfed groups on the planet. Couple that with a kind of extremism, where they will oppose golden rice or GMO yeast on the basis of evergreening IP laws (a fair complaint, imo), and then you can kind of see why they keep opposing things that are presented as solutions and keep getting hit with the terminally annoying “well, why don’t you have any solutions, then?” style of criticism.

trains run on time

I am here to regretfully inform you about the state of american rail infrastructure…

then you’re just a bot.

I mean to be fair you do make it pretty easy to discredit your entire argument, when you’re just gonna say that anyone calling you out on this very obviously stupid idea is a bot. Like that’s the same thing again.

Maybe I’m a victim of Poe’s law, but I’ve seen “launch nuclear waste into space” get way more repute than it deserves as an idea from people who have no clue about the actual issues with, even just normal aspects to do with energy generation. It’s a shorthand signal that lets me know that someone’s had all their thinking on it done for them by shitty pop science and shitty science journalism. It’s like if someone believes in antivax, or something. I’m probably not going to really think they’re a credible source, after that. This is also bad if the shit they’re saying is itself lacking in external sources which I can rely on outside of them.

I’m also flexing my brain right now because none of the shit you said at all really backs up the idea the nuclear energy is the future. Like, if you think it’s inevitable that more plants collapse and it’s inevitable that nuclear power plants get destroyed by missiles in times of war (also a great idea, on par with disposing of it in space, let me irradiate the exact area I’m trying to capture for miles and miles around), then you wouldn’t want nuclear power. If you believe in that and then you also believe in the overblown problem of nuclear waste, then there’s not really a point, there’s no point at which the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

The reason people aren’t going to accept nuclear if they believe it has cons is because like half of those cons are, albeit overblown, catastrophic for life on the planet, and the other half are failures to conceptualize based on economic boogeymen, just the same as with solar power. Political will problems, rather than problems with physical reality or core technologies. But still, problems that conflict with the existence of the idea itself.

You’re not going to convince people to go in on nuclear power, your stated idea, if you only point out it’s flaws, and then also post ridiculous shit.

This, this should be common sense, and I don’t understand why it’s not.

Okay, so, say I need some energy that’s pretty dense in terms of the space that it takes up, say I need a large amount of constant energy draw, and say that I need a form of energy that’s going to be pretty stable and not prone to variation in weather events. I.e. I seek to power a city. This isn’t even really a far-fetched hypothetical, this is a pretty common situation. What energy source seems like the best for that? Basically, we’re looking at hydropower, which generally has long term environmental problems itself, and is contextually dependant, or nuclear.

Solar also makes sense, wind energy also makes sense, for certain use cases. Say I have a very spread out population or I have a place where space is really not at a premium, as is the case with much of america, and america’s startling lack of population density, that might be the case. But then, I kind of worry that said lack of population density in general is kind of it’s own ongoing environmental crisis, and makes things much, much harder than they’d otherwise need to be.

I think the best metaphor for nuclear that I have is the shinkansen. I dunno what solar would be, in this metaphor, maybe bicycles or something. So, the shinkansen, when it was constructed, costed almost double it’s expected cost and took longer then anyone thought it would and everybody fucking hated it, on paper. In practice, everybody loves that shit now, it goes super fast, and even though it should be incredibly dangerous because the trains are super light and have super powerful motors and no crash safety to speak of, they’re pretty well-protected because the safety standards are well in place. It’s something that’s gone from being a kind of, theoretical idiot solution, to being something that actually worked out very well in practice.

If you were to propose a high speed rail corridor in the US, you would probably get the same problems brought up, as you might if you were to plan a nuclear site. Oh, NIMBYs are never gonna let you, it’s too expensive, we lack the generational knowledge to build it, and we can patch everything up with this smaller solution in e-bikes and micromobility anyways. Then people don’t pay attention to that singular, big encompassing solution, and the micromobility gets privatized to shit and ends up as a bunch of shitty electric rental scooters dumped in rivers and a bunch of rideshare apps that destroy taxi business. These issues which we bring up strike me as purely being political issues, rather than real problems. So, we lack generational knowledge, why not import some chinese guys to build some reactors, since they can do it so fast? Or, if we’re not willing to deal with them, south korean?

I’m not saying we can’t also do solar and renewables as well, sure, those also have political issues that we would need to deal with, and I am perfectly willing to deal with them as they come up and as it makes sense. If you actually want a sober analysis, though, we’re going to need to look at all the different use cases and then come up with whichever one actually makes sense, instead of making some blanket statement and then kind of, poo-pooing on everything else as though we can just come up with some kind of one size fits all solution, which is what I view as really being the thing which got us into this mess. Oooh, oil is so energy dense, oooh, plastic is so highly performing and so cheap and we don’t even have to set up any recycling or buyback schemes, oooh, let’s become the richest nation on the planet by controlling the purchasing of oil. We got lulled into a one size fits all solution that looked good at the time and was in hindsight was a large part in perhaps a civilization ending and ecologically costly mistake.

And I say just launch the waste into space

This immediately discards like, everything you’ve said up until now, though. It matters if it explodes on the way up challenger style and irradiates half of the continent with a massive dirty bomb of nuclear waste. It’s way more cost effective, efficient, and safer to just put it somewhere behind a big concrete block and then pay some guy to watch it 24/7, and make sure the big concrete block doesn’t crack open or suffer from water infiltration or whatever.

He’s not unusual in that regard, every President except for Trump, does this. But it’s especially annoying for Obama because he had the closest to a broad coalition in recent history and it got him a super majority.

Every president does this, right. The DNC will only let in presidents who do this, who never reach out to their voterbase, and instead focus on an increasingly shrinking, aging, middle class centrist population. So they can then go out and every single time compromise with republicans on policy that makes them look good, and then basically be the exact same on most other policy issues, most notably on foreign policy. Then when they don’t get anything done, oh, well, oh darn it’s gonna be by the metric of whoever the rotating super-corrupt bad guy is in the DNC, by whatever margin they might need. Oops, looks like you guys needed to all vote harder to get rid of manchin and sinema.

Point this all out, and people will call you a conspiratorial “both sides” -ing nutcase, but then people plod along every election with basically all of this baked in as a ground floor assumption, and the same exact strategy as always, and then are either surprised when it blows up and nothing happens, or they stand around with their hands in their pockets and bloviate about how everyone else just needed to vote harder, even though people will endlessly point out about how we have an electoral college, so it doesn’t matter, how the candidates pushed in the primary are guaranteed to be institution candidates, so it doesn’t matter, how voting districts are gerrymandered to shit, how we live in a two party fptp system, how studies confirm that well-funded political interest groups and lobbyists shape policy. How even if we give consistent and overwhelming victories we’ve been shown no indication that things are going to change beyond this, further down the line, because no change is even being attempted earlier on with less power.

They’ve actually shown the opposite by trying to outflank trump on whoever can be the most racist to migrants. They’re totally unwilling to even briefly entertain the idea that they could or should actually take a progressive stance on that issue, or try to explain how maybe migrants are all pretty much more chill than your average american, so instead their genius-level play is to try to take the same position as the guy who’s entire deal has been how racist he can be to migrants. It’s like they basically want to lose and keep the pendulum swinging.

It’s nuts, I don’t understand how nobody’s seeing this shit, we’re totally cooked.

I mean, exceptionally bad is still a kind of exceptionalism.

How are you hurt by alarms? Noise, high voltage, the fear of the things they indicate, or something else? legitimately curious, never heard of this phobia before

you know, I at least appreciate on here that, even if you’re going to be massively downvoted for basically no reason, at least there’s someone here making this post and then backing it up in their comments, rather than me just having to look at the headline and be like “yeah that sounds like fishy north korea style clickbait xenophobia to me” without wanting to actually look into it.

So, good job.

Excellent and much needed context, compared to just seeing images of contextually devoid book vandalism, and being trusted to assume a kind of naive, perhaps bad faith idiocy.

I legitimately wonder if there’s really any level of protest that people will tolerate. If you throw soup on the protective glass that covers a painting, prepare to get slammed with a 20 minute protracted conversation about whether or not soup can leak between the gaps in the fixtures that secure a painting to the wall, and whether or not that amount of soup can do damage, and how much money we’re all paying for it to be cleaned up, and how seeing a painting is a once in a lifetime thing which is now ruined for the people who went and so on and so on. If you block traffic, well, now I’ve had to spend 2 or 3 hours in delays, and there’s no cause that’s really worth a minor inconvenience. The protesting crowd should all get gunned down for that. At the very least, they all deserve to know that nothing they’re doing can every really matter or change anything ever.

Then of course, none of that’s actually related to the issue we really want to discuss, there, that’s all just tangential, complicated political issues, that we’re primed to bellyache and whine about. We can only show how much we care by donating to some nonprofit, while we go about our lives ideally uninterrupted an uninconvinienced by the protesters. I feel like I must’ve stumbled on this thread dozens of times already, and it never really gets any better.

I think what drives the root cause of this is some kind of nihilism, some sense that nothing can ever get any better, and if you think otherwise, you’re naive. That we really just exist to keep everything in a permanent deadlock. If you were to take more extreme action than this, well, no, that’s morally abhorrent, whomever will just get replaced by the institutional successor, and oh, you’re causing X amount of property destruction, which is X amount of economic value, thus, X amount of time, and thus, X amount of lifespan for someone. Then you’ve basically committed murder, if not mass murder, by wasting so many lifetimes. The many, sometimes literal, murders of the status quo otherwise need not apply, or else are assumed to be inevitable. Even if your actions here were somehow directly materially related to the conflict, right, it would be all too easy to just dismiss it out of hand as being not really effective, or as being adventurism or a waste of everyone’s time. Can’t I just get back to the perennial Big Game? I just wanna grill for God’s sake!

I mean I feel like I’ve seen him get smeared since way way before covid was happening, like, since the 2010’s at least he’s been getting heat for no reason, I feel like

No yeah for real. I’ve never seen him doing anything I would really consider to be annoying, or at least, more annoying than any other science communicator, and he constantly gets shit on for being like, too cocky, but then when you push back I never get any examples of things he’s actually fucked up on, just that he has bad vibes.

I mean, I dunno. I was sort of okay with the link’s awakening remake using this aesthetic, because it was a one off game, but it does sort of strike me as a very like, default, low rent kind of appearance, and the item and enemy copying ability also strikes me as something that’s not that interesting, and not as interesting as the normal zelda dungeon by dungeon kind of scheme. A good portion of the things you’re gonna copy are probably going to have exceedingly similar behaviors, they’re going to be functionally identical.

It’s obviously a copy, ironically, or maybe an extension, of the design philosophy behind the recent two big zelda games, and this one’s adapted it to a lower budget 2D game. I dunno, I’m still not in love with the idea as a whole, and that’s kind of after two big games. I dunno if it’s really ever gonna be on the level of, say, portal, or something, right? Which is a weird comparison to make, but I do feel the need to make it. I’ve never really found physics puzzles to be that interesting, which is gonna be what a lot of games that try like, universal mechanics, are going to have to cowtow to, because physics systems are theoretically infinite even though they actually do have a relatively small set of constraints, right. I’ve also never really enjoyed stacking boxes on top of one another as a solution to a puzzle, despite that being omnipresent in every good immersive sim, which is weirdly what I would kind of peg the modern zelda design philosophy as belonging to.

I dunno. I feel like the change in style has been kind of hard for me to pin down. It’s very obvious in a difference of feel, right, but in terms of formally locking down the actual difference, I can’t say I’ve really found much that’s all that weird about it. Sure, you can theoretically use whatever ability, anywhere, at any time, to make any vehicle, or scale any platform, stuff like that. But 90% of the time, it’s going to be totally useless as an ability. You’re going to fall into a couple of discrete, routine behaviors, even given an “infinite” ability that you’re just sort of, free to use and abuse like that.

Compare this to a conventional zelda tool, which is not generally usable anywhere, right. You can use the hookshot to stun or damage enemies, right, you can use it to grapple onto a discrete set of platforms, but outside of that it’s not gonna be too useful. I don’t see that as being all that different from like. Ahh, well, with this ability, you can paste together two pallets! It’s effectively the same, they’re gonna come with a pretty similar set of constraints and behaviors.

I feel like, to me, a lot of the fun of emergent mechanics comes from eeking out solutions to puzzles that designers probably haven’t thought about at all. Sometimes you can basically sidestep a challenge that otherwise you would’ve had to do, and in that way, it feels very much like a casual version of a speedrunning trick, or, it’s something that rewards your cleverness, or your understanding and mastery of the mechanics beyond even what the designers might anticipate. I like that much less when it feels like the designer doesn’t have a set, like, idea of a solution to a puzzle. When they’ve just given me all the tools, and then they tell me to go nuts, I don’t feel as though I’m circumventing anything, I just feel as though I’m doing the puzzle as god intended. There’s probably also some amount of, if everyone’s super, then no one is, going on there. If every puzzle is some puzzle I’m able to circumvent with clever rules lawyering or mechanics abuse, then it gets older, faster.

So I dunno. I really like the third banjo kazooie game, it was probably ahead of it’s time, if this is the kind of direction we’re going in now, and obviously I have some level of nostalgia for it, because the 360 was my formative console, because I’m a zoomer. Feel old yet? At the same time, the first two games were probably just straight up better games, if I had to actually be honest with myself. They have wider appeal, and even if you just have an ability that you can only use on a specific pad, with a specific symbol, and 95% of the challenges can only be conquered how the game designer intends, it’s probably still gonna be better and have more broad appeal than having to either come up with a discrete set of vehicles, use the defaults, or else spend like 50% of your game time in the vehicle creation menu constructing increasingly niche vehicles to better perform the specific task.

I dunno. You see what I’m getting at, though?

Part of that is soccer mom-ing, part of that is “urban jungle” brainworm fearmongering, I bet. It’s the transition from station wagons to minivans to SUVs to crew cab trucks. You need a big cool truck that can protect you from the elements, and from the potholes when you go somewhere worthwhile, and also from the crime, even! woah, so cool! kinda shit. Just like, basic fuck you get mine style stuff, there, no questions asked, contextually devoid vacuum “I need to protect my family” mind. People being taken advantage of, by marketing.

Even from the renders I can tell you that it’s probably not going to work out, all other things being equal. Sharing the “format” of like, a cabover, similar to a kei truck, means that it would more readily be suited for smaller scenarios in which maybe turn radius and immediate over the hood visibility is more important, right, but then, its size kind of defeats that, and I suspect that the slant of the window, in order to make it aerodynamic at highway speeds, and efficient, is going to end up putting the driver back so far that it’s going to eliminate your ability to actually see over the hood as much as you might want to. Probably the format also has adverse effects on crash safety, as you really want a hood on your car in order to catch a pedestrian, scooping them up by the legs, and also as a crumple zone to dispel some of the force of crash from the front, which is ideally where most of your crashes are coming from.

I think probably also that the conventional american automotive taste might defeat it, as americans kind of, historically, prefer a larger shittier hood on their vehicle. They prefer the sort of idiot dominance that a big hood gives them. Carolina squat style. I could be wrong on all that, though.

I think my biggest concern would probably be that, even though light trucks are the segment of the market which are very obviously viable for EVs right now, the people who buy trucks won’t want to buy them, and the people who want EVs won’t want to buy them. Implicit in both of those is those who can afford them, which I think automatically maybe selects for people who have the worst taste of all time. Light trucks make sense for EVs, right, you have a rear suspension which is supposed to be beefier for large loads already, conventionally in consumer trucks you’re not going to want a longer travel distance because they’re not supposed to be these highly efficient vehicles, and going electric gives you a pretty good and easy tow rating and high levels of torque low in the power curve like you might get with a diesel engine.

But I dunno. Basically I think americans might be too stupid for it. Might see more success in japan, but I have no idea what their EV infrastructure is looking like or if they already have kei trucks or larger cabovers which are electric. Fleet vehicles would probably need something like a swappable battery on the cheap, or a fast charging system that doesn’t destroy the battery immediately, but the first one probably requires more infrastructure and the second one seems maybe like it would be a limitation of the technology.