Bay 12 Games Forum

Sorry I must have been very tired when I wrote that, I meant Karen. Long day at work after getting almost no sleep last night.

Amateur data forensics, basically, yeah? Comes up where I'm working occasionally (have fun finding a book in a library when all you have is the barcode and relative location information ), and it's indeed lowkey interesting (when it isn't wildly time consuming and frustrating, anyway, ha). Can't imagine having someone hollering at you during the process helps any, though.

Well the main job is about something else (making sure people with medical needs such as ventilators are identified in case of power outtages), but sometimes someone just mumble their details into the phone and you got half a name and know they live at 39 <unitelligible> drive in <mumblesville>, so that bit requires a bit of lateral thinking and guesswork. A bit like a cryptic puzzle sometimes.

We want to go slow on the gene editing in real humans. For example, if we're talking embryos, we can just screen for the bad genes and do IVF for the embryos that don't have that gene, no need to edit the embryos in the first place. So that leaves the main use as being for gene therapy for already living humans, and since screening can be rolled out much cheaper and less dangerously than trying to hack the genome of already living people, there will be an ever-decreasing window of usefulness for gene therapies. We should still look into it, but providing mass screening would be far more efficient and less controversial than trying to edit babies*. Also, all that effort would basically be invested in making something we can already make for free: babies that don't have that genetic disease.

EDIT: *here's the main gist. Think about how many incidents of a specific genetic disease are prevented per screening vs per gene editing an embryo, vs gene therapies on an already-alive person. Then consider how much money each one costs to enact, and whether or not we have enough money to 100% roll out the solution. The basic screening technology would work out as the least-expensive option per number of cases prevented, so it's the long term best option to deal with the problem. Only once you have 100% screening, only then would it be worth investing any remaining money in the gene therapies, in terms of saving the most people.

Although every single line of evidence available to us in the real world shows that as people's standards of living rise, they have less kids, blowing a hole in the entire theory. And they simultaneously promote the theory that Democrats are killing off black people via abortions with the idea that Democrats are trying to out-breed white people through overpopulating non-white people. Such is the logic of people who have injected the koolaid directly into their brainstem.

EDIT: note a more reasonable interpretation is that Democrats are interested in improving the quality of life of all people who are actually alive, and are agnostic on how that affects the proportion of different races. So they'll support things that both increase the number of black people (better medicine access, childcare etc) and decreases the number of black people (access to abortions) based on the principle that both things promote quality of life.

The race mix doesn't even factor into Democratic thinking, that's a Republican obsession, but they project race as a motive onto Democratic decisions.

Incels should just hook up with femcels.

femcels have the option of just rebranding as the much more palatable radfems, so i don't think there are that many of them.

Maybe they're women with no date who are too toxic for the radfems however so they're slumming it on incel boards, I guess. (or a more likely analysis is that radfems are dime a dozen so they wouldn't stand out then, so they made femcel instead. It's a much smaller pond, so standing out as a prominent femcel would be as easy way to get online recognition).

@McTraveller: the desire for a "return to normal" is nice and all, but it will do nothing but ensure a second trump cones along. Probably a smarter one, too. The grievances that elected him (and they were not all racially motivated, though many of them were)

Well historically speaking, the racial thing is a scapegoat for the underlying grievances. The 'average' German in the 1930s probably wasn't largely motivated by anti-Jewish sentiment as the underlying reason they were pissed off, it was the collapse of the economy post 1929, and the Nazis, who were the full on anti-semitic people then capitalized by directing that anger at a scapegoat. Similarly the rank and file Nazis probably couldn't really give a shit about Jews or otherwise. They were in it for the power and/or freedom to commit violence. For example, if the death camps had non-Jews mixed in there by accident, do you think any of the killers would give a shit. They couldn't really care any less. They only wanted to kill a bunch of people, regardless of who they were killing. Anti-human at the heart of it, and any specific traits of the people they were killing were only window dressing which made it ok. Run out of Jews, gays, communists etc and they'd probably round up the dirty stamp collectors or train spotters and kill those people too. If such a thing goes on long enough, the bar is constantly lowered on who you're killing / arresting, see Stalin's Russia for examples of that.

Similarly, Trump capitalizes on rust belt loss of jobs by directing that anger at Chinese and hispanics (your job went overseas or someone from overseas is coming to take your job), and capitalizes on urban decay and infrastructure under-investment by directing anger at black people / hispanics (fears of social instability and neighborhoods being encroached by crime). The people losing their jobs aren't motivated by a deep seated hatred of Chinese people: in neutral circumstances they wouldn't have any opinion on them one way or another.

I think it would be similar with black people too, plenty of southern racist types seem ok with specific black people they meet, the 'ok' ones, but they will still speak out against the 'group' as a whole but they do so in broad terms linking them to, and blaming them for, negative societal issues and trends. Correct me if I'm totally off base, but relatively few will ever say they don't like black people just because they're black, but rather they link them to real social issues (poverty, homelessness, crime, drugs, collapse of families etc) which are perfectly reasonable to be concerned about, it's just not reasonable to make it a race issue, and that's where the political right come in and exploit these underlying fears of social instability by directing those fears at recognizable targets.

Also, by making those issues a thing that's about black people you no longer have to think about them as much, since they by definition are happening to someone else. So it's no longer the point that family structures are broadly collapsing and divorce rates are skyrocketing, that's the fault of the Democrats and their inner city policies related to black people.

I'll add onto what Max said here, Marx's Historical Materialism is a whole different kettle of fish to the idea of bolting-together a "communist society". Historical Materialism is about how productive forces in a society lead to technological changes and how those changes inevitably change the economic status quo, leading to a paradigm shift*. It takes the emphasis away from specific choices and focuses on systemic trends. e.g. capitalism was the inevitable outcome of the industrial revolution, basically because it outcompetes rival systems. The point here is that systems which outcompete other systems inevitably rise to be the dominant system. Nietzsche makes similar points. Leninist style communist states attempt to control the whole milieu, so they don't allow the competitive forces that Marx was talking about to even take place. A centralized state which tries to aggressively hold back the competitive elements of production is not much different to a theocratic state which tries to hold back the flood of new ideas and science, and both end up having elements in common.

* the paradigm shift in Marx's communism is actually the point at which the process of automation makes labor itself obsolete (“labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want.”. Consider this as the idea that work itself is moving up Maslow's heirarchy of needs over time; so communism is the point at which you don't need to work for basic needs at all, but you work to have something to do). And he argues that at this point the existing capitalism mechanisms for distributing goods will no longer make any sense: since the economic forces shape the society, it's when there's a paradigm shift in the economic forces that a new system can arise, and not before that. So any state which centralizes the concept of labor as the organizing principle isn't in fact "communism" under Marx's definition. In fact such labor-states actually fight against the very advancements that would lead to the communist state as envisioned by Marx, since you get vested interests to keep the centrality of labor in the economy, i.e. forced job placements and economic disincentives to further automate since you have to employ those people anyway.

I am not sure why there would be a lock that can be forced open with a credit card. The way any door lock I saw works, it is a ~5mm thick steel plate that slides into a slot in the door frame.

Those locks do exist, they're ones with a triangular bolt (cylindrical but with a cut out making a triangular silouhette), and it's only lightly springed so you can push something up the inside and push the bolt in. Usually, you only see those on interior doors, but if they were on an exterior door it would likely be the back door into a kitchen or something.

This sort of one:



Notice how the bolt isn't straight, but there's a curve. The inner side of the bolt is flush with the door, so you pull the card up and at an angle and you can push the bolt in that way. These things make sense for example for a bathroom door, however if they've been used on an exterior door someone did something very wrong.

I like how someone tried to justify the Hitler quotes as being relevant to the slides.

Which totally misses the point of why this is a problem. There are a million relevant quotes that could be found, but whoever put this together seemed to be of the mindset that you first bring up your big book of Hitler quotations, find one that vaguely fits the slide, then if that fails you begrudgingly go on Goodreads and find quotes by someone else  that might be relevant.

I'm pretty sure I could come up with all Darth Vader and the Emperor quotes that would fit the slides, too.

Or, we can entertain an alternate interpretation where the guy exhaustively crawled quotations sites, before begrudgingly going "well, I guess Adolf Hitler nailed the Ethics topic on the head again, I'll use his quote".