Lurker > adjl

caprontos posted...

There is no genocide (if there were, they the worst at it)

Prior to the events of this past week (and probably still now, with the magnitude of the retaliation), Israel had killed more than an order of magnitude more Palestinian civilians than vice versa. They've perpetrated as much genocide as they can get away with, and Netenyahu has on multiple occasions explicitly expressed the desire to do more.

caprontos posted...

there is no apartheid

I'll just direct you to this post because he summarizes how overtly false this claim is well enough that I see no reason to reinvent the wheel:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/3-poll-of-the-day/80587529/976538867

caprontos posted...

there is no unearned oppression.

The notion of "earned oppression" is a rather horrifying thought and kind of throws any pretense of trying to approach this from the perspective of a good person out the window.

caprontos posted...

They've been at war with Israel since it was founded.

Also from that linked post, Israel was actively expanding Jewish settlements at the expense of Arab citizens for a solid decade before Hamas became active.

caprontos posted...

It wasn't invented, it was re-establish based on a western promise to the Jews (and those western powers controlled the land and could do what they wanted with it).

That's inventing it. The region hadn't been significantly under Jewish control for literally thousands of years. "Re-establishing" that after so long is functionally identical to creating it out of thin air. The Britain claimed the land after the Ottoman Empire fell does mean that they had a legal right to do whatever they wanted with it, that doesn't mean they can't be blamed for the consequences of their colonial decision to massively overturn the status quo. In hindsight, establishing the country of Israel post-WWII made a colossal mess of the region. That's not even really up for debate (much like the fact that the colonial borders drawn post-WWI are the root of much of the instability that still plagues the Middle East). Disestablishing it now would probably be an even worse idea, but recognizing the root of the problem is still important.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's unrealistic to expect anyone to run a money-transfer service of any kind and not charge fees, though. If you can't make money doing something, no one is going to bother doing it in the first place.

I expect some fees, since as I said people should be compensated for providing a service, but the magnitude is still probably larger than it ought to be, purely because of a lack of competition to undercut them. Still better than Youtube, though.

LinkPizza posted...

Shellfish would apparently kill me The doctor said I was deathly allergic I wish I knew before the multiple times I had it

I had a friend in culinary school who discovered she was allergic to shellfish while peeling shrimp in class. Her hands like doubled in size.

Ozmose posted...

Nut allergies are apparently almost exclusive to the Americas.

I've heard it suggested that nut allergies might be linked to the fact that peanuts are often used as a cleaner crop and therefore pick up a lot of random chemicals in trace amounts from the soil they're cleaning. I'm not sure if that's a regional thing, but if it is it could explain regional differences in allergy rates.

Might be, but I expect the actual reason is that people are more likely to forget to pay their card down if there's a larger gap between the purchase and when it posts. Any company with a credit card really likes when people don't pay their balances off immediately, so it's not unusual to see them try to encourage small lapses like that.

Yellow posted...

I don't know what people are arguing about, I don't think Ozmose hasn't posted anything particularly wrong.

Not so much here, at least not that I remember. I'm guessing he's more referring to the other topic where he posted incorrect statistics about literacy rates and complained about "bot farms" and "echo chambers" and dipped out when everyone pointed out how objectively wrong he was, which (perhaps coincidentally) lined up rather closely with when Wanded showed up here with his smarmy "Why are you all talking about Palestine like it's a real place?" nonsense. And now Ozmose is back trying to spin his unwillingness to recognize being proven wrong as a good thing, and is getting appropriately dogpiled for doing so.

Yellow posted...

Yeah the whole "acceptance" argument aside it's really dismissive to how these terrorist groups actually pop up.

The fact of the matter is that the vast, vast majority of Islamic people have zero interest in terrorism. To that end, equating the two makes very little sense even before considering the horrific discrimination that kind of attitude opens up. Just as Israel's apartheid policies are not the fault of Judaism as a whole, Hamas' terrorist activities are not the fault of Islam as a whole. Islam just happens to be the dominant religion in an area where everyone feels so disenfranchised that the idea of fighting for liberation under the banner of anything as unified as a religion becomes pretty appealing, an appeal that groups like Hamas and Al'Qaeda and ISIS are happy to exploit because it gives them more bodies to blow up.

TheJustice posted...

And then even then places like Patron and GoFundMe and kofifi take a not minor amount of your earnings. Damn parasites.

Yep. I can't imagine it actually takes all that much to run a service that takes money from one person and sends it to another, especially on the scales these services do (it's one thing if you're handling like $100 a month and have to pay for a server, since then you need a significant cut to keep that server up, but those costs do not scale linearly as you handle larger amounts). Some cut is to be expected, since it isn't free to provide the service and those providing it deserve some compensation, but a much more substantial amount gets leeched off than is reasonable.

EvilResident posted...

^ poor excuse, why would you ever carry a balance over?

His second paragraph explained exactly that.

I'm in one right now. We just had a strike earlier this year, with considerable gains as a result.

Ozmose posted...

I seem to be taking up way too much real estate in your head. I know the thought of not being terminally online is alien to you, but it's a way of life for most sane people. I come and leave as I please, and I owe you nothing. You're just another validation seeker on the internet. I'm going to leave again right now, and likely forget you even exist. I imagine that's how most people deal with you in the real world as well.

I really like when people that are wrong try to spin ignoring evidence against them as somehow being a good thing. It's pretty funny.

"2+2 is 5"
"It's 4, actually"
"Yeah, it's 4"
"It's definitely 4, look at this proof"
"Lol you're all so terminally online I'm just going to walk away because I'm better than you"

caprontos posted...

The only way there could be peace is, step one - both parties have to accept the other exists and has a right to exist. Israel accepts that

Not remotely. Israel treats Palestinians like garbage, having stripped them of nearly every right they possibly could and stopping just barely short of exterminating the lot of them (and even then they've made quite a few earnest attempts at genocide). You don't get to impose apartheid over a population and then surprisedpickachu.jpg when that population ends up resenting you.

Would there still be resentment toward Israel even if they weren't being massive assholes to Palestinians? Absolutely. That's kind of inevitable when your colonial oppressor decides to invent a country on top of yours and expects you to get along with the new people. But the first step to improving those relations has to be making a genuine effort to coexist peacefully and equitably, not establishing oppression at the institutional level in hopes that everyone will give up and go somewhere else. Israel is the one with the power to take that first step, and they've chosen not to, making this whole mess their fault.

I don't want to have to see enough of him to pee in his butt. I'm not particularly keen on seeing his face, either, but we've seen enough of that (with or without devil horns) that seeing a piss-length more of it seems like a fair trade.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

He is instead being rewarded for everything he's done as CEO by being paid 1/3rd of a billion dollars as part of the sale.

How about we reward him for everything he's done as CEO by lining up to pee in his ear.

Wanded posted...

is that so...?
when was this "country" formed exactly?

In the closest state to its modern version, post-WWI as the Ottoman empire was carved up and the British took control of the region. Prior to that, it was a state of the Ottoman empire from around the 15th-16th century until 1917.

Again, add water to the kool-aid. That kind of concentration really isn't healthy for you.

I doubt they'd do that. The porn is the only thing keeping people halfway interested in Overwatch at this point.

BADoglick posted...

I'm only sick of bad to mediocre content. Andor and so far loki s2 have been excellent. If everything was that good then I'd be all about all of it.

There's good stuff here and there, but I find it's just too much. There's a lot that I'm interested in watching, but so much of it has prior movies/shows to watch for background and/or commits itself to a larger storyline that means future watching and it all just gets so overwhelming that I lose the motivation to start and just end up doing something else.

Wanded posted...

can you tell me more about this...."Palestine"?
can you describe it for me

You know you're supposed to add water to the kool-aid to dilute it, right? Not just snort it straight out of the package?

Shrek posted...

Bobby kotick is staying on until the end of this year, and then he's gone

Into a wood chipper, I hope.

Zareth posted...

But you see, that's why they shouldn't be able to use them, because the poor need to know their place and keep being poor

/s

I don't get why so many people cling to this mentality despite the fact that people being poor costs taxpayers more money than people not being poor. And that's not because of welfare, that's just because of the costs associated with having people struggle to survive and the lost potential tax dollars. It literally costs half as much to just give a homeless person a home as it does to leave them on the streets and have to police them and clean up after them, even before considering the potential for new revenue once they get on their feet and can start paying more taxes. Resisting that literally wastes public money purely for the sake of being an asshole.

BlackScythe0 posted...

I think it's more of the activision part than the blizzard part.

There's no actual distinction. Blizzard games have all the same executive meddling and predatory monetization schemes that Activision games have, and they opted to simply not release games with gambling mechanics in regions where those are illegal (or at least where it's necessary to restrict their sale to adults only) instead of releasing a less predatory version.

Like I said, not much, apparently.

RetuenOfDevsman posted...

How would you pay property taxes when you don't exist? You know, on the books.

Step 1: Rent apartment
Step 2: Pay landlord
Step 3: Landlord pays property taxes using rent

Of course, maybe the landlord is evading their property taxes somehow, but that's on them. You don't need a SSN to pay for housing, and if you're paying for housing, you're doing your due diligence to pay property taxes.

RetuenOfDevsman posted...

In any case, my point stands. Citizen or not, you should have to pay taxes to vote.

And everyone pays taxes. That's just an inevitability of living in a taxed society. The only way you can get around that is by living entirely off the grid in a self-contained society that doesn't collect taxes, but even there you're probably contributing to that society in some capacity that negates the need to collect taxes as a more fungible contribution.

Of course, there's the possibility to set a minimum tax contribution, but saying "you must pay this much to vote" immediately invalidates any claim you have of being a free democracy and is so vulnerable to authoritarian corruption that you shouldn't even start to consider it. I'm not sure what point you think you're making, but it's not a good one.

RetuenOfDevsman posted...

Though I will at least allow non-paying citizens to use public streets and such. Not libraries though.

Presuming that you're approaching this from the attitude of "those dirty poors shouldn't be able to influence my country" (never mind that an substantial number of billionaires manage to pay less in taxes than the average middle-class person, so good job letting them manipulate you into being angry at entirely the wrong people), why do you think that's beneficial? Libraries are an extremely valuable resource for anyone seeking to stop being poor, between the various educational opportunities, the availability of Internet (a requirement to get a job in the modern world), and other helpful social services. Insisting that only people that make a certain amount of money should be able to access that dramatically hurts financial mobility and generally costs taxpayers more in the long run.

Heck, I'll go out on a limb and say that most Muslim heads of state are comparable assholes to Netenyahu. Generalizing that to the entire religion as a whole, however, is just stupid, and suggesting that we should "reevaluate our acceptance of Islam" as part of that generalization is going full Hitler. You'll notice I'm not suggesting that we should "reevaluate our acceptance of Judaism" in criticizing Israel's policies. There's a reason for that. Don't go full Hitler.

RetuenOfDevsman posted...

Seems fair to me that voters should have to pay taxes, tbh.

But what do I know?

For the most part, anyone being paid under the table to such an extent that they don't end up paying income tax isn't making enough to pay taxes on that income anyway, and everyone pays sales, property, and other non-income taxes regardless of their citizenship status. So I guess you don't know much.

The notion of adding autocrafting and electrical systems so long after tech mods popularized the ideas seems odd. Adding mod content to vanilla is nothing new, but those ideas are well over a decade old and have been extensively built upon (including the whole genre of factory sims that Factorio catalyzed). If they were interested in such concepts, they've had many years to implement them, so it's kind of weird to be considering it now.

I don't know about that. I could believe that he's genuinely just dissociating from the issue before he takes in the necessary information to realize that he's disseminating false information. The whole "lol bot farm, I'll leave you to your echo chamber" thing does give the impression that he truly believes that he's right and everyone that's disagreeing is wrong, not that he's considered what everyone else is saying and weighed the evidence presented against his conclusion. It's actually kind of sad.

Of course, he could also be wilfully lying and just doubling down on his lies in the hope that his stubbornness convinces people to stop thinking critically about what he's said. It could go either way, really.

sveksii posted...

Honestly this is a bad approach. You're better off sticking to one trustworthy blocker (ublock origin is currently probably the best one out there), instead of installing random less known crap. Otherwise you're going to end up with an extension that the developer sells it off to some unscrupulous individual that pushes an update that turns it into malware. This in particular is a common problem with Chrome. And highlights why the less is more mantra is important with browser extensions.

One trustworthy blocker still might not be enough to protect you from that (see: AdBlock Plus selling out and letting any advertiser who pays them through), but it does at least reduce the odds of such shenanigans and there'll be a more active community able to warn you and suggest alternatives if it does start happening.

kind9 posted...

Creators have to kowtow to this crap and now they don't even know what words or string of words are going to get their video demonetized. It's a shitty system all around. It should be more like twitch, where you support the creator directly with membership in order to watch them ad-free. I'm a member on several channels that I support, but I have to pay youtube for the privilege of blocking ads? Naaah. If I'm not mistaken what revenue creators get from youtube premium is an even smaller fraction of what they get from ad views.

Yep. Youtube is an absolutely awful environment to work in. The only reason anyone still does is because they've got an effective monopoly on video content creation.

I just got the "three videos until the player will be blocked" message today. Unlike the other warning, refreshing didn't make it go away, and it did lock the player after three tries. But then I updated uBlock and everything works again. So... good job Google, you slightly inconvenienced me for two minutes and got no additional ad views out of it.

Ferarri619 posted...

Good. If Muslim nations in the Middle East won't condemn Hamas for their recent atrocities then maybe we in the West should reevaluate our acceptance of Islam.

That's... not how people work.

sabin017 posted...

They kinda have to or people will drop their subs when a month is dead.

I don't think that's really avoidable in today's market, no matter how much they churn out. With so many streaming services and so much of the interesting content being carved up between them, it overwhelmingly makes more sense for people to rotate between services every month or two as they finish watching the stuff they're interested in, rather than maintaining multiple subs and only ever watching one at a time. Companies know this, which is why you see so many services increasing their prices but grandfathering existing subs in under the old prices with the condition that they'll give up that "promotion" if they unsubscribe.

The streaming bubble can't keep growing forever, as much as corporations and shareholders want to cling to fantasy that it will.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


To be fair, cognitive dissonance can be hard to deal with. I can understand those that would rather bury their heads in the sand and pretend everybody else is the problem when they're unequivocally proven wrong, since accepting that a deeply-held belief was a mistake isn't always easy. They're still wrong, of course, and need to change their mind for the sake of not voting based on proven lies, but that doesn't mean I can't sympathize a bit with the challenges of being deprogrammed of decades of brainwashing.

BoomerKuwanger posted...

Sometimes now I seem to get ads that bypass ublock, but at a pretty low rate as if it's only a few getting through, so I'm really not sure what's going on.

That happens periodically. Ad-blocking is a perpetual arms race between advertisers and blockers, and every now and then advertisers figure out a new way to deliver ads that gets around the current state of blockers. A few ads leak through for a day or two, then the blockers catch up and they go away again.

kind9 posted...

Adblockers aren't exactly hurting their business considering every year is a record year in profits for them and they already made like over $15 billion this year alone.

I especially like the "if you don't watch ads, we can't support the creators you enjoy" excuse. If I just sent a dollar directly to each creator from which I watched more than ten videos, they'd be making more money off of me than Youtube would ever pay them for my views. There's a reason so many creators have Patreons instead of relying on Youtube's pitiful compensation rate, arbitrary demonetization, and willingness to let random butthurt nobodies destroy creators' careers.

You gotta admit, though: The guy's got spunk.

rjsilverthorn posted...

So far you can just close it and keep playing the video.

For me the X is replaced by a little progress wheel when it first loads. Presumably, it'll turn into an X when the wheel finishes, but I just refresh the page as soon as it shows up and it doesn't appear on the next try.

Zedonra posted...

I'm not always caught up on dishes or laundry so I have that lying around sometimes

You could probably benefit from having a laundry hamper and maybe a bin to store dirty dishes. You should still try to avoid letting dishes pile up too much because leaving food residues around risks attracting vermin, but even if you aren't keeping perfectly on top of them the simple act of gathering the mess in one place does a lot to help it look and feel tidier. A bunch of dirty clothes on the floor is a problem, but the same amount of dirty clothes in a hamper or basket is perfectly fine.

shadowsword87 posted...

West African peanut butter stew is actually a really good use for peanut butter btw.

I make Thai peanut satay sauce pretty regularly and serve it with stir-fried veggies and chicken, and that's really good, but this isn't something I've tried before. I'm intrigued.

Solid_Sonic posted...

Because I want to spend money out of an account that isn't my primary checking account. Problem is the way my accounts are structured (I have three different accounts in a single product from my bank) I can't get a dedicated debit card for it (I think) even though it is considered a real checking account.

Otherwise I have to move money around as I spend out of my primary checking account, which is too much management for my tastes.

I'd say talk to the bank. If push comes to shove, they'll very quickly figure out a way for you to use a debit card more conveniently if you threaten to move to a different bank. I'd be very surprised if it comes to that, though. An account structure that allows you to use a debit card easily isn't exactly a rare ask.

Ozmose posted...

Im not the one flooding the topic with posts.

That's what happens when multiple people notice how wrong you are. Nothing to do with bots, everything to do with you making a mistake.

Zareth posted...

Have they made big movements in the treatment of AIDS recently? You don't hear about how terrible it is as much as you did in the 90's/00's

Not big movements in the sense of a full cure, but we've kind of quietly hit a point where the treatment options that keep it under control mean it's no longer a death sentence in most of the developed world. It's still a life-altering diagnosis in the sense that you'll be taking meds for the rest of your life and will have to be particularly careful about sex (though some of those meds also reduce the risk of transmitting it, and there are also meds that partners of HIV-positive people can take prophylactically to further reduce their risk), but provided you keep on top of it you're probably going to end up living about as long as you would without it.

Of course, that's less applicable in areas where the meds aren't readily available, so it's still definitely a problem in the parts of Africa that have been particularly ravaged by it, but things are substantially better now than they were even just ten years ago.

My man, just take the L. You made a mistake. Unless you're hoping to make everyone forget about this by inflicting so much second-hand embarrassment that they can't stand to think about it anymore, just accept that and update your world view accordingly.

BucketCat posted...

They're not even cutting down the woods or anything in my area (which I think they would to at least re-use that local lumber), but are instead just building them in vacant fields.

The issue with clearing land to use for homes is that clearing it is expensive, and the profit from selling whatever lumber is produced (if it's even useful lumber, which isn't the case in a lot of areas) usually goes to a logging company that has bought the land. If a developer owns the land, they'll often want to split those profits, which makes fewer logging companies willing to take the job. There's also often opposition from environmental groups to clearcutting forests for developments when other viable land exists. Meanwhile, buying up a couple of abandoned farms and developing those is relatively cheap and has fewer hoops to jump through.

BucketCat posted...

There was one that finished being built 5 years ago and there are a grand total of two families living in that neighborhood that I've counted. I ride my bike through there all the time and it's some weird, creepy ghost town and they keep building more and more.

There's a good chance that most of the empty ones were bought by investors instead of prospective homeowners. They'll sit empty until property values go up, then be sold for a profit. Of course, the irony is that if too many houses are bought out by investors and nobody lives in the neighbourhood, that keeps property values from going up, so it turns into a game of chicken as each investor waits for the others to give up and sell at a loss so the neighbourhood can actually be populated and the remaining investment properties can turn a profit.

It's also quite possible that the developers gambled on there being more demand for homes in your area than there actually was, but that generally wouldn't explain a continuous stream of similar new developments. At some point, they'd stop, even considering the sunk cost fallacy.

Jen0125 posted...

Still wondering about the debt up to your eyeballs comment. Are regular people supposed to buy homes or no? The logic is inconsistent.

Clearly, you're supposed to buy a house, carve it up into six micro-apartments and rent them for $2000/month each so your tenants pay your mortgage off in a couple years, then sell the house for double what you paid, buy another house debt-free, and use the rest to buy even more properties where you get somebody else to pay off those new mortgages for you.

Blightzkrieg posted...

Sonic is a hedgehog, which is smaller than a human, therefore his maximum speed is higher. If you were to imagine a baseball pitcher throwing each character, you can easily imagine that Sonic's velocity would be greater.

Assuming sufficient launching force to overcome the weight difference, this isn't necessarily true. Being smaller yields less wind resistance, but the lower mass means the wind resistance that the object does experience has a greater impact on its velocity than the heavier object would experience. If the larger object is streamlined enough (perhaps with a bald, well-rounded head), that may offset the effect of the increased surface area.

Blightzkrieg posted...

When it comes to the culpability of civilians for the culture leading to a war, it's worth noting that half of the Palestinian population are children. They've literally lived under Hamas rule for as long as they can remember and never had a real chance to exert control over their own destiny.

Yeah, I'm more bringing that up as something Israel's citizenry should be considering. Even if half of Palestine wasn't children who've never known any other life, the extent to which Israel has stripped Palestine of their ability to influence the region means I don't consider them overly culpable for the extent to which the situation has deteriorated, beyond the obvious immediate responsibility for any deaths they personally cause.

A dead link in a 4-month-old article presenting year-old data? Big oof. That happens often enough with older articles that I don't put too much stock in it (except to look for other sources to corroborate it), but for something that recent it makes the whole thing seem fabricated.

Also of note, those are specifically *English* literacy statistics, and given the relatively high populations of those that speak Spanish as a first language in California, Texas, and New Mexico, it kind of makes sense that they'd have a relatively high population with limited English literacy. With that in mind, using literacy rates as a proxy for education doesn't make a lot of sense.

Because "communist" is widely used as a catch-all term for anything government-related that right-wingers don't like. Actually understanding what it means is beyond many such people.

Ozmose posted...

If you think Russia and China aren't communist countries, you should try living there. The whole postmodern "but it's not REAL communism" thing is getting old.

"They're not communist" doesn't mean "they're good places to live." It just means they aren't communist, and that's entirely possible to assess objectively. China's kinda borderline, being communist on paper but increasingly capitalist as more and more elites reach the point of having the resources to influence the government in their capitalistic favour, but Russia just straight up hasn't been communist since the Soviet Union fell. They switched to a different economic and governance system after that.

Now, Russia's not particularly democratic, which might be what you're thinking of, but that's got nothing to do with being communist. That's just being a dictatorship.

Dikitain posted...

Pure speculation, but I think there is a karma "threshold" where they will just keep putting you in purgatory. Then once you go below that threshold, ban hammer. Anyone remembers DSP9 or whatever his name was? He spent years in and out of purgatory before his karma got below like 700 or something, then they just banned him.

Schmenette's got pretty much the bare minimum amount of karma needed to post here, though. If there is a threshold, it's almost certainly higher than hers, and she's not unique in that regard.

In DSPwhatever's case, I expect it was less that he broke some karmic threshold and more that he evolved from just having a bunch of terrible video game takes that he expressed in the trolliest manner possible to actively downplaying and denying Covid in the early days of the pandemic. His history likely played a role in deciding that a ban was better than hoping that he'd learn his lesson this time, but I expect the significantly higher stakes were the primary consideration.

It really raises the question of why the admins bother letting them come back. Second chances are great and all, but when an account has spent 5.5 of the 6 months it's existed in purgatory, there obviously isn't much value in only temporarily banning it.

Presumably, if you're buying Lego as an investment, you're doing so with the intent of selling it some day. I won't be selling my dinosaurs, because they're awesome (and also assembled, which cuts down the value quite a bit), but I can still recognize that if I'd bought 3-4 extras I could make an easy $300 profit now.