Xhieron

The problem with a punishment mesmer, defensive juggernaut anything, and turret engie is that they result in degenerate gameplay. Turrets can’t be allowed to succeed in PVE (see: Lake Doric), and none of these class fantasies can be allowed at all in PVP.

Turrets and juggernauts turn into turtling bunkers that either grind play to a halt or turn into raid bosses, and the only way to balance them is to essentially make the style of play unfun for the person who wants it. “Being unkillable” or “controlling this space” can’t be supported in a competitive game mode. Now, you can balance this by just splitting everything and making the specs unplayable or wildly different in competitive modes, but that means you’re now devoting the dev resources to build the thing twice (for both modes), yet players can only really enjoy it in PVE. From a design perspective, that’s a really poor return on investment for an elite spec.

Punishment mesmer worked in GW1 because you had much better defined roles in all game modes with less overlap, and there was ability parity between players and NPCs, so you could interact with an enemy mob essentially the same way you’d interact with an enemy player. In GW2, you can’t punish a playstyle because playstyles aren’t that well defined, and you can’t create a niche for hex gameplay because they gave everybody else the mesmer toys (see: Torment and Confusion). If you try to make a spec that depends on them even more than certain mesmer specs already do, the byproduct will be turning revs into gods (again). There’s also no energy denial in GW2, and you can’t give a player a bar full of interrupts because everybody already has as many interrupts as the game can support without being catastrophically unfun. GW2 is just the wrong kind of game for GW1’s mesmer–like a lot of things that were better in GW1.

If you ask me, we don’t need more elite specs. We need more non-elite specs–stuff we can combine more freely with what we already have–and we need the elites to be “de-elited” so that the power level of the vanilla specs have better parity with their elite counterparts. I know they’ve taken a pass at this before (or two or three), but it has clearly not panned out. The presence of multiple options for ranged elementalists, for example, is definitely something that needs to be supported.

The nepo babies wouldn’t serve–same as always. And the political unpopularity of conscription has never changed. The last war draft is still in living memory, and US current military activity hasn’t been an improvement in terms of public appetite.

The US introduces conscription again, and there’ll be riots–and I don’t mean “some kids camped at college and the jackboots locked them up” protests; it’ll be government-building burning, widespread-looting riots.

If you want to do conscription, the kids have to trust the government not to kill them for oil.

I’m happy with Biden. Like, very happy. Biden’s awesome.

Obviously wasn’t God’s word, was it?

Alright, don’t everybody talk at once now. Tell us how this is Joe Biden’s fault.

Hear, hear! This is fantastic. The people who can change the state of Israel are the Israeli people. I hope their voices are heard.

The technology has to follow the legal requirements, not the other way around.

This is something that really needs to be taught better, at least in the US.

GDPR doesn’t mean that LLMs are forbidden in the EU, but it does mean that the companies that create them may be liable for damages. That said, the damages must be real. Actual damages is somewhat cut and dry (e.g., ChatGPT publishes defamatory information about you, and someone relies on it to your detriment), but GDPR also contemplates damages for distress (e.g., emotional).

If that’s true then the legal requirements will have to be changed …

I think this position needs to be rejected in the strongest possible terms. Our response to any emerging technology should not be “It’s too good not to have, so who cares if people lose their rights?” The right to privacy and with it the right to control one’s likeness, name, and personal data is a much easier right to conceptually trade away than, say, the right to bodily integrity, but I think we’ve seen enough dystopian sci-fi at this point to understand where the intersections might lie between other rights and correspondingly miraculous technologies. [And after all, without the combustion engine we probably wouldn’t be staring down the barrel of climate change right now.]

Should we, for instance, do away with the right to bodily integrity if it means everyone gets chipped shortly after birth? [The analogy to circumcision is unintentional but not lost on me.] After all, the chips mean that we can locate missing and abducted children easily and at trivial cost. They also mean that we no longer need to carry money or proxies for money. Crime is at an all-time low. Worth it, right? After all, the procedure is “minimally invasive.”

The point is, rights have to be sacrosanct. They need to be the first consideration, and they need to be non-negotiable. If a technology needs those rights to bend or give way in order to exist, then it should not exist. If it’s of sufficient benefit to society, then it can be made to exist in a way that preserves those rights, and those who are unwilling to create it in such a way should suffer the sanction of law.

That the evidence of guilt is extraordinary here is immaterial, because the law can’t distinguish between the evidence in this case and a wrongful conviction. You can say, “Well we only use this punishment when we’re super duper sure about it”, but the standard for any criminal conviction is already beyond reasonable doubt. There’s already supposed to be no question for all convictions, yet we still have people in prison today for crimes they didn’t commit.

That’s a surprise. In most US schools they’ll cut STEM and language and have rolling blackouts before they cut sports.

It’s a bad idea. The reason it’s a bad idea is the same reason that the death penalty is a bad idea: the US penal system frequently gets it wrong.

Thank you for this. That was a fantastic survey of some non-materialistic perspectives on consciousness. I have no idea what future research might reveal, but it’s refreshing to see that there are people who are both very interested in the questions and also committed to the scientific method.

But asking a party to amend the contract after you’re in breach and the other party doesn’t know it is a good way to get your contract rewritten by the court or worse.

Do people think women’s care only means hysterectomy and radical mastectomy? Does elder care only mean euthanasia? The problem isn’t that the term obfuscates particular procedures, because the particular procedures any patient receives are none of your fucking business. It’s that it’s used to hide assumptions that support demonizing the target group.

There are absolutely biological differences that influence what the standard of care ought to be, but that distinction only matters in policy because bigots and fascists need lines of division so they can restrict target classes from accessing healthcare.

If you want to have a conversation about puberty blockers, you can have that conversation. I think it’s a complicated subject. This issue is a problem because you want “trans care” to mean the least credible, most socially objectionable course of treatment for a target class of “less than” citizens you can imagine, whereas others just want healthcare. And whatever care that is is up to the patient and their doctor.

There absolutely is. Trans care is whatever care Trans people get. Just like women’s care is the care women get, children’s care is the care children get, along with elder care and care for the disabled. Unqualified “care” is the province only of white, gender conforming, AMAB men, preferably WASPs. You don’t hear as much about it now, but “black healthcare” is what gave us the Tuskegee syphilis human experiment.

Anything these bigots and fascists can use to distinguish the kind of care the “other” receives from normal care is a way to demonize the other and justify making their costs higher and their services worse, less, or outright illegal.

Sir, this is a Wendy’s.

Joking aside, what should they have done instead? Nothing? Because that’s the alternative. Is your position that these families would be better off if they got nothing instead of anything? The Democrats are making a bet here that they can campaign on expanding the child tax credit. Would reasonable, humane Americans prefer they’d gotten more? Of course, but the divided government isn’t a hypothetical: it’s reality. We have fascists in government because our moron neighbors put them there, so now we have to deal with them. I don’t like it either, but the response can’t be to throw up our hands, whine, and then lose when the citizens rightly decide the Democrats can’t govern. This isn’t a choice between sweeping progressive legislation and watered down half-measures. It’s a choice between any legislation and nothing.

The fascists aren’t an accident. They’re on the Hill because Americans put them there, and even if the Democrats sweep the elections in November, there is no scenario in which they do so overwhelmingly well that all the MAGA lunatics are no longer in government. These pricks are here to stay. And worse, they care a lot more about winning than governing, and this bill is a pretty clear demonstration that that fact is absolutely not true of both parties, and it’s not even true of the rest of the GOP, corrupt and compromised though it may be.

Most Americans–myself included–would rather have any improvement to the child tax credit than for the Democrats to engage in the same my-way-or-the-highway bullshit posturing of the QOP. We’ve seen where the moral highroading and stand-on-principle-until-the-axe-falls bullshit has gotten us. How about some actual government for a change?

Can I? Probably. Will I? No. I’m also frankly a little offended that you’re willing to devolve into explicitly racist utility hypotheticals. If that’s the tool upon which you need to depend for your argument, I don’t think there’s anything further to discuss. If you want to debate how many black people are worth one white person, you can have that conversation with someone else. Happy MLK Day.

I didn’t “slip” the word always in there. That’s the point.

In the past we did not have good methods or even good understanding of what kinds of indicators we should look at or how. The idea of privilege as a concept wasn’t even being studied until the late 1980s. So it was reasonable to use less precise predictive measures (like skin color) when looking at data in aggregate in order to remediate prior harm. But we’re not talking about anthropology here. We’re talking about policies that affect individual living persons, and if we want to know whether those persons experienced disadvantages, we can just ask them. This isn’t a matter of “Are you more likely to have suffered x disadvantage if you’re black in America?” It’s “Did you personally suffer x?” or at the very least “Did one of your ancestors personally suffer x?” If institutions are deciding they don’t need to ask that question because they can instead just screen all applicants of a particular skin color instead, they’re doing the exact racial stereotyping that we’re attempting to correct. That exact kind of screening is how the FHA and lenders prevented black people from owning homes historically: They decided that all black applicants were more likely to have certain bad qualities, and they categorically excluded them. Now, some well-intentioned but misguided liberals (and occasionally racists) are instead deciding that all black applicants have certain good qualities, and they categorically exclude everyone other than them. It shouldn’t take a huge logical leap to understand how that’s not better.

You’re right. All of those things are happening, and they’re despicable. The Israeli people should be marching in the streets, and Netanyahu should be tried as a war criminal.

I don’t live in Israel. And in any event, we’re talking about American domestic policy. The Israel state is an evil institution–like a lot of states–but the US interest in that part of the world means that the US is going to continue to give Israel its full-throated support, and it doesn’t really matter which party is in control of the US government. That one party is using that support to attack the other is just political theater, and everyone who studies global politics knows it.

Godwin’s maxim notwithstanding, the mention of Hitler and Stalin is actually a decent example: You realize Stalin was the US’s ally in World War II, don’t you? Sometimes nations don’t get to choose desirable company. The US’s reasons for supporting Israel may not be noble, but they’re rational. More importantly, what’s the alternative you’d prefer? The US should carpet bomb Israeli cities? let Russia have the Middle East (e.g., Syria)? or maybe just send a strongly worded letter? There isn’t a more humanitarian alternative that doesn’t have worse geopolitical consequences.

I agree. How do you identify otherwise advantaged people? Is skin color always a good indicator of privilege?

…

Maybe someone else will tell you. I’ve said my part.