Lurker > adjl

DragonClaw01 posted...

now no one cares, especially with Omicron strain being pretty weak.

As much as people want to believe this, the most optimistic data so far suggests a 29% lower hospitalization rate than other variants, and those are very preliminary studies with a lot of caveats attached to them because of the methodological limitations. Some other studies are suggesting little to no difference, and others still suggesting the rate might even be higher for Omicron (though with similar limitations). If that optimistic data proves accurate, that's a significant reduction, but it's not like the disease has become harmless, and that reduction could very easily be nullified by an increase in case numbers (specifically, a ~40% increase).

People have really latched on to "It's a milder illness!" because it's so nice to have a glimmer of hope after so long, but things are going to get quite a bit worse if that hope isn't tempered with an appropriate degree of caution.

JOExHIGASHI posted...

I'm not actually against what he says though.

Then why object to him saying it?

That's a choice.

I feel like Comic Sans has been making a comeback in the last couple years, in weirdly professional places where it wouldn't have been a good font choice even when it was in vogue.

Cobrander.

JOExHIGASHI posted...

He should mind his own country

"He's right and I can't think of any way to refute that, but I don't like that, so I'm going to insist that he shouldn't be saying anything at all rather than trying and failing to argue against it."

Grim Dawn was great. It didn't really hold my attention the first time I tried playing it (made it through Normal, but drifted away when I started running into issues surviving in Veteran), possibly because I'd stopped playing PoE relatively recently, but I picked up the remaining two DLC's I didn't have back in January and gave it another shot. 400 hours later, I drifted away again, but I don't see that as a problem.

Bulbasaur posted...

this game has too much stuff and is overly complicated

Eh, it's not that bad. Most significantly, it's almost impossible to permanently screw up a character even if you are struggling with some of the mechanics, so you've got plenty of freedom to just play around with it.

HornedLion posted...

I would say some s*** like, We need to make it so that politicians cant own stock but lets get serious thatll never happen.

It really does need to, though. They also shouldn't be able to own any investment properties, at least not if they're in a position to make decisions that will affect housing and/or commercial tenants. Also no presence on any corporation's board.

captpackrat posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/5/2/8/AAQwHjAACusI.jpg

https://outline-prod.imgix.net/20161213-5nxPvAYoTjr79seBRLoN

Somewhere in the 100-500 range, I think. The most expensive one I can think of off-hand was buying my parents a weekend in the hotel where they spent their honeymoon for their anniversary, which cost ~$400, split between three of us (they loved it, which worked out because my dad died eight months later and that ended up being their last anniversary). It wouldn't surprise me if I've spent more than that, but it's probably still in the 100-500 range.

That birdie was Zeus, who considerably exaggerated that. "Followed me around" translated roughly to "made a habit of disagreeing strongly with me whenever we crossed paths because we have fundamentally different world views." Generally speaking, whenever Zeus claims to be the victim of something, you should take that with several grains of salt.

Zeus posted...

I'll take overly dramatic nonsense for $100, Alex.

You think people shouldn't avoid giving money to companies that do things they don't like?

Arishok posted...

It's a known fact that ladders can't climb. Should have made your base on a building.

Squad 4 tried that. The chain ladder they made to get up there unfurled itself in the night and hauled up a team of guerrilla stepstools. There were no survivors.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

The people buying them are in on the scam. They launder money amongst their group and pay the artists a commission to handle their dirty money.

I don't think it's even that clever, overall (though I'm sure money laundering happens, as it does with the "fine art market"). There are just a lot of stupid people out there that don't want to be left out of an opportunity to spend money.

11110111011 posted...

I really don't care enough about that to not eat there.

Who cares if gay people can get married, as long as you get your sandwich, right?

UnMead posted...

NFTs are for real not that complicated Im not sure why the majority of people seem to be bending over backwards to intentionally refuse to learn or understand how they work and why they have value

They're literally a matter of paying money to receive a receipt saying that you paid money. It's a very secure receipt, so nobody else can claim to have paid for yours unless you sell it to them, but it's still nothing more than a receipt. The only thing you can do with it is sell it to somebody else, who can then proceed to similarly do nothing with it. Meanwhile, every one of these transactions consumes a buttload of electricity for the sake of all that nothing. They have value purely because people arbitrarily decided their FOMO was bad enough that they wanted to give them value.

BEERandWEED posted...

I'm currently trying to train a ladder to attack people on command. I'll get back you to on that.

*4 weeks later*

It's day seven of the ladder apocalypse. We lost Jake yesterday, leaving just six of us as the last known vestige of humanity. Our underground base remains secure, but by the sounds coming from above, I think they have learned to dig. It's only a matter of time now.

11110111011 posted...

Whom you buy from is generally a silly thing to worry about from the customer point of view unless they are selling a bad product, are trying to rip you off, or the company is in a position of being sold to inferior management (if you value / use warranty & customer service).

Unless you want to actually care about more of the world than just what products you end up with, since then there are plenty of other factors to consider. When you give money to a person or company, you are directly contributing to whatever else they want to spend money on. In the case of Chick-Fil-A, you get a tasty sandwich, but you're helping to fund the abolition of gay marriage.

In a world full of stupid nonsense that people waste ridiculous amounts of money on, NFT's have got to be some of the stupidest nonsense.

McSame_as_Bush posted...

Imagine a product, like a ladder, that has 5% market share but is responsible for 75% of all fatal ladder accidents. At some point you have to stop blaming user error, and concede the ladder has a design flaw.

Depends why those accidents are happening. If there is a user error that is common to all of those accidents, blaming the ladder instead of that error isn't reasonable. Arguably, designing the ladder to be resistant to that error would be a good idea, but given that the fatal ladder accidents in question roughly amount to dropping the ladder on somebody else, the argument can just as easily be made that those committing the error should be held accountable for it.

Or, to be less vaguely analogous about it, maybe we should be focusing on prosecuting people who cause their dogs to develop aggression issues instead of on banning specific breeds. The previous owners from whom problem pit bulls (or any other dogs) are rescued should be prevented from ever having contact with another dog again, by whatever means necessary.

Revelation34 posted...

Such a ridiculous law.

Evidently, the American public can't be trusted to have a food item in their hands and not immediately stuff the entire thing into their mouth with no regard for how much of it is actually edible.

funkyfritter posted...

I find it hard to be critical when social media influencers with millions of followers do dumb stuff. If it works out for them, great. If it blows up in spectacular fashion, easy content.

Pretty much. Either way, they're both going to end up benefiting from this. Hopefully it works out for them, for the sake of increasing the world's total happiness, but I think they'll be fine if it doesn't.

NeoSioType posted...

Maybe that's the reason the new PSO2NGS expansion was a worrying flop? Everybody is playing or waiting to play FFXIV.

I haven't seen anyone really talking about it but <10% of the 60K from Steam charts came back.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I got bored and drifted away from PSO2 shortly before the NA release of episode 5, and that's why I haven't dipped my toes into NGS. I'm vaguely interested, but it's not a high priority for me.

JF7X posted...

Why is CRT being debated now, when it's been in academics and schools since the late 1960s and early 1970s?

Mostly because the right is butthurt about BLM and it turned up in one of their searches for race-related things to be offended by.

Its more of a Christmas song than My Favourite Things. I've never understood how that one gets included in so many Christmas playlists.

Between omicron spreading like wildfire and a lot of people eschewing restrictions in favour of holiday stuff, it's really getting around.

acesxhigh posted...

It is basically a "problem" in every game with established meta. But I think that's the way it should be. I don't like when developers come in and say actually yes it's against TOS to play a certain way. You have to let a community self-regulate or things just get too "state-sanctioned-fun" for my liking.

Yeah, as bothersome as it is to have a dungeon run completely fall through because all of your DPS thought they should spread their points evenly across the tree and use every single one of their abilities in sequence instead of following any remotely logical rotation, officially punishing players for playing poorly (beyond the informal punishment of failure) is just not a great way to do things. Punish actual griefing, sure, but letting player bases self-regulate is good.

dioxxys posted...

It's no wonder that when we do hear about dog attacks, a majority of the time it's a pitbull.

That's less a matter of pit bulls being significantly more dangerous than other large, strong breeds of dog, and more a matter of pit bulls being fairly popular for people that want guard/attack dogs, who often mistreat them in training them for that role. If not for pit bulls, another, similar breed would hold that position and be roughly as dangerous.

The core issue is not that pit bulls are strong enough to cause harm, it's that they're routinely abused in ways that promote aggressive behaviours, which rescues often try to train out of them. That abuse is a large-scale problem that won't go away by banning any specific breeds

Zeus posted...

...so you're suggesting that what, because the government mistreated black people it should turn around and mistreat white people?

What is your basis for believing that CRT "mistreats white people"?

Kyuubi4269 posted...

As you already stated in the beginning, that's an autonomous response. Reflexes aren't courageous.

And what was it I said right after that?

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Removing a violent dog before the incident is very efficient

Well yes, that would be the ideal, but we're talking specifically about the response to the crisis situation. Preventative measures that had to take place beforehand aren't really an option once the crisis begins.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

and the scale of the threat was fatal.

The scale of the threat was one child in life-threatening danger. A larger-scale threat would be multiple people in life-threatening danger, in which case risking one life for the sake of saving several is a much easier cost-benefit analysis.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

If she just fled, she'd deserve much worse than prison.

Consider a variant on the actual scenario: She charged in to help her son, but was killed/incapacitated almost immediately. The son continued crying, given how upsetting the situation was, which continued to agitate the dog and triggered another attack, this time killing the son because there was nobody to intervene. Her other child came in to see what all the noise was, also began crying, and also got attacked by the dog, resulting in another casualty. The father comes home half an hour later than he did and finds three corpses and a very agitated dog.

That's a completely plausible alternative, had the father not happened to come home when he did. To be clear, I don't exactly like the idea of sacrificing the kid, and I can't imagine any parent would actually make this decision because of the emotions involved. I just recognize that, given that the incident had already begun (so preventative measures were out of the question), the best way to minimize the total loss of life would be to run away and lock the dog in with the kid. It's a similar principle to securing your own oxygen mask in a plane crash before doing your kid's or anyone else's: You're the only one with the power to help, but if you're unconscious/dead, you can't help anyone, so risking or even outright sacrificing another person to preserve your power to help is going to amount to the most good and minimize the overall risk.

Again, though, that's my armchair analysis of the situation with the benefit of hindsight. I very much doubt any parent would actually min/max their children's mortal peril like that, mid-crisis. That's just the optimal strategy, provided we accept minimizing total loss of life to be the ultimate goal of whatever approach is taken.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

I'm coming from the angle that she should be willing to die to solve her mistake as she should be aware that she is fully responsible for the incident and the child deserves life more than her.

So... "she should have felt that she deserved to die for this mistake." Basically the same thing, so my assessment remains the same.

Only if they're the only seats available, and that's pretty rare.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

It's not courageous to fix your mistakes,

Courage is a matter of personal feelings and thought processes. She wasn't thinking about fixing her mistake (since that'd be a really weird thing to think about in such a situation), she was thinking about protecting her kid. That's courageous, however badly you want to rationalize it otherwise from the comfort of your computer chair and with the benefit of hindsight.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Everybody has a moral obligation to risk their lives to fix a problem they made that threatens other people's lives.

That really depends on the scale of the threat and how efficient risking their life will be. If it's a matter of just one other life and there's a solid chance that sacrificing herself wouldn't actually save the kid, giving her life is not only not a moral obligation, it's not even a good idea. The optimal course of action would actually have been to lock the dog in with the kid and seek outside help: Same number of dead people, minimal risk of the dog attacking anyone else and fewer injured people overall. She'd likely end up jailed for that, of course, so you've got that consequence for screwing up you wanted, and poor dad's only left with one traumatized kid to raise on his own instead of two.

Sacrificial justice rarely helps anyone. If the only way to solve the problem entails risking her life, then sure, risk her life to get the problem solved, but you seem to be approaching this with the mentality of "she deserved to die for this mistake," and that's just silly and rarely reflects the optimal solution.

ArvTheGreat posted...

whats Wrong with crt Arv use to watch crt all the time

CRT's are miserable. They're bulky, heavy, extremely unbalanced, usually very unpleasant to carry because the bottom has open plastic edges, and to top it all off, they're also fragile and were relatively expensive so if any of the aforementioned issues causes you to drop it, you're screwed. I'm glad flat panels have taken over, if for no other reason than that I don't have to move CRT's anymore. The improved picture quality is just a bonus.

Whatever the next letter in the Greek alphabet is, I would presume.

It used to be my go-to pop, but I've kind of gone off of pop in general over the last few years. If I had to choose a pop to drink, I'd probably still take it over most other options, but generally speaking, I'd rather just have water.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

I was noting the moral justification,

The question is about the moral justification, it's about courage. Having the courage to step in and risk (and ultimately give) her life is a matter of a split-second judgement, not any post facto moral justification process. That's the basis for calling her a hero; there's no need to read any further into it.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

You can't heroically intercept your own screw up, that's your moral obligation, to not try to fix it is immoral. The fact she didn't deal with it earlier makes her worse than someone who didn't create the problem and thus didn't need to act, not better.

Heroism requires that you are doing beyond what is expected of you, this is the bare minimum after what she did.

That you think anyone has a moral obligation to sacrifice their life to fix a mistake is more than a little concerning, especially on this sort of relatively minor scale. That's not a remotely reasonable way to solve problems.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Every country had the potential to operate an absolute lockdown and kill off the virus

Eh, no they didn't. The notion of the entire world shutting down for 3-4 weeks to let the virus die out is a nice fantasy that sounds really simple and effective on paper, but there's really no way to actually translate that into the real world. If nothing else, the extent to which so many people have resisted and outright defied such simple restrictions as "wear a mask" tells us we'd never actually get everyone cooperating in a real lockdown, so that would either create a need for enforcement (expensive, ethically questionable, and results in exposures that would probably end up nullifying the whole exercise anyway) or just break the whole thing because of a few non-compliant douchebags wandering around freely.

Even if we assume that everyone would cooperate, the logistics of pulling it off would be absolutely insane. Right off the bat, you've got the challenge of getting a month's worth of beans and rice to everyone's door. Utilities would need to continue operating (at least power and water, and Internet/cell service would also need to be maintained at least well enough to communicate new directions to everyone), so those workers would still have to be out and about. Some utilities would be able to function by having their crews live on site for that period, effectively isolating them, but then there's the risk of an outbreak within one of those crews crippling the local infrastructure. Farms and ranches would need to continue to operate, since you can't just stop tending crops/livestock for a month and expect everything to be fine when you come back. Household repairs could possibly be ignored if we're okay letting a few unlucky people die to E. coli after their sewers stop working, but that's a hard sell.

The biggest mistake pretty much everyone has made is relaxing whatever restrictions they have had in place before case numbers actually got low enough for that to be a good idea. A lot of that comes from political pressure, which has been a major problem through this whole ordeal.

agesboy posted...

xiv toxicity swings the other way where some people absolutely refuse to listen to the most banal of advice, like "tanks should turn on tank stance" or "sages should use kardia on the tank at the start of dungeons"

I remember WoW had a fair bit of that. You'd get players just doing absolutely ridiculous things and resisting any sort of corrections or complaints about their performance under the pretense that "it's my $15/month and I'll play how I want!". It was kind of a problem.

Zeus posted...

Most states have laws against keeping crocodiles as pets yet pitbulls kill far more people every year.

To be fair, there are considerably more pitbulls being kept as pets than crocodiles. That distorts the comparison as bit.

Nichtcrawler X posted...

Yes, between the "Wappies" (Dutch word that gained a new modern meaning during the pandemic) and the rich countries just neglecting their promises to the third world concerning vaccines, the current international situation is certainly a lot worse than it could and should have been.

Eeyup. Things had been relatively good around here, but then one of our university sports teams came back from another university where a sizable outbreak was happening and failed to isolate, some members of which attended a large convocation ceremony that was held in violation of public health guidelines and turned into a super-spreader event. We've had more cases in the past week than we have in the entire rest of the pandemic combined, and the province as a whole has gone from being internationally recognized as one of the best responses overall to having the highest per capita case rate in the country.

DrPrimemaster posted...

Someone I hung out with tested positive, rip timing

One of my coworkers tested positive a week after I'd gone out for drinks with her and some other people from my team. The bar in question was identified as an exposure site, so I'd already been tested and found negative before her result came in (she figures it came from her daughter), but it's still kind of alarming how close I came.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

It absolutely does, she did as human guilt should force her.

Do you really think that the thought process of "my kid's getting mauled by the dog, I need to save him" actually takes long enough to process such a complex emotional response as "now that I consider the risks associated with adopting a rescue pit bull, I recognize that I bear responsibility for this current crisis, and because of that guilt, I'm going to intervene even though I stand a good chance of being injured"? That's not how brains work, dude. If you want to flippantly dismiss literally sacrificing her life as being a simple emotional response, at least suggest that it was maternal instinct. That's still a ridiculous way of looking at things (since you're actively trying to come up with an excuse to not applaud somebody for meaningfully risking her life, and that's never going to not be absurd), but at least it's remotely plausible.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

it doesn't absolve her of her original action.

It doesn't have to. You can screw up and also be heroic. Had she survived, her heroism wouldn't change the fact that she shouldn't be able to adopt another dog like this, but it would nonetheless have been heroic to intervene.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

If your country taught your own history, you'd know we abandoned the US to fight the French as the US was a loss maker, it wasn't worth keeping.

And yet the Brits continued to fight the Americans. Funny how that worked. Similarly funny that fighting another war to keep Canada (where I'm actually from, you silly goose) was worthwhile, despite their considerable geographical similarity. It's almost like the issue wasn't actually that the US wasn't worth keeping, it was that it wasn't worth drawing out a losing war over.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Britain includes Scotland, and Scotland's children all have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, their brains don't exactly work right.

Based on a quick google, Scotland's FASD incidence is around 3-5%, while the most robust study I could find for England found a 17% incidence. You should really check statistics before letting your slavering nationalism make you look silly like that.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

There is nothing superior about gratuitous french

There's nothing gratuitous about using french words for french phrases. "En masse" means "in bulk," which makes actual sense in this context. "On mass" means you're sitting on Catholics, which doesn't make sense much of anywhere.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Unlike you, I speak French, however since I'm speaking on an English speaking site, English is most appropriate.

If you wanted to speak English instead of French, you should have spoken English, not spoken French but written it using the closest available English homophones. That's never the most appropriate choice, and instead just means you're joining the ranks of "bone apple teeth" and "koo day tah."

Heck, even "in mass" would have been a valid sentence, but you chose to pretend you were speaking French with English words for some reason.

Amuseum posted...

you vaxxers are the ones treating vax as the all-or-nothing solution that will solve the pandemic. that 100% vax rate will eliminate the virus.

Herd immunity will eliminate the virus, or at least squash it to the point of no longer being epidemic (this is the definition of herd immunity). Whether or not the available vaccines are capable of reaching the herd immunity threshold without additional measures remains to be seen, particularly with vaccine-resistant variants thrown into the mix, but it remains true that higher vaccination rates than what the US can currently claim will be needed to get the virus under control. Depending on how well boosters are able to improve the situation, new vaccines may need to be rolled out to deal with omicron, but we'll see how the data pans out as more people get boosters.

Nobody (that knows what they're talking about) is saying that 100% vaccination will make the whole thing disappear. That would likely have been the case before delta, but delta reduced the vaccines' efficacy by enough of a margin that further efforts to reduce the herd immunity threshold would likely still be needed. What people are saying is that vaccines are a critical part of the fight against Covid and that higher vaccination rates are going to be needed to wrangle it (and, in turn, that anti-vaxxers efforts to keep rates low are interfering with that). Omicron hasn't changed that, it's just making other measures (likely including boosters, for those that finished their first pair of shots a while ago and have been waiting for the rest of the country to get with the program) more necessary.

Amuseum posted...

well the nonvax hasn't been able to leave their houses, while the vax are going around spreading the virus.

I'm not sure what land of fantasy victimhood you live in, but that's not actually the case in the vast majority of the US. The US' vaccine mandates have, by and large, been pretty toothless and inconsistently enforced in the areas where they've actually been put in place, and even that's a pretty small minority of regions. The unvaccinated still make up a disproportionate number of the country's cases, which becomes even more exaggerated when you look at hospitalizations, and more still for deaths. Nobody's actually banned from leaving their house; the worst "violation of their rights" they'll suffer is being turned away from a restaurant or two.

Amuseum posted...

yet at the same time, not only not take blame and shame when new variant is brought back from overseas via a vax carrier. instead put the entire blame on the nonvax who has done nothing wrong in this case.

Tell you what: You find me (credible) data that indicates that the unvaccinated make up less than 40% of the US' Covid cases, and maybe I'll humour your efforts to claim that the vaccinated are to blame for its spread. Bonus points if you can also find that data specifically for omicron, but the point loses a lot of its weight when you consider that omicron is known to be vaccine-resistant (which we can mostly blame on the unvaccinated population for keeping case numbers high and providing the opportunity for variants to arise) and is therefore expected to spread among vaccinated populations.

Nichtcrawler X posted...

What are you talking about? We got a new lockdown here...

The Netherlands are generally being more sensible about these things than the US. Large swaths of the US are doing nothing different, with some even welcoming omicron under the belief that it will out-compete deadlier variants.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Why call her a hero? That's like calling a pyromaniac a hero for saving people from a fire they started.

Because she sacrificed her personal safety and ultimately her life to save somebody else. That she created the situation in the first place doesn't change the bravery needed to intervene like that.

MartianManchild posted...

Friendly reminder that omicron was brought over to the US by a fully vaccinated individual(s). Maybe instead of forcing vaccinations on millions of individuals when obviously they didnt stop this latest variants, we stop the few people from traveling to foreign countries.

Even at its strictest, locking down travel isn't a guarantee of safety. The world needs a certain degree of international travel to function, so there's always going to be some risk involved. The regions that have successfully kept Covid under control have generally done so by being very strict about how people come in and requiring incoming travellers to isolate for two weeks, but that's more than most Americans are willing to accept regardless of their views on vaccines, so I can't see that working.

Moreover, while vaccination wouldn't have been perfect protection against Omicron arriving on US soil, a higher vaccination rate would nonetheless reduce its spread and severity (as well as doing the same for the variants already running rampant). I don't know why you people insist on treating vaccination as an all-or-nothing solution, but that's not how it works at all.

Fam_Fam posted...

its also the fact that we literally can't stop it now.

A lot more could have been done to slow it down, and still could, but that's not going to happen so long as the prevailing attitude is "why bother?"

Veedrock- posted...

Do people really still think we have an agreement with some entity that'll make a virus just disappear if we lockdown for an arbitrary amount of time?

I don't think anyone's presented it as a matter of the virus disappearing after an arbitrary lockdown period (aside from the extreme fantasy scenario of the entire world locking down completely for 3-4 weeks so existing cases can't spread and the virus dies out, but that's neither arbitrary nor a remotely feasible idea). It's a matter of slowing things down until other solutions are developed and implemented that can reduce the risks associated with returning to normal. These include mask mandates, plexiglass barriers, and vaccinations. Unfortunately, when a significant number of people are outright refusing to participate in those solutions and/or other precautions are lifted before case numbers reach a level where those precautions can manage them, it becomes necessary to lock things down to get case numbers back under control. Otherwise, case numbers remain out of control and you get problems like ICU's being unable to accept new patients.

The other night, I had a dream where I farted, which I thought was too quiet to hear, but then my girlfriend was like "did you just fart?" and I said "yeah," then she said "oof, that's a rank one" and then I sniffed and it was indeed a rank one. Then the dream ended.

Krazy_Kirby posted...

mods aren't part of the game, they don't count

I don't think they'd count for this specific question, but they absolutely should be counted in answering the question of "which version is better?". Whether the game was designed around modding or not (and many actually are, which makes the comparison trickier), modding is a part of the end user experience, which is ultimately the only thing that needs to be considered when comparing how good different versions are. All other things being equal, a version of the game with mods available is going to be better than a version without.

I imagine it would depend on when they went deaf.

MagicalPrincess posted...

And all of them have a right to sue since it's completely unconstitutional and illegal to force anyone.

This remains just as false and inapplicable as it was the first time you posted it. I don't know what you're expecting to change by saying variations of the same point over and over again.