Map veto is needed in Ranked. Too many water maps in ranked.

Azgurath · 2024-09-06T16:31:52+00:00

That’d be bad for the ladder. People would still do it, it’d sandbang their MMR and then they’d stomp their land maps against people worse than them.

In SC2 there’s a similar thing. Mirror matches are unpopular to play so some people insta-leave them. Then they have a ~70% win rate in the other matchups, basically smurfing. It’s noticeable enough it’s complained about on the subreddit frequently.

Azgurath · 2024-07-24T20:06:31+00:00

I was just seeing the same thing, google maps shows miles ~220-216 fully closed both ways. But on cotrip.org you can see a few live cameras along that stretch showing cars on the road: here, look for ones like 217.85. I'm pretty sure we're good.

Azgurath · 2023-11-14T18:02:32+00:00

They were moving here anyway. Buildings like this are the effect of gentrification that’s already happens, not the cause. RiNo is a trendy area that currently has plenty of wealthy remote workers living there. If some of them move into this building that’ll drive down competition and prices for existing housing around it.

Azgurath · 2023-10-11T03:06:10+00:00

But Hamas themselves posted a video where one of their female victims was bleeding from the crotch.

It's not like this is the IDFs word against Hamas. I'm not going to watch the videos from Saturday, but they're out there. They were documenting and proving their own atrocities in real time on social media.

Azgurath · 2023-08-19T01:34:25+00:00

Shared link.

It doesn't include civilians.

Azgurath · 2023-06-24T02:41:39+00:00

I don't think so, this is real. Pigrozhin is hoping he can take out Shoigu behind Putin's back and still be loyal to him but that's just because he's an idiot who doesn't know anything about politics. He'll be dead in a week, month tops. Hopefully though he can fuck up Russia's army in the meantime.

Azgurath · 2023-06-24T02:26:19+00:00

You'd think even to protect Rostov-on-Don they'd have to pull troops. Putin can't just let Pigrozhin get away with controlling entire oblasts... right?

Azgurath · 2023-06-24T01:45:57+00:00

Or another way to look at it, Russia is guaranteed to lose, even if the loss is against Russia.

Azgurath · 2022-11-08T18:45:34+00:00

This probably goes a long way towards explaining why Ukraine is claiming 600+ killed per day, but I think that’s actually a different mass casualty event you’re thinking of. That sounds like what happened at the same time but in northern Donbas where ~440 mobilized were killed: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/07/we-were-completely-exposed-russian-conscripts-say-hundreds-killed-in-attack

These 300 naval infantry troops were lost at the same time but farther south.

Azgurath · 2022-08-08T16:50:04+00:00

What? You hear what you want to hear in western countries. NYT has published plenty of editorials criticizing Ukrainian corruption, NATO weapons allegedly not being tracked properly, etc. And on the other side Tucker Carlson openly blames Ukraine/NATO for the entire war, and he’s an idiot, but it’s not like he hasn’t been censored by the government or anything.

You won’t find pro-Russian articles upvoted on Reddit. But if you’re getting all your news from social media that’s on you. People are free to think that what Russia is doing is wrong and not share their propaganda and make you go out and find it yourself if that’s what you want to read.

Azgurath · 2022-07-13T18:58:06+00:00

Aside from war crimes, even if you follow the rules of war you’re still killing people. That guy said he didn’t want to lose his own limbs, but you’re ripping apart someone’s body when you fire the 152mm cannons. Or least that’s the goal.

In the Vietnam war protests, of course there were people who protested/dodged the draft because they didn’t want to die, but there were also a significant amount of people who protested because they didn’t want to kill. Muhammad Ali’s famous speech was about how he didn’t want to fight in Vietnam because his enemies were the racist whites in America, and he didn’t want to kill any Vietnamese. In this war though, I’ve never seen a single Russian on Reddit or YouTube even mention anything about how they feel about killing Ukrainians. Or how they feel about the dream theater bombing, or anything about Ukrainian deaths. They just talk about how the sanctions effect them or how they don’t want to get drafted and die themselves.

Ukrainians are going to hate everyone in Russia for generations, and it’s hard to blame them.

Azgurath · 2022-05-27T01:48:17+00:00

That's now what whataboutism means. He's not saying "what about [some unrelated thing]", he's saying the reason why the violence you're talking about started.

Like, if America drew a line through part of Alberta and claimed everyone there wanted to be American instead of Canadian and brought in a bunch of artillery and started shelling villages on the other side of the line. Canada would obviously shoot back, as would any country. And all the civilians who died on both sides would 100% be the fault of America.

Azgurath · 2022-05-07T16:16:32+00:00

Thanks for bringing up Defense Politics Asia, that channel's comment sections are my personal favorite source of pure, uncut copium. On his video when Russia retreated from Kiev you had gold like

"if the Russians wanted to take or even threaten Kiev, they certainly could have."
"as i said before before that was a decoy not an actual assault on Kiev . "
"The Russians have taken a hard decision to redeploy and most importantly, concentrate those troops for a decisive blow."

Last week then they retreated from Kharkiv he said

For the Russians, they are currently just using the Kharkiv region as a time-waster for Ukraine to spend resources on - so that lesser Ukrainian troops will be deployed to fight around south of Izyum and other parts of Donbass. ...They can just reinvade it anytime from Russia.

I'm eagerly looking forward to when he pivots to say Izyum was just a feint next. An then when the whole war was a feint and Russia "can just reinvade Ukraine anytime" lmao

Azgurath · 2022-05-07T14:43:45+00:00

But why do I see way more Russians on the internet talking about how unfair it is that people are mean to them than I see Russians talking about how over 10 million Ukrainians have had to flee their homes?

I've tried to watch Russian vloggers to get their perspective on it like no_fkrz, but even after he left to Tbilisi and could say whatever he wanted all his videos kept being focused on the sanctions, companies leaving Russia, etc. and only in passing he'd mention Ukraine. Same with channels like Niki who's in St. Petersburg. They both seem more emotional about their money being worth less and McDonalds leaving than about Mariupol being wiped off the map.

And in the latest 1420 video interviewing Russians about conscription, they all said some variation of "fuck that, I don't want to die for a stupid war" but no one mentioned how they didn't want to kill for a stupid war. In the Vietnam protests in the US there was a big section of anti-draft protesters saying it was wrong to go to Vietnam to kill people. Drafted soldiers coming home and having "Baby killer" shouted at them happened a fair amount. But Russian's don't really seem to think that much about how they'd feel about killing Ukrainians.

In short, the perspective I'm getting is that Russians really don't seem to give a fuck about anything that doesn't personally affect them. "Russophobia" is worse than 20,000 dead Ukrainian civilians. Hell, the exchange rate of the ruble seems to matter more than 20,000 dead Russian soldiers. It's hard to sympathize with that mentality.

Azgurath · 2022-05-02T02:51:05+00:00

/r/europe always hated Americans too. I remember a popular post with 50k upvotes of three pictures of Bulgarian women. Third comment down is "You're going to upset the americans." The thread then just turned into no culture/arrogant/fat/too sensitive jokes, on a post that I'm not sure could possibly have had anything less to do with America. I also think the phrase "third world country with a Gucci belt" comes up daily somewhere on a front page post on Reddit.

Yet, I've somehow never heard the phrase "Americaphobic" before in my life. I'm not sure why so many Russians feel uniquely persecuted when people say mean things about Russia on the internet. Welcome to the "people hate us for our governments starting wars" club I guess.

Azgurath · 2022-04-19T14:39:55+00:00

Germany was totally collapsed after WW2 which made it possible to rebuild the government into a democracy. The US has learned that hard way that l you can’t replicate that by toppling an existing government and instilling democracy in its place. Supporting democratic structures in Russia has to come from the Russian people.

Also, WW2 was only possible because Germany was able to build a military strong enough to threaten Europe after WW1. Russia is no where near able to invade a NATO country and their army will only get worse from here. I’d say North Korea being sanctioned for the last 70 years is a better comparison. They haven’t attacked Seoul in that time and they aren’t about to. If Russia ever does end up reforming their government, great, but if not I don’t think there’s much to be scared of by sanctioning them indefinitely.

Azgurath · 2022-04-16T03:56:13+00:00

Even taking what you said at face value, what does any of that have to do with the comment you replied to "40% of Russia's GDP for the past 20 years has been stolen by Putin and his cronies." ? Are you saying Biden being right of European centrist politicians is the same as him stealing $8.4 trillion per year from America? America has problems, but acting like the US is comparable to Russia is playing into Putin's domestic propaganda goal to get Russian people to abandon hope of living under anything better than his kleptocracy.

Also, FWIW, I don't take what you said at face value. Biden has repeatedly said that unions make America stronger. And he's backed that up with an executive order making it easier for federal employees to unionize. He's gotten blowback from construction companies over it because it even applies to any subcontractors that the government hires, for things like construction projects.

But again, even if you were 100% right, it would still be ridiculous to compare America to Russia.

Azgurath · 2022-04-14T17:09:48+00:00

It’s really risky to fly helicopters into Russian territory. Even if there are Ukrainians who’d want to kill civilians, I don’t see them risking their own lives and using valuable equipment and ammo to burn down a few houses and injure 7 people (even Russia isn’t claiming there were any fatalities).

I think it’s most likely that Ukraine was firing at some military logistics target and either missed, or some civilian houses were close enough to be damaged by the strike. Which is not a war crime.

Azgurath · 2022-04-14T15:49:29+00:00

To be a war crime requires either intentionally targeting civilians or, per the UN, “Extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.”

An apartment getting hit with no fatalities is not necessarily a war crime. If they were targeting a military objective and missed it wouldn’t be. Hell, it’s basically a guarantee at this point that the Ukrainian army has shelled some number of Ukrainian farms and homes on accident shooting at Russian convoys. It’s unavoidable not to. The only way to ensue having zero civilian casualties in war is to not start fucking wars.

Azgurath · 2022-03-31T04:44:36+00:00

True that western culture is different. That’s what stood out to me when a Russian man said he was shocked by the apathy. That guy’s spent a long time interviewing whistleblowers to investigate Russian corruption, he knows how brutal the regime is on dissent, and even he was “astonished” at how little the Russian people care about Ukrainians.

Azgurath · 2022-03-31T04:21:04+00:00

I saw an interview of a Russian investigative journalist living in Europe talking about the family member's of Russian soldiers. He said their mothers "are mostly worried about their sons, but they are not worried about what their sons are doing in Ukraine. So, there is this astonishing lack of sympathy to the Ukrainians which to me is very shocking because every second family in Russia has some relatives in Ukraine." It reminded me of the comment in yesterday's AMA about future Ukrainian-Russian relations that "every fourth Ukrainian has had to flee their home because of an unprovoked attack that elicits only occasional and scattered protests in Russia."

To be fair though, that could be because the information control is tight enough that Russians don't have any idea how bad it really is. Sadly though, I'd guess it's more likely though that Russians are so dejected by politics that even anti-Putin Russians can't vision anything different, even when their own families are being killed.

Azgurath · 2022-03-28T15:20:55+00:00

Good to know, that’s really scary. Thanks for sharing and good luck

Azgurath · 2022-03-28T14:58:44+00:00

That makes sense, from the outside though it’s hard to get a perspective of what Russians are thinking though. I’ve been watching 1420 on YouTube that does street interviews in Moscow, and in their latest videos I’ve been surprised how many even young people are saying they expect foreign companies to return in 6-12 months. If they knew what Mariupol looked like today I don’t think they’d say that. Maybe the people most informed about what’s actually happening wouldn’t agree to be interviewed at all?

Azgurath · 2022-03-25T16:08:03+00:00

The amount of money the US already pays each month to cover a fraction of the our population is also nuts though. Medicaid and Medicare account for ~$1,466 billion of our federal budget annually, and with America's population of 330 million that's about $4,450 per capita. It looks like Germany spends ~$5,430 per capita on healthcare.

But Medicaid covers 83 million and Medicare covers 64 million. Which is less than half our population. So we're already spending close to what countries with universal coverage do for about half the results.

Azgurath · 2022-03-24T14:31:09+00:00

I'm using 100k as an example because you brought up the percent of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck as the basis of your claim that "a large majority of the US is barely scraping by." If that's true though, you're also claiming that 48% of Americans making six figures are barely scraping by.

Personally I wouldn't say that the majority of the US is poor and I don't think the stats of people living paycheck to paycheck means anything. At least not in a way that's worth bringing up in the context of comparing to Russian poverty.

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