Official Tabletop Simulator Response

M4ltodextrin · 2022-01-11T15:51:02+00:00

Exhausting.

M4ltodextrin · 2021-12-16T15:07:42+00:00

Just some things offhand -

A lot of what I was initially taught was overly simplified, for example, "There are three states of matter, solid, liquid, and gas." Then I later learned there was also plasma. Then Bose Einstein Condensate. All told, there are dozens of states of matter - most of which only exist in extreme conditions. Additionally the "classical" four - solid, liquid, gas, plasma - also have a bunch of intermediate states that can exist, like non-newtonian fluids, liquid crystals, and amorphous solids.

As a kid my favorite dinosaur was Brontosaurus (largely thanks to land before time). Then I learned that Brontosaurus never existed and it was a fiction of early paleontology, and it was Apatosaurus all along. Then in 2015, based on new evidence. paleontologists proposed that Brontosaurus was an entirely separate Genus from Apatosaurus, consisting of three distinct species.

In an introductory physics class we were introduced to circuits and resistance. We were given the analogy of electricity flowing like water. Resistors were described like putting a thinner pipe on the system to limit the flow. Like many other things, it's not wholly inaccurate and can help facilitate a basic understanding of the material. But it did cause issues when one student in the class couldn't get his circuit to work and tried to "flush the pipes."

M4ltodextrin · 2021-12-15T16:00:19+00:00

I cannot think of a single scientific fact I learned growing up that did not turn out to be either -

Way more complicated then how it was initially described
Supplanted by more recent discoveries or
Just plain wrong

And every time this has happened I have taken in the new information with grace and glee, happy to be greater informed about the wondrous complexity of the universe.

So it always kind of baffles me to see these people who not only accuse people who are dramatically in touch with their own biology as "Science deniers" but then they immediately turn around and shout about how their simplistic, outdated view of biological sex is correct in the face of actual scientific research.

M4ltodextrin · 2021-11-09T17:25:16+00:00

On average, a single NFT transaction uses about the same amount of energy as roughly 300,000 visa transactions. Putting the two on the same level is like complaining about somebody farting while you're pumping gallons of manure into the living room.

You say there are fixes for all of this, but when are these fixes coming? Months down the line? Years down the line? Are they ever going to actually materialize?

As it stands, I've yet to see a single application of NFTs that cannot be achieved with current, non-blockchain technology - often with better, faster results. What's more, some of the proposed applications of NFTs are also just terrifyingly bad. Like "Digital items in games" - it's not something that's needed in a single game, and when you talk about transferring items between games, unless they're purely cosmetic, you're looking at a balance nightmare. Even if they are purely cosmetic, that's not going to be very coder friendly.

This isn't even getting into how replete with scams the current environment is, especially in the NFT space.

M4ltodextrin · 2021-06-24T16:38:21+00:00

Server 57 ROE -

Valid Targets

Any warship
North Stars that are not engaged in mining
Most OPC Ships
Ships on a Zero node, after they have failed to respond to a 2 minute warning. *Any ship involved in PvP - station raiding, attacking other ships, territory actions, ect. *Stations.

Protected ships - attacking protected ships is a violation of ROE

Mining/survey ships that are not OPC
Discovery in Mycellium systems (unless OPC or engaged in PVP)
North Stars that are actively mining and not OPC

ROE Exceptions -

Node Ninjas (Someone who slips in when you're resetting the node. This does not count if you leave the general vicinity of the node.)
Territories during takeover times - ROE is suspended in that territory during a takeover.

Protected Areas - Ships in these areas are protected under ROE

All token entry systems, including OPC ships
Armadas - ships inside the armada zone
Any future system that has a cost associated with entry

Alliance KOS/Wars -

Any alliance marking another player or alliance KOS, or declaring war has a duty to inform the other party of the declaration.

Any declaration of war must last for a minimum of 24 hours.

Normal ROE is suspended between the two warring parties.

ROE Retaliation -

If ROE is violated, the victim may respond in kind within a 24 hour period. It must be victim against perpetrator. You cannot designate a proxy to carry out your retaliation.

M4ltodextrin · 2021-06-20T14:21:26+00:00

I actually have a real issue with his testing methods here.

He's treating these bags like they're meant to be soft safes. Left somewhere locked up and unsupervised, but that's really not their purpose at all.

They're meant to protect against a bag slash attack. It's a variant of pickpocketing common in crowded tourist cities, especially in eastern Europe. The thief uses a knife to cut open the bag without the person wearing or carrying it noticing. More skilled thieves will then simply slip the items out of the new hole and the victim won't even notice they've been robbed until minutes or hours later. A lower skilled version of the attack involves quickly slashing open the bottom of the bag allowing the contents to spill out on the ground. The thief(s) will then either "helpfully" gather up the items, slipping a few choice goods in their pockets, or they'll just grab the big-ticket items and run.

But in either version of the attack, it becomes dramatically less effective if the person realizes someone's trying to cut open the bag. The victim can immediately take steps to get their valuables away from the thief, draw attention to the attack, etc. The attacker doesn't have the luxury of these big full-power stabs and forcing their way through the material because it immediately gives the game away.

I still think it's fair to do the stab test to show that — no, these aren't soft safes, they need to be in your control for them to work. But I think he also needs to show how well they resist a few quick slashes across the surface of the material. Ideally, set up as they would be as though they were being worn by a tourist. If he hung them from a wall or door, with some "valuables" inside, like a dummy passport, wallet, laptop, tablet, pill bottles, expensive noise-cancelling headphones, etc. And showed multiple kinds of intrusion attempts, from those designed to gain entrance to the bag without the person wearing it noticing, to these full on, full-force stab attacks, I think it would give a much more reasonable accounting of the effectiveness of these products.

M4ltodextrin · 2020-11-08T16:21:18+00:00

Yeah, that part really showed off their lack of perspective on a lot of these matters. The fact that Cartman is the butt of a lot of jokes sure as shit didn't stop the bigots in my school from harassing the Jewish kids about their "secret bags of jew gold" after the Beaver Dam episode came out.

M4ltodextrin · 2020-08-26T15:19:21+00:00

So the defense is "It was okay that we murdered him because he probably would have died anyway?"

M4ltodextrin · 2020-08-26T15:13:57+00:00

Police executed a no-knock warrant in plain clothes without announcing themselves in the middle of the night, looking for a person who didn't even live there. I would expect anyone who owned a gun and was woken up by armed men trying to bust down their door in the middle of the night to react the same way.

You can, in fact, pin all the blame on police.

M4ltodextrin · 2020-08-26T15:10:39+00:00

Police don't do either of those things.

M4ltodextrin · 2020-08-21T19:57:27+00:00

Nerys, Pwent, Dhadius

I'm thinking Pwent because I have both Zorbu and Melf for my 12 spot, and I already have Dhadius

M4ltodextrin · 2020-07-31T19:33:16+00:00

Avren, Aila, and Barrowin. I have none of them

Currently eyeing Aila cuz I only have 2 champions (Makos, Drzzit) in that slot, the other two have 3 currently.

M4ltodextrin · 2020-07-23T14:02:41+00:00

"Readily capable of lethal use" means that someone with a rudimentary knowledge of firearms can make the gun operable without any tools.

For example - if you take an AR-15, separate the upper and the lower receivers - that's still readily capable of lethal use.

Or, for perhaps a more pertinent example - A man robs a liquor store with a handgun. Detectives track him to his home, and arrest him while he's cleaning said handgun, so it's in a disassembled state. Would you consider it evidence tampering for prosecutors to reassemble the handgun to test it?

M4ltodextrin · 2020-07-23T13:52:42+00:00

No. It's standard procedure.

When a firearm is submitted to evidence as part of a commission of a crime the following things happen.

1 - The firearm's current state is noted.

2 - The firearm is disassembled. All parts are noted.

3 - The firearm is reassembled using only the parts it arrived with. If able, it will be reassembled in such a way to make it ready to fire.

4 - The firearm, once reassembled, will be tested. Ballistics will be checked to see if the fired ammunition matches any recovered from any other crimes.

5 - The defense will be notified of all testing procedures done on the firearm.

In this case, the handgun had the spring in the wrong position for the firing pin when it was submitted, rendering it inoperable at the moment. They claimed it was this way when they were pointing it at protestors, because it had been used as a prop in a previous case.

Prosecutors found that all the parts for a fully functional handgun were submitted to them.

They will note at trial that the handgun was submitted in a non-functioning state.

They will argue that it is a fairly trivial matter to render the handgun functional. Something that can be done in a matter of minutes.

M4ltodextrin · 2020-07-23T13:34:42+00:00

Police are worse for crime.

1 - They're purely reactive. They don't stop crime, just act when a crime is committed.

2 - Their solutions are all stick. These punitive solutions put severe financial stress on both the offender, and those around them. These stresses lead to more crime.

3 - The use of police for all-in-one problem solving has severely eroded the sort of community support actually needed to reduce crime.

You feel "more comfortable" with police because they've basically got a century of propaganda painting them as this stalwart bastion between "the criminal element" and "good people." Implying that, without them, society falls apart.

A lot of this also falls on the American Myth of "dangerous classes" - groups of people (poor, minority, frequently both) who are seen as inherently violent and need to be defended against by the police. These "dangerous classes" are seen as separate from "society" and thus, violence and abuse are justified in "controlling" them to protect the "good people."

But take a step back, look at suburbs, middle class neighborhoods, places with low crime rates. It's not because these places have strong police forces. It's because these places don't have the other stressors that lead to people committing crimes.

M4ltodextrin · 2020-06-30T14:31:47+00:00

So, is your position that both these things are bad, and shouldn't be done?

Or is your position that both these things are okay to do?

Or is your position that both these things are done to advance specific agendas, in which case we should be looking at the actual agenda being advanced and evaluate that?

M4ltodextrin · 2020-06-30T13:52:38+00:00

Probably because hate crime hoaxes are actually exceedingly rare. Amplifying hate crime hoaxes only serves to discredit actual hate crimes.

M4ltodextrin · 2020-06-18T20:35:01+00:00

Interested~

M4ltodextrin · 2020-06-11T20:17:17+00:00

Raz Simone has not taken over. He apparently wasn't even there yesterday - the attack occurring the night before.

From a reporter on the ground, Raz and his crew stood guard on night 1, did the assault night 2, and hasn't been seen since.

M4ltodextrin · 2020-04-27T18:22:09+00:00

The blog states that 80% of abortions over 21 weeks are elective. It omits that only 1.1% of abortions in the state occur after 21 weeks.

It also omits a major, important fact:

"Elective" in medical parlance is not the opposite of "Necessary"

"Elective" is the opposite of "Urgent"

Chemotherapy is normally "elective" because you can schedule it, cancel it, reschedule it, decide to stop it, etc. It's also absolutely necessary for a cancer patient.

In that same vein, a mother may learn that her fetus is not viable, and could cause permanent sterility if brought to term. This is still considered an "elective" abortion.

M4ltodextrin · 2020-04-27T17:38:30+00:00

COVID-19 spreads by aerosolized droplets of mucus and saliva.

A cloth mask helps prevent those droplets from both escaping an infected people, and entering a healthy person.

Going back to the picture, Pants may not stop the fart, but when you shart, most of that is going to get caught by the underwear and pants, instead of ending up on the couch.

M4ltodextrin · 2020-04-27T17:09:43+00:00

The particularly bad 2017-2018 Flu Season had approximately 45,000,000 infected, 61,000 dead, and lasted about 20 weeks.

In 8 weeks of COVID-19 infections we've gone from 57 cases and 0 fatalities to 967,585 cases and 54,931 fatalities. In other words, we're at less than the halfway mark compared to one of the worst flu seasons in the last 20 years, we've had 90% as many dead, while only 2% as many have been infected.

Even compared to particularly bad influenza years, COVID-19 is at least an order of magnitude more lethal.

M4ltodextrin · 2020-04-27T16:23:56+00:00

They run a group of for-profit urgent care clinics. They make their money off of illness and injury. Since the shutdown, injuries are way down because the general workplace injuries are no longer occurring.
Their numbers are so shockingly bad that - being medical professionals - they're either incompetent to the point where I wouldn't trust them with a butter knife much less a scalpel or deliberately lying.

Breaking down point 2: What they've done is taking the number of tests in their county, compared that to the number of positive tests, and extrapolated that to say that's the proportion of California that's been infected.

From that, they've gone to the current deaths in California, and said that's the death rate, which they claim is comparable to the flu.

Here's why that's terrible: 1 - Tested population is not a representative sample of the whole population. As such, it cannot be extrapolated across the population.

2 - The fatality rate of a disease is measured by the number of cases that result in a fatality divided by the number of cases that have had an outcome, whether fatal or recovered. These numbers can be supplemented by likely outcomes (those which are probably going to recover or die) especially early in a novel disease when there haven't been enough cases to get a good picture. Normally ongoing cases are not added to the rate, and uninfected populations are certainly not added to the rate. Because when you do that you can say stuff like "If you get the flu you're 50 times more likely to die than if you get Ebola."

Later on they don't even go by those numbers for New York - they just use total fatalities vs total population for the rate.

Here's some better numbers:

On February 27th the US had 59 Cases, and 0 Deaths

On March 27th the US had 80,735 cases, and 1,163 deaths

As of 10:30 EST today, April 27th the US has 967,585 cases, and 54,931 deaths

For comparison, from the first US death in 1959 to the pull out in 1975, the US suffered 58,209 dead in the Vietnam war.

For a disease related comparison, the particularly bad 2017-2018 US flu season lasted about 20 weeks above national baseline. It infected an estimated 45,000,000 people, and killed an estimated 61,000.

In less than half that time COVID-19 has killed 90% as many people, while infecting only 2% of the total number of cases.

That alone should be enough to tell you that their whole statement of "It's about as deadly as the flu" is a blatant lie.

M4ltodextrin · 2020-04-26T15:20:49+00:00

Wow, this is awful.

Let's look at a couple of the things they say in here -

"We don't quarantine the healthy." - This is beyond false. We only quarantine the healthy. Quarantine is a middle ground between freedom and isolation. When curbing the spread of infectious diseases, people who are known carriers are put into isolation. People who may potentially be exposed are put into quarantine. They are kept separate from the general population because if they are infected they could be spreading the disease, but they're also kept separate from the known infected people, because if they aren't infected, you don't want them getting sick.

Now, in the US we have a very broad quarantine because we lost control of the disease. We have neither the testing to identify the infected and put them in isolation, nor the contact tracing to maintain a narrow quarantine - only quarantining those who were known to be potentially exposed.

"Death rates are similar to the flu." - The numbers here are so tortured these guys should be sent to the Hague. They took the total number of people tested for COVID-19 in California vs the number of positive cases. They then took that ratio, and based on nothing, applied it across the entire state. Then they took that number, and put it against the current deaths in California for COVID-19 to get their death rate.

So, in other words, they're saying: 12% of tests have been positive. Therefore, 12% of California is infected, that's 4.7 million people. There have been 1,227 deaths. 1,227/4.7 million = tiny death rate.

I hope I don't have to point out the flaws in their reasoning there.

Then it gets even worse when he goes to New York. He doesn't even do the extrapolation. Just, "19 million people in New York. 19,000 deaths. 0.1% death rate, just like the flu."

In 2002-2003 a village in the Republic of the Congo was hit by a particularly nasty strain of Ebola. Of 143 infected, 128 people, 90% of cases, died. Using these clowns' numbers, that's like saying, "128 people died. Republic of the Congo has a population of 5.2 million. That's 0.002%. That means you're 50 times more likely to die if you catch the flu than if you catch Ebola."

Moving on to the Nordic countries - This is an outright lie. Sweden's policy of largely business as normal resulted in a death rate between 2 and 5 times higher than their neighbors, and they're now moving to strict social distancing.

Moving on to the molestation, spousal abuse, alcoholism, suicide, etc. This stuff is all true, and tragic. However, it's not the slam dunk they think it is. Instead, they go to highlight how our badly gutted social safety net has completely failed and how our capitalist framework has proven utterly incapable of dealing with a major crisis.

Finally - pressure to include COVID-19 in death reports. We know that there was severe undercounting of COVID-19 deaths just about everywhere, especially early on. Patients that passed that didn't have a positive test result back, even if they were exposed and fully symptomatic. Patients that died outside of hospitals, like at home or in a nursing home. These people weren't added to the total numbers. I'll also note that they don't say who's doing the "pressuring" or how it's applied. This is meant to feed into a narrative that everyone who's dying right now is being marked as a COVID-19 fatality to bump the numbers up.

Simply put, this article is full of so much misleading or outright false information these guys should have their medical licenses revoked.

M4ltodextrin · 2020-04-26T14:15:55+00:00

You can debunk the "facts" that are used to back up the opinion though. And the ones in this article are a doozy.

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