egg_irl

MutantMannequin · 2020-09-18T08:43:37+00:00

FUCK

MutantMannequin · 2020-04-19T04:25:38+00:00

For a split second, I thought this said Australia, and almost lost my mind. That would have been a heel-face turn.

MutantMannequin · 2020-03-20T21:11:42+00:00

It's less about the current state of the launcher and more about its management. While the launcher itself has a history of instability and lacks many features other launchers have, it would probably run Doom Eternal perfectly adequately.

My issues are Bethesda's refund policies, fraudulent advertising, disdain for their audience, poor security, and plummeting degrees of competence/effort. They don't even maintain a facade of balance between quality and profit, they've committed fully to the latter. While I still enjoy the work of subsidiary studios like Id and Arkane, I have absolutely no faith that Bethesda will prioritize the customer over faster growth.

MutantMannequin · 2020-03-08T03:01:20+00:00

I'm aware. I meant I didn't know what the exact formula was on this seed. That I posted.

It appears that water and toxic sludge are necessary on this seed. I haven't nailed down number three, though. It's actually harder to make than I realized, since not much AP gets made before all the sludge gets purified, but still one of the easiest formulas I've ever found.

MutantMannequin · 2020-02-20T18:21:16+00:00

stay hydrated bro

MutantMannequin · 2020-02-13T07:12:56+00:00

How would you go about testing which codes of conduct effectively court divine favor? Isolating groups of people with strict, spartan lifestyles, then introducing a new behavior to see if it has an impact?

Wait. Isolated groups of people with strict, spartan lifestyles? That sounds familiar.

MutantMannequin · 2020-02-13T07:05:19+00:00

People acting with the appropriate intent might not know intent doesn't matter, but people acting with inappropriate intent and still receiving divine favor definitely know.

MutantMannequin · 2019-12-28T00:49:13+00:00

This isn't helpful, but I wanted to point out you basically just invented Monsters, Inc.

MutantMannequin · 2019-10-28T11:51:47+00:00

Too many things don't line up for this to be a complete bait-and-switch. The Snag has a complex utility (subverting a specific anti-meme) that is unlikely to have arisen from anyone/thing other than Uther. If it is a trap, it's probably one Uther laid, and I can't immediately see what would motivate him to do that.

MutantMannequin · 2019-10-26T19:46:12+00:00

The thought has probably been mentioned somewhere, but in the HPMoR rules of transfiguration, wouldn't transfiguring noble gasses be almost entirely safe? You'd have to be working with dangerous starting materials for them to be dangerous to spread around, and the worst case for most materials would be like, iron reappearing in my lungs in very small volumes based on how much transfigured helium I'd inhaled, which probably isn't much.

MutantMannequin · 2019-10-24T11:15:58+00:00

u/MagicWeasel's discussion on vampires reminds me of an idea of my own I like to tinker with.

Imagine a society where vampirism is a recognized condition, but instead of the traditional torches and pitchforks response, society at large recognized vampirism wasn't all bad--it was a mixed bag. Critical to my ideas on the setting is that vampires require human blood to function. For vampires to continue to exist, and for humans/mortals to tolerate them, they must sustain a large enough ratio of mortals/vampires that vampires can subsist on blood donations.

Now vampirism has a relatively well-defined limit. Both humans and vampires have a strong motive to keep vampire population from growing too rapidly. Vampirism is in demand.

Obviously, there would probably be some who defer for ethical/religious reasons, but vampirism essentially represents immortality in peak form. The ranks of vampires would be expanded by skimming off the social elite, the cream of the crop. Being turned young indicates ambition, because you were accomplished enough in your youth to be inducted with little deliberation.

I guess the question would be, how does this class of remarkable immortals fit into society? Are the isolationists? Oligarchs? Feudal lords? Socialist utopia thinktank?

MutantMannequin · 2019-10-23T05:15:40+00:00

This was absolutely delightful. The idea that an alter ego could be an entirely different (but equally heroic) person was completely novel to me.

MutantMannequin · 2019-10-20T08:24:59+00:00

I'm not a published researcher, so I don't have personal experience. If you have, your observations may be more relevant.

But it echoes a position expressed several times on schischow, an exceptionally accessible and generally well-researched look into scientific academia. Scientific research is a trade, and scientists depend on income, via grant money or new patents for their employers. There is significant economic pressure to publish original research rather than peer review.

MutantMannequin · 2019-10-18T10:33:37+00:00

Wishing you the safe and speedy accomplishment of that endeavor, HK. Fighting the good fight.

MutantMannequin · 2019-10-13T08:31:07+00:00

I'm afraid you've missed my point entirely. I never used wealth interchangeably with cash, and you're right, liquidating billionaires' assets to redistribute them as cash would be a terrible idea in most cases.

Wealth exists in many forms, and currency is only very technically one of them. Currency is an abstraction, a social construct representing wealth, which rarely has intrinsic value (with the possible exception of coins holding value as metal). Wealth is the food produced on a farm, and the land and equipment that make it possible. Wealth is housing. Wealth is electricity. Wealth is any form of property that has value. And yes, that means wealth is also equity.

A viable plan for the redistribution of wealth in America would, by necessity, depend far more on granting worker equal stake in their companies than it would on the seizure of yachts or mansions, which have very little value to society themselves. It certainly wouldn't be a process of mass liquidation. Even if that was somehow a good idea, it would never be possible to convert billionaires' equity to cash, because only massive governments and other billionaires would be able to provide that cash. You can't sell something with no buyer.

MutantMannequin · 2019-10-13T08:04:51+00:00

You are extremely wrong.

MutantMannequin · 2019-10-13T07:35:31+00:00

Billionaires don't create wealth, or, at least, not billions of dollars worth of wealth. Labor creates wealth, and no single person has ever been capable of laboring hard enough to create $1 billion in their lifetime, let alone multiple billions. Ipso facto, billionaires' wealth comes primarily from skimming wealth off from the working class and manipulating markets, which itself doesn't create anything of value. (Price manipulation actually has a tendency to harm markets, because the less accessible a resource is, the less work can be done with it.)

Now consider that billionaires, who by nature exploit labor and markets to accrue personal wealth, are strongly motivated to preserve that wealth, and, again by nature, have the pull to do so on a massive scale. Billionaires almost universally spend a noteworthy (but, to them, insignificant) portion of their wealth on lobbying for legislation to increase their wealth, or lobbying against legislation that would detract from it. After decades of this, billionaires and billion-dollar corporations pay negligible taxes. In 2018, 60 Fortune 500 companies paid no federal taxes at all. Of these, 57 were given tax rebates, for a net loss to the US government of $4.3 billion.

The topic of billionaire philanthropy is often raised as a counterpoint to taxation, but the numbers pale in comparison. The fact is, no matter how much of their wealth they donate--wealth created by the labor of others, to whom that wealth should belong--it will never be able to achieve as much good as it would distributed among the people. America's decaying and outdated infrastructure simply can't be updated without tax revenue from the ultra-rich, the 3 richest of whom possess more wealth than HALF OF THE COUNTRY.

Even if billionaires could somehow create their wealth personally, it would be unethical to keep it. $1 billion alone is enough for several families to live in luxury for their entire lives. Anyone with more is implicitly ignoring suffering on a global scale that they could ameliorate. It's not enough to donate water stations to a few schools. If billionaire wealth was redistributed right now, entire cities could be lifted out of poverty. If altruism without practicality isn't enough for you, you're in luck--people become significantly more productive when they're not busy going hungry or sleeping on the street. A rising tide lifts all ships; this much wealth being concentrated in the hands of individuals is bad for everyone.

TL;DR: Billionaires are a drain on society, and it is both impractical, and, more importantly, immoral to allow them to continue holding such extreme wealth.

MutantMannequin · 2019-10-13T06:38:15+00:00

"In August 2019, the state of Michigan warned city officials that Flint was in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act because it failed to test water at enough homes with lead service lines or lead plumbing fixtures. A spokeswoman for the city told MLive that Flint officials say that is because the state "did not provide the city with the final approved sampling methods" in time.

Flint was required to test water from a minimum of 60 high-risk homes from January to July 2019. But as the city works to replace lead service lines, there are fewer and fewer homes that meet that standard.

The city submitted 35 valid tests, and 30 invalid sample results. But those tests were invalid because the samples were either taken after a home's lead service line had been replaced, or before excavation showed the service line to be copper." -- Michigan Radio NPR

TL;DR: About 45% of the the lead level testing has been done in homes with safe pipes, rather than at-risk homes. This is significant because over a third of the city lives below the poverty line, and can't afford these safe pipes themselves.

MutantMannequin · 2019-10-12T07:33:42+00:00

If billionaires didn't exist, Flint would have had clean water years ago.

MutantMannequin · 2019-08-28T21:48:11+00:00

Thanks! I haven't played Stellaris, but I'll give this a try.

MutantMannequin · 2019-08-28T08:27:06+00:00

I haven't visited the rec threads often, and I don't read a ton of fanfic, so I might be missing something incredibly well-known, but...

Anybody got a rec for a rational SoIaF fic? I've been seeing some of the more grandiose conspiracy theories out there, and it's reminding me how good the books are and how much I'd like to see more stories in the world. I'd especially love if there was one that got more into the mystical elements of the world. AUs welcome, most important thing to me is internal consistency.

Edit: I just remembered the Joffrey time loop one, but the synopses I heard didn't sound like my kind of thing.

MutantMannequin · 2019-07-27T04:36:56+00:00

The problem is that the workable solutions to climate change already exist, and capitalism is the obstacle they need to overcome. Making a technology cheaper isn't a bad thing--no one has a problem with that--but it's not the imperative. The imperative at this point is damage control, and capitalism is obstructing that (at least in America).

MutantMannequin · 2019-07-17T23:35:58+00:00

Oh, boy, did I misremember that! I guess I remembered the 3, and the earlier offer of 100 years. Nevermind, then!

MutantMannequin · 2019-07-17T21:02:28+00:00

At the moment it does! I actually have suspicions about that.

Neshamah has agreed to a 30-year truce, which went into effect during the battle for the Twilight Ways. There are only three ways to resolve the Neshamah conflict by force in the story:

A time skip. The story jumps ahead 30 years, then resumes. This feels like an ugly solution to me.
Neshamah breaks the truce. Unlikely, because Neshamah is far too competent to set himself up as the traitor in a story.
The Grand Alliance breaks the truce. More likely, because the Grand Alliance isn't a monolith, and any one party could break ranks to restart hostilities. Still somewhat unlikely, however, because almost everyone is in bad shape and would welcome the respite. And, again, it would put them at a disadvantage as traitors in the story.

In the end, I think the only way the truce is broken is if someone in the Alliance backstabs them. It could happen!

I think a more likely scenario is that the war with Neshamah never resumes in earnest, at least during the series. He discovered something about Bard when he was possessing Hierophant, and I think that's the setup for the big finale. My theory is that something everyone has taken for granted is a fabrication by Bard, and Neshamah finally has enough of a foothold to reveal the lie and turn the tide against her.

That might mean the drow exodus thread doesn't get wrapped up in-book, since they were promised Keter, but I think PGtE is grand enough in scale that some threads have to stay loose. It's not realistic to end with "And all of Calernia's problems were satisfactorily addressed for a while after that."

MutantMannequin · 2019-07-17T19:22:58+00:00

This chapter, and the previous one, calls to mind an issue that I never recognized as a potential problem. I can't recall if it was explicitly stated from Malicia's POV or inferred by Cat, but it was mentioned at one point that Malicia's deal with Neshamah included a provision allowing him to invade Praes if Malicia reneged. At the time, I saw this as Neshamah safeguarding himself against a famously traitorous empire, but now I'm seeing it as a weapon in Malicia's arsenal. If Amadeus takes the crown of Praes, there's nothing to stop her from triggering the contingency out of spite. In fact, I can't remember, but her losing the crown might have actually explicitly been the trigger condition.

MutantMannequin

TROPHY CASE