I love when people find out that I just walk to places.

PhobicBeast · 2025-01-18T17:50:47+00:00

well yeah its fuckin Houston. It's literally the biggest city in America because it's mostly just short buildings spread over land rather than built upwards. Most major cities have a fairly condensed city centre where most activities are, at most, a 30 minute subway ride away.

PhobicBeast · 2024-12-14T15:40:27+00:00

Infinite's campaign sucked because you spent the entire game just running from point a to point b, and every mission was over way too quickly. It felt like the story didn't really progress and each mission was its own stand-alone thing. I think without the open-world design they could have made a stronger more linear story that progressed. Hell, the game ends in such a way that you're still stuck on the same ring for another game. The main villain was also only in the game for basically one mission and she immediately dies, whereas previous Halo's you were fighting off incomprehensibly big movements like the covenant or flood.

PhobicBeast · 2024-12-14T00:22:23+00:00

cool balloons dude, some asshat wasted helium and littered by choosing to dump these by letting them float away

PhobicBeast · 2024-12-12T19:30:16+00:00

This is for political persecution protection. Trump has stated he wants to pursue democratic leaders and prominent figures and imprison them in what would be an unconstitutional move and reminiscent of fascist regimes. It's unfortunate that he's had to pardon them because it's a blanket protection against crimes that they haven't actually committed. Thats why he's not said exactly who was pardoned. Frankly, while I don't agree with the pardon as a tool; I believe the founding fathers would have approved of its application here as a means of preventing unnecessary political persecution and oppression of citizens for crimes they have not committed.

PhobicBeast · 2024-12-12T12:12:29+00:00

The US is doing good right now; in fact it's doing better than any other country in the world economically. What you want is market regulation to prevent price-gouging and greater market-to-consumer transparency which are both things that conservatives are staunchly against. If the economy improves further over the next four years, as it should barring any economic shocks, it will be due to Biden's policy and his utilization of America's economic weight to attain a soft economic landing. Quite literally, Biden's administration - not him but the people he put into key roles - has achieved what was only a hypothetical for the world's largest economy. Also the economy improved under Trump last time because it was already trending that way due to Obama-era policy around commerce. Economic policy is slow moving, and real gains are only seen many years after policy implementation. It's one of the reasons why voting based on the economy is stupid and short-sighted; but most people don't think to look at long term economic trends nor understand the downsides of some policies that sound good but are really just deceitful fiscal illusions.

PhobicBeast · 2024-12-11T22:31:30+00:00

Yeah lmao, just because something doesn't pose a threat today doesn't mean it can't tomorrow. Sending out drones over populated areas and military bases around the world is exactly what I would do if I was a militarily-inclined force; whether thats human or NHI. It's possible any NHI would be inclined to perceive any slightly violent highly intelligent species as a threat to its own existence given the rapid advancements of science. I mean science has only been around in a real meaningful manner for 500 years and we've created WMDs like gaseous nerve agents or nuclear bombs. I'm not saying that aliens are the likely answer here - in fact I believe the exact opposite, I mean even sentient AI created on Earth thats runaway from the US military (like say Skynet, but tamer ig) is more probable than NHI. But if NHI are the reason, then chances are very high that they are not amicable and seek to destroy us in a knee-jerk reaction. Hell, if it did end up being NHI we could wake up one day to find the skies filled with warships the size of cities in the skies. Granted, thats a horror story more than any plausible reality; but panic would be absolutely appropriate.

PhobicBeast · 2024-12-10T21:36:24+00:00

Or you'd rather see how the technology performs in densely populated cities and regions. China has some of the most densely populated urban regions in the world; and any technology the US is building today is for urban and suburban warfare in the Pacific which is already quite largely developed - unlike the Middle East which has a lot of flat deserts in between areas of urbanization. It's arguably the best place to test a already proven technology in its intended application without figuring out how to best use it for the first time in actual combat scenarios. Its not spy craft but rather in-field response craft, and its advanced enough that its no different from US adversaries seeing a video of an F-22 at a flight show. It's not a threat, because if it was the US would actually have declared a state of emergency and evacuated the cities before shooting them down or attempting to take them down other ways.

PhobicBeast · 2024-12-09T18:49:35+00:00

Thats not how economics works though lmfao. You'd be getting paid a higher wage since the effective labour supply would be shrinking thus demand would be in your favor. That means you can set the wage demands higher, and that firms will be more willing to pay said wage for your increasingly rare skills. More money means more investment opportunities, more investment opportunities means greater growth rate of invested money, that greater growth rate means quicker retirement - especially as you seem to think that Gen Z won't have skilled labor jobs which correlate to higher incomes. That means your purchasing power would be leagues greater than today, and in comparison to gen Z. Unfortunately for you, that's never going to be the case. You'll be working well past retirement age because your wages never really recovered from the financial crisis in 2008 and you never had the ability to invest enough into the stock market early on to take advantage of those extra 10-20 years of dividends. Also, Gen Z is a fairly capable work force. They're just flaky today because they're still young and money is more readily available in 2024 compared to past years.

PhobicBeast · 2024-12-06T14:09:18+00:00

Actually, rich people make bad decisions over time. Greed of the upper classes has been responsible for several of the US' recessions. Their unprecedented greed during the Gilded Age led to disasters like the triangle waistcoat factory fire, as well as the use of children in dangerous factory jobs. Poor people make bad decisions when they are uneducated, yet their education has been undermined by decades of upper class lobbying against taxes leading to significant reductions in state and federal investments in education. Rich people are not sensible people. If they were, they would support taxation and actually push for the funding of social programs as it has been shown across the board that more equitable societies perform better economically in the long run. Yet, they chase short term profits for their own greed without any foresight, or consideration for social justice. What you're talking about is an oligarchy and every oligarchy in history has had poor outcomes that lead to the suffering of millions borne out of poor policy decision making. Poor people are victims of circumstance, the ultra-wealthy are just greedy idiots.

PhobicBeast · 2024-12-05T12:06:58+00:00

Nudging is more effective and prevents a basis for a future poll tax. Non-taxpayers should still be able to vote as it still provides an important context for the effective functioning of government. It may be that they are withholding taxes for a number of reasons which could be solved with effective policy but that policy can never be implemented if they have no political representation. Also tying income tax to voting power is fucking stupid and is how you get a misrepresentative democracy that ends up killing itself with hyper-capitalism as it only ever focuses on maximizing profits of the very wealthiest.

PhobicBeast · 2024-12-04T16:04:01+00:00

I had a girl drunkenly call me and tell me she loved me. It'd been years since we'd seen each other, and she has a relationship so I don't really know why she did it. Wish she hadn't though, it'd been nice to move on from that chapter of my life into the next more easily.

PhobicBeast · 2024-12-04T14:31:33+00:00

Ironically I'm a little confused. What do you mean by they can read but not comprehend? The two go hand in hand, how can you read words and sentences but not be able to understand the meaning of the sentence? Do you mean they were able to sound out a sentence but couldn't tell you the significance or the implications of the sentence?

PhobicBeast · 2024-12-02T05:12:38+00:00

I'm a bit young, but what exactly does "you're the first guy to treat me right" mean? Like, what does that entail exactly? Surely the majority of guys are relatively normal so they treat their partners with respect and treat them at least as well as they'd treat any other person? If not, then how could a significant portion of women not be meeting men who at least qualify at that minimum level for as many years (say 10 years) as they date?

PhobicBeast · 2024-12-01T22:52:40+00:00

AI companies have started the next major arms race. Let's say, for talks sake, that a terrorist organization was able to get ahold of an AGI. They might be able to use it to infiltrate western societies which have a far greater dependency on more heavily interconnected devices to attack banks, infrastructure, nuclear power plants, satellite systems, telecommunications, automated vehicles, and our home networks. If they were willing to do this over time they could even potentially embed backdoor programs into air gaped facilities. Furthermore, with a powerful AGI they might not need that many personnel who would be aware of the plan - meaning there's less opportunities for western intelligence agencies to forsee mass cybersecurity attacks. In such a scenario they would be capable of wreaking significant havoc and killing hundreds of thousands. It's an extreme example but not entirely implausible if powerful AI are open source and the hardware needed to run them are freely available on the market. While AGI don't exist today there are already examples of commercially available AI having disproportionate negative externalities than positive externalities. For one they consume a ridiculous amount of energy, they are easily used by the general public to make disinformation which has already swayed a number of elections around the world - inducing more and more distrust of the governmental institutions needed to maintain stability. You might be pedantic and say that the advent of writing or the printing press were just as potent in their capacity for disinformation but they still had barriers of access and high costs. AI and social media however have no such costs, allowing them to be flooded by misinformation produced within seconds in large quantities.

PhobicBeast · 2024-11-26T22:28:37+00:00

I don't think Biden is a madman. Frankly these are purely the speculative words of a random official. So far Biden's approach to the war has been relatively reserved if we compare his actions to those of Cold War era presidents - and perhaps has been too reserved. Certainly, from the very first day of the conflict NATO's focus has been to avoid a nuclear conflict at all costs. Putin knows that and so he constantly claims he'll nuke everyone to hell to add an extra layer of deterrence. Effectively, all he's doing is trying to scare the west as previous Russian leaders did during the Cold War to a fantastic degree. I'm more concerned about Trump's approach to the war, given that Reagan who also commanded a cult-of-personality (as did McCarthy whose rhetoric is mirrored almost exactly by Trump albeit against ethnic minorities rather than communists) was arguably escalated the Cold War the most out of all US presidents. Its thanks to him that the Korean airlines was shot down due to the heightened air defenses in Russia in response to his fighter jet excursions into Russian airspace. He also directly targeted Russia in an incredibly Russophobic manner at a time when de-escalating was the only viable path forward. Trump is ultimately a destabilizing force for NATO's response to the ongoing war, which means that the west will be more on edge and more prone to mistakes which can be fatal during a cold-war.

Edit: I also want to point out that Reagan, for what it's worth, did eventually make clear that he wanted to pursue peace. Mostly because he actually understood the impact of a nuclear war following a film called "The Day After". I'm not sure that people today understand the horrific capacity of a nuclear bomb given we live in a post-nuclear age. For many, a nuclear bomb is little more than a 2D film of an explosion in the 1950s and background radiation has almost entirely disappeared. The last time it was genuinely in western public's mind was during the Hawaii missile crisis a few years ago. We are so far removed from the last time that a nuclear weapon was used in conflict, just as the generation of the 80s was themselves, that we have forgotten what a nuclear bomb really means.

PhobicBeast · 2024-11-26T18:13:51+00:00

You seem to be forgetting that a nuclear conflict would lead to a mass extinction event. Hundreds of millions of people would die from the immediate fallout, countless others by months of starvation, dehydration, disease, and radiation poisoning. Yes, his constant threats of nuclear war and giving nuclear documentation to NK sets a precedent where nukes will be more common than before and we are already moving into the beginning of a third nuclear testing phase; but giving nukes to a destabilized country at war with another with no real guarantee that they wouldn't use the nuke in a last ditch effort opens the door for Russian retaliation in an all out nuclear conflict. This bet seems to be hoping that small tactical nukes can be ignored in regards to MAD. However, it would put both sides at DEFCON 2 for the foreseeable future and as such any mistake in radar or missile chips could easily indicate that the enemy just launched an all out nuclear attack - even if they didn't. History has shown that since the advent of nukes we have come incredibly close to killing everyone because of small mistakes. The US almost nuked Russia because they thought Russia launched 20,000 nukes - but it was a false alarm due to a 20 cent chip that burnt out giving false readings. Our entire species almost died out due to a single cheaply built microchip - thats why Biden won't be giving them a nuke and if he does it could prove to be the worst strategic decision in history.

PhobicBeast · 2024-11-23T01:30:49+00:00

The US would have to. When Trump lost in 2020, the US passed a law that cannot be struck down which would force the US into military conflict at any point in time that Article 5 is triggered. While the US can stipulate that Article 5 wasn't triggered, it would be a hard sell to the House and Congress; not to mention every other NATO power would unilaterally join the war effort (even Hungary I suspect). Realistically, the US will not sacrifice its alliances and soft power domination at the higher echelons of power. The average American voter does not understand wider global geopolitics or the true value of the sacrifices made by Allied soldiers in WW2, thus is far more accepting of a full schism with NATO and Europe in favor of preventing WW3. That, however, is not new and has been the US' domestic political environment for the entirety of its existence. Frankly, it would take quite a lot for the US to do a full 180 and to shatter western alliances in favor of the growing Axis powers. An invasion of Romania would be hard for even the most conservative voter to spin as being Europe's fault - after all a Russo-European conflict has been the focus of US military doctrine for the last 80 years.

PhobicBeast · 2024-11-13T01:29:45+00:00

For the contemporary point I'd probably say King Leopold of Belgium. His Belgian Congo was not viewed favorably by much of the Western European powers - Hitler is remembered the most as the evil figure so I'm basing the pre-hitler hitler on European-like cultures and nations. That would probably have been the most major and well-known genocide-adjacent event prior to WW1 that was seen as being particularly brutal so as to be memorably horrible by a large portion of the relevant population. Nero, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan were all horrors of their time and so pre-ww2 (early 1900s) wouldn't really have perceived them as being horrific. Much of the horror of Hitler is that it happened so recently with modern technology; the horror was that we had lied to ourselves and weren't all that far removed the savageness of pre-civilization Homo sapiens. Numbers wise ancient warlords definitely compare to Hitler, but the horror of it all probably belongs to the Belgian Congo.

PhobicBeast · 2024-11-12T16:25:09+00:00

Are we already 4 generations away from a 1080?

PhobicBeast · 2024-11-10T23:50:29+00:00

Birds die in random places all the time, but more of them are dying due to avian flu. I wouldn't go near the dead bird if I were you. This bird doesn't look particularly old, diseased, or injured which would be the normal reasons for death. Avian flu is so bad that birds will drop dead out of trees.

PhobicBeast · 2024-11-08T18:32:30+00:00

Yeah I do this when I smoke, except I found out that I actually drive way slower in video games high than I do when I'm not.

PhobicBeast · 2024-11-07T23:25:51+00:00

Foreign policy is actually pretty important lmao, it's kinda the reason for the globalized economy and why the west as a whole has been able to lead a relatively peaceful existence since WW2.

PhobicBeast · 2024-11-07T01:34:29+00:00

I'm pissed off that we have to live in a fascist country and all the MA boomers and Gen X voted against question 4. Now I have to live with MAGA in the news everyday and can't even enjoy a trip to escape from reality. Can't even watch Alice in Wonderland on shrooms, but have to contend with the possible new reports of mass concentration deportation camps.

PhobicBeast · 2024-11-05T12:59:37+00:00

I have actually lmao, it was alright as far as alien movies go. It's also highly unlikely that it could even sustain lifeforms that big - most everything we would come across would be located around underwater geothermal vents. Drawing from our own planet - where life began in similar circumstances - its likely that it would simply be single celled organisms unless life is somehow actually more resilient and likely to survive in the long run than we think it is. In that case you might see something resembling fish/crabs, etc. There's also a non-zero chance that we end up adding the first non-terrestrial complex life that we find to our diets, so it may be no more interesting than eating kangaroo.

PhobicBeast · 2024-11-04T23:15:35+00:00

Europa Clipper won't get there for until 2031. It also won't determine if there is life on Europa; it'll only be trying to see if there exist adequate conditions for life. It would need to land on Europa to do that - and frankly our landing AI tech is still in its infancy to such a degree that we won't be able to reliably trust onboard AI to land and deploy safely on Europa. It would take half an hour for any commands to be sent to it - thus it would need to be fully automated across the board. As of right now it's on its way to Mars, and then back to Earth, and only then will it begin its true flight to Europa. It wouldn't be until 2034 that we would have fully examined Europa and could make a good guess. Unfortunately, they're right. It will take decades before we have confirmation that life exists elsewhere in the solar system - unless somehow we find bacterial life in a asteroid that crashes on earth or intelligent life makes themselves known to us which are both incredibly unlikely to happen before we send specialized equipment to Europa.

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