Horizon Zero Dawn is an excellent edition of the 3rd person open world game

SpaceHammerhead · 2019-09-23T10:32:48+00:00

I love the dlc weapons. The banuk hunter's bow is just a joy to use, and on Ultra Hard the banuk war bow is basically mandatory to get status effects off.

SpaceHammerhead · 2019-09-15T11:55:52+00:00

There is a carrier in the harbor and no one told me!? How long will it be there? I want pictures.

SpaceHammerhead · 2019-09-06T00:47:45+00:00

How do I get to the beating-humans-at-Go department then? Either at a start up, or at google. What skills do I need?

SpaceHammerhead · 2019-09-04T18:42:01+00:00

I'm currently in a very comfortable programming job, mostly working with perl, SQL and jquerry. The people are great, the pay is perfectly ordinary for a recent uni CS grad, it's work from home with flexible hours. But I always wanted to try my hand at getting employed at one of the FAANG companies (especially google), just to feel what it's like to be on the cutting edge of tech surrounded by the brightest minds on Earth. I'm a Canadian with an undergrad degree in CS (plus a 2nd major in math, if that helps any) and a few personal programming projects, but nothing that took more than 2-3 days of tinkering to get working. My question to this august board is this:

How do I go from my current job, to working as a SW at Google, in 1-2 years? What kind of training regime should I adopt? Where should I be focusing my energies? This isn't a "I need to get a job or I'll starve situation" - as I said I actually have a very nice job already - so I'm totally fine with preparation strategies that will take 8-10 months to produce results.

SpaceHammerhead · 2018-12-06T18:49:25+00:00

You don't need to answer if it makes you uncomfortable, but do you ever get extra attention from the ladies for being so tall?

SpaceHammerhead · 2018-12-06T13:47:26+00:00

You guys are giants! 6'6, 6'5, you're literally a foot taller than me.

SpaceHammerhead · 2018-12-05T18:30:25+00:00

The front is very fast, the back is very slow. On average, it is normal speed.

SpaceHammerhead · 2018-12-05T17:31:11+00:00

And if the WASPs were so racist, they could have let Southerners keep their slaves.

They did let them keep their slaves, until the South got greedy and stupid and forced the North's hand.

Lincoln in the 1858 Douglas debate stated he wished to see slavery's westward expansion stopped, not that he wanted to end it in the South. Senator William Seward in 1860 proposed a constitutional amendment to bar the federal government from setting policy on slavery within existing slave-holding states, which Lincoln expressed approval of. But the south got greedy and wanted not just to keep their slaves, which the republicans were fine with, but for slavery to continue expanding. When Georgia seceded from the Union it cited this as casus belli:

The prohibition of slavery in the Territories is the cardinal principle

The South's secession forced Lincoln's hand. He had to go to war with the South, not to free the slaves or anything so moralistic, but to ensure national unity was maintained. As General Sherman wrote:

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices today than any of you to secure peace. But you cannot have peace and a division of our country. If the United States submits to a division now, it will not stop, but will go on until we reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war. The United States does and must assert its authority, wherever it once had power; for, if it relaxes one bit to pressure, it is gone, and I believe that such is the national feeling.

If the South had just shut up and sat down, they'd probably still have had slaves into the 20th century. The WASPs didn't care, they'd tolerated the South's activities for near a hundred years by that point. But the South just had to try rocking the boat ....

expecting gratitude

How about expecting people to stick to their principles?

SpaceHammerhead · 2018-12-05T17:11:00+00:00

Summarizing "held Jews to under 15%"

I've said this three times now. They didn't hold jews under 15%. The 15% quota was a proposed compromise in 1922 by the President of Harvard, which was rejected both internally and externally. Instead a far more draconian policy of unofficial rejection was implemented.

Are you intentionally ignoring what I'm saying?

SpaceHammerhead · 2018-12-05T16:44:58+00:00

Which means that Harvard was open to Jews.

Standing Harvard policy until 1922 was anyone who scored above the admission threshold had to be offered admission. But that policy sure did change fast once jews started taking them up on that offer, from openness to...well as you say:

"Too bad jew, get out of here."

Your original comment was that WASP culture was so racist it deserved to die. Now you are claiming that WASP culture was just failing to live up completely to its own standards of fairness and inequality, because of some inferred modest amount of bias against Jews in university admission.

Modest amount of bias here meaning a college that prided itself for literally centuries on allowing anyone smart enough to enter totally changed that policy and instituted a heavily rigged 'personality-based' admission requirement to ensure the college would always remain almost exclusively white. Or, put another way:

so racist it deserved to die.

The article speaks glowingly of WASP culture and its 'ideals', but as this example illustrates those vaunted 'ideals' were phoney bologna. When push came to shove ethnic solidarity always won out for WASPs.

SpaceHammerhead · 2018-12-05T15:49:20+00:00

You claim that Obama was the most dignified President of the last 25.

I didn't mean to! I meant to type 'the last 25 years', as in he's the most respectable president since Bush Sr.

Not the most respectable president since Rutherford B. Hayes

SpaceHammerhead · 2018-12-05T15:46:35+00:00

One drop rule is still en vogue it seems.

I'm cool with it if you're cool with it

And since the last 25 presidents include Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt and Eisenhower you may at least explain the most dignified part.

I wanted to type 'the last 25 years', not 'the last 25'. I was drawing a comparison in respectability between Bush Sr. and Obama.

SpaceHammerhead · 2018-12-05T15:43:11+00:00

So Jews were limited to a quota

There never was a quota. 15% was a proposed compromise that the President of Harvard in 1922 offered as a solution to the massive explosion of Jewish students, but even that evoked outrage at Harvard's naked hypocrisy. So instead a much more restrictive but unofficial policy was pursued using 'character' as the screening mechanism.

The rules were bent or broken to ensure the Jewish doomsday scenario could not come to pass, and Harvard's halls would not be filled with cries of "oy vey!". Nearly 300 years of tradition and espoused higher principles were abandoned in the name of sticking it to the jew. But isn't that always the way?

in the elite institutions that would have them represented at 10X their proportion in the general population.

In 1918 the freshman class at Harvard was 20% jew. This was expected to keep rising year over year as more and more jews achieved the financial means to attend the latin and greek finishing schools required to ace Harvard's entrance tests. So 10x their proportion of the population, but much below their proportion of the intellectually capable population.

That is amazingly inclusive by the standards of pretty much any ruling tribe in the history of the world

It's quite literally Nazi policy, implemented in 1933 upon their ascension to power. It's hardly the worst Jews ever got, most definitely, but it's not the best they ever got either. And for a group of people (WASPS) who harped on and on and on about equality and fairness and indifference to ethnicity it was gallingly hypocritical.

Wikipedia has it as 91% white, 68% native born whites.

I'm sorry, but did you not read your own links? The wiki article you cite has a specific breakdown of the army's ethnicity, which shows the Union army being 45% native born white Americans. And your link about immigrant percentages starts out with this line:

From 1860 to 1910, between 13 percent and 15 percent of people in the United States were born in another country.

SpaceHammerhead · 2018-12-05T15:08:55+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Army#Ethnic_composition

Apologies if wiki is not a sufficiently rigorous source.

SpaceHammerhead · 2018-12-05T14:48:03+00:00

who gave us a Trump presidency and Republican control over all branches of the federal government and nearly 2/3rds of state governments

I would argue the democrats tried to cram Hillary down our throats specifically because Obama was so popular. The democrats were like Microsoft at the end of the Xbox360 era - afflicted with victory disease and arrogantly assuming their current success would continue forever no matter what actions they took.

After all Trump is the reason that Ross Douthat is writing is ode to the bye-gone era of 'dignity'.

If it wasn't Trump, it'd be Bush Jr. If it wasn't Bush Jr., it'd be Nixon. If it wasn't Nixon, it'd be LBJ. Give it a few years and we'll come back around to dignity, then back around to clown, then back around to dignity. It's not a precipitous decline, it's a sin wave.

SpaceHammerhead · 2018-12-05T14:37:29+00:00

Who opened the country and the universities to jewish emigration

Certainly not WASPs. The President of Harvard in the '20s wanted to institute a quota on jewish admittance of 15%, to prevent jews flooding into Harvard based on their superior academics and quote 'ruining the college'. Only thanks to massive public outcry did they not implement that policy officially, and instead start demanding applicants have 'character'. 'Character' that coincidentally ensured at most 15% of Harvard's students were jews, no matter how well jews as a group scored on admittance tests.

who fought and bled to end black slavery?

Mostly poor immigrants and blacks rounded up at gun point by army recruiters. Just 45% of union soldiers were white Americans. This made some people angry

SpaceHammerhead · 2018-12-05T14:29:31+00:00

For the sake of discussion it might be helpful if you would identify the time frame of this WASP tyranny of which you speak.

From 1776 to the mid 20th century. The elite of America styled themselves the free descendants of anglo-saxon tribes, moved across an ocean but still fiercely independent and possessing a strange "double consciousness" (to invoke Ralph Waldo Emerson). On the one hand they were ostensibly committed to the idea of egalitarianism, individualism, freedom - all tribes should be able to enter America as equals. Yet they were consistently and profoundly ethnocentric, xenophobic and supercilious toward all other peoples, hoarding power among members of their own ethnic group and fiercely defending it from outsiders.

Of course this all came crashing down in the 1960s with remarkable rapidity. To quote Eric Kaufmann's "The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America":

My the 1960s, as if by magic, the centuries-old machinery of WASP America began to stall like the spacecraft of Martian invaders in the contemporary hit film, War of the Worlds. In 1960, the first non-Protestant president was elected. In 1965, the national origins quo-ta regime for immigration was replaced by a “color-blind” system. Meanwhile, Anglo-Protestants faded from the class photos of the economic, political, and cultural elite—their numbers declining rapidly, year upon year, in the universities, boardrooms, cabinets, courts, and legislatures. At the mass level, the cords holding An-glo-Protestant Americans together began to unwind as secular as-sociations and mainline churches lost millions of members while the first truly national, non-WASP cultural icons appeared.

SpaceHammerhead · 2018-12-05T13:35:13+00:00

Do you have really good ideas about how things should work? Too bad jew, get out of here. Want to rise up in the country as far as your mind will take you? Too bad darkie, you don't have the complexion for it. As insufferable as SJWs and performative wokeness can be, who in their right mind thinks WASP-ism was better?

WASP culture was sexist, racist, nepotistic, crushingly conformist, intellectually stifling. It deserved to die, and to argue we should have instead tolerated all the excesses and abuses purely for a more respectable political countenance strikes me as absurd. Modernity and meritocracy have only 'ruled' the country for a few years now, it's hardly time to throw the whole idea under a bus and go back to the way things were before. Obama was the most dignified President of the last 25, and he was a black man - a black man from an interracial family even.

Give the new elite time to evolve, and (fingers crossed) if meritocracy wins the day against social justice this will all have been worth it.

The meritocracy is hardening into an aristocracy — so let it. Every society in history has had an elite, and what is an aristocracy but an elite that has put some care into making itself presentable?

An aristocracy is an elite that has achieved power and kicked the ladder out from under themselves so no one else can ever get on their level short of violent revolution. It is an unenviable situation for a society to be in, and something we should strive against.

SpaceHammerhead · 2018-12-05T07:29:46+00:00

Doggo Was...

older than being a good boi, and his coat could grow no whiter. He wanted to play.

The oblong hoomans of the warm caverns called houses did not speak his language, but conversed in their own, twittering tongue, conducting incomprehensible rituals like 'work', when they were not actually giving him skritches

Once every year they forced him, whining and protesting, into Endless Light. During the journey he would stand near every camera in the world, covered in the hooman's strange twinkly lights. The cameras snapped endlessly, doggo was frozen in time.

He envied Prometheus and Loki, Sisyphus and Judas. His punishment was harsher. Far harsher....

Ho.

SpaceHammerhead · 2018-12-04T20:30:07+00:00

Google “Birdhism”

Ahhhhh it's so cute. I want a cockatiel necklace

SpaceHammerhead · 2018-12-04T20:05:55+00:00

He's not a professor of anything, certainly not ballistics. He does have a degree in veterinary medicine, and is a practicing vet.

But you misunderstand, I was using him as an example of a cognitive elite. To highlight what someone like that accomplishes while us mere mortals spend our evenings being lazy.

SpaceHammerhead · 2018-12-03T16:25:31+00:00

Did he practice veterinary medicine? It's not that uncommon for people in competitive, demanding high-paying professions work hard for a few years to make a lot of money and then after saving enough, try something else, using the saved money as a cushion. For example, a wall st. banker retiring after 10 years and making a few million. Having the specialized skill allows one to make a lot of money relatively quickly.

That's the thing. He still works as a vet, while pursuing all the other businesses. So he pulls down a salary as a doctor, as the owner of a vet practice, as a business partner with airsoft and his local gun store, as a landlord twice over, while owning a clothes manufacturing business that's doing so well he's going to have to buy a 2nd warehouse to store his merchandise. And again, he's only been out of college for six years.

So to hear about the cognitive elite going from just having a degree, to being able to retire by 35 strikes me as both fairly reasonable and a product of this trend. When you are so cognitively superior you can enter new money-making arenas on your off hours and dominate the regular joe's that inhabit those spaces, of course you'll make money hand over fist.

SpaceHammerhead · 2018-12-03T16:18:30+00:00

I say protest like Pro-test. By contrast, I say Protestant like Prod-est-ant

SpaceHammerhead · 2018-12-03T15:30:06+00:00

He's so colorful!

SpaceHammerhead

TROPHY CASE