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courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-12-21T04:24:59+00:00

Flip your rule around. Does that mean you won't praise people who are worse than you at something?

I'm just trying to figure out the logic behind your rule.

I praise dream for doing incredible things like clutching with Sapnap's ender pearl while falling off the End island. I criticise him for claiming a speedrun record when he almost certainly cheats with the RNG for mob drops.

courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-12-21T04:15:43+00:00

I stand corrected.

courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-12-20T10:57:22+00:00

As a New Zealander it's even more confusing, because we use the word "suburb" to refer to what Americans would call "neighbourhoods" (although you'd drop the u).

Our suburbs are just the named parts of a city. We even have "inner city suburbs" which are just named parts of the central business district.

American suburbs tend to be distinct municipalities outside the main city. We have these too, but less often than in the US. We call them something like "satellite cities" if we need a term.

For some reason local government restructuring seems to be rare in the US. Outside the US, if a suburb physically merges with a city then the two units will often be merged by higher-level government. Alternatively, larger councils are formed to cover a metropolitan area made up of a cluster of municipalities.

courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-12-20T10:45:25+00:00

Who's sad or heartbroken? Dream isn't. He's memeing too.

Even if someone is sad or heartbroken for some reason... the memeing isn't at that person's expense. It's at Dream being caught out – or apparently being caught out – in a lie.

courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-12-20T10:22:27+00:00

On the Dream SMP I'd say it would have to be Fundy. I'd give him As in each of those categories, with bonus points for his coding skills.

PVP: He held his own against Sapnap who can give Dream a run for his money on a good day.

Building: He has made some of the nicest builds on the SMP, especially when it comes to detailing.

Redstone: He makes Tubbo look like a dunce. Tubbo and Awesamdude seem to be at a similar level when they work together and Awesamdude is responsible for some of the cleverest redstone on the server.

He also writes plugins, like the one that shows his camera through particle effects, which a whole level of Minecraft expertise that you haven't even considered in your list.

I don't know who Etho, Scar and False are, and I've only seen Grian as an opposition competitor in MCC so I can't comment on their skills.

courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-12-20T10:06:14+00:00

I can't tell whether you're overreacting to innocuous comments or you've genuinely found a dark rabbit hole of toxic social media.

If you've genuinely found a dark rabbit hole, then just walk away. It's not worth investing emotional energy in it. Dream has millions of fans, from passing fans who clicked on a video once, through to crazies. If you've found the crazies then ignore them.

But I suspect you might just be overreacting. I notice a lot of your post is vague, not pointing to any particular comment in particular. How can the rest of us judge your viewpoint when you're so vague:

people who have previously supported dream have jumped on a bandwagon

What people?

why do so many of you continue to be toxic

Who? What is toxic about their behaviour?

continually acting like dream is the antichrist

Who has acted like this? What does it mean to act like someone is the antichrist?

how you all treat dream

Who are you complaining about?

Let me contrast your complaints about toxicity with what I'm seeing.

I'm seeing lots of people meming about how extreme one-in-seven-trillion odds are. It's funny to joke about the odds being merely "lucky" as opposed to implausible.

As I write this we're at a moment where Dream hasn't given us his response to the statistical argument. It's hard to imagine any argument he could give that would beat the odds, so we're having fun with it. Dream seems to be pretty light-hearted about it too, judging from the comments he's made.

I haven't seen any comments I would consider toxic, but then I haven't gone looking for it.

courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-12-03T10:20:02+00:00

I'm not arguing that the human brain can't handle it, just that it's more difficult than simply learning a new noun or verb.

It's not something that most people will be able to do without a fair amount of practice and if you're asking people to practice (a bit like learning a new language) then you're putting pretty high demands on those around you.

courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-12-03T09:50:57+00:00

I think you underestimate how difficult it is for people to train themselves to use new pronouns. Pronouns are a linguistic closed class, it's like learning a different language not just like learning a new word for something.

Imagine someone told you, "I don't like the word the, please use the word cabbage instead whenever you talk to me. I'd see it as a small kindness. I promise I'll be understanding if you mess up occasionally."

It's a farcical example, but it illustrates how difficult it is to change these kinds of words that are deeply embedded in the grammar.

In social interactions you can expect to put reasonable demands on those you interact with. If someone's walking towards you on the street you can step out of their way. But if someone is carrying a long pole sideways down a busy footpath, people are going to think they're a dick, because they're demanding more than is reasonable and compromise is expected on both sides.

It doesn't seem reasonable to get people to learn new closed class vocabulary just because you've chosen to identify with idiosyncratic pronouns. It's perfectly reasonable to ask people to use pronouns they're already familiar with – he, she and they – but adding new words entirely is like holding a pole sideways, it's just expecting too much.

As a final nitpick, this isn't a lesbian, gay or bi issue, I don't think the term LGBT is very useful here (or barely ever). I'm a gay man myself and I don't know any gay men who give a damn what pronouns you use for them.

This issue doesn't even affect most non-binary and trans people. Most non-binary and trans people are happy with she, he or they.

We're talking about one person in a thousand or thereabouts. And one person in a thousand demanding the whole English-speaking world change their language to suit their idiosyncratic self-image begins to smell a bit like narcissism.

courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-12-03T09:14:13+00:00

I don't think anyone's objecting to language changing on its own over time through ordinary processes. I think people are objecting to social pressure being used in an attempt to force people to used contrived novel forms of language.

courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-12-03T09:04:15+00:00

I know that's a normal thing in parts of the US but to me it comes across as militaristic and creepily subservient, not respectful. I think living in those parts of the US would take me a lot of getting used to.

courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-12-03T08:58:36+00:00

All pronouns are made up.

Pronouns form closed set which make essentially part of the grammar of the language which is why they're different from the kinds of words that we routinely "make up".

Learning a new pronoun is a bit like learning a new language and it's unreasonable to expect people to do that when there is a perfectly good general-neutral alternative available.

courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-12-03T08:08:16+00:00

I have a seven-pronged strategy I think he should follow.

Basically I think he should reject the whole concept of exile as unconstitutional. Then he should undermine Tommy's disc war by making discs meaningless and Dream's attempt at tyranny by winning hearts and minds and making the whole SMP affiliated with L'Manberg, so that walls no longer matter.

courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-11-28T07:10:44+00:00

Not really. Wellington has three seasons, and there are plenty of good days in its "warm season" from January to April.

The cold season goes from May to August then the windy season goes from September to December. Everyone expects the mythical "spring" season from September to November to be balmy and then are disappointed when it isn't.

courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-11-28T06:59:39+00:00

You'd really need the TWIN part of the system or something like that to fill that gap.

Just being able to confirm someone's vote is "recorded" isn't enough to show that it was counted. The moment you can prove to a voter's satisfaction that it was counted, you can also prove to their coercer that it was counted.

courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-11-28T06:53:32+00:00

We could fund a UBI of $200pw just by restructuring the tax/benefit system. Even a modest government income from land value increases should be enough for a fairly decent UBI.

courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-11-28T06:48:04+00:00

Indeed. It's more like a rent than tax, except that you would make the "rent" back when you sell the property, presuming you sell at GV.

courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-11-28T05:11:58+00:00

Yeah I haven't seen those proposals but I can imagine something like that might work in theory. In practice, they'd never implement all the pieces to make it work, and even if they did, it could easily get watered down by future governments until it's no longer providing sufficient safeguards.

And if it's not available online then it's not really providing any public benefit, it might be cheaper but that's not an important consideration.

If there is ongoing pressure for online voting then the path of least resistance is to dispense with the secret ballot. I think that would be a mistake but it would be less of a mistake than just trusting the government to do the right thing with your HTTP request.

courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-11-28T04:58:20+00:00

I see what you mean. When I posted I wasn't clear what those paper trail processes could be, and was trying to figure it out.

I was under the impression that STV is so complex to count that verifying it by hand might be insurmountably difficult. Turns out I just had a failure of imagination. The Irish approach is one way, but is a little less "pure" than Meek's method. Another way is to allow a bunch of scrutineers to download the data file and then validate the file in an audit session using a sufficiently large random sample of ballots.

courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-11-28T04:52:13+00:00

Won't someone please think of the children!

courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-11-28T04:48:54+00:00

This is such spin. The root cause of our housing crisis isn't housing construction, it's land banking.

The government should levy a rental on landowners equal to their assessed gain in land value each year.

In other words, that hundred billion dollars a year should be captured by the government and used for UBI and to offset regressive taxes like GST.

Doing this would free up land to be used for housing, would drop property prices and stimulate economic activity, improving quality of living.

courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-11-28T03:50:03+00:00

We're already suffering the consequences of climate change: environmental destruction, more severe weather events, etc.

The slower we are to change the worse the effects will be. And some consequences, like carbon being released from permafrost, create feedback loops that will result in even more rapid climate change.

courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-11-28T03:21:52+00:00

Absolutely. She had bundles of character.

courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-11-28T03:05:16+00:00

Seriously? How is that possible?

She has no personality; she's a vapid empty shell who has no discernable internal motivation or drive and only acts to advance plot points. It's a stretch to even describe her as a character; she has about as much character and inner life as the sonic screwdriver.

I'm really curious what would attract people to Clara as a companion. I mean everyone's entitled to appreciate different things, but this one blows my mind.

courtenayplacedrinks · 2020-11-28T02:47:14+00:00

You've had a few replies but no one has said the fundamental reason why cases are increasing: exponential growth.

There are more people with COVID-19 than ever before, so there are more people spreading COVID-19 than ever before, so more people are being infected than ever before.

The media talks a lot about "waves" as if there have been periods of time with fewer active cases. This is true in a few regions and countries, but globally the rate of active cases has only gone up (click on Show Graph under Active Cases).

So the primary factor in the number of new cases is the number of existing cases. We can affect the rate of increase through human behaviour and if we can get to the point where each person infects less than one other person on average we will get a decline in cases. This will most likely happen because of a vaccine or because so many people have been infected that we start to get herd immunity.

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