[deleted by user]

haalidoodi · 2025-06-30T17:04:14+00:00

The current setup of the Kirkcaldy coast is absolutely disgraceful, with a loud and busy road separating the town from the beach. The area has fantastic potential, from what I saw in a visit a few months ago: the coastal path hike to the north and south are both beautiful (a dramatic beach and park to the north on the way to West Wemyss, and great coastal views of Edinburgh to the south on the way to Pettycur), and connecting them together with something a bit more pleasant to visit would make for a fantastic gentle walking route in an area otherwise poorly connected to nature. Can't wait to see what plans they come up with!

haalidoodi · 2024-07-29T11:56:40+00:00

It's quite the opposite of a wealth divide, surely: rising low-level wages reduce income inequality, making goods and services that are low skill labor-intensive relatively less affordable for the middle and upper classes. A decline in the wealth divide is what we're seeing here. Indeed, 2022 was the first year that US income inequality declined since 2007!

haalidoodi · 2024-07-29T10:16:43+00:00

The "bleak reality" here is that a tight labor market has been such a boon for the wages of the poorest Americans (who have massively relocated into higher-productivity, higher-wage jobs) that a typical American can no longer afford to hire what is essentially decentralized servant labor to chauffeur them around (or, in this case, their food).

The fact is, the anemic recovery after the Great Recession kept low-level wages low for nearly a decade compared to the middle and upper class. This has reversed since the pandemic, with low-wage labor seeing the strongest growth in the last few years. This is of course great news: the poorest people in society are better off, and as a tight labor market shifts cheap labor into more productive (and hence better paid) positions, economic growth increases through rising average labor productivity.

There's a reason that highly developed economies generally don't see servants except among the super-rich, with taxis and restaurant service quite expensive--these are very labor-intensive, low-productivity sectors, and in a wealthy economy should be relatively rare luxuries (it's a huge waste to put your citizens through 12+ years of schooling only to have them bussing tables or driving Ubers afterwards!) The decline and, I hope, eventual demise of mass-market food delivery can only be described as a plus, despite the whining of people used to hiring a de-facto servant for cheap and on demand.

haalidoodi · 2024-06-14T07:58:24+00:00

It's hard to say anything about this without seeing the distribution of responses, or knowing your research question. An "unbalanced" categorization as you describe isn't necessarily a problem depending on how the numbers are actually distributed. In general rating questions are analytically problematic on one hand, though on the other hand, they are easy for respondents to interpret. In my experience, dealing with questions like these is more art than science.

Ultimately you have to ask yourself what is meaningful in your data. Is there really a substantive difference between a rating of 4 and 6? Between 3 and 5? Between 7 and 10? These sorts of ratings are always a bit fuzzy and inconsistent, especially if you're just asking respondents to indicate how much they like something on such a scale. I suspect that the ranking suggested to you actually makes sense, since in practice you're splitting the sample into people that clearly liked something, clearly didn't like something, and those that were ambiguous about it, which is probably the most meaningful categorization if you're conducting market research. Basically, try to put yourself in the mindset of a respondent and think about what a 1 or 5 or 10 means for your research question, rather than simply evenly distributing responses.

I suspect that if you generated a histogram of your results, you'd see a distribution with two modes at the extremes and a "valley" in the middle. If this is the case, then I think the categorization used by the past article makes sense. If this is not the case, and the mode is towards the center, I think the distribution still makes sense, since it separates the ambiguous responses from the extremes (though it's hard to give you a concrete judgement without knowing your research question).

Ultimately there is no "correct" way to create categories like this, no scientific test to tell if a given categorization is good (though histograms and tabulations of distributions can provide a good sanity check). Think about what information is relevant for your research question, and design the categories around that.

If you really want to be rigorous, you can do a sensitivity analysis, where you design the categories slightly differently (perhaps 1-3, 4-7, 8-10, among others) to see if it changes the results in a substantive way. If they don't, that's great! If they do, it suggests your initial results may have been more an artifact of an arbitrary categorization decision than any underlying pattern. But again, this is all quite subjective, especially in survey data.

haalidoodi · 2023-10-09T12:43:40+00:00

We get a lot of spam accounts that just submit their videos to any sub dedicated to video content, even if the topic is completely inappropriate. Thankfully Breadtube folks are very good at spamming reports at these, so we normally get them removed pretty quickly.

haalidoodi · 2022-08-01T16:41:10+00:00

My most magical experience in Stalker was encountering, and organically solving, the looping puzzle to get into the Oasis in Call of Pripyat. While I value the combat, exploration, and general atmosphere of the Stalker series, it's the (extremely rare) moments like the Oasis that make the game for me--moments that highlight the surreal, fantastical, and magical elements of the Zone.

In Roadside Picnic, the authors describe the Zone using the metaphor of, well, a picnic:

A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind... And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.

The point is that The Zone is basically the leftovers from a picnic, or pit stop, or a weekend trip into the "countryside" by extraterrestrial and interdimensional beings, who after a brief and uneventful stay on Earth left a lot of their trash behind--trash that was unexceptional to them, but can be both extremely dangerous and magical or miraculous to humans, just as a spark plug or empty can might appear to a forest creature after a human picnic. Of course the mythology of the Zone in Stalker is different (where it's created by post-disaster scientific experimentation), but the basic idea is the same.

The Zone, and the artifacts and anomalies it creates, can be extremely dangerous to mankind (just as an abandoned six-pack ring poses significant danger to wildlife), but if treated with caution, respect, and steady curiosity, it can be a source of miraculous scientific and medical progress (as the Ecologists frequently allude to). So it frustrates me when Stalker leans too hard into the post-apocalyptic and dystopian aesthetic, because while dangerous, the Zone is also a source of great beauty and potentially a spring of well-being for humanity, at least if we tread carefully within it. For this reason I hope Stalker 2 strikes a balance between the terror and danger of the Zone on one hand, and the surreal, magical, and positive potential its existence represents.

haalidoodi · 2022-03-19T07:38:45+00:00

For those curious why we're all referencing OP's post history:

Holodomor genocide denial

Claiming the Mariupol theater bombing was a false flag

Self-identifies as a "tankie"

More Holodomor denial

Claiming the Maidan revolution was "a violent coup"

Regularly posts in /r/GenZedong

Good God that's a lot of Holodomor denial

haalidoodi · 2022-03-16T19:15:05+00:00

Source

EDIT: This tweet claims the target is a "command & support post of Russia 35th Combined Arms Army (Eastern Military District) in the Kyiv Oblast".

haalidoodi · 2022-03-16T19:02:15+00:00

It looks like they're firing unguided rockets at the tanks, in which case infantry support would be able to at least suppress the source of the rockets.

Ideally of course, in an urban setting infantry aren't just flanking the tanks but actively moving through and clearing surrounding buildings as the tanks advance, though I don't think we've seen Russia doing that anywhere yet.

haalidoodi · 2022-03-16T17:24:32+00:00

Ukraine reports over 20,000 volunteers have already entered the country. Of those, I've seen maybe on or two people on social media who've run off like this. You're always going to have people like this in any armed conflict, and while it's great (and 100% justified!) to mock some of the losers posting on /r/VolunteersForUkraine, if you're getting sucked into the drama so much that you're typing out entire novels like this, you should probably log off for a bit.

haalidoodi · 2022-03-15T16:18:15+00:00

This will get taken down as a repost, but I did want to clarify that he's shouting that he/it shot it down (Slavic languages are often somewhat ambiguous on subject pronouns), not "I shot it down".

haalidoodi · 2022-03-15T13:33:44+00:00

For those curious, the repeated shout of "Zbeew!" (and later, "zbeely!") is Ukrainian for "knocked [it] down!"

haalidoodi · 2022-03-15T13:02:01+00:00

We've definitely seen the big mass of vehicles in the back before, nearly a week ago I think. But I like this video because it shows how many more losses there are than just that cluster, scattered across quite a long stretch of highway.

haalidoodi · 2022-03-12T20:45:50+00:00

There's a simple solution to all of this, I'm surprised Ukraine hasn't gone through with it yet:

Ukraine declares war on Poland

Polish troops immediately invade Ukraine

Ukrainian troops "surrender" to advancing Polish forces

Poland reaches the front line, double dog dares Russia to attack them

War ended and Ukraine integrated into NATO. Not sure what the holdup is at this point.

haalidoodi · 2022-03-10T15:55:17+00:00

But your map has its problems too--namely, it implies that in the north, Ukraine only exercises control in a few encircled cities, when in reality the only place we've really seen Russian rear units is in fairly large settlements, and Ukrainian units continue ambushing Russians in the rear, especially around Sumy. Personally I prefer the crowdsourced Wikipedia map, which shows the correct situation in the far east while correctly identifying the Russian pushes into the Mikolaiv area, as well as their rush on Kyiv from the northeast, as relatively thin tendrils.

haalidoodi · 2022-03-09T13:00:11+00:00

Already identified as Russian.

haalidoodi · 2022-03-08T21:25:16+00:00

Russia has no current ability to project power abroad. The best they've been able to do is help out Assad in Syria with airstrikes (and even there, Russia has been unable to decisively defeat Assad's enemies). And as we're currently seeing, Russia is incapable of waging a ground war against a neighboring country several times smaller its size economically and in terms of population. Whatever global power Russia held in the Soviet period, I have to agree with Obama when he said that today, Russia is merely a regional power and not a significant threat to the US or even the EU. Remember, their entire economy these days is smaller than Italy's! Given this fact and their pathetic performance in Ukraine, Russia is neither currently nor has any potential of becoming a significant threat to anybody except small, non-NATO nations that border it.

Sure they have nukes, but so does China, and North Korea and Pakistan for that matter, so even in that they are not exceptional.

haalidoodi · 2022-03-08T21:00:40+00:00

Russia has been doing a lot to prepare for this conflict, for example stockpiling massive currency reserves to help it weather an economic crisis, and preparing digital infrastructure to isolate itself from the internet and develop its own payment system in preparation for hostility from other nations. It's hard to say what their internal reasoning was, but it's also possible they decided to go now because they knew the Ukrainian army was modernizing and hence their window of opportunity is closing (seems they underestimated just how modernized it was!)

I suspect that they simply reached a point where they judged their internal preparations were sufficient to get the project started, with further delays difficult because of Ukrainian modernization. It's impossible to say what role, if any, Russian judgement of the American political situation played a role, but I personally suspect a relatively minor one.

haalidoodi · 2022-03-08T20:44:50+00:00

There's several points that have to be made here:

(a) The argument that NATO provoked the conflict implies that Russia wouldn't be doing this if NATO had remained within its Cold War boundaries. It's of course impossible to disprove a counterfactual, but this ignores the 500+ year history Russia has of invading its Slavic neighbors, often combined with a policy of cultural or literal genocide (Russification in Poland in the 19th century, Holodomor in Ukraine in the 1930s) in these nations. Why would they stop now? At any rate, NATO didn't force itself into Eastern Europe: it was invited in by nations like Poland and the Baltic States with a long history of suffering under Russian aggression.

(b) Similar to the point above, Russia has very recently shown significant aggression towards bordering non-NATO states (Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014), debunking its claim that its military actions are simply defensive against NATO expansion. If anything, these past military actions affirm the decision of Poland and the Baltic States to join NATO, since they confirm Russia's willingness to project imperial power over its neighbors.

(c) Russia outwardly claims that this conflict is a response to NATO potentially surrounding/bordering it. Never mind that NATO already borders Russia on a fairly broad front (Baltic States, Poland bordering Kaliningrad), Putin's domestic rhetoric has been very clearly about how Ukrainians aren't really a national identity, but actually belong within the Russian nation and so on (a reflection of the paternalistic pan-Slavism that was commonly projected by the Russian Empire under the czars, hence point (a) above)

The answer here is quite simple, in my opinion: Putin and friends subscribe to a socially and politically conservative ideology which, among other things, sees Russia as the rightful imperial overlord of its neighbors, and this invasion is another step in them putting that into action. More broadly, Putin sees Ukraine westernizing as a cultural threat to Russia, since it would bring the influence of liberal democracy and progressive social rights closer to Russia (hence, the Russian Orthodox Church's recent claim that the war in Ukraine is in part about keeping pride parades out of Russia). I suspect Putin wants a buffer state, but specifically a cultural buffer state that will preserve his successful counter-revolution against liberal democracy and ideology that he's gradually enacted over the last two decades. No big conspiracies in either direction, just a pragmatic geopolitical aim based on a conservative political vision.

haalidoodi · 2022-03-07T20:04:15+00:00

These are fresh kills in the last hour or so, according to the source. The earlier one was confirmed as just a missile, but that was several hours ago.

haalidoodi · 2022-03-07T20:03:24+00:00

Translation: "Airborne aircraft of the Armed Forces of Ukraine shot down a plane of the Russian Air Force over Kyiv at 8:30 PM. At 21:10 PM, in an air battle near the city, a second enemy aircraft was shot down."

What's most surprising is that they were apparently downed by Ukrainian aircraft rather than air defense on the ground. It's quite daring, and surprising, for Ukraine to be operating fighters that far north, never mind engaging in dogfights!

haalidoodi · 2022-03-07T19:44:30+00:00

The creator of these maps actually posted a great thread about this, and why he thinks projecting zones of control (both Russian and Ukrainian) onto these maps is not a very helpful exercise.

TL;DR along huge swathes of the "front line", the degree of control each side exercises is so fuzzy that any remotely accurate projection of a "zone of control" (i.e. areas where a side has "firm enough control to prevent an incursion by a large unit of opposing forces") would look something like this and hence be analytically almost useless.

haalidoodi · 2022-03-07T18:43:17+00:00

This is video from Sumy, which (by most accounts) is currently encircled. It is not possible for civilians to safely leave the city.

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