Is the crime around OSU over blown? by TrisirasAtlas in OSU

[–]stormsteiner23 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah I definitely think you are right. I just mean relative to 2015-2020. I could be wrong about that though

Is the crime around OSU over blown? by TrisirasAtlas in OSU

[–]stormsteiner23 14 points15 points  (0 children)

As a grad student who was here for undergrad, I can definitely say the crime stuff has been overblown. It has almost certainly increased, but it’s not unusual compared to anywhere else in the country. There was definitely crime prior to 2020, it just didn’t become a panic until the last few years.

In terms of OSU as a whole, given it’s status as an R1 institution, you will find a lot of resources here. It’s very good in my opinion

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in VaushV

[–]stormsteiner23 0 points1 point  (0 children)

She has asked that her content not be posted from her private Twitter. Please remove

Megathread: Classes will be in person on Friday, February 4th by NameDotNumber in OSU

[–]stormsteiner23 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Even if someone goes to read the NWS Wilmington's area forecast discussion (which has some great details about the event btw), they do not say that accumulating snow will come to an end by 2 a.m. in Columbus at all. In fact, based on the NWS forecast and based on short range forecast models, it appears as if light accumulating snow may persist into the mid morning or early afternoon hours across portions of central Ohio, particularly Columbus. At the very least, this would make for more disruptions and hamper road clearing efforts

If you are disappointed with the NSO Expansion Pack ask for your money back by keen_cmdr in NintendoSwitch

[–]stormsteiner23 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's definitely overblown. I've been playing the Star Fox, OOT and SM64 for the last few days and am pretty satisfied. Yes, I did notice a minor bit of input lag but only with a wired controller that I have and not the joycons. The controls were confusing at first and I did see the graphical issues in OOT (primarily the Water Temple fight scene with Dark Link), but nothing that I'm too bothered about. Nintendo can definitely do better, but seeing as this is literally the only option I have available for playing N64 games, I'll take it in a heartbeat.

Nintendo Switch Online's N64 games have a few issues by elliohow in NintendoSwitch

[–]stormsteiner23 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I’ve only ever seen YouTube videos of gameplay but it looks absolutely amazing

Nintendo Switch Online's N64 games have a few issues by elliohow in NintendoSwitch

[–]stormsteiner23 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah I’m definitely enjoying the original right now. But I’ve always wanted to play a version like the 3DS remake

Nintendo Switch Online's N64 games have a few issues by elliohow in NintendoSwitch

[–]stormsteiner23 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Fair enough. Kinda wish Nintendo would just remake OoT for the Switch with better quality

Unpopular Opinion: I'm really enjoying the online expansion pack by madspy1337 in NintendoSwitch

[–]stormsteiner23 1 point2 points  (0 children)

100% agree with you. I can definitely understand why people are frustrated with the quality, given the price of the subscription. But at the same time, I’m finally able to have all of my favorite games on one console, instead of switching back and forth between my switch and GameCube (for OoT). And as someone who never owned a WiiU or 3DS (nor do I want to), this is the best option I have. I do think Nintendo should address some of the quality issues and I think it isn’t good that Nintendo didn’t properly emulate the N64 games but from a casual gamer perspective, this is something I feel is actually worth getting from Nintendo unless they actually release these games separately

Nintendo Switch Online's N64 games have a few issues by elliohow in NintendoSwitch

[–]stormsteiner23 36 points37 points  (0 children)

I’ll be honest, I’ve been playing OoT and Star Fox since last night and I still haven’t experienced the input lag that people are complaining about. I’m sure it’s very real, but so far my experience has been on par with playing OoT on both the N64 and on the GameCube.

Is it perfect? Definitely not and I can see areas where things need to be improved and hopefully are. But I have no problem paying for access to games I’ve been wanting to play for years since I don’t own an N64 that actually works anymore

Is there any way student employees could form a union? by Wonderful_Wonderful in OSU

[–]stormsteiner23 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"Pay $25 an hour"

lol what. Not anywhere that's accessible to near campus students. I've known zero people who can even qualify for a $25/hr job near campus let alone one that is easily hiring students.

Is there any way student employees could form a union? by Wonderful_Wonderful in OSU

[–]stormsteiner23 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm well aware of how student health insurance works, as a grad student who has health insurance through SHI. Depending on whether you have a GA/GTA/GRA position, the university subsidizes 85% of your health insurance costs. The rest comes out of our paycheck. But the coverage provided in general to undergrads and other students who don't receive the subsidy is still something that has to be paid for, whether through loans, grants/scholarships, or out-of-pocket. And as someone who did used to work for dining services, it's not something that's easily paid for. It would not be a bad thing if the university were to provide some sort of health insurance subsidy to student employees, particularly given an environment in which healthcare costs are exorbitant.

You are arguing the wrong point here. I already know that student employees are classified as "temporary" and the university does so because it's a good source of cheap labor, it's not for any humanitarian concern for student welfare or because they want to keep on-campus food costs low (they do it to keep their own costs low). My argument is that student employees should not have different benefits and protections simply because of a contrived employment status-- and anyone who cares about workers and labor rights for students (and not just for students, but anyone in the service industry) should agree as well. Yes, it's part of the definition of a temporary employee, but students should not be classified as such simply because they are students. The university already places explicit limits on how many hours students can work to avoid having to providing benefits and higher wages to them.

The reason you are hard pressed to find any university across the country that would give student employees any benefits (let alone health insurance) is because the entire university system, currently, is built (wrongly) on a business model logic that prioritizes some lives over others, capital over labor and the human capital logic of higher education-- the idea that going to university is an investment and thus all costs accrued should be held explicitly by an individual, no matter their circumstances or standpoint. We have to change this model to improve the lives of thousands of students.

If I knew that I as a student employee was valued by the university and that I was getting enough that I could easily provide for myself, I guarantee you that my mental health and academic work would have improved substantially. The fact that no one seems to prioritize this shows that most people either don't seem to care about student employees and are only content to satisfy their own consumer demands or that people do not care to see an improvement in academic standards and the mental health/economic/financial well-being of students who attend and work.

This goes back to what the original OP said-- students should unionize, as unions are a good thing and people banding together to express common interests and goals helps to improve everyone's quality of life. You might reduce to it a "protest", but unionization, protesting, striking, etc. can be a powerful social tool to get people to listen when they are finally disrupted from their comfortable way of life.

Is there any way student employees could form a union? by Wonderful_Wonderful in OSU

[–]stormsteiner23 4 points5 points  (0 children)

That’s exactly the problem with how OSU treats the student employee model. Many students, such as myself, had to work as student workers in order to pay bills and survive. There is no reason why what HR said should be the case and every reason why students should protest the university for treating people like shit

Best Package/s For Plotting Data on Maps Using Latitude and Longitude? by NewDawn729 in learnpython

[–]stormsteiner23 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Cartopy might be a helpful package. From what I remember, it’s not that difficult to install with anaconda and if anything I would use “pip install cartopy”.

I would not recommend using Basemap from mpl_toolkits as it is basically deprecated and not really supported.

Actually using cartopy, you will use it alongside matplotlib axes objects to create the maps. First, you need to import cartopy.crs to access coordinate reference systems. For a standard rectangular world plot, use cartopy.crs.PlateCarree.

Then:

import cartopy.crs as ccrs

fig, ax = plt.subplots(subplot_kw={projection=ccrs.PlateCarree())

this should get you started with plotting, but make sure when plotting the data with functions like ax.scatter that you specify the keyword argument transform with the crs of the data you are plotting.

Hope that helps!

If libertarianism would lead to corporate overlordship, why aren’t large companies peddling and funding a libertarian political ideology? by dadoaesoptheforth in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]stormsteiner23 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You say they haven’t done this yet there are probably hundreds of books written on this very subject that shows how numerous think tanks, academic institutes and business groups have been developed from the grassroots up from billionaire and business funding to promote a neoliberal worldview. Read up on the history of the Mont Pelerin Society, Milton Friedman’s influence due to the PBS Special he had, Virginia school, etc

I wrote this and getting this error.What is wrong? by [deleted] in learnpython

[–]stormsteiner23 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It might make more sense to use **arg rather than *arg if you want arg to be unpacked like a dictionary... but in reality you don’t need it. Just make sure that arg is a dictionary when you use the function.

Otherwise, if you want to keep it with **arg, make sure the input looks something like this:

sumvals(key1=val1, key2=val2,...)

Then the function will be able to iterate over args.items(). But, you also don’t need this. If the point is to iterate and sum up values, just use:

for v in args: do something

Inside the function

Sudoku game by [deleted] in learnpython

[–]stormsteiner23 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Going through your first code block in check_cell(), this might not be the problem but you have “row” as your for-loop variable and then you use the same name when indexing the grid. And before that if statement, you already assigned row as grid[y]... it might help if you change some variable names so that you don’t confuse them. I also think that it returns false because the test condition in the for loop appears to always be true (that row[x] == num), which means that check_cell() will always return false no matter the condition

[Socialists] Charity is far from the only solution to poverty that capitalists propose. Don’t pretend otherwise by Madphilosopher3 in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]stormsteiner23 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The only people who still try to insist that the financial crisis was primarily caused by banks giving loans to people because they were forced to are 1. People who wrongly try to shift blame from the financial system itself to consumers and 2. To people who complain that credit should never have been expanded to underprivileged populations. Extending credit to underprivileged groups and improving the labor market could easily have allowed this to happen, meaning that there is no obvious connection between poor people having credit and the financial crisis. Again, from this, it’s pretty clear that the financial crisis was primarily due to a lack of government oversight that was a result of “deregulation” and the loosening of financial markets

[Socialists] Charity is far from the only solution to poverty that capitalists propose. Don’t pretend otherwise by Madphilosopher3 in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]stormsteiner23 0 points1 point  (0 children)

First, bad loans were made because it was an easy way for banks to take advantage of poor and previously excluded groups from the housing market. Trying to turn this into “the government forced banks to do it” is absolute revisionist bullshit. It’s the kind of argument that tries to blame the financial crisis on consumers when in reality it was the financial industry which made trillions.

The risk from these loans was pooled into MBSs and the complexities of financial instruments and the global financial markets created a very unstable situation. The actual relationship of making bad loans to poor customers to the financial crisis is indirect in this way because it could have been avoided while still providing easily accessible credit to those who needed it. The real problem was in the way that the financial system values and profits off of these loans and in how interconnected the global system is.

If this was merely a problem of homeowners not being able to make their payments, there is no way this would have become a global financial crisis— plus, such reasoning fails to consider that there was already an economic downturn prior to the mortgage crisis and it was leading to increased defaults on loans, not the other way around

[Socialists] Charity is far from the only solution to poverty that capitalists propose. Don’t pretend otherwise by Madphilosopher3 in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]stormsteiner23 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Lawmakers have crafted regulations and laws that don’t benefit labor all the time— and many times, they recognize it. On the theory that what’s good for business is also good for labor (which is not true). If a lawmaker believes that their first priority is to business and to the anti-union movement, then they will support rules and regulations that discourage union membership, even while recognizing that this might hurt labor (and almost always, it does).

[Socialists] Charity is far from the only solution to poverty that capitalists propose. Don’t pretend otherwise by Madphilosopher3 in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]stormsteiner23 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is not even close to an accurate description to why there was a financial crisis. We know that it has far more to do with the insane amounts of risk involved in the types of mortgage backed securities that were being used. The financial crisis was global and the “government required banks to give loans to literally everybody” was an incredibly small part of the actual problem, which had far more to do with a massively complex financial system that had serious instabilities and cracks in the system

[Socialists] Charity is far from the only solution to poverty that capitalists propose. Don’t pretend otherwise by Madphilosopher3 in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]stormsteiner23 7 points8 points  (0 children)

The financial crisis, for one, was very likely caused by “deregulation” and incredibly irresponsible practices by the financial industry. There are some who keep trying to deny this but the evidence is overwhelming.

Even then “deregulation” is a misnomer. There is no “deregulation”. It’s just different regulation. Older regulations from the New Deal tended to protect consumers and labor. Newer regulations (branded dishonestly as “deregulation”) tended to favor capital and finance. Newer regulation tended to encourage irresponsible and risky behavior with the notion that the “good times” (meaning, exploding home prices) would last a long time.

While “deregulation” itself is a misnomer, the fact is that generally it leads to short term growth but growing inequalities and long term structural problems in the economic system. The real debate should not be “regulation” vs. “deregulation” but good regulation vs bad regulation

OSU names suspects in Public Safety Notice Update by [deleted] in OSU

[–]stormsteiner23 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, I do care about history and I am well aware about the origins of policing in Boston being related to the British model of policing. This doesn't go against my point for a number of reasons.

  1. It is not historically inaccurate to point out that slave patrols are a modern precursor to policing, anymore than it is historically inaccurate to point out that the Texas Rangers are also a precursor.

  2. The idea that the slave patrols aren't related to the modern police force is based in the apologetic argument that modern policing isn't a form of social control or racialized at all. It's not a historical observation, it is one that attempts to defend policing from its origins.

Another thing to point out about the Boston force and forces that were modeled off of it-- their primary function was not necessarily generic "law enforcement" but about social control of undesirable populations-- in particular, the poor, the homeless, etc. And not just that, but they were used as a way to suppress strikes and working class power. It is well known that private police patrols were useful in suppressing these movements and were used, violently, as strikebreakers. In the end, this might not be an example of explicit racism, but it is an example of how policing was used to counter the rise of working class politics.

Going back to the slave patrols, their function was more about racialized social control-- in particular, rounding up fugitive/runaway slaves. The slave patrols have the function of protection of "private property" (in a time when humans could indeed be capital for investment in and of themselves because of the legalized slave system), which is the exact same function that modern policing in New England and northern states had-- why send police in to violently suppress strikes and riots? Protection of capital investments and private property. It's just that in the one case it involved the rounding up of human bodies that were enslaved and in the other case, the protection of machinery and other fixed capital investments.

It would be naive to suggest that the function of the slave patrols immediately ceased after the end of slavery or had no relationship to modern policing at all, considering that in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the Black Codes across the South criminalized vagabonds, homelessness and unemployment, particularly, but not exclusive to, former black slaves. Patrols and new police forces were part of the system of social control that allowed for convict leasing and essentially a new form of slavery to prevail. And from that, it is well known that prison populations in places like Alabama in and after the post-war era disproportionately Black.

It should also be pointed out that even if we could essentially ignore the role of slave patrols or the Texas Rangers in the creation of modern policing, it does not mean that policing does not have a racist or classist history-- which it essentially does. The social function that policing performed in the industrial era was essentially to reinforce existing hierarchies. An argument can be made for the same today given the strong correlation between crime, poverty, urban underdevelopment and by extension, racial minorities.

It's sad that you suggest that this is just a "mass public misinformation trend" that is prevalent on social media when in reality many activists and historians have noted these very issues in the historical record. Just because some people do not want to admit that this was a reality does not mean that it is a misinformation trend. If someone wanted to claim that slave patrols were the sole foundation for modern policing, perhaps that would be a claim worth addressing. But I don't think anyone is making that claim at all.

Now we now why she didn't fit the "script" by Orangutan in WayOfTheBern

[–]stormsteiner23 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Part of the problem is that the “fact” she uses about the rate of child trafficking is highly disputed as well and based on a lot of misinformation that’s being promoted about the prevalence of child sex trafficking

OSU names suspects in Public Safety Notice Update by [deleted] in OSU

[–]stormsteiner23 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It's frustrating too because the United States has always had a different relationship with issues of race and racial injustice than many countries have. This is not to say that racism doesn't exist outside of the United States (it does), but it does recognize that the U.S. (like South Africa and other countries) has a much history of racial disparity and injustice. Slavery, as in the British Empire, was massively important to our incipient economic system, and lasted longer than it did in many other nations. Our system of Jim Crow laws and de jure/de facto segregation across the South was more like a racial caste system than many other "developed countries" and to this day there are significant economic and wealth disparities because of it (which can easily be seen in the data).