You are an incredibly optimistic summer child.

you don’t hear a lot about blinding weapons or biological agents

Blinding agents aren’t that effective in warfare. Chemical agents do get used, especially on civilians. Biological weapons are a big risk relative to much more tested, targeted, conventional munitions. At the end of the day, flying an explosion at the other guy has always been the winning strategy, and still is to some extent.

The age of absolutism gave way to the age of revolution.

Ah yes, when you could drop off a few boxes of guns to some revolutionaries and they would be near untrackable in dense urban or wide rural settings.

Now, your revolutionary drone operator saves you the trouble of tracking by broadcasting his location, assuming he hasn’t already been sighted on your universal surveillance cameras or been swept up by irregular purchasing habits.

Shells are really cheap…

By dollars per kill, drones blow them out of the water. You need a big, pricey, vulnerable piece of machinery to target your shells. Your target will more than likely move or take a covered position once the shells drop. And obviously you need a spotting system for this as well (probably a drone anyway).

On average, for your light artillery it might take 8-10 shells to kill a target. That’s why they’re not precision killing equipment and are better used for flattening defenses or pinning down groups of people.

A drone just needs some piloting, human or otherwise. So you’re comparing 10 shells from a trained team out of specialized firing position with a calibrated gun vs. one guy with two drones in a backpack.

So when you stack up any belligerents [state vs state/non-state], the key math is who can deploy more drones from better positions with better range/targeting, better tactical intelligence and keep pressure over a longer period. A state actor will always have the advantage there.

I fail to see your point. Yes weapons kill people. But no weapon in history could

• be cheaply dispersed over populated areas
• linger for hours or potentially days
• patrol and chase targets into any kind of cover
• instantly and autonomously take offensive action outside of any chain of command

Did you read the article? The equipment does make the decision. That’s the whole point. One remote operator vibe-killing scores of people extremely efficiently. Yes there’s a human deciding to put the drones in flight but why would that remove culpability any more than collateral damage from a traditional explosive?

By your logic, nukes exist so there’s no reason to worry about any other types of war crime.

You can, to some extent, avoid an undiscriminating minefield. You can, to some extent, plead for mercy from the jack boot kicking in your door. You cannot avoid or plead with a mine flying through your bedroom window.

On the other hand the price of not stopping the war could be even higher…

From the perspective of Putin, what could be more costly than a few million destitute veterans marching on his palace? Best bet is to neutralize that threat by burning up your country’s resources in an endless meat grinder. Maybe you’ll get lucky and coast your perma-war long enough to die an old man.

Delay crashing the plane for as long as possible and then slam it hard into the mountain to kill all the angry passengers before you parachute out.

Once the left wanted higher taxes for everyone; Gen-Z socialists demand handouts funded by billionaires

Fucking crazy take. Billionaires have been paying far less than their share for decades. A regular person might pay 33% on their annual wealth gains while billionaire accounting and tax dodging leaves them near 0%.

People “demand handouts from billionaires” because 31.7% OF ALL WEALTH IN THE USA is tied up in the personal assets of 1% of the population. There is quite literally nowhere else to get the money.

Not universally for sure, Gen-Z men are especially problematic. But the sweaty dudes have become a minority of gamers, and I would expect broad-stroke “gamer” world views to reflect the influx of other demographics.

That’s what I’d like to see more of in this research. Cut it by age cohort, gender, income, genres of game, years in the hobby, etc…

A well designed game plants the seeds for that. E.g. trying to avoid toxicity by removing chat vs supporting community hosted/moderated servers.

From my quick read through of their methods it seems like they didn’t account very well for the types of games, platforms and demographics. The decade in question saw a massive explosion of gaming as a hobby into the mainstream and, importantly, a strong growth of women in the gaming population.

So as a whole you have games becoming more mainstream to younger (“woke”) audiences and more accessible while the inclusive-biased demographics also blew up. It’s not at all shocking that you’d find more inclusivity there.

A much more interesting study would be separating the gamers from the Gamers. Show me how people playing Splatoon and Animal Crossing compare to the neckbeards living in LoL and HoI4…

Gang rape: the rape of one person by several attackers in succession

Are you quibbling over two vs several? Or are you insinuating the title would be different if they were white? Because I’ve definitely seen the term applied to all races and any number of attackers.

Personally I don’t think we should worry that much about being politically correct when we’re talking about convicted sexual predators.

The fascists currently own that stake anyway, what’s the difference?

Nothing in the legislation reads as a bailout, the government would unilaterally take 50% stake and the associated voting power. The American public is no worse off if it doesn’t turn a profit or gets liquidated.

The bailout would happen when the conservative vultures circle. “We can’t let them fail, that would devalue the American portfolio (never mind that this bailout is 2x any value that could ever be gained back)”

Guess I don’t see it like that. To me both are serving the same function of fashion, but on the back is cheekily pretending it’s not and is therefore more disingenuous.

I also have a strong bias toward aesthetic over statement. There’s no reason my T needs to “say” anything any more than a striped or patterned shirt needs to “say” anything. I can just like how it looks or compliments my outfit.

I’m never going to wear some generic Coca-Cola or beer brand or “I speak sarcasm” shirt. If it’s an obvious legible statement (like a local band or charity) then that means it’s really important to me and I don’t mind looking like a trashy geek.

Counterpoint, wearing a graphic on the back feels shallow and self-aggrandizing. You’re never going to get to see the graphic you like in a mirror; friends and acquaintances you interface with all day won’t see it. It’s only for the benefit of anonymous observers behind you that you’ll never meet and won’t think about you twice.

It also is more antisocial. It’s natural to comment on a graphic when you’re face to face (pointing to chest, “oh you also like [Band]?”) and hard to broach a conversation from behind when they’re probably engaged with something else ("[Band]? Oh right, the shirt, yeah…").

It’s possible to pull it off, but in general I’d rather see someone confidently rocking a 3 wolf moon shirt than an incredible print drifting down the street on some anonymous back.

Well… Italian bureaucracy isn’t famous for being punctual and efficient.

🤡🤡🤡

Edit: “No alternative to shipping companies” but there’s somehow an alternative to reaching millions of people all on a single platform that they’re not leaving due to social inertia. Get on a bike loser, you can’t carry a package?

You need to educate yourself or keep your mouth shut. There are plenty of people who put a lot of time and effort into optimizing political engagement and weighing the pros and cons of all avenues.

400k people tuned in live to watch a one-off stream of AOC playing Among Us on twitch. 4.8 MILLION people watched the vod and that was nowhere near “all of Twitch”.

I want to see YOUR math on building a system that can do that with any consistency and then fit that into a mayor’s budget. Show me your road map to even sniff that audience size; where is your marketing spend going? Then on top of that, show me that there’s no better way to spend that money from the political war chest; explain how not generating a few pennies for Amazon is worth cutting N community outreach/charity events.

I’ll even help you out: we have a great comparison and it’s publicly traded so we know a bit about it. Truth social has about 6 million MAU, so we’re almost reaching that AOC Among Us scale (assuming they all engage with your stream). It took something like $5-$10M to stand up and costs $60M to operate every year. They ate a $31M deficit in their first year.

If you want a mayor to shell out that kind of money as a political stunt… I guess you must love millions of big-donor dollars that finance that kind of thing.

psychosis

noun

psy·​cho·​sis sī-ˈkō-səs:

serious mental illness characterized by defective or lost contact with reality often with hallucinations or delusions

Example:

looking at the problem we have with Big Tech and saying “yes, this is fine!”

Absolutely nobody here is doing that. Nobody in this entire comment section has said anything close to that. Car dependant infrastructure and fossil fuels are bad but you still have to get in your car and go to work if you want to not die.

You realize there are thousands of email platforms not owned by Big Tech? You could even host your own.

Gmail is 30% of global email traffic. It doesn’t matter what platform I choose, my message is still going to end up in someone’s Gmail inbox and stolen by AI.

If I was taking that problem seriously I would at least cut out Apple, Gmail and Microsoft domains and automatically lose 84% of my mailing list. Why don’t you care about that?

Sure, why not? Again, there are thousands of alternatives. You can even host it on your own hardware.

Why not should be obvious: the NYC Mayor’s office isn’t in the market of building, hosting, operating or managing social media platforms. Full stop. That takes money, time, marketing and expertise and provides zero value to his constituents beyond performative fuzzy feelings.

If you’re so smart and righteous what’s stopping you from building your own platform for these politicians? Why the fuck should Mamdani have to do it? And make sure to build up 240 million MAU while you’re at it, this has to compete with Twitch’s reach.

LOL you don’t need a “datacenter”.

Well shit somebody call up Amazon and let them know! This genius has figured out a way to host an interactive live streaming service scalable to millions of simultaneous users from his closet.

Let me tell you about this thing called email…

See my comments above, you’re sacrificing your own privacy and feeling sanctimonious about it. Snail mail has far stronger legal and physical protections than your email.

You say that like FedEx, DHL, UPS, etc. don’t exist.

Lmfao you’re here to shit on Big Tech but don’t care about these corporate vultures?

Bro try trolling a little bit harder.

Your argument is completely psychotic.

Gonna send emails? No way, 90% of people use Gmail and you shouldn’t give Google traffic.

Stand up your own website? Well it better not be in AWS, GCP or Azure. You’re still gonna need DDOS protection and the ability to scale to hundreds of thousands of users for this event so I hope you have the money to build your own datacenter. But be sure you’re making your own ethical internet backbone. Don’t want your money going to Verizon or Sprint.

Maybe thats all a little too complicated so we’ll need to go analog. But have you ever mailed a letter? USPS is run by fascists, gotta do better. Get on a bike (can’t have those emissions!) and hand deliver your 20k political zines. But don’t put it in their mailboxes, that’s reinforcing the status quo.

The ml multi-paragraph response under this is 🤌

Got them going like a top. The tldr is always the same

“When [bad country] commits an atrocity it’s obviously because they’re mustache twirling villains. When my dictator commits an atrocity, it’s really due to complex material conditions and the state of geopolitics and capitalist counter-revolutionaries and probably the CIA and Mercury was in retrograde and the sun was in his eyes and …”

Bro we evolved to live in groups of a few dozen people and be hyper focused on physically present danger. How could an early human possibly conceive of billionaire; someone who personally holds more wealth that hundreds of millions of people.

There’s no neoliberal mind prison. People just focus on physical, tangible threats (a lack of healthcare, food prices) and not the vague concept of some guy with 9 zeros in a bank account who’s causing it (often indirectly with 2+ degrees of removal). We need to wake up to the fact that no shiny ideology will magically spawn cohesion among 8 billion people.

This is some low effort trolling, do better.

Perverse fuel economy legislation and optimizing for high profit luxury vehicles meant consumers were choosing between a $20-30k ICE truck/suv or a $40k stripped trim EV.

In 2024 (when automakers were finally getting off their asses), only 10 BEV models were under $40k, most with pitiful range and only 2 just under $30k.

For comparison with ICE, there were 18 compact cars under $30k and 13 trucks under $40k. You could buy TWO Ford Mavericks for the price of an Ioniq 5 or a mid-trim Ford Mach-E.