Ozmodan wrote on Apr 30, 2024, 22:09:
I watched the first episode and stopped. Just another mediocre series. I was not impressed.

I agree with you about the first episode. It gets a lot better though and by the end I was glad I watched it.

Microsoft actually delayed the game for a year to polish it more. Per the Gamesradar article, "Starfield had a much earlier release date before Xbox told Bethesda to take its time":

"Truth be told, when the acquisition closed this game had a significantly earlier ship date than where we're actually launching in," Spencer stated, clarifying that he was referring to the November 2022 release date. Spencer added that he then "sat down with Todd and the team," and explained that they wanted to give this team "the time" to finish Starfield

Does "Fair Trade" Help Poor Workers? Fair Trade hurts the worst off https://fee.org/articles/does-fair-trade-help-poor-workers/

Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman: "All of the progress that the US has made over the last couple of centuries has come from unemployment. It has come from figuring out how to produce more goods with fewer workers, thereby releasing labor to be more productive in other areas. It has never come about through permanent unemployment, but temporary unemployment, in the process of shifting people from one area to another."

This article goes over what would happen in a "worst case" scenario where robots did everything humans do.

Let’s Hope Machines Take Our Jobs: We Want Wealth, Not Jobs
https://mises.org/library/lets-hope-machines-take-our-jobs-we-want-wealth-not-jobs

As far as wealth inequality, what most people don't understand is that over time the average American has grown wealthier. True, the average millionaire has grown even more wealthy, but that is bound to happen if both of them increase their wealth by the same percentage. In other words, if, say, every single person in the country doubled their income overnight, the gap between rich and poor would also double. For example, if the richest person earns $1,000,000 and the poorest person earns $10,000, the gap is $990,000. If both incomes are doubled, the gap enlarges to $1,980,000, which is double the original gap. Both are now much better off, but the media would sensationalize this like they always do as a bad thing. "The gap between rich and poor has doubled overnight!!! Be shocked and afraid!!!"

Why Wealth Inequality Is Better Than Ever Before
https://youtu.be/hxlunzojPcs?si=LdtfoNwaSD4JGFIb

me ignoring the account

Not renamed. Like the saying goes, if you’re not pissing someone off, you probably aren’t saying anything important.

Reaganomics...had the opposite effect

I get a kick out of people that disparage Reaganomics because usually they are big government leftists that think Reagan slashed taxes, regulations, and government spending. In reality, Reagan did the opposite. So the left is actually attacking their own tax, spend, and regulate philosophy when they attack Reaganomics.

As economist Murray Rothbard, a founder of the Libertarian Party and as free-market of a guy as you can get, stated in his late 1987 article, "The Myths of Reaganomics":

"How well did Reagan succeed in cutting government spending, surely a critical ingredient in any plan to reduce the role of government in everyone's life? In 1980, the last year of free-spending Jimmy Carter the federal government spent $591 billion. In 1986, the last recorded year of the Reagan administration, the federal government spent $990 billion, an increase of 68%. Whatever this is, it is emphatically not reducing government expenditures.

"....[W]hile indeed income tax rates were cut in the higher brackets, many of the loophole plugs meant huge tax increases for people in the upper as well as middle income brackets. The point of the income tax, and particularly the marginal rate, cuts, was the supply-sider objective of lowering taxes to stimulate savings and investment.

"But a National Bureau study by Hausman and Poterba on the Tax Reform Act shows that over 40% of the nation's taxpayers suffered a marginal tax increase (or at best, the same rate as before) and, of the majority that did enjoy marginal tax cuts, only 11% got reductions of 10% or more. In short, most of the tax reductions were negligible. Not only that; the Tax Reform Act, these authors reckoned, would lower savings and investment overall because of the huge increases in taxes on business and on capital gains. Moreover savings were also hurt by the tax law's removal of tax deductibility on contributions to IRAs.

"....Deregulation. Another crucial aspect of freeing the market and getting government off our backs is deregulation, and the administration and its Reaganomists have been very proud of its deregulation record. However, a look at the record reveals a very different picture. In the first place, the most conspicuous examples of deregulation; the ending of oil and gasoline price controls and rationing, the deregulation of trucks and airlines, were all launched by the Carter administration, and completed just in time for the Reagan administration to claim the credit.

"....Overall, in fact, there has probably been not deregulation, but an increase in regulation. Thus, Christopher De Muth, head of the American Enterprise Institute and a former top official of Reagan's Office of Management and the Budget, concludes that 'the President has not mounted a broad offensive against regulation. There hasn't been much total change since 1981. There has been more balanced administration of regulatory agencies than we had become used to in the 1970s, but many regulatory rules have been strengthened.'

"....It is no wonder, then, that even the Reaganomist Bill Niskanen recently admitted that 'international trade is more regulated than it was 10 years ago.'

"....Reagan's rhetoric has been calling for reductions of government; his actions have been precisely the reverse. Yet both sides of the political fence have bought the rhetoric and claim that it has been put into effect."

This comment was edited on Jun 9, 2023, 10:44.

What AI does isn't plagiarism. What it does is no different than what humans do. It takes what has already been created and remixes it into something new. Google "Everything is a remix" to see examples of how humans do it for everything.

VaranDragon wrote on Apr 5, 2023, 09:23:
I read this as: Don't ever move to the United States, Virginia in particular.

Actually, rural places full of guns are exactly where you want to move to, as Larry Pratt, Executive Director of Gun Owners of America for over 30 years, explained to Piers Morgan.

Piers Morgan: "Why do you believe, given that you have 300 million guns in circulation, and the worst gun crime rate of any of the civilized countries of the world, that more guns is the answer to less gun murder?"

Larry Pratt: "The problem occurs, sir, in those areas precisely where we have said 'No guns.' The problem doesn't occur where the guns are allowed freely to be carried, to be used by people. There we have very low murder rates. We have lower murder rates in other parts of the country than even in Europe, than even [Great Britain].

"But what has created the problem in the US is to say in cities and schools: those are areas where we are not going to allow people to defend themselves."

Piers Morgan: "What is the murder rate in Great Britain for the last three years? Do you know? From guns?"

Larry Pratt: "It's under 3 per 100,000, and in Fairfax County where Gun Owners of America is located, it is actually .3 per 100,000, about a tenth of what it is in your vaunted English bucolic countryside. The fact of the matter is, with guns comes safety, if the guns are in the hands of the good guys. And when you say the good guys can't have guns, the bad guys have a monopoly, and horrible things, such as the shooting at the schools take place.

..."We only have the problem in our cities and our schools where people like you have been able to get laws put on the books that keep people from being able to defend themselves.

"When you go to an area in the US where guns are freely available, readily able to be carried legally, there you find our lowest murder rates, lower than the murder rates in Europe. You go to our cities where we have 'cracked down' on guns, and people can't defend themselves, and that is where the criminals have a field day."

Hey man, that's just the price we pay for freedom. Nothing we can do about it.

The places that don't allow guns may not have as many mass shootings (though 77 people were killed in the 2011 Norway attack, a country with exceedingly strict gun control, in the deadliest known mass murder committed by a lone gunman in modern history), but they still have mass attacks. They have more bombings/arson than we do. Bombs are easy to make. Anybody who does basic chemistry can figure that out. The 2003 Daegu subway fire in South Korea is the deadliest mass murder committed by a single perpetrator where 192 people died and 151 others were injured. How many times have we seen now from Japan and China where there's been mass stabbings where they've killed 20+ people with knives? We have trucks now as the new favorite. We've seen that repeatedly in European countries that have extremely strict gun control. The 2016 Nice, France truck attack killed 86 and injured 458. This is why guns don't kill people, people kill people. People who want to take out a large group of people will do it even without a gun, and they can do so easily.

People get hung up on the tool because they want something easy to blame. They want an easy solution. And there is no one, easy solution.

The Myth That the US Leads the World in Mass Shootings
https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-the-us-leads-the-world-in-mass-shootings/

Do Mass Shootings Only Happen in the US?
https://youtu.be/H06v5XrrLdw

That is just a machine gun slapped onto the dog. Here is a video from a year ago of a robo dog with an integrated sniper rifle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlDLwTsRHtU

Compensatory damages are are damages awarded by a court equivalent to the loss a party suffered. Punitive damages are considered punishment and are awarded on top of compensatory damages. In places like the UK there is no concept of punitive damages, so compensation there will be the actual loss you have incurred. As part of tort reform efforts in the US, legislators made a cap on punitive damages in many states. In Virginia, Johnny Depp was at first awarded $5 million in punitive damages but that was reduced to $350k. One lawyer I watch thinks Jones will have his reduced to about $2 million in punitive damages.

Currently only three states, Massachusetts, West Virginia, and Wisconsin, tell jurors that there is a damage cap. The reason is because of law professor Michael J. Saks’s study which showed that when jurors were informed of damage caps, they would adjust the size of the award to meet the damage caps, even in cases with injuries of low and medium severity. He attributed this to anchoring bias, which describes people’s tendencies to rely heavily on a piece of information—in this case the damage cap—to make subsequent decisions.

Incitement Is Not a Real Crime
https://mises.org/wire/incitement-not-real-crime

"This problem is related to a similar problem: making noncrimes like slander (i.e., defamation) into prosecutable offenses. A 'slanderer' can say all sorts of things. And, indeed, a respect for freedom of speech dictates that we allow him to do so. After all, the people who hear what he has to say remain completely free to come to their own conclusions about what to do with that information. Just because some person says 'your sister is a whore,' doesn't mean we are required to believe him or act on those words in any particular way.

"In practice, laws against incitement and defamation are very dangerous to basic human rights, and both place nonviolent people in legal jeopardy merely for the 'crime' of expressing opinions. These laws are direct attacks on the right to free speech. "

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism by Robert Murphy:

"The government is always quick to transfer the blame for inflation onto someone else; unions, greedy businessmen, and Arab oil tycoons are all suitable scapegoats. Yet these groups can at best raise particular prices, not prices in general. If Americans have to spend more on gasoline, that leaves less money to spend on burgers and sneakers. In order to raise prices in general, the government must print more money.

"As Friedman and other economists have documented in countries from Brazil to interwar Germany to Soviet Russia, and from different time periods going back to ancient China, price inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon."

Economist Peter Schiff: "Who's in charge of the money supply? The Federal Reserve. So the Federal Reserve causes inflation. How does it cause inflation? When it prints money to buy US government bonds."

A better word for inflation is dilution. The newly printed money dilutes the value of the existing money. It takes a year or so for that new money to spread throughout the economy and raise prices. You can see how much new money they have injected into the economy here:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

The newly printed money causes an artificial boom in the economy as that new money is spent which will unavoidably lead to an artificial bust, as well as higher prices. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Best-selling historian/economist Tom Woods said this video explains in 5 minutes what usually takes him a 30 minute speech to get across.

The Truth About Central Banking and Business Cycles:
http://youtu.be/YaxIPPMR3fI

The Fed's goal is inflating the money supply in order to have unlimited access to money for any project, e.g. warfare and welfare. Otherwise, the government would have to tax citizens openly rather than by stealth.

Articles

More articles

BigVlad wrote on Jul 28, 2022, 02:26:
As an example of how poisoned and stupid this word is, just look at the discourse on the new Thor movie, even before its release. I watch a lot of movies so I come across this stuff on YouTube. Why do they call it "woke"? Because a woman plays a prominent role. That's it. Do you really think that Terminator 1/2, Alien, and Aliens would not be called "woke" by the right if released today? If you're definition of "woke" is not "minority and/or women bad" then you probably should not be using that word, since that's overwhelmingly how it is being used nowadays.

Those movies sold very well and have always been very popular among men of every political stripe. Men today don't hate those movies for having a woman in the lead role. Show me one of these youtubes that says that a movie is woke solely because a woman is in the lead role. And let's see how many views it has.

As this video by a woman with 4.4 million views states:

"Turns out 50% of the population is female, and you know what? They're not going to see these movies or support these TV shows either [shows the Rotten Tomatoes audience scores for woke movies]. Is it because women hate women? No..."

EVERYTHING WRONG WITH WOKE CULTURE | and the impact on feminism (2021)
https://youtu.be/Nqmd4iU8J3k

In this video that has 2.6 million views, the Critical Drinker gives examples of female wokism in movies and how it actually is a disservice to women.

What Happened To Our Villains? | Critical Drinker
https://youtu.be/vnRP7SKzOgk

Critical Drinker: "The problem is that good villains seem to be a dying breed these days. The awesome antagonists that used to dominate the screen and push our heroes to the very limits of their endurance, are gradually being replaced by weak, flaccid, forgettable imitations, with none of the power an menace of their predecessors. And because they no longer present a challenge, there's no real payoff when they get defeated."

[He shows examples of how Kylo Ren is a second-rate Darth Vader in every way imaginable, as well as other villains of today Why? Because in this case when it comes to woke movies] "...one of the golden rules is that women are never allowed to lose to men at anything for any reason. Whether it's a physical fight, a test of skill or intelligence, or even a simple argument, pick basically any scenario where a woman gets pitted against a man, and I can pretty much guarantee you the woman will come out on top.

"...it creates a very obvious problem when your hero happens to be female and your villain male. Traditional storytelling requires the antagonist to start out stronger and more dangerous than the hero, forcing them to grow and improve themselves in some way, before finally prevailing at the end. But naturally, this process requires the man to be dominant in the early stages, and as we've already discussed, that's not allowed to happen anymore, even if it's just a temporary thing.

"....And what's really interesting is that the problem still exists, even if you reverse the roles. Take Thor: Ragnarök for example. The villain in that movie is a woman, which is perfectly fine at the beginning when she gets to kick Thor's ass, but it becomes a real problem near the finale when it's time for him to win. You definitely can't show Thor hammering a woman into the ground, because that brings up all kinds of unpleasant accusations of glorifying violence against women. So instead, the movie takes the best alternative, and has a third-party step in to win the battle for him. Notice how they carefully managed to side-step the uncomfortable issue of Thor defeating her in a fair fight. Just a little something to think about there.

"The point I'm making is that the reason people didn't warm to characters like Rey or Captain Marvel, isn't because of their gender, it's because everything is made so fucking easy for them that it's basically impossible to feel any empathy. It's the same exact problem with Ghostbusters, or Harley Quinn, or Charlie's Angels. If your heroes do nothing but plow their way through a collection of unthreatening, neutered enemies, then you'll never get your audience to care about their struggle, because they don't fucking have one.

"So what is the solution here? Well, ironically enough, the solution is equality. And I mean real equality, not the bullshit Hollywood version that makes one side artificially weaker just to make the other look superficially strong. If you want your female heroes to be respected equally, then you have to put them through equal struggles against worthy enemies. You need to stop nerfing your villains in a vain attempt to avoid offending people on social media."

This comment was edited on Jul 30, 2022, 13:17.

Task wrote on Jun 13, 2022, 09:28:
I wonder if this will be the last game they create with the 'Creation Engine'. They really should move to Unreal Engine imo. I know this is an offhand remark, but I have read they keep having trouble with their inhouse engine.

Todd Howard explains how The Elder Scrolls 6 will build on Starfield's engine

Bethesda is using the same game engine to build both Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6, but work on the latter will lead to changes to their shared base.

In a new interview with The Telegraph, Bethesda studio director Todd Howard reaffirmed that the studio's Creation Engine 2 is being "built for both" games – and it's worth emphasizing that it's being built, not that it was built.

Bethesda previously confirmed that it began investing more into engine work ahead of the start of the new console generation, and Starfield will be the first game to put the new engine to work. However, the engine's feature set will be modified to meet the unique needs of Starfield, The Elder Scrolls 6, and by extension any future Bethesda games using Creation Engine 2.

Economics professor Thomas DiLorenzo in his phenomenal book "How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, from the Pilgrims to the Present":

The average American today works about half the number of hours as the 1870 worker did, spends much less time at home doing chores (thanks to such capitalist inventions as microwave ovens, refrigeration, frozen food, vacuum cleaners, etc.), and enjoys many more hours of leisure activity each year.

The shorter workweek was entirely a capitalist invention and not the result of government policy or labor union pressure. As labor productivity increased—thanks largely to capital investment by entrepreneurs—and wages rose, more and more workers could afford to work fewer hours and still support themselves and their families. As capitalism grew, and as more and more new markets were created, the competition between employers for workers became more and more intense.

One way in which employers competed—and compete today—is to offer workers shorter hours. Once a few employers started recruiting the best employees in this way, others followed suit. Those who did not were left at a competitive disadvantage. With rivals offering fewer hours of work per week, those employers who did not do so were compelled by competition to offer a wage premium to get employees to work longer hours. Either way—longer hours or higher pay—they put themselves at a competitive disadvantage. This is how America has gone from an average eighty-hour workweek to one of less than forty hours.

Economist Hunter Lewis: "Higher wages earned by unions actually come out of the pockets of other workers, not out of employers’ profits, a point that is now well established but still little understood."

Bestselling historian Tom Woods: "Labor historians and activists would doubtless be at a loss to explain why, at a time when unionism was numerically negligible (a whopping three percent of the American labor force was unionized by 1900) and federal regulation all but nonexistent, real wages in manufacturing climbed an incredible 50 percent in the United States from 1860—1890, and another 37 percent from 1890 to 1914, or why American workers were so much better off than their much more heavily unionized counterparts in Europe. American workers had the eight-hour-day well before Europe did, and they earned much higher wages. Unionism never accounted for more than a third of the American labor force, and that was at its height. Most of them seem to cope with these inconvenient facts by neglecting to mention them at all."

Forgotten Facts of American Labor History
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2004/11/thomas-woods/unions-lie-and-so-do-their-supporters/

"Labor union membership in private employment has greatly declined over the decades, from about 35 percent in the mid 1950s to about 7 percent today. The reason is the fact that unionization imposes artificially high costs on firms, in the form of above-market union wage rates and reduced efficiency and quality of product as they struggle with union hostility to improvements in productivity, arbitrary work rules, and the difficulty or even impossibility of firing incompetent workers.

"Under such conditions, firms cannot meet the competition of other firms, foreign or domestic, that are non-union, and thus sooner or later must go out of business. The most recent large-scale example is that of Hostess Brands. It finally had to close when one of the major unions it had to deal with was unwilling to accept a wage reduction, with the result that 18,000 workers became unemployed. This kind of story, repeated hundreds of times over, explains the decline in union membership."

Labor Unions, Thugs, And Storm Troopers
https://mises.org/library/labor-unions-thugs-and-storm-troopers

These "brave" multi-national corporations who are taking a stand only do so in places like the US. In places like the Middle East where they know they will get backlash, they are silent. They don't display their rainbow logo there.

I wouldn't call it a masterpiece as the gameplay was way too repetitive and not that interesting. The formula for almost every quest was: Use witcher sense to follow footsteps to something you kill. Also, the level-up system was lame. Adding 2% sword damage or whatever wasn't compelling at all.

Cutter wrote on Apr 15, 2022, 16:04:
Yeah, and if we don't shut Putin down hard they'll invade Taiwan next. I think they're just waiting to see what happens in the US 2024 elections. If Trump comes back and wins they'll do it for sure.

Trump recently said that he told Putin that if he invades Ukraine, the US will immediately bomb the hell out of Moscow. He said Putin probably believed him only 5%, but that is all you need to make someone afraid that you might be crazy enough to do it. Everyone sees Sleepy Joe Biden as such a pushover that it's no wonder Putin decided to invade under his watch and annexed Crimea in 2014 also under his and Obama's watch. Has Biden even said that he even wants Ukraine to win yet, or is he still dodging that question?

Biden admin won't say 'we want Ukraine to win'
https://youtu.be/7-u_8HnTt9o

Cutter wrote on Apr 15, 2022, 16:04:
We need to be laying the smack down on China too. Which should start with bringing manufacturing home and ending all these worker killing "free" trade pacts around the world.

"Instead of promoting global economic government, Congress should reform those policies that reduce our manufacturers’ competitiveness. Recently, a prominent financial journalist visited with businessmen who are launching new enterprises in China. When he asked them why they chose to invest in China, they answered: 'It is so much easier to start a business in China than in the United States, especially in places like Massachusetts and California.'

"This answer should send a clear message to every lawmaker in America: the taxes and regulations imposed on American businesses are hurting economic growth and killing jobs. If we are serious about creating jobs, we should be working on an aggressive agenda of cutting taxes and repealing needless regulations."

Don’t Blame Other Countries. Our economic woes begin at home.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2003/11/ron-paul/dont-blame-other-countries/

The Myth of "Exporting Jobs"
https://mises.org/library/myth-exporting-jobs

RedEye9 wrote on Mar 11, 2022, 19:15:
Governor Abbott and the Texas Taliban, criminalizing basic human rights one rule at a time.

Oh, so children should have all of the same basic rights as adults do since children are just humans like the rest of us, huh? We shouldn't forbid them from anything (like an irreversible, medically unnecessary surgery) based on the fact that their brains aren't fully developed? OK, then that means you are for giving children the basic human right of voting in elections, joining the military, buying cigarettes and alcohol, choosing how and for how long they want to be employed including in hazardous industries (if I have a basic human right to be a coal miner then why doesn't a child?), and letting them do porn and sex work if they so choose. Anything less is Taliban behavior. Many of these things are reversible and therefore less consequential than permanent surgery.