It is the designer’s responsibility to make the game fun. If the optimal strategy is to camp, and it isn’t fun, the game has a design problem. Players shouldn’t play games that aren’t fun.

And yet, communities have collective needs, and require that some of us administer those needs. What are we to do? Embrace anarchy or libertarianism? Not for me I don’t think. Just push for systems that create positive, pro-social incentive structures. It is the best I think we can do.

This all seems fine. But it seems, i don’t know, sort of small ball. Like, define the terms and do the work, but how does this matter? In this case the language has a broadly understood term: sex drive. But, we don’t say food drive or sleep drive. As a descriptivist, I start in a dubious position.

I never thought sex drive meant I would die if I didn’t get laid, nobody thinks that. I never thought using the word drive meant that there was entitlement.

If people are angry at Dr Nagoski for putting this idea out there, maybe she is hitting at SOMETHING that matters. Or, people are just angry at her for insisting this language matters at all. Hard to say I guess. I am pretty sure shitty people who do shitty things because they feel entitled to other peoples bodies, probably won’t become better if they use different words.

I’m fairness, she explicitly downplays the importance of this idea at one point in the video saying it is the oldest and simplest piece of science in her book. Perhaps she is only belaboring it due to the reactions the idea receives.

Do you want to know why the dems didn’t stand behind rail workers? It’s actually pretty simple.

Inflation is out of control, wages are increasing but not at rates that make ordinary workers feel secure. Supply chain issues from the pandemic are lingering and contributing to prices skyrocketing. A rail disruption would have exacerbated an issue that democrats already see as potentially existential.

So what leverage did those workers have? Yes they could fuck up the lives of ordinary people by destroying our fragile supply chains. Yes they could trash the profits of the rail companies. Yes they could pressure democrats to push for a speedy resolution as the politics of this strike would have been a disaster for them. So they played there hand. Turns out dems needed trains running more than another labor win. So they turned their backs on them and still have run the most pro labor admin since FDR.

Politics is messy and tough calls get made every day. Regarding AOC, she is smart, and probably learned in her first week that this shit is hard and there are a million ways to lose by winning. Playing the game strategically and having long term goals is not ideological. It’s just good governance.

I wonder what it would like if they rolled out the OG circa 1998 page-rank algorithm on todays web. What would that algorithm find if we ran it now? Would it be garbage or would it undercut all the SEO and find good stuff?

I have a hunch that the current search is bad, not because they cannot do better, but because it is profitable for it to be this bad. The most powerful SEO tool is probably your checkbook.

Legislative work is a career. One gets better at their career the longer they do it. I don’t hire rookie electricians, and I hate that my state forces to vote for useless green legislators. They don’t know what they are doing and they kowtow to lobbyists and interests who write all the bills that pass here. Term limits are step one in legislative capture.

Thanks for making room for an opinion that is often unpopular in left dominated online spaces.

It seems likely that every human culture has had some concept of gender and norms related to it. Those roles can be permissive or strictly enforced. They can match the expectations our culture gives us, or they can be surprising to us. Beside average size, and childbearing, there is unlimited flexibility in how a culture might define the roles and how they might enforce them.

While it is a tempting thought, it seems unlikely that we, here and now, have somehow managed to create the absolute worst human culture in the millions of years we have been at this. I agree that we should be watchful of that pitfall. Western self loathing, is in itself another way of assuming that we must be the main characters in the human story.

Doesn’t seem like the author really offers any possible reasons for the rights reaction to responsible urban planning, so perhaps I will offer some.

Conservatism isn’t solely a political philosophy that a person decides to adopt. There are personally traits that feed into a person’s susceptibility to right wing thought. People who have low openness tend to be conservative. To paraphrase Buckley, their brains wired up to tell them to stand athwart history and yell STOP.

These people all grew up in a car centric world, where dad commuted in to the city from the suburbs and mom drove them to the school everyday. That, to them is the comfortable, natural order of things. Their psychology begs them to preserve that order at all costs.

Even though that model of planning is really new, only going back about 70 or 80 yrs, to them it is the natural way. Any alternative looks like change and progress, which they are psychologically predisposed to be suspicious of. All change to them, can be reduced to something that is being taken away from them. Something that disrespects their forefathers.

Not all change is good and some conservative thought is useful when a society is planning its future. But, it’s really dangerous when we have made mistakes.

In our modern political landscape, there are charlatans like Peterson and Jones who know how to pick at their audience’s psychology and pull dollars out of it. They cynically use the fears of their audience and package up any “new” ideas as existential threats.

The key when discussing progress with conservatives is to opening them up to the idea that we are going back. In this case specifically, 15min cities sounds scary but “returning to the urban planning ideas that motivated our great grandparents” might sound great. Same change different reaction.

Conservative cruelty cannot be accepted or forgiven but the psychology that drives it must be understood and accounted for when developing communication strategies.

I know right. The fuck should I pay 10/mo to use Lightroom as a hobby photographer who will never make a dime off my images? 25-50/yr and I would never even look at the alternatives.

The free hobby license for fusion 360 means I am sort of locked in to auto desk CAD software because it is all I have used for years now. Big win right?

Piracy is just a fancy word for price sensitivity.

Photoshop would not have the market dominance that it enjoys if college kids where not pirating it for a decade.

My son knows how to model in blender because a 12 yr old cannot afford maya. In a generation blender will own the space. He will never use maya.

Napster created a generation of music fans that put way more money into the industry than previous generations ever did.

A certain amount of loss should be tolerable, because it is often the pathway to future growth. A pirated copy isn’t a lost sale, it’s your investment in the next generation of consumers

What boggles the mind in this whole thing is that moderation is the product. These fools are gambling with the only thing they can’t afford to lose.

Here is Reddit inc’s dirty secret. The value they produces as a company is mod labor they don’t control and couldn’t afford to control if they wanted to.

Attempting to gain revenue from AI bots ingesting the site’s content wasn’t the worst idea. Letting that turn into a fight with the moderators was crazy dumb. Nobody needed to know reddits dirty secret until after an ipo if it had been played right. That would have required a CEO who actually knew the secret though.

I run windows on the desktop, Linux on my server, and iOS on my phone.

I used android for years and had all kinds of fun rooting and installing alternate OSes. Modern android devices (the mainstream ones anyway) are loaded up we undesirable apps and services and partner bullshit.

I would have agreed 10 yrs ago, but, it seems to me that the landscape has changed. Last year I decided to change with it. The iPhone is a compelling mobile experience, I doubt I will go back to android, but we will see what comes.

They don’t gain much adding fediverse users to the content mill. I have a hard time believing anyone at meta wants to give us access to “their” content without the reciprocal user data and ad attention in return. Hell, Reddit just imploded to rid itself of “freeloaders”.

They saw an opportunity to take twitter’s users, they probably used activitypub because it was fast. If they start federating, we can decide how to handle it. They will win the war for users, but we can have a nice space that they aren’t allowed to touch if we want it.

After the 2008 financial crisis (when the article claims the divergence started). The US and the EU chose different paths. The US chose bailouts and the EU went with austerity. Both were very unpopular, but one of them was also stupid. Helping the “wrong” people, it turns out was a better choice than trying to actively hurt all the people.

I’m sure there is a lot of other factors at play but EU governments getting religion about belt tightening and small-government in ‘09-‘12 was phenomenally stupid.