Exotic dancers, waitstaff, sales people…

I imagine it won’t be long before Steam turns into the badguy.

People have been predicting Steam will do a heel turn for more than a decade. But, their consumer-friendly policies and ease of use have kept them the dominant platform despite immense spending from other companies.

They’re still a store, and I don’t think anybody’s confusing them with a charity. But, a nearly 20 year track record suggests that they know that being trustworthy and consumer-friendly is essential to their long-term financial success.

Nah, that’s still interacting with Github.

Needs one that’s like #4 from January to September, labelled: “Fuck Github and anything else owned my Microsoft”.

It’s similar, but homeless encampments are a bit different. The main difference, IMO, is that they’re much less permanent. In the DS9 clip it looked like people were not expecting to have to move any time soon.

In a real homeless encampment, the police often come by to harass people and kick them out. People need to be able to move quickly or they’ll leave stuff behind, and it will get broken, thrown away or stolen.

The other difference is that homeless people have cell phones. They’re not the latest models, they’re not in great shape. But, it’s really hard to exist in the modern world without one. In the DS9 clip they had no tech, probably because that was easier on the props department than trying to imagine tech that would be 20-years more advanced than what people had in 1995.

The Bell Riots weren’t what they were cracked up to be. Either that, or they got the date wrong.

But, the writers in that scene went really easy on the set dressers and costumers: “Ok, it’s a street scene in 2024, but everyone is poor, and as a result they don’t have anything built after… say… 1995.”

It’s not a MacGuffin. A MacGuffin isn’t important to the story, it’s just there to serve as motivation for the characters. In the Three Body Problem, the mystery of what happened to science is central to the plot of the entire book.

This isn’t “pretending to punch Lois Lane”. This is “why the hell did Superman just kill Lois Lane!?” The whole plot of the story is that science stops working. Scientists are killing themselves because of it. One of the characters is seeing a countdown when he closes his eyes. Aside from the Three-Body-Problem game parts, the whole rest of the book is structured as a mystery that they’re trying to solve. This mystery is the primary motivation for the characters in the book, and it’s presented as a mystery for the reader to speculate about.

Basically, the book is structured as if it were a murder on a train, and the whole structure of the story suggests that someone on the train is the murderer. But, it turns out that the murderer is Zeus, who descended from the heavens, killed the murder victim for his own reasons, and left. Ta-da, mystery solved! (And there’s the additional bullshit that scientists are committing suicide because their experiments are failing. That’s just so ridiculous. Actual scientists would be so excited by unexpected results. The way to upset a scientist wouldn’t be to have something appear to break the laws of physics. What would upset real scientists would be a replication crisis: either they can’t match someone else’s work, or people call into question their work because nobody can match the results they’re getting.)

And those are just the problems with the “A” plot. The “B” plot is the ultra-stupid simulation of life on a planet in a 3-body system. You know what life would be like in that kind of system: nonexistent. But no, you’re supposed to believe in people being flattened and rehydrated. I mean, come ON. And you’re also supposed to believe that people are playing this “game” and loving it. Has the author ever actually played a game? Has the author ever met any people?

The writing is bad, the characters are bad, the science is bad. It’s just a bad book. It’s a book that dumb people read and they think the author is smart, and if the author is smart the book must be good, it just went above their heads. But, the author isn’t smart, the book isn’t smart, the book isn’t good.

Real life experience can’t be catalogued

In ye olde days it couldn’t. But, what if the current database of YouTube videos survives? You’d get every non-expert trying everything in any way possible. If books and podcasts survive, you’d have every discussion on why things are done a certain way and not another way. Assuming it all survives, there’d be so much more information to future archaeologists and anthropologists than today. Right now we just dig up a shard of pottery and try to figure things out from whatever we can glean from that pottery.

It would make for a cool movie. The only problem is trying to imagine a really distant future that makes the present look barbaric.

They had fun with that in Demolition Man with the three shells. Star Trek TNG did it in The Neutral Zone where they had a bunch of people from the 20th century including a financier who couldn’t accept the lack of money in the future. But it’s really hard to make a future that’s believable and makes the present look barbaric.

If the records survived, they might not need anything from you, because they’ve already watched it all on video. But, maybe some of them would be interested to see it in person once. Even if we know how warriors fought 3000 years ago, it would still be interesting to see a true expert warrior using their weapons in a way that took a lifetime to master.

If the records didn’t survive, you might be a valuable person to study for a while, but it might quickly get tiring to basically be a sideshow performer, there to delight the people who think of you as this ultra-primitive thing that’s nearly an animal.

I would bet it would be pretty frustrating for most people after a while. You’d have this mental image of yourself as a sophisticated, modern person who was respected by his/her peers. Suddenly, you’d be living in a world where people around you might be struggling to contain their disgust. Things that are normal to you like eating meat or peeing in a toilet might be seen as animal-like behaviours.

If you’re lucky, then your sophisticated construction and engineering techniques might be seen as impressive feats of craftsmanship. In a world where robots fasten everything that needs fastening, just driving in a nail or using a screwdriver might be seen as something really fancy, like we’d now see the kinds of stonemasonry that they might have had millennia ago.

But, if your self-image is that of an advanced engineer, and the best you can hope for is to be seen as a quaint old-timey craftsman, that might not be very satisfying.

Except the new FTL-capable ships are the result of 3000 years of advancement. You wouldn’t even be able to figure out how to use the bathroom, let alone do the navigation and piloting to reach a new planet.

Imagine we had some Egyptians from -1000 BC who suddenly arrived unexpectedly in the modern world. They think Ra, Anubis and Horus control their fates. Iron is the most advanced technology they know of, but you’re proposing we make them astronauts?

I managed to finish the first book, but it was so terrible that I wasn’t willing to read any more or watch the show.

The whole book sets up a big mystery, then solves that mystery with the biggest deux ex machina bullshit ever committed to paper.

Except you’re basically a caveman. You leave and you’re one of the world’s foremost engineers, trusted to know everything necessary to build a new settlement from scratch, with no help from Earth.

You get there and your engineering knowledge is 3000 years out of date. The only people who are interested in your skills are archaeologists and anthropologists. They use an app to ask you questions like “Could you demonstrate how you used woodpaper to wipe your anus?”

Don’t try to time the market. Buy on a regular basis when you can afford it. And don’t assume the market is always going to go up just because it used to do that when sane people were in charge.

You deserve lemmy silver for teaching me about lemmy silver. :)

That was when the PRI won every election right?

From the outside, it’s interesting how Mexico has gone from PRI only, to PRI and PAN flipping back and forth, to now Morena winning the presidency twice in a row.

:( !lemmysilver

Yes, they’re immigrants, which means they’re only in the US because it had been a convenient place. Maybe now’s the time to move the entire operation to a new company. In the case of some companies like Google, who already have a worldwide presence, and already claim to do most of their business out of small tax havens, it’s probably just a matter of having some lawyers adjust a few documents and voila, they’re now based out of Malta or something.

Except when it doesn’t.

I tried it out, hopefully that works.

I wish I could upvote this more than once.

The economic boom the US experienced in the 1950s and 1960s was the result of:

• Pro-worker economic policies enacted during the great depression that were kept in place through WWII and remained in place until they started getting killed off in the 1970s and were fully killed off in the 1980s by Reagan.
• The top tax bracket being set at 90%.
• The US being one of the only countries that didn’t have its infrastructure absolutely trashed during WWII.

Even if the US went back to pro-worker, anti-oligarch policies, we’re unlikely to see another golden age unless there’s another world war that doesn’t damage the US. When people talk about their grandfather supporting 4 kids as a plumber, that was wonderful, but it was never the norm.

Let’s see: !lemmysilver