MolochAlter

Brown lentils.

• Dice onions, celery, carrots, in equal volume.

• Stirfry them in a pot with some olive oil.

• Throw in a sausage or some other meat with a strong flavour, just a small amount, stirfry until the outside is seared.

• Add a can of lentils and a can of tomato chunks and sauce, cook until the chunks have rendered.

• Serve with polenta or another neutral side.

I picked up an old amplifier from my parents, they bought it for their day’s equivalent of 4-500 bucks to use with their LP player, which has since died.

It’s a Scott from the 70s, made in the US, and it somehow now appreciated over inflation if you look at the sale prices on ebay and the like (~700€).

When setting it up i opened it to see if it needed cleaning out, and the insides were pristine, and clearly hand soldered.

The sound is clean as a whistle, it’s compatible with RC cables, and has a standard European plug. Not only does it not need upgrading, it stands head and shoulders over what you can get today for the same price they bought it for.

Sometimes, products made before planned obsolescence were just better.

Same, and I’d count that as contrarian behaviour.

This is a site populated mostly by the too edgy or too contrarian for Reddit, with the same flaws in incentive systems as Reddit, why are you surprised lol.

ignoring the issue with Lutris and AI for a minute

Please by all means, I ignored it in the first place, I find this way more interesting.

If you choose not to judge your own actions by the expected consequences of those actions for everyone involved, then how exactly are you supposed to judge them?

Well, this is only half the problem. It’s a bad system because it demands the impossible of you (i.e. accurately predict the future) but it also has a really narrow interest in the dimensions of human morality.

To directly answer the question however: you judge them by a set of principles, whichever you deem right, that you apply consistently across choices.

When it comes to inter-personal choices, the vast majority of all questions can easily be answered by asking yourself “am i betraying some explicit or implicit bond of trust with someone (who has not done so themselves) by doing/saying this?” and if you are, you just stop.

And to be clear, I don’t claim to follow this principle 100% of the time, I am not a saint, but that to me is the guiding principle when there are stakes to my behaviour, and it has not failed me yet.

If you’re following some rule that disagrees with the utilitarian view, then by definition it’s a rule that in your own opinion leads to a worse outcome for everyone.

(Emphasis added)

At its core, the idea of utilitarian morality is to “maximise utility”, that is to do whatever does the most “good” to the highest number of people.

This is, IMO, a terrible metric, and as a deontologist I am perfectly happy reaching a “worse” outcome by it.

It is not particularly hard to see how, by applying this metric, you can justify any kind of scapegoating, abuse, and/or undue leniency on people that would deserve harsh punishment in any deontological or virtue based system, as soon as enough “good” is produced through it.

There is a very dark, but apt, joke about this kind of approach to morality: that 9/10 people involved in it endorse gang rape.

To me, morality is a qualitative assessment, not a quantitative one.

It does not matter how many perpetrator lives will be ruined if they have earned their punishment, and it does not matter how much happier they would be to get away with the crime than the victim would suffer, comparatively.

To do anything else would be to relinquish morality to the whims of the masses, because it implies that there is a threshold past which the abuse of the few becomes negligible due to the benefits it brings to the many.

trying to claim that all utilitarians are either stupid or evil is just incorrect.

To be fair I also stated they can be naïve; I was one too in my youth, until I learned and understood better.

Utilitarianism really falls at the first hurdle of any kind of evaluation of a moral system.

It has no real prescriptive power because it demands you be able to correctly foresee the outcome of your actions, something literally addressed by “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”, an adage of at least 400 years ago, and yet people will still gravitate towards it as if society did not explicitly caution us about that mindset forever now.

At this point I can’t help but look down on those who genuinely identify as utilitarian as either too young, too stupid, or actively malevolent and trying to find a way to justify their bad behaviours as errors rather than malice or negligence.

Oh, I was convinced it was specifically bladed, as opposed to armi contundenti.

You always learn something new.

Yes, it’s the literal translation of our term for bladed melee weapons.

Bold of you to assume that Italian highschools have a shop class, the 3D printer is probably part of the computer lab.

Source: am Italian.

Personally I prefer my software to give me options, I hate when stuff like this is picked for me when equally valid options exist

“Jetpack cat”? Really? That desperate, huh?

Ok, I know this will be a bit of a read, but:

Capitalism vs Croney Capitalism

In an ideal scenario, a “free market” is a market that may be regulated but not in such a way that the state uses its institutional powers to play favourites.

Either a good or service can be provided on the market, which means that within the limits of the law any group or individual can provide that service, or the service is banned, meaning it won’t be allowed for anyone to provide.

Depending on who you ask, even simple barriers such as licenses to operate and OSHA guidelines are forms of interference with the free market; the reality is that in practice perfect information does not exist and society at large prefers limiting the ability of the incompetent to do harm accidentally or through negligence, rather than having them punished after the fact.

Croney capitalism is when these barriers are not only present but erected (typically by the government, but it could also be done by other regulatory bodies) in such a way that they deliberately privilege certain preferred entities (the aforementioned cronies) over others.

This, much like redlining was discriminatory to black people despite mentioning them explicitly, does not have to be an explicit bias, it can be as simple as tuning requirements to make them prohibitive to companies not already established in the market to prevent new competition from coming into existence.

The US definitely has a big issue with this at multiple scales.

What is the best solution

I find the best approach to markets is to look at their elasticity.

An example of a highly elastic market could be videogames. Nobody needs videogames to survive, nobody needs a specific videogame to exist, it’s entirely driven by preference and unnecessary voluntary spending, you have full access to the entire market regardless of where you are provided you can pay the price of admission.

Perfect field to build a market around, the client will naturally gravitate to whatever offer they find provides the best value for money, companies will read the signals and adapt, etc.

A highly inelastic market is, for instance, emergency healthcare. Whenever you are in the market for it, you definitionally have an urgent, time sensitive, geographically limited need for the product. You can’t shop around beyond that range and failure to find the product usually means permanent consequences potentially as severe as death.

In that case, a market is a terrible solution to the problem, as markets have no incentive to capillarise at a loss, and want to price their goods and services based on the value to the client, which in this case would be infinite.

A market handling healthcare without a non-profit option competing with it is a recipe for disaster, while flanked by one it becomes extremely beneficial.

Italy and France, 2 of the best healthcare systems in the world in terms of cost per capita and outcomes, are mixed systems where you can go to the state healthcare system for anything and pay a nominal amount (to deter timewasters) or you can get private insurance or pay out of pocket for private alternatives that have to follow the same standards as the public sector at minimum. This helps treating niche conditions or skipping the line on severe common conditions, meaning those who can afford private treatment will lessen the load on the public sector, reducing queues for those who can’t afford it.

In short: The best approach is looking at each market category and making tailored solutions that best fit the kind of good/service being dealt with.

Some markets, like security, are better left in the hands of a few strictly regulated entities, other are better served by a fully free approach (like luxury goods), most important things fall somewhere in the middle, where some state interference/mediation objectively leads to the best outcomes.

Very fair lol

Their games have been reheated bongwater broth for more than a decade now, more predictable than even Sony and far less competent in execution, did you need more reasons?

I mean, I’d bet dollars to donuts Ubisoft would win it handily if it gets to a class action or whatever equivalent.

For one, they’re basically on the verge of falling over so the economic motivation is a no-brainer.

For two, it’s a massive multinational company headquartered in France (a country with stronger labour laws than Canada) with plenty of legal advice available on these matters. I highly doubt they’d do it this blatantly if they were not confident this is an easy sell, instead of waiting something like 6 months to separate the 2 events enough for plausible deniability.

For three, good luck holding a foreign company accountable, in general.

All great mechanic driven games do this to an extent.

I had this with Portal and Minecraft back in the day, it’s just because they’re games that force you to think with their mechanics.

Except ubisoft is hemorrhaging money so it’s an extremely easy sell to say “the studio is not profitable and we’re in dire need to cut waste” and indeed can the lot.

My answer to those is always “i code for money, I don’t code in my free time”

Well, now you are talking much more with a sense.

No, now you no longer assume I am your enemy. The fact that you assumed disagreement with you meant supporting everything you disagree with is indicative of a few things, but then again so was your post.

Still, I believe that mocking right-wingers is one of the most efficient way to counter the right wing propaganda

You’re free to believe that, even if it were true you’re doing a terrible job of this.

“Why are MAGA never geniuses” is not mockery of the right; it’s just sad, ignorant, stupid elitism, and anyone who isn’t even stupider will immediately see it for what it is.

Moreover, to have any effect on the right you should probably not do it on hands down the most left leaning alternative social media, hence why this comes across as masturbatory self-aggrandizing.

The right-wing cheap tricks and vulgar propaganda work, the left-wingers over-intellectualism is lost in a mass of Internet garbage.

See above, also different types of propaganda work on different audiences.

This would not work on the average right-winger because it shows blatant hypocrisy to your own values, offers nothing they value, and confirms their existing opinion of leftists.

Leftists (socialists, communists, etc) are not supposed to believe in natural hierarchies; saying “this inherently superior person (child prodigy) agrees with an ideology that rejects the notion of inherent superiority (socialism)” is fucking moronic, and shows you are essentially just unthinkingly partisan to the point of revealing you don’t actually believe your own principles.

If you did, the fact that someone was considered a child prodigy would not matter to you.

All a right-winger would see when coming across this post is a smarmy, arrogant, not-as-smart-as-they-think, hypocritical left-winger showing their true colors and, despite not being right-wing myself, I would agree.

To add some constructive criticism: Right-wingers already see you/us as the outgroup.

You won’t reach them by mocking them, you might reach them by creating a different outgroup they also despise and leveraging that.

If even Margery Taylor Greene, the most unhinged political figure to come out of the MAGA movement broke rank over the Epstein files redaction and the revelation that Trump is not “on her side,” that seems to be the only effective way to split their political power.

Mock their idols, mock their ideas carefully, don’t mock them.

Nobody would come to the side of people who openly despise them, but they might join you in despising someone else. If you mock a right-winger directly it better be in such a way that 5 others see it and join in.

Bold of you to assume I’m a MAGA supporter and not just someone who finds your argument and attitude distasteful, especially since it makes my own position worse by association with you.

I.e.: you’re acting like a jagoff and making us look worse by conforming to the right’s stereotype of their opposition, and you’re making a terrible point because some random “child prodigy” having an opinion that agrees with you is a shit argument.

Get over yourself.