Open Thread

Open Thread #281

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31 thoughts on “Open Thread #281

  1. According to a new study the vaxx injured two dozen million people, disabled another mil, killed 300k, and caused economic damage of $150 bil:
    https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/bombshell-vax-analysis-finds-147-billion-economic-damage-tens-millions-injured-or-disabled
    I suspect that the number of deaths is off by at least an order of magnitude. This study also does not seem to take into account all the women who could not conceive or ended up miscarrying. Anyway, I just called Uber to tell him about it, but the fucker shouted at me that none of this is valid as long as I do not self fund my own team of scientists and personally link every single issue to the vaxx, following a list of criteria he should be able to not reveal until after the fact and change at will an indefinite number of times.

    1. none of this is valid as long as I do not self fund my own team of scientists and personally link every single issue to the vaxx, following a list of criteria he should be able to not reveal until after the fact and change at will an indefinite number of times.

      Haha made me chuckle coz it’s true ???? it’s also how feminists argue as well. Especially the “criteria that she won’t reveal until after the fact”

    2. The ???? Was an emoji. Somehow I’m pretty sure I’ve used emojis on here before. ????

    3. Which emoji was it? Standard smileys should work, but as I hardly ever use emojis, I would not even notice if there was an issue with any of them, or with emojis in general.

    4. Yah I don’t use emojis either. Usually I comment from desktop, but when replying from mobile the android keyboard gives these auto-suggestions based on the content of the comment, it’s really convenient.

      The first one was this Unicode char:
      U+1F92D : SMILING FACE WITH SMILING EYES AND HAND COVERING MOUTH

      Or this, not sure

      U+1F602 : FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY

      Doesn’t matter really.

    5. On the topic of impossible standards. I had another run-in with a feminist where she pulled this “you must have published 15 papers to be allowed to have an opinion” (but she doesn’t have to), and I just remembered another thing.

      These same leftists are the ones who censored and worked to blacklist two of the most published medical scientists in history because they opposed the covid narrative. So it’s not like there’s ever a level of “you have enough credentials”.

    6. I’ve always find it fascinating how the “you’re not allowed to have an opinion coz x” is a favorite go to for leftists. In fact I can’t remember a single discussion or debate between a leftie and non-leftie where this didn’t happen.

      Dave rubin once mentioned this with an example. Like he was arguing about economic policies with someone… And the leftie was like you can’t make arguments about employers since you’re not obe. Rubin was like dude I employ 7 people. Leftie: “pfftt 7 people, big employer hahaah”… Meaning you’re not big enough to be allowed to have an opinion.

      That reminded of feminists who always tell you that you’re not allowed to have an opinion because you haven’t had enough lays. But if you inform them of your number, than it is too many lays. There is never really a correct number of lays at which you’re allowed to have an opinion. And of course if you ask them for the number upfront they won’t say. You’re only informed after the fact that your number is either too low or too high to be allowed to disagree with feminists.

    7. That is literally a violation of free speech. I am free to form and I am entitled to my own opinion. If you wana challenge me, attack my claims by disproving it convincingly.

    8. CQV, have you visited Twitter or Reddit or any other mainstream site within the last three to four years by any chance? In case you did not notice, we live in a post-freedom-of-expression society now.

    9. I did visit Reddit exclusively for the SLP (Speech language pathology) section.

      I don’t care about social media anymore.

      Less trash into your head? Even better.

      I don’t mean to say I have mastered Logics and use it in discussing issues, but I did study cases where I was called out here for committing logical fallacies to draw a lesson. But with these guys, they don’t even care about logical fallacies, they don’t even need it, they abort a meaningful discussion before committing fallacies. That is just the level of idiocy.

  2. What do you guys think of the readon behind the reduction of tenure position? I understand the suply and demand thing, but I feel it is an attempt to dislodge academic opposition to government’s policy and make academicians become more subservient to the ruling class. You all might remember Chomsky and his vehement attack against the Vietnam War.

    Perhaps they don’t want to have many “petits” Chomsky who could have a voice on their aggressive foreign policies. No more “modern talkie”, so to speak?

    1. I think the government’s desire for conformity in academia is to blame, as you rightly state. It is much easier to get academics to produce studies that contain the kind of results our rulers want if they have no long-term job security. Of course, this goes hand-in-hand with academia producing more and more crap, and the reputation of higher education declining.

    2. It comes both from the left and right.
      The left wants to get rid of tenure so that they can fire the few right-wingers (or centrist) who are still in academia and don’t bow to the left wing.
      The right wants to get rid of tenure because academia is full of leftists and they want to take away their benefits. Also they hope they can make academia more right wing again.
      Of course, if tenure is abolished the right wing will fail and the left will win. All remaining right wingers will be fired and academia will be 100% (from probably 90%) left wing.

    3. This tenure talk also distracts from the biggest problem in academia. It’s overrun by left wing bureaucrats. These bureaucrats resulted in the massive increase in costs, decrease in quality and massive increase in left wing activism.

    4. This is absolutely the case. Those university admin jobs must be some of the cushiest ones out there. These people tend to be fairly unqualified, but this does not really matter. You could almost think that the modern university is a scam that only exists to feed hundreds of thousands of leftists.

    5. I think your observation is correct CQV. There is definitely something going on with governments trying to weaken the (true) intellectual class and also make them subservient.

  3. Here is one of the most thoughtful articles I have read on ZH in a long, long time:
    https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/age-average
    The main statement is that everything converges to look the same, e.g. architecture, cars, logos, interior design, etc. The article presents several hypotheses. With some I agree, such as focus testing, but I would argue that there is also a big elephant in the room: People are probably more conformist than ever, thus the work they produce tends to look alike. Also, bland design is probably a consequence of people getting dumber, which applies to producers and consumers alike. Less intelligent designers produce less interesting designs, and even smarter designers need to dumb down their creations because they are serving a dull audience.

    1. I am not sure why people are getting more conformist but we can probably agree that this is indeed the case. Women are in general more conformist than men, so we can skip right past this demographic. Men, on the other hand, have been experiencing a decades-long decline of testosterone levels. My hypothesis is that the most likely explanation is the combination of the observed drop in T-levels, excessive medication from an early age onwards, and the systematic demoralization of men in education and wider society.

    2. Agree that the world is more conformist and you provided pretty good hypothesis why this is the case.

      I also made the observation that a lot of people are fake non-conformist. With that I mean that they believe they are non-conformist because they have tattoos or because they are non-binary or take drugs, not realizing that all of this gets pushed by the mainstream so that they are actually very conformist.

      A similar irony is that left wingers think that they are rebelling or fighting the system, while the whole system supports them. Heck even the radicals (antifa, extinction rebellion) who do terrorism or borderline terrorism are even protected.

    3. You have to marvel at the effectiveness of government propaganda as it makes the NPC population embrace their own extinction. Men and women alike think they are acting in their own best interest by doing drugs, not having kids, and eating crappy food. They ruin their health themselves and accept this as the status quo. The scamdemic was a perfect example of this, i.e. people lined up to get multiple injections that have the potential of killing or debilitating them.

    4. My hypothesis why the world is getting more conformist is that the leftists captured all institutions and that the institutions are all openly pushing their agenda and demanding everyone to bow to the party line (or else you will be ostracized). Normal people just cannot fight this so they just follow the agenda.

    5. >With that I mean that they believe they are non-conformist because they have tattoos or because they are non-binary or take drugs, not realizing that all of this gets pushed by the mainstream so that they are actually very conformist.

      Yup. Basically,a lot of these attempts are Tryhard at being non-conformist. yet,when you try to dig deeper,you’ll probably find most of them subscribe to bluepill/disney/mainstream beliefs in almost every other area of their life.

      Is it really considered questioning the norm,when you only start questioning something BECAUSE you see other people questioning it? I questioned the Education system before I found out I wasn’t the only one finding problems in the system.

      I questioned the 9-5 before I read the writings of the people who went into detail on the issues.

      When I was a young boy,I questioned the idea of courting a girl for months on end (I might have seen no issue with this had it just been a pleasant “getting to know each other” period,but often this process involves you putting up with bad attitudes and emptying your wallet regularly on her whims) with zero guarantee you would actually be able to get the girl in the end,etc. This was way before I discovered manosphere writers who revealed many women out there would actually fuck “Chads” behind closed doors (and their boyfriend’s backs) very quickly.

      You would not at all be able to tell I hold any of these non-mainstream views just by looking at me. I don’t feel the need to advertise that I am “different”. I just am. And I think this is true of anyone who actually IS genuinely different.

    6. I don’t know how can you guys get to experience a conservative girl in the East. I mean even mentioning sex might trigger negative responses from them. The first thought that comes to their mind is how to take care of their parents once they earn money.

      Comparing this to Western women, you see that there are no reasons to marry them.

  4. Tears of the Kingdom is a glorified asset flip with new innovative mechanics. I think it’s clear at this point that the majority of development probably went into the gameplay aspects and complex crafting systems. The game will more or less be a more refined BotW: https://youtu.be/I0-nzrEft4w

    1. That kind of effort should not be underestimated. I have had a look at this video, and the attention to detail as well as the extent of the implemented gameplay physics is quite remarkable. One caveat is that I only very briefly played the original, but enough of it to notice that it was a very well crafted game. Also, we know that there are plenty of new areas. Still, the foundation of TotK has been provided by BotW, so charging $70 for the sequel as opposed to $60 for the original seems a bit hard to defend.

    2. I would say this game is basically BotW 2.0, so if you want to play Zelda then this sequel is essentially the definitive edition.

    3. The defense for the $70 price tag seems to be that the game is on 32gb cartridge. So, they’re essentially passing on the production costs to the consumer. This doesn’t convince me, though, because I’m betting the digital version will still cost the same.

    4. The pricing of digital versions on consoles is completely off. Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft would otherwise manufacture and ship physical games to stores, which buy them at a discount. There is also the surely non-trivial cost of designing and manufacturing promotion materials. All of this goes away with digital distribution. Of course, there are costs for this as well, such as software development for the online store and the infrastructure, but this scales a lot better than their counterparts in the physical world. If anything, digital versions should be 20 to 30% cheaper by default, and even then the margins would be very high.

    5. Perhaps this is why many new releases coming out for $70 these days are generally $10 cheaper for the Steam versions. But then the same game bought digitally for the PS5 probably still costs $70, so it doesn’t add up.

    6. I think the push for $70 can be wholly explained with companies testing this price point to see if they can get away with it. In Germany, Sony has been trying to charge 80 Euros for PS5 games. I find it quite surprising hat Nintendo took so long to jump on the bandwagon, considering that they have successfully positioned themselves as a premium gaming brand. No other company gets away with charging the full price for a game five or six years after its original release. They only throw you a bone with “players’ choice” editions, with an uglier cover, when a system is on its last legs, and even this is done to clearly differentiate the cheap from the more expensive offering, even though you will get exactly the same game.

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