ToucanLoucan

Oh I wouldn't say I go for VTubers specifically? It's more about the streamer, what they play and what their commentary is like. I honestly don't care much if they have webcam, vtuber avatar, or neither.

I enjoy a handful of streamers for a few reasons:

* I get to experience games I wouldn't normally have time for: I work full time, and as much as I love games and always make time for them, I still have a finite amount of time to make and a solid chunk of that time has to be devoted to multiplayer games, since it's a big part of how I meet my social needs. And even then, some games that are quite fun to watch for me are games I don't necessarily want to play? Like I love watching people play things like Lethal Company, but I don't have a friend-group to play with, so a streamer is great for that. Also horror games usually have really interesting worlds, but uh... I am a chicken shit LOL

* It also broadens the number of games I'm exposed to quite a bit. Many a time I have tuned into a stream, watched it for awhile, and been like "okay this actually looks really good/fun/interesting" and turned off the stream to go buy it on Steam. I've just bought Claire Obscur because I initially thought it was Yet Another Damn JRPG (objective 1: go to class, final objective: kill god) but I was thoroughly incorrect, and corrected by watching some streamers and an essay on it, and I'm really excited to play it now.

* Additionally, a wild third option: sometimes it's nice when working remotely to have a stream on for background noise. It hits your brain in a way that's vaguely similar to hanging out with a friend when you're both doing completely different things and just... existing together. It's completely fake of course, the streamer has no idea who I am, but it doesn't need to make sense to feel nice to my brain.

"America is in decline relative to the world" might be true, but is it helping anyone to focus on that?

Helping who? I don't know that it's a help or a not-help, but it is an incoming reality I believe, and the United States as a nation, it's government as an entity, it's corporations as economic units and it's people as... well, people, are used to being deferred to on matters of taste, on matters of policy, in trade negotiations, what have you. The dollar has been the currency of Business for far longer than I've been alive. Almost any country you travel to on this planet has options for English speakers, not just because it's a nice thing to do, but because wealthy travelers from The U.S. (and Britain) are worth pandering to. We are privileged incredibly all over the world and that is largely down to economics: if you wanted to make big money on this planet, you sold your shit to Americans. That was the axiom that built several economies from dust in the East following WWII.

I'm not even commentating here on whether this is good or bad and I don't really think it matters for the purpose of our discussion, but it is true. Americans corporations, leaders, and people are accustomed to a level of deference enjoyed by few other nations, and we're already seeing feathers getting ruffled and tempers flaring when that deference is no longer treated by allies and competitors as required. When America is "left out" of various international politics, it literally makes news.

Oh there most certainly is a power struggle/corporate race, for sure. AND I don't think it's pure economics at all, when so much of the rhetoric around that struggle is framed so often with this "America has to defend itself," "China will kill us," "shoot all the communists," ooh-rah United States chest-pounding, etc., it's simply impossible to have that discussion be anything close to good-faith.

If you want my honest take, I think we're well into the beginnings of the downfall of America as the center of world economics, largely and wildly by it's own unnecessary actions, and soon, she will have to learn to be "just another country" as opposed to the central unified "norm" that pervades the world markets, and I'm not sure the U.S. is prepared for that. And I bring that up because I don't think American firms have ever had to contend with other nations being on a footing to, if push comes to shove, tell them to fuck off.

And 9 million starve to death annually because it isn't profitable to feed them, what's your point?

Oh I don't think it's either of those things, I think it's good old fashioned Racism/Xenophobia. We did the same shit to Japan and Korea when they were coming up out of their respective post-war periods, and we still do, to a degree. With China's ruling party also being "communist" (in massive, massive air-quotes) it also lets political actors dust off the McCarthyism to boot.

This is, to be clear, not meant as a ringing endorsement of China, China's policies, or to absolve China of it's wrongdoings, of which there are MANY. It's just to say that it's remarkable to watch the pearl clutching of the privateer capitalist class as state-sponsored capitalism levels their own game up against them and starts taking them to the cleaners instead.

A real Godzilla "let them fight" situation as far as I'm concerned.

It will never stop being funny to me that China does the exact same shit American corps have been doing since the 70's but because it's scary China it's suddenly a problem.

American startups flood markets with below-cost loss-leader products explicitly to kill competition and create network effects, and then jack the prices just as high, if not higher, for the service in question after the fact, oftentimes while making it so those providing the service earn even less money than they did before. Commentators: "Free market great"

China does the exact same thing: "Communists wanna kill the West"

I'll fully grant that the vast majority of the time when I use the word neoliberal, it is indeed derisively. Doesn't change that this is, again, simply an observation that names the thing. Markets, localized or world, free or not, do not function in vacuums. They are shaped by ideologies, including that of the neoliberal school of thought.

It's frankly far more derisive of me and any reader really to say that because "free market" has the word "free" in it that the majority of people will cosign it happily with no further thought. Do you also think the DPRK is a democracy because it says so?

The EU has a large menagerie of businesses, successful and otherwise. If hiring friction and tax policy were the whole story, you'd expect the EU to lag in all capital-intensive industries, not just have a specific gap in hyperscale tech, which is the one sector most directly shaped by network effects and first-mover advantage from a market that let a handful of US firms scale first.

Additionally I'd push back on the premise that "doesn't produce hyperscalers" is even a mark against a system in the first place. They're what you get after competition has mostly finished collapsing into a handful of winners who then run the supposedly free market. Funny how the same people who'll lecture you for an hour about the sacred competitive forces of the free market go quiet the second vertical integration and monopoly-adjacent scale start choking those forces out.

You should've kept reading:

During the past couple of decades, rampant neoliberalism and “globalism” allowed the U.S. tech industry to capture almost the entire European IT market, including all “social media.” This has recently proved to be a ghastly mistake, and now the EU, along with its member states and companies, are scrambling to claw back their digital sovereignty.

This is not a partisan political statement, it's a factual one. It is simply a statement of fact that neoliberal world markets have permitted hyperscalers to cross national boundaries and provide the same services at scale to governments worldwide, and like, without even going into any U.S. politics at the moment, isn't that... really weird? Like many EU governments had essentially put their ability to function as states in the hands of a foreign actor. That's WILD.

It's perfectly valid in our increasingly enshittified world to be angry with all those responsible for it. As much as you're right to point the finger a the C-suites, ultimately ALL of these user-hostile features, every single one, only exists because devs keep putting fingers to keyboards in exchange for checks.

Tech workers had a time where unionization and getting a voice in our companies was very much on the table, and the biggest voices among us shouted down the others in the name of rockstar salaries and free beer at the office. The "top contributors" at huge companies were scared shitless that they might have to accept a wage too much like the REST of their software engineer coworkers. The horror.

My girlfriend has been using an AI music generator and like, her music is the best generative music I've listened to. Her prompts are crazy, lots of actual like, music theory and specific requests.

That said, it still shares these qualities. It sounds like AI images look. Oversmoothed/overtuned.

Like as a creative myself, what AI has taught me more than anything is that a lot of what we call artistry happens in the friction between an artist and their tools, when they're pushing to the limit of what they know how to and what their tools are able to do, that's where the great shit is. And it's not even that AI is a bad tool necessarily, it just doesn't create any friction. It can be frustrating, for sure, when you just can't get it to do what you want, but it's not an interesting frustration like friction because you aren't the problem, nor your skill: the tool is the problem.

That probably sounds like I'm saying it's bad and again, no. I'm saying the friction between the artist and their tools is the interesting part, and because there's very little friction, meaningfully, between artists and AI tools, it just comes out... boring.

The push for generative AI is "you can make anything," and that's true. But if you can make anything, then by necessity, anything you make is unimpressive. It's only really impressive if you're not sure if you can make it.

The US fails to learn the lessons of it's last... idk, every war since WWII. Leadership cites kill stats when it has nothing else to cite, but killing, while certainly an important part of war, is not the key to victory and that's why we keep losing. Actually winning wars requires controlling strategic points on the battlefield, both literally with armed combatants, and metaphorically by getting civilians to support you. The US fails at both. We show up with incredibly superior firepower, establish FOBs where we think we need, drive armored convoys to supply those FOBs but they take fire on every trip, have to look for and clear IEDs, what have you. There's no control apart from the FOBs themselves, and the enemy has easy run of all territory not being patrolled at that precise moment.

This is the same problem that doomed us in Vietnam, in Korea, in Iraq, and will doom us in Iran. It's also the same problem that fucked over South Africa and Rhodesia and seems to be a common problem for white supremacists, but that's just my editorializing.

In any case, showing up and killing shitloads of people and then leaving does not win wars, it just LOOKS kinda like it does if you have no idea how to win wars, and assures you promotions in your organization. As soon as your military leadership starts citing that instead of actual progress on the conflict and the objectives at hand, it's a safe bet they are on their way to loss via attrition.

And that's not the ONLY factor of course, our military is too expensive and relies too much on fancy tech as opposed to solid strategy, everything we use is hideously expensive so any losses we take tend to hit harder, etc. But I think this is the most important thing to cite when discussing America's inability to actually wage war in a way that does anything besides get service people killed and enrich the MIC.

If you have evidence as to any of the wild conjecture you're posting, you're more than free to provide it instead of just lobbing out accusations as though they change anything substantive about the arguments being made.

and it was discovered just now? May it be that he played exactly by the rules, the real rules, of the regime - corruption being among the foundational rules of it - and thus it was going for 30 years? And right now he just got his turn like it usually happens in totalitarian regimes. The regime will for show find an excuse to execute you if you got your turn, corruption is just the easiest one.

Yeah, that would be wild if any of that completely unsubstantiated conjecture, bordering on fan-fiction, was what actually happened.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

White collar criminals often get caught later in their "careers" precisely because they do it for years and years and years without being caught. They get complacent. They get messy. Each round of embezzlement leads to a larger body of evidence that exists somewhere that becomes more and more damning as time goes on.

The regime wouldn't want to create impression of political disunity among the officials.

In this thread we have dozens of examples of political officials being prosecuted. I'd strongly suggest you park your McCarthyism, take a break, perhaps go for a nice walk.

But again you're flattening all browser compatibility into ancient browsers that 10 people use and saying closing the end of that gap is far too difficult to justify the time and expense required, but what exactly are we talking about there? What broke? Can people on IE6 get the majority of the content but the subscription popup is broken, or does the page fail to render entirely and leave them completely high and dry?

It's impossible for me to engage with this thought experiment without thinking of hundreds, perhaps thousands of sites I've been to (their provider rhymes with Rare Mace) where literally nothing works without JavaScript, and I don't mean animations are broken or images look funny, I mean the website is a white fucking screen because literally everything is loaded in via esoteric new JS frameworks which aren't firing because the engine choked on an analytics package and died before it even got that far, and that site is showing...

... text. Formatted text. With perhaps some pictures. And animations nobody outside of marketing cares about.

So like, is your site broken because it's legitimately cutting edge shit, doing difficult work, and providing an answer to a complex user problem? Okay cool, IE6 support is probably not a high priority, I agree. Or, is it an utterly run-of-the-mill ad for your company's services, that was made incorrectly by people who don't know what they're doing, and/or have overengineered it beyond recognition of the actual problem it was trying to solve? If it's that one, then put your shiny toys down, rebuilt it simply and with regular tooling, and THEN see how your IE6 compatibility is doing.

I'll tell you this much: I've NEVER tested for IE6 on my personal website. I just did. Navigation is a bit wonky and my blur filter effects are broken, obviously. But you can still read my posts and navigate about.

Even calling it memes is overly charitable. It's deliberate stoking of rage at scale to accomplish political ends.

It's by design. The outrage merchants post day in and out to signal allegiance to this bizarre cult.

People also don't respect how WILDLY influential GamerGate as been. There's good arguments to be made that Trump and his shitty White House would never have come to pass if not for moot re-enabling political discussions on 4chan at the behest of some combo of Epstein and Bannon, explicitly to stoke reactionary rage at anything "gay" in games.

Like don't get me wrong it's deeply stupid and perhaps respect is the wrong word, but it's crazy how much those old events are shaping current culture war nonsense.

We are incredibly market-brained at this point. A certain kind of person loves markets because they provide decisions on complex questions at scale. And like, that's not NEVER true, but it also takes for granted a lot of rational thinking among people who act completely irrationally with incredible regularity.

Perhaps our greatest cultural fiction right now is the "rationality" of markets, and people are looking for insight more than ever on our insane world. So that makes perfect sense to me, really.

Yes but eliminating unnecessary e-waste is a good thing for everyone.

This isn't about the government being your nanny, it's about the government, long term, building a better more sustainable society for everyone, as it should be doing. And I don't think there's a reasonable objection to that.

They stole the entire internet to create tools with the explicit goal of taking away people's ability to earn a living. The fact that they have goodwill to lose at all is a testament to our unbelievably short attention spans.

The problem is that scammers juice engagement numbers and everything right now makes money via user engagement. The platforms are incentivized to not punish scammers, spammers, etc. one ounce more than they can manage without pissing off their users.

My apologies for not being more explicit

Accepted.

the specifics of the loss of the "libertarian" "crypto bros" is not a wholistic cause but rather a small fraction of the cause but more importantly also a symptom. A symptom of something that happened in broader society of alienated or ignored voters being hoodwinked by smooth talking fascists that showed up with a message more enticing than "we don't want your vote" or "you're a self-selecting bloc of marks" or "your values are fucked." You can hate they're that dumb, or that immoral, or what not but at the end of the day their vote still counts as much as yours.

Yeah, no shit: that's literally how fascism has always worked, every single time. It shows up with simple, tidy, "common sense" answers to complicated systemic problems, because that's the entire product. Fascism is a con that skips the part where you have to be right. We're not going to out-simple that without becoming liars ourselves, so no, I'm not interested in a messaging arms race against people who don't have to tell the truth to win.

And "their vote counts as much as mine" is true enough, sure. But you don't get to hide the content of that vote behind "well they were just susceptible to a good pitch." What was the pitch? Let's actually look at it instead of being coy: the "simple solution" fascists are selling right now is some version of "X group is ruining everything." Trans people (wave) get blamed for the "destruction of the West." Immigrants get blamed for "diluting western culture." These aren't complicated ideas that require nuance to refute, they're stupid on their face, the kind of stupid that falls over the second anyone actually looks at it. And that's exactly why I don't waste breath "engaging" with people parroting it: if your entire platform is just scapegoating, you just want to feed a sacrificial lamb to the volcano to make it stop erupting, I'm not obligated to pretend that's a serious discussion. A human one certainly, and an impulse I understand as it winds through our history like mold in raspberries, but not a serious point to be debated.

Call it a symptom if you want. But the disease was never "we didn't message nicely enough at crypto bros." The disease is that "blame the weird/foreign group" still works on people who'd rather have a villain than an explanation. That's on the people selling it certainly, and also it's on the people buying it: Both things are true at once.

You've answered the question as to why those people didn't support you

I asked no such question. You said:

It's not hard to figure out, the fascists have been more explicitly welcoming to crypto freedom or at least put themselves out there to solicit that vote even if you claim their underlying policies aren't.

To which I said:

If you back fascists to promote crypto, your values are fucked.

This is not a statement wondering why they didn't. I know why they didn't, even if I didn't directly say it. I'm saying here if your support for proper policies or candidates is contingent on their supporting your stupid shitcoins, then your values are fucked and I'm not interested in your conclusions as a result. Or to be more specific, if you're prepared to give Fascists power because you think it'll be better for your coinbase account, your values are fucked.

And while there is certainly a cost to having principles, to say that Kamala didn't win because she refused to court crypto is just ridiculously out-of-touch. That's a big question with a lot of variables, but I assure you things like:

1) Her being a woman

2) Her being non-white

3) Her being yet another pro-corpo do-nothing Democrat, with a back story including being a PROSECUTOR of all things

Had a shitload, a metric assload, an utter container-ship load more to do with her defeat than anything even tangentially related to your weird secondary finance system, and on that point I would bet a lot of REAL, not crypto, currency.

And here's the part you're missing about Trump and his ilk "showing up": that offer means nothing. Fascist regimes don't keep promises to their useful idiots, they keep them right up until they're not useful anymore. They'll feed your crypto conartists to the same wolves they'll feed me to, because nobody wins long-term under fascism, including the fascists who aren't currently holding the leash. Ross Ulbricht's pardon doesn't tell you Trump loves crypto freedom, it tells you Trump knows how to make a low-cost gesture to a bloc he needs this cycle. And frankly it tracks well that crypto holders were targeted by the Trump admin anyway, you're a self-selecting bloc of marks, ready and eager to hold ANOTHER bag to go with the one you've statistically speaking, already got.

But far more importantly: Fascists are not shy about the Fascist shit they aim to do, namely to harm people at scale. If you cosign that for bitcoin, I'm not here to persuade you or win your heart: that is not a position that a reasonable person takes, and so I see no purpose in attempting to reason with you.

If libertarians can't parse than putting fascists in power is, long term, a bad fucking idea as demonstrated literally every time it's happened throughout history, I don't want their fucking vote. I'm not interested in their opinion about anything, especially this.

It is not my nor anyone else's job, including Kamala's for that matter, to coddle your sweet little fee fees about wanting your fake power-wasting money to work. It is especially not anyone's job to tolerate socially corrosive viewpoints like fascism to indulge your ponzi scheme. Full stop.

It's also well documented that fascists will happily enable and cosign the efforts of whatever their chosen right people are to steal money on industrial scales from everyone else, so they were always going to support crypto. Completely foregone conclusion and to be honest, I'd bet money that a notable amount of crypto figures did in fact know that and voted accordingly for the party that was prepared to let them get away with financial crimes, as they have done before, here and elsewhere.

If you're so offended at the notion of someone saying your values are fucked, respectfully, un-fuck your values and then I won't have to say it anymore.

If you back fascists to promote crypto, your values are fucked.

In the real world, most people respond to economic incentives.

Then why is there a shortage? Are you telling me the $750,000 yearly compensation still isn't enough?

If you as a person are turned off of a career because you can only make a mere, paltry peasant wage of $300k per year, then I think that's really a you problem there.

And as to your comments about shortages, we already have shortages.

but an orthopaedic surgeon being paid the $300k USD-equivalent in Germany instead of his $750k USD income today at median would be very unhappy.

I'm sure he'll manage.

If we want to increase the labor share then we'll drive down healthcare spending.

It may not be simple but it's clear the United States is doing something catastrophically wrong. All the other healthcare systems on the planet in developed countries have problems, sure. But we spend magnitudes more money to receive middling-to-shit healthcare. Medical debt and bankruptcy is a unique American problem that also happens to be the most reliable way for otherwise productive and prosperous members of our society to end up fucking homeless. Because they got SICK. I rarely use the word "evil" but that really fits IMO.

Like you cannot tell me with a straight face that the insurance industry couldn't be blown the fuck off the map tomorrow and literally everyone who doesn't own an insurance company isn't instantly better off.

I'm told that's communism