frmersdog

I called it infamous not because I have a particular problem with it, but because of the way it's characterized by (Western, at least) fans. They snicker at and make jokes about the scenarios he apparently employs. (Admittedly, it doesn't sound like my thing, and I haven't looked too deeply into the material. It could very well be that I'm getting trolled.)

I agree that you can find genuinely disturbing things in the manga world and that Masamune's work is relatively benign (though some of his depictions of less-developed adult women might upset some). In general, I find the idea of commercialized erotica amusing, especially when coming from sources with more mainstream claims-to-fame. In these cases, I don't attach a connotation of moral bankruptcy or anything like that to the idea of them being "infamous", though maybe that's just me using the word wrong. I intend it more in the sense of, "Hahah, oh wow, THAT guy did THAT? That's crazy." Kind of like when we found out about Tezuka's softcore furry/snakewomen doodles.

You're probably not going to get it. And he has decent reasons for not wanting to bother.

The nature (infamy?) of his activities over the past few years should also be noted. (And maybe chuckled at if you have a bit of a dark sense of humor.)

The author is an over-opinionated a*hole, so not taking him seriously is perfectly fine.

Well, you're both right, sort of. Most people aren't making SV-style money out of college; they really should be paid more. But the ones that are making those types of salaries, should absolutely be paid less. So should their seniors. So should their managers, and their C-suite. And everyone else - particularly in "low skill" positions - should be making more.

I listen to the details of the lifestyles of high-earning young people - international trips, 3- and 4-figure tech purchases on a whim, $60k cars, a house - and compare that to the young people I worked with in (sales-oriented) retail: working multiple jobs to make rent; paying off bare-survival-related debt; in one case, our manager having to gift a top performer a (beater) car because she simply could not have afforded one otherwise, just so that she could leave work and get home in a reasonable amount of time (she was never late for her shift). These were the people who still physically showed up to work while everyone else locked down.

There's too much money in the top tax brackets. Compressing inequality solves a lot of problems. Including yours, actually: when both senior and junior engineer time is less valuable, as a rule, the less pressure there is to squeeze productivity out of every moment. Take a pay cut and work fewer hours. Let some of that money that was left over get taxed and put into a grant to rebuild infrastructure or fund the arts.

Hey, hi, yoohoo whistles. Everyone gather 'round and reread this part:

  Lacking proper training and a viable salary, many young animators don’t feel they can keep going. The Japan Research Institute estimated that a quarter of them quit the industry within four years, and two-thirds in eight years. This retention problem has often been viewed as a form of natural selection. “I think this way of thinking is misguided,” said Sudo Tadashi, the author of two books about the anime industry. “Truly brilliant” animators are needed for roles like director and character designer, but without enough “adequately good” animators—particularly in-betweeners—the industry wouldn’t be able to function. “I don’t think a field where only top-level talent could stay on is a good place,” Sudo said. The question, then, is how to create an environment that helps more people become “adequately good”.

The grunt work still has to be done, of course. As ever, if you want to know where much of the expertise has gone, look to China (and South Korea). This is not a new phenomenon; I don't think the article mentioned it, but a large part of the growth of the expertise of Japanese animators in the 20th century was the work that they got that was outsourced from the US. Go ahead and look through the staff/production lists of your favorite childhood cartoons - particularly holiday specials - from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. You'll be surprised what you find (or not).

?

The bureaucracy is not the body of law or the judiciary, which were the only government-related targets of my criticism. I agree that the legal system needs to be more accessible to non-lawyers. At the heart of that grievance is the professionalization (read: privatization) of the legal field, which turned a tool for finding justice, despite disputes into a career pursued for prestige and wealth. The problem is that the law and the people who adjudicate it have been captured by private enterprise. The bureaucracy is, like... the court clerks. Who I don't have a problem with, they're quite helpful.

In fact, they'd be integral to this "simplification of the legal system", since what that's essentially asking for is not to make adjudication more accessible, but to move disputes out of adjudication into a procedural venue (where the rules are simple, everyone knows them, and you either follow them and win, or don't and get the hammer).

Across all of the examples - legal recourse, healthcare, housing - what you're looking at is the end of the ambiguity of paradigms driven by private companies with opaque policies and conflicts of interest, and the arrival of an institutional monolith which can be changed by voting in elections. They don't even have to have a monopoly, they just have to be there as an option. I suppose policing is the exception, and while the vision there is unbundling instead of bundling, you're still looking at wresting control for social services out of the hands of the professionals who have captured it.

The legal system is captured by legal professionals. The average American is bound by a system that they can't engage directly with. The middlemen who most people must hire to navigate through it generally will not help unless there's a substantial payday in it for them. And in civil matters, defendants have no right to representation.

(Also, the judge is colleagues with counsel, opposing or otherwise; none of them think much of you, which a trip to /r/LawyerTalk will confirm.)

All of this is a choice. Essentially the same choice that we have to have medical insurers instead of a single-payer system; a broken housing market controlled by large corporate interests, instead of one where prices are moderated by a stock of residences built by the government and sold at-cost or lower, as in Singapore or pre-Thatcher Great Britain; broken and spread-thin policing instead of the kind of sophisticated social support system that you would expect the richest country on the planet to be able to afford (and avoids sending the same armed ex-jock to domestic disturbances, mental health crises, car accidents, public school security, etc.). My suspicion is that the fight against change in any of these cases is so fierce because breaking one cartel threatens the others.

No they haven't:

I said corporate, not PE.

And then you rent from someone else because in reality large corporations own only a small percentage of rental units.

Most of the rest are owned by medium-sized corporations that use the same services.

You're again only making the argument for getting rid of those grants people can't get anyway in favor of a UBI that everyone gets automatically.

UBI within the tax regime described above doesn't abolish the paternalism you're attacking, it just shifts it.

How are they paying more money for anything to receive $1000 in cash instead of a $1000 payment that can only go to a landlord?

I am, once again, going to state that you don't seem to understand the topic at hand.

Or maybe you do, and pivoted to UBI because you realized that the tax issue was indefensible.

You don't know what you're talking about. The corporate takeover of most rentals (apartments and homes alike) near the roadways and transit these people need to get to their jobs (let alone in areas where they wouldn't have to commute) has made those rentals inaccessible. They use little-known credit reporting companies specific to the rental industry that have basically no regulatory oversight, and which allow landlords to deny applications in an opaque way without liability. Housing voucher wait lists are years long; they're basically impossible to get on. The only housing assistance that was available to most people were pandemic-era emergency eviction grants, and those are gone.

Van life, couch surfing, living in hotels: these are the options available to them. And it's obviously not so simple as "roughing it" for a few months, as they're essentially forced to sell or abandon most of their personal property.

What you're talking about it taking people in those dire straits and forcing them to pay MORE money just to keep a roof over their heads, while millions of wealthier Americans own multiple properties where they and their family are the only residents. It's ridiculous.

Isn't this the opposite? If you give them a UBI then they can buy whatever they want. If you give them paternalistic micromanaged benefits like SNAP then they can buy carbonated high fructose corn syrup in a can but not vitamins or farming supplies.

I am, once again, going to state that you don't seem to understand the topic at hand.

The buyers would be only those that can make efficient enough returns to offset this tax

Or people who aren't wealthy enough to have to pay it.

You could also just... not pay. And then lawyer-up when the IRS comes after you. (They will not come after you, because they know you've lawyered-up and aren't going to make it easy.)

IIRC this is part of how they avoid taxes in general. Penalties don't hurt enough for the ones who do eventually face them.

Boy, that's going to suck for people whose credit situation has shut them out of most traditional housing situations. Or people who rely on what other people don't consider food for sustenance, for whatever reason (protein powder? multivitamins? supplies to grow/produce your own foodstuffs?). Just as examples.

Yeah, "It won't affect the 99%," is the wrong framing. The entire point is for it to affect the 99% (by undoing the effect disproportionately high wealth among the wealthiest and disproportionately low wealth among the middle and least wealthy).

I think your assumptions are off, though; less wealthy people might not be "forced" into investment at all, but given the "opportunity" to pay off debt or increase/diversify consumption. In the end, the important part is the wealth transfer downward, wherever it ends up. No trickle, but you can pump it.

In a globalized society, all of this is downstream of a dysfunctional economic system, which itself is downstream of the misplaced priorities of the countries with the most power. Speaking out of my ass, but I'd bet that the amount of money spent on wars by 5 certain countries over the past 5 years could have been used to eradicate Ebola. But we chose one use for all of that time and energy, and not the other, so here we are.

People figure out things to say about topics they care about. But the kind of person who comes to HN doesn't care about the DRC, so yeah, not much commentary. Not surprised, just disappointed. If such people also dislike being called out for their concern, that's kind of them to reconcile.

As good a time as any to remind people that the Southern Strategy was never really all that Southern:

https://www.uh.edu/news-events/stories/052815watchingtvracia...

https://www.mediamatters.org/legacy/video-what-happens-when-...

Historically-speaking, if your local news can twist the context to make you easier to sell to (products, services, ideologies), they will do that.

Zero comments half-an-hour later, despite being on the front page

That tracks.

That's strange, I was just asking Claude to write a motion for me earlier, and I've never even taken the LSAT.

Banks

I wonder how many months until this suggestion becomes slightly embarrassing. I barely want my banks to know what I buy and to be responsible for my money. I really don't want them knowing everywhere I go online. Especially when "my" bank goes under and all of my data gets sold off to whoever takes it over.

Image editing program -> different versions of the image, each with some but not all of the elements you want, on each layer -> mask out the parts you don't need/apply mask, fill with black, soft brush with white the parts you want back in. Copy flattened/merged, drop it back into the image model, keep asking for the changes. As long as each generation adds in an element you want, you can build a collage of your final image.

And this is almost certainly the direct cause of the Dot Com Bubble bursting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcv0600V5q4

We were bamboozled on a massive scale.

You need to have a, "Okay, I've tried 10 times, it's not working, what's the answer?" button. That will help not just us rubes who can't understand, but also in the off chance something is broken and even "correct" answers are being rejected.

We had a deal and we tore it up. More than once, if you include the inciting incident of undermining a democratically-elected leader who was bringing the central player in the Middle East into the mainstream economic and political global order that America had set for everyone. "Not like that!"

Frankly, it's hubris all the way down. Kalief Browder.

I dunno about that. At a previous job, we temporarily relocated to a building that featured a series of identical classrooms that were accessible by connecting doors in the back (it was really one long room with heavy dividers that did a good job of looking like regular walls).

You could look from one end to the other, seeing a series of doorways, and then walk through them all; every time I walked from one room to another, by brain would do a little power cycle as it tried to deal with the sensation of having walked into the room I'd just exited.

The deeper-in I got, the more I couldn't shake the feeling that something was "off" about the whole set-up; there were windows, but looking out them, the view felt... fake? It's hard to describe.

This was a few years after SCP became popular, but before the Backrooms - which was why I immediately understood the appeal.

I don't think it's too far to include Earthbound. After all,

  You cannot grasp the true form of Giygas' attack!

https://archive.is/iioaU

There's a business lesson in the longest lived creatures being the ones that move slow, abide small insults, and make themselves generally unappetizing.

When the temporary url dies, it becomes a referral link to cryptocrap.

Huh. Good to know. Please don't click it anymore, thanks.

IIUC this is how ads on 4chan work. I learned this during my brief foray into targeted merchandising (https://www.temporary-url.com/9CBFE). Everyone on a given board at a given time was seeing the same ads.

Situational training is a joke (based in part on tactics developed in Israel/Occupied Palestine, i.e., for a literal military occupation), load-outs aren't designed around need but as a hand-out to our arms manufacturing industry (laundered through the military), and the cops involved in these sorts of raids are literally chosen to not be intellectually curious enough to question it.

I used to operate a firearms training system. To this day, I wish I'd stolen the videos that they use so that I can prove how ridiculously unprofessional and biased they are.