BuckeyeSundae's recent activity

  1. Comment on Joe Biden campaign ramps upcampaign staffing and posts US electoral college map in ~news

    BuckeyeSundae
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    Totally get that desire (I share it), but it's most important to win. It will be a repudiation of everything Trumpism represents to crush it, and that would let us pay down some of the debt that...

    Totally get that desire (I share it), but it's most important to win. It will be a repudiation of everything Trumpism represents to crush it, and that would let us pay down some of the debt that built up in the past four years.

    4 votes

  2. Comment on Joe Biden campaign ramps upcampaign staffing and posts US electoral college map in ~news

    BuckeyeSundae
    Link Parent
    I think there's a huge and crucial difference between "winnable" which seems is this map, and "tipping point to 270". Texas, Georgia, Iowa and Ohio are all extremely unlikely to be tipping point...

    I think there's a huge and crucial difference between "winnable" which seems is this map, and "tipping point to 270". Texas, Georgia, Iowa and Ohio are all extremely unlikely to be tipping point states--that state whose margin is the difference between 269 and 270 for Biden. If Biden wins those states, and polling is showing they are competitive this cycle, it would be because Biden is up nationally by 8-10 points. States like Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and (awkwardly) North Carolina are more likely to be that tipping point state.

    Edit: I'd put Florida in that awkward zone where Democrats want it to be a tipping point state but it'll probably be a weirdo +4 R leaning Florida man anyway.

    4 votes

  3. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    BuckeyeSundae
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    Got into BATTLETECH lately. I fear the ass kicking that cometh. I hear the power curve in this game is gonna come for me. So far I've been lucky. I love the world building and I'm pretty happy...

    Got into BATTLETECH lately. I fear the ass kicking that cometh. I hear the power curve in this game is gonna come for me. So far I've been lucky. I love the world building and I'm pretty happy with the main plot for a generic-choose-your-own-main-character sort of starting point.

    3 votes

  4. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    BuckeyeSundae
    Link Parent
    I've wanted to play more of both games, but I got stuck on the first one because the barrier to remapping the control scheme from an Xbox 360 controller to PS4 controller was too annoying to dig...

    I've wanted to play more of both games, but I got stuck on the first one because the barrier to remapping the control scheme from an Xbox 360 controller to PS4 controller was too annoying to dig into. With so many games, and more than enough platformers swarming me at the moment, I opted to wait until I had the energy to beat that horse dead.

    2 votes

  5. Comment on Sweden has revealed that despite adopting more relaxed measures to control coronavirus, by late April only 7.3% of people in Stockholm had developed the antibodies needed to fight the disease in ~health

    BuckeyeSundae
    Link Parent
    It's worth pointing out that a lot more matters than just government policy. If you have, say, a highly individualistic culture where group action is relatively hard to encourage through less...

    It's worth pointing out that a lot more matters than just government policy. If you have, say, a highly individualistic culture where group action is relatively hard to encourage through less restrictive means, and especially where trust in the government is very low, you have fewer soft options available to leverage to encourage people to engage in the sorts of personal behaviors needed to help contain the virus. If, however, you are in relatively low population density country where trust in the government is considerably higher, then you have more public policy options than only harsh lockdowns.

    It's worth remembering that Sweden has the population density roughly equivalent to Arizona, which is the US' 39th most dense territory (including places like DC and Puerto Rico above the state). Given the nature of this virus' spread, especially among highly urban areas, it's not unreasonable to expect Sweden to have less at stake overall than a more densely populated country (like most of the US).

    8 votes

  6. Comment on Do we really want a new Cold War with China? Corporate media is laying the ideological groundwork for a new cold war with China, presenting the nation as a hostile power that needs to be kept in check in ~society

    BuckeyeSundae
    Link Parent
    I totally agree that it is difficult to characterize the dynamic now with the terms people seem currently most like to use. One of the biggest problems is with the term "war." We are simply not...

    I totally agree that it is difficult to characterize the dynamic now with the terms people seem currently most like to use. One of the biggest problems is with the term "war." We are simply not very good at coming up with terms to describe non-war conflicts. We want everything to be a war, even when it's not. The cold war itself included many actual wars so it usually gets a pass despite not itself being a war. One of the defining characteristics of a war is discrete, specific objectives. Another: physical violence. The era we're entering does not have much of either of those. It contains vague objectives of disinformation, instability, and state sponsored propaganda. It will be more "I wonder what damage I can do with this official's credentials" and less "I am going to target the servers containing information created by the secretary of defense to steal documents involving national secrets and diplomatic strategy." It will also include a lot less direct death (except via assassination).

    The lexicon hasn't caught up to the reality of what's happening, and that's probably a fair reason for why we always end up stuck in the rhetoric of the immediate past. But like, any student of the revolutions of the 1800s notices that just about everyone is talking about the French Revolution of the late 1700s when talking about how to proceed, clear up until and including the Russian revolution. Politicians in the run up to World War II were caught reacting to the world order that had caused the first world war. Those after the second, determined not to repeat the "mistakes" they perceived from the first's resolution.

    When people say that history repeats itself, what they really should be saying is that history rhymes, and one of the reasons it rhymes is because it's really quite hard to learn the patterns that drive these events and react to them before they come to a boiling point. China and the US are on an avoidable collision course. And not just them. Nationalism has seen a resurgence across the globe in a way that few have really grappled with in a meaningful way. What are those driving factors? What has driven people to retreat in the way that they have, when they have? These are the big questions that if you can get ahead of them, and if you can convince other people of the right view, you can improve the lives of billions of people. But that's the trick. Humanity is generally terrible at predicting, especially from priors. One of those reasons is they're generally looking to the wrong priors: those more immediately accessible, and whose narratives they can more easily recount.

    3 votes

  7. Comment on <deleted topic> in ~finance

    BuckeyeSundae
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    Can't help but feel like this is one of the bigger weaknesses of a decentralized system like the US' when it comes to information security. That said, these mules are in a good deal of trouble....

    Can't help but feel like this is one of the bigger weaknesses of a decentralized system like the US' when it comes to information security.

    That said, these mules are in a good deal of trouble. The thing about the US banking system is that it's pretty user-attributable to a point. That point is the juncture between a legitimate bank account (the mule's bank account, in particular) and a wire transfer to god knows where.

    The thing that strikes me about this story is who is identified as being disproportionately impacted: first responders, government employees, and school (government) employees. The linking characteristic of those people? Their names are publicly available. That suggests something about the tactics the criminal org used to get the PII in the first place (that is, they probably also got the PII from the same state and local governments they would later defraud).

    The main unanswered question for me--and the one that will likely stay unanswered unless indictments come from this--is how much did the organization actually get out the door from these states? I would hope that the fact this information is being released means the investigation is in its late stages. They may not have final loss figures yet (which is why they talk in terms of "potential" losses), but "massive" can mean a lot of things. Is it the number of people whose PII was involved? The amount of money lost? A combination? How important this story is depends on the answer to this question.

    3 votes

  8. Comment on Do we really want a new Cold War with China? Corporate media is laying the ideological groundwork for a new cold war with China, presenting the nation as a hostile power that needs to be kept in check in ~society

    BuckeyeSundae
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    Official statistics aside, which will necessarily under-report China's stats (because they try their best to obscure many of the Chinese state's most sensitive secrets), it's striking to me just...

    Official statistics aside, which will necessarily under-report China's stats (because they try their best to obscure many of the Chinese state's most sensitive secrets), it's striking to me just how little imagination observers have when it comes to describing emerging dynamics in the world. We seem forever bound in the rhetoric of the immediate past.

    Simply put, the US and China will not be in a "Cold War" style conflict, where both support proxy wars across the globe in an attempt to win more allies and add more chips to their respective boards. The world has changed since that famous dynamic with Russia existed. No, the shape the new conflicts will be taking are all about information security, disinformation campaigns, and intellectual property theft. These conflicts turning digital in a way few want to acknowledge, because digital systems support the increasing complex military capabilities of modern armed forces, because digital infrastructure underpins the core societal functions of a nation from banking, to taxes, to spreading news and increasingly shopping and work. These are priors in modern nations, btw. It's not necessarily only a China and US thing. This is the shape conflicts are starting to take, as we saw in 2016 with Russia's visible foray into disinformation campaigns.

    I mean, real talk, there's a reason that the internet in China is so tightly controlled. The Chinese government sees the internet (and globalization generally) as a threat vector and have acted for years to limit the extent of the threat while trying to get the benefits of not saying no entirely. And they're not entirely wrong to take that approach. Just look at the little nuggets of allegations coming from Iran and North Korea about what the US is doing to get a sense of how this is playing out between non-warring adversaries. But that tight control over the flow of digital information also amplifies American concerns about the Chinese government's willingness to trample over its own citizens' rights with little more justification than "for the good of the state."

    Moving forward the non-war conflicts will be primarily digital and aimed at disruption of infrastructure or the target nation's legitimacy. It won't be a cold war in any meaningful sense as it applied to the 40-some years after WWII. In one sense, it's going to be more a reversion to tactics from the first world war: the more you can drive a wedge between a people and their government, the less of a threat that government is likely to be to you, the power with the means and interest in pursuing this strategy.

    19 votes

  9. Comment on What seventy-four former Biden staffers think about Tara Reade’s allegations in ~society

    BuckeyeSundae
    Link Parent
    I have a background as a political organizer, so grain of salt, etc. One thing you figure out quite quickly is that everybody has a reputation in politics. Your reputation precedes you, and is...
    • Exemplary

    I have a background as a political organizer, so grain of salt, etc.

    One thing you figure out quite quickly is that everybody has a reputation in politics. Your reputation precedes you, and is usually talked about in opaque terms and sometimes, when drunk, directly. I drank enough with enough colleagues to know well in advance, for example, that nobody wants to work for Amy Klobuchar (who has a reputation for acerbic tirades), that every wonk--in theory--would love to work for Elizabeth Warren, and that Cory Booker really is a bubbly happy dude (though he gets awkwardly competitive about weird shit).

    But the one thing that was always true, even the story a year ago about Biden being too touchy was going viral, is that everyone has ever had a chance to meet and work with the guy loves talking to and working with Joe Biden. That struck me. Because no one had such nice things to say even about Obama, who some drunkenly described as "a little cold" and "brilliant and scholarly, with all that comes with." Or Hillary, who got reviews such as "incredible listener" and "remembers that one time we met 14 years ago in a little farm in Iowa" and "expects half as much work from her team as she puts in herself, which is still going to kill you to try and match."

    So yeah, it is still going to require digging into the evidence to get a better idea of what the likelihood of Reade's accusation really is, but there's no false equivalence here. Kavanaugh responded to the allegations against him by launching into partisan tirades while attempting to rise as an "unbiased judge." Biden responded to the allegations by denying them and insisting that they have a chance to be vigorously investigated. He hasn't launched into character attacks (of which there is ample material); he hasn't gone out of his way to ridicule her like Trump has to his many (23 I believe) accusers. He has reacted with restraint and calm.

    It is a fair point that former employees still in politics have an incentive to say nice things, but my experience in the dark bowels of political organizing leads me to be a little more generous when giving them the benefit of the doubt. It jives with what I've heard from many others, years before these allegations came up.

    6 votes

  10. Comment on US polling suggests Tara Reade's allegations are having a moderate effect on public opinion of Joe Biden in ~society

    BuckeyeSundae
    Link Parent
    I didn't take offense (if I had, I probably would've just said nothing). So no worries there. I wasn't saying the calmness was a virtue, just as you weren't saying all people who will continue to...

    I didn't take offense (if I had, I probably would've just said nothing). So no worries there.

    I wasn't saying the calmness was a virtue, just as you weren't saying all people who will continue to calmly support Biden even in light of the most recent allegations from Tara Reade are assholes. My focus tends to be about maximizing impact (you can tell I used to be an organizer with phrases like that). So my point was solely restricted to the exhausting nature of engaging echo chambers, where a consensus appears to have formed that you, the reader thinking about participating, may not wholly agree with. Waxing into moral fights of character, quoting Martin Luther King's echo of Frederick Douglass, all of this only serves as examples of why engaging in these environments can be exhausting. Who wants to have lengthy rehashed, over and over (and over) discussions abuot what MLK meant by the "white moderate"? Who wants to have lengthy, rehashed discussions about what Douglass meant when he described the type of northern abolitionist that was more evil than the slave owner? Be careful where you apply this logic, because it is poison to constructive discussion with people who might be brought into your ideological camp. You are implying that they are more evil than republicans. Who would want to engage that level of vitriol if they felt that logic was being applied to them?

    You want Stacey to care. I do too, really. But maybe Stacey doesn't have the bandwidth to care that much, especially when she's a hair trigger away from being implied to be an asshole or more evil than the people she sharply disagrees with enough to vote Dem in november. You and I both know that economic disparities and the service sector generally shouldering a lot of emotional labor makes that possible. She'll do what she can with the eggs she's got, but maybe she can't read the news every day or else she'll pull her hair out. Does that make her vote in November destructive? Seems mighty glib of you to claim so without knowing more, especially because her vote is a reflection of her best effort to understand the stakes of the election. You don't necessarily want to jump down peoples' throats when they're trying their best with what they got. That will turn people off to your message, and that hurts your effectiveness as a messenger.

    The thing about echo chambers that makes me roll my eyes is this lack of concern about being messengers for our political beliefs. Like, yeah, I agree with a lot of the sentiments in this thread too. I can't lie about that. But lurkers read these words too, even if they don't say so. Lurkers almost always outnumber active participants online. On volume alone, those lurkers are very likely to include people like Stacey. I think it's really damn important that people try their best not to imply these lurkers are assholes or evil or whatever, because that hurts your ability to persuade them of your larger vision.

    3 votes

  11. Comment on US polling suggests Tara Reade's allegations are having a moderate effect on public opinion of Joe Biden in ~society

    BuckeyeSundae
    Link Parent
    Mainstream isn't the same as moderate. I tend to use "moderate" to describe people who can put aside their personal feelings to listen to those who disagree with them (or those who have few strong...

    Mainstream isn't the same as moderate. I tend to use "moderate" to describe people who can put aside their personal feelings to listen to those who disagree with them (or those who have few strong preferences that push them away from those they might otherwise disagree with).

    But that doesn't mean that Biden's supporters are "moderate", only that they don't like engaging Bernie supporters, who are often young, left leaning, or otherwise quite outspoken, or Warren supporters, who are often quite educated and wealthy and frankly at risk of getting holier-than-thou with a lot of their beliefs (myself included). There are specific reasons that Biden's base of support has been avoiding us. We're tough to talk to. We're not particularly accessible. We make it hard for them to talk to us.

    Which is also kind of my point about why this sort of echo chamber is exhausting. Like good on us for patting ourselves on the back and being on top of our shit morally, but what good does that do if we're not effective at getting people to both like our ideas and like us personally. They go hand in hand.

    6 votes

  12. Comment on US polling suggests Tara Reade's allegations are having a moderate effect on public opinion of Joe Biden in ~society

    BuckeyeSundae
    Link Parent
    Why do you even have to say this hypothetical person could be an asshole? Don't you see that by choosing to emphasize that you belie your own hostility to someone with a more calm take on Biden?...

    Why do you even have to say this hypothetical person could be an asshole? Don't you see that by choosing to emphasize that you belie your own hostility to someone with a more calm take on Biden? Like, if I were Stacey I would want to avoid engaging where people so glibly imply me to be an asshole too.

    1 vote

  13. Comment on US polling suggests Tara Reade's allegations are having a moderate effect on public opinion of Joe Biden in ~society

    BuckeyeSundae
    Link Parent
    No one said the people I'm talking about are silent. No one said they're the majority. All I said is that they choose not to speak here. Don't come at me with Reagan rhetoric I didn't use, that...

    No one said the people I'm talking about are silent. No one said they're the majority. All I said is that they choose not to speak here. Don't come at me with Reagan rhetoric I didn't use, that just proves my point about the annoying hostility of in-groups that amplifies this self-selection caused echo chamber.

    5 votes

  14. Comment on US polling suggests Tara Reade's allegations are having a moderate effect on public opinion of Joe Biden in ~society

    BuckeyeSundae
    Link Parent
    They're not coming here, or at least they're not going to speak up in a thread like this where a lot of people seem to have already made their decision to hate the guy. Surprisingly, most people...

    They're not coming here, or at least they're not going to speak up in a thread like this where a lot of people seem to have already made their decision to hate the guy. Surprisingly, most people don't generally like to have open conflicts with others and politics is still largely relegated to those who opt into the confrontational nature of the discussions.

    It's not reflected in social media because social media is biased against moderate, unremarkable voices and in favor of the extreme and counter-narrative. Why is it biased in that way? because that's what grabs peoples' attention the easiest, and that's all what most social media platforms are about. Who gives a shit about Stacey from Nebraska who thinks that the Democratic party has some flaws, but generally at least tries to represent her in an evidence based way and is allergic to rhetoric that oversells, overpromises, and ritually underprovides. And why should Stacey, who knows that speaking up will just get her a lot of focused hatred from Sanders supporters, from Trump supporters, and probably also from nation state actors, devote even a second to what will almost certainly appear to her as trolls?

    14 votes

  15. Comment on US polling suggests Tara Reade's allegations are having a moderate effect on public opinion of Joe Biden in ~society

    BuckeyeSundae
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    idk, I feel like these conversations are the same sorts of echo chambers that led to Trump winning 2016 being such a shocking unthinkable thing despite ample polling showing it was quite possible...

    idk, I feel like these conversations are the same sorts of echo chambers that led to Trump winning 2016 being such a shocking unthinkable thing despite ample polling showing it was quite possible and just as importantly a lack of polling in important states showing little for certain at all.

    I think people need to realize that conversations on the internet don't reflect random chunks of the electorate. There's self-selection that happens in these discussions that happens far up the chain from the conversation itself. Biden has a very large, devoted base, but if you were to read this thread you'd think it is a surprise anyone in their right mind likes the guy much less would consider supporting him over the godking Sanders. Same thing happens in all sorts of online communities. It's just part of the territory.

    But it also makes me roll my eyes and be much less likely to see it as worthwhile contributing myself.

    15 votes

  16. Comment on Elon Musk says shelter-in-place orders during COVID-19 are ‘fascist’—‘Give people back their goddamn freedom.’ in ~health

    BuckeyeSundae
    Link Parent
    It's also not hard to see his self-interest in getting the economy going again for his bottom line.

    It's also not hard to see his self-interest in getting the economy going again for his bottom line.

    9 votes

  17. Comment on Microsoft Word now flags two spaces after a period as an error in ~humanities.languages

    BuckeyeSundae
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    idk. I've never typed on a typewriter. got to say that QWERTY is the more painful legacy from the typewriter days than an extra space between sentences. This is similar to if Microsoft were coming...

    idk. I've never typed on a typewriter. got to say that QWERTY is the more painful legacy from the typewriter days than an extra space between sentences. This is similar to if Microsoft were coming at python programmers with the old spaces versus tabs argument, and insisting on one side as the right answer. It's cute they think they get to decide. Microsoft has a long legacy of being preachy bastards though, so not terribly surprising.

    Subtext: I'm not salty at all that Microsoft autocorrects a single hyphen to be a dash character, which is available in utf-8 encoding but not available in ASCII, thereby potentially breaking some of the older code I have to work with on a regular basis if the user accidentally lets Microsoft decide their delimiter for them.

  18. Comment on Suggestions for non-fiction books about the decay and decline of human civilisation? in ~books

    BuckeyeSundae
    Link Parent
    Sorry, this chain made me cynical and sad about political discussion on this forum. To recap: Just because human society has perhaps, on the whole, improved doesn't mean that we don't have...

    Sorry, this chain made me cynical and sad about political discussion on this forum.

    To recap:

    1. Just because human society has perhaps, on the whole, improved doesn't mean that we don't have significant problems we have to address yet right on our collective doorstep. To suggest that saying we're the best we've ever been means we have nothing left to achieve misinterprets Pinker's argument (and this is coming from someone who doesn't really find Pinker's claims in this book particularly compelling).
    2. How human society reacts, locally and globally, to these looming issues is far from predetermined, and assuming that it will necessarily lead to chaos and self-disillusion is both defeatist and counterproductive to waht I assume CPriest's goals are (that is, trying to increase people's desire to address human driven global warming).
    3. The entire premise of this thread, non-fiction books about Human civilization and decay must in some sense be fanciful because of the fact that human civilization, as a whole, has not yet in fact decayed or declined. The Modern Era(TM) is in a state of flux, and so it may seem like "decay" if you expect the world to always stay the same no matter what, but it doesn't so ...
    4. the only books that can be recommended are not worth reading (i.e., probably quite questionable) or are histories of periods so long ago that the record supporting their narratives is sorely under-resourced and leaves far too much unknown and unaddressed to be particular useful for what I can infer is the OP's interest here.

    The sorry was to you because you tried to offer some challenge to the OP. Most of this is in response to the OP.

    11 votes

  19. Comment on What's a song you enjoy listening to from a genre you don't? in ~music

    BuckeyeSundae
    Link Parent
    Chris Thile might as well be a genre all to his own at this point. His collaboration in Goat Rodeo Sessions alone is a mindfuck, Quarter Chicken Dark is something they performed in a Tiny Desk...

    Chris Thile might as well be a genre all to his own at this point. His collaboration in Goat Rodeo Sessions alone is a mindfuck, Quarter Chicken Dark is something they performed in a Tiny Desk Concert, and the very idea of a song played or written in 13:8 annoys me in a good way. To your point, he had been doing collabs with Edgar Meyer for a while at that point, and he continued to do so after, as well as a bunch fo other artists.

    He is actually frustratingly well positioned to be a good host of the show formerly known as Prairie Home Companion. Guy has connections to a half dozen genres of artists at least.

  20. Comment on What's a song you enjoy listening to from a genre you don't? in ~music

    BuckeyeSundae
    Link Parent
    Depending on which direction you want to go from there... As close to Katamari as reasonably possible KK Cruising from Animal Crossing has nearly the exact same chiptunes/jazz fusion thing going...

    Depending on which direction you want to go from there...

    As close to Katamari as reasonably possible

    • KK Cruising from Animal Crossing has nearly the exact same chiptunes/jazz fusion thing going on (and a ton of excellent covers over the nine years--I'm old--since its release). This song captures a lot of the happy go lucky energy of Katamari.

    More Chiptunes please

    More (modern) Jazz!

    • <This song I can't write, because it's in Japanese>, by Tokyo Brass Style -- I don't know where this song is from, but they seem to do jazz versions of other songs. I haven't heard one I dislike. For example, I can't replicate the Japanese, but I know this one is from Neon Genesis Evangelion and I haven't even thought about that anime in a decade.
    • All That Jazz' album Ghibli Jazz, covering Ghibli songs in a Jazz style.
    • Guns & Roses from "Baccano!" will get you a feel for the direction of the music from that show. Kind of Cowboy Bebop-esque as far as soundtracks go--which of course would also be something I'd recommend if you hadn't listened to much of that soundtrack either. Both swell times.
      (This hole can also get very deep when you start breaking away from covers of songs and into more stuff like Django Reinhardt or Caravan Palace, alleged father of gypsy Jazz as a genre and a French electronic jazz band, respectively. And I should also mention that this direction also brings up the sort of stuff I was getting into with the French Canadian folk exploration I referenced in my main comment.)
    2 votes