Xhieron

Warning, Reddit link: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fkftiwovba73b1.jpg

The thing that did it for me is the picture making the rounds of the truck sight lines showing the M1 as safer than an F250 in terms of blind spot. These things are really ridiculous.

The problem with a punishment mesmer, defensive juggernaut anything, and turret engie is that they result in degenerate gameplay. Turrets can’t be allowed to succeed in PVE (see: Lake Doric), and none of these class fantasies can be allowed at all in PVP.

Turrets and juggernauts turn into turtling bunkers that either grind play to a halt or turn into raid bosses, and the only way to balance them is to essentially make the style of play unfun for the person who wants it. “Being unkillable” or “controlling this space” can’t be supported in a competitive game mode. Now, you can balance this by just splitting everything and making the specs unplayable or wildly different in competitive modes, but that means you’re now devoting the dev resources to build the thing twice (for both modes), yet players can only really enjoy it in PVE. From a design perspective, that’s a really poor return on investment for an elite spec.

Punishment mesmer worked in GW1 because you had much better defined roles in all game modes with less overlap, and there was ability parity between players and NPCs, so you could interact with an enemy mob essentially the same way you’d interact with an enemy player. In GW2, you can’t punish a playstyle because playstyles aren’t that well defined, and you can’t create a niche for hex gameplay because they gave everybody else the mesmer toys (see: Torment and Confusion). If you try to make a spec that depends on them even more than certain mesmer specs already do, the byproduct will be turning revs into gods (again). There’s also no energy denial in GW2, and you can’t give a player a bar full of interrupts because everybody already has as many interrupts as the game can support without being catastrophically unfun. GW2 is just the wrong kind of game for GW1’s mesmer–like a lot of things that were better in GW1.

If you ask me, we don’t need more elite specs. We need more non-elite specs–stuff we can combine more freely with what we already have–and we need the elites to be “de-elited” so that the power level of the vanilla specs have better parity with their elite counterparts. I know they’ve taken a pass at this before (or two or three), but it has clearly not panned out. The presence of multiple options for ranged elementalists, for example, is definitely something that needs to be supported.

No, sorry. I try to be deferential when talking about this stuff, but this is pretty cut and dry, and I’m afraid you’re just wrong here. This is Greek–not theology. πίστις is the word we’re talking about. It shares the common root with πείθω–“to persuade” (i.e., that evidence is compelling or trustworthy). πίστις is the same word you would use in describing the veracity of a tribunal’s judgment (for example, “I have πίστις that the jurors in NY got the verdict right/wrong”). The Greeks used the word to personify honesty, trust, and persuasiveness prior to the existence of Christianity (although someone who knows Attic or is better versed in Greek mythology feel free to correct me). The word is inherently tied up with persuasion, confidence, and trust since long before the New Testament. The original audience of the New Testament would have understood the meaning of the word without depending on any prior relation to religion.

Is trust always a better translation? Of course not–and that’s why, you’ll notice, I didn’t say that (and if it were, one would hope that many of the very well educated translators of Bibles would have used it). But I think you can agree that the concept is also difficult for English to handle (since trust in a person, trust in a deity, and trust in a statement are similar but not quite the same thing, and the same goes for belief in a proposition, belief in a person, and belief in an ideal or value, to say nothing of analogous concepts like loyalty and integrity).

The point is that πίστις–faith–absolutely does not mean belief without evidence, and Christianity since its inception has never taught that. English also doesn’t use the word “faith” to imply the absence of evidence, and we don’t need to appeal to another language to understand that. It’s why the phrase “blind faith” exists (and the phrase is generally pejorative in religious circles as well as secular ones).

Now, if you think the evidence that convinces Christians to conclude that Jesus’ followers saw Him after His death is inadequate, that’s perfectly valid and a reasonable criticism of Christianity–and if you want to talk about that, that would be apologetics.

In any event, if you’re going to call something bullshit, you better have a lot of faith in the conclusion you’re drawing. ;)

The way faith is treated in the First Century doesn’t translate well to modern audiences. Having faith of a child isn’t an analogy to a child being gullible. It’s an analogy to the way a child trusts in and depends on his parents. Trust, arguably, would be a better translation than faith in many instances.

Faith for ancient religious peoples wasn’t about believing without proof. That would be as ridiculous for a First Century Jew as it is for us. Faith is being persuaded to a conclusion by the evidence.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Windows 10 LTSC 2021 ends support in 2027 (although it doesn’t matter quite as much). And it’s likely that the Win 11 LTSC later this year will necessarily be free from much of 11’s bullshit. Linux is still the right call, but for those of us who need to run a Windows machine for whatever reason, there are alternatives, so, you know… yarr.

That was the point… Did you reply to the wrong comment?

That’s flattering, but I was actually just expecting a press release. So where is it?

She sure can’t. Sounds like all OpenAI has to do is produce the voice actor they used.

So where is she? …

Right.

It’s a safe bet. The number of voters Biden loses if he were to change positions enough to appease any authentic anti-Zionists (as opposed to agitprop elements, for whom no position would be good enough to silence) would dwarf the number of voters he might gain. That might not mean he gets reelected, but hell, changing positions at all would cost him votes. Like I said: all choices are bad. It would have been a political disaster for any president, because every voter who cares enough about it to be a single-issue voter is entrenched enough to not be swayed at all unless the other side is completely alienated.

He can’t find a way to appease both sides? Well what does that look like? What’s the position that appeases both staunch Zionist voters and the subsection of the anti-Zionist protestors who vote? That’s not a rhetorical question. Every other US politics-adjacent post on Lemmy recently has been OP or one of their comrades criticizing Biden for his position on Israel, and I’m genuinely interested to hear someone articulate the nuanced position that Biden should supposedly take that he’s currently failing at, and how he’s supposed to do that and not immediately lose all prospects of reelection. FFS, even characterizing this as a division between “pro-Israel” and “against genocide” is already throwing nuance out the window. From where I’m sitting, Joe Biden has as nuanced a position as he can, because the nature of foreign relations in the Middle East in 2024 is itself nuanced and, for US interests, profoundly precarious. If you want nuance, you better be prepared to swallow a healthy dose of realpolitik alongside it, and that’s something that as of yet I’ve not found any noble armchair advocates and red-shadowed “patriots” willing to do.

It’s a safe bet, by a lot, and the calculus doesn’t really change no matter how much nuance you apply, because with every statement you’re always trading some nebulous number of single-issue pro-Palestine/anti-Zionist voters for a much larger group of pro-Israel/Zionist voters.

Then you have folks like the OP who are essentially working as a thinly-veiled propaganda arm of Hamas/Russia/etc., and it really muddies the signal-to-noise analysis on the issue.

It’s a problem for Biden, but there’s no winning. Trump doesn’t have the problem only because he’s not the incumbent right now, so he can hem and haw and try to deflect from the reality that he’s much worse on the issue–like every other issue–for people who align even a little bit with any policies left of center.

So Biden just has to basically take the hit, because the Democrats care about functional government and stable diplomacy and foreign policy relationships, whereas the GOP, as the party of dysfunction, white grievance, and ethno-religious fascism, isn’t saddled with the same considerations. Biden actually tried–and partially succeeded–in slowing down arms shipments to Israel, and the GOP threw a shitfit in Congress because they want those arms shipments: Their donors want them, and they can hang it on Biden’s neck no matter what, because people like OP will continue to go to bat for them.

AI = Absent Indians

The nepo babies wouldn’t serve–same as always. And the political unpopularity of conscription has never changed. The last war draft is still in living memory, and US current military activity hasn’t been an improvement in terms of public appetite.

The US introduces conscription again, and there’ll be riots–and I don’t mean “some kids camped at college and the jackboots locked them up” protests; it’ll be government-building burning, widespread-looting riots.

If you want to do conscription, the kids have to trust the government not to kill them for oil.

Alright, don’t everybody talk at once now. Tell us how this is Joe Biden’s fault.

Hear, hear! This is fantastic. The people who can change the state of Israel are the Israeli people. I hope their voices are heard.

Christmas.

Not to shit on my own profession (about this–there are plenty of other reasons for that), but lawyer education is nowhere near doctor education.

To paraphrase one of my professors, “Ever wonder why in the legal profession you can get a terminal degree after only three years without having to write a dissertation?” [Answer: It’s because lawyers control their own profession, along with the government that controls how professions are regulated.]

On the OP, I don’t think police should be required to pass the bar exam. The reason is that the bar exam, and by extension law school, covers much more material than police should ever realistically need to know, even being generous. Cops don’t need to know which agents owe their principals fiduciary duties, for example. They don’t need to be able to articulate contract remedies or determine when a party might have a prevailing argument against personal jurisdiction.

They should, however, have to pass a version of the UBE that covers criminal law and procedure in their jurisdiction, and they should have continuing education requirements. [And in many if not most or all US jurisdictions, they already do. --they do in mine, at least.] More importantly, they need to carry a bond.

In order for any of this to matter, however, first a court has to hold that the police owe a duty not only to the public at large but also directly to those in immediate need. In the US, the state of the law with respect to police and other state actors vis-a-vis victims of the torts and crimes of others is reprehensible. Take a look at Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005), DeShaney v. Winnebago County, 489 U.S. 189 (1989) (“Poor Joshua!”), and Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d. 1 (D.C. Ct. of Ap. 1981). And if you like podcasts, Radiolab has covered this.

In short, the police need to be bound by a legal duty to rescue, and members of the public need a private right of action against agencies (police and others, including agencies like DCS) to whom private remedies have been surrendered when those agencies fail to perform their duties as required. It would require an upending of the American “system” in favor of something closer to civil law jurisprudence (e.g., the European continent). And it’s desperately needed and long overdue.

That’s a surprise. In most US schools they’ll cut STEM and language and have rolling blackouts before they cut sports.

That’s a chicken and egg problem, though, isn’t it: Netanyahu’s government wants Hamas because the conflict keeps Bibi out of prison, and Hamas wants to remain relevant. All the same, the Israeli and Palestinian people are the ones who suffer due to both regimes being in power, and Hamas doesn’t shed its guilt just because Israel doesn’t want a reasonable Palestinian government. Neither side wants to blink because they have multi-generational hatred for the other side, and that means popular support for further violence probably isn’t going anywhere. You back down! No, you back down!

The result is that neither side is going to take real steps to deescalate, because both sides benefit from the conflict. That the Palestinians are suffering more, by orders of magnitude, doesn’t make either side’s position any less entrenched: Bibi wants to stay in power (and free), and Hamas wants to remain relevant and in power, and they’re more justified now than ever. Both regimes need to be replaced.