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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I don’t know that I’d agree with the notion that games that are engaging need to be rated higher. Is there harm to playing one game a lot?
    I’ve read books that were so engaging I kept reading long after I should have stopped for the night. The author very much intended for the book to be engaging and to hold my attention. Should we rate the book as more mature because I kept reading it?

    I don’t think balatro is any more addictive than most other games, it just has a low barrier to starting and a quick turn around.

    Ratings should be informative and harm based. “This game is full of violence” and “this game has gambling”. Factual.
    A game being prone to being played alot isn’t factual, it’s just an observation that some people find it fun. Without an associated risk of harm you’re just putting a scary number on something because of your opinion about it.




  • Yeah, you’re not exactly sounding rational there buddy.

    You think we should mistrust doctors who advise you take a preventative treatment that every healthcare system on earth recommends and has since the treatment was created because in one country the people who pay for medicine sometimes don’t want to pay for things the doctors recommend (and you’re saying don’t trust the doctors, mind you), even though the people who pay for it actually recommend it because they make more money if you don’t get sick.

    Even in a full conspiratorial mindset your nonsense is disjointed.

    Antivaxers are fucking idiots because they don’t have a coherent internal logic for their paranoid woo, they don’t have the ability to understand any of the research that’s happened, and they don’t want to trust the people who do because those people clearly want to hurt them and give them… A developmental disability. For profit somehow.



  • They’re saying that they find due process to be lacking and the prosecution to be political.
    Do you think it’s depressing that someone would donate money to the defense of someone they think is being inappropriately prosecuted?
    If you think they’re guilty, you should still want them to get the best defense possible, so that when they’re found guilty it’s airtight. Our justice system is based on an adversarial model. If the prosecution, with the resources of the state, can’t successfully argue that they did it and that their arrest and all procedures were properly followed, do you really want that to still mean someone faces the death penalty?


  • So, for the actual answer to how you get private security: you hire a company like constellis (formerly blackwater, or Iraq war crime fame) or the honest to God pinkertons, who are actually still around.
    You pay them unholy amounts of money and get some burly people to follow you around, with skills proportional to how much you’re paying them. If it gets to the six figure a month range, they also get more war-crime-y because you’re going for the highly qualified special forces folks who miss the fun of combat and murder.
    If you try to pay what feels like a reasonable sum for private security you’re getting a cop working a second job who is definitely not taking a bullet for you, and probably not doing anything more to keep you alive than what’s coincidental to keeping themselves alive.

    The company I work for does business in countries where kidnapping foreign business people is a common and lucrative way to make money (it’s effectively IT consulting, we’re not evil beyond the baseline capitalist level). We hire security people for preposterous sums and basically get former special forces who drive a car, make sure the person who showed up to the meeting is actually who they should be, orders delivery food, and tells you not to do stupid things. They try to keep you from getting kidnapped in boring ways, and if you do get kidnapped they coordinate the ransom exchange. (That I know of the most that’s ever happened was someone made the phone call to verify that the car they were about to get into at the airport was the pickup, and were told that it was not, abandon your bag if they’ve already loaded it and immediately go back into the airport and wait for the guard who showed up a minute later and handled the police interaction)

    In general just try to avoid being in a position where you feel like you need to have hired a hero.