All too often, taking the “evil” path in RPGs just locks content. Most of the NPCs end up against you and you lose side quests rather than getting additional ones to compensate.

I think the Elder Scrolls games did well with the Thieves’ Guild and Assassins. There was a fair amount of content that was unlocked, and depending on your playstyle (and how much you roleplay in single player RPGs) you could still do major quest lines.

It’s just that, after decades of playing computer RPGs, I will tend to default to an paladin type character until I get the lay of the land.

In 2012 I voted against Obama because I thought he was too conservative. I didn’t think his healthcare program went far enough, I didn’t like his foreign policy of continuing the Bush wars, and I thought he turned out to be far more establishment than he had indicated as a candidate in 2008.

I voted for Jill Stein. I said it wasn’t a protest vote and that I was voting my conscience, but it was totally a protest vote. Stein would have been the worst president in US history, and I even knew that at the time. I did it because Obama had a predicted 99% chance of winning my state, so I figured it was safe and would communicate to the democrats that there was a preference for more left leaning candidates.

What I did not do was try to campaign for Stein to try to get swing state voters to vote for her. I didn’t try to get swing state voters to not vote.

First “democrats” is doing a lot of work here. I’m assuming the voters that you’re talking about turning out were democrats. I’m assuming the politicians they voted for were democrats. So what you mean is some subset (eg Third Way types, which have already been mentioned).

Use numbers. What was the turnout for the previous years? What was the turnout for Obama? For Bill Clinton? Was it bigger when Dennis Kucinich was in the race? Other than Bernie, he was the leftmost candidate that I can recall - at least in the top 5 in recent years. State the point you are trying to prove clearly, then demonstrate it.

I’m a Bernie supporter - he actually helped secure a research grant I worked on, I’ve met him in person, and I donated to each of his campaigns since I started to be able to do that kind of thing. I’m a member of the DSA. I’m also a scientist, and I deal with this kind of thing all the time.

What you’re basically coming off as, to be honest, is that family member in the maga hat who keeps yelling that 2020 was rigged.

You gave no competing hypothesis. I offered several.

This is a hot take.

Here’s the problem with your hypothesis:

You’re mixing together people who don’t vote with people publicly advocating not voting. That’s completely unsupported. Let’s see some stats on why people don’t vote. Is it because they don’t have time because they’re working, because they’re uncomfortable with the process, because they’re being lazy? On the other hand, what are the predictors of voting? We know age is a factor, so that would encourage us to think about the time availability question.

The second part is that the disengagement approach you’re advocating has driven the Democratic Party to the right. The Third Way movement came entirely from seeing Reagan’s engagement numbers. Not voting casts a zero information signal. First, the numbers only move mildly from year to year, and even when they do it tends to come down to the charisma of the candidate, not the policy positions.

A surprising number of Americans want universal healthcare, support LGBT rights and are against racism, yet vote for Donald Trump or DeSantis because they can get the crowds riled up in the way that policy wonks just don’t.

I mean, when the republicans did that huge study that found that economic and demographic changes in the US meant they needed to adopt more progressive policies (eg not being openly racist) if they wanted to have a future, the gop said “screw that, we will just depress the vote.”

So, no, your policy is not evidence-based, and it’s unreasonable. It forces the country to the right. If that’s what you want, go for it.

I fully agree with you on your response. My attempt at being brief (as a perusal of my post history will show I have a really hard time with), I sacrificed accuracy for brevity.

And just in case you’re hitting your weekend and bored, I am also able to have a full scale discussion on the semiotics of pick up trucks and the surrounding culture in general.

Several US states have requirements on a minimum bumper height and restrict things like how far tires can extend from the wheel well.

There is scientific consensus - to the point of being unanimous as far as I know - that these raised vehicles pose a significantly increased danger to pedestrians and to other vehicles. There is entirely a legal precedent to pass laws that say things like bumpers can be no more than six inches from the ground and that driver visibility must be cleared to within a foot of the front bumper.

In the US, these issues are largely handled at the state level, although there are some federal regulations in place. When I was a teenager in Jersey, they required annual inspections that included testing for operational lights, braking efficiency, emissions, and so on. In New Mexico, there were no inspections at all, and you simply had to pay for registration.

As these quasi-monster trucks become more prevalent, there’s an increasing need for legislation. Manufacturers are driven solely by consumer demand unless regulated, and politicians are more worried about upsetting Dodge Ram drivers than they are about public health and safety. I literally could not imagine a nationwide 55MPH law passing today (there were complications with doing it when they did do it, but it was successfully executed when it happened).

What we need is this generation’s Ralph Nader to go after the industry to get the public to support and demand political action.

Yes. These should be made illegal, or restricted from on-road use. As trucks increase in size and height, there are studies that they become more and more dangerous. They should be banned for safety reasons.

I’m going to simplify things a bit.

Darwin articulated the theory of evolution by natural selection.

It goes like this:

1. Individuals in a community vary in their physical properties. Some may be larger or smaller, faster, stronger, or smarter.
2. This variability can affect the chances for those individuals possessing more favorable characteristics to survive and reproduce better than the other variants.
3. If those physical properties are inherited, then the ones who reproduce more leads to having the next generation of their population having more individuals with that property.

What it boils down to is that evolution is the change in the gene pool of a population over time. Natural selection was the term coined to mean that nature breeds animals and plants just like farmers do - it chooses based on the characteristics it “wants” - by which I mean the ones who survive and reproduce more successfully.

So far, so good.

The problem is that while Darwin was working that out, biology still held to a model that we call “blending inheritance.” They knew that offspring could inherit traits from both parents, and they thought the result was a blend of the two - a short person having a kid with a tall person would produce a medium sized kid, and so on.

Blending is completely incompatible with Darwin’s theory, and he worked really hard to fit that square peg into the round hole. He never did.

The irony is that during this same period Mendel was doing breeding experiments on pea plants, crossing tall with short, or different colors of flowers, and so on. He demonstrated that inheritance is particulate. Rather than a blend, it was a random mixture of alternate individual genes that caused the variety in the offspring. Basically, if you cross a plant with wrinkled peas with one with smooth peas, half the offspring will be wrinkled and half smooth. You don’t wind up with plants that had semi-wrinkled peas or which have a mixture of both. Unfortunately for Darwin, Mendel’s work remained undiscovered for decades. (I’m not sure whether wrinkled is actually a 50/50 or not, I’m just using that as an illustration).

It wasn’t until the 1940s that the two biggest ideas in biology were brought together in what’s called the modern synthesis. That’s where we began what could be considered modern evolutionary biology.

Mendel was extremely fortunate to have been working with plants that showed dominant and regressive characteristics so clearly.

I agree and I’m even a bit sympathetic - not to their leadership, who can sleep in the bed they made, but to the idea of the site. I just think they could have taken a few of those millions and used it to figure out something other than “We can increase revenue by eliminating access and making the experience worse for users that remain unless they pay us monthly.”

The heavy-handedness of the policy combined with the short timeline and non-negotiable, let-them-eat-cake stance makes me feel like this was a shoot from the hip thing rather than something fully investigated via models with decision points and predictions. In short, very Elon/Trump.

I also think the drama will have died down, and even of it didn’t, it would have a limited effect on the IPO by itself. Twitter losing about 2/3 of its value isn’t because people think Elon is a jerk. It’s because he’s killing growth and revenue. If a company can’t trade on its profitability, it has to do so on its KPIs. What I’m saying is that if reddit’s growth was negatively affected by the ham fisted decisions, it’s going to pile negatives on top of already existing negatives.

Basically, I think it was a desperate move but also a terrible idea, not unlike Elon forcing $13B in debt on Twitter and then making up for it via the destruction of verification.

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the $8, and lose his own advertisers?

Mark 8:36, approximately

I don’t think reddit was positively affected (as of yet) by the decision - otherwise they wouldn’t be doing the outreach stuff. If only 20% of reddit users are creating 80% of the content (a wild ass guess that’s not unreasonable as a starting point), and if those engaged users are more likely to be protesting/leaving, then the aftereffects are going to be showing up over the next two quarters. If spez needed to show a turnaround for the money folks, it needs to be a turnaround and not a “we tried.”

I just think they’re selling into a down market - down for them in particular but also for the industry - and if they IPO under those conditions I don’t think they’ll hold their initial pricing. “Here’s a turd. Do you want to pay a premium for it in case we can polish it?”

I couldn’t think of a worse time to try an IPO, though. They’re selling into an already less than enthusiastic market. Although there’s been recoveries on parts of the tech sector, if the VCs are hurting for funds and the institutions are being conservative, it’s going to be a disaster.

I am not sure that the bad press over the APIpocalypse is going to have a lasting effect in and of itself, but if they’ve lost users or have slowed growth in the US market as a result, that definitely might. Elon destroying all remaining value at Twitter and spurring an exodus to Threads and other sites is also going to make people question hopping onto a big social media investment because the market has become less predictable than it was a year or two ago.

The late 90s were where you could use an IPO as a take the money and run exit strategy. I think they should have avoided Musking the site and instead pushed all out for growth and look to get acquired, maybe by a Chinese company looking to own a large US-based social media company.

It really looks like the financial decisions at reddit are being handled with the same level of competence as the site policy decisions.