Zagorath @ Zagorath @aussie.zone

Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

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"operative" instead of, uh, something else

I think they meant "operand". As in, in the way dy/dx can sometimes be treated as a fraction and dx treated as a value.

Fake and gay.

No way the engineer corrects the mathematician for using j instead of i.

a school teacher is more likely to come from a wealthier, more conservative background

I couldn't find stats for Australia, but in America teachers are statistically more likely to be Democrats than Republicans, so I don't think this is supported.

It is also worth noting that, though I couldn't find anything on Australian educators' political leanings, teachers are one of the most highly unionised workforces in the country, and our centrist party (the one the media and many in the general public would call "centre-left", like your Democrats) has explicit ties to the union movement.

a school teacher is paid poverty wages

In Australia they're paid quite well. It doesn't scale as highly for the average teacher as it does in many other highly educated jobs, but the base salary is pretty good. There's the important caveat that teachers are largely expected to spend their own money on classroom supplies, though.

teachers are hired by administrators who are usually men, men who can have unaudited privilege

Teachers in Australia are hired by the department based largely on very impersonal factors like qualifications. There's not a huge amount of room, at the level of classroom teachers, for that kind of bias to have as much of an effect. What more personal decisionmaking does happen is done largely by principals, who are former teachers themselves. Because hiring is done at the department level, principles can get involved in decisions like who gets a job at which school, but the fact that they have a job at all is much more impersonal. The promotion and hiring of principles and other non-classroom positions may be a different question.

That said, I'm not disagreeing with your main point. It is a systemic failure. At a scale far larger than merely within schools.

Do they? Most cyclists I know do at least a bit of running.

Swimming though...even triathletes think swimmers are nuts.

More supply is part of what's needed, absolutely.

But there's more to it than just that. The amount of incentives to invest in housing means more people bidding on a house, which raises the price of the house, which makes housing an even better investment, so more people bid on the next house, which raises housing prices even further. We need to cut that off by strongly disincentivising the use of housing as people's primary investment.

There are other things that could be done, like a levy on unoccupied homes (including "holiday homes" which might be occupied only a few weeks or months per year) and on unregulated hotels (Airbnb). And better protections for renters. And preventing developers from land-banking or drip-feeding homes onto the market rather than building as much as they can.

Realistically, the housing market is so fucked, we need a mix of all of these.

I don't think it having "ideological connections" makes this metaphor weaker. In fact, I think it highlights exactly why using a comparison out of left field makes the metaphor stronger. The only reason non-fundamentalist-Christians and Jews in the west have for denying the genocide in Gaza is that it has become normalised to do so. If you take a step back and think about why a white moderate "Christmas-and-Easter Christian" (or even an atheist) American, Australian, or European might have a connection to what's going on in the Middle East...like, really think about it, there is no rational explanation. Only because others have decided to politicise it and make it a talking point and a part of political identity, do westerners end up having disproportionally strong opinions about it. It's self-reinforcing in that way, but it's no more rational than the Welsh Rwandan genocide denier, at its core.

not counting plugging in cars

fwiw you can get wireless car-mount docks.

For every time a person has an intensely strong opinion about something they don't know much about and which doesn't actually affect them.

The first thing that came to my mind is the genocide in Gaza. Jews and fundamentalist Christians have a vested interest (sort of...), as do Israeli citizens (more obviously) in denying the genocide, but way more people than those small demographics do so. Those others are the grandpa.

But it occurred to me as I was writing that this could equally apply to things like gay marriage, or trans rights.

Happy cake day, frend!

(Psst. This is a metaphor.)

I took physics in high school, so I'm basically a qualified expert. I can confirm that quantum mechanics tell us that this is possible. Exceedingly unlikely, but possible.

I'm just a little concerned about the fact that they call it a "demo", and not "early access". That at least seems to communicate the idea that it's limited in breadth but not depth, which doesn't bode well IMO.

I did really like the "planet to system"...system. It's a simple mechanic, but quite clever.

Mandatory military training makes sense in places like Finland, South Korea, and Taiwan. Places with neighbouring countries that are highly aggressive and believable threats. It makes no sense in Australia, thousands of kilometres away from the nearest potential threat and girt by sea surrounded by ocean. Where, if we did come under threat, the more highly specialised fields of the standing military (navy and air force, far more than army) will be a more relevant part of our protection than any conscripts with 18 months of training when they were 18 ever could.

I downloaded this not long after you posted it (at the same time as Little Kingdom), but only just got around to playing it a day or two ago. It felt like a good early access of a game, but it felt very slow-paced and lacking in content (in a way that didn't seem like it's just because this is only a demo, but I could be wrong there). There's no multiplayer mentioned, but it seems like a game that could work in multiplayer, so it's a shame that it doesn't. I can't see very much replay value in it if it's singleplayer only.

Yup! Retold is pretty fantastic! They've added a new Chinese civ (redone and better than the Chinese from Tale of the Dragon in the Extended Edition), and there's a new Japanese civ coming out soon. There's also a fourth Major God for the Norse providing a much more defensive option, along with a new one-level campaign that explains why the Norse came down to Egypt in the main campaign. And the multiplayer scene is alive and well like it hasn't been since ESO went down! It also comes with some of the nice UX upgrades that the Age of Empires Definitive Editions had.

Splitting lanes is not legal in the vast majority of the United States but idk where you’re from

Where I am it's explicitly allowed for motorbikes (at a maximum speed of 30 km/h), thanks to a relatively recent law change. Pushbikes are a different story. There's no law explicitly allowing it, and this has led to some people (even people in positions of perceived authority, such as the social media team of the Department of Transport and Main Roads) to suggest that it's not legal for bikes. But the reality is that it is legal, as a necessary side-effect of the fact that cars are allowed to overtake bikes without leaving the same lane. Basically, bikes are allowed to share a lane with another vehicle, and this has the effect of also allowing a bike to come up through congested traffic.

It’s very very rare for me to see a car blow through a red light outright

I find this rather hard to believe. First, remember that an amber light does not mean "be careful" or "get ready, you might have to stop soon". It means stop right now, if it's safe. How often have you seen drivers actually do that? I've had so many times where, as a driver, I saw the amber and found myself in that awkward position where I didn't know whether it was appropriate to keep going or to stop, and eventually decided to go through; a situation where it is obviously going to be the case that anyone behind me should stop, because I was on the borderline, so anyone behind me must be well over the other side of the line. And yet, so many times not only has the car behind me gone through, the car behind them did too. And that's before we even get into the daily cases where they don't even start to enter the intersection until after it has turned red. I've got a mate who rides a motorbike and posts helmet-cam footage on Facebook at least weekly, and every one of his compilations includes at least one case of a driver who runs a fully red light.

For cyclists, recall that there are some places in your own country that explicitly allow cyclists to go through a red light if it's safe. Not everywhere does (nowhere in Australia, to my knowledge), but those places that allow it do it for a reason. Evidence shows that it makes cyclists safer. Not all lawbreaking is equal, and the evidence pretty clearly tells us that when cyclists break the law, it tends to be for far better reasons than the reasons drivers break the law, even though the rate of lawbreaking is the same.

They’re motorized vehicles when its convenient to them and pedestrians when its not

Almost like...they're neither? What you describe here is perfectly legal.

They split lanes

Legal

blow through red lights

Imagine thinking cars don't 🤣

and they loooooove to go out in big groups

Not remotely against the rules

and take over the road

Please define. Because as someone who has spent many hours in a car, I've been prevented from going at the speed I would like to go by other cars far more than bikes. And my life has been put in danger by cars, not by bikes.

The simple fact is that data tells us cyclists and drivers break the law at roughly the same rate at worst. (Incidentally, one study from a place with better infrastructure shows that when good infrastructure is in place, cyclists break the law considerably less often than drivers.) Studies also show that cyclists break the law to keep themselves safe (this has been backed up by multiple studies). When drivers break the law, it's because they think it's more convenient not to bother.

The simple fact is that though @makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml claims it's cyclists being "dictators" and you claim they "take over the road", the reality is quite the reverse. When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. And no demographic in our society (excluding socioeconomic and racial discussions) is more privileged than drivers.

Yeah it seems pretty unlikely that any AI chat bots are manipulating code in the complex (whether the output is correct or not is immaterial to the complexity of the changes being made) ways that they are that quickly despite actually being done by humans.

V5 was a mess? I'll admit I've only read through the rulebook and watched LA By Night, never actually played it. But I really, really like the system. It feels like it strikes a pretty great balance between an amount of detail that can give you meaningful character choices, while also being really elegant and intuitive to play with. The same thing that made 5e so successful for D&D.

Werewolves have never really interested me, so I never looked much at that. But I quite liked the idea behind Mage so I was looking forward to seeing what they'd do with it, both mechanically and in the metanarrative.

I can't speak for horses. I've only once in my life encountered people on horses while on a bike. It's an exceedingly unusual scenario.

I can tell you that, as a matter of fact (not anecdote), drivers and cyclists break the law at roughly the same rate. But that in crashes between cars and bikes, the car is the responsible party in 80% of cases. And that studies have established that when cyclists break the law, it is overwhelmingly done in the interest of their own safety, while drivers break the law in the interest of perceived convenience.

I only realised after writing the above that that you mentioned "trails". Sounds like you're talking about mountain biking. I can't speak to that, I'm almost exclusively a roadie, using the bike either as a means of transport or for exercise/training on the road. Saying "you" doesn't really work here. The amount of overlap between mountain bikers and road bikers is surprisingly small.