No no, OP, you see, how will I transport four fully grown corn-fed american patriots around?

A normal car?

No, I need to transport these four fully grown corn-fed american patriots while also transporting a bunch of material that I can’t have in the cab of my car.

A trailer?

Don’t be ridiculous, it’s too heavy, a normal car couldn’t tow that.

A slightly better car?

No, that’s insane, it’s much too heavy, and besides, I need to transport three metric tons of stuff, all outside of my vehicle, which means I need a trailer and I can’t keep any of it in the back of my normal car.

A beefy cargo van, with a covered cabin, and a divider?

No, see, you simply don’t understand, all my loads need to be uncovered. I’m transporting, uhh, loose gasoline? Not in a barrel, just loose in the bed, and 400 2x4s, and, uhh, gravel. I don’t want a semi, because you need to be licensed for that and I would rather pay more to have a personal vehicle which is capable of all of this at once rather than pay for a delivery. I also need good ground clearance, because I’m going into the unpaved american wilderness with these large uncovered loads. I’m not antisocial, I just need to transport this to my off grid homesteading compound in the middle of nowhere, with my four platonic corn-fed american patriot roommates, or my fifteen sons and daughters which I’ve already pledged to my friends’ other fifteen sons and daughters. How do I pay for all this? It’s all super cheap, I swear, I’m just an honest normal rural farmer, and I work a normal job as a military defense contractor, or running IT for some wing of some megacorporation, or maybe I just have inherited money. Everyone wants to be me, but I’m the only person who’s allowed to use this truck and say it’s totally acceptable because this is a totally legitimate use and I’m just exercising my normal freedoms.

This is all normal, and fine.

Unfortunately I don’t think threads are great for paved roads,

It depends on the type of tread, some are made to run on roads, some really aren’t, or just kind of tear up roads. It’s the same principle as running chains or studs on your tires when you’re not in the winter or not in the mud. If you have rubber pads for contact on your tread, it could probably be better considering the load is spread out much more compared to the relatively small contact patch of a tire. The problem is that you’re gonna outweigh that gain with the larger amount of emissions it’s gonna take you to go anywhere on account of your treads not being as efficient.

The top bike is referred to as the “lady bike”, as you’ve said, but for any external viewers, the top bike is probably a better choice for city bike in general. There’s the point about not having to swing your leg around when mounting and dismounting the bike, true, but the bike also promotes an upright seating position as opposed to a totally horizontal, leaned down, motorcycle like position, which will be more comfortable for long ride periods for most riders, at the cost of aerodynamics. The bottom bike is extreme overkill for most uses, but it’s also the bike you’re going to probably see most often in the US outside of mountain bikes, since nobody tends to commute on bike here.

It’s america, so it’s not impossible

how much garbage do you produce on a daily basis that you need a truck to haul it hoo lee

I’d need a truck to tow it anyways.

Common misconception, but you do not, and a folding trailer hooked up to a car with a tow rating capable of pulling it takes up much less overall space when it’s folded up than the truck will most of the time. You’ll also probably get better gas mileage, which is a bonus, plus better pedestrian safety, less force going into a car crash which collectively makes everyone on the road safer, and makes it safer to crash into stationary objects, decreased roadwear, things of this nature. This sort of trailer setup is done all the time in europe, as another comment concurs.

https://lemmy.world/post/16709798

It’s weirder than that, even

I can distinguish the definition for each, which is why I’m applying the label. I’m just using a different definition than you.

To perpetuate supremacy and keep an in group and out group amongst all it’s colonies and populations, something that they found necessary in order to be able to extract colonial goods and maintain property, they had to build a hierarchy. That hierarchy was partially based on race. The US was a colonial state and actively engaged in the genocide of the native americans, both before and after, so much so that hitler took notice and said, gimme a slice of that. This happened with basically every colony that England took, even their first ones, like ireland, where now a very slim population actually speaks irish. I don’t really feel bad in calling that kind of behavior to be like, prototypically fascist.

Maybe if you were to define fascism as integrally privatizing other public goods, like mussolini and hitler did, then that might swing things a little bit, but america and england both went and did that later on and historically have had no problem with doing that. There’s really not a good definition of fascism that I’ve ever heard that doesn’t apply to america or england, other than “oh, well, those countries were super authoritarian”, and then somehow they don’t recognize, say, that america has 1% of the world’s prison population and a massive police state, and the level at which we propagate authoritarian governments globally in order to further our own interests. The semantic argument that people try to hash out over definitions of fascism, it’s not the real crux of the issue there, it’s just a kind of obfuscation of the real talking point, which is that people aren’t realizing the massive amount of bullshit the imperial core has been engaging in on a near constant basis for like the past couple hundred years, and precisely how bad it really is.

throwing kyle under the bus is a classic Tenacious D bit, though

Well yeah, but that’s only one part of fascism. You could say pretty much the same of any war, lots of non-fascist goverments, and hell, you could say we already do that, just look at how the campus protests were treated, the BLM protests, the civil rights protests, the sufferagettes, a personal favorite of mine would be the horrid history of our oppression of labor by siding with companies and enabling the use of pinkertons to gun down crowds, yadda yadda.

No, if america was to be fascist, it would be fascist for historical reasons which already existed, which have been around for a while already. I don’t know whether or not america suddenly having a dictator, would really have too much of an effect on it suddenly becoming fascist, despite the popular consensus that fascism just requires a really racist guy to suddenly be a dictator. I actually don’t think that would factor too much into the definition at all, I think you could pretty easily have a fascist democracy, and you could definitely have a fascist oligarchy.

I’m pretty sure imperial japan was mostly run by a military cabinet which internally needed a certain number of votes, and the emperor was more like a figurehead and religious figure that had a certain amount of sway over the cabinet’s decisions as he was like, a big deal, more than him being a figure of political power. From what I remember, anyways. Me personally, I’d be pretty comfortable calling imperial japan a fascist state, even if it maybe conforms to that definition less well than, say, italy or germany.

So, we have an imperialism which has both historically been in place around the globe and constantly been effecting an in-group, which exists internal to borders, and an out-group, outside them. We also have a couple different in and out groups within the US. Black people, Native americans, you name a racial minority, we’ve done fucked up shit to them. So, pretty textbook so far. Violent military expansionism, imperialism, and high levels of domestic racism is what most people would probably tally up fascism to be as, colloquially. They might not even pick up on a dictator being a central component. We also have corporate capture, which is pretty solidly the case in america. We have an erosion of public utilities and infrastucture. We have a police state. Fervent nationalism, controlled mass media, blatant theocratic intervention, you know, we have all the classic markers of pretty much all the definitions.

The only qualification I can cook up is that we’re presumably a “democracy”, right, which I didn’t really even think of as being a requirement. You can have a fascist democracy, it’s just a democracy where not everyone can vote, which has always been a kind of tenuous characteristic of democracy at best. We went from wealthy, white male land owners being the ones to vote, to rapidly most everyone being able to vote, actually fairly recently, in the grand history of the US. Especially horrible once you factor in gerrymandering, segregation, white flight, and redlining, which means that the average black voter had much less say (and still does have much less say) than your average white voter. We also elect people, who elect people, with more or less vote weight on both a local basis through gerrymandering and more or less weight on a per state basis through the electoral college, in a fptp system, where a kind of nash equilibrium ensures that there’s only gonna ever be two viable parties or candidates in local, state, or federal elections, for pretty much the majority of america.

So, we’re a “democracy”, but I would say that we’re only a democracy insofar as a 5 month old fetus could be considered a human. We might consider athens to have been a “democracy”, too, right, according to the formal definition, but if only white male landowners can vote, then that’s already such a subset of the population that you might legitimately be closer to an oligarchy at that point. And both an oligarchy and a democracy can be plenty fascist. Hell, the germans arrived at their fascism through mostly totally legitimate democratic processes.

So, I mean, yeah, america’s pretty much always been a fascist country, sorry to break it to ya.

so does that mean England was fascist?

The biggest imperial and colonial power of perhaps all of history? yeah probably

Not so much, it would more be along the lines of a standard military coup, which doesn’t necessarily have to originate from a fascist. Those can and do come from all sides of the political spectrum.

I don’t think biden would ever do that, and probably if he did, he’d be the worst president dictator of all time with only the mild upside that he could maybe only do so for the rest of his probably not long lifespan, or for the next couple months as they run another election, which he would probably do since he seems like kind of a sap.

But, if he were replaced by a person I actually liked, or there was someone who’s policy I agreed with in that position, I’d pretty much be fine with it, and I get the feeling that most people would be fine with it too, as in, a majority of the population. The levers of power might freak out though, and that might put a damper on things.

So, obviously he could just [redacted] the supreme court justices he doesn’t like, appoint new ones, and then the only thing congress could do would be to expand the court or whatever, right? but then why couldn’t he also just keep killing people in official acts until he gets a bunch of people that are like “yup, that was official and you don’t need to do anything about it”? I know that’s probably a slippery slope, right and would probably get him a shit ton of public pushback, especially after a certain point, from both conservatives, who predominantly make up the military, and economic power structures, to liberals who would prize decorum and “fair play” above all else (but I repeat myself), and so maybe that leads to a dissolution of society, which maybe leads to an even worse society as the people who control the levers of power are already the most horrible people, but, yadda yadda.

But, I dunno, how many congress people does he have to make go away, before the rest of them start to get the picture and then start to behave in their own self-interest, as they’ve always behaved? How many people do you really have to threaten in a system where the people who climb to the top are only going to be there out of their own extreme self-interest?

you know, I at least appreciate on here that, even if you’re going to be massively downvoted for basically no reason, at least there’s someone here making this post and then backing it up in their comments, rather than me just having to look at the headline and be like “yeah that sounds like fishy north korea style clickbait xenophobia to me” without wanting to actually look into it.

So, good job.

I mean, I dunno. I was sort of okay with the link’s awakening remake using this aesthetic, because it was a one off game, but it does sort of strike me as a very like, default, low rent kind of appearance, and the item and enemy copying ability also strikes me as something that’s not that interesting, and not as interesting as the normal zelda dungeon by dungeon kind of scheme. A good portion of the things you’re gonna copy are probably going to have exceedingly similar behaviors, they’re going to be functionally identical.

It’s obviously a copy, ironically, or maybe an extension, of the design philosophy behind the recent two big zelda games, and this one’s adapted it to a lower budget 2D game. I dunno, I’m still not in love with the idea as a whole, and that’s kind of after two big games. I dunno if it’s really ever gonna be on the level of, say, portal, or something, right? Which is a weird comparison to make, but I do feel the need to make it. I’ve never really found physics puzzles to be that interesting, which is gonna be what a lot of games that try like, universal mechanics, are going to have to cowtow to, because physics systems are theoretically infinite even though they actually do have a relatively small set of constraints, right. I’ve also never really enjoyed stacking boxes on top of one another as a solution to a puzzle, despite that being omnipresent in every good immersive sim, which is weirdly what I would kind of peg the modern zelda design philosophy as belonging to.

I dunno. I feel like the change in style has been kind of hard for me to pin down. It’s very obvious in a difference of feel, right, but in terms of formally locking down the actual difference, I can’t say I’ve really found much that’s all that weird about it. Sure, you can theoretically use whatever ability, anywhere, at any time, to make any vehicle, or scale any platform, stuff like that. But 90% of the time, it’s going to be totally useless as an ability. You’re going to fall into a couple of discrete, routine behaviors, even given an “infinite” ability that you’re just sort of, free to use and abuse like that.

Compare this to a conventional zelda tool, which is not generally usable anywhere, right. You can use the hookshot to stun or damage enemies, right, you can use it to grapple onto a discrete set of platforms, but outside of that it’s not gonna be too useful. I don’t see that as being all that different from like. Ahh, well, with this ability, you can paste together two pallets! It’s effectively the same, they’re gonna come with a pretty similar set of constraints and behaviors.

I feel like, to me, a lot of the fun of emergent mechanics comes from eeking out solutions to puzzles that designers probably haven’t thought about at all. Sometimes you can basically sidestep a challenge that otherwise you would’ve had to do, and in that way, it feels very much like a casual version of a speedrunning trick, or, it’s something that rewards your cleverness, or your understanding and mastery of the mechanics beyond even what the designers might anticipate. I like that much less when it feels like the designer doesn’t have a set, like, idea of a solution to a puzzle. When they’ve just given me all the tools, and then they tell me to go nuts, I don’t feel as though I’m circumventing anything, I just feel as though I’m doing the puzzle as god intended. There’s probably also some amount of, if everyone’s super, then no one is, going on there. If every puzzle is some puzzle I’m able to circumvent with clever rules lawyering or mechanics abuse, then it gets older, faster.

So I dunno. I really like the third banjo kazooie game, it was probably ahead of it’s time, if this is the kind of direction we’re going in now, and obviously I have some level of nostalgia for it, because the 360 was my formative console, because I’m a zoomer. Feel old yet? At the same time, the first two games were probably just straight up better games, if I had to actually be honest with myself. They have wider appeal, and even if you just have an ability that you can only use on a specific pad, with a specific symbol, and 95% of the challenges can only be conquered how the game designer intends, it’s probably still gonna be better and have more broad appeal than having to either come up with a discrete set of vehicles, use the defaults, or else spend like 50% of your game time in the vehicle creation menu constructing increasingly niche vehicles to better perform the specific task.

I dunno. You see what I’m getting at, though?

buh-buh-buh but what about when I refer to mechanical engineering! what about when I need to adjust my cam timing! oh no!

I dunno, I would broadly agree and I think that it’s probably not a good thing to be calling people, but I do have two complaints I would like to file with the official board that governs this sort of thing. Neither of them relate to the word’s banned usage, however. Of course, it’s still gonna be a little weird.

One is that I like -tard as a suffix, I think it has a kind of satisfying mouthfeel in pronunciation, I think potentially we need some more words that use it, and I don’t think that as a kind of, like, workaround, or way to say the slur more. I kind of wish the suffix was dissociated from the slur, so this was more possible. The only other word I can think of that does this is mustard, which apparently arrived at a similar pronunciation through a different etymological route. I dunno, I find it to be a kind of like, inherently hilarious word, or satisfying word to say. Unusual, maybe, maybe like an unusual morpheme pairing. Maybe I have some level of just like unprocessed shitheadery though, that’s very possible. I also kind of wish there was a way that actually worked to de-escalate the weight of a slur, to rob it of it’s weight. Obviously, taking it back doesn’t do much, because it’s just going to be subject to the same in-ground out-ground dynamic, a la the n-word, right. It’s okay if gay people call each other or themselves the f-slur, it’s not okay if some straight guy walks in and does it. More positive associations might work but then, you know, doubtful that would work in the first place, and also you’d probably not see a lot of people wanting to take the L and push it on that one because everyone would hate them for it, both the people insulted and those who would use it as a insult.

Also, I don’t like this kind of mentality more broadly of “oh you gotta be more creative when you insult people.”. Some people are so boring and uninterestingly fucked, that they aren’t worth the creativity you expend upon insulting them. I think it just kind of shadows the problem here. No, you don’t want to say the word because it denigrates an entire group of people when you use it in an insulting manner. There’s not really anything there about creativity, or lack thereof, that makes it a moral problem. Sometimes you do need a low-rent insult, it should just be one that isn’t a slur. Call someone a shitheel, or something, it’s easier than this, there are plenty to choose from.

Okay, thirdly, I think there’s also a broader, and interesting question here, of, how an insult being based on like, unchangeable characteristics makes it more mean or more of a slur, right. But then that sort of, leaves out things we might consider as being changeable, like, say, body weight, which I would also say is a dick move, to insult someone on the basis of their weight, or to constantly bring it up, or anything like that. On the other hand, insulting someone on the basis of their eye color is maybe like, very antiquated, still potentially mean, and potentially very mean in like, maybe india? But I dunno so much if it would be considered a slur, really, as much as just kind of a very weird thing to bring up. Insulting someone on the curliness of their hair, maybe, but then that could be seen as a proxy for other things, just like most traits. It’s hard to do this with something too obvious because most of them have been historically associated with like, eugenics and shit like that. Maybe if you were to insult someone based on how big their feet are or something, that might be a more socially acceptable or lighthearted insult, even if it’s still mean.

We also have, like, technically all characteristics are unchangeable, if we live in a deterministic universe, right? Insulting someone’s intelligence, even if they don’t have autism or down syndrome or what have you, is still insulting a deterministic aspect of their character, which was sort of unavoidable for them to stumble into. If you insult someone for even, their choice of boots, right, you are just insulting a characteristic about them which was ultimately inevitable, the result of many dominoes falling into place. I think perhaps when we attempt to understand the purpose of insulting someone, we give it this guise of free will and agency which I think ultimately makes it more mean than it would otherwise be. It robs it of its whimsy.

We view insults as some sort of like, vehicle for tough love, vehicle for change, perhaps, or we view it as maybe righteous, because you’re insulting someone on something they can change and by implication I think, should change. I think we have to be honest, though. Insults are not for the people who are being insulted. They are for the people saying them, they have always been. If that’s the case, it doesn’t even need to be really related to the person you’re insulting at all, or even necessarily directed at them. It doesn’t need to be such a mean thing, if it’s just for you. And if it is just for you, then I think it’s more valuable to do that assessment and figure out why you’re actually doing it, instead of just like, giving into mindless frustration and calling someone a mean name, like a child.

I mean it’s not as though that’s not a problem in normal companies. It’s just that normal companies can sort of use the guise of structure or professionalism to harangue whatever employees the clique ends up disliking. The cliques are baked in, in a normal company.

Playstation still basically conforms to a on the right, since O is generally used as a “confirm” button, and X is generally used as a back out button. So, they fill the same role as the conventional layout, they just abstract it in a kind of more fun way.

I mean idk if it’s that funny of a time. Even if they were criticizing 5-6 months ago, and who’s to say they weren’t, it’s a much more engaged in conversation right now, so it’s not a fuckin shocker that people are gonna start talking about it.