I checked Wikipedia and it says you're still alive. This is for you.
I will be surprised if you read this. Well, my last post has 289 views, and maybe some of them are you, or maybe RSS readers don't add views and you use that.
I am writing this for what I could consider purely selfish reasons: there is nothing promising that I can think of doing, and so I can either write this post, or waste time doing stuff. I got my weight down to 54.3 kg at the start of this year by not eating or drinking anything for a day, but then I convinced myself that what was important was not whether I ate, but whether I went online, and so within 24 hours my weight was up by 2 kg and it hasn't been close to that low since.
One thing I have been doing recently is posting polls on Reddit. Today I was considering posting a poll asking, "if someone thought of an idea that would change the world, would you expect them to try to share it by making a popular Reddit post", but that's similar to another poll I asked about using money to share an important solution. (Incidentally, I somehow did not realize for years that the name I used for my mage in World of Warcraft in 2006, Taemojitsu, rhymes with the name, Kagomitsu, that was on the email address that Mei shared with her sister, and now I wonder if that's weird and I should stop using the name.)
I have also had no less than three conversations with people about the main suggestion promoted by this weblog (all within the last few months). One caused me to focus on the angle of "parents helping their children". Although the data that resulted did not cause the second person I conversed with to take action, that second conversation did help me realize that talking about "rich people" working less is not helpful, because people view that as a small and unproductive demographic, which is separate from the main culture and possibly acting selfishly.
The third conversation was with my oldest brother, who is now in prison. As a result of the dialogue, I challenged myself to write an explanation for "why society needs an excuse like war for people to be nice to strangers". In a followup email to my brother, I explained that I avoided making a value judgement about the importance of stopping war in order to, basically, avoid the conclusion that love makes people evil. This explanation is one that I did not post to Reddit and so is not publicly available online at the moment.
Anyway: my brother criticizes my writing for being too long and rambling, saying I should read the Elements of Style again. If you were to share what I will lazily start calling "the idea", people would truly be surprised, me included. Therefore, it's fair to say that I have not discouraged anyone from sharing the idea by implying that you would share it. I will take the incident where you let your site's domain name expire, and I posted about it here after a day, as evidence that you might read this site.
I also wanted to say that when you started making dance music again in 2013, I was not sure why. If it had any relation to me posting videos from clubs in Singapore, it would seem to have been from a misunderstanding: I thought it would have been clear that I had no extra money to spend at the time, and I have never been to a dance club myself. The only time I ever went to any event that included dancing was, I believe, a graduation party for my middle school class, at which I didn't dance, but probably just brought a book and sat in a chair reading it. My church almost certainly held events with dancing, and like most high schools my school had dance events like the "prom", but I did not attend any of them.
(I did attend an uncle's wedding when I was probably less than 10 years old, but I would not have been expected to dance at that age; and I did take tap dance lessons for a year or two and then perform on stage, but that was not social dancing; and I have been to at least two talent shows in my life that included dance performances.)
The second person I mentioned in 2012, as 'Person B', hereby named as Kate Kiatsiri (Kanyakorn Kiatsiri, Keidsiri), did upload photos to Facebook in 2011 or 2012 of herself at a club, though.
I'm not sure what else I should say. I think the model I wrote for my oldest brother was useful. I recently tried sending it to an economics journal that has no fee for submissions; the editor was kind enough to reply with an explanation that the journal was not for new research, and encouraged me to submit it elsewhere. The idea here is that an economist might be reluctant to make the claim that "high earners" working less helps the poor, if no economics journal has ever published an explanation of why that might be so. But even if an economics journal were to accept it, I would still have to find someone who would be willing to use that explanation as a basis for action. So anyway, I'll just paste it here, to avoid making this post too long: When rich people work less, does it help the poor? A simple model
My brother criticized the model for not including unemployment, using an example that used the names Hans, Christian, and Anderson (the three names of the author of a popular book on fairy tales that includes stories like the original Little Mermaid where she dies at the end).
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Update 24 Mar 2025, 04:39
The reason not to update this post is that when I act randomly, it can cause people to think that I am not competent and discourage them from supporting this idea. I therefore ask that anyone who is not Yoko Ono not read beyond this.
My brother would surely criticize the way I am writing this. I have no plan except "mention some Japanese language songs". If things went as I planned, I would be asleep, because I had believed that an annual check of fire suppression systems would be today and so was trying to get some rest before that time block. But in fact that is tomorrow, and realizing this meant one less reason for me to try to sleep instead of writing this. So I had a healthy breakfast of 13 peanut butter cookies that I made yesterday (146g) and 175g milk and now am writing randomly.
When I realized 16 years ago the complexity of interactions that result from "exposing needs to get closer to other people", aka the L-word, one of my thoughts was that people communicate through culture like songs. It's a problem that people can't directly describe; the importance of the problem and the efficacy of any remedial solutions cannot be agreed upon; and so songs are an appropriate medium as they do not need to describe things that people will agree are true.
Anyway, I had some music playing as part of ceaseless experiments with how to sleep and how to wake up. After some other songs like Mozart - Requiem in D minor (ss0_t583), at 3:09:58, Crow Song was randomly selected by my computer out of 56 songs and started playing.
I can't pretend that other people will care about the songs that I find meaningful. I learned of this song because of Mei, aka 'Person A' and the first person I mentioned in the post about the first petition, whose last name is almost certainly not Hiratou. I don't even know if she finds the song meaningful or interesting. TANGENT. At some point (don't feel like checking chat logs) I mentioned the TV show Densha Otoko to her. There was a video game character in an MMO that I assessed with high confidence to belong to Mei; maybe she even linked it to me, or maybe it appeared on a Photobucket account that she linked to me or something. Google's AI says in response to "what is the anime character in densha otoko" that the fictional anime show in the TV series is "Getsumento Heiki Mina" (月面兎兵器ミーナ), and so I guess that was the name of the character, unsure of the spelling. I have two of her WoW characters bookmarked from 15 years ago, and I only remember knowing of two, so I think the Mina character must have been in Aion. I think it was the templar character (the class I had said was the worst in the game at PvP) with which she enjoyed fighting clerics (the class that I played; note interaction where after servers merged, someone announced in chat that they were deleting character and I surmised that this was Mei, etc. etc.; I think that was shortly before the last time I logged in to Aion).
Anyway, the point is that her having a character with that name made me believe that she had watched the show Densha Otoko after I had mentioned it. It would fit a pattern of naming game characters after characters from works of fiction, such as drow (dark elf) characters from Forgotten Realms novels. To be specific, as I saw it, the analogy was supposed to be just as the viewpoint character in Densha Otoko was initially enamoured with Mina but then found someone to care about in real life, one could imagine that I would 'give up' Mei (someone who could have been fictional as I had never seen her image or heard her voice) if I cared about Kanyakorn Kiatsiri. Note: I have never been big on names or conversation, and so I am unsure if I ever addressed Kanyakorn Kiatsiri by name (any name) in real life, or for that matter online.
This is, in fact, quite similar to how I attempted to create a Warcraft 3 account named Mitsuko, after the character in the book Battle Royale who dies to gunfire, but had to settle for Misaki.
But the point is that this is a single piece of evidence that suggests Mei might have watched or read something that I had mentioned. As a counterpoint, when Mei moved to Japan in 2007 (returning to the US after a year), I mentioned and wanted to send her the book The Diamond Age, and I don't believe she ever read that book. The reasoning is that prior to the Mina character, I had expressed a minor point of criticism: Mei had said "I didn't know you watched stuff like [dramas]", and I had replied that I mentioned it before: this was one of the spammy emails I had sent to her while she was in Japan. So it would have been reasonable for her to watch a drama I had mentioned then, even if she hadn't read a book I had mentioned.
Anyway. Mei once sent me a screenshot of a long list of anime series that she had watched. I never attempted to watch them myself. Actually I just remembered that one of her Aion characters was named Taiga, after the character in 'Toradora!'. (And those were the only two Aion characters of hers that I knew of.) So in 2009, I watched at least two anime series that Mei watched; but there is no reason to think that these two held any special significance for her.
One of them was 'Angel Beats!', and this is where Crow Song comes from. As I said, there is no reason to think that other people will see any of the music that I listen to as significant or interesting.
I illegally downloaded the following songs from Girls Dead Monster, the band made up of fictional characters from the show 'Angel Beats!':
'Crow Song':
'01 - Crow Song.mp3' '02 - Alchemy.mp3' '03 - My Song.mp3'
'Little Braver':
'01 - Little Braver.mp3' '02 - Shine Days.mp3' '03 - Answer Song.mp3'
'Thousand Enemies':
'01 - Thousand Enemies.mp3' '02 - Rain Song.mp3' '03 - Highest Life.mp3'
Apparently they had more songs? I'm not sure if I deleted ones that I didn't like. Alchemy has the line, "fureru mono wo kagayakashite yuku" which I occasionally think of (just a day or two ago I thought of it in the context of not being able to make polls that make people look stupid); but only Crow Song is linked in my sleep folder. Rain Song is too sad. Thousand Enemies is not useful when I am trying to do nothing. Crow Song has the line, "kibou terasu hikari no uta wo" or something, maybe I mangled it.
When I was living outside in 2012 and I would go to a certain plaza for Wi-Fi after the public library closed, several times someone played very loud music from a guitar with large speakers. I considered whether it was possible that Mei was paying this person to play music there. See relevant lines of lyrics from Crow Song.
Anyway, that was one song! Its lyrics are in Japanese and you are Japanese.
The second song I was thinking of was Rusty Nail. I linked to this to Mei and asked if she thought one of the band members was cute (the one that later committed suicide), and she focused on the fact of his unusual hair color. I . . . DO, in fact, have a cover of this song downloaded: Rusty Nail (Cover)[GERMAN SUPLEX], but I have not illegally downloaded the original song itself because, unlike Crow Song, it isn't a song of hope. So that means the place where I have a copy of it is just in Orangemarmalade's first PvP video in World of Warcraft, made in 2005 or 2006: a Korean person using a Japanese song, which is why for the longest time I was uncertain whether some other songs in Korean PvP videos were Korean, Chinese, or some other language.
Then, like, some songs by Hatsune Miku? I'm not sure if I could say I view them as significant. I previously obliquely referenced the song Stratosphere (as the title of an archive-containing jpg, using a photo of the sky taken by Kanyakorn Kiatsiri), which Mei played at some point and which was communicated to me by the instant messaging client changing her status or something; but I'm not sure if I even have it downloaded. There is a particular cover of "エアーマンが倒せない feat.初音ミク" which, again, Mei linked to me; but I have not bothered to link to this in the music folder that I use, so I rarely listen to it. And it definitely is not about memory, which is a common point between Crow Song and Rusty Nail.
It isn't Japanese, but I can at least mention Kamelot - Karma. It is featured in Gegon's 'The Last Ovski' PvP video (2006). So I checked: other Japanese songs in the 56 illegally downloaded songs in my sleep folder (I have literally never paid money for music):
01_Tatta Hitotsu no Koi (Instrumental)
03_Cool Whispers
18_Tatta Hitotsu no Koi (Pr1)
19_Tatta Hitotsu no Koi (Pr2)
20_Tatta Hitotsu no Koi (Vocal Version)
from the OST of the drama Tatta Hitotsu no Koi (2006);
FinalFantasyVIIINightwishGhostLoveScore.avi is not a Japanese song but was made into a video using a Japanese game and posted on Google Video in 2007 or earlier;
Kanako's Theme - Suwa Foughten Field, is definitely not a song one would expect to sleep to, but in the past when I was trying to stay awake for some reason, I found that even music like this could not keep me awake;
Kouya Ruten (karaoke - vietsub)
LEVEL5-judgelight- 歌詞付きフル
【東方原曲】風神録「ネイティブフェイス」(Native Faith) 【高音質】
🔴【歌枠】洋楽限定🎙English Song Singing Stream!!【ココツキ】[CocoTsuki - My Immortal - Evanescence] [cDl0zdi2IMs] (unlisted video, not a Japanese song but a Japanese singer)
荒野流転 歌詞付 (the song I linked at the end of https://pastebin.com/Wy8B0hK9)
This concludes sad Japanese songs that are not too sad.
Oh, one other song that I remember, the Hatsune Miku song "04.vanished the life -notreborn" from the album CLOSED SYSTEM, which (again) Mei listened to which caused me to download it. But the album has four other songs which I have zero interest in, and according to my filesystem the last time I accessed this song was 12 Sep 2021. Maybe it's too sad! In the same category is 火葬曲, by Hatsune Miku: only a few days ago I illegally downloaded the cover of this song by Nana Mitani, as well as her cover of "Megu Megu ☆ Fire Endless Night". 火葬曲 is the song that Mei listened to a day or two after her cat was killed by a dog (Jan 2011); which I surmised was the cat that she got in 2004 and named Misaki, after me, but it might not have been.
That would have been a good place to stop but I remembered the end credits song from 'Angel Beats!' and found another song as well. Those end credits have lyrics that, without listening to the song or doing a web search, are something like "at some point people become alone, living only in memories". 「孤独さえ (word I don't understand, aishi) 笑ってられる様に私は戦うんだ、涙なんて見せないんだ」. The other song I found was 01-PLANETARIUM, featured in the drama Hana Yori Dango, which I am currently ignoring because Japanese companies like to copyright strike everything; last accessed 12 Sep 2021 as well (an hour after 'vanished the life -notreborn', so not an automatic search). I had thought of the Angel Beats end credits song before I started writing this, or I wouldn't have mentioned it; there are two other Japanese language songs that I didn't remember until I saw them in a list of files that I won't mention (or three if you count A Cruel Angel's Thesis, last accessed 15 Mar 2024, or four with "Morning Musume" which is the name of a group and I don't even know what song it is; and Elfen Lied- Lillium_0001 which is not a Japanese language song, but a song about a Japanese anime, would make five more songs; or six with "mikuウマウマ_製作者様に感謝" which features a Japanese character, not sad; or seven with ParaParaParadiseBoomBoomFire which features Japanese dancers, not sad).
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Update 24 Mar 2025, 19:30
The title of my main weblog is partly a reference to the fictional city of Ankh-Morpork, as well as to the shaman class in World of Warcraft using ankhs as a reagent for self-resurrection. So it isn't a surprise that I am once again referencing a work of the late Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum, p54:
Choices. It was always choices…
There’d been that man down in Spackle, the one that’d killed those little kids. The people’d sent for her and she’d looked at him and seen the guilt writhing in his head like a red worm, and then she’d taken them to his farm and showed them where to dig, and he’d thrown himself down and asked her for mercy, because he said he’d been drunk and it’d all been done in alcohol.
Her words came back to her. She’d said, in sobriety: end it in hemp.
So I have no excuses like "can't fall asleep" for updating this post again.
A comment on a video which apparently is favourable to you:
I did not realize Yoko Ono was still alive today, and 91 YEARS OLD.
(8 months ago, 2.8K upvotes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMOABV_zgrk&lc=UgymJne_2Xet7ztPMJ54AaABAg
I haven't watched even a single second of the video because I would have to stop the music and sound of waves which has been continuing since I first tried to sleep, 17 hours ago. I am commenting only about the surprise felt by the people who upvoted this.
The truth is, the accurate way to describe the situation is "there was never much of a reason to expect success". On the other hand, the way that I would attempt to make people think of the situation, if we do succeed, is what TV Tropes has decided to call the Xanatos Gambit: "a plan for which all foreseeable outcomes benefit the creator — including ones that superficially appear to be failure." Pick a random number from 1 to 100: it's not that the number was predicted, it's that there was a plan for each number to show how it was the perfect number.
No one wants to waste 10+ years of their life. However, this is a common outcome, and there is no sense in complaining about it. Some people do not even get 10 years of life.
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Update 24 Mar 2025, 22:24
Acting as if it was all according to plan is just maintaining consistency with people's expectations. It's like in a story where the audience learns something, and then the main characters almost immediately learn it as well or demonstrate their knowledge of it, even if learning it then is completely unrealistic or the explanation for previous actions seems inconsistent with knowing this information, because the audience will judge characters if they do not know something that everyone else (the entire audience) knows.
Currently trying to skim through the comments of various clickbait videos so I can spend my time doing something more interesting. Many of these videos are about why the viewer will never be rich, or will never retire, or will never stop working, or other variations of this wording: when I skimmed through the transcript of one video, which I am trying to find but modern website memory requirements are working against me as it is already 22:52 and at least half this time has been waiting for my browser to unfreeze, the answer to the title "why" of the 10+ minute video was "lifestyle inflation". Many other videos are about why the viewer does not choose to stop working, or otherwise alter their behavior to effect positive outcomes. Taken together, the real reason many people can't stop working, is because other people won't stop working (leading to high prices for housing etc.). Still waiting for a browser tab to load, with my poor 16-year-old hard drive continuously reading and slowly reducing swap space usage, after many laborious minutes spent writing that information.
So the title of that particular video was, You Will Never Have Your Finances In Order, Here's Why (again, "because of lifestyle inflation"). I took the effort of skimming the transcript (not watching the video) because the video description says,
You will never be rich!
It's not something that people hear enough. Based on the demographics of people who watch my videos most of you are from advanced countries so you will be doing well by global standards but you still won't be rich.
With one comment with 2.3K upvotes saying,
I was a financial adviser for many years and I can't tell you how true this video is. I used to have to do suitability by federal law which means I had to ask what people made and almost every millionaire I dealt with income was over 250000. Even more notable was most millionaires didn't understand basic investing. Trust me they got more help than the average Joe.
Implication, >$250k income and a millionaire is not "rich" or "having your finances in order".
Anyway, I thought I'd try to think of some examples from a drama like The Legend of Anle (the title of which, 安乐传, uses the same character as Water Margin 水滸傳, one of the six best-known classic Chinese novels: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/傳#Definitions_2), of audience knowledge influencing the story. Well, okay, I guess the biggest thing: the identify of the main female lead, Anle. The intro to each episode has a montage of images that includes the main male lead blindfolded, but near the end of the series we see that this is nothing more than a literal scene from the story, not a metaphor. In fact, the male lead knew the identify of the female lead all along, just as the audience could be certain of her identity within one or two episodes. So we conclude that the male lead is not so stupid that he didn't know something that the audience knew.
Or as a second example: the identify of a prominently featured character. Very soon after the audience learns this information, other characters discuss it and so it becomes known by characters for whom this information would be important. Or more generally and as is common in stories, information relevant to the plot is only revealed to the audience at a point when the main characters have already performed actions that they would have changed had they known this information, like the existence of a letter sent by Princess Anning.
Or to sum it up, acting like you don't or didn't know what you're doing just causes people to be anxious: it doesn't accomplish anything else useful, even if the truth is that you didn't know what you were doing. Allowing people to tell themselves a story that (mostly) absolves them of responsibility, while making you more responsible for outcomes, is not morally wrong.
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Update 25 Mar 2025, 00:06
That could make for an interesting poll: "If a politician that you elected doesn't have any idea how to fix a problem, would you prefer they act confidently or express their uncertainty?" with answers that examine both what people want, and how they would morally judge a confident attitude. But I'm not going to make such a poll.
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Update 27 Mar 2025, 21:58
This post is still hovering at 2 views, at least one of which is probably me, so I'm like.
80 minutes ago my brother used an Amazon Echo device to pass along a message from my sister, since I don't have phone service, about a mini pizza; so I went to her home and ate some food, and also listened to her reading a few pages from The Lives of Christopher Chant to her daughters. So I learned what a besom is.
I do find it regrettable that I have no confidence that people (like economists) that I shared the idea with understood that it helps low earners when high earners work less. To me, this is such a dumb reason for someone not to share it. But if they wanted it to be known that they were not dumb, they could have talked to me and indicated which points were understood by them, and which were not.
This is how stories work. Sometimes the outcome is undesired by some people. But a story is more acceptable if a person could easily have avoided the undesired outcome by changing their actions. For example: in the drama Love Game in Eastern Fantasy (永夜星河), the princess could have exited her carriage after being saved by a wandering demon catcher. She did not, and so lost him forever. The secondary female character, Miaomiao, could have been more assertive in rejecting an unwanted suitor and prevented a bracelet from being put on her wrist, which led to misunderstandings. Although the situation was resolved, she had allowed the situation to slip out of her control.
In the drama Can Lan Jue (苍兰诀), the current God of War is interested in Orchid but does not end up with her. Since she was also interested in him, the reason they did not end up together is no more and no less than because he erased her memory of an encounter they had together, in which he almost killed her by accident but she saved his life. All he had to do was not erase her memory. Similarly, all people had to do was reply to me.
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Update 27 Mar 2025, 22:51
This has nothing at all to do with you, but I am deliberately not saying anything else to anyone online. Someone who streams games could set up a 45° mirror with a screen parallel to a desk, and put a camera behind the mirror, so that they appear to be looking at the viewer when they look at the screen. One person says their engagement skyrocketed from putting a tiny camera in front of their screen. On the one hand, there are people who play games and regularly get tens of thousands of viewers without always looking at the camera. On the other hand, would they get more viewers if they did this?
Thought of this because of a video I watched years ago, where an expert archer appears to shoot the camera, but it's a mirror which cracks. Too dangerous to use glass and risk damaging the camera.
Also, completely unrelated, I have no idea how the Chinese version of Three-Body did those 'Buddhist' shots with a mirrored image that gradually fades out towards the center of the screen. It seemed it must have been through a clever arrangement with glass (not metal) as the reflective surface. A good understanding of reflections and how to set up the shot physically seemed more likely than easy, boring use of digital effects; or maybe I observed an actual, slight difference in perspective in a mirrored shot.
Regarding the economic idea, I worry that someone who shared it might be asked, "well if it's so easy to fix most problems in the world, why didn't we do this before?" and not know how to answer. To me, the bit with improving signal accuracy (and how it relates to conflict-promoting attitudes that lead to war) is the answer, which is the part that I haven't pasted online, only emailed to a few people. I think most people wouldn't even ask this question, or would be satisfied with an explanation like "production efficiency has greatly increased" or "the Cold War ended".
If people can agree that it does help low earners when high earners work less, then maybe there could be discussion about why some ways of getting high earners to work less are better than other ways (because they encourage higher signal accuracy in other areas, by destroying income as a reliable signal of ability). But the conversation must start somewhere. Despite writing this post on 18 Mar, I have no idea if the world is in such a state that it's possible for that conversation to start now. Specifically, as the only thing I control, I wonder if I need to write more.
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Update 29 Mar 2025, 02:43
I am writing this because there was something that made me happy, which makes me want to share it, but if I shared it with anyone else it would be like I was giving up on you sharing the economic idea.
The second conversation I described in this post was with free software advocate Richard Stallman. A year or so ago I came across a utility program with a manual page that mentioned he had written some of it: the 'uniq' utility, which I have since found occasional use for. He was too busy to continue discussing the topic of the economic idea, both when I emailed him this February and three years ago. So if I was writing to him, what I say here would not even be read. I don't know if you might feel the same way.
Extra details so I don't have to worry about whether to feel guilty for selecting what information to include, because I have no confirmation that the reason you or other people are not sharing the idea is not that you think I am a bad, or dishonest, person (this uncertainty could be cleared up by people talking to me): I was watching a video by Smiley, and she started to sing the lyrics to a popular song with the word "boom". I tried to think of other songs with this word, similar to the conversation about songs with "baby" in Baby Driver. BBoom BBoom(뿜뿜) by Momoland is one such song. While I listened to that song, I checked the comments: one of them mentioned "great!"
This seemed somehow familiar, but when I listened to the song again I couldn't find it, nor did it appear in a lyrics video. I thought it might be a Lisa Rhee dance cover video: either she didn't cover it, or it got deleted, but while searching I found a video from Indonesia where they say 'great' near the start of the song.
Incidentally, I think this video from the Philippines is better. But I'm watching these in 144p because I'm just searching for information (and because my computer has 3% free memory and 61% swap space used, and I can only play 720p60 without it overheating); I don't care about either of these videos of males dancing. And I found the video I watched before: dance cover by Vivian Shen, where she puts "Great!" on the screen to match the audio at 0:09 and 1:33. Based on the comment on the official video with 2.7k upvotes, saying "Great!" at this point in the song must appear in a lot of other videos or performances.
But that's just background information. During my search I saw some other videos which have remarkably high view counts compared to subscribers, suggesting high quality: a dance cover with 700k views by Karen Zeng who has 36k subs, and a dance cover with 1.7M views by Mari G who has 38k subs (with the description, "[ Edit ]: HOLY COWS TYSM FOR 1M!! views omkfjhajsdhfakjsdh ^^ this is surreal, you guys are AMAZING💗💗💗"). Also the short video of the dance by chanieme, comparing original vs TikTok (Douyin) versions of the dance, has 22M views.
At this point, I'm going to compare myself to the fans of Chinese dramas (Cdramas) as described in a post I replied to on Reddit. Their heated advocacy of their favorite actors or dramas can be off-putting to outside observers. I thought that these dance covers were inferior to the performances of the Chinese (Taiwanese) temple dance group Pop Candy 跳跳糖, but I couldn't remember why I thought this.
Of course this is how people often think: we have a certain opinion but can't remember why, or re-evaluating that opinion would take too much effort (like solving 100 math problems). But I looked through some videos and found one reason I think Pop Candy's performance is better, and then I found that I had already noticed and noted this detail:
06 Aug 2024
BBoom BBoom 뿜뿜: BJ햄찡: CfxaD3fKX_U at 38, 80, 142 (audio edit at 114, skip ~46 sec) same as shorts; BJ Ssonim: upwfcz8n5NM; Lady's: _EZHQTjOFG4 at 87, 2RZED1V6l80 at 86; 依庭 紅茶: pPa6GQZ-Uyk at 314; 包家潮州六姊妹: -DE10joCE08 kick at 34; T4g8jvvdYJc run forward at 73
They don't (didn't, because Covid-19 combined with smart phones and TikTok might have mostly ended temple dance culture, I don't know) do that quick run to switch positions in all performances, even when the circumstances would allow it: for example, they don't in a video recorded on 25 Mar 2019 by 熾焰狂峰, or the same performance recorded by Angel 志. They just run in place for a second.
I made a note of this in case I'm ever able to animate it in a program like MikuMikuDance (which Mei introduced me to, sending me a basic video she made on 06 Oct 2010, after she had figured out how to get UI text to show up properly). So far I haven't animated anything; either because I'm lazy, or because I'm concerned that expending effort in that way is not the best way to get people to use the economic idea.
Most of the videos that I think would make good motions feature female dancers, but, for example, I still need to take a minute or two to evaluate Dschinghis Khan - Moskau (Starparade 14.06.1979) to decide whether it could succeed as a dance motion.
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Update 30 Mar 2025, 03:15
A zero-value update, which I am writing because I experience no negative consequences for it. In general I am not checking the news, but I checked my Yahoo email accounts to prevent them from being deleted from inactivity and after signing out I saw some headlines that I clicked on.
This story made me think about how so many people don't expect, or hope for, any drastic change in how the world operates:
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/finance/news/meta-platforms-meta-mega-cap-223956154.html
A lot of the time, criticism happens because people perceive an environment in which a certain action is contrary to the interests or desires of an overwhelming majority of the population. People think that they are criticizing someone who is too dumb to see what other people want. This kind of criticism can only be neutralized by showing that the factual basis for the criticism is wrong: that the majority does want a certain outcome. Providing this evidence can be difficult, and so someone who suggests changes that affect diverse population segments, each with their own conceptions of what people want (which inevitably means that some of these views will be wrong, to varying degrees), must be prepared for this kind of criticism with no easy way to immediately answer it.
This story makes me want to make a poll about free speech:
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/phd-student-snatched-masked-officers-050035809.html
Without actually mentioning the key phrase, "free speech", but instead phrasing it something like, "Should people be allowed to voice opinions that are critical of the attitudes taken by a majority of the population, and which have the potential to cause real-world harm, without being punished?"
This story makes me want to make a poll about how badly people want the fighting in Ukraine to end:
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/senator-mark-kelly-snaps-back-042815440.html
"Everyone wants this war to end, but [...]"
So the poll would be, how much would you personally pay to stop all fighting in Ukraine? With options starting at nothing (or paying to make it continue). A lot of people could probably be said to only want a war to end if it means their side "wins". If the offered outcome is one in which their side "loses", even if no more people die, then they would say that they would prefer for the war to continue, even though it means more people die. And if people say this, then I see no reason not to believe that this is what they want. (Although keeping in mind that a reckless attitude can sometimes be beneficial in confrontations, which teaches people to hide what they really want.)
It might be better to make the options for a poll like this in terms of a percentage of income, though. Like, at the moment, I apparently have about $30 in money, which is mostly or all Christmas gifts from my mum over the years; there might also be a $50 or $100 bill from an envelope about 12 years ago, which I found behind my door and didn't remember who it was from; so I might pay up to $130 to stop tens of thousands of people from dying in war, because that's all I have.
A lot of the polls I created, I didn't vote in, though. There was the poll about a button to end all war ("but not police brutality"): I didn't vote in this poll, but I wouldn't push that button, even though I would pay at least $30 to stop the fighting in Ukraine. (And if there was a button to stop only the fighting in Ukraine, I would push it.) Also, I don't have an opinion on the Turkey-Kurd conflict, in which Kurdish attacks are often attacks on Turkish military forces that are very similar to the attacks the US military experienced while in Iraq, which most a lot of people in the US called terrorist attacks. Noting that the US military often prefers to describe things precisely, and so incident reports more typically referred to "enemies" or "military-aged males", and not to "insurgents" or "terrorists".
I also have no opinion on what the rules should be for ownership of natural resources: whether all profit from using up a limited natural resource should accrue to people who live within 10 km of the resource, or 100 km, or 1000 km, or 10 000 km. This being one of the reasons that a group of people sometimes want to form their own country, to avoid sharing profits with people who live further[*] away. (*I am avoiding changing it to farther because of the word farthing.)
One can imagine a world where people are not penalized for having opinions on topics like this, but this is not the world we live in. People see society, and public discourse, as being full of problems, to the point that minor issues cannot be discussed without harming progress towards solutions for much bigger problems. People who have a strong view about minor issues will see an opinion as a reason to reject someone who expresses an opposing view, while people who agree with the expressed view will often not view this as significant enough to support someone who expresses it: these opinions act as a blacklist only. (One can imagine using 10 different issues, with two possible opinions on each, to reduce a pool of potential candidates from 2^10 = 1024, down to 1, and yes I had to use a calculator as I thought it would be 1 million.) Even people who don't care about the minor issues will take the act of publicly expressing an opinion as evidence that someone is not suitable for leadership, because they are alienating potential supporters for no good reason (since the minor issue will not get solved anyway).
If we fix major issues in society, then it would be more acceptable to express opinions about other issues.
To be honest I just had the thought, how many people, even people like the people on this list, know that it's almost certain that people who were hostile to the government of Ukraine fired on crowds of people protesting against the government in 2014 in order to get the government blamed for the resulting deaths? Anyway, if the "no wars or internal conflicts" button were pressed, then violent protests against governments would not be possible, and so Ukraine's 2014 revolution would not have happened. (Ukraine's president at the time explained that he did not want to give the order for police forces to fire on civilians, and so the only option left was to give up power.)
Incremental update in chronological order: the fact of expressing opinions on minor issues being a political disadvantage is itself a minor issue, and so while I think it would be possible to teach people about it (like a classroom experiment, with progressively solving issues to see how it influences voting), there isn't going to be a discussion about whether to teach people about this unless major issues get solved.
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Update 30 Mar 2025, 18:27
I was idly thinking about Ukraine and war and other things from the previous update to this post, and I thought of a poll and then realized it would be a bad poll, that no one should create. "If the fighting in Ukraine stopped now, would you say that Ukraine won the war or lost the war?" Or asking whether Ukraine or Russia won the war.
Compare that famous quote, "a strange game: the only way to win is not to play." Asking a question in which it implies it was possible for either side to win the war would cause people to get emotionally upset. Maybe Ukraine and Russia are both winners, similarly to how maybe Korea somehow benefits from being split in two: but "winning" in this manner is not how people would typically think of the outcome of war, and language is better without miscommunication. A lot of Chinese costume dramas and donghua (anime) touch on war, but I thought of a scene from Love Game in Eastern Fantasy, where after being killed dozens of times for harming the main female lead with changed medicine, Miaomiao makes a wish that "all affectionate and righteous people are at peace", and explains that "peace is the greatest wish of ordinary people".
The fighting in Ukraine is like the lyrics to the popular song, Through The Fire And Flames (via Grim - Total Annihilation, 2006, but he only used the first few minutes which didn't include these lyrics): "Now here we stand with their blood our hands / We fought so hard now can we understand / I'll break the seal of this curse if I possibly can / For freedom of every man."
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Update 31 Mar 2025, 04:55
My next task should have been listening to '『火葬曲』- 実谷なな 『Cremation Song ⧸ Kasou Kyoku』- Nana Mitani [OB1_zB5DaGg].mkv', but I didn't want to be sad so I looked for a way to procrastinate by seeing if I was ready to sleep. The album art shows her family name first, so I guess I should rename files to match. Family name second must just be a convention suggested by the publisher.
I requested in the first update to this post that no one else read these updates, but I didn't expect anyone who read up to that point (maybe no one) to follow that request. Like, I mentioned the drama The Legend of Anle in case someone who owns a $5000 white wig reads this. But now I am really writing as though no one else except you will read this.
I must say that I have a severe lack of confidence, not in my own abilities, but in my ability to influence what other people do. It's so easy for me to imagine other people doing nothing, no matter what I do.
In my crazy world, the US government (synecdoche, a word I learned from Elyse Sugimoto: only a tiny part of the US government, from an agency I can't predict) is looking at what I do online, possibly reporting some information to people, and occasionally interfering. I blame the US government for my browser apparently failing to properly retrieve YouTube DASH video or audio chunks due to what seems to be file length of 0. I can get around this when I expect it to be a problem by using youtube.com/embed/, but I use the main website and UI partly as a way of possibly getting some kind of input about what I should be doing.
The basic message that I have been getting is that I shouldn't be watching AoE2 videos, but the consistency of browser problems etc. varies. I was able to watch about the first 26 minutes of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK1wAIothdc earlier, then problems started around the time that the first game in the set was pretty obviously over, meaning it was a waste of time to continue watching that game except for entertainment.
Anyway, I mention this because it's possible that Sherine has some knowledge or involvement about this interference. Survey, A particular end, and a particular means: six responses and, actually, an amazingly diverse population of respondents. Only two are from the US. All six answered Yes to "Would you be upset if there were great improvements to the world that only came about because people were killed?" (Edit: I remembered I was one of those six.)
Sherine only knows about the idea because a bomb at the Boston marathon. I cannot say whether killing people was the goal, but it was a likely outcome and the actual outcome. It seems reasonable to say that if no one had been killed, it's less likely she would have acted in a way that caused me to contact her and less likely she would have cared about the explanation I offered for the actions of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother. So, this is a story that results from some people being killed.
Your story also involves someone being killed. People commented on the video I linked (that I did not watch) that they did not know that you were next to John when he was shot. The typical thought that people seem to have about that is that "it must be so traumatic to be next to someone you care about when they are violently killed". My thought, as you might expect, is that the person who killed John Lennon, whose name I do not remember, had no desire to kill you. My thought about this in the past 11 hours, some point after the previous update, was that "one can think of this in terms of the expectation that males will fight and die, while females are not expected to take such risks."
If fighting in wars is really such a big concern for males, one might ask why males did not band together and support a solution to war which would keep them from dying. Of course, males don't think like this: no civilians in the US expect to die from war unless they specifically volunteer to go to a war zone as a private military contractor (or in a more vulnerable role like a health care worker or journalist who goes to a war zone). But I can be just as disappointed in, say, poor people: even using a metric like "disability-adjusted life years" to measure the burden of being poor, the decrease in lifespan from being poor is probably much higher than the average decrease from violent deaths.
Basically, we can observe that in this world, people die. A lot of people can say they have been affected in a substantial way by someone dying. Kate Kiatsiri reacted significantly to someone she knew dying, in 2012: maybe this male was a romantic interest of hers, and maybe if he hadn't died, they would have married or something and I wouldn't have a reason to mention her now. Sherine had her cousin or whatever who died, although I somewhat harshly stated in response to her lack of action that she didn't care about that cousin. The friend of Sherine's middle school crush died, coincidentally shortly after Sherine sort-of shared the idea on Twitter, and the last time I checked he still had that friend in his Twitter bio ~10 years later, although I either forgot his name or he deleted his Twitter account.
So people prefer a story that does not involve anyone dying, but we do not have to respect this wish. I am basically expressing my uncertainty whether it would be better for people to learn of the idea because the actions of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother influenced Sherine, or because your husband was killed which probably resulted in you acting in a different way and being more interested in reading things like comments on your website. Do you think it would be better if Sherine's story causes people to learn of the idea?
P.S. comments to this post are open
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Update 01 Apr 2025, 17:17
I shouldn't be updating this post. I had decided I shouldn't do anything online (like watching YouTube videos) for three days, other than doing Google searches for my current weight and daily diet (edit 22:47: and checking Yara's Twitter account), which I have been doing since around the time the recent fighting in Gaza started. (I also watched several episodes of the Chinese drama "Everyone Loves Me" (2024) last night, on a smart TV.)
Today I thought of the possibility of contacting Grigori Perelman, who famously rejected a $1M prize after some controversy regarding whether his proof of a difficult problem was complete. I made a note of it, so that maybe I could try it at some point (possibly years) in the future; and then I went online and checked.
After doing my own searches, I asked an AI (text model thing), which nicely summarized the information I had already found and gave me confidence that I wasn't missing anything. However, linking to answers seems broken, and some bookmarked older answers redirect to the main page. Anyway, I asked perplexity.ai (the engine that most frequently gave correct answers in a comparison), "what is grigori perelman's most recent email address", then clicked on the suggested followup questions, "How does Perelman's email policy compare to other mathematicians", "What kind of emails does Perelman typically respond to", "Are there any exceptions to Perelman's strict email policy".
Also, I republished the post from 2017 that had a comment from the mysterious "B". Ohh, and I just found the Comments tab. Hi, Ellie Kesselman! I am honestly amazed that you commented on this site! I have published your second comment that was withheld as spam by Blogspot, even though I have comment moderation set to Never.
It turns out that no one else could have logged in, and so the inactivity on this blog is not an indication that no one cared about this idea. Google now uses IP checks for suspicious logins, if a browser's cookies do not indicate previous use of an account. I almost got locked out of all my accounts myself after moving to a new location.
You don't know how many times I spammed that link to pastebin on different sites to get to 4000 views, haha.
Yoko Ono: I had mentioned Grigori Perelman to my friend Hanna, back in 2011 or something (at least I think I did). This was regarding the uncertainty over whether he had successfully proved a theorem. The reason I thought of contacting him now was simple: 1) He has a reputation, and if he said something to the news media they would listen. 2) His actions indicate he cares about problems, and is willing to make sacrifices. Sharing this idea would involve the risk of a sacrifice due to failing. 3) It seemed that maybe not enough people knew of him that there could be a chance of actually contacting him.
Regarding the third point, there might actually be a better chance of contacting the much better-known mathematician Terence Tao (whose list of topics he doesn't respond to I had already found before asking Perplexity AI).
The argument for why I should not try to contact these people (such attempts would most likely fail, but I cannot rule out success), and why you should act as though I did not update this post today: the first argument that I posted on pastebin, which Ellie Kesselman mentioned in her recent comments (I literally do not remember anyone ever replying when I posted the link to that argument on so many weblog posts in 2011), opens by talking about knowledge specialization.
The fact is, mathematicians have no special knowledge of economics. They also have no special knowledge of whether it is important to fund militaries in preparation for war, or why people who earn $1M per year work hard so that they can earn more than $1M the next year, or why young people spend all their time on TikTok instead of researching solutions to problems that will affect their future.
I have done my best to verify that the basic idea of this site (a decrease in wage rate with an inflection point earlier than the minimum that most people would choose to work) would both work, and would also have a net positive effect on society. Or, to put it another way, that smart people are not secretly better off under the current system and are disguising their intelligence in all of the studies that show that smart people have lower fertility. Or, to put it another way, that there is not a "morality gene" which has been increasing in frequency. (Let's agree that an alien invasion, in the style of Larry Niven's Protector or more subtly as in Vernor Vinge's True Names, is unrealistic, and that I am really a human and not an alien AI masquerading as a human on the Internet.)
Although mathematicians like Grigori Perelman or Terence Tao understand much more about maths than you or I ever will, they have average competence in other knowledge areas. If I had contacted one such back in 2011 and they had shared it, they would have been sharing something that they had made only a minimal contribution to verifying. The same would be true even if they shared it now: I would be asserting, with more confidence than I could have had in 2011, that it would be right for them to share it, and they would simply be relying on me: a person who would share no consequences of failure from them sharing it, as I have no reputation to lose.
This lack of contribution from their area of expertise would be one more reason for them to ignore any attempt from me to contact them, but it's also a reason it's no better for them to share it than for anyone else to do so. Maybe, even without expertise, they would better understand it than you do. I don't know. How well do you understand it? Does my oldest brother, who is in prison, really find it difficult to understand my point that high earners working less helps low earners? I felt like your reaction in 2011, and then later in that Twitter status that you deleted in like Oct 2012 which I can't even really remember (and maybe I even misremembered that such a status ever existed), suggested you thought all of this was important.
I will make it clear, since I don't think I ever did so: a lot of time, the benefit from "art" is in providing a new goal to the audience. Often, that goal is no more and no less than "spend some time contemplating this art work". My uncultured self thinks of the museum scene from Ferris Bueller's Day Off (same scene played slightly slower and lower pitched, which one is right??), which prominently features people standing still looking at art.
In this way, by diversifying people's goals, art has the effect of increasing awareness of "the varying reliability of primary signals". But, according to the quote that opens that argument, the most precious asset is time. It would be better if people could diversify their goals without having to spend time looking at, or experiencing, artwork. I wrote the second part of that document because it seemed to me that people were avoiding solutions that involved conflicting goals. This idea that provides, or rather encourages, a conflict between wage rate and total income (noting that this conflict does not exist with overtime: one maximizes wage rate by maximizing income and time worked); and also the solution to tanking specialization that I suggested for World of Warcraft, back when it was a completely different game than it is today, 14 years later.
In that solution, tanks are supposed to balance the twin demands of damage (or threat, which comes from damage), and mitigation. The game around the time that I made this suggestion was one in which tanks were only concerned with mitigation. Whenever threat became a problem (from power inflation), the developers just buffed the threat multiplier that tanks got, so that it ceased to be a problem.
So the idea here is that people tend to think in terms of solutions that preserve the existing ways in which people measure things: things like "whether a tank is competent in their role". Around the time I made that post, tanks were judged as incompetent if they ever lost threat. (I have no idea how it is in current WoW, but in Classic WoW which replicates WoW as it was in 2006, one can see many examples of tanks losing threat in videos that are posted of dramatic and interesting content.) So I was suggesting a solution that would cause tanks to be judged negatively by the existing standards. Criticism would only be reduced if people changed the standard, i.e. signals, by which they evaluated other players.
Similarly with this economic idea. Instead of "rich = smart", or "rich = bad" as the case may be, people would have to use other methods to evaluate people. And people seem to be reluctant to suggest changes which would force people to think differently. The second part of that argument explains why forcing people to think differently has benefits to society.
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Update 03 Apr 2025, 09:41
I want to live on infinitely, if I can live on infinitely, everything will[be fulfilled] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%8F%B6%E3%81%86
Alchemy - Girls Dead Monster
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk&lc=UgxMn4ntWm8BIPZhCPJ4AaABAg
my browser just had a bug that makes me restart
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Update 03 Apr, 10:07
After having another store-bought cookie (US$0.34 before tax, 280 kcal), I have decided to finish this update. I linked that video for one reason: the loss of the Sewol ferry in 2014.
As usual, I didn't bother to watch the video; I just read comments to see whether it was worth watching, without contributing watchtime to something that might just be clickbait. (YouTube uses watchtime to decide which videos to suggest to other users: that video is currently #10 on trending.) Comments say that the video was already posted months ago on Kurzgesagt's Korean channel, and everyone in Korea already knows the information in the video. One Korean comment says that the video focuses on birthrates (for the "SOUTH KOREA IS OVER" clickbait title), but Korea also has big economic and political problems too.
I want to draw attention to one theme in the comments (there is also a well-written English comment by a Korean 7th-grader, using their mother's account): the difficulty of finding jobs. The statistics don't look bad: the Republic of Korea only has a 5.4% youth unemployment rate in 2023, down from 10% eight years ago. In contrast, India is at 15.6%, down from 26% in 2018; the United States is at 8%, down from 15% in 2021 due to Covid-19 and 18% in 2010; Spain is at 29%, down from 55% in 2013.
But people think it's bad. One person said that something that was mistranslated as job-to-job ratio was 0.28, which they said was 0.28 people out of 100 getting a job. (Maybe this is 0.28 hires per 100 job applications.) Another person talks about their difficult economic situation and how surprised other people are to learn that this person went to a top university with a scholarship. Other people talk about 60+ hour work weeks. In general: young people feel poor, think that housing prices are too high, and think that old people control all of the wealth and political influence. They feel that old people are making young people work hard, to the detriment of the country's future; but the point is that young people feel they are being forced to work hard and that it isn't their generation's choice. (The 7th-grader wrote about students having to study 12 hours a day, their career aspirations, and their lack of hope for the future.)
I assert that even though the young unemployment rate seems low, too much supply of labor is still the correct explanation for these problems. The explanation that most people have is the "people are greedy" explanation. I am too lazy to search through my Reddit posts for when I submitted this explanation (those posts might have comments on what people thought of it), so I am just pasting it again here:
A Brief Explanation of Economic Inequality in the 21st Century
(I logged in to see if it would get it to show up on the list of recent public pastes: nope.)
To quote from that (tip, use shift-ctrl-V to paste instead of ctrl-V, to paste without formatting which sometimes messes up rich text entry fields like this one):
Most people have a very basic understanding of the causes of inequality. They say that it's because rich people are greedy or cheating. Imagine people distributing some resources, like children taking candy from a piñata. One person is greedy, taking 10 times his share, and another person hesitates for too long and ends up with just one piece of candy. In this explanation, the solution is for people not to be greedy.
So, Korea's problems are not because old people are greedy. But young people have no reason to see the truth of the situation if they don't see a realistic solution. Blaming another group of people gives them (i.e., their dumber friends, for whom they care dearly) moral license to act without responsibility, as with the partying that led to 159 people suffocating in a crowd in 2022.
Well, I was also going to mention the "nut rage incident": the Wikipedia article is incomplete and does not clarify that Cho Yang-ho ordered cabin crew chief Park Chang-jin off the plane not because the nuts were not served on a plate, but because he was not able to confidently refer to the rules to contradict her claim that the rules stated that the nuts should be served on a plate. It is an example of people in Korea being reluctant to challenge authority, even when an authority figure is in the wrong.
In contrast, the Korean drama "My Dearest Nemesis" (2025) has a scene in Ep 01 where the main female character sprays a company director with a fire extinguisher because he was smoking in a room where he shouldn't.
To be clear: my best guess is that maybe when I shared this economic idea on the English forums for the Korean game Aion, an English-speaking employee might have found it significant enough to share with the main Korean branch, and it could have found its way from there to the Korean government. Or maybe this is completely wrong, which would not concern or upset me.
Another video I'm not bothering to watch: How The Finance Industry Destroys Economies (linked comment: "Automated rent extraction" is a phrase I didn't think would immediately make total sense.) For anyone who thinks society can't do better than the current system of encouraging everyone to work as much as possible (powered by fossil fuels).
Yoko Ono, I don't think talking about Korea's problems makes you more likely to share this idea. I think about the Sewol disaster's victims every time I take a cold shower, which during the winter is not often. I hope you will excuse me writing about a topic that does not directly concern you.
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Update 03 Apr 2025, 16:25
I was going to write that the situation was that you had refused to share this idea, and that I was doing nothing, and compare this to the scene from Everything Loves Me around Ep 08 where Gu Xun is at the arcade trying to get Yue Qianling to agree to take a job (and contrast with Hana Yori Dango where the male character waits in the rain), but this is too serious for that. I am not acting like you have refused to share it.
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Update 04 Apr 2025, 11:12
I'm saying this because I feel like you might have had some confusion about my identity. I might have said this on my currently-banned Twitter account, which you may or may not have read. When I was in Iraq, in 2008~2009, I wrote みさき or ミサキ, sometimes vertically I think, on the styrofoam clamshell containers that I used to store a meal in (I would wake up around 3~5 pm shortly before my shift, go to dinner and store that extra meal which was ostensibly for a second person, and then eat that meal in the middle of my shift around midnight); and around 12 years ago, my third-oldest sister sent me a light blue cloth facial tissue holder with MISAKI embroidered on it for Christmas, but no one has ever addressed me by that name in real life, I believe. I have never introduced myself as Misaki.
Also, I made a poll: Is "Rich people are greedy" a good explanation for economic inequality?
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Update 04 Apr 2025, 13:51
I'm not surprised that the currency exchange rate poll that I posted for a teenager audience
my browser just had the bug that makes me have to close it
https://www.reddit.com/r/polls/comments/1jcw9xg/would_you_want_the_value_of_the_currency_used_in/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Teenager_Polls/comments/1jcwj5m/would_you_want_the_value_of_the_currency_used_in/
Interpolate the rest of what I would have said here, it's fairly predictable
https://www.reddit.com/r/Teenager_Polls/comments/1jcw10j/do_you_truly_consider_yourself_to_be_a_good_person/
https://www.quora.com/How-do-Jean-Calvins-and-Thomas-Hobbes-philosophies-relate-to-each-other/answer/Isidore-Fitzroy
https://www.quora.com/How-closely-do-Calvin-and-Hobbes-reflect-the-philosophies-of-John-Calvin-and-Thomas-Hobbes/answer/Elliott-Yoon
https://www.quora.com/In-‘Calvin-and-Hobbes’-does-Calvin-ever-give-any-indication-that-he-knows-Hobbes-is-not-alive/answer/Zack-Brown-320
(The comic about fate)
Oh, well it seems that I didn't quit my browser, so I don't have to log back in but I also can't see what I type until I switch tabs, alt-tab to another pgoram and back, and then al-ttab I mean ctrl-tab back to the original tab. Screen does not update, I meanredenred screen content does not update unless I do that, although scroll location with the same content can change if I simply alt-tab without switching tabs. So, I wanted to add this link about trust: well< it's too hard to find it since I can't get the screen to update I mean by typing trust * in the URL bar. Bu it's a survey about trust in different countries; the chart I found of interest was India and China having high trust, according to this survey (there are many surveys about trust which sometimes show different results, possibly due to different wording).
The point about this that I wanted to make is that some religions may reduce trust in people, making people act worse, because the rules of the religion substitute for evaluating morailty through other ways. It's like a lactic acid bacteria reducing the pH of milk which kills off other types of bacterias; only in this case, it's a morality I mean a religion that creates a toxic environment for other means of evaluating morality, by making people act badly if they don't convert to the religion and follow it. I have typed all that without seeing the screen dupate and ow I am pressing Update.
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Update 05 Apr 2025, 16:53
As you know, the current president of the United States was almost killed by an assassin's bullet last year, during the campaigning period. The motivations of the assassin remain unknown. As a result of this event, I didn't publish a survey that I wrote about the importance of preventing a future decline in human intelligence.
I prefer to have the view that no one is bad. Partly, one might say that through this attitude, I seek to convince other people that I am also not bad: this is one reason people are resistant to this worldview, because they perceive it to be to the advantage of people who are actually bad.
I have always felt that if we fix most problems in the world, then we should release everyone who is in prison. If this were to happen, it would now include my oldest brother (if he is still alive then). Some people who are in prison have done things that are quite bad (and some people who are not in prison have also done bad things, but that's another topic). A lot of people who are in prison for doing bad things are convinced that it's right for them to be in prison. My goal is that I could potentially meet anyone who is released from prison, with them knowing I have some responsibility for them and a lot of other people who have done bad things being released from prison, and they would not harm me.
I thought I would mention two examples of people doing bad things: one from real life and one fictional. Real life: the person nicknamed the Night Stalker.
At age 12, Ramirez was taken under the wing of his older cousin, Miguel Angel "Mike" Valles (June 14, 1949 – April 8, 1995), a soldier in the U.S. Army who himself had already become a serial killer and rapist during his service in the Vietnam War. Mike often boasted of committing gruesome war crimes in Vietnam, and shared Polaroid photos with Ramirez showing Vietnamese women whom he had raped, murdered, and dismembered or decapitated. It is alleged that many of these photos depicted women being tied to trees or wooden posts both before and after they were sexually assaulted and killed by Valles.
His capture:
Her husband, Manuel De La Torre, witnessed the attempt and struck Ramirez over the head with a fence post in the pursuit. A group of over ten residents (including Jose Burgoin's sons) formed and chased Ramirez down Hubbard Street in Boyle Heights. They soon restrained Ramirez and relentlessly beat him.
His attitude after arrest:
At his first court appearance, he raised a hand with a pentagram drawn on it and yelled, "Hail Satan!" [...]
He stated to reporters after the death sentences, "Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland."
The fictional case is the Japanese film Grotesque (2009). I have not watched it. The IMDb description is "A doctor kidnaps a young couple and forces them into a game of torment that slowly extinguishes their hopes for survival." The key points, as I see it, are that the kidnapper does not seem to have a motivation for the crime that most people would guess at; the kidnapped people die, but manage to injure the kidnapper; and the ending shows the kidnapper preparing to abduct more people, while showing evidence of the injury.
The details of the movie involve the people being restrained in a way in which they can obtain some freedom by injuring themselves. In a way, it might be seen as a counterpoint to the story of the novel 1984: in which two people who believe they love each other end up betraying each other rather than face their fears, which in the case of the male character is a fear of rats (such as with the reputed torture that involves heating a metal bowl on someone's chest to force rats in the bowl to burrow through the person's chest to escape). So in this Japanese film, there is no betrayal.
As a counterpoint to that film, I would like to mention that the director or something of the Chinese drama Can Lan Jue (苍兰诀), aka Love Between Fairy and Devil (兰 means orchid and this English title sort of forces the overall story, but is probably good for attracting interest), said that the overall message he wanted to make with the drama was that "love makes people better."
We can see how this is a message that a Chinese creator is more likely to incorporate into a work than a Japanese creator. Meanwhile, many works from US culture have the superficial message that love causes people to act in a good way, but rarely focus on the possibility of people other than the main characters expressing love. The expression of "acting in a good way" also often involves killing many people who are seen as being bad (and without love).
Anyway, if the antagonist of that Japanese film were real, then my hope would be that his thinking would change such that he would not try to kill me if he had the opportunity. Of course, if he were real, then I also think he should go to prison, unless people used this idea and people agree to let people who have done similarly bad things out of prison.
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Update 07 Apr 2025, 08:35
The views on this post went up from 2, to 3. Current song in mind: Bakeneko's rendition of Lunatic Princess on piano.
I think the poem by Edgar Allen Poe about Quoth the raven begins when the narrator is trying to sleep? This is where I was at. Perhaps I felt more confident because I managed to do something that I failed at several times before, which was to visit my local store when it opens so I can check the availability of reduced-price bakery goods at that time. Then I was trying to sleep with my alarm set to 10:00, but unsurprisingly I just ended up thinking. My main attitude for a while was scorn, for you and everyone else who has failed to engage with me.
But I suspected this was at least partly a protective attitude. It is like someone, or a group of people, who gain confidence from doing easy things, but then are not prepared when things get difficult: naturally, I end up thinking of a warlike example, of a large group of people encountering small groups or individuals as they chase, until they encounter a tougher army. War is an area that is prone to poor evaluation of difficulty: "All warfare is based on deception."
The truth is, although I did not reject the possibility of lengthy discussion of this idea in 2011, I did not want to discuss it. One reason being that I was on a time limit due to financial constraints and had an uncertain future; but also that I preferred to avoid direct association with this idea for romantic reasons.
Note that I wouldn't want to talk about any of this if I thought that millions of people might read it. This is just an effort to get you to share the idea as soon as possible, with no thought of what might happen after that.
When I think about why I was in the situation I was in, in 2011, it seems to me that it was because Elyse Sugimoto commented about my expressed intent to go on a religious mission to Japan for my religion. I don't consider myself religious now, but I was raised to be religious, saying prayers before meals and before going to sleep and so on. She would have written this to me sometime during high school. I can't be certain of the timing: another thing that happened was that I became extremely busy during my third year of high school, causing me to be unable to talk to most friends, including those I had made attending a summer program ("COSMOS") at the University of California, Irvine the previous summer. So I don't know if Elyse Sugimoto's comment came before or after this busy period.
I may have mentioned before, on Twitter (and this is why I don't mind the account being banned, I said so many random things), that Elyse Sugimoto's email address may have been meaningful. As I think I explained around August 2011, we went to the same middle school together, in the same grade, in Hawaii; then I moved to California a month or two into my first year of high school, and maybe a year later she also moved to California. Anyway, while she was still in ) browser bug, restarting, she mentioned in an email or a letter (she sent me at least one had
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Update continued, 07 Apr 2025, 09:06
Lyrics to Rain Song by Girls Dead Monster:
公園の木にぶつかり 君のように泣いた
Colliding with the trees in the park, I cried like you did.
Lyrics to run kitty run solo [v5] NUMB:
but I know you were just like me, with someone disappointed in you
Continued: she sent me at least one physical letter, with a spelling mistake that she crossed out and corrected, as well as a $5 gift certificate for See's Candy that I never used. Sadly, this letter and the gift certificate was lost sometime between when I left California in 2005 and when I returned around 2016.
While she was still in Hawaii, there was a school dance. She had some position in the school government. I am honestly not sure if most schools had this: to me there was a huge contrast between my school in Hawaii, where I went to an attendance thing in the gym with all students and the different grade levels sort of competed against each other with lots of stomping of feet on the wooden bleachers and one of the older grades doing a performance using the song "Who Let the Dogs Out", and my school in California which was dumb and the closest thing to something that anyone cared about was the marching band, which I didn't care about.
So: Japanese high schools apparently often have active student leadership. My reference is Toradora, which I watched half of last year. (Mei probably uses similar references to understand high school culture, if she skipped it and went straight to college.) Schools in Hawaii seem to be heavily influenced by the significant Japanese population in Hawaii. Anyway, her being in the school government is just something I wanted to mention, otherwise not important. So, she went to a dance after being invited by someone I had thought of as one of my two friends in middle school: these were Justin Yoshida, and Christopher Fujino. I don't know if they would remember me: one of my points of reference for memories is stories like the aforementioned My Dearest Nemesis, which I was only able to watch the first two episodes of due to being poor, but at that point in the story they have not yet recognized each other from 15 or 16 years earlier.
Or, say, the novel Fire and Hemlock, where the main character has some difficulty recalling events from 7 years prior.
I distinctly remember asking a friend at my new high school what it meant for two people to be "official", as Elyse said that her accepting the invitation must mean that they were official. Anyway, later on she changed her email address (I don't remember the old one) to "pristinebelle": Wiktionary's example is "In her new dress she felt like the belle of the ball." I don't know how I responded to this, if I did at all: again, it might have been during the time that I was very busy with schoolwork, to the point that I was not doing class projects that were worth a significant portion of a grade because the time doing an easy project was time not spent studying and learning.
This is all to provide context to me giving significance to Elyse's reply about my intention to go on a religious mission to Japan. By this point in time, I can't even remember her reply to characterize her reply except as an opinion that proselytizing in Japan was unnecessary.
I don't think I ever thought of the religion I was raised in as better than other religions, even though most people probably think their religion is better. To me, a religious mission was just something that I viewed as expected; I don't think I would have cared about converting other people to my religion, or activity of proselytizing itself; it would just have been an excuse to go to Japan and learn more about Japanese culture and language. As can be inferred from her name, Elyse was probably not born in Japan and although she probably had some knowledge of Japanese, I think she was still taking an entry-level Japanese language course in high school.
So this is a story about a well-intentioned religion, and a well-intentioned person (me), that leads to a minor disagreement which is blown all out of proportion in its significance because of the idea that morality is important or something; what was that survey about asked about something like this..?
Maybe the significance with which I saw this was increased because of the criticism that Christopher Fujino had for my religion (as explored in emails in high school, not when we were friends attending at the same school). Honestly, I find it interesting that I even mentioned to anyone what my religion was, and asked other people what religion they were.
One other thing I remember was that when the United States attacked Iraq, I said in an email to Elyse that the US's leaders, who were responsible for this attack, were not evil but stupid. I don't know what she replied to this, if anything; but I think I got the impression she was not as smart as I was. As I might have said on my banned Twitter account, I think she said in middle school that she expected I would "cure cancer" or something (a typical thing that people say to express that someone is smart, although later we learn that there are many types of cancer with different causes etc.), and on a particularly significant math test, I got the highest score; meaning, higher than her or anyone else in a group of students attending advanced classes.
I guess relevant here is the survey where I asked whether people thought smart people from different countries had more or less similar moral views than smart people and stupid people from the same country; maybe the same survey as I alluded to before? The idea being that maybe Elyse and I couldn't have been in a relationship because we had different moral views about minor matters.
I thought it was worth talking about all of this to explain where I thought it had "gone wrong", in some sense.
End result, I don't regret acting like I didn't want to talk about the idea in 2011, even if acting like I wanted to talk about it could have resulted in you discussing it then and sharing it, and me not losing the last 13 years or so of my life.
Is this a good (sufficient) explanation?
In the drama The Double (墨雨云间) (2024), as one of the "horrible" things the step-mother (I'm still a little confused there; is Jiang Li thought of as killing her unborn brother and trying to kill her step-mother, or did her actual mother die?) did was try to marry Jiang Li off to some random official's son who doesn't really care who he marries. I definitely felt like I acted a little like this. It's one reason I never really left my house, and in particular never went to the library, after I went back to California.
Hm well apparently this might not have been a weblog post, but an email to someone: when I suggested that sometimes one takes certain actions in order so that one does not hate "oneself, or something else" as I put it. I don't know if Mei is dead, or if she has forgotten me. Maybe she never existed (as my oldest sister explicitly suggested in 2012, in my leadup to living outside). One thing that can still make me smile a little is the possibility that Mei thought I had passed the Japanese language proficiency test at the end of 2011, after I said that I was "done" with an unspecified task, but in fact I did not and so I tricked her a little. This just shows how if she was or is interested in me, it was a waste of time for her think that she should wait for me to pass it. But if the reason I failed it was that "I was busy explaining how to fix economic problems that affect the whole world", I think I would have hated the world for being stupid.
But since I had the opportunity to study for it in the limited time I had with my financial resources (even though I never actually decided to set the goal of studying and passing the test), I don't hate the world or you for being stupid, even if it means spending 13+ years of my life doing unimportant things when simply talking about it would have made everything happen a lot faster.
(Edit: I think that might have been an email I sent to the blogger, Riverbend.)
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Update 08 Apr 2025, 18:10
Learned that Blizzard decided to restore characters who died due to DDoS attacks on World of Warcraft Classic Hardcore. That thread has lots of people complaining; either that any characters are being restored at all, or that characters were only being restored from DDoS attacks starting from 22 March, when many more characters died to attacks around 12 March. This made me think of the polls I did after one of the earliest of these DDoS attacks:
https://www.reddit.com/r/wowhardcore/comments/1j736aq/disconnecting_during_a_play_session_in_hc/
https://www.reddit.com/r/wowhardcore/comments/1j7397v/disconnecting_during_a_play_session_in_hc/
https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/1j73e5t/disconnecting_during_a_play_session_in_hc/
This made me think, "maybe the developers are listening to the players". The expectation immediately after the attack was that the dead characters would not be restored: "I am already being told that a rollback is not going to happen."
This theme of "listening to what people want" inspired me to make another poll: Would you want Yoko Ono to share this idea?
https://strawpoll.com/NoZrzoXJeZ3
The post on r/Teenager_Polls was removed after just 1 recorded vote ("No"), here is a repost.
Sort of related, suggesting either that a lot of Reddit users don't come from the US, that teenagers have significantly higher unemployment than 20~24-year-olds, that Reddit users have significantly higher unemployment than usual, or that US youth unemployment is undercounted (maybe because it probably means "actively looking for a job"): Do you have a job? Over twice as many say "No but I want one" compared to "Yes".
Not really related: Be honest would you beat someone up you hate for a million dollars? 93% say yes.
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Update 08 Apr 2025, 19:54
I perhaps somewhat rudely replied to the user who asked "My question for you is this: why would the higher earners willingly limit their work hours?" using private messages, despite that they had not responded to an earlier private message. I noticed an apparent contradiction between my reply to question and the original post: my reply was that it would be the subset of high earners who incorrectly believe that other people want them to work long hours.
Whereas the original post refers to a financial justification and a way to "win" by working less.
Resolving that contradiction: the strategy is to leverage people who would want to work less for their own sake, if it's shown that it's also better for other people, in order to change the incentives for people who are either indifferent towards how much they work or who prefer working long hours. The former might change their habits to work less. The latter might continue to work long hours, and could be seen as being oppressed by the majority that prefers a changed system; but they would benefit in other ways such as through action to address climate change and resource exhaustion, or from the reduction of violent crime. Some might still prefer the current system over these other benefits. Do you think we should avoid changing things because people with these preferences might exist?
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Update 09 Apr 2025, 00:39
You can see the results. The platform has a bug (which I reported) which causes "Other" responses not to accumulate a vote when they are first created, which means there was one other answer of "No, it's a bad idea (Other)" from someone in r/Teenager_Polls, which I removed when I edited the poll since that answer had 0 votes. If no one further votes in the poll, then I and no one else voted Yes, while seven people voted No (including two using Other), and the remaining responses were,
Why on earth would random famous people in entertainment be obliged to share things like this? Politics is where change happens. And this is basically a thought experiment, because no one is going to implement thing, because we live in a capitalism. This is such a bizarre question. Whether or not the policy is a good one, the premise of this question is absurd.
I truly do not care and don’t understand why you’re spamming every subreddit with this
I think she should share the idea that high earners should work MORE, given her place in Western culture and the effect it would have
The additional places I posted the poll to get those 8 extra votes included
https://old.reddit.com/r/YokoOno/comments/1juv8kl/would_you_want_yoko_ono_to_share_this_idea/
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheBeatles/comments/1juva2d/would_you_want_yoko_ono_to_share_this_idea/
https://old.reddit.com/r/protest/comments/1juwlpf/poll_would_you_want_yoko_ono_to_share_this_idea/
https://old.reddit.com/r/millenials/comments/1juvie7/would_you_want_yoko_ono_to_share_this_idea/
https://old.reddit.com/r/Millennials/comments/1juvlko/would_you_want_yoko_ono_to_share_this_idea/
https://old.reddit.com/r/war/comments/1juvugq/poll_would_you_want_yoko_ono_to_share_this_idea/
This doesn't include the communities were it was auto-deleted by automoderator rules. None of these posts have a positive net upvote score, on a site where all posts start with 1 (from the poster).
A possibly useful post from one of the communities where the submission was automatically removed:
https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/1jt3p4a/my_job_offers_unlimited_ptobut_using_it_feels/
Note that posting in numerous communities can risk biasing data, because communities which support an idea will upvote it and cause it to get more visibility. My choices of communities were based partly around which ones had a higher chance of accepting the post. It's safe to say that if I re-posted the poll on r/SampleSize once per day, as the rules allow, for a month, then the proportion of No votes would be similar to or higher than in these results.
Edit: someone asked in the poll, "Why does yoko ono need to share this idea" and I guess I forgot to mention in the description that you are associated with peace, like having the site imaginepeace.com.
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Update 09 Apr 2025, 21:44
Do I trust people? I was thinking that I don't trust that someone like Mei would act in a way most likely to keep me alive. That was, after all, the whole point of me living outside in 2012: to try to force the issue. Although I was always healthy while living outside, one cannot exactly slowly die in the streets of a city: an unhealthy individual will be transported against their will, with attempts made to save their life. This would have meant my fate moving beyond the control of someone like Mei, and I would have preferred a quick death.
But I don't think that, when she didn't try to meet me at a certain location in Seattle, US at a time I had specified, this broke my trust that she wanted me to happy. It's just that I was led to conclude that she believed that the course of action she could take which was most likely to lead to me being happy was also one in which I might choose to die, i.e. if she didn't try to meet me or communicate with me in any way.
There was also that odd occurrence: in late 2021 or late 2022, some time after I first tried contacting Greta Thunberg, there was the day when I stopped eating (I think for about a month), and also stopped going online, I think; and on that same day, the landline telephone rang a bunch of different times. On many other days when the phone rang and I answered it, there would be no response; on that day, I never answered the phone and acted like it was probably one of my sisters trying to reach my mum, who does have a smart phone, but it might have been someone calling for a different reason.
Anyway, that's why I haven't deviated from my daily habit of checking Yara's Twitter account and doing a web search for my weight and daily diet. It serves as my excuse for the fact that after a month or so, I resumed eating.
The relevance of all this is that if I imagine that someone who cares I think cares might care about me, like Mei, has some attitude or acts in a certain way, then I have to excuse anyone else who has that attitude. For example, Mei didn't sign the first petition; so I can't be prejudiced against anyone else who didn't sign it (i.e. all but about six humans on this planet). In this case, the possibility that Mei cares more about me being happy than me being alive.
(This just made me think about "wireheads" in Larry Niven's Known Space series, like with one of the first scenes in Ringworld Engineers, where one of the main characters who is experiencing joy from "a wire going to the pleasure center of the brain" kills an intruder and then resumes sitting until the electrical current is turned off by a timer. Imagined as a technology which literally leads to people caring more about being happy than being alive, causing them to die.)
One might here refer to my "complaint" the first time I failed to get her to meet me, around Dec 7, 2010: "you just don't want me to die".
Anyway, I was thinking about several things, which don't go in a particular order and I might forget some of them before I mention them.
I don't think it was an important mistake for me not to mention that you are associated with peace. While the basic theme was to make a poll that explores what people wish you would do, inspired by the WoW Classic Hardcore DDoS situation and the second paragraph of the first pastebin etc., the intro was just for teenagers who might never have heard of you and the important thing really was just that you have influence. Not what your own priorities are. But I did make sure to mention war because I was implicitly assuming that people would know of your association with peace. I just think I overestimated how many people would know that you do care whether the world is at peace. You might describe yourself as "92 years young", but the typical person expects people who are much older than half of a typical human lifespan to not have much in the way of passion, or interest in current events or causing change.
Third topic: Malala. You may or may not be aware that I made an extremely cursory attempt to get her to share this idea, sending a single message on Twitter, I believe. I don't think my lack of interest in trying to get her to share it is prejudice against people who don't come from east Asia. Biggest point: I believe you are already aware of this idea, or I wouldn't have made this post. I believe Malala is not aware of it, and it would be very unlikely I could do anything that would make her aware of it. This point basically excuses any other reasons I might have of which you or other people might be more critical. If I thought both you and she didn't know of it, and that trying to contact one of you was the best course of action, maybe I would choose her at this point, despite any reasons I might have to prefer not to.
Fourth topic: possible polls. Something like, "would you have a negative opinion of Yoko Ono if she shared an idea which she described as fixing economic problems like unemployment, but she didn't talk about how it would fix other problems like war". It's hard to even phrase the question. I note, in case anyone else reads this, that you were promoting a charity dedicated to feeding hungry young people in the US, maybe around late 2012: an economic issue. So it isn't that you have never expressed a concern about economic problems. This poll would basically be alleviating any concern you might feel about being dishonest for not discussing predicted effects of a change that you are suggesting.
What I don't know here is, if you are aware of this economic suggestion, do you believe it would end war? And could you explain to other people why it would end war (as I believe it will)?
I have not seen anyone ever try to convince anyone of anything related to this idea. Never seen someone else argue that high earners working less helps low earners. Never seen anyone attempt to offer an explanation of how this solution, or any other solution, would end war. Can you do this? Would you try to do this? Or, if you shared this idea, would you prefer to avoid talking about any complexity which might lead to criticism that you might be unable to respond to?
I note that this poll I created had a brief explanation of why this idea would end war; but if anyone was convinced by this explanation, they did not respond to indicate their understanding, and several people responded that they were not convinced at all by the explanation. (My private messages to the first person who offered this criticism referred to comments of the videos [Russian popular support for war, 613K views 08 Apr 2025]How Did Russia Grow Such a MASSIVE Army and [224K views, 08 Apr 2025]Why Russians Die for Putin–The Harsh Reality Behind the War in Ukraine, and I also mentioned the "military industrial complex" as a job creator, but I didn't even try to discuss non-economic reasons for war. Bonus video, that unlike the above two videos I actually watched at least some of: [246k views, 10 Mar 2025]Russian Troops Ambush Ukrainian HUGE Grad MLRS Convoy! showing many Ukrainian male soldiers being killed by drones.)
Someone in the "Israel Gaza" or something community also responded saying my post had nothing to do with Israel and Gaza. Either they didn't read the post, which mentioned Israel and Gaza, or they read it but did not think this idea would affect that conflict.
So, if you shared this idea, would you mention that it would end war? Could you proficiently argue against people who would say, "well we have to fight because the other side just wants to kill us"? Do you ever argue? (Could Malala argue well about this?)
Chinese drama Everyone Loves Me: the male character suggests to his female online crush that she act like a "Frail Princess" to attract her real-life crush, not knowing that it is him. His friend expresses his confusion about that advice as the male character had never been attracted to "Frail Princess" behavior, and then realizes that the advice is actually meant to make the female character's crush not like her, in order to give the male character a chance. Don't be a Frail Princess!
An example of my worries about the competence of other people: I'm pretty sure that when I played World of Warcraft, if I was in any kind of dangerous situation I would constantly spam the Tab key, which selects a nearby enemy. This acts as a way of not getting surprised. And yet, in video compilations that show the moments when players lose characters they spent dozens of hours playing, there is no indication anyone does this. Neither the skilled players nor the unskilled players seem to be spam-pressing Tab, which would result in them selecting an enemy hidden behind some object or one not close to their mouse cursor.
Am I misremembering that I did this, or was it just not an optimal thing to do? Consider another aspect of gameplay: using mouseover macros or addons for heals, in which the target of a heal is based on the position of the mouse cursor, instead of the typical behavior of healing the current target (if friendly) or allowing for selection of the heal target after pressing the button (if current target is hostile). Sometimes in these hardcore death compilations, there are indications that mouseover macros are responsible for problems: like when mousing over the target of target, and the target changes which causes a heal to go to the wrong ally; or just because it's a reactive method of making decisions that does not anticipate damage. Easy and lazy, but worse in some cases than harder methods.
When people don't use difficult, but effective methods even when faced with a strong incentive to do so, it suggests their inability to discern or apply those methods. I haven't seen anyone succeed in convincing someone else about any point related to this idea, but I haven't seen anyone fail to do so, either. I am just concerned.
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Update 11 Apr 2025, 11:25
Nothing to do with you or this economic idea, I'm just posting this here so that if I never say anything online again, the chance of this being used increases from 0 to a very small number.
poll: "If you were searching for a song you like on YouTube, and one upload was marked as normal volume and another marked as very loud, which one would you watch?"I had originally thought about this on 31 Mar but forgot I had thought about, and made a note of it. These are my thoughts from that day and the adjacent days, since they might be a little interesting (not removing any potentially embarrassing parts):
Comment: "Loudness wars push volume up. This makes songs sound worse due to clipping. Some services like normal YouTube cap the maximum volume, but YouTube Music removes the volume caps, allowing songs to play as loud as an audio mixer chooses. If YouTube allowed uploaders to change the maximum volume when watched on normal YouTube, but viewers had a warning of how loud a song is (and potentially how much it has been damaged from clipping), would they choose the loud song or the normal volume song?
The biggest reason not to do this is that it would mean adding extra information for every single video recommendation. If most people don't care about this information, it would be bad to include it."
30 Mar 2025
"How Hackers Stole $1,000,000,000 From..." by fern
videos about false flag attacks in Ukraine 2014?
(person who worked at entrance of computer room at military base during pre-deployment training)
31 Mar 2025
(not online) try to replicate oven bug, increase temperature without pressing "start" then press timer button and increase time?
plan: two months without saying anything to anyone online
wiktionary "saa(, ne)"
joined military partly because of Iraqis who were unfairly killed in ~2004, thrown off a bridge
songs could have intended volume: loud, very loud, medium, etc. Normalized volume reflects this. Quieter songs are rewarded with less clipping, user can turn up volume manually, or turn down volume before playing very loud song. Shown in search results. Intention is to prevent loudness wars from harming audio quality. When same song is available in both loud and quiet versions, user can select which to play. (Inspired by OB1_zB5DaGg, -5.1 LUFS)
suggest 'Dschinghis Khan - Moskau (Starparade 14.06.1979) [lyuFLU2Zqz0].webm' to Natsumi-san
Mr Taxi, official audio version? mLZ-PvU5fvs is different sound, from music video. Korean version?
3siHEaHT32Q is dup (but mono) of QO05GhaDxmA, check; rename QO05GhaDxmA
download Hot Pink
related 'afreecatvBJ徐雅韩国热舞剪辑24[BJ Seoa - Hot Pink] [g7ykZjcSdxc].webm'
is avr4H2ZPeEA bugged? super fast audio, but ends at same time as dance at 90. But voices seem fast.
Hot Pink muted? checked audio, _q_RzVPMSak sYT4oNqB5Vk O6IU2Ew8qFg nHHZ3Pq_mQw
what dance is mNlbNr9Hy90 (loop to start at 147)
comment 【MMD RWBY】 Caramell Dansen - Nora[164.18 BPM] [o_yoX4RRro8][v scale 0.995030303 +0.535s]
is original 165 BPM (like QH0sdkyX3S0 Jpn ver.)? also views on QH0sdkyX3S0, still no model DL?
aOJCXioChJ5w is private, right? Kara Mr.
01 Apr 2025
ask AI, 'have you ever been to a food yard?'
Epang Palace magnetic door?
Everyone Loves Me Ep 08 38:58, fancy form of 'ni hao'?
Ep10 kabedons
8th grader syndrome, acting shy?
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Update 11 Apr 2025, 16:07
I was idly staring at my sleeping bag, trying to convince myself not to do anything online. There is a 1.8 mm fiber sticking out remarkably straight, speaking to the strength of the materials used to construct the item, and it made me think of the damage to the inside end of the bag from the rubber soles of the moccasins (purchased from a tourist place near Fort Huachuca, US) that I wore to keep my feet warm. My memory of these moccasins has honestly been supplanted by a different pair of moccasins which my second-youngest brother gave me.
This made me think of how every day, I needed to dry out the sleeping bag, because the end would be wet, apparently from condensation from my breath. This involved finding a table, preferably one with an Ethernet outlet, next to a large open space so I could not-very-discreetly open my duffel bag and expose the wet parts of my sleeping bag or blankets, so they could dry.
I was breaking the rules every day that I brought in my duffel bag. The first time I tried to visit the library carrying a duffel bag was after I finished my military training at the aforementioned Fort Huachuca. I was told I was not allowed to bring in such a large item because of the risk of people bringing in bombs. So I could have easily been denied entry the first time I tried to visit the library while carrying a similar duffel bag in 2012.
I think the first post on this weblog was the night I was kicked out of the airport, after staying there for a couple days trying to plan? So if the library had enforced the rules, I might only have posted here for a day or two.
This just goes to show how silly it would have been for anyone to assume that I would devote a lot of time to this idea.
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Update 11 Apr 2025, 20:48
Also, I want to point out that on Walmart's Great Value brand of LED lights, the savings formula is wrong, because despite that millions of people buy this brand and potentially examine the box and see the formula, the level of feedback about it being wrong is insufficient for the mistake to be corrected. I'm sorry, I don't have anyone else to talk to.
I bought a purple LED lightbulb because I thought younger relatives might like it (I'm acting like the Chinese scientist from Three-Body who we first see taking care of a grandchild or young neighbor). The formula on the box for savings is "((INANDESCENT WATTS-LED WATTS) x.11 ¢/kWh x 1095 HOURS)/1,000kWh". It seems to use the letter x, not the symbol × that a calculator would use. 11¢ = $0.11, but that's minor. kWh should be multiplied, not divided, in order to cancel out. It took me like five minutes of standing in the store, looking at the box, to understand this formula and conclude that it was wrong, even though it's very simple. It's like how some people saw the alligator problem on a UK maths exam and immediately went, "Snell's Law" and knew the answer, and others had to spend lots of time reasoning it out. This "/1,000kWh" is really just multiplying by "1 kW/1000 W" = 1, and see here how I made a mistake as well, because there's no reason to have hours in there. The "1095 HOURS" is really "1095 HOURS/YEAR", and it cancels with the hours in the cost of electricity.
I just wasn't sure whether it was going to be a case of needless complexity in units.
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Update 12 Apr 2025, 01:48
A few days ago, to precise at Wed Apr 9 12:55:01 PM MDT 2025, the short shuffling script that I had playing music chose a performance of Hate(싫어), and when I checked it on YouTube I found it had been made private. (Like many YouTube videos, even the title was not archived.) But there are many performances from the same group still available on YouTube.
After two hours or so of being bored, trying not to eat food, and thinking, I found an excuse to go online again, even if all I do is write this.
The conclusion that "it helps low earners when high earners work less" is not automatic. One can easily imagine such a world where this is not true: the purpose of this idea, basically, is to get enough high earners to work less that it isn't true that working less helps low earners.
The way that a lot of people imagine that high earners working a lot helps low earners is simply taxes. This is because most people think in terms of their own country. On the one hand, if a country is big and has a lot of internal trade, with significant costs to trade with distant places (most of this would be land transportation, because single trip sea transport is very cheap in comparison), then the 'foreign losses' of economic activity or GDP from high earners working less will be lower; and on the other hand is supposed to be something else but I forgot it while trying to phrase the bit in parentheses. One can try to model the situation as a bunch of very small "countries". Parents giving money to their children is sort of like voluntary taxes and wealth transfer; if the countries are a bit larger than a family, then you can have forced (via voting) wealth transfer but still have most of economic activity gains go to other countries.
Anyway. We ignore taxes, because along with taxes also come increases in rent etc. We just look at what situations in the model can lead to the result of high earners working less actually causing low earners to be worse off.
From here on, just "rich" and "poor". The easiest to imagine is that the poor person who makes Medium Bananas for a rich person does not use their earnings to buy and consume Medium Bananas from other poor people: instead, this poor person just saves and saves and saves, until they can buy a Good Banana.
Perhaps from this poor person's perspective, they are better off. They earned 5x as much as any other poor person and got a luxury good no one else they know can afford. But in this case, we just go ahead and call this poor person rich, and observe that if this "rich poor person" worked less and could not afford the Good Banana, and instead settled for some Medium Bananas, then the poor group is better off. Result, our conclusion that "rich people working less helps poor" is intact.
The simplest way to truly conclude that rich working less harms the poor, is if our rich people are already buying from the poor. A rich person who sells Good Bananas to other rich people, and uses it to buy multiple Medium Bananas from poor people. So we have money going from rich to poor. If this rich person works half as much, then they can only buy half as many Medium Bananas.
From here, we can imagine that almost all rich people are, in fact, buying Medium Bananas. To get this to work, we might need a new way of money going from the poor group to the rich group: either we invent Rent, and say that they all live in the same country (or that the rich group in fact owns all the land in the country that the poor live in, and the poor don't want to start a revolution because it would involve violence against a government that is being bought off by the rich), or we make the poor people buy Good Bananas from the rich people.
Both explanations would be reasonable. In my bookmarks, unwatched, are many videos like,
Luxury Fashion Is For Broke People
Why Ultra-RICH don't buy Luxury Products?
How Luxury Brands Brainwash You to Buy
Why Rich People (sorta) Don't Wear Luxury
designer brands are for broke girls
How Designer Brands Keep You Poor
Not sure if related to this point,
[high prices for luxury]The PC Industry is in self destruct mode...
the romanticisation of old money & the myth of quiet luxury
One of the key thinking patterns which we can use to decide whether we live in a world where high earners working less would help the poor or harm them, is the thought pattern "if I like to buy things at low prices, then I should also try to sell things at low prices". Our model does not allow participants to change prices, but when they can, this is the kind of thing that keeps money from circulating from the group of rich people, who have a lot of money, into the group of poor people who have very little money.
To be clear, if we observe that many people have this thought pattern, then we likely live in a world where high earners working less helps low earners.
Completely unrelated, some bookmarks that came up from searches for "designer" and "brand":
GD Column 17: Water Finds a Crack
Why We Need Terry Pratchett’s Brand of Moral Outrage
Note that on Blogspot, as a site that at least in the past was not dynamically generated, page modify times can sometimes actually mean something. I didn't want to check this weblog to avoid affecting views, but I note that if I go to my main weblog and press Ctrl-I for page info, it says October 6, 2024. This at least is at some point in the past, and not the exact moment that I pressed Ctrl-I. So I am pressing Update at 03:03, having made a few minor changes to this update after first publishing it.
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Update 12 Apr 2025, 03:31
The views went up from 3 to 4. It wasn't me!
I thought of what might be a good poll, if my initial enthusiasm to start my browser is any indication. "If you had enough money that you could afford to work less even if you wouldn't call yourself rich, but you didn't want to work less, what proportion of your friend group would be needed to socially pressure you into working less?" 231 characters, not sure if Reddit allows 255 in titles?
Basically, the idea is that when you get close to 50%, it's hard to tell what the real proportion would be. If 95% or 5% of people think something, then someone can accept the social pressure or not, but there's no ambiguity about what that pressure is.
As it gets closer to 50%, there's more potential for disagreement about the direction of social pressure, which when people equate the majority opinion with "the right thing", means more potential for disagreement about what the right thing to do is.
I was thinking about this, the disagreement close to 50%, in some other context in the past day, I think, but I completely forget.
Anyway, I'm sure you understand how if high earners worked less until doing so is no longer helpful to low earners, then people would be in disagreement about whether people who are choosing to limit how much they work are doing the right thing.
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Update 13 Apr 2025, 01:50
There was an informative comment on either this video or this one. It was about how industry concentrates in a specific area to reduce shipping costs. Basically, the topic for which Paul Krugman, who did not publicly share this idea, received a Nobel prize. The commenter's opinion (unless I'm confusing it with a different comment) was that it would take 10~15 years for industry to return to the US, even with protective tariffs.
Of course, Russia has been doing the same thing: trying to boost local industries.
When people are uncertain and anxious, they tend to follow the herd and not seek out new opinions or discussions. To get people in the state of mind to support this idea, I thought of this poll or question: "If a country has a lot of money, does this make it easier to have enough jobs for all of its citizens?"
This wording is meant to discourage associating jobs with hiring lots of foreign workers, as the US does with agriculture and as rich Arab countries do with construction.
Current politics prime people in the US to think about what is best for the group. When people see the solution to economic problems and uncertainties as "make more here, buy less from China", they are in the mindset of working more, which could make them reject this idea if they heard of it. Thus this poll or question. Is the US a country with a lot of money? If it is, then how does it make sense for a country with a lot of money to have a lot of people who are stressed and unhappy for financial reasons?
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Update 13 Apr 2025, 02:27
I wasn't trying to do anything that would make me update this again. So, since I have no idea whether you will read this or what might make you share the idea (other than maybe silence from me), I will talk about something different: dramas and films.
I watched a few minutes of The Mummy featuring Tom Cruise, maybe shortly after it came out, like 2017. When he flashes into a different visual world or something; and the plane escaping from the haboob (dust cloud). I wonder if Autumn has seen this film.
The white wig in The Legend of Anle looked ok from the front, but from the sides and back it was super-obvious. Sometimes you could see flashes of her black hair underneath. According to commenters, in the novel it was the great-aunt who had white hair. Anyway, I thought it was a nice look; and I think if the great-aunt has become immortal through her cultivation or whatever, then her still having black hair is a great way to show that she hasn't aged.
I stopped watching Till The End Of The Moon last year when the white-haired drought demon Siying 姒婴 died, just a few episodes before the end of the series. Baidu describes her as,
Characters in the web drama "Chang Yue Jin Ming"
Si Ying is a character in the online drama "Chang Yue Jin Ming", one of the three demon generals in the demon world. Her real identity is Nüba (n.b. Baidu translates this as "the real body female demon"), and she is the right-hand man of the devil. She is wearing red clothes and having white hair, she is beautiful, domineering, cool and sassy. She has high IQ, strong strength and loyalty. She follows the first demon wholeheartedly and is committed to finding the demon fetus, allowing the demon god to return and revive the wasteland. She is very dependent on her elder sister. The role is played by actress Wang Yifei.
(zh:女魃 is has no definition, zh:魃 recommends zh and ja Wikipedia articles, where 魃 redirects to 旱魃, which is a drought demon, English article Hiderigami, which relates that "Since mid-Han to early Ming, the goddess image has slowly changed to that of a ghost, because the worship of nature has died down since Qin and Han, so the goddess nature has gradually been denied in the hearts of people." So a real demon, in contrast to the 'clam demons' from the enlightened life episodes, or the butterfly demon in Can Lan Jue or the fairies who were previously flowers or plants.)
My intention was that I might finish this series if people use this economic idea. I thought I might also watch it if I got below a certain weight, but that is impossible in the short term.
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Update 13 Apr 2025, 03:25, a few minutes after posting the above
Just on the topic of fiction, I liked the Netflix series Jiok. (Aka H***bound,
— I'm trying to see if I have a screenshot of a book from an English soldier who was in India during a revolt, in which he avoids saying the name of the place that I just censored above; and I came across a screenshot which I will just type out,
"Even people who were queuing up in the supermarket line to buy toilet paper, they have no idea why they are buying toilet paper," said Andy Yap, a professor of organisational behaviour at the Singapore campus of INSEAD business school. "They just see other people doing it and start doing it themselves because they are afraid they might lose out." (2020-03-21) Then another screenshot, from 2020-03-22, of a Yahoo style poll, "Are you concerned by the coronavirus?" with 220k votes, with plenty of people clustered at the end of the spectrum labelled "No — measures are in place to combat the infection."
This is in the middle of a bunch of screenshots that are mostly the World of Warcraft Classic battleground end screen for the Taiwanese or Chinese player SupremeQAQ, as objective evidence of his exceptional skills in PvP. Example, 31 minute AV, 31 killing blows, 6 deaths, next highest players are 25 and then 22 KBs, a few minutes after two screenshots of using the ability h***fire to um... apparently, farm Alliance in their starting tunnel, with a low-health Stormpike Battleguard visible in one.
From 2020-04-05, a screenshot of a comment:
"In Richmond BC in the Warehouse district a Seagull would bring food for a stray cat then they would play around together for awhile. After all that they would go onto the grass and take a nap together. I watched them do this for 6 months I left working in that area but I wonder if they are together still."
Anyway, can't find that screenshot from the English soldier's book.
I thought Jiok was a well-done series that touched on interesting issues; like the susceptibility of humans to believe in claims by other humans for which there is insufficient supporting evidence. I think there is now a second season, which I have not seen. After I moved to the region I'm in now, when it snowed, I would sometimes draw the Arrowhead symbol on the snow. (Edit: I'm not a bully, really.)
I think that, like many smart people, I have never needed another explanation for the ugly things that people sometimes do other than that "people are stupid", and that is how I viewed what I said about the first petition ("sign this petition if you want people to be good"), but all the smart people in the world have had limited success in preventing those ugly things from happening and Jiok explores people trying to find an explanation in a world that does not seem to make sense.
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Update 15 Apr 2025, 21:04 (actually finished 16 Apr, 00:20)
tl;dr: US military members caring about preventing mistakes, and also expressing respect for adversaries. As I write this, 'top' shows
MiB Mem : 3925.5 total, 366.9 free, 3167.1 used, 391.5 buff/cache
MiB Swap: 3074.9 total, 905.7 free, 2169.2 used. 480.2 avail Mem
which basically means I'm fine if I don't open more tabs.
It started out with something innocent: I was trying to get an Amazon Echo device to play "Oh My" by Jang Yoon-Jeong (used in Orangemarmalade's first WoW PvP video the Alexis priest PvP video by the Korean player who also had a mage named Francis). After many, many attempts, I managed to play some songs by the same artist, and since I had asked it to play "the album Jang Yoonjeong dash oh my", I had hope it would play the song I wanted. But after a couple songs it started playing other artists, and eventually the device returned to not recognizing the name of the artist, making me unable to try to to ask it to play "more songs by the same artist" to find the song.
(I cannot just use the app because I don't have a smartphone, and it's set up using my second-youngest brother's Amazon account.)
I was, however, able to get it to play two songs today that I had failed to get it to play in the past; '광 Club Mix Version' by SG Wannabe and '삐리뽐 빼리뽐 (2010 Remix Version) Bbiribbom Bbaeribom' by Coed School, which is the version used with (I just learned that search operators work, including date range) the Chunghwa Telecom opening dance at the 2017 Kaohsiung Information Exhibit.
It also now has the Copacabana version of Roly Poly. It played randomly for me due to similarity with other videos in a playlist; I had failed many times to get it to play in the past, but didn't check whether it was available on Amazon Music at the time. Although it would be Science to see if Amazon's Alexa service will now recognize the song title, I have not tried again. (Note that when asked the song title, Alexa will use the pronunciation "copacapana", due to transliteration from Hangul.) Tangent, via Google:
Yes, when used as the name of the Korean alphabetic script, the word "Hangul" is typically capitalized. It's a proper noun, and capitalizing it is the standard practice when referring to the writing system itself.
No, the word "katakana" itself is not capitalized when used in English, regardless of whether it's referring to the Japanese writing system or a specific word. Capitalization in English is typically used for proper nouns, sentence beginnings, and specific grammatical conventions, not for the name of a writing system or language term.
Anyway, the topic of Alexa's language profiency and voice (it's apparently possible to add better recognition of Korean as a skill) led me to look up the voice actor used to train Alexa and whether she was underpaid; and that led me to this video that she made: Shame Of Thrones
It only has 480 views, and she only has 38 subscribers, despite that she gave her voice to Alexa. I was going to comment on the video, but since I'm linking it, I won't comment to make it harder to find my YouTube account.
Before I signed in to comment I wanted to finish off one or two other YouTube tabs; but in typical fashion, I eventually got distracted by a video with comments that were interesting enough for me to start watching the video. I actually resisted the urge to write here about another video's comments that talked about how frequent it was for inspection companies for engineering or construction to ignore problems and discourage employees from reporting them. The tl;dr of the Wikipedia article: the vessel did not have accurate weather predictions (just like with the US ship that sank in a hurricane); and the crew was not prepared for direction of incoming wind and waves to shift rapidly due to encountering the other side of the eye wall.
As a result of this typical YouTube video walk, I learned of some events that are no longer news: the collision between a US aircraft carrier and, via the comments of that video, an F-18 being shot down by the same carrier's battle group.
The comments also mention several other cases of US navy ships colliding with civilian ships. Many comments are from people with enough experience to give insight into this collision. (Also note the circumstances which led to the collision that caused the Halifax explosion in 1917: when rules meant to avert a collision existed, but did not work.)
I was also going to make slightly argumentative replies:
Always appreciate you covering the things the regular media just doesn't care about. 1 person dies in Gaza it's a headline, 1000 people die in Africa and no one even blinks. — Comment on The World's Worst War is Reaching its Climax
From Wikipedia, "According to a report published by Le Monde in November 2024, the war may have killed over 150,000 civilians through the combined tolls of bombardments, massacres, starvation and disease." The infobox says "522,000 infants dead due to malnutrition". This is the article for "Sudanese civil war (2023–present)", but I remember a news article from years ago, maybe 2015~2021, of a camp that was receiving UN protection (blue helmets sort of thing), and food aid; and armed forces of some group would always try to steal the food, and r*** the females who had to leave the camp to forage for food or wash their clothes or something, and babies were always dying: that was how the article closed, by mentioning once again how babies were always dying.
The recent Gaza war is at around 75k deaths, so it might have more civilian deaths from violence than Sudan, although it has a much lower number of dead babies.
Anyway, the point I wanted to make in replying would have been that the Gaza war is just more visible; and I wanted to back up that point by checking the proportions of the population in Gaza and Sudan that have Internet access, according to a source like the CIA World Factbook.
Another comment from the same video: "Felt bad in the AMA when he said no one is watching the Sudan videos...so here I am."
The other comment I wanted to reply to, or at least check if Wikipedia now has this information (since it didn't when I read about this in the past), was
There was 1 Australian survivor of the battle that we know of who passed away in the lifeboat Able Seaman (AB) Thomas Welsby Clark, from New Farm in Brisbane, was found on Christmas Island by locals but was not reported for 60 years.
The lifeboat is in a museum in Australia. — comment on No Survivors: The Horrific Sinking of HMAS Sydney
Or on second reading, maybe Wikipedia already had that information, because he still died, and there were probably other lifeboats launched that just never reached civilization.
This was all background, which most people wouldn't want to read. I looked up the friendly fire F-18 shootdown, and found this:
After noting the misspelling "ballstic", I checked what site I was on and then the comments. Again, people who are interested in a topic like this are often quite experienced. One comment that sparked many replies:
I was a MK92 fire control tech in the 80's. I never understood how the Vincennes mistook a commercial airliner on ascent for an F14 on descent. I can't imagine a scenario where the many layers of procedures could fail to allow a cruiser to shoot down an F18. I'm sure those layers of procedures are only much more complex now than 40 years ago. I've also never been on war footing and I don't know if they were under a swarm attack or any other details, but I'm sure CIC was plenty hectic. I'm not going to criticize the crew without knowing anything myself. I hope there's a public report to detail exactly what happened.
Thankfully the crew was able to eject without any serious injury.
Another comment made me investigate FFG-7:
I was at CSEDS when it (CG-49 shoot down) happened. It all boiled down to training, and lack of situational awareness. I find it very difficult to understand.With one reply stating,
Today the Aegis Display System (ADS) has the ability to challenge IFF which it did not have at the time of the CG-49 shootdown. The crew training was/is(?) Dam Neck, VA Aegis graduates with their then a few weeks of training. O's and E's failed that day. As was discovered in the CG-49 flight 655 shootdown incident investigation . . . operator intervention CAN create problems via overriding automated systems designed to prevent these specific kinds of things from happening.
The thing that chaps my hide is the removal of the FFG-7 in the wiki writeups on the CG-49 incident. That was changed because it was previously mentioned and now it is gone.
The FFG-7s got two-way Link-11 after that too.
I knew an OS who was onboard 49 that day and met a few others over the years. Their stories are very similar despite being told years apart. Most all versions available paint Captain R as aggressive in nature.
But I think that comment is wrong; it was probably just the USS Sides, FFG-14, which is mentioned on Wikipedia (I'm not sure if this commenter could have been referring to other wikis; for example, Intellipedia).
The following year, Commander David R. Carlson authored an article in U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings in which Carlson called into question Vincennes' self-defense justification for the use of force and wrote, "Iran Air Flight 655 was shot down for no good reason." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Sides
What I wanted to bring attention to though, in the main article for the shootdown, was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655#Radio_communication
In the time that followed (the specifics of which are debated, see below), Vincennes incorrectly assumed the aircraft to be hostile and issued 10 challenges to airliner, seven on the Military Air Distress (MAD) frequency, and three on the International Air Distress (IAD) frequency. Sides additionally made one challenge on the civilian frequency after those of Vincennes. The aircraft was not equipped to receive military transmissions, and the civilian challenges received no responses. With unanswered challenges, the crew of Vincennes commenced the process to engage the aircraft.
My first thought was that "the ship was not prepared to communicate with a commercial airliner and made the faulty assumption that its communications were being heard." But the article continues,
The ICAO concluded that Flight 655's crew assumed the three calls they received before the missiles struck must have been directed at an Iranian P-3 Orion, which was also taking off from Bandar Abbas.
The next sentence, "The crew likely were monitoring the civilian international air-distress (IAD) frequency at the time of the shootdown," has as one reference the Iranian submission to the International Court of Justice. I did not know that they did this, or that the US's payment to Iran resulted from it; actually a case of the ICOJ working as it should. Thankfully the 328-page document is searchable, allowing one to search for "distress".
"British airline pilots have told [Flight International] that radio interrogation in the Gulf by US warships is confusing. Typically, US warships will say 'Aircraft at 20,000 ft, range 15 n.m., bearing 310°; this is US warship - state your nationality and intentions'. This is ambiguous, as the aircraft being asked does not know where the ship is, and so may not realise the message is addressed to him."
And,
It is highly relevant that the Defense Department itself has condemned its own warnings as unclear.
The only thing that the ICAO Report and the Defense Department Report failed to mention was that U.S. warships had no right to issue such challenges in the first place.
To be honest, this makes me think of game streamers, who sometimes seem to assume that other players they interact with in the game will be watching their stream and so that talking out loud is an appropriate way to communicate, when this may not always be the case. Or they may assume that players who can hear their voice also have a good awareness of where the streamer's game character is, and so when the streamer says "here", the other players will know the location being designated.
I note that MH-17, which was also believed to be a military aircraft, was given no warning in 2014. (Not mentioning the Ukrainian passenger plane that Iran shot down.)
Moving on: a long article on the same US Naval Institute site that shows how US military people care about preventing similar incidents, and an impressive comment: http://disq.us/p/1tryl6o
Random excerpt:
13) Another data point is the USS Sides (FFG-14), an Oliver Hazard Perry Class Frigate, possessed RECEIVE ONLY Link-11 capability at that time in History. At their location at significant angles off the track, their tactical displays clearly showed the COMAIR climbing out and proceeding down the air route, and saw the AWG-9 ESM hits staying near Bandar Abbas Air Base, but that information was not transmitted on Link-11, for that ability the Sides did not possess.
I am not focusing on this information as I have not absorbed it at the time of writing. While attempting to confirm the involvement of FFG-7, I found this:
These draw their name from Z-Grams. e.g.,
G. WHEN VISITING FLEET UNITS, I NOT ONLY DO NOT WISH TO SEE FRESH, PAINT APPLIED STRICTLY BECAUSE OF MY VISIT BUT CONSIDER THAT RUSTED SURFACES HASTILY PAINTED OVER ARE A REFLECTION OF POOR COMMAND DISCRETION. THIS TYPE OF PREPARATION FOR ANY SENIOR OFFICER VISIT SHALL BE PROHIBITED.
I. [...] FURTHERMORE, SO LONG AS THE HEAD GEAR MEETS SAFETY STANDARDS, NO MOTORCYCLE OPERATOR SHOULD IN ANY WAY BE PENALIZED OR DENIED ENTRY BECAUSE OF THE COLOR OF HIS HEAD GEAR.
4. FOR MANY YEARS THE ALCOHOLIC HAS BEEN STIGMATIZED, IGNORED OR “COVERED UP.” THE SUCCESS OF OUR EFFORTS HINGES LARGELY ON OUR UNDERSTANDING THAT THE RECOVERED ALCOHOLIC CAN BE A STABLE, PRODUCTIVE MEMBER OF OUR NAVY, THEREBY ENCOURAGING THOSE WITH PROBLEMS TO SEEK HELP WITHOUT FEAR OF UNDUE CAREER JEOPARDY.
The H-Grams contain a lot of historical detail. Some stories of human bravery etc., considered an admirable quality:
The Iranians use the monument as an inspirational example of an Iranian ship commander who went into battle against overwhelming odds and chose to fight bravely rather than to flee. Some would argue that the skipper of Joshan was foolhardy in ignoring repeated U.S. Navy warnings to turn away or be fired upon. However, despite the U.S. threats, the skipper of Joshan continued undaunted with his assigned mission, stating that he was operating in international waters with every right to be there (a right that the United States regularly asserts for ourselves) and that he would take no provocative action. And, in fact, even when Joshan came within range of its one Harpoon anti-ship missile (provided to Iran by the United States before the 1979 revolution), Joshan's skipper maintained discipline and did not fire. Only when there was no doubt that the U.S. surface action group was about to fire on him did he seize the initiative and take the first shot, which luckily missed—barely. My point is that although neither the IRIN or IRGCN are ten feet tall, they are both capable of showing considerable courage, determination, willingness to sacrifice for the mission, and initiative, and the fact the Harpoon was still operational was a testament to Iranian ingenuity—which they also displayed in the mining of Bridgeton and Samuel B. Roberts.
https://www.history.navy.mil/about-us/leadership/director/directors-corner/h-grams/h-gram-034.html
Also, the main page for H-Gram 20 says,
The sad irony is that the deaths of 290 aboard Flight 655 were a significant factor in ending a bloody eight-year war between Iran and Iraq that had cost the lives of over 500,000 soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians.
Second detail to mention, The Bomb That Changed the Course of the War
On 8 May 1942, 24 SBD Dauntless dive bombers from USS Yorktown (CV-5) commenced an attack on the Japanese fleet carrier IJN Shokaku in the Coral Sea. As each bomber nosed over in near-vertical dives from 18,000 feet on the wildly maneuvering Shokaku, their windscreens and bomb sights fogged over so badly during the descent that the U.S. pilots were blinded, forced to release their bombs "by memory." [...]
Finally one SBD, piloted by Lieutenant John Powers (U.S. Naval Academy '35), his wing on fire after being hit by cannon fire from a Japanese Zero fighter, pressed his dive well below the standard minimum pull-up altitude. Power's bomb hit Shokaku nearly dead center and caused horrific and nearly fatal damage, starting massive fires and killing over 100 Japanese sailors. Unable to pull up in time, Powers flew through the frag pattern of his own bomb and crashed alongside the Shokaku. [..]
By the sacrifice of his life and that of his radioman-gunner (Radioman Second Class Everett Clyde Hill), Powers quite likely prevented the loss of the Yorktown at the Battle of the Coral Sea and changed the outcome of two of the most important battles of World War II.
Video that uses game cinematics in which a Japanese plane is damaged and attempts to crash into a stricken and sinking destroyer, only to be shot down: Victory The Cost of Freedom Cinematic. (In another video the Japanese pilot and US sailor both survive to come home.) Similar videos: 6.4M views by a Japanese user, 19M views, 3.9M views.
Third detail from the H-Grams:
Stevens would later reflect on his mixed feelings about the downing of Admiral Yamamoto (a feeling that was not unique to him among intelligence personnel involved) in that it was a deliberate elimination of a specific individual rather than a nameless enemy (some might call it a targeted assassination). Stevens would say the experience would affect his thinking on the death penalty, which he eventually came to oppose.
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Update 16 Apr 2025, 23:04
If you post twice on Twitter, I will take it to mean you don't think it would be wrong for me to attempt to contact someone who is experiencing very minor bullying, whether you read this before your account posts or retweets two statuses, or after. I wouldn't want me being nice to cause a harmful result like you not sharing this idea.
The issue is very minor. As context, yesterday one of the videos I had clicked on was a deceptive video that attacked an actor who is supportive of Gaza. YouTube allows videos to lie in the thumbnail and title, and audiences frequently reward these lies, but I was interested in how far from the truth the video could be and still be rewarded by the algorithm (with further recommendations of the video to other people). I watched it using /embed/ to hopefully prevent it from increasing the watchtime of the video. (Regarding this video, a clip of her saying "I don't want your business" was a poorly worded reference to TikTok subscribers, not any films she appears in.)
The recommended video at the end was a typical, 'popular person just ruined their life' type video, about one Clara Dao. For example, the actor Dwayne Johnson has had videos like this made about him due to what some people see as inconsistencies in whether he had ever gone to a fast food restaurant before. So when this video quoted numbers for subscribers or followers, I checked to see if there was any actual drop in follower count.
As an example of the very minor bullying, 19 hours ago, she posted a video on TikTok which got the comment, "Just stop creating videos at this point- you already disappointed millions of people" (10k likes), to which she responded "But i make myself happy 🥰 other people’s opinions are none of my business" (2k likes). People are not rewarded on social media for being sad unless for a relatable or sympathetic reason: a majority of people in the comments talking bad about you is not such a reason. So it's possible she really is upset that people are hating on her.
For example, this video, captioned with a quote from a commenter: "Your flat chest is your whole personality", or the similar quote at 4:19 in the "ruined life" video, or this video, or her turning off comments on the "13 habits that make me skinny" video. Video, another video, first comment on this video.
So: motivations. Someone being bullied slightly? Maybe not a big deal. Not everyone responds like the previously-mentioned main female lead in My Dearest Nemesis, who threw a bully's school notes out of the window into the rain and who verbally attacked a coworker who insulted her in a washroom.
But I think people who truly try to act in a good way are most affected when they are accused of being dishonest. A selfish person would not care about the loss of <5% of followers.
The other unwatched videos I have: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXRoRGK54Ug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8RfzP0XZGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVuTYohaFrk
In Love Game and Eastern Fantasy Ep 08, Liu Fuyi gives a satchet to Miaomiao (who refers to him with the suffix for "older brother", to show that she has no interest in stealing him away from Mu Yao), who thinks to herself how Liu "is nice to every girl and doesn't make Sister Mu special" and begins to lecture him on how he should avoid being so indiscriminately nice. Everyone Loves Me Ep 01 even has an anecdote of how a male studying with a different female that he met at the library threatened a relationship.
But Miaomiao also protected a classmate from bullies when she was younger.
It's easier to show females as protecting people from bullies; violence against males is considered more normal and acceptable, so a male who intervenes is more likely to provoke escalation. Other dramas in which a female physically fights bullies include Hana Yori Dango (Japanese); Boys Over Flowers (Korean) and maybe the other versions of the same story like Thai and Chinese; Extraordinary Attorney Woo; and Legend of the Blue Sea.
When asked "Does any character in the Korean drama The Glory try to protect another character from bullying?", Perplexity.ai says no. I'm not sure if the bullying started because the main character told the bullies to stop bullying someone else, though: a recap doesn't mention this.
When asked "Does any character in the Korean drama Rich X B*tch try to protect another character from bullying?", Perplexity.ai gives an answer that ends with, "Overall, while direct and consistent protection from bullying is rare in Btch X Rich*, the drama does portray moments where characters resist or challenge the established hierarchy, sometimes offering brief support to those targeted by bullies." I only remember the main character taking off her shoes to climb out of the school window to escape, and the story being in contrast to that of The Glory, with bullying in general being a much less successful activity.
Series in which males don't physically confront bullies: Sisyphus: The Myth (2021), and All of Us Are Dead (2022). Perplexity.ai says,
Which episode of the Korean drama Sisyphus portrays bullying by young children?
The portrayal of bullying by young children in the Korean drama Sisyphus: The Myth occurs in Episode 12. In this episode, flashbacks show Han Tae-sul as a child witnessing bullies beating up his classmate, Seo Won-joo. Tae-sul intervenes and tells the bullies to stop, demonstrating a clear depiction of childhood bullying and its consequences.[1] [2]
All of Us Are Dead opens with the severe bullying of a male. Later on, a male character tries to intervene in the bullying of a male and a female character, but not physically, and the targets of the bullying choose to accept the bullying, rather than the help, using the logic that they would just be bullied later on.
I previously tried sending this idea to two males who were receiving some online harassment, although neither would have said they were being bullied: Asmongold and Pilav.
If I did say anything to Clara Dao, who as mentioned reads and responds to at least some of the messages directed at her, then I would probably mention this idea. Generic supportive comments mean little. One can change how one thinks of criticism, but this level of bullying is very minor in any case, and it would be barely worth it to send a message that likely wouldn't be read. I would have to at least watch the '13 skinny habits' video first to understand what she views as important, but she might have goals that would only be fixed by people using this idea, with the resulting changes to culture etc.
Did I ever mention that I named my first computer after Alex, the protagonist in the novel (with 21 chapters) The Clockwork Orange? Perplexity.ai confirms, in response to "What is the first sentence of each section of the novel, The Clockwork Orange?", that this sentence is "What's it going to be then, eh?"
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Update 19 Apr 2025, 09:38
Since no one has ever had a conversation with me with an aim towards sharing this idea, I don't know whether someone would prefer to use something I wrote. Out of both politeness and laziness, this makes me tend towards not writing things meant for a specific situation: I don't want to suggest that someone must share what I wrote, or for that matter reveal my existence at all, and by doing so deter someone from taking action. Sherine did share the post titled "For Sherine Ayy", which was titled such under the mistaken impression that Ayy was part of her name (and because it sounds like "love" in Japanese), when in fact she was just being Canadian.
A few days ago Yesterday morning, before I went to sleep, I became sad and stopped reading because of a quote. My notes for the day, in "online tasks2, 16 Sep 2022.txt":
17 Apr 2025
Re: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Flatters#Massacre and "expedition across Sahara": what if the Earth was on Ringworld, and separated from other civilizations by 500,000 km of desert?
Napoleon quote, armor of Egyptian army gleaming in the sun, and visiting mother of dead general. (Also, searching for the ancient Suez canal) (And saving general who stupidly attacked a much larger army) (Rivalry with Antoine Le Picard de Phélippeaux)
(search TIL for suez canal napolean)
what were the difficulties encountered in the deception operation in WWII involving planting a dead body on the shoreline with fake plans? Difficulties in getting the plans to German command
Napoleon was about 30 years old when France invaded Egypt. The general who killed himself was about 27 years old.
Historians and authors say things about history being lots of boring things happening in between battles, or perhaps that this is how history is perceived. Battles are, by their nature, instances where inaccurate perceptions are corrected: both sides think they will benefit from win the battle, but one of them is wrong. More than just the loss of human lives (since there can be battles involving 10k participants and the battle is decided with just a few dozen lives lost), I think this is from where battles derive their salience. In any case, I am bringing attention to a battle and the campaign that followed.
The general who killed himself said, "it's stupid for us to be here, we should go back."
Meanwhile, in the US, people were arguing about whether political parties are bad, or something. In India, Britain — or the East India Company — was probably doing British things. The Manila galleon trade would end 17 years later, after 250 years of sailing secret routes east across the Pacific to exchange (AI Overview, since I wasn't sure whether to say "Oriental":) "luxury items and exotic goods from China, Japan, and other parts of Asia" for New World silver.
The important thing is not that the armor of the combined Egyptian army, with its various elements (Ottomans, local tribes, etc.) looked cool in the sun, but that Napoleon noticed it and felt it was worth sharing: presumably at some later point, years later. This was after Napoleon had destroyed that army, killing thousands of people in it and covering the shining armor with blood, and then failed to capture Acre due in part to the assistance of a former classmate (who had scored higher than Napoleon on examinations) to the defending force; a classmate who died of illness before the siege finished. And it was probably after the remaining French forces in Egypt were defeated by the British.
At this point, one might ask, what was it all for? Was this memory of the appearance of the Egyptian army important? Why did Napoleon have such an interest in finding the ancient Suez canal, such that he spent time searching in the desert for it? Why did he name a battle after the pyramids: how common is it for military leaders to actually name battles?
These are questions about how Napoleon thought; what values he held, what he thought was important. Many people would merely pay attention to the military outcomes: the fact of France losing its hold on Egypt, the number of lives lost on each side, whether the decision to invade Egypt was one which should be seen as likely to lead to success or not. (If Napoleon had not executed thousands of captured troops after an earlier siege, maybe the defenders of Acre would have surrendered and Napoleon would have conquered the Ottoman Empire like he afterwards said he would have if Acre had fallen.)
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Update 20 Apr 2025, 18:22
A correction to the first update from 24 Mar: Mei read the webcomic 'Exploitation Now' after I shared it with her in 2004 or 2005. I think I was always a little hesitant to share things because she didn't like a Warcraft 3 scenario that I liked, DotA-like (or Aeon of Strife-like, before DotA) with three factions, multiple heroes per player, and dragons in the middle, called Rival Nations, or the fast, high-pitched music in Run Kitty Run which I liked; and I didn't really enjoy the Footy Wars scenarios that she liked and tried creating.
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Update 25 Apr 2025, 00:45
"I failed to distract myself because the YouTube DASH segment loading fail bug happened several times"
I was thinking about several things and trying to see if they had relevance. The 'civilization has gone dark' situation from A Fire Upon the Deep. I always thought of this as the spreading of memes: not physical corruption, but mental changes propagated over existing communication channels using language.
The game with apples in the Japanese drama Liar Game, where something important happens once everyone trusts each other.
Seeing a ghost in The Double (墨雨云间), not to be confused with the series on YouTube with the same English name but completely different story.
What is a ghost? Someone you believe to be dead, who nonetheless (honestly I have to look up words like this when I use them) appears to be alive or something. In The Double, it's someone who looks the same but uses a different name (despite being able to share the same nickname, allowing the main male character to address her ambiguously). Whereas I call myself the same name as I had in the past: but am I really the same person?
If people used this idea and I was able to have a message for lots of people (let's not say everyone: some people literally don't care), it would just be "animate all these motions in MMD, so that people can use them to make new videos." Helping people who, although they don't know me, act as though they would help me if they knew me. If I had money, this is also what I would do (besides give it away like a typical lottery winner): pay people to do motion traces for MMD.
So this is the thinking I have as a poor person with no money: of course I wouldn't try to do things to get money. That would remove one the "special" qualities I currently possess. Rather, if I actually animated anything in MMD, I would use what is most concisely described as the ransomware model of information distribution: people could pay to use the motion individually and after a certain total threshold it would become free, or after a set amount of time has passed. As I see it, this provides assurance that a creator is not "unfairly" benefiting from selling something, i.e. information, that costs nothing to reproduce. Works best if one tracks the actual hours spent animating, so people can compare the effort with the total remuneration.
I would also use the distribution rule (people usually don't bother to read the rules) that redistribution is only possible for money, not for free. This would be in deliberate contrast to creators who say the opposite, that a work can only be used for free, and cannot be incorporated into anything that's sold. Part of the intention of this is that if people break this rule, and redistribute for free instead of charging for it, then people would have a positive opinion of people breaking this rule, instead of a negative opinion as is the case with breaking the 'no commercial use' rule.
Anyway: if I had money to pay people to animate, I would have them still use this kind of payment model. (If I was using it myself, then the money would be donated to whoever performed the dance if possible, or used to fund more motions made by other people.) I am not saying that people should get free stuff, or cheap stuff: just as this economic idea encourages high earners to work less, effectively resulting in less profit per employee for companies and collectively causing wages to rise, i.e. people selling their labor for more, I would encourage anyone I paid to also try to make money, or to "sell high" instead of selling low.
I wouldn't think of me paying people in this way as giving them free money, either, even if they sold their output for a standard time cost. I would view it as me buying a certain change in the world: dance performances that I like being animated, instead of the vast number of popular songs and dances that I don't care about.
This is very much a poor people concern. Dance performances on YouTube are free to watch; and poor people are more likely to appreciate and care about free things.
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Update 25 Apr 2025, 19:43
To be honest I think managing the johnlennon Twitter account is a little weird. But if you wanted to share this idea, and the way you wanted to do it was through his account, I wouldn't mind.
The reason I went online just now, which caused me to check your account and see your status two hours ago, was first to check which year the first book to feature Liriel Baenre was released; and second to confirm that Lillium is the genus for true lilies.
An article deleted from Wikipedia for Liriel says, "Liriel's adventures caused drastic consequences for all drow, including the return of her aunt Quenthel to her old House, as well as allowing drow magic to function on the surface." Mei used her name either on MSN Instant Messenger before the service closed down, or as a game character name, and this might explain why she cared about the character.
A more detailed article says about Fyodor, "After he was mortally wounded, she aided him along his way, making sure she had his sword with him as his traditions demanded. Ten years later, she still had not gotten over him and found herself unable to love another. She contemplated raising him from the dead, but decided against it."
Games and fictional settings are sort of weird like this. I like the take from the Intercontinental Union of Disgusting Characters:
"Then . . . she could be re—" Damn, he almost let the word "resurrected" slip out in front of one of his senior nemeses. He had to give them as few ideas as possible; if she could be raised from the dead, then the Disgusting Characters might want to prevent that.
"She could be raised any time," the cleric noted, "But not if someone destroys her soul while it's in Heaven."
[...]
Ah, there, with the armed security guards escorting her to the concorde. This was getting a little too schmaltzy for Omnion to take, but she consoled herself in the fact that once she'd sprayed Sick Sword's soul's non-corporeal blood all over the runway things would get more agreeable. Not wanting to let her get in that SST and take off, she scrambled over the heads of the waiting crowd holding Hymenslayer high above her head and yelling some incomprehensible get-out-of-my-way phrase.
Sick Sword looked back and gasped. She was completely unarmed, and couldn't cast any spells that required material components, including fireball and lightning bolt. She had to hold Omnion off somehow. Concentrating, she flexed her brain neurons into action and froze Omnion in a psychokinetic grip.
Skipping around a bit. I never read the books with Liriel. I did read some others featuring drow, the dark elves in the Forgotten Realms setting. It was a stereotype for players in early WoW to name their elf characters after either Legolas from Lord of the Rings, or the drow Drizzt Do'Urden. I remember the first time Drizzt saw the sun, at a very low angle early in the morning, making it faint enough not to blind him, though I don't remember any plot surrounding that or the name of the book.
I think settings with resurrection magic tend to more often forget that possibility, since it makes for bad stories: if you could actually restore someone's life and consciousness, it would be done frequently, making death almost trivial. (Roleplaying games sometimes have rules like "resurrection gives a permanent penalty to constitution", or "it ages the caster by several years", or "no resurrecting someone who has been hit with a disintegrate spell", but those are minor considerations.)
When it comes to more serious writing than the IUDC, I thought of Futmalls (預支未來) (2020): a 'doll' is brought to life. She is acted by the same person who plays another character, a streamer, although I can't remember if it was this character or another streamer who dies. The audience hasn't learned of the death at the time of the doll's activation, anyway.
There might be a Black Mirror episode that more closely follows the idea of 'bringing someone back to life through technology'; beyond just the one about living in a completely virtual reality, San Junipero. If so, though, it didn't stick with me.
I was more impressed with the storyline in Can Lan Jue (苍兰诀). Someone is brought to life, scores or hundreds of times in fact, with each life ending in tragedy. This is, ultimately, related to a warning given by Orchid's master, to the then-God of War; but I don't remember if it was the same warning that Orchid's master gave to Orchid herself, about attempting to meddle with someone's fate. . . .
Well: this reminds me of the anime version of Can Lan Jue, aka Love Between Fairy and Devil. We see another tragic death of the former God of War, with the person who betrayed and killed her inexplicably apologizing and crying after killing her. But in that story, Orchid takes over the empty body, but it begins to deteriorate as it isn't alive, which is sort of showing how 'bringing a body back to life' may not be that good of a plan.
Anyway: I am not trying to say you are like the character in Can Lan Jue who was trying to restore the former God of War, who interfered with his fate in some way (I can't remember if she saved him before or after he died from cold and hunger). I am basically just writing random things that relate in some way to the fact that you posted something on Twitter.
If I hadn't mentioned before, Lillium is the name Mei was using MSN Messenger, around 2006. At the time, I thought it was just a reference to the song Lilium from Elfen Lied, which I never saw; now I think it was a direct reference to the plants that are poisonous to cats. The idea being that I was like her male cat Misaki, and that she would be poisonous to me just like the plant is to cats.
So I think it might be reasonable to say that if Mei is still alive, neither she nor I am surprised that we aren't in a relationship, ~20 years later; and that neither of us would truly consider this to be due to a mistake by someone, but rather due to a lack of mistakes. Like, it was a mistake that Mei thought I still had a home, the first time I tried to meet her by going to the public library; but if she suspected that there could have been someone I liked before her, and that I adopted a female persona in part to avoid the possibility of romantic entanglement during online interactions, then her suspicion had a valid basis.
Around late 2010 or 2011, I'm not even sure when (I thought of this idea in March 2011), I wrote to my friend Hanna, "the only direction is up, but which way is that?" This was partly a reference to how someone who is plunged underwater, or is in a snow avalanche, may not know which direction the surface is. If you were to share this idea, I don't think it would be possible to do so in a way that would be bad for Mei: like how going any direction from the center of a sphere is closer to the surface.
Oh, by the way, the former God of War is not the only character who is brought back to life in Can Lan Jue. I am not someone who tends to watch series more than once, and I have the fear that (not "I fear that", which more implies more certainty) I might not appreciate the series as much if I watched it again, in a different physical environment; with ads; with what I considered to be a worst translation on comparison; and having watched other Chinese dramas afterwards which may make me view it as less special.
One of the few comments on my main weblog was on the post titled, A certain scientific railgun, after the anime series, which I watched after Mei mentioned it. Lyrics of first opening theme song, Only My Railgun. But it's hard to feel the song has relevance after 14 years of people not replying to me: it does not seem similar to when Misaka Mikoto destroyed the berserk amalgamation's core. And the song was released with "Late in Autumn" on the B-side. This is why I have the second opening theme song my sleep folder, not this first opening theme song.
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Update 26 Apr 2025, 12:29
Accidentally checked this account's email after logging in. StrawPoll replied on 09 Apr,
thanks for your message! Wow, this is really a critical bug. I just released an hotfix to make sure the first vote for an "Other" option is counted correctly. The bug was introduced while adding a temporary cache to the data interface. When adding a new "Other" option, the vote registration system checked the validity of the option based on the outdated cache. I have now ensured that the cache is updated between the two steps.
I can offer you to fix your results by manually fixing the votes of your given poll link and setting all "Other" options with zero votes to one vote. Let me know if you would like me to do this.
Regarding the edit vote permissions: "Admin" means permission to edit all votes.
- Nobody: Not even admins can edit votes. (But the can change the settings, duh)
- Own votes: Everyone can only edit their own vote
- Admin & own votes: Voters can edit their votes and admins can edit all votes
- Everybody: Everyone can vote any vote, even their own.
Anyhow, for reporting this critical bug above, I'd love to gift you a permanent Pro version. Feel free to create a free account and let me know it's email address.
In mid-2013, after I said "a representative sample", Sherine said "it really is all my fault". I won't bother to say that I am not sure precisely what she meant. I will just imply that it would have been possible for Sherine to get supporters of Dhozkhar Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to share this idea, even if this would have implied his legal guilt for many of the acts he was accused of (he was found guilty of all charges in court). Was she right?
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Update 26 Apr 2025, 13:01
I had thought I planned to say two separate things in the previous update, before I got distracted by the email. I remembered the first thing: "Anyone can do hard things if they practice." After literally seven years of practice, I sat down to try to play this song in less than 12 minutes, for no other reason than that it was about 11:48. It took me about 18 minutes, despite only minimal repetition of parts where I made mistakes.
HOWEVER, I am not sure if anyone other than me could be said to have had any practice in convincing people to use this idea. You don't get better if you don't try.
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Update 26 Apr 2025, 23:23
Slimey Limey, link YouTube; wall the trebuchet
YouTube account, no reply
Demi
pastes
last email, spammy emails
songs; soundcloud; piano
maths; hanna
https://www.google.com/search?q=experiment+people+shock+themselves
"On average, the study participants who elected to self-zap gave themselves 1.47 shocks in a 15-minute interval — “not including one outlier ..."
"how many people died in gaza today"
Israel inflicts 'man-made starvation' on Gaza as attacks kill 45
Al Jazeera
22 hours ago — The Gaza Government Media Office updated its death toll to more than 61,700, saying thousands of people missing under the rubble are presumed ...
These updates today follow from me reading your most recent status and noting the title of your album: "Power to the People."
I am pausing my search for a YouTube channel to note the story of the novel, Fire and Hemlock. I reread it maybe 8 years ago because it was one of Diana Wynne Jones's novels that I felt I did not fully understand when I read it when I was young. The main character is pressured into doing something that isn't to her benefit because of the presence of many older, serious people who would disapprove of her if she didn't do it, and she is afraid of looking foolish.
It's easy for you to do nothing in response to what I say. It's even easier if I say many things, most of which you don't care about, and you don't want to bring attention to what you consider to be my mistake of saying extraneous things. Something something, dignity.
I stopped trying to find people who might share this idea because I didn't receive a response from Andres Acevedo, after emailing him around late February. This might not seem unusual: as I said to Richard Stallman, basically the only other non-anonymous stranger who talked to me about the idea that I can remember was Susan Wilson: the same Susan Wilson who received controversy from the game community in ~2013 when she made a Gofundme for her daughter's expenses for a game development class.
I chose to view Andres Acevedo's lack of response as noteworthy, and possibly suggestive of hidden interference by "unknown entities", aka Yara et al. Just this moment, I checked his Twitter account: no apparent activity since last year, so doesn't disprove this. I compare this to when I attempted to inform ZeroEmpires of this idea, way back in 2016 or so, only about five years after I first started trying to et people to use this idea: shortly thereafter, he announced that he would be ending any involvement with the game Age of Empires II; only to reverse course a few months later, mysteriously return to the game, and finance a tournament. The first AoE2 game I watched on YouTube was a game by him on a randomized map split by a large river, with a sort of weird island in the center that most players didn't really explore or make use of, and multiple teams that betrayed each other at the wrong moments with FFA diplomacy settings.
If Andres Acevedo publishes another video, I will have more evidence to assess whether there is interference by "unknown entities". But it's no use for me to try to get people to share this idea if it just leads to "unknown entities" contacting those people and suggesting, without explanation, that it would be better for them not to do anything or reply to me.
Now I refer to my notes.
But, my browser just had the display update bug, that freezes the screen. I am publishing, restarting, and then continuing. Video I wanted to link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wWVFzI6Cic
Videos that I have open for no real reason, other than to send periodic pings to the server, and have to close now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksvIdetjWZ8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bko07PPMKFg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnnc2IRKSxM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4g8jvvdYJc
(last one linked before) I realized that the reason Nicky 棠棠's performance looks better, at the start just after the jump, is that she moves her hip to the right first, which accentuates the following movement. Note how her fellow dancer, 庭庭, does not even rotate her hip, but treats the movement as a step forward and then back.
(In the military, during basic training, two things that instructors would have trainees shout while doing physical exercise (aka push-ups): "attention to detail", and "teamwork is the key". It seems like a basic thing, but some people just don't pay attention to details.)
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Update 27 Apr 2025, 00:37
I will point out that that although the chance of me dying (why isn't it "I dying", I don't understand English) in the past 10 years is relatively low, despite my complete lack of health care, it's amazing my hard drive is still alive. The SMART data maxed out at 10 years active spin time a few years ago. (Techically "Power On Hours", but I gave up trying to get it to actually spin down since there was inevitably some activity to wake it up.) It still only has a single bad sector, in a file that I identified long ago and have not since touched, so the drive has never had an opportunity to try to write to that sector again and remap it if the write attempt fails.
If it died, I would have to decide what to do, which would basically be me asking myself if it would be justified for me to transfer the photo of Kate Kiatsiri that I saved from her Facebook page in 2012 to my desktop folder on a new drive. I might just prefer to stop using my computer.
In the short story True Names, one character, the Slimey Limey, is describing an operation he did to get some money, involving also giving millions of other people money. Someone else remarks that they might be able to find his true name using just that information, and he waves his hand and says it was a bit more complicated that that. Anyway, same thing with me linking the first video. In the second game in the video, towards the end, we see four trebuchets being killed by melee units. (We also see 30 arbalests being flattened by a siege onager shot, visible on the timeline in the end-of-game summary.) This could have been prevented by some walls around the trebuchets.
It wasn't actually that big of a mistake not to have those walls in this game: it would have been reasonable to expect to be able to push faster, or to win a fight and thereby effect the same aim of protecting those trebuchets. Another action that might be expected to influence the game more than building those walls would have been to kill the enemy trebuchet with arbalests, staying out of castle range, before paladin numbers could grow. That would probably have been a low-risk, high-reward move; while walling the trebuchet here has the most utility when an ally does not send the expected military forces.
Really not sure if I have any reason to mention it though, other than that I changed the name of my first Twitch account to Wall the Trebuchet.
This is the second point in "people not sharing this idea". Demi Rose Mawby didn't share it.
WoW Classic was released in August 2019. The earliest posts by Demi Rose that I can see are from Nov 2019. I did see this status. Sometimes when I eat nuts, I think of what Demi Rose said in an interview, that nuts are a food she likes but has to be careful of. One of the foods I am currently slowly eating are macadamia nuts: one container of nuts that are slightly rancid because they were kept in the refrigerator, and another container of nuts that are very rancid despite having a later expiration date, because they was kept at room temperature. I ate 20g of the slightly rancid ones yesterday. These nuts have a significantly higher fat content than the "fake nuts" that are peanuts, and significantly less protein; and I have to say that from a nutritional standpoint, I don't think I would buy them.
So I cannot read, or examine the context around, the retweet and the post by Demi Rose that I remember, which I would describe as "a reaction to me watching Peyton Chorvat streaming WoW Classic." (This is the connection to "Wall the Trebuchet".) It couldn't have been a reaction unless she knew I was doing it, and she couldn't have known except through the involvement of "unknown entities".
However, I think I'm not supposed to be angry or upset that people contacted by "unknown entities" are not sharing this idea. Demi Rose's birthday is 27 March and I didn't do anything unusual on that day except check her Twitter account.
I also said in the past, after her father died, that "I'm glad he died" or something similar. I didn't say that after her mum died. I expect anyone who learns this to view this as a potentially hurtful thing to say.
If I hadn't noted these things, I would most certainly have forgotten them; and it's enough to remember roughly what I was going to say, without the extra effort of how these different topics might relate and what is the best order for them. My friend Hanna, who I think received a college degree in economics, said to me in 2011 that economists are impressed by maths. So, it might not even be possible to get an economics journal to submit anything if it doesn't use maths.
A day or two I was thinking of something involving maths? Ok, like: "simulate work output as the product of knowledge times effort, where both of these are have diminishing returns like the square root of time or the log of time or something". Then, "optional: output is also a function of sleep with diminishing returns, so that optimal output involves a non-zero amount of sleep". With all of this, we just reach the conclusion that "overworking people with a constant wage rate is inefficient, because they will eventually contribute less than they earn."
Quite a basic conclusion to use all this math for: the important thing is multiplying knowledge by effort, so output is greater than linear with time; but also still having a limit, due to the need for sleep and also the wage rate. This reasonably follows the understanding that it's better to employ 1 manager working 20 hours, than 20 managers each working 1 hour. (Note that that specific math is important: if it really was just knowledge and effort are both the square root of time, then multiplying them just gives us time, which is the wrong result.)
Then from this, we would derive the potential value from people working less. We know this value exists, because at some point (due to need for sleep) the marginal output from working more is zero; and before here, the slope of output is positive but almost zero, but the wage rate would still be high, so unproductive to employ someone at this point.
Then we name variables for everything, to make it impressive, and divide the potential benefit in two, half going to the company and half going to the employee in the form of higher wages.
Then maybe we could track the effects of value being split up like this, adding additional workers to keep the total work done for the company constant; and making estimates for changes in spending, using a marginal spending function for the employee, and make some kind of model for where that spending goes and what effect it has. (This is the "buying Medium Bananas instead of Good Bananas" part.)
Ok, next point. I don't really care about your music! I might have listened to one or more songs of yours long ago, like in 2013.
Sherine linked to some songs, on Soundcloud. She had an account there which had her voice, I think: I didn't bookmark it. I do remember that when linking a song, she said that the song, which was played on a piano, made her sad. Instead of that song, I saved some other songs she didn't link, on 17 Jul 2015: "song of storms piano again [197441840].mp3" and "A Song Of Simplicity [184318681].mp3". So, I guess, don't feel bad that I don't appreciate your music?
The note "last email, spammy emails": I was thinking of making some point about how Mei didn't respond to most of my emails, basically after the time when she either blocked me or was pressing some kind of "report as spam" or something button, returning the same message as when an account is deactivated. Like, "I'm not going to write a bunch of messages if you never respond, because I have had the experience that it doesn't lead to a good result." But there was the huge number of 'spammy' messages that my Yahoo account received over a period of several months, around 2015 or something. I felt that those were from Mei, as a sort of reimbursement for the emails I sent to her. The last email I received that was definitely from Mei was just before 2011 ended. The second-to-last was maybe in 2009, after I sent an email from the military address I had in Iraq, as proof to her that I had actually gone to Iraq. (I don't think I sent anything else from that unclassified address to anyone else: normal daily correspondence was on the classified SIPRNET, not connected to normal Internet including mail servers.)
Pastes:
impetus towards action, 22 Jan 2025.txt
conflict narratives, 04 Oct 2024.txt (This is the explanation mentioned in the original post on 18 Mar, that could imply that love is evil)
stat progression in MMOs, 01 Jan 2025.txt (I am going to post this on a public forum for discussion if my weight goes below, I think, 53 kg. Currently it is ~64 kg. On 01 Jan, when I wrote this, it was ~54.34 kg as mentioned in the original post.)
So: do you still think that it is realistic to expect normal people to support this idea, or for me to find some other influential person who is willing to, let's say, act like the leading bird in a V-formation?
Also, for no particular reason, I was going to mention that Sherine's last name is Saikaly. Her sister is Nadine. I don't know her brother's name, but it would probably be easy to learn it from public data. I don't know Yara's last name, and I didn't keep track of her brother's account; he might use his last name on his profiles.
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Update 30 Apr 2025, 13:43
I didn't see the film Inception (2010) until years after it was released, but I liked it. "A half-remembered dream." Experiencing a lifetime over the course of a few hours, and then the memory of that life fading and not affecting the memory of events that happened before it.
There was something I said to my friend Laura (Drunkenfairy on Guildcafe, Shadowbunny in World of Warcraft): "The world needs heroes". I think it was after her best friend died from anaphylatic shock in 2009 (a friend whose name I asked for then sadly forgot): this would mean I used my unclassified military email address and that I no longer have access to a record of the conversation.
Heroes are very common in Chinese stories. The first Chinese drama that I watched was some episodes of the Singaporean drama, Heroes in Black (2001): it literally has "hero" in the name. One of the first Chinese films I watched was Hero (2002), due to people recommending it on Amazon back when reviews were mostly from humans, not bots: "It became the first Chinese-language movie to top the American box office." Noting that (Wikipedia references Roger Ebert's review that apparently says that the film was the most expensive film project in China at the time; I shared this idea with Roger Ebert in 2011, on his infamous post about video games; and) I also watched The Emperor and the Assassin (1998), which was also "the most expensive Chinese film made up to that time", features the same assassin, and does not attempt to portray that assassin as heroic.
The film Hero did not try to be historically accurate. Rather, it reflects a Chinese disposition to fill the world with heroes. I am making this post, basically, because while I was watching weight-loss-related videos, at 13:15 my computer started playing the Shaolin Soccer theme. And at this exact moment (14:08), it's playing the song 來加油HO from the baseball team formerly known as the Lamigo Monkeys. This team also sometimes used the Shaolin Soccer theme during its games:
2014-08-15 桃園國際棒球場 Lamigo VS 統一獅 Lamigirls Amis 小妍 林智勝 應猿曲
20150402桃猿VS統一 - Lamigirls Eli 倪倪 一下 林智勝應援
20150402桃猿VS統一 - Lamigirls Eli 倪倪 八下 林智勝全壘打[轟吧, Shaolin Soccer theme]
20150402桃猿VS統一 - MVP 大師兄 林智勝 + Lamigirls 獨一無二, Chance, Shaolin Soccer theme
20150422桃猿VS義大 Lamigirls Eli 倪倪 七下 林智勝應援
Lamigo Monkeys 応援風景 31林智勝 Amis(Lami-Girls)
05⧸08 兄弟 vs Lamigo 賽後，擊出勝利打點的林智勝獲得本日MVP[2014 Shaolin Soccer theme, 內山姑娘要出嫁, Moskau]
Point: the new Age of Empires II expansion is controversially giving heroes to the kingdoms of Shu, Wu, and Wei, saying that "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms places a significant emphasis on the heroes of the era, whose valor, loyalty, and strategic brilliance are central to the narrative."
The original animated film Mulan, with an old and weak emperor who is easily taken prisoner by enemies, was not popular in China. The live-action remake, which was intended to better appeal to Chinese audiences, has a strong emperor who states that he killed the father of the antagonist and is only captured through a devious stratagem.
I am asking you: be a hero. Don't act in a way that Chinese people would disapprove of.
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Update 01 May 2025, 22:00
I have sent an email to Clara Dao (who mentions her real name on her second YouTube account). As a result of randomly being recommended, and watching, On These Questions, Smarter People Do Worse, I converted an intended video comment into an email to the Veritasium team. I didn't mention the main idea of this site in either email, just the importance of high earners working less in fixing problems. If either of them replies, I might have an opportunity to mention this idea.
During an unsuccessful search for ... oh, I said "queue" instead of "cue" — for "a named effect that explained a study, or general effect, where people who see a blurry image take longer to identify the subject in the image, as the image becomes less blurred, than people who start with a less blurry image. That is, once people decide something, they become resistant to changing their minds (but do eventually do so, unlike the description of 'belief perseverance')", I found some other things that were not worth mentioning in an email but for which a bookmark would not suffice:
Results indicated that both positive primes and greater fluency increased the positivity of impressions. In an interesting pattern, priming effects were greater for perceptually disfluent (blurred) faces, consistent with disfluent images also triggering more elaborate, constructive, and longer processing.
The aforementioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process—even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it—can alter judgment of the truth of the statement, along with evaluation of the intelligence of the statement's author. This is called the "illusion of truth effect". Multiple studies have found that subjects were more likely to judge easy-to-read statements as true. [...]
In a study, participants were presented with statements, some of which were true and the rest being false. Half these statements were presented in high contrast colours and the other half were presented in low contrast colours. Independent of truth, participants judged the high contrast statements as true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processing_fluency
In other words, the more skillfully or elegantly an idea is communicated, the more likely it is to be considered seriously, whether or not it is logical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluency_heuristic
I have tried many variations in complexity. I believe that for a serious proposal, complexity is unavoidable: people will not support a big change to society just because some words are written in a specific font.
___
Update 02 May 2025, 16:15
"Auto-scout, auto-farm, auto-everything!" —Otto the Great (allegedly)
I watched the first 40 minutes of the third video. Summary: World of Warcraft is introducing a button to allow players to use the correct ability without knowing anything about the game. They are doing this primarily because there was already an add-on (implemented using the game's UI scripting language) which did the same thing, which many people were already using. Some people see the addition of this feature as bad for the game. Their opinion is that it reflects a design that caters to a tiny minority of players who play the game at the highest level as a job.
At 23:42, Asmongold played a video from 2020 of himself enjoying the game as it was then. He admits he is just as much to blame for the culture which led to this single-button feature as the three people in the video.
There is some kind of pressure to make the game hard to play. Before WoW Classic (re-)launched in 2019, people would often point to how frost mages in original WoW would only have to press a single button in raids, Frostbolt, as their way of showing that the game was worse then. Someone in the video comments referenced this.
My view, and the view of a lot of people who played original WoW, was that raiding was inherently boring. It was hard mainly because of the difficulty of coordinating 40 people with varying schedules and unreliable Internet connections (some people were still using dial-up modems at 56 Kbps maximum, which is about 10% of the bandwidth needed to stream a YouTube video in 360p), and because of the lack of knowledge. The first guilds to clear content generally did not share with other guilds what they learned from their attempts: it was actually significant when one such guild, which I forget, shared their strategies for clearing Molten Core in 2005.
I have thought that WoW should change one of the reasons that raiding was so boring: bosses being immune to most crowd-control mechanics, including roots (able to attack, but not move) and snares (moving more slowly, as opposed to attacking more slowly). Warcraft III, which contributed much to the art style and class design of original WoW, already had a mechanic where certain units would be affected to a lesser degree by abilities. But this isn't really the point.
This new single button is almost certainly focused around one thing: doing maximum damage, for specializations with a damage role. (There is probably no such thing as a hybrid damage/healing specialization in WoW now, where the button or the "assisted highlight" would recommend both damage spells, that target enemies, and healing spells, that target allies.)
Most suggestions on how to avoid having this single-button functionality, aka auto-play, will be on how to make doing maximum damage easier, so that the single button is not necessary.
It would be better to think about how to change the design so that the question of how to do maximum damage becomes less important.
"How to do maximum damage" is only a question at all in modern WoW because (as I understand it, without being able to name a single ability that has been added in the last 10 years) of the interactions between abilities and the large number of powerful abilities with cooldowns.
Classic WoW, in contrast, has a design where a great many powerful abilities have no cooldown: they are instead limited by their mana cost, or come with the disadvantage of a long cast time, which doesn't matter when attacking a distant, immobile boss but is often important in other situations, like PvP.
Oh, sorry for disordered writing, but one title I used for my most important PvP suggestions in WoW in 2006~2007 was "Bringing the WAR back to Warcraft". I thought I would mention this because of you being associated with peace and all. People in original WoW didn't care as much about raiding being boring, because there was world PvP, where players randomly encounter each other in an unstructured, inherently unequal and unpredictable environment and fight for minimal rewards (less than the opportunity cost of not doing more rewarding instanced battlegrounds).
So in Classic WoW, the question of "how to do maximum damage" is very easy: you just analyze your abilities, which may vary somewhat during leveling as new ranks can be significantly more powerful than the previous rank, to determine which has the highest damage-per-second.
This was not the most interesting question for several reasons:
1) the highest damage-per-second also sometimes had bad damage-per-mana, although talents frequently pushed up damage and made high dps spells also have high dpm, and mana took long enough to recover that it mattered.
2) the damage of a single spell could have significant overkill for a target's remaining life, meaning wasted mana or time spent casting.
3) the five-second rule meant that it made sense to open with a long-casted spell, finish with an instant or channeled spell, and occasionally do different things if procs gave mana-free spellcasts, which did not trigger the five-second rule.
4) positioning of the target mattered, because a nearby target could potentially attack the player but could also be more easily looted. So a sequence of spellcasts would optimally kill a target just before it reached the player. This would depend on the target's health, which could vary between mobs (caster mobs having lower health), the initial distance to the target, and the opportunities or player's ability to kite the mob during e.g. the 1.5 sec global cooldown after casting an instant-cast spell.
5) mana importance could vary, such as if only one more mob must be killed and then there would be a long period of walking during which all mana would regenerate.
6) other considerations such as damage taken were important. Casting Frost Nova was low dps for the 1.5 sec global cooldown that followed, but it could be important for staying alive.
7) for mages at least, the importance of taking damage could vary, since food could be conjured for free. Eating to recover health could be done at the same time as drinking to regain mana (something which new players did not always realize). It might make sense to take damage if it did not endanger a mage's life or lead to lower dps through casting pushback (delaying a spell's completion when getting hit).
A lot of these concerns never really applied to raiding, which is one reason why it was a less interesting part of the game. Still, the point is that one can make the question of "how to do maximum damage" less interesting and less relevant for achieving goals in the game, whatever those may be. Again, making threat more interesting would probably help (so that doing more damage has a distinct possibility of leading to a drawback or penalty), though I have no idea if threat is a concern in the "mythic plus dungeon" content which many players in modern WoW find the most interesting part of the game.
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Update 02 May 2025, 20:51
The most likely result if you read this is for you to somehow use it as a justification for not immediately sharing the main idea on this site. Well. My general thoughts, having skimmed one or two other videos about WoW's upcoming autoplay button and watching up to 32:48 in Blizzard Is Adding a One-button Rotation.. My Honest Thoughts by Xaryu, is that Blizzard's developers just do not feel as strongly about moral issues as I do.
Any conclusions I would make about Blizzard's current actions would be based on the design, because I don't really care about the story and it's not being influenced at all by the Blizzard employee in that video. (Supposedly the new trilogy of planned expansions is partly because a story-focused developer came back and found that the story or writing team did not really have any long-term story plans, so he made one.) But I think it is possible to make conclusions about the moral values of Blizzard employees based on the past story.
Warcraft III launched in 2002. Its expansion, The Frozen Throne, launched in 2003. According to Wikipedia, the last we see of the characters Arthas and Illidan before the defense of the world tree in the base game is when, "Illidan meets Arthas, who tells him about the powerful 'Skull of Gul'dan'. Consuming the Skull and becoming a demon-elf hybrid, Illidan uses its power to kill Tichondrius but is banished from the forest by his brother as he is now part demon."
World of Warcraft, launched in 2004, did not feature either of these two characters. Of course, Blizzard could not anticipate the spectacular success of WoW; but eventually planning began for an expansion, and this did feature one of the characters, Illidan, and was released in early 2007. Perhaps they could have delayed re-introducing these characters for another 10 years, but many players of WoW had played Warcraft III and wanted the story to return to these characters that they knew.
I think I had a brief conversation about Mei about the players in WoW having the opportunity to fight and kill Illidan, and that she also didn't like that players did that. I don't actually know how much of that expansion, The Burning Crusade, that she played. She had transferred servers around September or October of 2006 (I had made and leveled a new character on the server she had transferred to, Stormreaver, a few months earlier, after I finished military training), and so I didn't know the name of any characters she might have played during that time, I think. Actually, I must have known at least one character of hers, because I sent in-game mail to her during the time when she was apparently blocking my emails; but this character was not actively being played at the time, as shown by the WoW Armory website. (So I was not sure if Mei might have died and caused her email to expire due to inactivity.)
Anyway: she did play a death knight during the following expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, released in 2008. In 2006, she had expressed a disinterest in the story at the time, which was Ahn'Qiraj, and that she wanted the story to go back to Arthas, which it did in that expansion. Shortly after that, she expressed on the forums a lack of interest in progressing through multiple difficulty levels after first experiencing the story on an easy difficulty level, and due possibly in part to me discovering this idea, I have no knowledge of any of her game-related activities beyond that point.
Blizzard included these characters, Illidan and Arthas, in expansions because players wanted to see them again. They allowed players to fight them because it was an excuse to get loot. Although the specific form of the encounters and story likely underwent some refinement, there was probably never any chance that these characters would not end up dead.
The fan-made movie, Tales of the Past III, shows a character being raised to undeath by Arthas. Although I never played through it, this was is the experience of every death knight character in WoW: starting in the service of the Lich King, Arthas, but eventually breaking free of his control somehow. So Mei's death knight, a Blood Elf, eventually slew the entity that had enslaved her. Similar to Sylvanas: "The short story Edge of Night by Dave Kosak, published in 2011, explores Sylvanas’ emotions after Arthas is dead."
The key points from all of this: Mei played a character who had an in-game reason to want Arthas dead. Most characters did not really have such a justification. Arthas had contributed, in some way, to "saving the world" of Warcraft, by facilitating the elimination of a key agent of the Burning Crusade. Even if someone starts a war, that is not usually seen, in both modern and ancient times, as a reason to kill that person. Ok, I will ask AI: "Was Arthas planning to invade the continents of Azeroth or Kalimdor? Yes or no". Perplexity.ai says no (references omitted):
No, Arthas was not planning to invade the continents of Azeroth or Kalimdor in the sense of a military conquest for his own empire or kingdom. Instead, as the Lich King's champion, Arthas led the Scourge in devastating campaigns across the Eastern Kingdoms (the main continent of "Azeroth" in the context of the Third War), including the destruction of Quel'Thalas and the attack on Dalaran, to fulfill the Lich King's and the Burning Legion's goals. His actions ultimately led to the summoning of Archimonde and the Legion's invasion of Kalimdor, but this was not a plan of Arthas himself-it was part of the Legion's broader strategy, with Arthas acting as a pawn.
Arthas did not personally plan to invade Kalimdor; rather, the Scourge and the Legion threatened both Azeroth (the Eastern Kingdoms) and later Kalimdor as part of the Third War's global conflict. After becoming the Lich King, the Scourge did launch attacks on major capitals across both the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, but these were orchestrated by the Lich King, not Arthas as a mortal prince or as an independent agent.
Attacks on Kalimdor didn't seem familiar, until I realized that they happened during World of Warcraft, not Warcraft III, and so Perplexity.ai is wrong. Oh, tangent: I was going to link to Wowpedia, because it has some pages on loot systems that have been deleted from the newer wiki, and my first bookmark there is an achievement that Mei's character got, which was added on 2010-11-23. So she must have played the game after that point.
Anyway, original WoW had an event called the Scourge Invasion, with the Scourge being under the control of the Lich King, Arthas. Most notable for being featured in Faxmonkey's "Even Stupider Mage Tricks".
Despite that: the basic idea that humans should try to avoid killing other humans. Or in the context of WoW, where Illidan is an elf, and an entire player faction has no humans on it, that sentient beings should try to avoid killing other sentient beings. (There is a moment in the Chinese-made WoW movie, War of Internet Addiction, where an image of a group of real-life humans appears on the screen, and then an image of non-human game characters in the same poses. Since it has no real relation to the dialogue taking place it could be anywhere in the hour-long movie and I won't bother to find it.) Although I never really experienced the story of either expansion, I don't believe there was any suggestion in their story that it would be bad to kill Illidan or Arthas.
To sum it up, with the caveat that "Mei's death knight character killed Arthas", Blizzard did not seem to think it would be bad for the players to kill either of these characters, while I think it was bad. And this is the kind of thing that led to some players quitting WoW, long before addons that automated ability rotations became issue: Blizzard not caring when players did some things that people might think are bad.
The one significant thing that Blizzard did do was, "when did blizzard ban virtual reality addon in wow" > during patch 3.3.5, banning the Augmented Virtual Reality addon that drew images, such as raid markings, in the 3D game world. That wasn't a moral concern: it was "this addon is making the game seem less complete or consistent."
Jimmy: The World of Warcraft Story has the narrator say, "If you're on Thottbot then you're cheating anyway." I also agreed somewhat with that thinking. I sometimes used outside resources, to check drop rates or find special items, but felt that it was somewhat wrong to do so. Blizzard's official policy was that data-mining was not allowed.
The point is that if players cheat, meaning to do actions which are seen as unethical because they provide an advantage but result in an overall worse experience for players, a game should discourage those things. A game that implicitly rewards cheaters, by not punishing those who cheat for an in-game advantage, will experience an increasing percentage of cheaters in its population.
Blizzard's tolerance of cheaters might just be typical. Perplexity.ai, when asked "what percentage of us high school students copy homework answers?", quotes results that range from 74% to 80%: "80% of students at one high school admitted to copying homework at least once a month in a 2017 survey."
Regarding both copying of homework answers and using addons to make raiding easier, my perspective isn't a usual one: I would have derived very little benefit from copying others' homework answers in high school. But I might have benefited from being dishonest in other ways. My grades in my last two years of high school were often bad because of not doing projects: if I had turned in a very bad project on which I spent only a few minutes, instead of no project at all, I might have gotten a D on the project, worth ~60% of a full grade, instead of getting 0%. This would have been a very efficient way of raising my grades, and poor grades might have been the reason for my initial rejection from my school of choice.
But I viewed doing this as unethical. Better to find out what would happen if I learned as much as I could and got very good test scores, but poor grades.
So: as revealed in the video I linked, the concern that Blizzard has is not that players are using addons to gain an advantage. It's that the process of accessing and installing those addons is too difficult. If raiding is a test, they don't care if people cheat on the test.
I don't think I'm being too critical here, despite their attempts to use "private auras", not visible to addons, to make encounters more difficult. Their core concern there was still just making difficult encounters that are not too similar to previous encounters. They didn't care about addons being used to automate other parts of those or other encounters.
Caveat: way back in original WoW, Blizzard did make a change to stop one kind of "cheating": the DeCursive addon was made less powerful. Search for "decursive wow addon nerfed": Google's AI Overview says,
Yes, the original Decursive addon in World of Warcraft was nerfed or significantly altered, especially during the vanilla era. The original version, which allowed for more automated debuff removal, was replaced with a version that required more manual interaction and didn't automate as much. This change was likely due to concerns about the addon making the game too easy or taking away from the player's agency in removing debuffs. Reddit also mentions that the aim was to use a more restrictive API, which meant no decursive or automatic downranking of spells.
One comment says it was nerfed in patch 2.0, but another person says,
I recall we were raiding AQ20 the week the patch went through and there was much qq about the extra effort to actually keep players decursed for one of the bosses.
Which is closer to the timeline that I remember, only a few months after guilds started clearing raids, and not 1.5 years later. (Edit: AQ20 wasn't released until Jan 2006, while the Molten Core raid was first cleared in April 2005.)
So: in the video I linked in this update, they talk about boss ability usage being predictable. This is a clear instance where "cheating" is very helpful, and all it requires to make "cheating" less helpful is to increase variability so that timers will not be accurate.
There is a slight cost, in that with more randomness, the performance of a group will have less correlation with the group's "skill": a less-skilled group might clear a difficult encounter before a more-skilled group, due purely to luck. This also applies to the randomness which I proposed should be added with new threat mechanics. But games are inherently limited when used as measures of skill, even when no one cheats: individual performance will always be limited by effort, and group performance will be limited by the composition of the group. A person who is very skilled won't perform well in a game if they must spend most of each day working and caring for disabled relatives; or if they happen to play with a group of friends who, due to inherent ability or lack of time to play, do not have good individual performance.
So games should be for fun, and randomness that makes cheating more difficult is good.
I hope your sense of justice is strong as well.
___
Update 03 May 2025, 10:37
Oh, no: I am talking about a dream. Remarkable in the apparent consistency and validity of its abstract thinking, and for me waking up when I did. Yesterday, 02 May, I started playing music with the intention of going to sleep around 04:37, didn't set an alarm besides an increase in volume and 150-sec inter-song delay that triggered after 12000 sec, and woke up around 14:13: much too late. Today, I went to bed around 03:28, less than 14 hours after I woke up, and didn't expect to fall asleep. But I did, and am now awake.
I noticed the remarkable clarity of my abstract thinking in the dream, then (while still dreaming) rolled over from my back to my side, and noticed how activating the part of my brain that involved movements had disrupted both my thoughts and my ability to think clearly, then spent some time remembering what I had been thinking about and trying to decide if it was as worthwhile as it had initially seemed.
Unsurprisingly, I overestimated its value, but I think it might actually have non-zero value. Other details of the dream are unrelated: my two middle school friends were present, but these details were unrelated to the abstract thinking.
The abstract thinking was this: imagine reality as some kind of 3D possibility space, because we are used to thinking in 3D. There are possible things, represented by empty space, and impossible things, which are solid. Something like a ball could move through this space (again, because we are used to continuity, without things teleporting around).
Now: someone could say, "I don't like how this looks. I want to make things look prettier." They constrain the possibility space, so the ball moves along certain tracks and things overall look nicer. What they imagine is still within the realm of possibility.
But a different person, who has the same goal of wanting things to look prettier, starts with the same true possibility space but modifies it in different ways. Their conception of where the ball can or will move is different. These two modified spaces both reflect the same base reality, but are inconsistent with each other. The path for the ball that one person imagines has the ball going through solid objects in the space the other person imagines.
Each person thinks that constraining the possibility space is harmless: they are only making it prettier, and any movement of the ball that they imagine is still possible. But when you combine their thought processes, we reach the contradiction and disagreement about the validity of movements.
(Shortly after I woke up, 'Ghost Love Score' on Nightwish's 2006 End of an Era concert finished, so during my dreams probably either that or the previous song was playing, around 1:10:00.)
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Update 03 May 2025, 13:04
My confidence that talking about this idea, economics, war, or peace will prompt you to share this idea: zero. The best thing would be for me to say nothing at this point, meaning at least for the rest of today. But I got distracted by a comment after I continued the video from yesterday, which made me think of how nice it would be to do stuff with friends in what is almost certainly a "grass is greener on the other side of the fence" moment.
The comment is someone saying they would rather take someone with a "Cutting Edge" achievement, which someone gets by completing content within a certain time period after its release, than someone with a 100 parse, which is the top 1% of performances according to a metric like damage-per-second against a particular boss in combat logs submitted to an analytical website.
This made me think of a poll: "would you rather being in a dungeon group of top-performing players, or a group of new players with bad performance?" The majority would prefer the first group. The question is how many people would prefer the second group: a number close to zero, or a much larger number like 20~30%?
The reason for preferring the first group is not only the better group performance, but also the opportunity for making interesting friends.
However, this opportunity is higher for people who themselves perform well. So I realized that one should maybe qualify the question and state that with either group, the player responding to the poll would be well-treated. It is an unfortunate fact that many players in WoW attempt to avoid playing with low-performing players, such as by kicking them from their automatically created groups, which gives the kicked player a penalty that prevents them from playing for a while in the same type of content.
If it sounds insane to reward players for being mean to others, and to punish players who are treated badly by other players, then I agree. But that isn't the point.
I have basically no experience with doing things with friends. I met Mei on a particular custom scenario in Warcraft III, which I won't name because I use it for the password of one of my email accounts, and she got sort of mad because I was killing her (maybe with a ping advantage) but decided to add me as a friend at the end. But I think because of her getting mad, I never played on the opposite team from her again.
In WoW, her first character (in the open beta) was a night elf hunter, while mine was a gnome, so our characters didn't meet until around level 15~20, in Lakeshire, where she tried to see if I would be surprised by the loud noise and sudden character movement when she switched hunter aspects. Then we traveled to Booty Bay, trying not to die to piranhas in the river, to do some fishing.
After the game's launch, we were again in separate zones. She invited me to her guild, but I left it shortly thereafter. I don't think we actually played together in the game until over a year later, on Stormreaver, when she joined my Sunken Temple group that needed a tank and made the run very easy due to being lvl 60 with Tier 2.5 raid epics. Other than when I complained about her not fighting against Horde in Booty Bay, and she unexpectly flew there to participate (immediately and predictably dying to guards), or the time (maybe immediately following) where she dueled a Horde warrior on the sand bar south of Booty Bay while I watched (with that warrior making a post on the forums about the duel), that was the only time we played together in World of Warcraft.
I didn't really play with any other friends in the game either. I did make a friend in the game, Hime aka Anh, whom I did a quest with killing wolves in Duskwood around lvl 20~25, but we didn't become friends until I unexpectedly encountered her again when I was giving away enchants near the Stormwind bank. I was higher level by then, and we never actually played together again. When she needed a group for the Scarlet Monastery, around lvl 35, I was already at or close to level 60, and I messaged people of the appropriate level for the dungeon to make a group, then left the group without even escorting them to the dungeon, which involved traveling through hostile territory on a PvP server.
So, I wish I could have played with her then. But I didn't want to make the run easy, as Mei had made my Sunken Temple run too easy with her lvl 60 warrior.
In general, I tried to form groups with new players, by directly messaging people of the appropriate level (or slightly lower) instead of relying on public chat channels, and mentioning quests (which could only be done once). I actively avoided groups that had the purpose of efficiently farming gear. On my paladin, created with the launch of the Firetree server in 2005, I was one of the highest level characters on the server by around lvl 45, and received an invitation to join other high-level players, but I was not interested as I expected they would simply be farming gear in dungeons, instead of playing as I did by focusing on quests and preferably doing each dungeon only once.
This habit of preferentially grouping with new players made it unlikely that I would encounter someone who would demonstrate exceptional performance, such that I would have a strong interest in being their friend.
Years later, in 2007 or 2008, I did have the opportunity of playing with many other people in battlegrounds on the public test realms, with premade lvl 70 characters with standard gear. There might have been people whose names I came to recognize. But optimal play did not involve persistent interactions with certain other players. I was either fighting alongside everyone, in large battles, or I was doing things on my individual initiative like capturing or defending bunkers and towers, with even one extra player being an unjustified waste of resources. Perhaps I could have made friends if I had tried, but I didn't, maybe due to earlier failed attempts to initiate meaningful conversations with strangers: or the fact of Mei not responding to any of my emails while she was in Japan.
I guess I did meet someone during that time, whom I haven't talked with since 2011 or 2012, who was making the journey from the night elf zone to Ironforge on a low-level character on the public test realms, but I never made any friends from playing in group content. And yet I see the appeal of making friends this way and playing with them: of preferring the group of skilled players rather than the unskilled players.
But my thoughts about this are biased by my lack of experience. I know that people play with their friends in online games. I know that some people, particularly younger people who are not overweight, enjoy practicing and performing dances with friends. At some level, I know that people do other things with friends, like go hiking in the wilderness (as portrayed in the film, A Lonely Place to Die). But I guess videos of these activities are not as popular as videos of games on YouTube, because I don't have much awareness of these activities. I also see interactions in dramas, but often there are just one or two close friends, and activities done as friends are constrained to ones relevant to the plot, and probably subject to some form of bias towards memorable, unique experiences instead of being more representative of everyday life.
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Update 04 May 2025, 14:17
Don't wait for everyone to care about the things that you care about. It isn't going to happen. People tend to stop caring about a problem if they think it isn't possible to solve.
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Update 05 May 2025, 01:01
A comment I made on YouTube, which I enclosed in single parentheses, made me think of someone on the World of Warcraft forums in 2005~2006 who would enclose all of their posts in double parentheses to denote out-of-character communication, and now I have thought enough that I have a reason to mention this person.
Summary: it is too bad that "my" generation did not share this idea, but it is also not surprising to me, and it may be because of my experiences that make me not be surprised at this that I found this idea at all.
Elf Only Inn: I am going from memory here. A short search didn't give the relevant comic. I am linking these without reading them:
https://bigshinyrobot.com/comics/the-sunday-funnies-elf-only-inn/
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Webcomic/ElfOnlyInn
https://tropedia.fandom.com/wiki/Elf_Only_Inn
http://www.elfonlyinn.net/archive.html
http://www.elfonlyinn.net/about.html
So instead of being a comic about elves and demons and vulcans, it's a comic about people pretending to be elves and demons and vulcans. Duke, Megan, Woot, Nimoy and the other cast members all interact in the make-believe world of Elf Only Inn, which they access from their computers across the country. They've never met, but their relationships are real.
The specific comic I thinking of is when one of the characters goes to another chatroom, focused on some real-life topic. Instead of a unique and interesting fantasy avatar, everyone in the chatroom has a boring avatar, something like the depictions of gender for public bathroom entrances.
So, in 2000~2010, maybe people used their real-life names in some contexts to interact with strangers. But these contexts were not very interesting. There was no streaming video until ~2005 with sites like YouTube, which did not even have 360p video. The archive page mentions the day the comic shrunk in resolution because the author realized that some viewers were using a monitor resolution 800x600. Many people with computers did not even have a camera with which to display images of themselves, and there was no mass system of data selling or whatever it is that allows random people to make money off of strangers without those strangers actually paying nowadays. So using one's real name or image on the Internet had very little advantages and carried the small risk of being harassed by strangers from the Internet. It was safer not to do it.
This is why a certain person posting on the World of Warcraft forums using a female night elf avatar used double quotes around everything they said. It was actually reasonable to interpret their base identity to be that night elf, instead of a human (or a cat, etc.) at a computer. No one used real names: not even the community managers. The names of a few lead developers were publicly known, but even these individuals were more typically referred to with a game-related nickname.
It was within this context or milieu that I tried and failed to get Blizzard, the developers of World of Warcraft, to use certain game-related suggestions that I felt were important for the future success of the game.
Despite all I have written on various random topics, you might not know this. Starting I think in 2005, during the time period when my only Internet access was public library computers, I started posting suggestions on the World of Warcraft forums, and basically continued up until I finally quit in 2007. (I did post again a few times, like the argument I copied to my main weblog in 2010.) This period was, basically, trying to have the maximum chance the actual game developers would see my suggestions, by bumping my threads with superfluous posts, which was against the rules.
It mostly ended when a community manager finally replied to one of my threads, in early 2007, and locked it due to my constant bumping. I think it's likely that the more important game developers never saw my suggestions from this time. The main point is that there was no large output of support from other players in support of my suggestions; the way there was for, say, player interest in a cosmetic feature that eventually became Transmogrification.
A month or two ago, I saw that I had a screenshot from 2007, when another player on the forums noticed my forum signature where I said I was quitting and basically expressed a high opinion of me. But I don't recall this player ever posting in support of my suggestions.
My first explanation for this would be that "it was just a game. Everyone hiding behind fantasy avatars was partly because people agreed that what happened in, with, or to the game wasn't really important. If the game became stale and uninteresting because of a bad design, that wouldn't really be a bad thing for the real world, because a lot of people played the game too much anyway."
But this explanation doesn't work for people not supporting this economic idea.
An explanation that does work better for this is, people saw my suggestions; if they were smart, they saw that they made sense, that they would benefit if the game implemented my suggestions, but also that the game's developers and all of its employees would benefit; and then the question became, why wouldn't the developers implement these suggestions without other players having to post in support of them?
After all, it's quite reasonable that many good suggestions would not be understood by a majority of posters who read them, so just having a voting system would have left many good suggestions behind. The way to identify good suggestions would be for a competent developer to read them. The official policy at the time was that suggestions should go a special forum, which developers never replied to, supposedly because of some past legal drama where someone claimed that Blizzard had illegally copied a suggestion. This meant that neither the original poster, nor other players, could know if a suggestion had already been seen and recognized as good by the developers.
Unlike the "just a game" explanation, this one can apply to the lack of support for this economic idea.
I don't think I would have agreed with the "just a game" explanation as justifying inaction, anyway. To me, it was just time: if people had vocally supported my suggestions, I wouldn't have had to keep bumping them. And during most of the time I was posting on the forums, I was not actually playing the game: I was trying to progress in real life. If I could keep healthy priorities, other players could too, even if the game became better and more "addictive". (Websites like Cracked used to write articles about how WoW was a very well-designed Skinner box or something: I could not find any such articles earlier than 2010, though. Another site's post from 2015.)
So: Blizzard developers not seeing my suggestions, or them having unfounded confidence in their design, could have explained my initial failures. But Greg Street, aka Ghostcrawler, saw my argument from 2010, and indirectly praised it. (After I broke the forum rules by crosslinking it on an unrelated thread he was responding to.) Blizzard was considering doing at least something different about threat . . . threat decay, specifically. But they ended up doing nothing except a mechanic which gave tanks bigger damage numbers (the Vengeance mechanic).
I said something: apparently, it was in the actual argument, first paragraph (and not in some later reply which I didn't save): "the hopes and dreams of people provide a guiding force, which is not always apparent in the direction it will take the game." Anyone who follows WoW can see a clear demonstration of this, when Blizzard went from saying "you think you want [WoW Classic], but you don't", to making WoW Classic. And, of course, many of my polls and surveys about this economic idea have been to try to illuminate some desires which may not be readily apparent: like the preference for young people to earn their own money instead of getting it from hard-working parents.
But this applied to my suggestions as well. I felt they were good suggestions. But I couldn't say with confidence that implementing these suggestions would actually lead to a larger playerbase than an alternative.
I think later events provide at least some evidence that my suggestions would have helped. Again, the Vengeance mechanic was purely about giving bigger damage numbers to tanks, so they were doing more than like 1/5 the damage of a typical dps player. (I think this is accurate because tanks had something like a 500% threat multiplier at that point.) Eventually, I think WoW arrived at the different solution of not allowing gear-based tanking specialization. The hybrid gear paste I linked a week ago talks about how (honestly I forgot this until I reread the start when I pasted it) with the proper math players have many options; while with bad math, players have only one option.
So: I made good suggestions. But these suggestions were not taken. Possibly Blizzard did not want to exactly follow the suggestions of someone who was not an employee. It was partly for this reason that I applied to Blizzard on January 1, 2012. I was not hired, which could have been for several different reasons: since my rejection was not until I think May 2012, very late, I think it was related to this economic idea.
Although this chapter was after I had already found this idea, the overall story is that there was something I could not accomplish due to systematic systemic problems. And yet those systematic systemic problems were also ones I could anticipate hindering my subsequent efforts to spread this idea. That is: I could not be surprised when average people, with nothing remarkable for a newspaper to say about them, did not support this idea because they did not support my other idea.
All I can say is that Mei probably knew about my game-related ideas, at least since 2010 (I think I communicated a brief critique of Aion's PvP system to her in 2009 as well), which means she could have anticipated the lack of support for this economic idea as well; and yet she didn't try to stop me.
So, yeah: I thought that person on the World of Warcraft forums who always posted with double-parentheses around their text was pretty cool, even though I never adopted that habit myself. It was more like I was posting my suggestions in-character, as a gnome mage: a class with intellect as its primary stat, and a race with a bonus to intelligence.
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Update 05 May 2025, 22:42
Around 9 years ago, my friend Hanna (same age as me) said she wanted to punch me in the face. She also said that she worked in payroll, but didn't explain further. My best guess would be something about how using this economic idea would be illegal without changes to laws. (Edit: I had intended to say that it might have been because I was still talking about this idea, but I had forgotten that she mentioned working in payroll.)
I think the right thing for everyone I know to do would have been to support this idea. For example, signing the petitions. They did not.
"Offer everything, ask for nothing. Expect the same." This was advice I once read about how to act with one's friends.
The message here is supposed to be something about how I'm not rewarding anyone I know for not sharing this idea.
You are aware of how US Americans give up much more easily than Japanese when faced with a seemingly impossible problem? Ok, it looks like there was just a single, non-rigorous study, and it might not replicable. Maybe students give up once they see their classmates give up in a snowball effect, with a large variance between schools or even between classrooms. Or the Japanese students only kept trying because they were told to do it by a teacher, but would have given up sooner if faced with the problem on their own.
To be honest, I thought this was a study done with older people. I fear that anything I wanted to say has been undermined by the lack of factual basis. I am still publishing it so that you can judge whether to stop caring about this economic idea &c.
While attempting to find a study by Harold Stevenson that Perplexity.ai believes exists but cannot name, I came across this quote, from 1993: "Schooland (1990) confirmed this perspective, finding that Japanese college students do little work, seldom go to class, and cheat openly on tests." This sounds like what I read, I think in a textbook for learning Japanese, that colleges are hard to get into but once you're in them, they're easy. In contrast, I have not heard this about Korean or Chinese colleges.
This person believes that an anecdote from Stigler and Stevenson about a young Japanese male taking 45 minutes to do a problem reflects a true cultural difference:
https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/why-american-culture-gets-mistakes-all-wrong/
I can't access or find the name of the study linked in that article; the link gives an error.
This article from Stevenson in 1987 gives data comparing US, Chinese, and Japanese cities, which the 1993 article criticizes for using a poor US city with a large number of people from certain ancestral backgrounds. But it also gives data about expected performance. One of my 2012 posts, the one immediately following the first petition, mentioned that most people think they're above average but that some cultures might be different. At the time, I had no data on other cultures. That article says,
When we asked American first-graders how well they believed they would do in mathematics next year, 75 percent said they would be among the best students. Only 37 percent of the Sendai and 50 percent of the Taipei first-graders were this confident. (Beijing data have not yet been analyzed.) Similarly, 58 percent of the American fifth-graders expected to be above average or among the best students in mathematics in high school, percentages that again were much higher than those of their Japanese and Chinese peers, among whom 26 percent and 29 percent, respectively, anticipated this degree of success.
Eighty-seven percent of American fifth-graders thought their parents were "happy" or "very happy" with their math performance. The percentages of ratings at these levels for the Japanese and Chinese children were 52 percent and 38 percent, respectively.
Similarly, 83 percent of American children thought their teachers were "happy" or "very happy" with how well they were doing in mathematics compared to 22 percent of Japanese and 37 percent of Chinese children. It will be difficult to convince Americans that their children should work harder in mathematics when both parents and children are satisfied with their current performance.
I don't have any particular point yet: I read the following after I had finished pasting the above, from another article by Harold Stevenson in 1993:
“Let's say that your child took a math test worth 100 points. The average score was 70. What score do you think your child would get?” Both groups were confident in their children's ability. The averages given by the fathers of children at grades 1, 3, and 5 were much above the hypothetical average of 70. Chinese and American fathers alike gave estimates in the mid-80s.
[...] Results have been consistent. Americans will be satisfied if the scores are similar to or lower than those they expect; Asians will be satisfied if the students do better than what is expected.
This might not be the best methodology, because it might not control expectations about the difficulty of the test. Grade inflation in the US is certainly a thing; I have read comments that say that grades in Korea are normalized, so people must fight for the top grade and it is actually possible for the average to be a low C. Grade inflation:
Most students taking the ACT have claimed to be labelled as "A" students by their high schools. Despite apparently impressive GPAs on ACT registration forms, the average scores have fallen since 2012. Data from the Department of Education, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress have also found strong evidence of grade inflation and declining achievement.
A search for "us average grade in school" says,
High School: The average GPA is around 3.0, a B average.
College: The average GPA is around 3.1.
Is the average gpa in the US REALLY 3.0?
Reddit · r/gradadmissions
30+ comments · 11 months ago
In my undergrad class, average GPA was over 3.5. Average GPA at Harvard is 3.8. I think you are way overestimating how hard it is to get a high GPA in America.
So: if the children of the surveyed fathers regularly got test scores in the mid-80's, the respondents might have given an answer that basically ignored the stated average score and only reflected the student's typical test scores.
On the other hand, I have learned that Chinese people like to brag about the academic or professional success of their children. Even if the question was adjusted so that the stated average was well above typical test scores, respondents still might say that their children would do better than the average.
Edited in after posting:
"Our culture exacts a great cost psychologically for making a mistake, whereas in Japan, it doesn’t seem to be that way. In Japan, mistakes, error, confusion [are] all just a natural part of the learning process."
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-jul-22-me-stevenson22-story.html
"0% of the videotaped U.S. eighth grade math lessons had instances of deductive thinking, as opposed to 61% of the Japanese lessons"
https://www.gcsu.edu/sites/files/page-assets/node-808/attachments/fulco.pdf
"In general, it may be said from an analysis of picture 1 that the Issei, Nisei and white middle class are self-motivated and achievement-oriented, while the white lower class are not. The determination to push ahead no matter what the obstacles, which is evident in the Issei stories, is a part of the Japanese value system and character structure, and it is this orientation that has been passed on to the Nisei in somewhat attenuated form."
"This reflects the American lower middle class overevaluation (particularly in the women's stories) of education as morally good in its own right; also, one 'gets an education' as a status symbol in much the same sense as one buys a new car or a house. Education is likewise valued as a status symbol by Japanese Americans, but the emphasis is more on the knowledge and learned background it gives one, or as a down-to-earth means to further achievement."
https://escholarship.org/content/qt69v51802/qt69v51802_noSplash_2b7fa5c61dd515178ec4211aeef57598.pdf
Mindset: "don't be too curious about the world, because you might learn something that upsets you." Works well with the idea that people are 'bad' by nature, as this suggests one is more likely to learn of people doing upsetting things. I would suspect that Japanese people invent and watch things like horror movies more to test whether they truly believe that people are not 'bad', but I haven't watched any horror movies myself, or discussed the topic with anyone.
"In a 'The grass is greener . . .' pas de deux, Japan pronounces the innovation and flexibility of Amerian education enviable, and we report that the Japanese system is the one to be admired." (1987)
I will just say this: if you don't want to share this economic idea, don't share it.
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Update 08 Jun 2025, 18:56
It's been over a month. Am I justified in updating this post?
I might have mentioned this before in a place where you could read it. I bought two external hard drives while I was in Iraq or shortly after, around 2009. I named a red one Mio, after the female lead in First Kiss (2007), who is scheduled to have surgery which she might not survive. She had a strong will to live. A silver hard drive I named Teppei, after the main character in the drama Karei naru Ichizoku (2007).
It's a curious thing to name objects. Growing up, my family's vehicles had names. The large Navy surplus van which was required to fit all of my siblings was named Bigfoot. I even named the 4GB flashdrives which I obtained in 2008: Obsidian, after the viewpoint character in the Obsidian Chronicles (the character also uses the name Triv, after answering that his "name is trivial").
https://www.google.com/search?q=why+did+triv+have+that+name+in+dragon+weather
AI Overview
In Christopher Rowley's Dragon Weather (it seems there might be some confusion about the author, it is Lawrence Watt-Evans who wrote Dragon Weather, not Christopher Rowley), the character Triv gets his name in a specific and memorable way.
Here's the explanation, based on user recollections:
- The main character, an escaped slave, tells a girl he meets in a brothel that his name is "Unimportant" because he wants to avoid being found.
- The girl, struck by the length and meaning of this "name," suggests calling him something shorter and easier, like "trivial," which then gets shortened to "Triv".
Therefore, the name Triv in Dragon Weather originates from the character's attempt to be anonymous and the subsequent playful renaming by another character who finds his self-declared name "Unimportant" to be, ironically, quite a mouthful.[1]
And another flash drive with two partitions, for LiveUSB booting, named Banana (for the song on the car radio when I stopped living with my oldest sister and she drove me to my new home) and Grapefruit, for reasons you might remember.
Anyway, Teppei got dented when I was carrying around all my stuff (I think my rice cooker also broke) and eventually died after several months of using it to seed dramas on BitTorrent, in mid-2011. This is all just to give attention to the character in the drama, who died at the end.
Maybe 10~12 years ago, I was discussing something with my brother, and this somehow led to him expressing the opinion that Japanese people were, on the whole, more likely to lie and be dishonest than US people. I can't remember if I had anything to say that could have changed his mind. I might have mentioned the chance of people not taking money they see in a parking lot or something; or maybe people returning lost items or money instead of keeping them:
ライアーゲーム オープニング (uploaded 11 months ago, but there's a strong possibility it will get deleted in the future)
"If people only act in a good way because they're rewarded for acting that way, are they really any more likely to act a good way when there are no established rewards?" I guess is the question.
But it makes me think of this article: https://japantoday.com/category/crime/how-to-stop-your-umbrella-from-getting-stolen-in-japan
Which is in my bookmark folder, "Umbrellas unread, 26 Feb 2022". Which also contains,
https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/2bw8z0/the_umbrella_exception/
https://www.tsunagujapan.com/8-situations-to-be-aware-of-when-visiting-japan/
https://blog.govoyagin.com/umbrella-culture-japan/
and follows the bookmark folder, "Ukraine etc. unread, 26 Feb 2022" (31 items, including "The history and impact of bananas in Guatemala", "A (Grudging) Defense of the $120,000 Banana - The New York Times", "The banana as we know it is in imminent danger | Ioannis Stergiopoulos, André Drenth and Gert Kema | The Guardian", "Five Moments That Prove Contemporary Art Is A Hoax") and "Download pan.baidu, 26 Feb 2022" (3 items) and is followed by "Ukraine president approval, 27 Feb 2022" ("Ukrainian president Zelenskyy is having 90% approval rating : ukraine" and "r/Ukraine’s Approval Rating of Zelenskyy Several Days before the Invasion. How has your Opinion changed on him Now? : ukraine").
Without actually reading all of those links, my understanding is that they say that Japanese people rarely steal, with umbrellas being the big exception where a lot of people will take any umbrella if they need one. Dramas don't focus on umbrellas so I don't really know.
Of course, even if Japanese people are mostly honest, it doesn't mean that Japanese people expect other Japanese people to be mostly honest. The dramas IWGP (2000) and Nobuta wo Produce (2005) both feature the main male character being taken to a police station and accused of a crime. In the second, the character reflects how scary it is when no one trusts you. (The drama Sexy Voice and Robo (2007) also has a scene where the mother gets very upset when her husband doesn't trust her.)
A few months ago, on 18 Mar 2025, I asked Perplexity.ai, "What is the significance of the three monkeys?" Unfortunately, it does not store the answers for very long, but when I ask it again today, it says,
Interpretations in East and West
- Eastern Interpretation: In Japan and much of Asia, the three monkeys are viewed as a positive moral guide, reminding people to avoid evil in every form to lead a virtuous life. The monkeys are sometimes seen as a way to ward off evil and maintain good mind, speech, and actions.
- Western Interpretation: In Western contexts, the symbol often takes on a more critical meaning, representing willful ignorance or denial of wrongdoing—essentially "turning a blind eye" to impropriety or injustice. This interpretation suggests a lack of moral responsibility by refusing to acknowledge or confront evil.
This "turning a blind eye" was the sense used at the start of the film Cast Away, and maybe the sense meant by Nadine Saikaly in 2013 or 2014.
Anyway, my view, in the context of things like Miyamoto's Book of Five Rings where he says that, "Generally speaking, the Way of the warrior is resolute acceptance of death", and his criticism of strategists who are "concerned only with sword-fencing" and "flourishing the long sword and carriage of the body"; and Sun Tzu criticizing recklessness; is that the notable omission is "do no evil", because people can find it difficult to agree on whether certain significant actions are evil. There is a well-known caster of Age of Empires II, from a Catholic-majority country, who describes any unit that dies as going to the "d*** h***". Clearly, this person views soldiers that kill other soldiers as acting in an evil way; and Japan has had a lot of soldiers.
I was annoyed at you for not sharing this idea in early 2013. But I can't say that you not sharing it was wrong. Maybe I could have found some way to get people to use it without your help. Maybe people would have disobeyed orders that seemed to make no sense.
I was considering sending an email today, saying that I avoid suggesting "do this thing which would obviously be good for the world", due to the risk of that course of action not being taken: it would threaten the story that people who didn't share this idea are stupid. But I didn't send that email.
Other things involving the Internet from the past two days that I didn't do:
07 Jun 2025
Reddit image post: "auto scout, auto farm, auto mobile" with cheat car, arrow pointing right from each
plot of Doubt featuring Meryl Streep
if government agency doesn't spend all of its money one year, can it use the unused amount the next year?
(belt or whatever that was not registered as returned at AIT, no receipt)
Ask Reddit: "which currently existing ethnic, religious, or political groups is it most acceptable to express hate towards in your culture?"
compare [8gkUS8dX9mo][FPetr-mURbY] dates, views, current quality, remove FPetr-mURbY
08 Jun 2025
poll "Robots do all work. You get $100/day. Everyone else gets $10k/day. Do you press button that destroys all robots?"
minimap high speed of -zGH10TAw_c
Also I am slightly sick with a cold.
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Update 11 Jun 2025, 19:15
I looked up the Riemann zeta function, which I think is related to the possibility (in a loose sense) of unusual strings of primes or non-primes which bring a ratio below or above a certain value. I started out not really understanding it, and my understanding did not significantly progress before I clicked on "Basel problem".
As may be evident, I have largely recovered from my illness, which was probably COVID again. I joke to myself that anytime I get sick it must be COVID, despite hundreds of other respiratory diseases in the world, but the positive test results of other individuals make it likely this time. I have never been tested for COVID myself.
What I found funny was the mention, and use, of L'Hôpital's rule in that article, because of an obscure video that only a few thousand people have seen and even fewer would remember:
WSG v Operation LAWL by the player Arash on the game server Mannoroth-US, released 2007-01-01
That was awesome, you didn't need to let us hear the sound at the end though it broke my $60 headset I just got >.<
One player from the opposite team mentions this rule at 4:29, prompting another to ask, "do you guys always talk like this?"
According to Perplexity.ai, the AP Calculus BC test has long covered L'Hôpital's rule, while the easier Calculus AB test only started covering it in 2016. So these could have been high school students, but it's more likely they were college students at this time. Smart, and yet acting in a way that caused the author of the video to waste 25 minutes running around outside of the map, wasting time, in order to waste the time of the enemy team whose voices can be heard.
If I learned L'Hôpital's rule, which I might have since I did take the AP Calculus BC test (by reading ahead and neglecting to do my homework), I had long forgotten it. I would also be unable to evaluate the integral in the article, "Proof that 22/7 exceeds π".
The danger of being seen as a smart person is that people may expect that you may form a group with other smart people, which will act in opposition to a group that contains people who aren't as smart.
So I was led from that thought to this one: "Don't trust anything that you can't verify yourself." But this is kind of wrong, because we do this all the time. I have never been to Finland, but I believe that it exists and people who claim to come from Suomi actually do. So instead, "Don't trust anything that someone in your trusted group can't verify."
If we believe things that can't be verified, we get the replicability crisis in science. So this seems a fair standard to apply to claims.
But, what about when the trusted group is "people who aren't too smart", and the claim is being made by someone from the "group of smart people"?
I've tried to focus on explanations that most people could understand, even if they might not immediately accept them because uncertainty about the existence of relevant information or feedback systems that could contradict the explanation.
Consider an alternative: a detailed model of the economy, as complicated as climate models (or actual economic models that organizations like Moody's or the Congressional Budget Office might use to calculate fiscal multipliers), which the average person will never understand. Some smart person says, "this proves society should undergo a drastic change which, in both the short term and the long term, will lead to some people feeling like they have lost more than they have gained."
An explanation can be simple enough that everyone can understand it. If society does change, maybe people 30 years later will no longer the details of why it had to change, other than a small number of specialists; that's fine. If people needed to, they could still take the time to understand it once more (like so many other things we learn in school and then forget).
Not the smartest; because that can lead to a lack of trust and lack of effectiveness. The value of being a smart person among average people, rather than an average person among smart people.
Well, I'm sure that after pressing Update, I'll almost immediately begin to think that saying all this was not helpful.
I guess I wanted to express that I would prefer to be grouped with average people or something?
"Somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me, I ain't the sharpest tool in the shed"
Hatsune Miku ~ Triple Baka - Full Song feat. Teto and Neru
I remember the portrayal of Sir Isaac Newton in Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle as a master of disguise, able to hide in plain sight among the common people.
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Update 12 Jun 2025, 14:21
I'm writing about chess, but I found something else. I did a search with "locate -i chess|less" to see if I had saved an image of your white chess game, and found 'chess deception 05 Feb 2012.txt', and in the same folder was 'circular 22 Jan 2012.txt'.
I had completely forgotten that I wrote this. This was posted on a version of the World of Warcraft forums which no longer exists, and it might have been read by a neuroscience student at the University of Colorado; the lead systems designer for World of Warcraft; and a shadow priest who wrote a poem on the forums.
It's 9k characters. I'll put it on pastebin: How to fix human racial (advanced users only)
Raw version because when I visited pastebin a month or two ago, my browser froze for a bit and then all my tab titles gained a background of random images like from games and I was worried that my 3-year-old browser had been hacked by ads. The title has a double meaning: the overpowered human racial in World of Warcraft at the time was called "Every Man for Himself", added in 2008, nerfed in 2010 then un-nerfed four months later, redesigned (nerfed) in 2016, and finally renamed in 2020 to "Will to Survive".
I think I found your site because someone mentioned your white chess game on Roger Ebert's post about whether games could be art. But I don't know how much you care about chess. I personally never liked it that much. I did like the game Archon, with superficial similarities to chess, played on an Apple 2e with a black-and-white (green on black) monitor. The sequel with better graphics was not as fun.
What I wrote on 05 Feb 2012 is very brief; I think I posted it before:
invisible chess— pawns move forward if a diagonal capture is requested but the location is empty, an illegal move is reported as such and prevented, a long-distance move can end in an early capture, game pieces that are captured are displayed during removalHowever, in modern culture, there are just as many people watching others play games as there are playing games. Maybe this isn't new. Physical sports have always involved lots of spectators. And chess has been spectated for a long time as well, maybe as one of several forms of international competition that was about mental, rather than physical, ability. I see a lot of chess-related videos in recommendations, even though there is constant danger of cheating in the modern landscape.
So this is my idea:
chess variant, "recent move is hidden". Better for streaming and observers than Kriegspel (?), because less information is secret. Each player moves without knowing what opponent's most recent move is. Moves are recorded by an observer to observe checks to king. As with Kriegspel variant, movements can be interrupted early to end with a capture, for rooks, bishops, and queens, and attempted pawn captures can convert into a forward movement. Illegal moves (maybe just those that would put one's own king in check) are prevented, giving the opportunity to move again, but require queuing an additional move. If opponent's next move again results in check and the queued move does not resolve it, t
My browser just had the 'not updating screen' bug, so I'm typing this blind and am not bothering to indent the bit I just pasted above. Just pressing update.hen the scenario is repeated, with the queued move nullified but another queued move required. Losses of one's own pieces are learned of immediately, but the cause of the loss is not learned until the next turn. Captures of opponent's pieces (whether intentional or not) are also learned of immediately.
Time lag chess?
For streaming, the game state can be displayed with no more information than the opponent already has, with the current move (that will be applied before opponent's next move) being hidden, as well as queued move if in check.
Example: opponent moves pawn. Player moves rook sideways in a path which intersects with pawn, unintentionally capturing it. Before player moves, they did not know pawn was there: after moving, the board updates to show the loss of the pawn, but not the identity of the piece that captured it, as the rook's movement is still hidden.
A pawn's movement being blocked could count as an illegal move, or it could act as skipping one's turn (not possible in regular chess).
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Update 13 Jun 2025, 04:07
Note for previous update: to facilitate casual games between two players on a physical board, an illegal move could be nullified after the opponent's move has been revealed. This provides more of an advantage to the player who made an illegal move (and justifies treating a blocked pawn as a skipped turn). The main disadvantage of then having to make a hidden move and queue a second move is not having any information about captured pieces for the two moves before the queued move.
There would be many game states where the optimal decision has a random component, similar to the game of rock-paper-scissors (じゃんけん). (Example omitted.) My browser did the the 'screen not updating' bug again, I'm just writing the rest of this in a text editor.
Having a hidden move allows pieces to make "forced marches" and appear in unexpected places. I was thinking it's like Hannibal going over the Alps, except I've never really read about that except that I know that all of the elephants died from the cold. But it's supposedly famous and effective, and would have been less effective if his enemies had satellites tracking his movements.
Some people might think that a game with random components is worse. But it makes computers perform worse.
So, before this bug occurred just a couple minutes after I started my web browser, the question was supposed to be: I might not blame you for not sharing the idea earlier, but what about Sherine? Does she blame you?
I think her attitude can be described as "the threat of blame in case a course of action is due to stupidity." She was angry at someone for the wounds suffered by Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. I thought she was probably angry either at me, or at you.
So, if you believed that people who learned of this idea might indirectly be influenced to take a risky course of action, I personally think that it's fair to say she doesn't blame you.
My understanding is that Dhzokhar Tsarnaev and his brother did what they did because of Palestine. To be more precise, they could do nothing, which would be best for their own lives, or they could do something like what they did, which they believed would be better for Palestine; and their decision to do something might have been influenced by Dzhokhar or both of them knowing about this idea. But some people would regard that as unjustified speculation.
It never felt like Sherine wanted you to share the idea. If she felt that your inaction was to blame for any Palestinian deaths in the 2011~2013 period, it seems logical that she would blame you for later deaths and would want you to share the idea if she believed it would prevent those deaths.
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Update 16 Jun 2025, 23:17
The views on this post are up to 12. I think you're reading this, but I have no idea if those views are from you.
After your most recent Twitter post, I thought it was related to some posts I made on a game-related forum, which would only be possible if you were working with the US government. But I think it was a mistake to think that, and I only did because I had already decided that what I had said in my previous update was not important and forgotten about it.
Article: Most female doctors in poll can understand Tokyo medical school reducing female applicant scores
Intended topic: negative opinions of people who work less. But from reading one of the article's sources, that might not be it.
The site, SoraNews24, is slightly suspect in its accuracy: this particular author, Casey Baseel, wrote another article in which she translated にしわき as Ishiwaki. But both sources for this article about doctors are in Japanese.
Random whinge: I only have one YouTube video open, which I was watching before I got distracted by certain names being bad; all other YouTube tabs I have open were loaded without Javascript (including several I reloaded before signing in to write this). All of the news articles should be loaded without Javascript, including the college student one after I accidentally loaded with Javascript and noticed embedded Tweets etc. loading with images.
So basically one video, this Blogger page, then like Google translate, and maybe the two source articles. My non-browser open programs are basically terminal windows, one video with ffplay, text editor windows, and a calculator: these should use maybe 200 MB memory. After a fresh start, my system uses maybe 600 MB out of 4 GB.
And yet it's still currently using, according to 'top',
MiB Mem : 3925.5 total, 835.8 free, 2640.1 used, 449.6 buff/cache
MiB Swap: 3074.9 total, 883.3 free, 2191.7 used. 976.4 avail Mem
While writing this it has twice paused for a long time, 5~30 sec, for disk space swap because the free memory wasn't enough for some task. (I can see that it freed up a bit, maybe up to 10% of memory, a few minutes ago.) My browser sessions from 2013 have like 200 tabs (that prompt to be restored every time I mistakenly open a non-private window), and now my browser can barely handle a single video.
Anyway, I think it would be a bad look if you, as a person with Japanese ancestry, can't get Japanese people to listen to you, and the explanation of rejecting female applicants because they might work less after they graduate seemed to suggest you might have difficulty here. I was going to just say that and list the other news stories I had open, and then because the last story is https://soranews24.com/2025/06/04/bumping-men-are-a-uniquely-japanese-class-of-criminals-that-are-hard-to-deal-with/ I was going to link a video (video text: "POV: Walking in public 1 week after living in South Korea" and "POV: Walking in public 5 YEARS after living in South Korea").
Also I was going to mention that the second female lead in the drama Tatta Hitotsu no Koi (who later starred in Liar Game) was studying to become a doctor as the story concluded. So that's my mental image of a female Japanese doctor.
Also because I loaded that video, while writing the above paragraph I had another browser pause and checked and — just got another one — it was at 104.5 MiB mem free, 883.6 swap, which is now down to 857.6 swap which seems small except that it probably took like 20 sec to write that 30 MB to disk. I guess I can't have two videos open at once.
I'm not bothering to read the first source article, it would just give me more to talk about. The second source article includes one quote which translates as, "I worked on holidays and until late at night, and had repeated miscarriages. I don't get the understanding or cooperation of those around me, and I feel like I can't do it anymore." So in this explanation, it's not because society, patients, or other doctors would be better off with fewer female doctors, but because females are better off not working as doctors. This is a more understandable reason to reject candidates, although it is funny to do so by lowering the scores of female applicants rather than setting different thresholds as it seems every other organization does (whether based on gender or ethnicity).
So the medical school might have the view that it was helping female applicants by secretly reducing their scores.
I note that my father is a doctor who retired a few years ago, and I seem to have been unsuccessful in convincing him that it would be better for doctors, along with everyone else, to work less. One video that I might try to show him is "How the US created an ambulance crisis", which will probably say that "ambulances are super-expensive in the US because they pay local governments for a monopoly". Not about doctors, but about a situation where people don't receive as much medical care due to government policy, and so similar to doctors. The article quotes Tsushima Ruriko, who says, "It has been believed that doctors have to devote their lives to work 24 hours a day." Why? Is it because they are underpaid and if they didn't work that much, they (browser freeze, decrease down to 754.7 MiB free swap) couldn't afford their food and housing?
Regardless of whether that belief is correct, people believe it.
"POV: Walking in public 5 YEARS after living in South Korea"
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Update 18 Jun 2025, 22:43
I hope I'm not wasting your time. I sort of feel that if I experience something, it's hard for me to put it behind me if I haven't slept. I'm critical of the most recent book I read, "Fall; or, Dodge in H***", and don't view it as encouraging people to have thoughts that are useful or interesting, but it does have some positive points: interesting turns of phrase — I have a long list of words from it that I intend to look up, and tangent: I wrote down a thought I had (08 Mar 2024):
"Most significant mistakes made by large groups of people are mistakes that you make as well"
aka 'people aren't as stupid as you think they are'
("remember Moab")
I appreciated the use of language which, due to its rarity, is perceived as archaic: "barely wotting that he had just been threatened". The reason I mention the book is the title character's thoughts about how sleep breaks the thread of consciousness:
In the Greek version, Clotho was the spinner—the creator of these threads. Lachesis was the measurer. So that would be your snooze button right there—she had her nine-minute tape measure out the whole time Dodge was lying in bed. And Atropos was the cutter. The Greek version of the Grim Reaper. Though, according to the theory that Dodge was developing, the loss of consciousness when you fell asleep was basically the same as dying except that you could wake up from it.
I learned today about the fighting between Israel and Iran, and visited a video I had seen a week or two ago about "Why countries don't assassinate leaders", and still didn't bother watching it but checked the comments and replied to some. This didn't precisely put me in a bad mood, but it did restrict the things I'm interested in doing, and so I just put my bed down (my current practice is to stand the mattress against a wall when not using it, like a futon) and let time pass.
I view music basically as a way to evoke certain emotions or attitudes, which are expected to be of benefit. It's already 23:10, and so the song that was playing when I started this, "Roll Tide (From "Crimson Tide" Soundtrack) [K0_5Nup_uBw]-part.webm", has long since finished even though it looped to play three times. I just couldn't be brief regarding the book.
The song that prompted me to get up was just the third song. Ghost Love Score, then Megu Megu ☆ Fire Endless Night - ver. Mitani Nana, then [CocoTsuki - My Immortal - Evanescence] [cDl0zdi2IMs]. Mentioned it in the first update to this post.
For a long time I viewed the song as being about someone who was still alive. Everyone else seems to think it's about someone who's dead, and I guess that makes more sense.
Most humans in the modern world live a long time. The number of people whose romantic partner dies without having what people would consider a full life is a small minority.
So, if one has the goal of helping those people, one is helping a minority. The point is that if one considers doing things only because they help the majority, one may not have justifications to do as many things. Maybe a thing that helps a minority will cause some inconvenience, or even rise to a level that some people would call harm, to the majority.
Why this song, My Immortal? At one level, there's probably some explanation by the band Evanescence, why they wrote and composed this song. We just ignore that, in typical death of the author style (TV Tropes version here); and I use the term without bothering to read about it to make sure I'm using it "correctly". If a song becomes popular because people misinterpet it (see: Gangnam Style by PSY), then the misinterpreted meaning has more relevance.
The song conveys the attitude of not wanting to forget about, or move on from, someone who apparently is dead. (Used at the end of a WoW "machinima" video, Here Without You. A high-definition remake retains the use of the same songs, but I haven't exhaustively compared it to make sure it's not missing some important element. Very likely the original is accumulating very few views since it's 240p with terrible bitrate on YouTube; bitrate for low-resolution videos was higher ~15 years ago so they looked better.)
Why care whether you forget someone? One could live their life, and then either forget the person or not, based essentially on random chance. An entity might not understand why a human might try to influence this outcome and experience happiness or sadness at the expectation or fear of one or the other outcome.
Well, I'm sure you understand this well enough that I don't need to do a lot of thinking about which words to say. The main point is that it's helping a minority. But, luckily, I remembered that I was also going to say this: "nakereba narimasen." The phrase people sometimes use to justify the necessity of an action. But if we crudely translate "naru" as "become", then WHAT will not become? The answer is often, "something that helps a majority of people". Because people are used to accepting that minorities, or individuals, may have to make sacrifices for what people might lazily refer to in English as "the greater good".
I am pointing out that this is optional. One can do something that only seems to help a minority.
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