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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I suspect games tinker with the formula behind the scenes, to accurately place people faster if nothing else. The more players the longer it could take for the skill of any one to show up in the numbers, so I bet they factor in other game specific metrics at least at first. There would be some risk of this being abused, but that’s less if they keep it a secret and maybe the progress numbers shown to players aren’t quite the same as the real numbers used to decide who to match them against.





  • Well I mean, what defines the meaning of “Redistribution of wealth doesn’t work” in the context of this meme is explicitly the intent of an imagined propagandist. A defining feature of mainstream political discourse is to refuse the problem of wealth distribution as a topic of consideration at all, it’s redirected to some narrower conception of the problem or made about values. I think what you are saying is not quite the same as a defense of the statement as delivered.

    But anyway it’s still wrong; even if bureaucratic mechanisms of wealth redistribution were unavoidably self defeating, it is not the case historically that wealth redistribution doesn’t happen, it just tends to happen via traumatic collapse.



  • I think a common conclusion in general, I dated a woman once whose mind went to that explanation constantly for all kinds of things and it was basically always a distorted picture of reality. I think people just don’t get needed validation due mostly to arbitrary bullshit and the world sucking and that makes it easy to buy into toxic self hating memes.




  • But is chicken-ness actually defined by genetics? An important characteristic of a chicken is its domesticated status, if you consider the birds they descend from, they are remarkably similar, and it’s hard to imagine that any one mutation would have been what caused people to start calling them by their own name or considering them as a separate species. It’s possible that the first chicken became the first chicken when it was captured by humans, and so preceded the first chicken egg.








  • I found a source that includes the second half which makes it more obvious:

    Dr. Macho believes #42’s behavior is intentional and aimed specifically at him. “I caught him laughing at me once while I was trying to sort data he’d fucked up. I know what you’re thinking, ‘Can rats even laugh? And what would it look like?’ Trust me, when a rat laughs at you, you’ll know.”

    When asked why he doesn’t simply exchange #42 for a less malicious rat, Dr. Macho explained, “You can’t just use an infinite number of lab rats. They start to think you’re a psycho if you keep asking for more.” Dr. Macho sighed. “I feel like I’m living in an annoying Pixar movie where I’m the bad guy – oh, wait….I’m the bad guy. I’m the evil scientist performing experiments on a sassy, smart rat. And my name is Dr. Stu Macho? Oof, yeah, I’m the wrong one here.”

    Just behind Dr. Macho, #42 winked and walked directly into his food bowl.


  • The diet experiment is presented as present tense. The cat smell experiment is described with “I once ran an experiment”, part of the speaker’s “thesis”, which is in the past. They are clearly keeping #42 alive to be used in totally separate research, in this fictional The Onion esque scenario.