Probably beside the point because I imagine the author just wanted to show a neat math-based solution, but in this situation with no dice available I've just used playing cards. If you want to simulate a 6-sided dice roll you grab cards 1-6 and shuffle, nice and simple
Branding surely played a role too, microsoft is constantly upping the ante on naming things as terribly as possible. I'm an avid gamer who follows gaming news and I couldnt tell you the difference between an xbox series s vs xbox one vs. xbox series aeiou and sometimes y. It's almost as bad as .net framework -> .net core -> uh.. lets just call it .NET actually that won't be confusing for anybody
100% this (for me at least). I’ve owned all the Xboxes since the first one up through the… Xbox One, I think? Was that one? I think I actually had an Xbox One X as a mid-lifecycle refresh, and when the next one came out and had a terrible name, pricing and storage situation, I threw up my hands and stopped trying to keep up.
The "one xbox one x box" meme is well over a decade old at this point lol. Definitely a "hold my beer" moment from MS after nintendo's uncharacteristic marketing misstep of wii -> wiiu.
Oh yes. It's such an easily avoidable unforced error it's downright incomprehensible - especially after failing by naming their third generation "XBox One" (and the WiiU fiasco providing a cautionary tale). Even Wii was an example of a product good enough that overcame its mildly confusing name. Console naming isn't actually hard.
I blame the rise of "Institutionalized Marketing Departments" inside tech companies dominated by careerist middle-managers who've never actually created any marketing themselves. They just hire and manage creative, ad, PR and branding agencies. The branding agency hires a naming consultancy for a million dollars who has a bunch of hipster creatives brainstorm a short-list of very clever names, do surveys and analyses overflowing with data (and false precision) then package it into an incredible pitch presentation delivered by their most attractive hipster with the coolest foreign accent. All to sell some "too clever by half" high-concept name - because that's the only way to justify their million dollar fee.
I'm pretty sure Sony didn't pay anyone a million dollars to spend three months coming up with "You should name the Playstation 3's successor... Playstation 4."
>We need to do everything possible to increase participation in the democratic process
Do we? Participation should be made easy for those eligible and inclined to do so, but I don't see the benefit of encouraging participation from people who can't be bothered to put some effort into it, or are ignorant of the issues and candidates and are easily swayed by trashy campaign ads. I've seen the statistic thrown around that less than half of americans can even name the 3 branches of government, and if that's true I think those people have a civic duty not to vote.
I'm not advocating that people not be allowed to vote, I'm just pushing back on the dogma of more voter participation = better, IE. just because you can vote doesn't mean you should if you dont understand what you're voting for and don't really care enough to learn.
Seeing the constant barrage of campaign ads every couple years made me think about it- Why does campaign financing matter, how do they turn money into votes anyways? The answer apparently is ads, but I see these bottom-of-the-barrel slop political advertisements and wonder how that trash could possibly have a measurable effect on the outcome of an election. But it must work, otherwise they wouldn't spend so much money on it. And the fact that elections can be meaningfully influenced by the amount of ads a campaign can run is a signal to me that the democratic process is broken in some fundamental way. The votes of well-informed constituents are drowned out by the more numerous cohorts of partisans, reactionaries, and the apathetic just going through the motions to fulfill their 'civic duty', so it seems to me that increasing voter participation without changing anything else is only going to exacerbate the problem
> And the fact that elections can be meaningfully influenced by the amount of ads a campaign can run is a signal to me that the democratic process is broken in some fundamental way.
That's probably rational ignorance. It's hard to get people to investigate the details of policy and their consequences when theirs is just one vote out of millions. It's too much work. But that leaves the voters susceptible the kind of ads you mention.
Or stated more simply: getting informed doesn't scale, but mass advertising does.
Athenian-style democracy might handle this problem better. Randomly select, in some unbiased manner, a smaller number of people who then decide. But I suspect sortition is a little too unusual and feels a little too chancy for people to accept as a serious proposal.
Wouldn't banning political ads, and large sum political spending, and PACs and lobbying (I assume you're from the US based on the comments) be a better solution than whatever the f*ck "don't vote if you don't understand" is?
Democracy means that everyone gets a vote, uneducated, bigoted, communist, fascist, everyone. If you don't accept that, you don't accept democracy.
How is the argument much different than any current arguments? You can already get significant benefits from the state as a citizen (in European countries, at least).
The difference is magnitude, the benefits that European countries provide has made them a very attractive destination for immigration, so it stands to reason that something like UBI would make them even more so. No matter which side of that debate you're on theres a point where the math breaks down and some difficult choices need to be made, either you provide these generous benefits to your citizens or you have a generous immigration policy, but both of them together may prove unsustainable
Which is why unchecked immigration is already a problem. Increasing the benefits without dealing with unchecked immigration is going to make things worse.
It's not about writing off the injured due to their low odds of survival, its about your willingness to lower those odds for your other loved ones, or yourself. How does your thought experiment change when caring for your mother/father means your children might starve?
Ok but for every person who tries to save a stranger from drowning how many other people choose not to? Probably not 0. If I saw a stranger drowning and they were larger than child-sized I probably wouldn't attempt it- apparently its pretty common for the drowning person to panic and use their savior as a raft, drowning them in the process
Why do volunteer firefighters rush into a burning building to try to save children from some family they have never met before? Every day we afforded examples of people sacrificing their personal interests for the benefit of others.
But also, biologists usually use a definition of "altruism" that does not include close kin. Richard Dawkins was explicit about this in his 1976 book "The Selfish Gene." Helping someone you are directly related to is not considered altruism.
It's literally a skill issue. The correct way to help a drowning person is to get behind them and then hook your weaker arm around their neck & head while doing backstroke with the other. Having them on their back facing up (and out of the water) dispels the panic reflex. But this obviously requires you to be comfortable int he water and have some prior rescue training.
I think in the premodern era, you never saw strangers (not like we do). You probably had a pretty good idea who everyone was, and probably knew most people pretty well. If that's even partially true, then although nowadays you might drive past a person on the highway, if your cousin or a lifelong trusted acquaintance asked for help you'd give it. It seems that everyone you saw, esp saw injured or sick, was probably someone you've known your whole life.
You're also heavily discounting the fact that you had to live not only with yourself if you did nothing, but the shame/angst of their family who you definitely lived next door to. TFA is about taking care of "their own", not strangers.
Good way to look at it. More broadly, there must have been different groups that practiced different policies with regard to ill and injured. Some of the groups fared better than others. Since most of modern societies do care about their ill and injured, it appears that this policy proved more advantageous. Even if only slightly so.
.NET was always a clusterfuck of naming, as in the early 2000s Microsoft was slapping the .NET label everywhere. .NET Passport (now known as Microsoft accounts), .NET My Services, Visual Studio .NET (which was the same as regular VS, just with support for building C# and VB.NET apps added), .NET Server 2003 (Windows Server 2003), et weary cetera.
In this respect, as in many others related to .NET, Microsoft was inspired by Java. In the late 90s, Java wasn't just a language, it was a VM, runtime environment, enterprise platform (Java EE, now Jakarta EE), smartcard technology, remoting protocol, operating system, desktop environment, floor wax, dessert topping...
So Microsoft did with .NET what they now do with Copilot, right? GitHub Copilot (AI-assisted code completion and chat), Microsoft 365 Copilot (the suite), Microsoft Copilot (the chat thingy), Windows Copilot (the chat thingy, but directly on Windows), Copilot for Azure (LLM doing RAG), Copilot for Dynamics 365 (I assume something similar)...
"Moving rivets around" is how I might describe the recent SS2 remaster from nightdive, it was pretty good. This DX remaster is more like "let's have the cheapest contractors we can find run this venerated classic through an AI upscaler and charge 30 bucks for it". Notice the sign on the wall in the unatco break room that says "Stratigies" in the remaster trailer. DX deserves far better than that
On the bright side, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, while largely a different dev team was a fantastic game and scratched the itch for me when it came out. One of the few games in the last 15 years I’ve actually played to completion.
Eh. It didn't really feel like Deus Ex to me, spiritually. I think Prey (2017) hits way closer. I haven't played the System Shocks, so I don't know if they were aiming for that or for Deus Ex. I've heard some people from Looking Glass went to Arkane. It seems like there's only 5-10 people in the world who know how to make immersive sims and keep making action RPGs where you can upgrade your body and have quests with multiple viable approaches.
It had some cool mechanics but was pretty meh on the storyline. I didn't really feel a connection to the characters like I felt with the original Deus Ex. Except maybe copter pilot girl
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Olson
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