Lemmy.zip instance admin

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I think the impact of wealth and access to nutrition and an environment that does not stunt development plays a major role here as well. A good example of this is height in Europe post-industrial revolution and improvements in medicine:

    Most notable being a 20cm increase in the Netherlands in just over 100 years as well as changes in places that industrialised quickly like China:

    Not to say that geography plays no role but it’s closer to 10cm gap than a 30cm one.




  • Into Lebanese (some consider it Syrian, doesn’t change the dynamic) occupied territory before and after Oct 7th. Gradual escalation (with 80% of those attacks coming from Israeli side) expanded the scale of the northern/southern front to what we see today. Israel has killed 2 orders of magnitude more civilians than Hezballah has and has sought escalation at every stage.

    Before Oct 7th, they would exchange fire in occupied Lebanese land and tensions would rise then fizzle out about once a month.






  • Yeah, like the other person also mentioned Counter Strike has had a major cheating problem for two decades and it’s still pretty bad today. Valorant is a very similar type of game: twitch shooter that needs fine motor skills and reaction time where one player can dominate an entire match. Valorant has a more intrusive anti-cheat and a lower ratio of cheaters but both game still have cheaters and cheats. People will pay large monthly fees for access to premium, not-yet-detected cheats to compete in competitive circuits.

    What’s distinct about twitch shooters is that the core gameplay is very simple (just click on everyone’s head) but it can take thousands of hours to become really competitive at them. People who are not at the same level as their opponent may think they are cheating if they outskill them enough which leads to a feedback loop where new players feel like they need to cheat to be on equal footing because the other person HAS to be doing it too.

    Players with a lot of hours can usually tell if someone is cheating with relatively high accuracy (except at very high skill levels where the cheaters are also incredibly good at the game) but newer players tend to consistently call cheats on players that are just better at the game. Competitive drive, lack of trust in other players playing fair and high skill ceilings all create the demand for cheats which in turn creates lucrative opportunities for cheat developers.

    Ruining other people’s fun is also another popular reason like you said but I would say most cheaters justify it to themselves in some way.





  • On May 31, 2010, the Gaza Freedom Flotilla comprising of the Mavi Marmara, Sfendoni, Challenger I, Eleftheri Mesogios, Gazza I and Defne Y vessels, departed with the aim of delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza but were confronted with an illegal raid and intervention by Israeli military forces. The vessels were only carrying humanitarian aid and aid workers. During this attack and in its aftermath, 10 humanitarian aid workers lost their lives and 56 were severely injured. Nine of the 10 were brutally killed during the attack, and the 10th victim died after spending a prolonged period in a coma

    https://ihh.org.tr/en/mavi-marmara





  • Government spending/revenue as percentage of GDP is the common proxy for government size. That said actual empirical evidence doesn’t lead to clear cut conclusions about the relationship between economic growth/outcomes and government spending. It’s very much dependent on the country, quality of government institutions and components of the expenditure.

    Intuitively, you can clearly see that if you had 2 identical countries where 50% of gov spending went to building schools, hospitals and roads in one and paying interest on national debt in the other then you would expect very different outcomes with the same government “size”.

    For the US, that metric has been close to 30% for the last several decades with spikes during crises like 2008 and 2020 (changes to money supply or “minting” is a component of government size but usually a temporary one). It’s been relatively stable outside of that since the 1970s. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-spending-to-gdp

    Relative to the rest of the world’s rich countries it’s on the lower end:

    In my view, it’s highly dependent on the quality of the government institutions and components of spending. People immediately think of inefficiency and bureaucracy when governments are brought up but there is empirical evidence to show that gov spending on things like education and infrastructure are usually “productive” in additional to contributing to factors that may not be properly captured by measures like GDP growth.

    In short, people reducing government spending/regulations as inherently bad/controlling are at least not being completely honest because it’s a very complicated discussion.