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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.


  • Any popular posts that involve a minority/enemy of right wingers doing something bad or sticking out get brigaded. A blatant example is PublicFreakout where threads are usually fairly normal unless it’s a black/arab/Indian person doing the antagonizing then pretty much all the top comments are dog or regular whistles. Similar “brigading” can happen even in a city subreddit similar to r/Canada even if they are regular users otherwise. If the post is good enough fodder the subreddit will suddenly resemble a klan meetup even if it’s usually otherwise “normal”.

    ActualPublicFreakout is an alternative that doesn’t need brigading because it’s already similar to WorldNews.


  • 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.


  • 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.











  • Sami@lemmy.ziptoTechnology@lemmy.worldComing to you soon...
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    1 year ago

    They can just phrase it a little differently and argue semantics in front of a bunch of 70 year olds who don’t know what a browser is in a hearing or two. Maybe a couple campaign contributions through completely legal channels and that’s that. Anti trust enforcement has been falling in the US for decades.



  • Sami@lemmy.ziptoTechnology@lemmy.worldGoogle search is over
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    1 year ago

    I get the same as the main post. Either way the point still stands. I had someone correct me with a misconception about something because he googled it and thats what it said in the answer box. It’s getting increasingly difficult to rely on search results especially when google synthesizes them into questions and answers with little context