Bassman1805

It's a little too dramatized to call it a documentary, but it's a fairly accurate retelling of an important American story. Better than half of the movies I ever watched in history class as a kid.

This is a movie that US citizens should watch. Not because it's a good film (it is, though), but because it's an important story in our (very recent) history.

AoE2 is one of a small number of video games I can entertain an argument about building an immense skill gulf between average and top tier players, like chess. But the size of that gulf is just incomparable.

There are approximately as many titled chess masters* as there are total monthly AoE2 players. And truly, the difference between a Candidate Master and a Grand Master is probably as big as the difference between a candidate master and an average player. Grand Masters are just so insanely skilled, they can pull some crazy flexes by forcing their opponents' moves due to traps they set tens of moves ago.

I watched a GM streamer playing against his subs, with the rule "no matter how bad you're losing, you can't forfeit" so that he could show of these stunts. He was doing stuff like promoting every single pawn to a queen (which gets tricky because when you have 8 queens you have to try to not accidentally checkmate your opponent until you get the 9th). Taking only the pawns from his opponent, and then forcing all of the pieces back to their starting square before checkmate. Forcing an "underpromotion mate" (where you win by turning a pawn into a knight rather than a queen, pretty rare circumstance). Drawing basic pixel art with the pieces on the board at checkmate. And these weren't all against noob players, some of them were quite skilled or even semi-pro, but to someone at the top tier of chess there is almost no difference between semi pro and beginner.

GMs are crazy good.

*All master titles combined, not just GM.

I wanna see Elon play a grandmaster and get absolutely memed on. The gulf between the average person and a top tier chess player is probably 10x greater than the gulf between the average person and a top tier gamer, in any video game. Chess just has such a large player base and literally centuries of tactical/strategic development, few games can even claim to have fostered the level of expertise required to be a top player.

Side note: chess skull is often correlated with intelligence. There might be something there, but at the top levels it's really just about having played thousands and thousands of games and recognizing patterns between is how often you've played. Perhaps some genetal intelligence translates well to chess, but little chess skill translates to general intelligence.

To quote Paul Morphy, who was a worldwide chess champion at 21 years old but retired at 22: "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."

I don't know if you mean turn Lemmy fans into lemmy fans, or lemmy fans into Lemmy fans. But either way, I'm for it.

Joke's on me, I still have to use windows at work!

Bill Nye kind of is a dick though.

Some people are really warm in acute person-to-person interactions, but lack the chronic empathy to spread long-term kindness. See "southern hospitality" clashing with who those areas vote for.

Others have a well-oriented moral compass but are just really abrasive in person. That's Bill Nye. I've met him and he's not like, super mean but he's got a bit of a holier-than-thou (or rather, smarter-than-you) complex.

Cool how you used the quote markdown for a bunch of stuff I didn't say.

My argument is "The banks have a ton of capital. They are willing to grant lower classes access to that capital, as long as the bank is able to make some profit from it. If the bank cannot profit, they will just sit on that wealth and lower classes will lose the only access to such capital that they currently have."

Like I said, the fact that many borderline necessities in the US require access to capital beyond one's individual means, is a real problem but separate from this argument.

Nobody with financial sense is taking out a 16.9% loan on a car. 5% is pretty typical right now for people with a decent credit history.

Whether or not that's reasonable, is certainly up for discussion.

Definitely shop around, but sometimes the dealership does have an actual competitive offer. Especially if you threaten to use external financing (and have the pre approval in hand), they might knock down their interest rate to save the deal, as the loan is where the money actually is.

You pay for the ability to access capital you do not currently have. Nobody owes you thousands of dollars with which to but a car. If you want to buy a car with money you don't have, then you have to give the bank something in return. That something almost always is "more money than we initially lent you, over the course of the loan period" and if you shut that down, banks just won't give loans anymore. Suddenly poor and middle class people have lost their biggest tool for accessing capital.

Lack of public transport is a separate problem. The US has dropped the ball across the board there. Only a handful of cities have any reasonable public transport and even those systems are old and often shitty.

Education being so expensive that it needs to be financed, is a separate problem. Education is too important to leave to the free market, letting our system metastacize to this extent is the result of decades of compounding failures.

16.9% interest is predatory, but "interest above inflation" is necessary if you want banks to do anything besides hoard money.

They're mostly [Trade deficit]/[Exports to US]

Which is a fucking stupid basis for tariffs.

The 8 minute long one is a parody, but it's basically the same as the real one except it has like 50 cycles instead of 5.