Yeah, well, I stand by that being disingenuous, intellectually dishonest crap. It’d feel weird giving the mostly technically correct Ipsos/Pew survey a hard time for a shaky headline but giving you a pass for outright manipulative demagoguery, so this is me not giving you a pass.
Cool.
So most of that post doesn’t apply to the point I’m making because, honestly, the issue is with sports in the first place, so the argument is about sports being trivial and that whole thing is irrelevant anyway.
But I am setting that aside because “young adults are children because it is convenient to the point I’m making and besides I bet they start before they’re 18 anyway and will somebody think of the 25 year old children, and also porn bad” is such an intellectually dishonest argument that suddenly I don’t care that somebody at Pew is annoyed at gambling ads during sports to the point of deploying subtle headline manipulation. I’m more concerned with what you’re on and trying to make you understand why you should make a genuine point instead of wrapping yourself in demagoguery, because maaaan.
Not really, no. I am upset at the type of binary framing you are deploying here being present even in well established research institutions to push specific viewpoints.
Like, say, having a study series that in 2022 reports a 57% neutral answer headline that result as “few people think sports betting is good” and following that up several years later with a 50% neutral answer as “Americans increasingly see sports betting as a bad thing”. That’s what you call framing, it’s not supposed to be there, and it may not annoy me much, because this subject is irrelevant, but it does annoy me.
I also take some issue with the wording of the question, if you must know, which is “Thinking about the fact that betting on sports is now legal in much of the country, do you think this is generally…”. I would question why they needed to remind people that this comes from a regulatory change if they weren’t going to report it that way, especially since it forces them to keep the same framing in 2025 when they follow up.
But hey, that’s nitpicking. So is the whole thing. But it’s still a bad headline and a bad way to frame the results. And arguing from authority isn’t going to change that. I’m not particularly impressed or reverent when it comes to Ipsos or Pew’s methodology for these, they aren’t that complicated.
It absolutely does not. I’m not American, so all of that is based on weird, unapplicable, culturally-specific fixations.
Sports betting here has been available under government sanction offline for the better part of a century, it has its own complicated history and the way it interplays with online betting is quite different and has different impacts.
Not that it would matter much, it’s still fundamentally irrelevant. “Will someone think of the children two steps removed from the thing I’m advocating against” is the oldest, dumbest political manipulation tool and this isn’t even a particularly good application of it. But even if that wasn’t a huge stretch… man, in the context of… you know, the current state of the planet, it ranks somewhere next to “do you think there’s more empy air in Cheeto bags specifically these days” in my personal scale of urgency.
…
…
THAT is what they increasingly see as a bad thing for society?
The hell?
Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but what Americans think is increasingly not a good guide to take any sort of action in the first place.
That said, I actually salute the real majority of people in the survey that were assaulted with this question and went “the hell are you talking about, get out of my face”. Because yes, the results say 43% responded “bad thing for society”, 7% said “good, actually”, and 50% said “get out of my face” and are the normal ones.
Let this be a lesson not about sports gambling, but about how bad surveys, misleading headlines and moral panics can be used to manipulate large groups of people.
And to be clear, my stance on US sports betting is: get out of my face. I’m more than happy to talk about how the modern online betting industry uses inadequate regulation to bypass pre-existing rules and how this is another vector of the concerns about online regulation of server-side services and their interactions with privacy and censorship.
But “is it a good thing for society” is going in the “get out of my face” column.
I suppose it makes more sense the less you want to do and the older your hardware is. Even when repurposing old laptops and stuff like that I find the smallest apps I’d want to run were orders of magnitude more costly than any OS overhead. This was even true that one time I got lazy and started running stuff on an older Windows machine without reinstalling the OS, so I’m guessing anything Linux-side would be fine.
After a OS update? I mean, I guess, but most things are going to be in containers anyway, right?
The last update that messed me up on any counts was Python-related and that would have got me on any distro just as well.
Once again, I get it at scale, where you have so much maintenance to manage and want to keep it to a minimum, but for home use it seems to me that being on an LTS/stable update channel would have a much bigger impact than being on a lightweight distro.
I’m sidetracking a bit, but am I alone in thinking self hosting hobbyists are way too into “lightweight and not bloated” as a value?
I mean, I get it if you have a whole data center worth of servers, but if it’s a cobbled together home server it’s probably fine, right? My current setup idles at 1.5% of its CPU and 25% of its RAM. If I turned everything off those values are close to zero and effectively trivial alongside any one of the apps I’m running in there. Surely any amount of convenience is worth the extra bloat, right?
They’re not the same, though. Well, at least not if fully implemented. They overlap but one won’t get you seamless integration from a physical server and the other won’t set up a VM and run the one piece of software on it for you automatically.
I still think the whole thing is frustratingly working around having a proper translation layer that works out of the box. It’s nuts that we have it up and running for gaming, which is arguably the most complex use case possible, but booting up Excel is like “nope, sorry, too hard, can I interest you in just streaming that window from a whole separate system instead?”
I mean… really?
You should talk to Windows users, then, because… you know, WSL is a thing.
I would like to not have a use case, but… I kinda do. What I don’t have is a solution to that use case, so I just dual boot. Because both a VM and a VM-but-it-puts-the-window-you-want-directly-on-your-desktop are not good enough for the types of applications that are not working or unsupported.
My Windows machines seem to be just fine with the couple of NFS shares I use for easier cross-platform mounting on boot. It comes at the cost of some security, though, so I use it to share unimportant stuff I want to mount very freely, like some media libraries. I use SMB for the rest.
I’m curious, what’s the issue with NFS on Windows for you?
That punchline took a longer walk than the frog.
Not only is this already in place, Steam literally proposed it to unsupported territories as a way to bypass the issue.
I thought that was borderline unacceptable, honestly, but so is everything else about the whole payment processor mess that’s going on for no good reason.
It will still expand and shed enough stuff to effectively blanch whatever part of the solar system it doesn’t actually engulf, though.
It doesn’t even have to go supernova to kill everything, which is kind of the point.
I’m not an astrophysicist, but that ends up being the weird perception thing about them, right? Mostly they’re like a star of the same mass, and then a few will get really big and be at the center of a galaxy, but the perception is that of a natural disaster.
Big ball of plasma in the center of the solar system that will definitely eventually explode and wipe out anything left alive on any surrounding planet? NBD. An object of the same mass but it’s smaller so it doesn’t shine? People picture it as being more immediately violent for some reason because the “light can’t escape” thing sounds so wild.
So just so I’m clear, somebody decided that the way to handle this was… free advertising?
In no way is that the same as arguing that both sides are right or have a point. For one thing I’m actively agreeing with one side.
For another, who decides the “deserves it” part? Is it just you? Is it a popularity contest? Lots of the gamergate morons thought their targets deserved it, too, for a lot of the exact same reasons being provided here. Is being an acceptable target just a popularity contest? Are we all meant to be targeted at all times to just see who has more support? I mean, I’m assuming the religious prudes that used the same techniques to get those games banned in the first place thought they deserved it, too.
A bunch of leftists and feminists, particularly in Europe, are intensely anti-porn, to the point where they call themselves “abolitionists” and are proposing legislation with similar effects to this thing. I don’t agree with them, like I don’t agree with this instance, but I’m not ready to make my personality about starting a grassroots online sabotage movement towards them.
The “ends justify the means” argument is honestly chilling, because I realize in this context that yes, absolutely, that is how we operate. That’s what’s behind the “made a bad tweet, got in a plane, found out they were the main character on the Internet five hours later” stuff. If you get enough people to think you’re a valid target that “deserves it” all bets are off.
Historically this has been particularly bad around gaming, where a lot of the audience is tech-savvy and heavily connected. And frankly, I think that space sucks and in many corners of the Internet gaming commentary revolves solely around half-understood outrage.
Look, there are downsides to doing things this way, is all I’m saying. I’m not particularly concerned about this instance, because clearly the thing that happened was wrong and in bad faith already and it’s actually a good thing that the monopolistic impact of payment processors gets highlighted, because that’s objectively worse. But seeing the process divorced from the moral outrage or disagreement still demonstrates some things about the Internet that I find profoundly problematic.
Is it? I don’t know that I can get behind people based on who they choose to go after. I’ve always had trouble to find a mob that goes after people I dislike any less scary than any other.
And for the record, again, I do agree with the underlying sentiment and have no particular empathy towards payment services, of all things. I just find it very hard to see “gamers” rallying to do the whole online disruption thing and cheer rather than picture the very real instances of attacking individuals in the exact same way.
It’s just kinda creepy, honestly. More so if the only line we have for this is how much we like the targets at any given point. I’m gonna spend a long time thinking about this one. So far a bad faith letter campaign and an online disruption campaign are both having an outsized influence on something that probably shouldn’t be swayed so easily in any direction beyond official government regulations. Even if this ultimately falls on the side I agree with it’s… not a good look and I come out of it more concerned than I was. And I was concerned about this scenario already.
I mean, before getting too excited it’s worth taking a second to remember this is the exact playbook that launched Gamergate. Will be some of the same people, too, considering porn is the great unifier of the US left and… well, horny nerds.
I agree with the sentiment, but I’m not gonna get super hyped for the “gamers can organize a remote pressure campaign” thing ever again without some icky feelings.
Absolutely not the case. See, what’s happening is you went “will somebody think of the 25 year old children”, I said that’s a disingenuous argument and you went “will somebody think of the 25 year old children” again. My not engaging with the disingenuous argument isn’t “light on arguments and refutations”, it’s me refusing to argue the issue on the disingenuous terms you are presenting.
Which is an argument I find pointless in the first place because my point wasn’t about… 25 year old children being seduced by sweet, sweet sports gambling, it was that the Pew survey results were presented in a surprisingly skewed way that is representative of that exact “think of the children” falacy, regardless of the merits of the argument.