testfactor

joined 2 years ago
[–] testfactor@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago

Setting aside the fact that polygraphs are pseudoscience mumbo jumbo that don't work in any meaningful capacity, and the results of which are really just the vibes of the person running it (with all of their bigotry/biases on full display.)

The bigger issue is that there are over thirteen thousand school districts in the US. If each school board is four people on average, that's over fifty thousand people you'd have to do polygraphs for. And that's if all you wanted to do was school boards.

Trying to get all of those people polygraphs would be an absolute logistical nightmare. There aren't that many polygraphers out there.

And we shouldn't be legitimizing polygraphs anyway. They have time and time again been shown to be absolute bunk, and to discriminate against people with issues like anxiety (or really, anyone who gets agitated when you accuse them of something). The only people who can reliably pass polygraphs are sociopaths, which feels like the opposite of what you want to be selecting for here.

[–] testfactor@lemmy.world 6 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

Absolutely! It's just a complete coincidence that the people who the school system is failing are barred from fixing it because in order to pass the test you have to have done well in school. It makes perfect sense.

It's not like the US has a history of refusing to educate people, and then refusing to let them participate in civic matters by gating that access behind tests. The US certainly has never, say, made passing a test a requirement to vote to disenfranchise people.

And we all know that, of course, that any test would be super effective at preventing the abuse the above article is about. You just put the question "are you sexually attracted to children," on the test. That way you'd keep out creeps. And no one would ever lie on a test. That'd be ridiculous.

I don't know why people are disagreeing. It's a perfect system!

[–] testfactor@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

Ah, fair. I only watched the non-short one. Didn't even notice the shorts.

[–] testfactor@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Has he released another video? I only see one on his YouTube page.

[–] testfactor@lemmy.world 12 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

I wish the video actually had him using it to hit a drone or something. As is, it only shows one actual launch, and it didn't look all that impressive. His motors didn't seem to have enough umph to let the missile stabilize properly.

[–] testfactor@lemmy.world 44 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Is it possible for Chic-fil-a to ever redeem itself in your eyes?

If they fired everyone involved with every controversy and started donating every cent of profit to LGBT charity groups, would you say they were a good company, or is it once tainted always tainted.

Chic-fil-a has made a lot of changes in the past decade and a half, and I'm of the opinion that, if no amount of self reflection and change can ever make us reconsider our condemnation, then there's no reason for anything to try and change, as it won't stop the hate.

Not that Chic-fil-a is perfect, but I would argue they are now as good or better than any other fast food chain we're not actively hating on. They actually pay their employees more than minimum wage and give them one guaranteed weekend day off if nothing else.

So why continue to put them down now that it's "mission accomplished?" If the goal was for them to change, and they have, it seems that we should bring them back into the fold, no?

[–] testfactor@lemmy.world 6 points 4 months ago

Sure, many games are tied to various Steam services, but that's by the choice of the games developer. Steam offers various built in services that game devs can choose to use if they want. It's not like it's some kind of requirement.

You might as well complain that game devs use Windows binaries, locking their games to only run on Windows. Sure, I prefer it when they target other platforms, but that's 1000% not Microsoft's fault that the dev chose to dev for their platform. I'm not mad at Microsoft for so many games being Windows only. I'm mad at the devs.

And games that build themselves around Steam services are of course going to be tied to Steam. That's a choice the devs made. If they wanted their game to run without needing the Steam client, they trivially could have built it that way. They just would have had to either reimplement all those Steam features themselves, or done without.

And if people want those Steam features, every store client who wants to run those games would have to implement those features in an interoperable way. It's easy to say "have interoperability between clients," but that's glossing over the potentially thousands of dev hours required to implement all of the features needed. And that's assuming they could all agree on a spec.

And to your final point about being open source. First, it gives very "any musician who gets paid is a sellout" energy. But more than that, it doesn't actually solve the problem you have. Even if Steam open sourced their tooling, that doesn't mean other players in the space could integrate it. Steam has grown organically for the past 30yrs, and trying to extricate the deep inner bits and then graft them on to your own solution isn't as easy as it sounds.

[–] testfactor@lemmy.world 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

But they aren't tied to a store? When you download a game from Steam, it's just an executable on your box. You could put it on a hard drive and move it wherever you wanted. You don't have to launch games you bought with Steam through Steam. They aren't streamed. They are saved locally to your computer.

You can only download it from that store, sure, but that's not apples to apples. If I buy a game from GameStop, they won't give me another copy for free, just cause I threw away the copy they gave me. Once you download the game, that's what they sold you, and it's notionally your responsibility to keep track of it. Them allowing you to keep downloading new copies forever isn't strictly necessary, and costs them money every time you do it.

And if you can run the games you downloaded without Steam, all you're saying is "there should be other places to buy your games." But there are. Those exist. Less people use them, sure, but what do you propose? Kill Steam because too many people use it to buy their games? Legislate that people are required to shop at other stores?

[–] testfactor@lemmy.world 16 points 4 months ago (4 children)

But this game is getting distribution through GoG and about a half dozen other platforms listed in the article.

Do most people game through steam? Yes. But centralization of the marketplace isn't necessarily a bad thing. There's a reason why people complain when they have to use other game stores an launchers. It's the "I have 50 different streaming services" problem.

If Steam starts abusing that market position, then yes, we should care about that and they should suffer backlash. Which makes the question of "did they do the right thing here," very much relevant.

[–] testfactor@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

While preventable child deaths are obviously terrible, I feel like this could be overextended.

Like, how many child deaths has McDonald's caused vs guns. I'm too lazy to do the math like the other guy, but I'd presume it's comparable. (Although I suppose by the time it catches up to them they're no longer children.)

Idk, you see things like, "leading cause of death in children" and it makes the number seem huge, but it's less than 100 kids a year. And it looks like around 400/yr die from drowning in swimming pools. So if we really care about the children, we should bad swimming pools? They kill 4x the number of kids than guns.

I'm not saying guns are great. But using child deaths as part of the argument just feels like a great excuse to ban literally anything you just don't like.

[–] testfactor@lemmy.world 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Even in your made up scenario it doesn't prove the negative. Maybe your mind reading didn't work because Apple has a mind wiping device that made them forget. Maybe the crystal ball didn't work because Apple made an even more powerful "crystal ball blocking" device. You can't prove that's not what's really happening.

So no, you in fact can't prove a negative.

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