Trying a switch to tal@lemmy.today, at least for a while, due to recent kbin.social stability problems and to help spread load.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Han is the captain. The captain of a ship makes the calls as to what it does, and the Millennium Falcon came back.

    I think a better question is why Luke gets special recognition versus the other pilots. I mean, he happened to be the one to make the final shot that blew up the Death Star, but everyone else in the squadrons went in too.



  • So, first, that text is from the Declaration of Independence, not the US Constitution, which defines legal rights.

    But, secondly, the right to “pursuit of happiness” needs to be understood in the (somewhat euphemistic) language of the time. It is generally understood as referring to a right to property; this right was a core dispute in the American Revolution, and mirrors a nearly-identical “life, liberty” phrase from John Locke where the term used is explicitly “property”. That is, the right is not to never feel unhappy or depressed, but rather to not have one’s property taken away by non-elected parties.

    https://www.crf-usa.org/foundations-of-our-constitution/natural-rights.html

    The Tea Act, which imposed taxes on American colonists, was a critical dispute in the American Revolution:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Act

    The Tea Act 1773 (13 Geo. 3. c. 44) was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain. The principal objective was to reduce the massive amount of tea held by the financially troubled British East India Company in its London warehouses and to help the struggling company survive.[1] A related objective was to undercut the price of illegal tea, smuggled into Britain’s North American colonies. This was supposed to convince the colonists to purchase Company tea on which the Townshend duties were paid, thus implicitly agreeing to accept Parliament’s right of taxation. Smuggled tea was a large issue for Britain and the East India Company, since approximately 86% of all the tea in America at the time was smuggled Dutch tea.

    At the time, it was generally accepted that in England, only elected officials had the power to tax; this is one of the rights of Englishmen.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_Englishmen

    The “rights of Englishmen” are the traditional rights of English subjects and later English-speaking subjects of the British Crown. In the 18th century, some of the colonists who objected to British rule in the thirteen British North American colonies that would become the first United States argued that their traditional[1] rights as Englishmen were being violated. The colonists wanted and expected the rights that they (or their forebears) had previously enjoyed in England: a local, representative government, with regards to judicial matters (some colonists were being sent back to England for trials) and particularly with regards to taxation.[2] Belief in these rights subsequently became a widely accepted justification for the American Revolution.[3][4]

    However, American colonists had no elected MPs in Parliament. Parliament was willing neither to grant them elected MPs, nor to refrain from taxation and have locally-elected legislatures perform taxation. Parliament’s counterargument was that Americans had “virtual representation”, in that MPs elected by people in the UK – though not elected by American colonists – had their best interests at heart.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_representation

    Virtual representation was the idea that the members of Parliament, including the Lords and the Crown-in-Parliament, reserved the right to speak for the interests of all British subjects, rather than for the interests of only the district that elected them or for the regions in which they held peerages and spiritual sway.[1] Virtual representation was the British response to the First Continental Congress in the American colonies. The Second Continental Congress asked for representation in Parliament in the Suffolk Resolves, also known as the first Olive Branch Petition. Parliament claimed that their members had the well being of the colonists in mind. The Colonies rejected this premise.


  • My assumption is that that’s gonna get thrown out because they don’t have standing. Probably some kind of case law along those lines already, since I figure someone’s probably tried that before.

    googles

    Looks like it.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliana_v._United_States

    Juliana, et al. v. United States of America, et al. is a climate-related lawsuit filed in 2015 by 21 youth plaintiffs against the United States and several executive branch officials. Filing their case in the United States District Court for the District of Oregon, the plaintiffs, represented by the non-profit organization Our Children’s Trust, include Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, the members of Martinez’s organization Earth Guardians, and climatologist James Hansen as a “guardian for future generations”.

    They call for the government to offer “both declaratory and injunctive relief for their claim—specifically, a declaration of the federal government’s fiduciary role in preserving the atmosphere and an injunction of its actions which contravene that role.”

    In January 2020, a Ninth Circuit panel dismissed the case on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue for an injunction.

    Legal actions to affect climate change by federal and state-level governments have been attempted since the 1990s; one of the first known cases was led by Antonio Oposa, a Philippine lawyer that represented a class-action suit of 43 students against the Philippine government to protect a forest surrounding their village.

    Since 2011, Our Children’s Trust has been filing various state and federal lawsuits on behalf of youth, though most of these have been dismissed by courts, as courts generally have not ruled that access to a clean environment is a right that can be litigated against.[8][5][6] Such cases are also generally dismissed as lawsuits cannot be initiated by “generalized grievances”, and require plaintiffs with standing to sue and can demonstrate concrete harm that the government has done, and that the courts can at least partially redress the harm by order of the court.[9] Further, cases cannot be brought to court if they deal with a “political question” which cannot be resolved by actions of Congress and the President.[9]

    The “political question” bit should be inapplicable, since this is a company, but the lack of standing to sue for climate change probably does apply.

    I assume that this is a crowd-pleaser by the California executive, that they expect it to get tossed out but want the political points.







  • Yeah, sorry, but no. That’s not slavery. If you’re present in the country illegally and working illegally and could be returned home at any time, you may not be making as much as you would if you were present legally, but you are not compelled to work. You can always terminate working and return to the country where you are legally supposed to be. If you choose to be in Country A illegally and working there rather than in Country B legally and working (for less) there, that is your choice, and you are not being compelled to work.

    Slavery entails someone being compelled to work.



  • Max wants to push alerts on viewers when there is breaking news on CNN.

    I could maybe see there being a market for this if the default is not to show them, and there’s an option to receive notification of developments on a specific topic. It’s better than rabidly refreshing a particular topic that you are specially interested in.

    Like, say you live in an area with an approaching hurricane, and you wanted to be alerted if there are any new developments on that particular topic.

    However, I have a hard time believing that, in the general case, people want alerts popping up.



  • I don’t think that the issue is the quality of their QA. Well, okay, maybe that’s a factor, but I don’t think that that was the big one for Fallout 76.

    Some of the issues in Fallout 76 that they shipped with, they had to know they were shipping with. It wasn’t that QA didn’t turn up problems, but that they took too-ambitious a plan, ran out of time, and then didn’t delay the release to fix all the broken stuff. Yeah, they did a lot of work to fix the game post-release, but by then, a lot of players had already been soured by the initial bad experience.

    They did significantly delay the Starfield release, so I assume that they are trying to put this out in a more-sane shape.


  • That’s probably part of it. A big chunk of the aspects that I didn’t like about it relative to Fallout 4 – from killing off slow-mo/pause VATS, to not having a world that can change much, to limited-size “settlements”, to limited moddability, to having immersion-breaking other players jetpacking around with not-in-theme names, to having limited story content – come from the fact that they built it to be a multiplayer game.

    But even so. I’ve seen some footage of the game at release, and it was pretty bad. And not just bugs, but the content…I mean, a Bethesda game not having human NPCs?

    I will give them props for putting a lot of effort into fixing the game post-release, but I still feel that the thing shouldn’t have shipped when it did. It simply wasn’t ready when it went out the door.

    Also, some of the fixes they did do that I think people did like – like reducing the severity of the food/water/radstorm survival elements, which many players didn’t like having to hassle with, or reducing the role of PvP, which a lot of the playerbase didn’t like – didn’t result in game rebalancing. Like, the player shelters were clearly intended to be a significant element to deal with radstorms, but radstorms are essentially ignorable. Food was intended to play a bigger role, and there are features oriented towards things like reducing the rate of one’s demand for it, but that was removed.

    If you look at Fallout 4 or even moreso Skyrim, modders went through and rebalanced the game long after the release. I’m not saying that everyone who played those games got to enjoy those changes, but I think that they were good ones. Fallout 76 isn’t really moddable in that way, so it’s dependent on Bethesda’s devs to do all that…and they didn’t really do that.

    There were no really memorable moments from the game, the way, I don’t know, the battle for The Castle or the arrival of the Brotherhood of Steel’s aircraft or some other moments in Fallout 4 really stuck with me. I guess to some extent that’s part of just having to make a lot of the content something that you play over and over, but it still was kinda disappointing.

    And I’m not demanding that they work for free. I bought all the DLC for Fallout 4 and Skyrim. I’d happily have bought something like the (excellent) DLC packs for earlier games in the Fallout series for Fallout 76. But, instead, they only sold mostly-aesthetic content in the Atom Store. Which, okay, great, if someone really wants to decorate their player camp and wants to pay for it could be appealing to someone. But they didn’t create a route to pay for more story content, more maps or the like. They did create new free content, but that necessarily has a limited budget, and again, was kinda oriented around multiplayer (and didn’t catch on much with me and didn’t seem to be terribly popular with players on the fo76 subreddit, either).

    There are some things that I did like about it, that I don’t think it got credit for. The building mode performance was significantly-improved over 4. They toned down the “everything is dark and awful and evil and every person and company is twisted” aspect in 4, which I think was a big plus; there were plenty of people just trying to live their lives in difficult situations, which felt more like 1. I’m not absolutely rabid about the new areas, but the Mire looked nice by the standards of their engine, was a good use of their engine’s godrays. They did a bunch of performance and stability work (that had to happen, given that one couldn’t just “reload earlier saves” if something broke in a saved game a la the single player games).

    I could have lived with Fallout 76 not being Fallout 5, but what I wished that they could have done was to keep selling single-player content in traditional DLC form. A lot of MUDs and similar games have a “remort” feature where one can start with a new character and earn some persistent rewards for doing so, so playing through story content multiple times is still fun. “New Game Plus”, kinda. The online aspect for single-player content would just be to provide DRM, so that people wouldn’t just go swipe all the stuff that they’re selling in the Atom Store. And the stuff on offer in the Atom Store…ugh. If you look at the mods in Fallout 4, people created high-resolution texture packs, new companions, new story content, and they don’t have anything like that for sale. You could have segregated anything that affected balance out of the multiplayer areas, had very solid single-player-only content. It might not have been Fallout 5, but I think that it could have done a much better job of making people who wanted that happier while still providing a multiplayer game for those who wanted a multiplayer game.