nednobbins

Things will only have useful size metrics when the buyers want useful size metrics.

Men's pants come with useful size metrics because they're useful and we attach very little meaning to the measurement of men's pants.

Women's pants come with stupid size metrics because we attach a lot of meaning to the measurement of women's pants.

It's the same reason condoms sizes are all on the spectrum of large to extra large without actually providing a length and diameter.

And the spidertron is really cute...
But who's ugly or cute on the inside? That's what counts, right?

Right?

There are already some games like that.

Some games like Eve or Factorio have backstories that make it clear the player sucks. Capsuleers are immortal but the rest of the crew isn't. The Factorio engineer lands on a strange planet, pollutes the hell out of it and kills the natives.

Then there are games like KOTOR or Pathfinder:ROTW where the evil path has you make some pretty fscked up dialog decisions.

"He says" is not the same as "he says, essentially".

One is directly reflects what he said, the other injects your interpretation of what he said. It requires the leap of believing that defending democracy is best done by stopping Trump, even if it means abandoning journalistic ethics. He claims that defending democracy requires an impartial media.

To say that he doesn't want to defend democracy is entirely bullshit. It's not what he says or implies. He just disagrees with you on how best to do so.

That's not what he says. Not only does Kahn not say that himself, he's not even asked about it.

He's asked, "Why don’t you see your job as: 'We’ve got to stop Trump?'" And he responds that the role of the media in a healthy democracy is to provide accurate and unbiased reporting, rather than hiding or misrepresenting facts to favor one candidate over an other.

The left shouldn't wait. It should have started years ago.

Project 2025 didn't start yesterday. https://web.archive.org/web/20230920110555/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/us/politics/republican-president-2024-heritage-foundation.html
It didn't even start in 2023. That's the culmination of years of planning.

The thing that pisses me off the most about Project 2025 is that there's no Project 2029 from the left.

It's because we're talking about two entirely different groups of people.

More and more Democrats are calling for Biden to withdraw because they don't believe he can beat Trump.

Republicans are happy to stick with Trump because they're fairly sure he can trounce Biden.

It's silly to talk about a "pundit class". It's not like they're a group with any coherent ideas, much less any sort of persistent group loyalty. They're just people with opinions and a platform.

This article tries to make it sound like he's a really popular candidate and there's some shady group of kingmakers trying to block him.

The main reason that people are pushing for him to step aside is that they don't believe he can beat Trump. It's not that people were grumpy about a raspy voice. There was already a lot of suspicion that he's going senile. He got the benefit of the doubt and the debate was his chance to prove the doubters wrong. Instead he confirmed their deepest fears. Since then, he's provided a steady stream of examples of his diminishing mental capacity.

A formal cognitive assessment might lay those fears to rest but, at this point, it's unlikely. For many people, the conclusion is clear; the evidence is in and he forgets what he's talking about mid-sentence. Many people look at the polling numbers around that just want someone who has a chance of beating Trump.

The visual qualities are exactly the point.

If you wave around the constitution, it's indistinguishable from some random bits of parchment. Most people can recognize their flag, even when it's flapping around and next to similar flags. Humans are just very visual creatures.

In either case, the pledge isn't actually to the object itself but to the country represented by that object.

The problem we have in the US is that Old Glory is commonly used to represent some particular group's vision of what the US should be rather than a symbol of the country as a whole. When that sort of change is broadly positive, such as when it started to become a symbol of American ingenuity in space, it's easy for everyone to rally behind. When it starts to symbolize a message like, "We should give the police unrestrained power." it becomes more divisive.

do they think anyone else realistically could, at this point, other than Biden?

The answer to that is clearly, "Yes." The calls for him to bow out are coming from all corners; various mainstream media outlets, donor groups, alternative media, pundits, and even sitting Democratic politicians.

The people calling for Biden to drop out are completely different from the people who want Trump to stay in the race.

Democrats want Biden to drop out because they don't believe he can beat Trump.

Republicans want Trump to stay on the ticket because they're pretty sure he'll crush Biden .