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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • As someone who has done a lot of distro hopping in the past, I’ve found that going for a stable release that is widely used as a daily driver is superior for gaming than “gaming specific” linux distros, largely on the basis that the gaming distros have routinely had buggy UIs, driver issues, and a variety of unexpected and undesired behavioral problems tied to the array of “gaming adjacent” software installed, most of which you can install yourself with little to no effort and most of which you probably don’t want or need in the first place.










  • I’m not. Universities aren’t places of open or free learning. They’re deeply invested in capitalism and benefit greatly from intellectual property laws. In fact, most universities function largely as state subsidized pipelines that take people without a viable, real world skill set and turn them into people who still don’t have a viable real world skill set, but who do have a piece of paper telling corporations that they’re able and willing to put up with complete bullshit, general mistreatment, and dull, grueling labor for years without incident. Which is good enough for your typical middle-class wage slave and whatever they might want to do.



  • The causal link is implied. When someone says “Pitbulls and certain other dog breeds do not just have a bad reputation because people irrationally fear/hate them, they actually do pose a greater risk,” this is another way of saying that a particular breed of dog is innately more dangerous than another. Not that it has the potential to be more dangerous, but objectively is. The only logical deduction from this statement is that there must be something about the animal’s breed that makes it this way. It’s literally the exact same logic used by people who cite FBI crime statistics in order to paint specific entire ethnic groups as innately “more criminal” than another ethnic group.



  • They’re statistically correlated with incidents of mauling. Nobody is denying the statistical correlation. But there is a difference between observing a statistical correlation between breed and maulings and asserting a causal relationship. My argument is that the assertion that “pit-bulls are innately, biologically predisposed towards violence against people and other animals” is not supported by meaningful evidence. If you are arguing that they are, then you’re gonna have to convince me with more than “insurance companies say they are.”



  • One of the things we based rates on was the breeds of dog people owned. Pitbulls and certain other dog breeds do not just have a bad reputation because people irrationally fear/hate them, they actually do pose a greater risk.

    This is a classic example of someone observing a statistical correlation between specific factors and using that to assert a direct causal relationship between them. It implies that an insurance agency is able to 1) accurately identify every single breed of dog in every single insurance related incident (which is definitely not the case, because I doubt every insurance company is doing genetic testing on every single dog it comes across) and 2) tie a causal relationship between dog breed and incident. If I were going by typical insurance metrics, and to borrow from your analogy of “teenagers as unsafe drivers,” you would also assume that red Camarros, something more expensive to insure than your more conservative sedan, were statistically more dangerous than, say, a white Civic, as if they were what caused their drivers to get into car accidents, as opposed to young, reckless people interested in a fast sports car to simply go out and buy one. These are people who would be reckless behind the wheel of any car, but who are statistically correlated with a particular type of one. But you still mark the red Camaro as more expensive to insure regardless of who buys it because it’s statistically correlated with a higher degree of accidents.