I have such great memories of the blackout. I was in college at the time, so obviously indestructible.
The first night, we had 2 grills with 10ft high flames roaring but I would say in a controlled fashion. The cops quickly asked us to not do something dumb like that anymore and we agreed.
Memories of the local party stores selling 40oz's for pennies on the dollar, as the outage would last days but the booze would not. It didn't really turn into anything bad for us in SE Michigan other than a fun story I can tell my internet pals about 20 years on.
If I recall correctly, we were also somehow the first house in the neighborhood to get power restored...I remember playing a Dreamcast with a hacked NES emulator running Rampart 2 player. I never made good on it, but I always said I wanted to make a shirt that read "I blacked out in the black out of '03"...which is probably for the best.
Hang out around here for a while and you will realize quickly that us tech bros mostly just know tech stuff. Our perceived intelligence in topics which we don't spend our time on is called hubris and we are swimming in it at all times.
There is a solution, but no one wants to hear it. Anonymity is the problem and the only way to curb cheats like these are to have extreme meatspace penalties and some sort of central ID mechanism that requires some sort of real and personal identification
Those people will next use their mother's ID, their grandparents' IDs, and so on. Then move on to stolen IDs. Which is not preventable unless you do full-on hardware attestation tied to real ID, which means China-level surveillance.
Source: Living in a country where gaming accounts are already tied to real identities :)
You mean a system where when you get misidentified (this will almost always happen at scale) you get effectively banned forever, across multiple games? Yeah... I think I know why people aren't keen on that.
(And yeah, I'm ignoring the general issue of how you id people, how you secure that data, what happens in a highly toxic game environment when someone breaches that, etc.)
It's not a realistic solution that can be applied. It's the way in the same way as a bomb in your desktop that explodes if you're found cheating is the way.
Besides, there is another way, which is just as stupid: just ban everyone. No more video games, ever. And there you go: no more cheating in video games.
That is not a solution because it blindly solves one problem in isolation while creating a whole host of other problems that are equally if not more destructive.
It is improper to say this is a solution when you swap out the problems for something worse as a surrogate at the same time.
When you are tied to one physical ID, you give disproportionate power to the game manufacturer, which enables them to monopolize, and engage in coercive, and corrupt behavior more readily.
Say they decide after the fact that they don't like your objective review of a game you bought because shocker it was "unfinished". They decide to ban you, that ban alerts all other manufacturers, and they block you as well. Or someone who can issue those bans decides to blackmail or extort you.
If you don't comply, in the process, they revoke access to all your licensed purchases. It is tied to a real ID, so there's no way around it. You've just been cancelled from games/entertainment as a whole.
If this touches on physical aspects like interfering with your ability to get food, hold a job, etc, you've just been forced into the dregs of society with no due process outside a rule of law. "There are plenty of people that haven't had this scarlet letter attached, ... we'll just choose anyone but them", is how it will go.
This is not a new concept, in fact it is one of the common elements found in Maoism and collectivism in general.
So the solution you propose is communism by another name. Any educated person knows Communism fails in common ways intractably, and as a result this cannot be a solution.
A good rule of thumb is, if it involves a centralized hierarchy structure; its more likely than not going to be some form of communism/socialism (fabian/globalist/its gradual neighbor)/or collectivism, and one must consider slippery slopes where once you adopt one thing, you slip all the way down to another.
Ludwig von Mises wrote a book back in the 1930s-1950s covering all of the intractable failures, under the title "Socialism". The detailed problems he describes are intractable, and naturally occur in such systems.
Communism and its derivatives are all about obscuring its origins deceitfully to trick you into thinking and agreeing its a solution. They don't give you the whole picture and they strive to mislead towards pipe dreams which never happen in practice, towards control you can't take back.
the other day I was washing the dishes and in my head I started hearing "listen to the sound, of my big black boots"
My favorite collab is the record he did with Saul Williams, it is a banger. You can hear TR all over that thing, and that was the one (or released at the same time as the one) that was given away for whatever you wanted to pay for it.
It isn't the fault of the group that suggests and standardizes protocols, it is everyone thinking they are smarter and they can do it better is the problem.
There is a book about this theory written in the 1960's called 'The Structure of Scientific Revolution' by Kuhn that talks about some sciences which progress one funeral at a time and how progress is not linear. He also remarks how people from outside the standard thoughts and education surrounding the current system are typically the ones to actually progress science.
One example is Geocentrism vs Copernican astronomical models -- Copernican could never have sprung from the status quo because everything revolved around the Earth in Geocentrism instead of around the Sun. You can't square that circle.
About geocentrism vs heliocentrism, 3blue1brown has recently released a video [1] that talks about about it. It is about the cosmic distance ladder, but geocentrism is mentioned, and it makes a lot of sense in context.
To summarize: heliocentrism was known to the ancient Greeks, who realized the Sun was much bigger than the Earth, so it would seem logical to have the Earth go around the sun.
But the counterargument was that if the Earth goes around the Sun, the stars should move relative to each other during the year, because of parallax, and they didn't have instruments that were precise enough to see it, so they assumed that they didn't.
Copernicus major contribution wasn't heliocentrism, but the orbital periods of planets. And the model wasn't complete until Kepler calculated the shapes of the orbits. For details, watch the video, it is really good.
I'm being picky here, but I don't think you portray an fair view of Kuhn's epistemology here.
Kuhn does not define a value-scale of both methods, on the contrary, he merely introduces the concept of different researchs: one being critical (developing new paradigms) and one being accumulating (further refining existing paradigms).
He also hints to the almost inevitably organic interactions between the two, such that critical research naturally evolves from a pragmatic need to express things simply from a new paradigm when the old one becomes too clumsy for a use case.
This is what happened in your example as well. Copernic (and later Galileo) did not invent heliocentrism out of the blue, the theory around it existed since antic Greece. It is even arguably the Renaissance, leading metaphysicists to revisit ancien texts, that spurred the idea to Copernic to consider it. But ultimately the need for the new paradigm was pushed by the need to revisit the calendar, which was drifting, and the difficulty to do it in a geocentric world, where you have to take planet retrocession into account.
Heliocentrism was well known, the issue was that the copernican model was a bad model for the evidence and knowledge of physics available at the time (it was basically equivilent to a geocentric model but less need more epicycles, not less, and also required that the earth rotated and some unusual properties for stars). It took Kepler figuring out ellipses and slowly beating out epicycles as a way to do the math, as well as some other experiments which established the world did indeed rotate (not for lack of trying by heliocentricism advocates, but it's a hard measurement to make), to bring the idea mainstream. (And arguably only Newton's laws of motion actually tied it all together)
Having just finally read (well, listened to) Kuhn's book, I can say:
(a) I wouldn't quite characterize the book as being "about this theory" — it's a bit more nuanced. He definitely says that it's usually younger scientists with less invested in the currently reigning theory that are most likely to push forward a revolution. However, I don't recall any examples in the book of people who where wholly _unaware_ of the previous theory.
(b) You should absolutely, definitely read it. It's a classic for a reason, and the writing style is a delight.
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