sp3ctr4l

I realize this is a joke, and it did elicit a good chuckle from me, but I have two technical sort of nit picks / factoids.

As I understand these things:

To the vast majority of Catholics, the Pope is not literally a god-king, who becomes basically a minor god oh his physical death, or just literally is onenof the greater gods made incarate... the Pope is God's chosen representative on Earth, sort of like a more formalized version of many Old Testament prophets, who also leads God's church.

Also... the Amish, the Mennonites... they very much do have as part of their culture, which very much revolves around religion... that you more or less are a expected to, and by this cement that you are a good person of faith and character, that you help others by participating, often regularly, in work-gangs, to stand up at least the basics of barn or house, in what is a shockingly short amount of time, and done in a very high quality manner, with less technologically advanced tools than what is normal for others.

Seriously, if you've never seen this, go look up something like Amish Barn Raising on youtube.

They start with basically just raw materials, assemble large parts of the framing, stand em up with just ropes, set up and join the whole thing, get the outer walls and roof on and doors on, in under a a single work day.

Depending on how exactly you draw the line on 'slavery'... maybe? Kinda?

For the Great Pyramid, the current approximate consenus is that it was basically a corvee labor system for a large amount of the population of Egypt.

Basically, when the farmers were all in their off season, they'd be drafted for a number of months a year to aid construction as general laborers.

They were housed, fed, and paid for this, by the state/royal coffers.

They were paid in material goods like foodstuffs, as currency in the way we think of it wasn't really a thing at the time.

And yes, they absolutely did have divisions of labor, they had basically nobility or psuedo nobilility people who could largely read and write as trained architects and engineers and mathematicians and record keepers and accountants, and had a whole slew of the craftsmen / stone mason class below them.

So... it is forced labor, you couldn't really opt out, but you would be compensated.

Egypt did have roughly chattel slaves at the time, they probably participated as well, but they are estimated to be about 10% of the total population of Egypt at the time.

(Compare this to say, 1st century AD/CE Rome, where I think the estimate is more like roughly 20-30% being slaves)

There is also the religious component: It is likely that many of the drafted laborers viewed this as a privilege or sacred duty to construct the tomb of their living god-king, who they would have believed became essentially immortal, his spirit would be preserved for eternity, as a consequence of their work.

So maybe think of it as an extremely intensive mission trip to go build shelters for the needy, as a rough analogue to modernity... it was some kind of good, moral, holy thing to do.

Who gave Harvey Weinstein a cattleman hat and a Senate seat?

Fucking Oklahoma, goddamnit.

Gotta keep your nethers soft as feathers =P

The source I am using has options for 'The World' and over 100 countries.

They have a whole section summarzing their data sets, if you scroll down.

In the gigacalculator dataset, the US and World populations do not have the same mean, which indicates they are differentiating between them.

If you are too lazy to do the math yourself, you have no grounds to criticize the source I am using, who are themselves using many, many datasets, who actually have done the math.

Your source, howstuffworks, says its about 171cm, but they also say this varies widely, and the source they use, worlddata.info, does not actually provide a 171cm global mean adult male height anywhere.

Go, click the about to get to howstuffworks' source. There are no given global means at all, they are per country and region.

No, that is not how that would work.

It is, actually, allow me to explain:

Visa and MasterCard have policies for who they do business with, ie, merchants and vendors.

The business they do with Valve is the business of processing online payments, Valve is one of their merchant partners.

They can absolutely shut everything down in the name of upholding their own moral / business standards, via deciding to no longer be a business partner with Valve.

If Valve uses an alt payment system for adult games, Visa and MC are still business partners with Valve, Valve is now in violation of their partnership guidelines, ergo, Visa and MC drop Valve.

Visa and MC are concerned with the reputations of the partners they have, in general, not so much with the exact transactions they actually process.

Being mad at Valve is reasonable, because they did not have to ban all games that their payment processors disagree with.

No, its not, and Valve did have to act in this way, see above.

Itch.io and Nutaku just did the same thing after Valve did, you can no longer buy any games that cost money, that have explicit sexual content, so by your logic, its Valve and Itch.io and Nutaku all being unnecessarily censorious, of their own accord, rather than the reality, which is that MC and Visa are strong arming all these digital market places.

EDIT: In itch.io's case, they even delisted their totally free adult games.

So yeah, being mad at Valve is stupid, people need to be mad st MC and Visa and probably also PayPal.

Being mad at Valve is shooting the messenger.

Fortunately the petition is at least correctly aimed at the payment processors.

But also...

If MC and Visa won't budge on their positions, well, if Valve then makes an alt payment system for adult only games...

MC and Visa go, oh, hey, you're violating our guidelines, we no longer support Valve/Steam, now no one can buy any game.

This is a MAD situation, Valve would have to come up with a comprehensive payment processing system for everything, in secret, and then deploy it all at once.

They would have to roughly make their own form of PayPal, alongside their own bank.

If you didn't know, PayPal technically isn't a bank, it and Venmo use Synchrony Bank... which is an actual bank.

If they did something like that, it could work, but it would have to be at a similar scale as PayPal, that is to say, massive....

Because doing this would/could basically be the nuclear option:

MC and Visa and PayPal would/could drop them.

So, they'd have to basically develop a massive project, in total secrecy.

... Which is something Valve has arguably done a number of times, they are notoriously opaque as a company.

......

Sort of as you mention, they already have a barebones backend framework to scale up from the steam gift card / user gift card balance system.

I am... uncertain if their backend for that already does or does not include an actual legally defined bank though.

...

Problem is that this would necessitate a massively costly undertaking, as well as ongoing maintenance costs, and Valve is also notorious for basically running on what most other firms would consider a skeleton crew for the size and scope of what they do.

Worth also noting is that Monero also, not too long ago...

They specifically rewrote/updated the uh, block solver problem that miners solve for a reward...

They updated it to make ASIC mining basically not work.

Because they do not want it to be feasible for some rich assholes to build an ASIC mining farm.

They want mining to be distributed, done by individuals, in remotely collectivized mining pools.

Yes, it is individually, not as energy efficient as PoS system... but if you have a PoW system, that is specifically difficult to scale a large scale mining operation for...

Well, then basically no one does that.

Go lookup how much power gets thrown into Bitcoin or Eth., vs Monero.

Yep, they have much larger transaction volumes, but they are also way, way, way more energy intensive due to at least in significant part, it being profitable to run a large scale mining op.

And, not having people able to run huge mining ops, also just keeps things more stable on the value/price/txn speed front.

Monero is the least worst of all cryptocurrencies in terms of being an actual, private, secure currency.

Everything else is to a different degree, some kind of a speculative investment asset, the major ones also all happen to be orders of magnitude worse at overall energy consumption, which is largely used to just do crypto forex trading... people still do not really buy anything tangible with BTC or ETH, outside of either basically, or just actually, some kind of scam.

~= means approximately equal.

https://www.gigacalculator.com/calculators/height-percentile-calculator.php

Going by this, and using 25 as the age, which is my guesstimate for the ages in the OP image, it seems to more precisely be ... 178.4cm.

Do you have an alternate dataset you find to be more accurate?

Well, given our low voter turnouts...

Roughly 1/3 of our population is so stupid and hateful that they would rather have a President that hurts people they don't like, than uh... anything else.

I feel like a lot of non US people really do not fully comprehend the level of just literal hatred that fuels many Americans, as well as how common it is to be extremely charismatically performative in a massively hypocritical way, in just every aspect of life.

We are a country of adults that read at an average of a 6th grade level, with astonishing levels of religious extremism and cults (compared to other countries with similar levels of economic development), who are aware our society is collapsing, but are largely too stupid to even understand why.

We were sold the lie of American Exceptionalism, were indoctrinated into it as a sort of secular cult, it is now apparent this is/was all a lie, and people are (have been) essentially having a kind of mass psychosis in terms of how they handle this revalation.

Our systems are massively corrupt, they've been incrementally corrupting for decades, but the effect has been snowballing.

A few people and groups would pop up from time to time and point this out, and push for a specific, meaningful reform to actually stymie this at a systemic level, and they would be crushed by both corporate and political PR campaigns, but also just a general sense of 'you are overreacting and hysterical' in the broad population, that came from that smug security of the American Exceptionalism ethos.

Basically, we are largely a nation of incurious, brutish, overconfident, malignant narcissists, who revel in biased reasoning ortiented toward justifying an already held belief, who are often already taught from a young age to evaluate the world with the irrational magical thinking of religious cults, which normalizes cognitive dissonance and conspiracism, which then leads to the present outcome you correctly find to be so absurd.

Unleas you 'watch' the game with some kind of image training AI, that then learns how to approximately hallucinate a game.

https://gamengen.github.io/

So, technically, you can "watch" a game and sort of cause that to result in a sort of playable game.

This is however vastly more time and compute intensive that just ripping a movie, and results in... something of a fever dream version of a game, that tends to lose accuracy and stability the longer you play it.