^writers tend to be terrible at thinking outside the box of their own particular societal contexts and expectations, or at least the editors often get nervous of straying too far from those. So, yes, current Japanese legislation is practically relevant here.

From what I poked at Plaza so far Myrtle probably isn't too good a fit esp. with risks limiting natural DP gain and/or team sizes - the way she has to go Block 0 to do her thing tends to result in either early leaks or not getting much-needed early points out of her.

On a completely unrelated note I managed to get Swire off the guarantee on one of the new banners (naturally the 10th pull because RNGesus hates us all), now I just need a Ch'en from somewhere to have a full Lungmen cop show going o3o

A cruel but magnificent drama of nature

Like this absolute madman. To quote one comment, "at this point Arknights is an action game" O_O

What is this? Is this the level of skill and planning that's needed to play that particular map? Like they weren't doing this just to be fancy, this was legit the best way to finish the battle. That's amazing.

Well that's the level of god-tier tryharding needed to clear that map with those risks - there's a translation in the comments and I feel faint just reading the list. D:

From what I gathered that's roughly the highest difficulty combo you can take there, and the only reason to climb that mountain is because it's there. Madlads be mad.

Ayano being a gay mess is fine too~

...I mostly just filled my friendlist by way of support partner use tbh >_>

WHY IS EVERYTHING SO EXPENSIVE? FECK!

#relatable ;_;

The actual bottleneck in promoting Your Dudes by and large isn't the assorted materials but the Brobdingnagian piles of LMD spent on vidya player rents (or something) to push their levels to cap.

Mind you speaking of CC the only thing I seriously want out of this one is Siege's (wicked cool) skin; the rest is really just conveniences (ie. mats and dosh) - definitely nice to have if you can get them with reasonable amount of work, but not something to give yourself a hernia over.
Unless you're doing it for bragging rights and M A S S I V E E P E E Nthe art, of course.

Like this absolute madman. To quote one comment, "at this point Arknights is an action game" O_O

My focus during the free sanity weeks was to grind red certificates to max out Breeze and Ethan...I'm not even halfway done. Was that a good idea? I should probably E2 Siege or a Defender now.

According to YT Ethan's CC abilities, while somewhat RNG, will be very useful in Contingency Contracts so there's that rest depends on how well you can tolerate his TOTALLY RADICAL edge; Breeze seems like a fairly typical multihealer but her skills read like they're meant to focus her more intensely during high-pressure moments which seems useful, especially the second one which changes her cast into an AoE "healball" - theoretically that can heal up to 9 targets at once.

E2 Siege just about obsoletes kill-type Vans in one fell swoop since her second passive keeps cashing in SP even after the fire support has been deployed and starts doing the bulk of the killing. Plus her stats are high enough she can be used as ersatz Guard esp. with second and third skills. Definitely worth.

^ >Maki and/or Nico
>lie convincingly
...pick one?

Yeah, they're busted af all right. :P

last edited at Jun 8, 2020 10:12PM

^^doubly so as Cool Big Sis Nearl A) is a literal (former) Knight and all-around chivalrous badass B) also goes by the epithet "Radiant Knight"

Dissolving the police department and unions and recreating it worked out well for Camden. https://world.wng.org/2018/03/camden_s_new_day

Emphasis on recreating - as per the article about half of the old guard were kept on with retraining. Good for them and better still if they can keep it going, but basically irrelevant in the grand scheme of things given the fundamentally local and "isolated" nature of municipal law enforcement organisation in the country.

Finnish cops would likely nod in agreement with the "smile-campaign" strategy adopted there though, as they deliberately and consciously opted for similar policy starting already in the Sixties or so - making it stick being made whole lot easier when law enforcement is vertically integrated on national level. Works, too; in polls the police have for decades been consistently ranked as one of the most trusted and respected occupations in the country, even the criminal element tends to have a sort of grudging "fair enough" relationship with them.

The primary if not sole employer of prison guard unions is public prisons. Private prisons are 8.2% of the incarcerated population, and falling. https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-prisons-united-states/ They're a problem, but blaming them as a major problem is barking up the wrong tree.

...varying from 0 to 50% depending on state, and you bet your ass the relevant actors spare little effort lobbying for their interests as business now does.
Political influences have been instrumental in determining the growth of for-profit private prisons and continue today. However, if overall prison populations continue the current trend of modest declines, the privatization debate will likely intensify as opportunities for the prison industry dry up and corrections companies seek profit in other areas of criminal justice services and immigration detention.
...so basically, yay greener pastures opening elsewhere. Nothing new about Capital shifting focus as circumstances change, of course. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The private prison lobby is a problem but no more the fundamental underlying one than the guard unions - if anything it is au contraire explicitly a symptom, as the entire industry didn't exist before 1985.
This is where we start approaching the actual core of the problem, namely the pants-on-head retarded US approach to crime and punishement as embodied in the black farce that is the "War on Drugs" and the resulting obscene ballooning of US prisoner population.
Thanks, Reagan!

And because US voters are sociopolitical illiterates who swallow "tough on crime" populist bullshit (it's been a favourite GOP hobby horse in particular since at least Ronnie Raygun) hook line and sinker there's no end in sight to this soi-disant War, which roughly everyone who actually understands the first thing about the dynamics of crime and drug abuse flatly declared lost on Day One.

So, yeah. Systemic problems - more specifically a boneheaded and blinkered insistence on throwing offenders behind bars instead of trying to do anything about the socioeconomic causes of crime. Because it's way cooler to spend dosh on cool weapons and dramatic drug busts than on the well-being of the populace or fixing your goddamn bridges since that would be oh noes socialisms durr, amirite?

Doesn't stop us from pointing out the harms those unions cause.
...
Yes, the US has highly decentralized police departments. How does that make it not a problem that police unions protect criminal cops?

Confusing symptom with cause, again. The unions are not protecting dirty cops because they're unions, they're doing it because of far deeper problems in the whole system - ingrained attitudes (not in the least a strong "us vs. the rest" occupational ethos and culture), issues with lack of real accountability in part due to excessive organisational independence at the local level, widespread corruption etcetera. Dissolving the unions would do exactly nothing to address any of that shit and instead likely only worsen the working conditions of the honest cops - only encouraging them to become corrupt and cynical simply to make ends meet, a dynamic amply attested in Russian law enforcement (which is orders of magnitude more centralised and more dysfunctional, because lol Russia).

And I've been seeing a lot of leftists call for police abolition, so "highly necessary" is debatable.

It is not. Those people are ignorant morons and can be ignored as such. A society without some form of higher authority systematically and consistently enforcing such laws as exist inevitably and in quite short order degenerates into the "primal ooze" of vendetta law where the only real security derives from the deterrence of such retribution as you and yours can exact for being wronged. This is already how things practically work in the lawless underworld within organised societies, much as the more organised kinds of criminal try to regulate their interactions with various codes of conduct (naked greed and opportunism routinely overrides those).
There's a good reason why one of the most popular refrains in royal propaganda since very ancient times was the monarch as a "lawgiver" who brought and upheld peace and order.

"the US has more people in jail per capita"

Doesn't mean prison guard unions can't be part of the cause of that.

They're not, though. The profession is not so large and wealthy as to have much in the way of real political clout. Their employers, that is the prison industry and its shareholders, is a very different story and finds a very ready political and rhetorical ally in the stereotypically Right "law & order" narrative the Republicans have been pushing for decades.
Which works, too.
Case in point: back during Obama's years in office I could still be arsed to actually trawl US online political discourse (I quit the habit years ago in disgust at the exponentially increasing levels of toxic bullshit involved). One article that stuck to mind discussed the polled & openly stated pro-Republican stance of the local prison-guard unions in, IIRC, Florida or thereabouts which interviewees specifically stated came from the GOP's "tough on crime" image which in their assumption obviously meant job security for themselves.
The catch?
These were state and federal prisons, and what the unions were apparently forgetting or actively ignoring was the GOP's general giant hard-on for predatory privatization and being in bed with the private-sector prison industry which is no friend of unionised labour at all, or spending any more than it must on actually running its jails for that matter. Thus insofar the members of these public-sector unions voted according to their expressed preferences they were factually undermining their own group interests basically merely because they were buying into some frankly rather crude political propaganda.
Which is one reason I added the caveat to the "rational actor" bit.

The US general public being staggeringly politically (and come think of it literally) illiterate and reliably reacting to perceived upticks in crime with calls for more and harsher sentences is part of the same equation. The knee-jerk reaction is pretty universal, of course, but most countries have at least somewhat less ignorant voting populations, less pathologically polarised politics and mostly the good sense to not fucking privatise their prisons in the first place (IIRC it was actually experimented with in 17th-century France and quickly ditched as a Bad Idea).

"The guard unions are simply acting rationally"

So? The Koch brothers or some corporation lobbying for deregulation are also acting rationally. Does that morally excuse them? Does that mean we shouldn't call out the harm they do?

No, but the point is you're barking up an entirely wrong tree. You're blaming a convenient scapegoat for far larger and more complex systemic problems it is at most a minor symptom of.

last edited at Jun 8, 2020 7:58PM

A quick search finds critical articles from both the left and right. A Reason article is critical of both private prisons and guard unions, but says the latter are bigger.

While American Libertarians fall on the right of the political spectrum, it does seem a little reductive to identify them as a critical voice from the right generally. Pretty complicated, though.

I think the reason why it's complicated is because all of those are certainly right-wing economically, but it ain't necessary for them to also be so culturally (though, from what little exposure to libcaps from the US, Canada and UK I had, a large amount of them are culturally right-wing, too). Another piece of evidence that the political compass test ain't the best such political test.

It's generally a good idea to properly define and distinguish between the economic and social axes of the political spectrum - it's perfectly possible to hold views that cheerfully combine the "opposite" ends on those. A classic case in point would be the OG Fascists and Nazis who combined rather "Leftist" economic ideas - such as subordination of the economy to the common good and generally quite sincere populist desire to improve the lot of the "common man" and hatred of "finance capitalism" - with authoritarian-reactionary social and cultural values so far out to the "Right" they literally redefined the extreme end thereof. (In practice of course they found it necessary to reach an accommodation with established economic and societal order; Hitler's purging of the more far-out populist "Red Nazis" -the sort who tended to read a little too much into the "Socialist" in National Socialist- in the Night of the Long Knives was partly that and partly internal power plays.)

The axes just get conflated in Anglo-American politics because the "first-past-the-post" voting system used across the former British Empire inherently produces a polarised de facto two-party system - for want of viable alternatives people who actually want their votes to go towards electing meaningful degrees of political representation (ie. more than tiny irrelevant groups or even individuals somewhere in the margins) are obliged to band together with often only very vaguely like-minded folks under the auspices of one of whatever the "big two" parties in the relevant context now happen to be.

Which is pretty much why to a Continental Eurofag like me, used to very colourful coalition governements, UK politics read as a farce and US ones as morbidly pathological. (The latter was actually a fairly common characterisation even in scientific literature already a few decades back when I studied PolSci...)

sometimes corrupt, excessively anti-competitive, or power-abusive.

Ie. same as the "capital" side of the equation. Turnaround is fair play if you ask me, given "labour" tends to be the primary victim when the latter slips its leash.

But with public sector unions, they're opposing government, which kind of represents the people, rather than opposing capital.

See "privatised prisons", but more to the point pretty universally the State isn't known as a particularly generous paymaster for its rank-and-file workers (having to at least try to run vaguely balanced budgets has some relevance to that) - just ask teachers and such for the proverbial second opinion. There's an old (late 1800s-ish) Finnish proverb that roughly translates "the official's bread is long but lean", ie. job security is good but the pay mediocre at best (and the first no longer applies these days anyway obv), and while it referred more to the petite bourgeoise cog-in-the-machine bureaucrats the principle naturally applies more widely.

Also not really seeing why public servants in general and ones who do an unpleasant, highly necessary and often quite dangerous work in particular should be denied the essential right to argue for their interests vis-a-vis their employer in an organised fashion.

Police and prison guard unions don't seem to be in the net public interest.

Are we talking US context here? Because those would be basically irrelevant there (save for their members' collective professional interests natch, don't see why they shouldn't get to organise to promote those like everyone else) compared to the grossly dysfunctional mess that is the organisation of law enforcement in that country, and doubly so the utter counterproductive idiocy that is privatised prisons.

Yes, US, and I disagree with their being irrelevant. The police unions are a big part of why it's hard to bring the police in check, AIUI the guard unions lobby for longer prison terms. Both kinds of unions spent lots of money to defeat California's 2008 Prop 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_5

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

"The CCPOA has supported campaigns for tougher criminal sentences, including large contributions to the 1994 campaign for Proposition 184, the 'three strikes' ballot initiative, which puts repeat offenders behind bars for lengthy terms. "

"CCPOA political activity routinely exceeds that of all other labor unions in California."

A quick search finds critical articles from both the left and right. A Reason article is critical of both private prisons and guard unions, but says the latter are bigger.

You're confusing symptoms and causes. The fundamental problems with US law enforcement come from, on one hand, its farcical pattern of organisation (or rather lack thereof) which is decentralised to the point of dysfunctional atomisation - with nigh every administrative level having its own regional one all the way down to all but the smallest municipalities having their own locally organised semi-independent ones resulting in a giant mess of overlapping and conflicting jurisdictions and Devil of a time trying to impose some kind of unified standard or systemic reform on the whole tangle; on the other, various unpleasant attitudes deeply rooted in the social and cultural background context (not in the least centuries of outright chattel slavery combining with the usual racial hierarchies European "settler societies" erected everywhere often quite against the wishes of their mother countries) - trying to root which out of the system being heavily complicated by the aforementioned excessive decentralisation to the point of unmanageable fragmentation.

Whereas the matter with the guard unions is merely one facet of the underlying and far more serious problem of commercialised incarceration which is what creates interest groups with vested economic interest in more and longer jail sentences in the first place, not to mention such a bloated prison industry it can try to push its particular interests. Lest we forget the US has more people in jail per capita than, IIRC, any three other countries put together and that's including blatant repressive police states - this should speak volumes of why that industry can wield enough clout to try to affect policy to begin with.
The guard unions are simply acting rationally (as far as their members perceive it anyway, which really isn't saying much given the general political and economical illiteracy of the US population - analysts who actually know their shit don't necessarily agree with them) within the framework of a system that, to be quite blunt about it, to a fairly large degree exists to extract at public expense a profit margin from societal problems.
Yay for using prisoners for profit-oriented menial labour which totally isn't subsidised profiteering from de facto indentured servitude and blatantly unhealthy competition! Free market 4 muh freedums! o3o

By way of comparison I can't recall ever hearing of our (ie. Finnish) prison guards pushing for longer sentences; this assuredly has much to do with our prison system being entirely state-run rather than being at least half in the hands of profit-seeking private enterpreneurs which cannot but also have an effect on how the "grunts" view their jobs, as well as a very different cultural attitude to the whole topic of crime and punishement in general. (Far as I've ever heard their complaints are just the usual ones about wages, pensions etc. and being perpetually rather understaffed, ie.basically the same as any public servants'.)

Reading it again, on the first page its the Friend that says "a little big and kinda pretty" while our Main *bully just says "i bet shes a slut too" and out protagonist then hones completly in on her instead of the one who startet it.

I wonder why that is [thinking]

gaydar OP pls nerf

There are socialist/leftist factions that see workers' unions as the key to revolution, and as an anarchist who has a general distain for political parties, I can't say that I'm not one of those socialists.

One might invoke the concept of "labour aristocracy" here... More to the point, the legalisation of unions and various other reforms to address the various labour-capital conflicts and lower-class disaffection were how states with half a brain defused societal tensions that left unaddressed might have well led to revolutions of whatever form - as indeed eventually happened in several countries where such measures were taken "too little too late" or not at all (though stresses from the various wars of what some historians have termed the "age of catastrophe" were often also involved).
Case in point some of the first "welfare state" policies in Europe were pushed through by that radical rabble-rouser Otto von Bismarck, who IIRC was quite candid about them being a cost-effective way to "buy peace at home"...

sometimes corrupt, excessively anti-competitive, or power-abusive.

Ie. same as the "capital" side of the equation. Turnaround is fair play if you ask me, given "labour" tends to be the primary victim when the latter slips its leash.

Police and prison guard unions don't seem to be in the net public interest.

Are we talking US context here? Because those would be basically irrelevant there (save for their members' collective professional interests natch, don't see why they shouldn't get to organise to promote those like everyone else) compared to the grossly dysfunctional mess that is the organisation of law enforcement in that country, and doubly so the utter counterproductive idiocy that is privatised prisons.

last edited at Jun 8, 2020 4:35PM

:^)

Random question, what is your opinion on worker's unions?

The fact that for a fair while the employer side had them outlawed (and has been known to engage in outright organised-crime tactics against them after that) should speak volumes of their necessity and importance.

last edited at Jun 8, 2020 3:23PM

I question the legality of the faces Wanko makes

last edited at Jun 8, 2020 3:20PM

Chiaki can go from cute & adorable to super cool ikemen (and back) in about 0,3 seconds.

...and remain a pervy breast-obsessed gremlin throughout. o3o

^ "surrounded by raging lesbians!"

the only label we need is comrade

Note that the Russian revolutionaries originally used bratva, "brother" - "comrade" was something the Bolsheviks insisted on. Make what you will of that.

I'm talking about labellings in general if that's confusing, not just those terms, I'm fine if you want to be called one way or the other just don't do that to me, you might be disappointed if I don't met your expectations

General descriptions and analytical frameworks are not "labels" any more than, say, "tall" or "short". You also seem to be laboring under some rather considerable misunderstandings as to their use and purpose.

But we already had the word quiet, calm and etc...

...I'm not sure why you're talking like these were somehow new terms (they're rather old Latin derivatives), but they're catchalls covering recognisable ranges of personality traits. They describe, in single words, what you can broadly expect of someone by way of interpersonal interaction - useful shorthands, when delving into greater detail is unnecessary or unwarranted.

I find it obsessive, like for people who are afraid of losing grip ,,, If you put 3 or 5 labels on me and tomorrow I decide to something that goes against that, then people will be forced to change their descriptions, and if the next day I do something unexpected again then we will need to come with new terms for me or try to convince me that I should go back to who I was, who knows maybe they'll praise me because they like me more now but all my life I was just being myself, I'm not saying is wrong to try and keep things under control, I just don't care what people expect me to be/do based on their analysis, and I'm not sorry for having a twitter account with a description that only says I like anime and music... And even with just that, people will be like YOU'RE A WEEB!! and intuitively create a behavior pattern for me, I hate that, can we just have an open mind and relax?

We're just separating humanity more and more... Is kinda like, when you see a M from E and think they must like X or Y and it all starts the moment we separated a group billion of people into very specific patterns, labeling and preconceptions over time... just saying, don't try to put me in a tiny box, inside a box inside a bigger box. Some people are inside so many boxes that the words start to lose meaning anyway, well, I'm just rambling at this point

Er... what? What does any of this have to do with broad-strokes summaries of observed particular behavioral patterns?

Except I didn't change anything. That edit was some grammar fix so it was like that before you replied to me, so did you reply to me without reading entire comment?

The part I previously quoted was bad enough by itself. So much the worse if the whole thing was nonsense in the technical meaning of the term.

The above point duly stands. What the heck are you even trying to say there?

Don't want to get into that argument but at least I agree that I don't want more labels on me or remember even more existing ones... I just need my name and my nature and anyone will judge me differently anyway.

Well in real life most people would say "Serene is very very.... very quiet"

Which most people (familiar with the vocabulary anyway) will also readily and intuitively understand to fall under the umbrella descriptor "introverted", which was kind of the point - the terms are descriptors of readily recognisable aspects of individual personalities, not arbitrary social constructs. They serve a practical purpose as such words now do.

last edited at Jun 5, 2020 12:55PM