# i am not a hunter

Autumn is my favorite season. The horror genre is in the mainstream entertainment channels. The temperature is in the 60's. The leaves are in color. The women are in yoga pants. The pumpkin spice is in god damned everything, including my veins. And the wildlife - specifically the tastier speces - are allowed to be hunted.
[show self in hunting gear]
[elmer fudd impression] be vewwy vewwy quiet. we'we hunting cwiptids.

## hunting in general

[hiking? sitting in a hunting blind?]
On rare occasion I do get a tiny amount of flak for the practice of hunting. generally when I'm spending any time socializing with anyone, food is involved. So i *could* return with something like, we just ate meat, so is there a moral issue with doing more of the work myself?
But I've gone for a gentler approach with some self deprecating humor; i have never successfully harvested any animal, ever. Is it really hunting, or is it paying for a license to wake up before dawn to carry 20 lbs of crap on a glorified hike?
Hopefully that's funny, because unfortunately it's true. 

Sitting in a blind for hours is depressing. Partially due to sleep deprivation, sure. But i'm beginning to doubt that deer exist. I've seen them, in person, in the past. Right? was that even real? 
I hate sitting in silence. But what's the difference doing that in a hunting blind, at home, out in public?
there's nothing to do but think.

[beat]
The fact that I bought my first hunting license and have ensured I will never again see a deer is a statistical anomaly, right? how do the numbers add up?
[https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/deep/wildlife/pdf_files/game/deersum2023.pdf page 7]
I think their definition of success is to estimate 1 permit to 1 deer. looks like they're estimating 30%. so the situation is pretty bleak.
If you go out hunting, odds are... you're coming back empty handed.
[beat]
so I guess, keep the faith? the one deer walking down this one path will *tooootally* come by and intersect with the time you're there. 
[beat]
Keep waiting. 
[beat]
Your patience will be rewarded. Your efforts will pay off. Have faith.

Ok, for real. Deer exist, I know. I know because I have evidence. 
[alternate] BOLD statement. Have you disproved Godel, and developed a framework for determining truth that requires no axioms? have you out-logic'd renee descartes and proven anything at all, when you could be a brain in a jar? have you done what CGP grey is afraid to, and ventured through the "What Is True" dimension, returning unscathed?
Respectively; no, no, and not entirely but maybe a tiny bit? You can only *approach* 0 faith, like an asymptote. Acknowledging that gives you a heuristic to weigh the validity of evidence.
People talking about something's existence is not evidence. but I can buy some laughably overpriced venison in the store, right now. Granted, the fact that someone would lie to everyone and argue it's ok because it makes money is... really... how the world works. at the moment. Presumably forever. One person proposes one thing, and doesn't get interrogated.

## hyperlitigator

Consider the most terrifying cryptid in my culture: the Hyperlitigator. Imagine a cold blooded reptile, emerging from a swamp, and snapping its jaws shut over a slight legal loophole. By twisting the court to its will (how hard could it be), it can extract financially ruinous judgments from poor, long-suffering job creators.

### food donation
For years, retailers said the reason they don't donate food is that they're afraid of getting sued. projects to solve food insecurity
[https://foodtank.com/news/2024/12/zero-waste-strategies-tackles-liability-fears-in-food-donation/]
have mostly been campaigns in reducing food waste by assuring retailers that it'll be fine.
Meanwhile various meal ingredient services have marketed themselves as solving hunger by reducing food waste. which is silly, if they have any effect it's to shift food waste into packaging waste.
no one has ever sued for being saved from starvation. nevertheless the US passed the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act of 1996 to encourage donation - all it does is assure they can't be sued. 
Maybe it worked. I can't find anything about how much food is donated per year since then.

### california prop 65

have you noticed that essentially every product ever has "the california proposition 65 warning"? in 1986, California voters banded together to say hey maybe it would be nice if we could avoid being poisoned a bit.
You had better believe that every. single. time. a company has to admit that their product is toxic, they frontload the state they want you to hate, and then the legal precedent they want you to dismiss. They want you to find it tedious. They want you to think it's dumb, and take their side against the threat of lawsuit.
It was a publicity stunt to get some politician elected. 
[//TODO: veritasium video]
Meanwhile, no one has ever been held accountable for contaminating every human alive with PFAS, in california or elsewhere.

### UV pet drying

One of the inspirations for this episode was someone convinced that people dry their pets in microwaves, so those will be getting warning labels. 
[fact or fiction guy, john walker? john something or other?]
never happened. It's an urban legend. 
[screenshot of Colyne]
the myth endurse

### Hot beverages are hot

the famous one that we're all up to speed with by now - some company served some literally-skin-meltingly hot coffee to Stella Liebeck, her coffee got spilled, and I cannot stress this enough: her skin. got melted. 3rd degree burns. Micky D's lost the lawsuit, and forever more tells everyone how mad they are about it with the warning on the cup. maybe one might argue she wouldn't have tried the lawsuit if she had socialized medicine? Still, I guess we found her, the 1 person who won a lawsuit and got a payout.

### arbitration: the end of justice

however. In 2018, Epic Systems Corp (no relation to Epic Games, as far as I know) engaged in wage theft - dollar per dollar the most common crime in the united states, every year, for many years - so Jacob Lewis attempted to start a class action lawsuit, in accordance with the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.
As usual, the supreme court decided that these pesky laws need to get out of the way of a corporation harvesting wealth from the peasantry (well it was 5-4, exactly the split you would expect). 

Ever since then, **every** user agreement has included an arbitration clause. You know. Because apparently real lawsuits are unjust, real courts are overburdened... So we'll privatize justice, that certainly won't create a kangaroo court. 
[//TODO: effects of arbitration court]
...oh.
Well that's probably why arbitration clauses in contracts tend to also include some advertisement about how waiving your right to trial is actually a good thing.

Justice is dead. And yet we're still afraid of some mythical hyper-competent litigation monster.

For what it's worth, apparently the hyperlitigator stays within america. Other countries *also* think Americans can (and will) file (and win) any frivolous lawsuit. To those people, I say go ahead and rent an apartment.

## the barrel-cracker-misser

ok so we're not going to find the hyperlitigator. A deer is going to walk over the hill any second tho, for sure.

you remember when cracker barrel had a redesign? It's current at time of writing. The logo got rid of both the cracker and the barrel. The interior got rid of everything.
[tv: jacksfilms "what does woke even mean"]
[2 strawmen. 1 holding a sign: "haha, i don't know what you mean by "woke""]
It kicked off a discussion on the left where they made fun of the right for the fact that the left wing doesn't know what "woke" means. 
a company with a recognizable - if hokey - aesthetic has """streamlined""" to a hollow nothing that you couldn't pick out of a lineup with any of their so-called competitors. There is one culture, one aesthetic. and it is inoffensive. noncommittal. bland. 
[fade up some communist anthem]
as usual, the soul has been sacrificed on the altar of capitalism.
[cut music]
this sounds much more like something I'd complain about than your stereotypical maga fascist. but then again, cracker barrel is a restaurant that has a very "country" aesthetic. if we remember the "brad's wife" fiasco, the customer base skews boomer. The kind of person who aren't worried about a deep fried steak with a side of pork sausage cutting their life expectancy - they only anticipate another few years already.
I searched. Article after article, most maintaining a proper level of neutrality, but eventually - finally - paydirt. I found him. The ONE GUY who thought the redesign was soulless, and... **woke**.
That's all. He's it. I have not found anyone else. As far as I know, his world also thinks he's weird.

## woolie vs archiving schemes

[beat] 
I watch Woolie Vs. or, used to. He's on indefinite hiatus, or whatever you want to call it; the gig economy doesn't have paternity leave. I hope youtube deigns to inform me of his return, when (or if) he does. At present, there are no remaining channels in the LP genre who FINISH their games, and have... insightful commentary, silence during game dialog, at least 1 interlocutor -
[alternate] is that even really important?
i think so. resolving conflicting perspectives is usually more interesting. and it's surprisingly hard to manage a conversation while playing a game.

anyway. When he started his spinoff channel, he had a bizarre naming scheme for his episodes. Then he switched the order to part number, game title, episode title. Great! automatically self-sorting!
Then someone told him he archives the episodes and has some weird-ass filing system that got broken.
[https://xkcd.com/1172/]
so woolie switched back. I forget if he explicitly stated it at the time, but obviously he's not taking a poll or switching it repeatedly. so now it's forever backward from perfection, like a european date.

all because of one guy saying one thing one time. I wouldn't have thought that would be enough.

## warframe wiki
[beat]
What'd I say the odds of seeing a deer are? 30% per license? so the scenario is more specifically, if I am looking for 1 deer, and I come out here *up to* a certain number of times until I find one and stop. Sadly the data we have is estimated based on purchasing 1 license.. Let's pretend I'll automatically make a precisely average number of hikes per license.
anyway, in 4 years I guess that'd be.. hang on let me grab a shell...
```python
>>> successChance = 0.3
>>> rolls = 4
>>> failureChance = 1- successChance
>>> 1 - (failureChance ** rolls)
0.7599
```
success chance is 30%, roll 4 times... failure chance for 1 run would be 1 minus success chance. so the chance of failing all 4 years would be failure chance to the power of 4. and so the chance of any other outcome, i.e. succeeding in 1 or more year, would be 1 minus that, which would be... just under 76%.

You see how that works, warframe wiki?! 
Ok warframe, like any freemium game, has an element of gambling. The majority of what you spend real money on is gauranteed odds. Or, more cynically, you're paying them money in order to *not* play the game. Which is why when I saw the ludicrous resource cost for cryotic for sibear, I vowed to master every weapon in the game except that. I had that done, for a second there, but they're continually updating it.
Anyway. While we're looking at the warframe wiki... In order to sell in china, they had to publicly disclose their drop rates. (what a cool thing for China to have done for its citizens. do you think they also disallow forced arbitration? oh, no, they're on the same page as us with that, damn.) So as a result of the public drop table, we get to see charts like this.
[nekros acquisition]
to get Nekros, a.k.a. the best warframe 
[alternate] he said, very transparently baiting comments.
Look, in the game about shooting stuff to get loot to build gear to more effectively shoot stuff, etc... Nekros increases the loot you get. best.
[alternate2] hey, focus. **to get nekros**...
...you do the lephantis assassination. looking at the table, your inference is correct; lephantis will definitely always drop... precisely 1 of those 3 pieces. there is no world where you do that mission less than 3 times. that distinction doesn't really matter in practice. You do it once, you definitely have 1 piece. You do it a second time, you probably have 2 out of the 3 pieces. once you're in that situation, you ask yourself: how many runs do I do to get the last piece? This table helpfully says you're "nearly guaranteed" at 17 ish kills. It also says it's "expected" at 3 kills. what do those words mean?
there's a link:
>  For more detailed definitions and information, visit here. 

[https://wiki.warframe.com/w/User_blog:FINNER/Warframe_Expected_%26_Nearly_Guaranteed_Numbers_-_An_Explanation] -_
In that one, wiki contributer Finner explains what is meant by "nearly guaranteed". it's a range, so at the lower end of that range is 99% chance, at the top of that range it's 99.99%. easy. what i have been salty about for like a decade is that his definition of "expected" is *bizarre*. It's not helped by the fact that I think he's referencing old data. 
[mark up a screenshot, circle where he talks about 6-7]
he divides the warframe drops into 3 "types". type 1 is like nekros, where all 3 parts drop from the same place. type 2 is where all 3 drop from a different place. (Type 3 is just equinox, with 8 drops needed. That one's a slog.)
[tyl regor mission, but duplicated in a grid, and as though multiple of them are speaking at once] I'm very excited now...
But if we look at his math for type 2, we can see what he actually means by expected. Assume the law of large numbers applies to small numbers. I.e., if you want to roll 1 of the 6 sides of a d6, you just throw it 6 times.
check out this page. 
[https://wiki.warframe.com/w/Sortie]
occasionally you'll see links for "expected", to the wiki page for the stats concept of expected value.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value]
That's not how expected value works. Expected value is the other side of this! so in the linked wiki article, you'll see that it's *what* the average you observe is converging *to*! So check it out, the article shows a graph:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value#/media/File:Largenumbers.svg]
That shows rolling a dice, averaging out. as in, "i have rolled a d6 with this number of pips showing, on average". if I roll one time, and roll a 2, my "average value" is 2. if I roll a second time, and roll a 6, now my "average value" is 4. The "expected value" is 3.5. as in, if I keep rolling many times,
[point out bottom of graph]
*then* my average will *converge on* 3.5.
whoever it was that introduced this math is lost to the sands of time. for this game all about random drops, that person's peculiar concept of "expected" is on a massive portion of the pages across the wiki!

maybe I, just one guy, can convince the rest of the world of the random things I insist on. Who knows what the odds are of that, though.

[beat]
I once heard someone say deer are "crepuscular", meaning they're active around sunrise and sunset. as opposed to being nocturnal, like bats, or diurnal, like (well-behaved) humans.
[check watch]
I don't know what a deer considers "after" dawn.
[beat]
[hike back]

