At what point did we become obliged to address critics of the video game industry?
I refuse. As long as there is a pulse through these veins, I will continue to make the games I want to make, rather than the games it's in the best interest of the public relations side of the entire independant game industry to make.
Freedom doesn't only exist so Danish people can make fun of Muslum terrorists.
Depends on what you consider to be AI. Some think that the Proportional controller in a cars cruise control counts as artificial intelligence. If that's the case, then there have been quite a few instances where a PID controller allowed the process to upset, causing human casualties.
And what about the judges who have found the music industry guilty of criminal collusion on a number of occasions? Are they just laymen while you aren't?
People who don't know history are often berated for their ignorance.
At best, Compaq is responsible for the current PC market because they reverse-engineered the PC BIOS so third parties could create PC hardware.
What Microsoft did in the 80s is known as "Riding coattails" -- they were an insignificant company that managed to land an extremely lucrative contract.
Look at it this way. Did Yahoo bring about the Internet? Only in the egotistical non-reality where Al Gore helped.
I don't see the problem unless you're in a camp that believes it has a legitimate theory to oppose evolution. We teach children Bohrs model of the atom even though it's wrong. We teach our kids a lot of "almost correct" theories as fact. In fact, we do the same thing with adults (For example, lots of people know that computers are made up of transistors. How many people know what a transistor actually does? For that matter, what voltage and current are?).
The truth is, by the time you're at a level where you can begin to formulate an effective proof that a certain theory is wrong, you're at a level high enough that it's understood that current theories are always just the most useful models at a certain time.
Again, the debate isn't really about bad science vs. good science. The problem is trying to present metaphysics as physics. Theories are proven or disproven all the time. Sometimes bad theories take much longer than they should to die because scientists are dogmatic. This doesn't change the fact that when trying to observe a phenomena, you can't point to a red herring that God created *everything* as a viable alternative theory, because it isn't an alternative theory at all.
It's like trying to refute the sentence "Grilled cheese sandwiches are made with bread and cheese" by saying "That's not true! I have a theory that the bread was baked in an oven on Main Street, which is opposed to your theory!". Certainly, the second theory could be true, it might not be, but it's completely irrelevant to the primary ingredients in a sandwich. If the bakery on Main street tried to legislate that Culinary Arts students be taught that there were diverging theories about the contents of a sandwich, there would be similar backlash(Maybe. I'll be the first to admit that there are some secular zealots out there who need to read the first line of the definition of their monkier. Ideally, people would be against the bakery as they are against the ID folks).
The vast majority of our science has come from religious people. Albert Einstein famously said "God does not play with dice" while refuting elements of quantum theory. The issue here is the same as it has always been, where the theory being debated isn't a physical theory.
See, THIS is an excellent opinion from your own mind. I'm glad that you posted it, because in a lot of ways, you're absolutely correct.
Dogmatism from any camp is dangerous, I agree. I'm lucky because my field is the physical sciences rather than biology and such. Frankly, I find biology in general to be sort of wishy-washy science. It knows that some things work and that some things happen, but the theories as to why these happen are often analagous to the "phlogestin" theories about combustion from earlier centuries. Personally I find that evolution is a sound theory based on obvious principles of natural selection drawn out over a period of time which can be observed in a lab with single celled life forms whose life spans are very short, but there are a lot of others that aren't so clean and logical.
I think the universal scorn for ID has less to do with a dogmatic view that science is the only way anything that anything can happen than with a view that ID simply isn't science: It's metascience. Just like Newton could go "We think what goes up must come down because God made it so masses attract one another through a force called Gravity", it's entirely possible for scientists to say "well, we think that God created the universe in such a way that natural selection would create humans". That's completely ok, until they start treating that part as if it is science. Science and religion are only compatible as long as it's understood that we're analyzing Gods creation, not analyzing God. This is important because it places ID outside the realm of science, which is natualistic and seeks only to look at the earth as it exists through whatever force created the Universe.
Because of this, it's possible to say that God is responsible for the phenomena that occurs on the earth, but that belief has to be outside the observations of science. For example, ID appears to be more or less "yes there's natural selection and evolution but God did it" as a counter-arguement to evolution, rather than as a complement to it. Breaking the fourth wall of reality is certainly important in spiritual matters, but since it appears that the world God created runs by a set of rules, and the job of science is to try to decipher these rules, it's unimportant and coutnerproductive to even bring God up in the physical equation.
As for using the defintion "anti-conservative", I have to say that's a very dangerous term. "Conservativism" as such hasn't existed for more than 30 years, making it newer than liberalism, and most "conservatives" will admit this(not the correlary, naturally). It's existance as a brand new political ideology pretending to be the way things always were frustrates the hell out of me.
The reason it frustrates the hell out of me is that I am a conservative in the traditional sense, using the wisdom of my forefathers to determine the best course of action in the future, and not doing anything too radical in terms of altering a tried and true formula, and yet I'm sitting here somehow being called "leftist" for being a sane rational human being who doesn't feel like doing completely unprecidented things or taking extremist attitudes.
Here, however, is where our attitudes diverge. When I see scientists saying "don't try to mix religion and science", I'm not looking at some republican hating extremist leftists, I'm looking at scientists. 2000 years ago the greeks who recorded most of the knowlege that would be held as scientific fact for the next millenium and a half had the same attitudes.
You pull the predictable political ploy of painting 700k users from around the globe with the same "you hate republicans! You're just another commie leftist!" brush.
I have turned it around by pointing out that by the acutal definition of leftist and rightist, trying to turn science classes into a bunch of politically correct garbage is leftist and a sharp deviation from the norm as long as any human has been alive. As far back as Newton, religion took a back seat to science. Religion was still powerful and important, mind you, but it was accepted that since God created the world, then where scripture and the physical world diverge, scripture was misinformed, and if a scientific fact has been proven, it would be taught as the truth. Turning it around and saying that the evidence collected in the physical world no longer trumps faith is a deviation, and a break from tradition. Hence, teaching crystals and spirits and plinky plonky music in a science class is leftist, and teaching science is staunchly traditionalist and conservative.
To be frank, science has been the golden boy longer than any human has been alive. It is the religious people who are the leftists in this case, trying to change an established tradition of teaching science in science classes into a new practice of teaching politically correct gibberish about spirits and crystals and whatever these wackos think is hip this week. 400 years ago, perhaps, actual science would be ignored and metaphysics would be taught instead, but the 50-200 year old technology you're using to air your pathetic quasi-partisan, jingostic, egocentric political views are a result of just as many years of physicists teaching physics.
The people jumping and shouting and making a fuss trying to show how pious they are don't know the first thing about their own religion. After all, isn't humility and silent stotic faith one of the primary pillars of all the major religions?
Can you prove that statement beyond all doubt? Or is this something you take on faith?
Rather, the opposite of faith. I'm forced to accept it's existence independently of myself because it is often not the same as I think it is or want it to be. Since these experiences aren't a part of me, they are something else. That something else happens to be, in my own approximation of the world in this limited mind of mine, the physical world.
Ah, but if the server's hard drive fails, then the conversation will disappear- with no record. So can it be said to still exist? Or is it just an illusion?
The conversation would not disappear, it would simply become inaccessible or indistinguishable using our limited instruments and understanding. Even in the event of a catastrophic failure, our conversation has still altered the physical reality of the state of magnetic flux in the read heads which altered the drive platter. Even if you degaussed the drive platter, the action of placing the information on the drive would alter the way that the platter would accept a magnetic field, likely creating harmonic currents in the coil of wire you use which would become EMI travelling away from earth along with all the other noise we produce.
The physical world as we understand it operates under a law of conservation of energy and a law of conservation of mass. This means that there would be no way to completely destroy the memory of this conversation, and the best you could hope to do is spread the knowlege so far that all the other knowlege of the universe drowns it out so humans can't detect it. Regardless, in an analog universe, it's always going to be there.
The physical world exists independently of your opinions about it.
Now, it could be said that we're trapped in a 4 dimensional universe and we don't see the world as it truly exists. This does not negate it's existance.
Now, the nature of this world can be discussed at great length, and our ability to percieve and understand this world can definitely be questioned, but the fact that this conversation can even be percieved to have taken place, and the fact that it will continue to exist on this server if I get amnesia or poke my eyes out with hot irons is evidence that facts to exist, even if we are not capable of actually percieving them or understanding them.
You useless bible-thumping retards piss me off. Everyone knows that life on earth came about because the evil overlord xenu brought the overpopulation from his evil galactic empire on space-faring DC19s then threw them into volcanoes before using nuclear weapons to blow them up.
You damned Christers are just remembering the false memories from your body thetans who were held in a massive 3d theatre for 30 days after their souls had been vacuumed up by giant soul vacuums.
And how are they to do that without any grounding in logic?
The world inside your head is an abstraction at best: It has been proven time and time again that what is true (where truth is defined as the state of the physical world as it exists independantly of our senses or thoughts of it) owes no fealty to what is believed to be true.
Thus, it is critical that before letting someone use their minds to form an opinion on any given subject, that they have the facilities to form reasonably accurate models of the world as it exists outside of their senses.
A perfect example of this is the art of war with cannons before Newtons calculus of fluctions and universal laws of gravitation. Before those two concepts were uncovered, those practicing the art of war utlized flawed aristotelian physics to determine the path cannon balls would take. This resulted in a theory that cannon balls would do one thing(many war manuals depict cannon balls as having roughly linear movement for their journey until they ran out of energy and fell to the ground), and a reality where they did another.
In this case, a mind without the proper mooring to come to a decision will do as the pre-newtonian cannoneers did, and will form an opinion based on interpetations not in line with reality. "The scientific method" as taught in most schools may not be the path to the wisdom to form realistic opinions, but exposure to true science and engineering certainly is, because the real world has the final say in any arguement between a physicist or engineer and the world.
Dude, I reject modern medicine and use crystals and little bits of poison diluted until it's pure water to cure diseases! I'm pissed off that *MY* tax dollars (well, I haven't worked since I left high school, but I could TOTALLY pay taxes some day!) are going to medical schools to train so-called "Doctors" about "anatomy" and "biochemistry" so they can make "medicine" that "works". I mean, with the exception of nutrition, the concept and implementation of the antivirus, vaccines, antibiotics, the identification of carcinogens and poisons, reconstructive surgery, the heart lung-machine.....well, most of it except for pain killers really, it's all just there to mask the symptoms! antibotics just attack the SYMPTOM of a bacteria attacking your body, not the REAL CAUSE of the disease -- DEMONS!
And that's how I went back in time and saved President Reagan.
Sadly, we have a word for people who refuse reality when it's presented to them and instead focus on trying to enforce something that obviously isn't litrerally true as being so anyway, and it's not religious; The word we use is insane.
"I'm disgusted by the idea that I'm not Napoleon Bonaparte." "I'm disgusted by the idea that the government isn't trying to control my thoughts with implants in my teeth!" "I'm disgusted by the idea that I evolved from an ape!"
I have a theory about why one could initially be +5 and another could be -1.
Now, you see, people who click on "Linux beats Windows to Intel iMac" will likely be more often than not predisposed towards using Linux. However, people who click on "Windows should someday run on the new iMac" are more likely to be predisposed towards using Windows.
Now here's where things get complicated. You see, it can be said that Windows users will be statistically more prone to helping spread falsities and half-truths about other operating systems compared to someone who has used a number of operating systems, in this case including Linux.
Now, Because of these situations, as well as the fact that moderators are chosen from a pool of over 500,000 individuals rather than a single hive mind, it can be forgiven that two messages in two different threads have two different, polar opposite, moderations.
That's a silly thing to say. To live through the way of the iron fist is fine, but it's certainly not the only way to live. This life is too grandiose, and this world is too vast for every battle with every insignificant antagonist to be significant.
One can live by the way of ease by choosing the conflicts which will actually lead to your goals being fulfilled, rather than fighting in every conflict which presents itself. Those who fight first and seek victory second will never win, but those who seek victory first then fight to conquer an enemy already defeated will always be victorious.
Don't act suprised. This is the same government that thinks that Video News Releases and staged "town hall meetings" which are actually just long Republican infomercians are a part of a healthy democracy.
Frankly, the more the world watches, the more the US resembles some third world soviet banana republic.
Slashdot Mirror
At what point did we become obliged to address critics of the video game industry?
I refuse. As long as there is a pulse through these veins, I will continue to make the games I want to make, rather than the games it's in the best interest of the public relations side of the entire independant game industry to make.
Freedom doesn't only exist so Danish people can make fun of Muslum terrorists.
Depends on what you consider to be AI. Some think that the Proportional controller in a cars cruise control counts as artificial intelligence. If that's the case, then there have been quite a few instances where a PID controller allowed the process to upset, causing human casualties.
And what about the judges who have found the music industry guilty of criminal collusion on a number of occasions? Are they just laymen while you aren't?
People who don't know history are often berated for their ignorance.
At best, Compaq is responsible for the current PC market because they reverse-engineered the PC BIOS so third parties could create PC hardware.
What Microsoft did in the 80s is known as "Riding coattails" -- they were an insignificant company that managed to land an extremely lucrative contract.
Look at it this way. Did Yahoo bring about the Internet? Only in the egotistical non-reality where Al Gore helped.
I don't see the problem unless you're in a camp that believes it has a legitimate theory to oppose evolution. We teach children Bohrs model of the atom even though it's wrong. We teach our kids a lot of "almost correct" theories as fact. In fact, we do the same thing with adults (For example, lots of people know that computers are made up of transistors. How many people know what a transistor actually does? For that matter, what voltage and current are?).
The truth is, by the time you're at a level where you can begin to formulate an effective proof that a certain theory is wrong, you're at a level high enough that it's understood that current theories are always just the most useful models at a certain time.
Again, the debate isn't really about bad science vs. good science. The problem is trying to present metaphysics as physics. Theories are proven or disproven all the time. Sometimes bad theories take much longer than they should to die because scientists are dogmatic. This doesn't change the fact that when trying to observe a phenomena, you can't point to a red herring that God created *everything* as a viable alternative theory, because it isn't an alternative theory at all.
It's like trying to refute the sentence "Grilled cheese sandwiches are made with bread and cheese" by saying "That's not true! I have a theory that the bread was baked in an oven on Main Street, which is opposed to your theory!". Certainly, the second theory could be true, it might not be, but it's completely irrelevant to the primary ingredients in a sandwich. If the bakery on Main street tried to legislate that Culinary Arts students be taught that there were diverging theories about the contents of a sandwich, there would be similar backlash(Maybe. I'll be the first to admit that there are some secular zealots out there who need to read the first line of the definition of their monkier. Ideally, people would be against the bakery as they are against the ID folks).
The vast majority of our science has come from religious people. Albert Einstein famously said "God does not play with dice" while refuting elements of quantum theory. The issue here is the same as it has always been, where the theory being debated isn't a physical theory.
See, THIS is an excellent opinion from your own mind. I'm glad that you posted it, because in a lot of ways, you're absolutely correct.
Dogmatism from any camp is dangerous, I agree. I'm lucky because my field is the physical sciences rather than biology and such. Frankly, I find biology in general to be sort of wishy-washy science. It knows that some things work and that some things happen, but the theories as to why these happen are often analagous to the "phlogestin" theories about combustion from earlier centuries. Personally I find that evolution is a sound theory based on obvious principles of natural selection drawn out over a period of time which can be observed in a lab with single celled life forms whose life spans are very short, but there are a lot of others that aren't so clean and logical.
I think the universal scorn for ID has less to do with a dogmatic view that science is the only way anything that anything can happen than with a view that ID simply isn't science: It's metascience. Just like Newton could go "We think what goes up must come down because God made it so masses attract one another through a force called Gravity", it's entirely possible for scientists to say "well, we think that God created the universe in such a way that natural selection would create humans". That's completely ok, until they start treating that part as if it is science. Science and religion are only compatible as long as it's understood that we're analyzing Gods creation, not analyzing God. This is important because it places ID outside the realm of science, which is natualistic and seeks only to look at the earth as it exists through whatever force created the Universe.
Because of this, it's possible to say that God is responsible for the phenomena that occurs on the earth, but that belief has to be outside the observations of science. For example, ID appears to be more or less "yes there's natural selection and evolution but God did it" as a counter-arguement to evolution, rather than as a complement to it. Breaking the fourth wall of reality is certainly important in spiritual matters, but since it appears that the world God created runs by a set of rules, and the job of science is to try to decipher these rules, it's unimportant and coutnerproductive to even bring God up in the physical equation.
As for using the defintion "anti-conservative", I have to say that's a very dangerous term. "Conservativism" as such hasn't existed for more than 30 years, making it newer than liberalism, and most "conservatives" will admit this(not the correlary, naturally). It's existance as a brand new political ideology pretending to be the way things always were frustrates the hell out of me.
The reason it frustrates the hell out of me is that I am a conservative in the traditional sense, using the wisdom of my forefathers to determine the best course of action in the future, and not doing anything too radical in terms of altering a tried and true formula, and yet I'm sitting here somehow being called "leftist" for being a sane rational human being who doesn't feel like doing completely unprecidented things or taking extremist attitudes.
Here, however, is where our attitudes diverge. When I see scientists saying "don't try to mix religion and science", I'm not looking at some republican hating extremist leftists, I'm looking at scientists. 2000 years ago the greeks who recorded most of the knowlege that would be held as scientific fact for the next millenium and a half had the same attitudes.
Actually, I was just joking around because of your name. :P
You have misread my comment.
You pull the predictable political ploy of painting 700k users from around the globe with the same "you hate republicans! You're just another commie leftist!" brush.
I have turned it around by pointing out that by the acutal definition of leftist and rightist, trying to turn science classes into a bunch of politically correct garbage is leftist and a sharp deviation from the norm as long as any human has been alive. As far back as Newton, religion took a back seat to science. Religion was still powerful and important, mind you, but it was accepted that since God created the world, then where scripture and the physical world diverge, scripture was misinformed, and if a scientific fact has been proven, it would be taught as the truth. Turning it around and saying that the evidence collected in the physical world no longer trumps faith is a deviation, and a break from tradition. Hence, teaching crystals and spirits and plinky plonky music in a science class is leftist, and teaching science is staunchly traditionalist and conservative.
Say, you've got a little stereotype on your face.
To be frank, science has been the golden boy longer than any human has been alive. It is the religious people who are the leftists in this case, trying to change an established tradition of teaching science in science classes into a new practice of teaching politically correct gibberish about spirits and crystals and whatever these wackos think is hip this week. 400 years ago, perhaps, actual science would be ignored and metaphysics would be taught instead, but the 50-200 year old technology you're using to air your pathetic quasi-partisan, jingostic, egocentric political views are a result of just as many years of physicists teaching physics.
The people jumping and shouting and making a fuss trying to show how pious they are don't know the first thing about their own religion. After all, isn't humility and silent stotic faith one of the primary pillars of all the major religions?
Can you prove that statement beyond all doubt? Or is this something you take on faith?
Rather, the opposite of faith. I'm forced to accept it's existence independently of myself because it is often not the same as I think it is or want it to be. Since these experiences aren't a part of me, they are something else. That something else happens to be, in my own approximation of the world in this limited mind of mine, the physical world.
Ah, but if the server's hard drive fails, then the conversation will disappear- with no record. So can it be said to still exist? Or is it just an illusion?
The conversation would not disappear, it would simply become inaccessible or indistinguishable using our limited instruments and understanding. Even in the event of a catastrophic failure, our conversation has still altered the physical reality of the state of magnetic flux in the read heads which altered the drive platter. Even if you degaussed the drive platter, the action of placing the information on the drive would alter the way that the platter would accept a magnetic field, likely creating harmonic currents in the coil of wire you use which would become EMI travelling away from earth along with all the other noise we produce.
The physical world as we understand it operates under a law of conservation of energy and a law of conservation of mass. This means that there would be no way to completely destroy the memory of this conversation, and the best you could hope to do is spread the knowlege so far that all the other knowlege of the universe drowns it out so humans can't detect it. Regardless, in an analog universe, it's always going to be there.
You're right! I DO believe that the almighty zeus looks down upon us from his throne on Mount Olympus!
And all your fancy google earth can't stop me! MWAHAHAHAHAHA!
The physical world exists independently of your opinions about it.
Now, it could be said that we're trapped in a 4 dimensional universe and we don't see the world as it truly exists. This does not negate it's existance.
Now, the nature of this world can be discussed at great length, and our ability to percieve and understand this world can definitely be questioned, but the fact that this conversation can even be percieved to have taken place, and the fact that it will continue to exist on this server if I get amnesia or poke my eyes out with hot irons is evidence that facts to exist, even if we are not capable of actually percieving them or understanding them.
Stop defending the opiate of the people.
How does one reject red shift/doppler effect?
Ok, how about we mod the great-grandparent troll, grandparent insightful, parent funny, and this post off-topic?
Then we can get off the assinine topic of moderation altogether.
You useless bible-thumping retards piss me off. Everyone knows that life on earth came about because the evil overlord xenu brought the overpopulation from his evil galactic empire on space-faring DC19s then threw them into volcanoes before using nuclear weapons to blow them up.
You damned Christers are just remembering the false memories from your body thetans who were held in a massive 3d theatre for 30 days after their souls had been vacuumed up by giant soul vacuums.
It says so right in OT-3.
Wait a minute....You mean diseases aren't caused by demons because they're attracted by our sins?
Oh shit....I......I think I have to go to a hospital.....
And how are they to do that without any grounding in logic?
The world inside your head is an abstraction at best: It has been proven time and time again that what is true (where truth is defined as the state of the physical world as it exists independantly of our senses or thoughts of it) owes no fealty to what is believed to be true.
Thus, it is critical that before letting someone use their minds to form an opinion on any given subject, that they have the facilities to form reasonably accurate models of the world as it exists outside of their senses.
A perfect example of this is the art of war with cannons before Newtons calculus of fluctions and universal laws of gravitation. Before those two concepts were uncovered, those practicing the art of war utlized flawed aristotelian physics to determine the path cannon balls would take. This resulted in a theory that cannon balls would do one thing(many war manuals depict cannon balls as having roughly linear movement for their journey until they ran out of energy and fell to the ground), and a reality where they did another.
In this case, a mind without the proper mooring to come to a decision will do as the pre-newtonian cannoneers did, and will form an opinion based on interpetations not in line with reality. "The scientific method" as taught in most schools may not be the path to the wisdom to form realistic opinions, but exposure to true science and engineering certainly is, because the real world has the final say in any arguement between a physicist or engineer and the world.
Dude, I reject modern medicine and use crystals and little bits of poison diluted until it's pure water to cure diseases! I'm pissed off that *MY* tax dollars (well, I haven't worked since I left high school, but I could TOTALLY pay taxes some day!) are going to medical schools to train so-called "Doctors" about "anatomy" and "biochemistry" so they can make "medicine" that "works". I mean, with the exception of nutrition, the concept and implementation of the antivirus, vaccines, antibiotics, the identification of carcinogens and poisons, reconstructive surgery, the heart lung-machine.....well, most of it except for pain killers really, it's all just there to mask the symptoms! antibotics just attack the SYMPTOM of a bacteria attacking your body, not the REAL CAUSE of the disease -- DEMONS!
And that's how I went back in time and saved President Reagan.
Great to use such a polarizing phrase, isn't it?
Sadly, we have a word for people who refuse reality when it's presented to them and instead focus on trying to enforce something that obviously isn't litrerally true as being so anyway, and it's not religious; The word we use is insane.
"I'm disgusted by the idea that I'm not Napoleon Bonaparte."
"I'm disgusted by the idea that the government isn't trying to control my thoughts with implants in my teeth!"
"I'm disgusted by the idea that I evolved from an ape!"
I have a theory about why one could initially be +5 and another could be -1.
Now, you see, people who click on "Linux beats Windows to Intel iMac" will likely be more often than not predisposed towards using Linux. However, people who click on "Windows should someday run on the new iMac" are more likely to be predisposed towards using Windows.
Now here's where things get complicated. You see, it can be said that Windows users will be statistically more prone to helping spread falsities and half-truths about other operating systems compared to someone who has used a number of operating systems, in this case including Linux.
Now, Because of these situations, as well as the fact that moderators are chosen from a pool of over 500,000 individuals rather than a single hive mind, it can be forgiven that two messages in two different threads have two different, polar opposite, moderations.
Why is it that every woman needs to broadcast the fact of what they are?
Get back in line. You're no different from the rest of us.
That's a silly thing to say. To live through the way of the iron fist is fine, but it's certainly not the only way to live. This life is too grandiose, and this world is too vast for every battle with every insignificant antagonist to be significant.
One can live by the way of ease by choosing the conflicts which will actually lead to your goals being fulfilled, rather than fighting in every conflict which presents itself. Those who fight first and seek victory second will never win, but those who seek victory first then fight to conquer an enemy already defeated will always be victorious.
Don't act suprised. This is the same government that thinks that Video News Releases and staged "town hall meetings" which are actually just long Republican infomercians are a part of a healthy democracy.
Frankly, the more the world watches, the more the US resembles some third world soviet banana republic.