BearGoesChirp

How many deaths would getting rid of modern transportation cause? You can't just measure something by the negatives.

Is that possible?

The good landlords aren't pulling out every technically not illegal trick to make more money because they value things more than just being in the clear legally, but they do value being in the clear legally. The slimy landlords don't care about other effects, as long as they are legally in the clear. If you increase punishment/enforcement of the laws, you will hit both the good and the slimy landlords harder, with the slimy ones still taking a lead because they don't care about factors like a good reputation or having a clean conscious (yes, I'm somewhat stereotyping the good and slimy groups).

That the slimy ones know and practice working around the law may even mean that the good landlords get hit harder from a crackdown. In some way the government can't focus on the slimy landlords because by their very being they avoid government focus more than the good landlords.

I feel this response is confusing right with might. Just because some group has the political might to make laws that benefit them does not make those laws right, does it?

Time to start ScamCoin. Every transaction on the network will be considered a donation of which you may or may not receive some worthless ScamCoins in return.

>It's not exactly wrong, but it's way too anthropomorphic and attributes way too much intent.

This made me start wondering something... at what point can something be attributed to intent? When did the first intent arise? If humans are blobs of matter following the laws of physics, why can we possess intent when nature cannot? What is the simplest process which can have intent?

This is probably just a restatement of an existing problem like where does intelligence come from. Just a random though I had reading your post.

That's why States Rights is the solution. Let each state control what the law is for them and only for them. Tyranny of thy own self.

(Ignoring for the moment state level tyranny of the majority.)

Prosecutional discretion is legalized bigotry. The legal system has a strong history of allowing sexist, racist, and classist thought to drive how laws are enforced. Any fair or just system would allow no such discretion.

>Often, the only way for us to have a working body of law that makes sense is for the government to simply stop enforcing the outdated ones.

Fairly enforcing every law on the books regardless of a person's income or gender and ending plea deals, which would tie up the court systems, would create a disaster. But it is something we need, because the law as is, where everything is illegal and the police target whomever makes them mad is even worse of a disaster. (Yes, police do consistently enforce some laws, like no murder, but there are far too many laws on the books police pick and choose to enforce as it suits their prejudices).

>with a lot of very costly court cases and headaches for the various agencies tasked with enforcement.

Sounds good to me. When those agencies are so low on budget they can't enforce the laws and people get sick enough of the status quo they elect law makers who'll actually remove bad laws, then we will end up better off.

There is also issues with what is discriminatory/hateful language.

If I point out that the vast majority of criminals are men, that is simple fact. If I suggest it might be because of something related to being male, few would call that hate speech and few would bring up alternatives such as bias in the legal system. Only when I get to the point of saying all males should be treated as criminals will I get significant push back of people saying that I'm wrong.

Now, replace gender with some other demographic, and people become much more hostile to my points, and I am considered to be dancing much closer to the line of hate speech.

What about if I have legitimate criticism? There are many legitimate criticisms of some sects of different religions. If I happen to speak to broadly, say using Christian or Protestant when I'm really talking about Calvinist, should that really count as hate speech? Or should someone ask if I'm really generalizing the larger group and give me a chance to qualify which subsection I'm speaking about?

Mean, median, mode, standard deviation, skew, etc. are all important measures. When people are talking about inequality (in any subject, not just here), they aren't likely focusing on just one of these, but on combinations of these.

>If that is true, why is it true? I think that's a far more interesting question.

Almost any scientific finding should be ended 'but more research is needed to be certain'. Perhaps the question to ask is why isn't this getting more research, given just how important the topic is to the lives of so many people. All of the questions you raise can be tested with further research, so why aren't they? Why is some of the best data (best is not to be confused with good, as best is relative) from dating web sites?

While many cultures are different, I think we can talk about average culture, especially given certain selections. Average culture of people who use a dating app is likely different than average culture of people who scorn dating apps, and we can talk about what happens in each. There will be exceptions, but this seems true of any psychological/sociological statements. When we are talking about cultural norms, we are talking about averages recognizing there are sub-cultures and counter-cultures which can be quite different.

Take doing interviews (since I think that will be less controversial of a median to talk in). There is general advice on what one should do for an interview. It may be that you will be interviewing with someone whose opinion of you will go up when the see you in a t-shirt and flip flops, but when asked advice on what to wear to an interview we still tend to give advice based on the averages of wearing somewhere between business casual to business formal. We even stereotype different types of business culture (mobile startup vs international bank), and rarely do people point out a lack of peer reviewed studies or that there will be exceptions (or if they point out exceptions, they do it in addition to, instead of as a counter of, the standard advice).

>Before it was paid very well, being a "computer science programming nerd" had a very low status in general society.

Being very stereotypical and based on anecdotal evidence, but it still seems pretty low status (in the overall culture) despite the money to be made.

If I fire you from your government job because you said something I didn't agree with, being that I'm an acting agent of the government, am I violating your First Amendment? This would not apply to a private employee firing someone for the same reason because they are not an acting government agent.

>Government employees tend to excel at working organisational politics (i.e., in serving their organisational customers) rather than in serving their taxpaying customers.

So you are saying that government employees are greater at serving the people who actually matter. Not the people who should matter, but the people who do.

Imagine a startup that focused on its customers' customers (maybe once or twice more removed) instead of the people paying it. Would anyone be surprised if it gets out competed by a different startup focusing directly on their customers, even if at the cost of their customers' customers?

This isn't unique to government. I've seen private organizations where employees will make choices that benefit their own department at the cost of the overall organization. I sometimes wonder if a natural selection-esque drive behind this is the reasons that inefficiency grows as organizations grow.

> We should pay market rates, but we should pay them for market quality.

I think this would fix a lot of problems, but implementing it is going to be a nightmare because it isn't just the rank and file employees who you need to do this for. You almost have to start at the top, and from what little I've worked with governments, you are looking as a massive cycling of employees and a large loss of institutional knowledge. Also, given that much of how any government agency works is dictated by some of the same people who would be replaced under this, you are looking at having to pay people much more than even going market rate because of the extra costs of working the position.

For example, hiring good government IT is not just going to mean having to pay market wages, but also having to account for paying people to work in dead languages and eldritch abominations built by poorly managed contractors who often still have rights to the software that prevent the government employees from doing major changes (lots of contract security).

Did it occur in a state where being in possession of a weapon inside your home is a crime? And if they felt threatened, it should be up to a jury to determine if it was self defense or murder based on why they felt threatened.

But only for cops. Shouldn't cops be treated like anyone else, which would normally mean being fired or maybe, if we are lucky, unpaid leave?

>Minecraft players are playing a game to gather resources to build things. Alice is playing a economic simulation. Obviously she is going to win.

What is missing is that people were still able to play minecraft without the market, even on the given server. Did like the price? Then go mine your own, with the same chance of getting it as you would in the vanilla version.

The only person who did anything bad (which I think may still be arguable, but lets just say the only one who did anything bannable) was the one duping the items.

If anything, the tax they implemented in the 1.7 server was worse than the market takeover of the 1.6 server because it wasn't something a person could opt out of and forced an effective black market.

Couldn't you taint the crytocurrency?

It wouldn't be exactly something that can be done overnight, but it wouldn't be impossible. Depending upon how strongly they implement the laws, it would kill currencies that don't offer protection from being tainted.

>Clemson, where I went to school and the current defending champs had a budget of $104,000,000. Of that, they spent $103,000,000. If you'd be so kind as to identify the shareholder who's rolling in that $1 million profit I'd appreciate it.

How does one account for the potential of Hollywood accounting when looking as just a few top numbers? If you look at the cost verses income of movies using the same standards, most box office hits were financial disasters, no?

I don't have much issue finding them on steam.

Sometimes I look through new releases, and if I see something I like, try it out and review it. Yes, this is often filled with lots of bad games. Other times I look through new games on a given category, and only pay attention to the ones positively rated. This gets rid of all the shovel ware.

But most often when I am looking at a new indie game, I have gotten the recommendation from somewhere else. Often friends or reddit.

I can't think of a better system that would allow something like alpha Minecraft of Dwarf Fortress while stopping shovel ware. I've even found some RPG maker games that were great, but can be impossible to tell apart from all the bad ones. Maybe it exists, but centralized curation is not it.

Also, the current system allows those who want centralized curation to have it. You just follow self appointed curators you like. The benefit is that if you stop liking them or want to follow more than one, you are free to. You can't just pretend all the games they don't curate don't exist, which is what happens if there was a centralized curation in place.

Even if console gamers are a different breed, I feel like the homebrew crowd is even more different from console gamers than console gamers are from pc gamers.

>Console makers aren't interested in making devices that sell at super thin margins and provide zero incremental revenue because they get bought by a homebrew crowd that won't buy into the ecosystem.

But are they really a threat, and are they a big enough threat to be worth spending the time and money to lock out?

>or perhaps scarcity existed in terms of time it took to procure materials.

I would say this is pretty much the case.

Even the simplest most abundant resources takes time to harvest. And that rare resources take much longer to fine, and can be much more dangerous to gather (requiring people to suit up with a set of expensive gear that they could lose in the process).

What makes different servers so diverse is that mods can drastically change the underlying cost and risks of gathering material. There is a turtle mod that allows you to program a turtle to mine resources for you. While it is kinda slow, it runs steadily without intervention and can quickly strip mine an area to provide you with plenty of resources. But it can't farm animal items like wool, so it significantly lowers the time investment of ores while not at all impacting animal product costs.

Why? To me this is no different than a person who is against mass murder being okay with multiplayer first person shooters.

The consequences don't impact real life, you can leave at any time, and in most cases it is very simple to recover, even if not fully.

I think the real interesting morality starts happening when it does impact real life. For example, someone in a poor country farming items to sell on the black market as a way to make real life currency they need to live. I've read about (though am not really sure about the authenticity) of gold farmers in places like Venezuela doing this to survive.

What happens when killing and looting someone in a game actually costs them a meal in real life (even if the real money trading is banned, a rule is only as good as it is enforced)?

This reminds me of the time a few friends and I were playing a modded minecraft server and destroyed the market and entered into a post scarcity economy. The mods were different, but we took over so fast that every admin on the server was investigating us for hacking (eventually we were cleared).

The server we were on was much smaller, and while there was an economy, it was never to the point that B would buy from A just to resell at a higher price than A was selling.

One game that fascinates me with its economy is Path of Exile. It tried to do away with gold, and in doing so gave evidence that there will always be some sort of currency. Granted, I think this was already shown in Diablo 2 when, because of the gold cap being far below the value of the best items, a second organic currency economy was born trading in runes (I think it was runes, its been a long time).

I've read a conspiracy theory that Nintendo is wising up a bit to this, but can't do so openly, which is why the SNES classic was just as easy to hack as the NES classic even though a few simple changes could've made it much harder. They know the number of people who would pay $15 for a 15 year old game that hasn't aged well except for nostalgia is limited (assuming they even have the rights to sell it), but the market for hardware that would let them emulate them with a better (perhaps not better but more nostalgic) experience than the simple PC emulator setup is wide open. Thus the NES and SNES classic.

As I said, it is just a conspiracy theory, but leaving the power port to transfer data as well as power in the SNES classic after the same design allowed massive hacking of the NES classic does give a slight nod towards the theory.

Can this even happen again? Look at PCs. The cost to produce a very low quality game has never been cheaper, and the infrastructure to spread it has never been better. But there isn't really a problem. We now have marketplaces that have some level of curation in them that prevents this from being a major problem. It isn't a perfect system, but there is no threat of it crashing the video game industry.

Social expectations of games, knowledge about games, information sharing about games, and platforms that allow this knowledge to propagate have made it so I can't see this as being any threat at all.

Add in that we are talking homebrew, so its not like the content will have Nintendo's stamp of approval on it nor accessible to the average user, and the line of reasoning seems completely invalid.

Though it wouldn't be the first time a company did something for reasons that were no longer valid.

What if the value add of off shore had nothing to do with the work done, but with the threat of replacement. Not that you could actually do the replacement, but the threat of it could result in reduction in wage growth that more than made up the waste of using off shore outsourcing.

Don't think I've seen this idea explored before. Maybe the numbers show it is completely idiotic (I did basically come up with it in the shower). Guess its my new conspiracy theory of the month.

>How does someone having wealth stop anyone else from acquiring theirs?

Through lobbying of laws that increase their wealth more than others. Tax breaks that give scraps to the poor while giving massive benefits to the wealthy. A legal system that only the rich have a chance of truly navigating.

Ideally it shouldn't matter. One person being rich doesn't make another person poor. But politicians have been for sale for some time, and even basic concepts such a free speech and the open exchange of ideas are strongly tied to wealth in a way that ends up being bad for the little guys.

Electronic password managers never made sense to me. While you can do more to secure a single target, it is a more valuable target and one mistake costs you all your passwords. For me a physical password journal is best. While it does make you vulnerable to physical attackers, the cost invest to target someone physically is so much higher that if I have to deal with that threat level I'm already a goner. Just have to hide it from the kids.

From past experience I've found that taking an economic/scientific approach to certain things, especially human relationships, is considered a profane act in certain parts of modern day society. Many of my past attempts to discuss the economics of relationships results in accusations of sociopathy for attempting to understand relationships under a transactional framework. I've yet to figure out the cause of such opposition.

That HN doesn't result in this reaction (at least not nearly as strongly as other places) means it is one of the places most equipped to discuss it.

But it is possible for the most equipped place to discuss something to still be woefully inadequately equipped to discuss it. The richest person in a room can still be poor.