dmwallin

You also have to consider that faces are one of the things that we have the strongest perception of, with lots of our neurons dedicated to the task, so when you get things wrong it's far more noticeable than many other bodily animations would be.

I recommend thinking about what you can do that would significantly differentiate the gameplay from what is possible irl. Just putting laser tag in VR is a downgrade in many aspects from what you can achieve in reality, so you need a lot of gameplay innovation to make it a compelling proposition. One small example of where just copying things from real life falls short: Your proof of concept show walls (because that's what laser tag does to create compelling gameplay) but walls are a mediocre choice in a colocated VR game because the actual behavior (users can always walk through them in VR) defies the user's built in expectations about what it means for something to be a "wall".

It seems plainly obvious that history shows the opposite is true; corruption is increased when money and power are centralized amongst a few people. There's a reason the term "Robber Baron" came around the last time we experienced massive inequality as a country. If you have some examples to the contrary I would love to hear them.

This article's title is disingenuous and is guilty of the same thing it accuses the study of.

The actual content of this article is the following (TLDR)

1) That the study didn't show a reduction in negative health outcomes, rather the control group showed an increase in negative outcomes.

2) The author of the article disagrees that this is equivalent to the stated claim, and offers a number of alternative explanations why you might see this outcome in the data

3) The author offers some critiques around lack of data transparency and the statistical rigor of the study.

In the end the title is a semantic nitpick around the difference between "improved absolute health" and "improved relative health outcomes" and not the smoking gun of bad faith actors it implies.

No way to fail it but you also can't pass a non-existent test. N/A for cases like this would be more accurate.

That's not entirely true. Having a national presence can pay off in terms of being able to sign deals with larger clients.

The USA is already one of the world leaders in percent of population incarcerated; it doesn't seem we are suffering from an inability to imprison. If we as a society decide to revoke someones freedom and choice, then we should be willing to shoulder the cost. Making imprisoning low cost, or even worse profitable, creates massively perverse incentives. If it costs the system little to nothing, why bother to make sure people are really guilty? Why bother to spend the money to rehabilitate? Your goal should be to align incentives, which makes a high-cost and humane prison system have lots of favorable characteristics.

All these "illegal" guns started their life as brand-new perfectly legal firearms. It's a very leaky pipeline, one in which the industry and industry funded lobby groups have at least a bit of a mixed incentive to solve. The vast majority of the proposed gun-control laws focus on tightening up the leakiest parts of the supply chain, or on reducing the overall demand for various firearms.

>>> training your body to see the virus sooner and know how to attack it with less "training"

This is literally how every vaccine ever made works.

There's a difference between the way our minds work and the way reality works. In reality a physical object can only exist in one place which naturally leads to hierarchal organization being the dominant paradigm. On the other hand our minds operate associatively.

When we started to build out computer systems we based the UX on metaphors of real-life tool equivalents. I would posture though that as we become more of a computing-literate society and as computing moves closer to becoming an extension of our minds as opposed to an extension of reality, the dominant paradigm will shift towards associate models of organization.

The goals of a nation-state are not the same as those of a corporation. Having a monopoly on a strategically important industry is valuable in and of itself, especially when viewed from a geopolitical perspective. Just look at what's currently going on in semiconductors.

People love to roll out this popular criticism of democracy but there is very little actual evidence to support it. It can be quite a bit more expensive and much more visible when you have to influence a large number of people than to influence a small group of stakeholders. There's a reason why lobbying is such a huge part of american politics.

Even more to the point both historical and contemporary evidence indicates that power and influence spread more evenly across a countries citizens is strongly correlated to overall quality of life.

The approach that would be most interesting to me would be if you could build out your assets with really high quality assets, along with engine friendly low quality versions and then use a slower but high quality ray tracing setup to render out extremely well labeled training sets. This would potentially allow you to have detailed aesthetic control over the end results.

It's unfortunately nowhere near a stealth UBI experiment and really just a classic welfare trap, in the vein of so many other government programs. There are many bad incentives in our unemployment system and it was clearly never designed to be a delivery method for long term stimulus.

We are talking about liquid assets though, not net worth. As other commenters have pointed out, the middle class has most of their net worth tied up in non-liquid assets such as cars, houses, or retirement funds.

I think you need to adjust your internal model as to what constitutes solidly middle class. To quote some more realistic numbers:

>> Here, we define the middle class as the middle 60 percent of the income distribution in terms of what a family usually makes in a given year—ranging from $25,300 to $111,400 in 2016 (the latest year for which data is available). The median middle-class family has total liquid assets, defined as checking accounts, savings accounts, money market accounts, call accounts, and prepaid cards, of just $4,000. Unsurprisingly, the top quintile is more secure with a median of $31,300 and the bottom quintile is even less secure, with just $600.[1]

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/03/26/the-middl...

This is a poorly written op-ed. The author claims to prioritize the valorization of wealth, the encouragement of saving, and the encouragement of children, but fails to make any case for why we should value these. He then completely neglects to make any case for how increasing capital gains might lead to the deterioration of these values.

Raising capital gains is not going to discourage the next innovative companies, in fact it's likely to have the opposite effect. When a startup succeeds enough to reach a taxable event it is often at an exponentially large return on investment. In comparison a simple doubling of the tax rate is not going to materially affect the magnitude of that outcome.

Capital is always in search of returns. A general tax on net gains is not going to materially change that fact. The primary effect it will have is to further encourage investment into value-generating assets instead of speculative plays, something desperately needed right now in this frothy market.

What competitors?

This gets into a chicken and egg argument. You are arguing that the level of demand is leading to the current price point, while complainers about E Ink argue that anti competitive practices lead to higher prices which results in a lower demand.

In a competitive market, both are actually true. The fact that there aren't really any major competitors to E Ink in that market indicates however that there probably is some sort of moat (whether it is IP, or otherwise)and that prices are likely higher than they would be in a more competitive market. There are a lot of signs that there is latent demand in the market and lowered prices would lead to an increase in total market volume.

Seems pretty obvious to me that conservatives would be as susceptible to prejudices as the rest of humanity. Stating that common prejudices amongst those who identify as conservative might negatively affect specific policies is not itself moralizing.

I trust their business incentives more than my ability to self-host securely and I value the convenience more than the extra cost.

There's no such thing as perfect and unimpeachable and attempts to move the needle eventually have diminishing results and steadily increasing costs on the system. If you let a side push the definition of whats acceptable beyond what is a reasonable standard you make it increasingly likely the procedure will fail in some inconsequential way and give bad faith actors more ammunition to make unreasonable claims about the validity of the results.

“Corporations are capital mafias that extort money from employees or government. They do whatever they can for shareholders at the expense of people that rely on those jobs. Furthermore they are just political machines for uber-capitalists and neoliberals. I've seen companies endorse candidates that actively are working against their interests just for political favors.”

It's more that intelligent people are still human, and human beings are not good at being clear-headed when they feel that their identity is being attacked (ego protection). If you identify as "rational" or "intelligent" that makes you vulnerable to defensive behaviors to defend your self-perception.

Set yourself a threshold amount that you are okay with a 100% loss on, and a periodic schedule based on your risk-appetite. At each interval if you are above your threshold you sell your excess holdings and if you are below you sit tight.

Alternatively you can set yourself a price threshold. For example, sell half your holdings every time the price doubles. Essentially this acts as a log function on your gains in exchange for lowering risk.

There's a ton of room for fine tuning a set of rules to manage risk, as long as you are willing to stick to them.

The problem is their opinion often aren't actually based on first principles. Humans have a strong tendency to form an opinion for various emotional and social reasons, and then build up a set of justifications ex post facto, often without realizing it. The more intelligent you are the easier it is to do subconsciously and it's often harder for your ego to admit the strong role your id played.

There's a tradeoff here. While obsessing over small details can take you away from more important work, it's also something that you can build up an instinct in your craft for and the actual cost in productivity drops precipitously. IMO it's important to make a practice of these type of things and a culture of excellence can pay off in the long run, as a culture of cutting corners can often end up cutting the wrong corners.

To be clear, Excel is a prominent and notable example of a visual programming tool. It uses a functional programming paradigm across a 2 dimensional data structure and has obviously been remarkably successful in it’s domain.

If you goal is to work on a top down Rpg-style game, as a single developer I would HIGHLY recommend using a tool like RPG Maker (https://www.rpgmakerweb.com/)

Games like Pokemon/Zelda are very content driven and usually don't have any sort of complex systems that require deep access to game engine internals. As someone working solo, you are going to want to spend most of your time creating fun/interesting content. Tools for this genre have been built many times before by people with far more experience building them. If you spend your time rebuilding them yourself, it's a recipe for stalling out without having much to show.

If your goal is really to just have fun building out gameplay systems as a programming challenge, I recommend using a lightweight code-oriented scripting language engine. Some good examples in this space are LÖVE (Lua, https://love2d.org/) or Phaser (Javascript, https://phaser.io/). These will allow you to jump right in to building games without needing to learn a graphical UI and are usually more agnostic about how you build your game than fully featured environments.

If you prefer the latter, but still want to end up with a finished game at the end, I recommend scoping down from an RPG to something like a Sokoban-style puzzler (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokoban). Use a tool like Puzzlescript (https://www.puzzlescript.net/) to prototype your mechanics. Once you've finalized your mechanics you can then recreate it in the engine of your choice and add any polish. Having a playable prototype will make it much clearer what systems you will need to build.

Best of luck building!

How are you going to decide which corporations are you going to tax? How are you going to get citizens from the upper percentage of the tax bracket to just agree to join a voluntary experiment.

It turns out that designing studies for national policies is REALLY hard due to the complexity of our modern society. Institutions exist across a large variety of scales and the smaller the study the more you have to account for external factors and abstract out things like funding sources, which are not directly connected to the effect of the money on the populace being studied.

It's much easier to look separately at the effects of income, and compare that to separate studies on the effect of higher taxation, to see if the tradeoffs are worth it.