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Yarrr... Linux! in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Wednesday, January 18 2006 12:40 Profile #85
Well, you may be right. Economics is complicated. I am sure, though, that whatever it is, it isn't just a bunch of abstract notions, so that a few new global laws could straighten everything out. The wealth and poverty of nations is staggeringly large amounts of very real stuff.

An example that sticks in my mind is this article on concrete, written by someone named David Owen, and originally published in The New Yorker in 2003. It explains a lot about contemporary concrete construction techniques, then at the end it wanders off into a description of the Hoover Dam. The Hoover Dam is about 6 million tons of concrete, it was finished in 1936, and it will take another fifty years or so yet before it completely cools down from the internal heat of setting. Blah, blah, blah -- awfully big dam. Then the final line:
quote:
Anyway, here's the point I want to make: New York City adds concrete to itself at the rate of approximately one
Hoover Dam every eighteen months.
That's wealth, and it's wealth that is still accumulating fast, while most of the humans in the universe are still lucky to have rooves.

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Yarrr... Linux! in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Wednesday, January 18 2006 04:48 Profile #82
But what is the evidence or argument that has persuaded you that American wealth actually has been gained at the expense of the rest of the world?

I'm not just attacking you -- I have been wondering a lot about this point myself. So far, though, it just isn't clear to me that the rich world simply got rich by robbing the poor. So if you could explain your view to me, it might help me understand an important issue better.

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Yarrr... Linux! in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Wednesday, January 18 2006 00:34 Profile #80
quote:
Originally written by PoD person:

I'm coming closer and closer to the depressing conviction that my USA's standard of living is predicated on the poverty of several third-world countries. I would welcome some sort of disproof, but it seems that our proletariat became bourgeousie by turning itself into the white-collar controllers of an impoverished global proletariat, and that's ;_;
I'm not saying you're wrong, but why do you say this?

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Colonization in Richard White Games
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Tuesday, January 17 2006 13:13 Profile #8
quote:
Originally written by Januarist Revolutionary:


—Alorael, who would be happy to buy an introductory book entitled Nine Variations on Linear B. Maybe the third book in the series would be Nine Variations on Planar B?
At least the Nth volume would go to zero size in the limit where N became infinite.

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Yarrr... Linux! in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Tuesday, January 17 2006 13:05 Profile #67
Property is theft, man. This thread belongs to the people!

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Geneforge 4: "Not a Shaper" in Geneforge Series
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Tuesday, January 17 2006 12:47 Profile #46
Huh, I had forgotten all about that guy. Makes it sound as though G4 might feature the second Sholai expedition to Sucia Island (or at least, to the Shaper lands).

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Yarrr... Linux! in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Tuesday, January 17 2006 11:25 Profile #65
Well, the idea of using the law to compel big corporations to act as we little people please has obvious appeal. The disadvantages of too much centralized control, and the advantages of market capitalism even for the little people, are less obvious to abstract thought, and seemed worth spelling out.

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Yarrr... Linux! in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Tuesday, January 17 2006 01:22 Profile #62
quote:
Originally written by Kelandon:

From what little I understand of political economic theory (not as much as I should), part of the argument for socialism is that the GDP alone is not a great measure of the overall well-being of a society. Being able to control certain aspects of the economy to make sure that our money is serving us instead of us serving our money is worth a small reduction in growth rate.

For example, in terms of environmentalism: after a certain point, cutting costs by using less clean methods to manufacture products runs up against increases in medical bills due to the problems that pollution causes.

More importantly, who gives a damn about being able to buy a table for fifty dollars instead of seventy-five if you can't breathe the air without getting cancer?

The other (purely economic) rationale that I've heard is that strict laissez-faire capitalism is subject to a boom-and-bust cycle. If you study U.S. economic history, you start to notice that there's a pattern of panics every twenty years: the Panic of 1819, the Panic of 1837, the Panic of 1857, the Panic of 1873, the Panic of 1893, etc. That's what laissez-faire capitalism gets you. Socialism can be used to mediate the booms and busts so that one gets a more level (although still somewhat bumpy) rate of growth.
I believe these are classic arguments against strict 19th century laissez faire. But they're not so much arguments for socialism-as-opposed-to-capitalism, as arguments for government superstructure on top of the free market. All the industrialized capitalist countries put some amount of this in place over the 20th century, so that even in the US, which surely lags in this respect, there are laws to protect the environment. (You want to see eco-catastrophe, check out the former communist countries: red doesn't necessarily mean green.) And even the US has a progressive income tax, social security and medicare, an activist Federal Reserve, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Some people would say that this means we're all socialists now. I don't want to debate terminology; it's just that this thread did start off talking about some much more radical alternatives to unfettered capitalism than that.

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Stop me before I murder Lark in Avernum 4
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Tuesday, January 17 2006 01:05 Profile #10
I kept hoping that eventually you'd get a response, "Wow! You have now brought me every %&§°!! iron bar in Avernum! You can stop now. And here's a cookie for each of you!"

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Dorikas trouble in Avernum 4
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Tuesday, January 17 2006 01:00 Profile #11
A4 dialogs do that a lot, and it drives me nuts.

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Stop me before I murder Lark in Avernum 4
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Monday, January 16 2006 08:19 Profile #3
Of course, Lark is still pretty annoying.

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Yarrr... Linux! in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Monday, January 16 2006 08:14 Profile #59
Inflation is only part of the correction. One of the most basic and important advantages of capitalist economies is also one of the hardest to measure: continuous quality improvement. The extreme low end of today's consumer products is often better than the extreme high end was twenty years ago. Accounting for inflation doesn't take into account that today's fifty bucks can buy what five thousand bucks couldn't, back then.

We take this for granted, but it only seems to happen in capitalist economies. In fact I think one could argue that this one issue was the single great failure of Soviet communism. By the standards of 1917, the Soviet system was extremely successful.

So I doubt that the true absolute wealth of the poorest Americans has declined. Even if it has, however, this isn't really a big deal, because it certainly hasn't plummeted to Third World levels in the past 20 years. 100 years ago, it was pretty close to that. American grandparents remember when 'a chicken in every pot' was a promise, not a joke. Like the stock market, the wealth of capitalist nations has its ups and downs. Over the long haul, it does better than anything else.

Africa is an example of why one can say that income stagnation in America is not big deal. In economics the stakes are starvation, not keeping up with the Joneses. Africa is certainly in a bad way, and I wish I understood more about why. Half a dozen recent books haven't given me any clear ideas for simple fixes.

They have convinced me that chalking it all up to exploitation is about as helpful as telling a cancer patient that they are sick. When two healthy capitalist enterprises strike a mutually profitable deal, the fact that each is getting more than they give the other isn't seen as a problem. So the only reason to speak about African exploitation is that Africa is so poor. But then why is it so poor in the first place?

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Resistance is futile in SubTerra
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Monday, January 16 2006 01:47 Profile #11
quote:
Originally written by The Stew Boy:

Please say this again in one-syllable words.
All your boards are belong to us.

(Take the two syllables in 'belong' one at a time.)

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Yarrr... Linux! in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Monday, January 16 2006 01:42 Profile #55
The classic argument for laissez faire capitalism is that wealth disparity is nowhere near as big a moral issue as absolute poverty. Raising the standard of living of the poorest fraction of society, or at least of most of it, is worth all kinds of unpleasant costs -- including the cost, if such it is, of making the richest fraction of society disproportionately richer still.

In other words, the rich getting richer is an acceptable side effect in a system that makes the poor less poor faster than any other practicable system.

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Yarrr... Linux! in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Sunday, January 15 2006 14:07 Profile #29
Gold bullion isn't valuable from necessity, though. It has some practical utility, but not in proportion to its value, which is just as much a social convention as, say, government.

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Helping Jeff advertise in Avernum 4
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Sunday, January 15 2006 08:42 Profile #79
Chitrachs ate 'em, of course.

If you never re-read books, maybe you should try better books.

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
where is this sleater fellow? in Avernum 4
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Saturday, January 14 2006 15:32 Profile #5
I advertise again, in case you are very frustrated, my maps of the Honeycomb posted in a recent thread in this forum.

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Quake for chicks in General
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Saturday, January 14 2006 05:58 Profile #12
Just do not go drinking with a Finn. I believe the Finnish liver is dual-cored.

[ Saturday, January 14, 2006 05:58: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ]

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Colonization in Richard White Games
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Saturday, January 14 2006 05:42 Profile #7
quote:
Originally written by Thuryl:

Would a machine designed to allow you to write in ancient scripts more quickly be a Linear B accelerator?
No, but a linear accelerator B factory would be fun. I think maybe somebody has made one already. It has to ramp particles up to enough kinetic energy to be on resonance for producing B mesons in collions. B mesons are nice because they are, to a first approximation, bound states of one b quark and one b antiquark. Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is perturbative for the heavy quarks, so for them it makes predictions we can understand and test. (This is unlike the situation for the light u and d quarks that compose protons and neutrons, for which QCD still makes nice cartoons to show the public, but is actually just a whistle in the dark as far as quantitative science goes.) So B physics is a good testbed for QCD.

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Resistance is futile in SubTerra
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Friday, January 13 2006 13:11 Profile #9
My mysterious hierarchs can beat up your mysterious hierarchs! Nyah!

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Helping Jeff advertise in Avernum 4
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Friday, January 13 2006 13:08 Profile #63
Actually, Alwan and Greta do develop gradually, but reasonably. Their experience drives them to more extreme versions of their initial inclinations, but that's not hard to believe.

Bumping off Stalin, at the right stage, might have done something.

The issue of player power is one I have raised before, as something I would like to see better justified. To me it calls for explanation, how an apprentice can come out of nowhere and in a few days settle problems that defeated mighty leaders with years of experience. G1 did this quite well, I thought: the PC was a Shaper in a land of serviles, and there were canisters, and lots of buried secrets. But in G2 I really wondered why Barzahl didn't just walk over and whomp Easss the same way I ended up doing.

In G3 I felt there were grounds to rationalize the situation, in that I got an impression that there were actually far more rogues around than just the ones the player met, so the authorities had their hands full still. But it would have been interesting to get some explicit indications of why the PC was so uniquely effective, even compared to leading Shapers. Even just some remarks about the Shaper obsession with caution and security being paralyzing in a crisis.

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Helping Jeff advertise in Avernum 4
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Friday, January 13 2006 11:37 Profile #59
Well, you haven't seen all the alternate endings.

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Helping Jeff advertise in Avernum 4
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Friday, January 13 2006 10:58 Profile #56
Sounds very good. I'm sure Jeff could do something in this direction -- in fact it sounds as though he wants to. Not as a counterargument, but just as a continuation of the thought, though, I wonder how long can that kind of thing be kept up.
I mean, I'd go beyond just getting Bob off his duff, and say that I like the idea of a complicatedly scripted game, where NPCs take initiative, respond dramatically to the player's choices, etc. I have a bad feeling about the scaling of this sort of thing, though. A game as long as a game has to be, if it is to sell for $30, probably just can't handle much complexity, because of how it multiplies itself. That means that Jeff just can't afford to go too far this way.

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Helping Jeff advertise in Avernum 4
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Thursday, January 12 2006 17:04 Profile #48
Well, there were Litalia and Hoge in G3. They were both quite active, at least by implication. You met them early, and they dogged your path for a while. And the system of islands makes for a succession of local Bobs.

G2 is pretty much as described. Bob sits there. At least you get to choose your Bob. But the reason why everyone just waits for you to decide the course of fate is hard to see.

In G1, I thought that staticity was actually an effective theme. The whole island was in a standoff, with the stopper half out of the bottle, and the PC arrives as a newb who has just enough capability to begin tipping things. The sects sat and waited, Trajkov and Goettsch sat and waited, the tombs and sealed labs sat and waited, the ancient spirit city sat and waited. And I thought it all made sense.

Maybe that's the root of the problem, though. The static world worked so well in G1 that Jeff stuck with it.

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Resistance is futile in SubTerra
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Thursday, January 12 2006 15:40 Profile #6
quote:
Originally written by Knotty:

quote:
Originally written by ME:

Some sort of high-ranking RWG cultist should annex this forum.
You're really stretching it when you say that this board has requested assistance. As well as saying the annexation was invited. I only played SubTerra for a few minutes.

Unless I've misunderstood SoT and have granted myself much more importance in this whole deal than I really have.
Let your guard down for a moment, and the legions of White pour in. Your suggestion was apparently all the pretext our hierarchs needed. But don't blame yourself; it was probably your implants.

Woops, I mean: great game, this SubTerra. It totally deserves its moiety of Spidweb bandwidth.

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Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00

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