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Comment by sippingabonedry | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad they're spending time and effort on issues important to everyday Americans' problems.

You sound dismissive, but gamers as a whole is a demographic that is hard to be ignored and happens to span groups otherwise counter to one another. Any politician who would not take advantage does it to their own detriment.

He represents a poverty-stricken district. Nobody should give a fuck about gamers until their basic needs are sorted.

You know.. and I am just going to throw it out there: never going to happen. So we might as well do what can be done.

If your life is otherwise impoverished, a video game could be one of the few options for affordable entertainment, particularly if a viable market for used games exists (which is one of the things this legislation wants to mandate).

So the way we fix poverty is free PlayStations for welfare bums? Holy fuck.

That's not at all what they said and you know it, so why pretend that's what they said?

no, poor people shouldnt have entertainment they've already paid for be taken away such that they have to spend a second or third time on it.

I see we've downgraded to no bread and virtual circuses.

So, to be clear, you believe government should focus on one problem at a time to the exclusion of anything else or am I missing something? That's never been how government, of any form up to and including the utopian visions that people keep in their dreams, has functioned.

I agree, we have much bigger fish to fry, but "I don't care about this issue so nobody should" isn't how you build a coalition to get the poverty addressed. A lot of politics is "hey Gamers, remember how I got you that thing you wanted? Well now I need support as I take on a bigger, more important topic". Inversely, saying "I don't care about your problem until another problem is resolved" tends to fray the group because you're quite literally telling people you don't respect them or their needs/wants.

You should check out the book "Let This Radicalize You", great primer on how to organize and get actual results vs doomering on the internet.

Addendum (reason for edit): Here's a list of other policy proposals and stances this guy is making: https://ritchietorres.house.gov/resources Draw your own conclusions, but he doesn't seem like he's 100% focused on gamer issues at present...

> Nobody should give a fuck about gamers

Buddy, gamers are a LARGE part of how Trump won his first term in 2016.

I just realized where the anger comes from: this particular division is not something that D/R team could easily splinter ( yet anyway -- I am sure we will soon be hating on the candy crush ppl ).

You know how some engineering teams have a really difficult time prioritizing? Maybe in planning there's a big long list of project ideas some of which really need more discovery to define scope. There can be stuff that seems really important to a long-term vision but is also hard to estimate and higher risk of scope creep etc. And there's stuff that's cheap/fast/low-risk but doesn't solve the larger important problems? And even in the context of a company that is still burning through investor money, you fix _some_ of the smaller things even while you're still figuring out the bigger things, b/c otherwise you'd likely _never_ do the smaller things?

I'm not saying legislators are doing their best in a good faith effort to serve their constituents. But even if they were, you would sometimes see things like this, right?

I know some teams don't let work out-prioritize the party planning committee.

Video games is about as big an industry as TV and movies.

Bigger

I'm glad you can handle the concept of handling more than 1 thing at a time.

Yeah, I'm certainly not opposed to this law, but it seems like a strange thing to focus on as our democracy and the rule of law is crumbling in real-time.

I sincerely don't understand this mentality. Legislators consider more than one bill per legislative session. We can (and must!) push along multiple axes, otherwise we will always be behind right?

The house is engulfed in fire and we're sweeping the kitchen floor.

If this were the only bill being considered I'd agree with you. By this logic we would only focus on one issue at a time and others would get worse in the meantime, so we would always be behind.

Just because the fire department is insane doesn't mean that the cleaning crew needs to stop working.

> the rule of law is crumbling in real-time.

Why would the people in charge focus on this? They consider it a feature, not a bug.

> but it seems like a strange thing to focus on as our democracy and the rule of law

Society is improved one issue at a time, and if you sit around waiting for the revolution to come, you will end up like the socialists who never win any elections and achieve nothing for decades.

No, we do not need to overthrow all of capitalism overnight, or solve "democracy", or whatever it is that you are advocating for, before we take any action to improve society.

That is code for "just don't do anything except LARP and complain, and attack anyone who actually is accomplishing things". Its a useless philosophy.

If we never passed normal somewhat mundane legislation in "unprecedented times," we wouldn't have passed anything new since September 2001.

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