someone7x

You say the business model is moving to F2P but that is only part of the story.

In the complete opposite direction we have Kickstarter et al.

Now perhaps the “get filthy rich” business model is only sustainable by freemium addiction (they pay 5x!). At this point it’s more about greed/entitlement than than it is starving artists getting their bone.

> In every situation, the most natural strategy is to maximize personal gains.

The iterated prisoner's dilemma begs to differ.

There are many many situations where cooperation is both natural and optimal.

Based on a 1960s albino warrior mage (Elric of Melnibone) which is based on a 1920s albino pulp villain (Monsieur Zenith) who is really just based on Holmes' Moriarty.

The Witcher's DNA is very interesting.

"Some people also fail to realize that there will always be poor people."

Replace "poor people" with heretics and you sound as self-rationalizing as an inquisitor.

Reminds me of the motte and bailey fallacy. The bailey is personal dislike and the motte is protecting animals/children.

Given the context of living on the street, what is easy in accessing farmland?

Lack of experience and capital quickly come to mind as challenges. The more I think about it, the more I want to say that everything is hard in accessing farmland.

> So a profit motive will always beat out a non-market based approach, which isn’t really news

Call me a dreamer, but I wonder if that would remain true in a UBI-style environment?

> I like writing “if err != nil { … }”

That idiom was my biggest turn off in learning Go.

I would be 100x happier with "if not err {...}"

> The area is organized under state law as a community development district. As a result, voting is restricted to local landowners.

wow, how is that constitutional?

Permaculture is like A Pattern Language, but for useful plants instead of buildings.

I like the first principles approach it takes.

The more I've learned about gardening the less fun I find the abstraction of gardening games.

I think it's mainly about how important soil health is for growing plants and how poorly this concept seems to be modeled in games.

Square Foot Gardening is a great introduction; an retired aerospace engineer finds the world of gardening full of contradictions and myths.

He boils it all down to fundamentals that are easy to apply.

> It's the experienced developers that try to gold plate to avoid the issues that they had in the last project

Literally learning from the past and applying it to the present is “gold plating”?

I’m stunned.

People who see me work invariably ask: Why do you use bing?

And I invariably answer, in my best Idiocracy: 'Cause they pay me every time I do!

> a common wrongdoing

I’m not aware of any other term that captures a practice that is both commonplace and wrong.

This is good and I’m adding it to my lexicon. Thanks!

SMUD... now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.

Not one person I knew chose PG&E instead of SMUD.

The Yolo County stuff makes me sick, just like banning municipal wi-fi.

Reminds of that guy in The Crucible that gets crushed with rocks for refusing to take part in the witch trial.

You make a false choice between "congresspeople and their friends" and "someone shrewd enough to be making $10m/yr"

Not all congresspeople are corrupt and not all those making $10m/yr are shrewd. These are classic government-bad capitalism-good strawmen.

Personally, I doubt most of the folks capable of spending/investing $10m/yr are actually making that money themselves.

In that case I would prefer the semblance of accountability I get from Uncle Sam instead of the supposed benevolence of random individuals spending money that fell in their laps.

Reminds me of the "You're just a tracer!" scene from Chasing Amy.

I keep hoping Brave will be a success in this regard; their browser has a wallet built in for micro-paying the sites one visits: https://brave.com/faq-rewards/#what-is-brave-rewards

That's an uncomfortable number of laws against African-style braiding.

Is licensure the new oppression meta?

I think you misunderstand me. It’s not that it’s a veneer, it’s that the veneer is tolerated despite resulting in voter suppression.

Voter suppression should be a universal bad in a democracy no? It’s not only bad when done for racist ends.

> They were making the argument and affirming that they were discriminating based on political affiliation, in an attempt to show they were not discriminating based on race. It was a conscious legal strategy to admit this.

Wow. Can't be racial prejudice if its already political prejudice.

Reminds me of the court scene in New Jack City where the Wesley Snipes confesses to being a foot soldier and therefore he can't be the kingpin.

> and when it comes to accessibility questions, the chief concern isn't necessarily whether everyone uses it.

I wish more developers had your perspective.

My Dad uses Windows' high contrast mode. It's less that "literal dozens" use this feature and more that this feature transforms all that desktop-shaped-material into a computer for the vision impaired.

Isn't the biggest performance enhancement the transition from not-working to working? I view accessibility as the ultimate performance enhancement for a given slice of users.

> Since Apple has historically focused on executing extant ideas well...

> I disagree, when apple released the iphone, they changed the face of what smart phones would ultimately become.

It looks like you're actually agreeing: They (Apple) executed on an extant idea (smart phones) so well that they changed the face of the industry (app stores, etc etc).

There's a popular book called "Factfulness" that explores the dynamic you're describing: the world is generally getting better and the media is institutionally incapable of reporting it (because they thrive on sensation instead of facts).

If you are swayed by facts and data, it's probably right up your alley.

Comments like this are why I come here.

I can only add an anecdote to this:

I read a book where a planet would blink out of existence occasionally, but long went undiscovered because all the high tech scanners and computers kept throwing out the "impossible" readings as corrupt data.

I'm glad I read that book so I could grasp what you're saying here.

> BMI just hits the tare button on what it means to be broke

> It doesn't level the playing field, it just elevates it.

Raising the lower bounds of poverty sounds like a good outcome!

Exactly this. Pennies not being accepted in so many use cases requiring exact change is just ridiculous.

And there are competing humanitarian reasons for giving it. The sadness is that our laws choose the institution over the individual.