I don't buy tons of media but I do always look to see if I can find movies I like in 3D at a reasonable cost. The problem thus far has been that they are always priced at an absurd premium, like $30 or $40 for a movie that I wouldn't likely buy at $20 anyways.
I'm looking forward to these head mounted displays for a few reasons. It'll enable me to watch and play games which may not be appropriate for younger audiences prior to bed time. It should eliminate any screen glare type issues. I can take my computer use to the recliner and sit more comfortably without having to use a gigantic monitor or move a lot of furniture to get a proper viewing angle.
"You don't have an automatic right to have a functioning drinking water well on your property; numerous natural contaminants, water rights, mineral rights, utility regulations, etc. can all restrict that anyway."
You are correct that many things can affect your property rights. That said if you own property and have not sold or leased any of those rights then you certainly do have grounds to hold someone else liable for damaging your property, and a well can be part of that property. It isn't like this is untested legal ground here, do some reading about Davey Compressor Co. v. City of Delray Beach or Wood v. Picillo.
I think it really depends on how much car you are buying. I don't see anything wrong with taking out a small loan to buy a quality used car. The definitely bad example though would be a friend of mine that as an E-3 bought a nearly $40,000 sports car almost entirely on credit straight out of training. He spent the next 4 years of his life on a starvation diet trying to keep ahead of the loan payments and insurance.
So yes, you frequently need a car in order to hold a job. But you have to be shrewd about it and buy the car you need, not want, at a price you can readily afford even if you are temporarily jobless at some point.
I expect that Teslas will depreciate but it'll just be less than with an ICE powered car. I'll be looking for a 30-40% depreciation before I could dream of talking the spouse into buying one.
For whatever reason I always had a negative view of Unity. Then I started playing 7DtD and couldn't believe that it was a Unity game. 7DtD actually just moved up to an updated version of unity and even with a lot of cheap placeholder textures the game looks amazing for a voxel game. Savage Lands is another Unity game that I've played a bit of and the lighting there blew my mind, it is especially noticeable during dusk and dawn when the light shines at angles through the trees.
I agree that a mod store is a good idea and could have huge benefits. If they resolved the financial split though they've still got issues that can only really be passably resolved by heavily curating that store. I'm not sure that Valve wants to pay a bunch of people to do that curating, even just for one game like Skyrim that would probably require several staff members.
I don't think anyone here is advocating abolishing vaccines. And so long as an overwhelming majority of people are being vaccinated then society is relatively safe. The odds of one of these diseases making some fantastic leap in virility bypassing current vaccines is vanishingly small whether or not a few million people in the USA vaccinate. Much of the rest of the world is a petri dish for this sort of thing already. Even if that did happen it'd likely be more of a hiccup in society than a serious danger. Many diseases and illnesses that were once highly lethal are no longer so because we have a much better sense of how to care for sick people. Your hyperbole about not vaccinating every person possible leading to the next super bug is relevant only to apocalyptic movies and video games.
"you have no freedom to choose something that threatens other people's lives (nevermind your own)" Patently bullshit, sorry. You can choose to smoke tobacco, drive a car, light a cooking grill, go skydiving or any other minor thing that entails some very small to infitesimal risk of danger both to yourself and to others. If you choose not to be vaccinated you then are at risk of contracting some disease, which there is an incredibly tiny chance of you coming in contact with barring unusual circumstances like traveling abroad. In the case that you do become infected there is some fractional risk that you could pass it on to other people who aren't vaccinated, such people make up a very small part of the population so the odds of both events happening, especially once you know you are sick, and so avoid contact with other people, is vanishingly small. Granted that risk goes up the less people vaccinate but it's still fantasy to postulate that we're anywhere near the point that it poses a serious threat to society. So I'll err on the side of personal liberty and continue to insist that everyone should have the right to determine what they do with their own body.
My chief complaint with Bethesda getting a cut in this case is that their support of the game has been crap. They shoved out a few DLC's and basically phoned it in. For years there was a mod for which the sole purpose was fixing bugs in the game. Bethesda, rather than adopting those fixes and releasing a bug fix patch just left it all to rot. Meaning that if I wanted to quickly fix the hundreds of known bugs which the community had already figured out I had to install some 3rd party mod, instead of Bethesda patching their game. Bethesda already gets their cut whenever the game sells another copy. Piggy backing profits on the hard work of modders who evidentally care more about actually improving the game than the publisher does is just sickening. If modders were enabling people to use Bethesda IP without having to license the use of that IP from Bethesda then I could see an argument for them getting a cut. But as it is Bethesda isn't doing anything to earn that cut.
There is no doubt that those disease have caused a lot of death, but they still don't seriously threaten our society. Just like the terrorists could attack and kill as many people as they did on 9/11 on a quarterly basis and it wouldn't seriously threaten our society. The threat to society is obviously a bogus argument as our society has already weathered that threat and grown very quickly before we developed vaccines. I'm vaccinated, and my family is all vaccinated. I have sympathy for people who can't be vaccinated and so are at greater risk. But I won't force other people to under go vaccination because it is morally bankrupt in my view. I support a woman's right to abortion and a person's right to assisted suicide for much the same reason.
Do you have an angle regarding how this is a threat to society, that doesn't revolve around an emotional plea like "think of the children"?
Probably because if you accept the status quo of racism and just avoid those places it does nothing to fix the racism problem. You might as well ask why all the black people didn't up and leave the USA after the civil war. If we want to change peoples racist attitudes and stereo types you have to make it personal. They need to see that their fears and hatreds are unreasonable as frequently as possible. Going to a country where a significantly large part of the population has an unreasonable hatred for you with the purpose of rendering humanitarian aid is a pretty good way to do that. Whether or not it is a wise decision for your personal well being is a very valid question. But often times the people who do this kind of work value the work they are trying to accomplish more than their own well being, at least before they are actually put into mortal danger. Then again most people's ideals and motivations become very maleable once they are under immenent threat of death.
An unvaccinated person is not a threat to society. Such a person represents a non-malicous possible danger to a very small percentage of the population. We didn't have vaccines for most of our nations history and those diseases never posed more than a passing threat to our society. Sure it sucks when people who can't or weren't vaccinated die from some disease that should have died out by now, but in my opinion it smacks of a "think of the children" argument and isn't worth forcing people into medical treatments they don't want. If we're going to go down that road we should spend our resources on stuff that will likely be more effective, like forced blood, bone marrow, and tissue donations.
The problem is that it isn't necessarily politicians that are abusing this system. It is the agencies manned largely by bureaucrats with a few appointies leading them. Changing the political leadership will do little to stop all of this unless that leader ship change happens encompasses both houses and the presidency, and has a strong will to end the abuses.
You can actually look to the DEA situation right now as an example of how troublesome the long term bureaucrats can be. The current head of the DEA is being forced to retire because she wouldn't give up on trying to enforce Federal pot laws in states that have legalized it. It might take awhile to find a replacement and get them in place, and even then there will probably still be a significant portion of that agency that will continue to push enforcement of those laws even though the President is telling them to cut it out.
Two ways that I can think of off the bat: 1. Rigged dice 2. Dice roller using slight of hand
For rigged dice it should be simple enough to roll the dice a few times before hand to verify that they work properly. Use a single pair of dice, one representing 10's the other 1's, roll both together once for each number in the lottery. I suppose you could use an electric magnet with rigged dice to get them to roll how you want but I'm not sure you could do anything other than cause the same number to be rolled each time, which would be blatantly obvious as cheating.
For a non-random person, and yes I realize that picking a random person is just as error prone as anything else, you could get your own ringer. The trouble then is what could that ringer accomplish? Are their people that can actually roll dice consistently enough to roll the numbers they want? Barring that possibility they could use slight of hand to substitute rigged dice for each roll. The problem with slight of hand is that it only looks magical and convincing when you aren't looking for it. Pick people wearing short sleeves and keep multiple cameras trained on them at all times and you've ruled out that threat entirely.
For me the biggest reason to go with something simple like dice is that the ways to cheat it are pretty obvious and easily detectable if you are looking, corrupting it would require multiple people to be involved in the cheating. The output from a computer for random numbers in such a system is far easier to cheat because it is so complex that most people involved may not even know what they are looking for and it only requires a single person that is passably sly to pull it off.
I can't speak for Buddhism, but in the LDS (Mormon) faith the stated reason for not discussing such sacred (secret) things outside of a Temple and/or with someone who doesn't have a current Temple Recommend (official documented approval for participating in aforementioned sacred ceremonies), is that if they end up mocking them then they could bring down the wrath of god on themselves. There is no implication that I've ever heard that it is up to the church or members to act on behalf of god and his wrath, but I wouldn't doubt that someone might think that or take that upon themselves.
Having participated in modern ceremonies I can attest to them being entirely benign and unsurprising. I've heard salacious rumors before about what happens in temples but the most intimate things get is holding hands. I have heard that there used to be multiple blood oaths as part of the ceremonies in regards to maintaining the sacred (secret) nature of those ceremonies, but apparently that was phased out some decades ago and I've only ever heard it mentioned once, so haven't substantiated it at all.
Anyways in order to obtain a Temple Recommend you need to have declared your status as a full tithe payer to two seperate authority figures. That declaration is just part of the interview process and I've never heard of anyone being called out for being dishonest in that regard. A Full Tithe is 10% of your increase, which leaves a good bit of ambiguity for defining what your incease is. Of course if you don't have an increase, don't make/earn/receive any money, then you don't have a tithe to pay. So obtaining a Temple Recommend could be perceived as having a price tag in dollars of anywhere from $0 to $ billions.
Charity deductions are kind of hard to use as a casual tax dodge. are at least make little to no sense to use in that way. People who run mega churches are dedicating much of their working life to doing it and I don't disagree that they should be prosecuted when appropriate. For the normal tax payer though donating to charity isn't saving you any money because it's a deduction not a credit. That means that you simply don't owe any income tax on the dollars donated to charity. That is very different from a credit which is essentially income tax that you don't have to pay, and in some cases can receive cash back for if it excedes your tax bill. You still have to pay social security, medicare and whatever taxes on charitable donations.
The issue isn't so much about whether it is a religion. The whole point of the tax exempt status is to advantage groups that are beneficial to society. Now I realize that there are very valid arguements for pretty much all religions being harmful to society and so not warranting tax exempt status. In the case of Hubards get rich quick scheme though it is more obvious that it is not beneficial to society at large. The same is likely also true for the West Boro Baptist Church which appears to be more about a family of lawyers trolling for cases where they can sue for infringements against their rights.
Grain fed meat is pretty much an artifact of our affluence and over production of corn. If I had to go to subsistence farming I sure wouldn't be wasting time producing grain for livestock. Pasturing and hay would have to suffice, and even then I'd probably skip the really large livestock that are less efficient and more labor intensive. Go with chickens, sheep, goats, and maybe pigs. You could possibly do fish in an aquaponics system if you've got a way to keep their water warm enough through the winter, and a way to keep them fed.
There is some really neat stuff you can do with fish in tanks and growing vegetables and such in the water. I believe it's called aquaponics, a mix of hydroponics and fish where the fish provide the amonia for bacteria to breakdown into nitrogen for the plants. You have to feed the fish but they can usually be fed duckweed or something else that is easily produced in very large quantities in what amounts to wading pools. The only water that leaves the system is whatever evaporates and is part of the harvested vegetable or meat.
That does seem to be very random, although not actually perfectly random as you noted with a miniscule variance. I'm not trying to claim that using new dice with different people rolling the dice will be more random, it could quite possibly be less random. My main points though are:
Would rolling dice be sufficiently random such that guessing the most likely numbers is impractical?
Would rolling dice be an easier system to corrupt, as apparently happened in this case?
Last I heard we weren't anywhere close to running out of coal, there is literally mountains of the stuff still around and relatively easily available. And more than a thousand years ago people were producing coke from coal, so it shouldn't be an issue. Steel and iron production would probably happen on a smaller scale but you'd have huge quantities of it still sitting around waiting to be recycled. Landfills would be great sources of harder to find resources like copper. The one thing that I can think of that could be problematic would be making plastics in a world with less available oil.
Neither is the computer though. I wonder what the difference is and if it actually is significant enough to matter. I'd just go with a set of dice, buy new dice for every drawing and pick some random person on the street to roll the dice each time.
I think it's more a function of them having access to those tools and being about to act out on all those fantasies and wishes. I knew lots of people growing up that would have loved to have access to this stuff to do the same. Most of them don't, even now that the tools are available to them. I suspect that it has more to do with them having matured and getting a better view of the reality surrounding them.
Most of these kids streaming and whatever will eventually give up on it when they realize it's not getting them anywhere. Some of them with stick with it just because they find they honestly enjoy it as a hobby even if it ends up being a net financial loss. And some select few will manage to make a career of it. We'll likely continue to see this happen as younger generations try to emulate the successes that they've seen come before them. Just look at how many people turn out for those televised talent show auditions. I'll bet they have hundres or thousands of applications to every act that they actually even put before the judges, let alone show on air for 15 seconds or less.
Honestly I could care less what those people are doing for the most part, or even that they are doing it and possibly making a living. It doesn't affect me by and large, I watch a couple youtubers because their stuff entertains me. I could just as easily watch some TV, read a book, or practice my own incredibly bad singing or something. If someone wants to put themselves out there for everyone to critique and fawn over that's their deal and it's no skin off my back.
I'm not sure what you mean by, extort honesty. I'm guessing you mean that the demand from the person holding evidence is that the other person come clean and reveal what they have done, thus negating the evidence? If that is what you mean, I don't know if it'd be considered blackmail or not, though I suspect it still would be. If the evidence being witheld is not directly related to whatever they want the other person to reveal then it would definitely be blackmail.
Examples of the above in order: A. I catch a friend's spouse cheating and threaten to reveal their discretion to their spouse unless they do so on their own. B. I catch a friend's spouse cheating and threaten to reveal their discretion to their spouse unless they admit to something else that they have done wrong.
I'm not sure that B makes any sense outside of a movie plot. For A I'm not entirely sure it would be called blackmail, but I suppose it still could as the outcomes of being outed for something, and coming out on your own terms for the same thing, usually bear very different consequences for the individual involved. Generally the judicial system looks very poorly on blackmail, even if it's done with good intentions, because keeping evidence of wrongdoing secret from it prevents the system from doing its job properly, or at all.
No, blackmail is when one person of group has evidence of another person or group having done something either illegal or otherwise embarrassing that they would prefer to keep private, the person with the evidence has to threaten to release that information unless their demands are met, usually some personal profit is the demand.
In this case the person holding the evidence passed it along to other parties for use in legal procedings and possibly to the media. They did not try to use it to extort anything out of the person who was the subject of the video.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't buy tons of media but I do always look to see if I can find movies I like in 3D at a reasonable cost. The problem thus far has been that they are always priced at an absurd premium, like $30 or $40 for a movie that I wouldn't likely buy at $20 anyways.
I'm looking forward to these head mounted displays for a few reasons. It'll enable me to watch and play games which may not be appropriate for younger audiences prior to bed time. It should eliminate any screen glare type issues. I can take my computer use to the recliner and sit more comfortably without having to use a gigantic monitor or move a lot of furniture to get a proper viewing angle.
"You don't have an automatic right to have a functioning drinking water well on your property; numerous natural contaminants, water rights, mineral rights, utility regulations, etc. can all restrict that anyway."
You are correct that many things can affect your property rights. That said if you own property and have not sold or leased any of those rights then you certainly do have grounds to hold someone else liable for damaging your property, and a well can be part of that property. It isn't like this is untested legal ground here, do some reading about Davey Compressor Co. v. City of Delray Beach or Wood v. Picillo.
I think it really depends on how much car you are buying. I don't see anything wrong with taking out a small loan to buy a quality used car. The definitely bad example though would be a friend of mine that as an E-3 bought a nearly $40,000 sports car almost entirely on credit straight out of training. He spent the next 4 years of his life on a starvation diet trying to keep ahead of the loan payments and insurance.
So yes, you frequently need a car in order to hold a job. But you have to be shrewd about it and buy the car you need, not want, at a price you can readily afford even if you are temporarily jobless at some point.
I expect that Teslas will depreciate but it'll just be less than with an ICE powered car. I'll be looking for a 30-40% depreciation before I could dream of talking the spouse into buying one.
For whatever reason I always had a negative view of Unity. Then I started playing 7DtD and couldn't believe that it was a Unity game. 7DtD actually just moved up to an updated version of unity and even with a lot of cheap placeholder textures the game looks amazing for a voxel game. Savage Lands is another Unity game that I've played a bit of and the lighting there blew my mind, it is especially noticeable during dusk and dawn when the light shines at angles through the trees.
I agree that a mod store is a good idea and could have huge benefits. If they resolved the financial split though they've still got issues that can only really be passably resolved by heavily curating that store. I'm not sure that Valve wants to pay a bunch of people to do that curating, even just for one game like Skyrim that would probably require several staff members.
I don't think anyone here is advocating abolishing vaccines. And so long as an overwhelming majority of people are being vaccinated then society is relatively safe. The odds of one of these diseases making some fantastic leap in virility bypassing current vaccines is vanishingly small whether or not a few million people in the USA vaccinate. Much of the rest of the world is a petri dish for this sort of thing already. Even if that did happen it'd likely be more of a hiccup in society than a serious danger. Many diseases and illnesses that were once highly lethal are no longer so because we have a much better sense of how to care for sick people. Your hyperbole about not vaccinating every person possible leading to the next super bug is relevant only to apocalyptic movies and video games.
"you have no freedom to choose something that threatens other people's lives (nevermind your own)" Patently bullshit, sorry. You can choose to smoke tobacco, drive a car, light a cooking grill, go skydiving or any other minor thing that entails some very small to infitesimal risk of danger both to yourself and to others. If you choose not to be vaccinated you then are at risk of contracting some disease, which there is an incredibly tiny chance of you coming in contact with barring unusual circumstances like traveling abroad. In the case that you do become infected there is some fractional risk that you could pass it on to other people who aren't vaccinated, such people make up a very small part of the population so the odds of both events happening, especially once you know you are sick, and so avoid contact with other people, is vanishingly small. Granted that risk goes up the less people vaccinate but it's still fantasy to postulate that we're anywhere near the point that it poses a serious threat to society. So I'll err on the side of personal liberty and continue to insist that everyone should have the right to determine what they do with their own body.
My chief complaint with Bethesda getting a cut in this case is that their support of the game has been crap. They shoved out a few DLC's and basically phoned it in. For years there was a mod for which the sole purpose was fixing bugs in the game. Bethesda, rather than adopting those fixes and releasing a bug fix patch just left it all to rot. Meaning that if I wanted to quickly fix the hundreds of known bugs which the community had already figured out I had to install some 3rd party mod, instead of Bethesda patching their game. Bethesda already gets their cut whenever the game sells another copy. Piggy backing profits on the hard work of modders who evidentally care more about actually improving the game than the publisher does is just sickening. If modders were enabling people to use Bethesda IP without having to license the use of that IP from Bethesda then I could see an argument for them getting a cut. But as it is Bethesda isn't doing anything to earn that cut.
There is no doubt that those disease have caused a lot of death, but they still don't seriously threaten our society. Just like the terrorists could attack and kill as many people as they did on 9/11 on a quarterly basis and it wouldn't seriously threaten our society. The threat to society is obviously a bogus argument as our society has already weathered that threat and grown very quickly before we developed vaccines. I'm vaccinated, and my family is all vaccinated. I have sympathy for people who can't be vaccinated and so are at greater risk. But I won't force other people to under go vaccination because it is morally bankrupt in my view. I support a woman's right to abortion and a person's right to assisted suicide for much the same reason.
Do you have an angle regarding how this is a threat to society, that doesn't revolve around an emotional plea like "think of the children"?
Probably because if you accept the status quo of racism and just avoid those places it does nothing to fix the racism problem. You might as well ask why all the black people didn't up and leave the USA after the civil war. If we want to change peoples racist attitudes and stereo types you have to make it personal. They need to see that their fears and hatreds are unreasonable as frequently as possible. Going to a country where a significantly large part of the population has an unreasonable hatred for you with the purpose of rendering humanitarian aid is a pretty good way to do that. Whether or not it is a wise decision for your personal well being is a very valid question. But often times the people who do this kind of work value the work they are trying to accomplish more than their own well being, at least before they are actually put into mortal danger. Then again most people's ideals and motivations become very maleable once they are under immenent threat of death.
An unvaccinated person is not a threat to society. Such a person represents a non-malicous possible danger to a very small percentage of the population. We didn't have vaccines for most of our nations history and those diseases never posed more than a passing threat to our society. Sure it sucks when people who can't or weren't vaccinated die from some disease that should have died out by now, but in my opinion it smacks of a "think of the children" argument and isn't worth forcing people into medical treatments they don't want. If we're going to go down that road we should spend our resources on stuff that will likely be more effective, like forced blood, bone marrow, and tissue donations.
The problem is that it isn't necessarily politicians that are abusing this system. It is the agencies manned largely by bureaucrats with a few appointies leading them. Changing the political leadership will do little to stop all of this unless that leader ship change happens encompasses both houses and the presidency, and has a strong will to end the abuses.
You can actually look to the DEA situation right now as an example of how troublesome the long term bureaucrats can be. The current head of the DEA is being forced to retire because she wouldn't give up on trying to enforce Federal pot laws in states that have legalized it. It might take awhile to find a replacement and get them in place, and even then there will probably still be a significant portion of that agency that will continue to push enforcement of those laws even though the President is telling them to cut it out.
Terraria is a pretty fun digging sim, though not 3D.
Two ways that I can think of off the bat:
1. Rigged dice
2. Dice roller using slight of hand
For rigged dice it should be simple enough to roll the dice a few times before hand to verify that they work properly. Use a single pair of dice, one representing 10's the other 1's, roll both together once for each number in the lottery. I suppose you could use an electric magnet with rigged dice to get them to roll how you want but I'm not sure you could do anything other than cause the same number to be rolled each time, which would be blatantly obvious as cheating.
For a non-random person, and yes I realize that picking a random person is just as error prone as anything else, you could get your own ringer. The trouble then is what could that ringer accomplish? Are their people that can actually roll dice consistently enough to roll the numbers they want? Barring that possibility they could use slight of hand to substitute rigged dice for each roll. The problem with slight of hand is that it only looks magical and convincing when you aren't looking for it. Pick people wearing short sleeves and keep multiple cameras trained on them at all times and you've ruled out that threat entirely.
For me the biggest reason to go with something simple like dice is that the ways to cheat it are pretty obvious and easily detectable if you are looking, corrupting it would require multiple people to be involved in the cheating. The output from a computer for random numbers in such a system is far easier to cheat because it is so complex that most people involved may not even know what they are looking for and it only requires a single person that is passably sly to pull it off.
I can't speak for Buddhism, but in the LDS (Mormon) faith the stated reason for not discussing such sacred (secret) things outside of a Temple and/or with someone who doesn't have a current Temple Recommend (official documented approval for participating in aforementioned sacred ceremonies), is that if they end up mocking them then they could bring down the wrath of god on themselves. There is no implication that I've ever heard that it is up to the church or members to act on behalf of god and his wrath, but I wouldn't doubt that someone might think that or take that upon themselves.
Having participated in modern ceremonies I can attest to them being entirely benign and unsurprising. I've heard salacious rumors before about what happens in temples but the most intimate things get is holding hands. I have heard that there used to be multiple blood oaths as part of the ceremonies in regards to maintaining the sacred (secret) nature of those ceremonies, but apparently that was phased out some decades ago and I've only ever heard it mentioned once, so haven't substantiated it at all.
Anyways in order to obtain a Temple Recommend you need to have declared your status as a full tithe payer to two seperate authority figures. That declaration is just part of the interview process and I've never heard of anyone being called out for being dishonest in that regard. A Full Tithe is 10% of your increase, which leaves a good bit of ambiguity for defining what your incease is. Of course if you don't have an increase, don't make/earn/receive any money, then you don't have a tithe to pay. So obtaining a Temple Recommend could be perceived as having a price tag in dollars of anywhere from $0 to $ billions.
Charity deductions are kind of hard to use as a casual tax dodge. are at least make little to no sense to use in that way. People who run mega churches are dedicating much of their working life to doing it and I don't disagree that they should be prosecuted when appropriate. For the normal tax payer though donating to charity isn't saving you any money because it's a deduction not a credit. That means that you simply don't owe any income tax on the dollars donated to charity. That is very different from a credit which is essentially income tax that you don't have to pay, and in some cases can receive cash back for if it excedes your tax bill. You still have to pay social security, medicare and whatever taxes on charitable donations.
The issue isn't so much about whether it is a religion. The whole point of the tax exempt status is to advantage groups that are beneficial to society. Now I realize that there are very valid arguements for pretty much all religions being harmful to society and so not warranting tax exempt status. In the case of Hubards get rich quick scheme though it is more obvious that it is not beneficial to society at large. The same is likely also true for the West Boro Baptist Church which appears to be more about a family of lawyers trolling for cases where they can sue for infringements against their rights.
Grain fed meat is pretty much an artifact of our affluence and over production of corn. If I had to go to subsistence farming I sure wouldn't be wasting time producing grain for livestock. Pasturing and hay would have to suffice, and even then I'd probably skip the really large livestock that are less efficient and more labor intensive. Go with chickens, sheep, goats, and maybe pigs. You could possibly do fish in an aquaponics system if you've got a way to keep their water warm enough through the winter, and a way to keep them fed.
There is some really neat stuff you can do with fish in tanks and growing vegetables and such in the water. I believe it's called aquaponics, a mix of hydroponics and fish where the fish provide the amonia for bacteria to breakdown into nitrogen for the plants. You have to feed the fish but they can usually be fed duckweed or something else that is easily produced in very large quantities in what amounts to wading pools. The only water that leaves the system is whatever evaporates and is part of the harvested vegetable or meat.
That does seem to be very random, although not actually perfectly random as you noted with a miniscule variance. I'm not trying to claim that using new dice with different people rolling the dice will be more random, it could quite possibly be less random. My main points though are:
Would rolling dice be sufficiently random such that guessing the most likely numbers is impractical?
Would rolling dice be an easier system to corrupt, as apparently happened in this case?
Last I heard we weren't anywhere close to running out of coal, there is literally mountains of the stuff still around and relatively easily available. And more than a thousand years ago people were producing coke from coal, so it shouldn't be an issue. Steel and iron production would probably happen on a smaller scale but you'd have huge quantities of it still sitting around waiting to be recycled. Landfills would be great sources of harder to find resources like copper. The one thing that I can think of that could be problematic would be making plastics in a world with less available oil.
Neither is the computer though. I wonder what the difference is and if it actually is significant enough to matter. I'd just go with a set of dice, buy new dice for every drawing and pick some random person on the street to roll the dice each time.
I think it's more a function of them having access to those tools and being about to act out on all those fantasies and wishes. I knew lots of people growing up that would have loved to have access to this stuff to do the same. Most of them don't, even now that the tools are available to them. I suspect that it has more to do with them having matured and getting a better view of the reality surrounding them.
Most of these kids streaming and whatever will eventually give up on it when they realize it's not getting them anywhere. Some of them with stick with it just because they find they honestly enjoy it as a hobby even if it ends up being a net financial loss. And some select few will manage to make a career of it. We'll likely continue to see this happen as younger generations try to emulate the successes that they've seen come before them. Just look at how many people turn out for those televised talent show auditions. I'll bet they have hundres or thousands of applications to every act that they actually even put before the judges, let alone show on air for 15 seconds or less.
Honestly I could care less what those people are doing for the most part, or even that they are doing it and possibly making a living. It doesn't affect me by and large, I watch a couple youtubers because their stuff entertains me. I could just as easily watch some TV, read a book, or practice my own incredibly bad singing or something. If someone wants to put themselves out there for everyone to critique and fawn over that's their deal and it's no skin off my back.
I'm not sure what you mean by, extort honesty. I'm guessing you mean that the demand from the person holding evidence is that the other person come clean and reveal what they have done, thus negating the evidence? If that is what you mean, I don't know if it'd be considered blackmail or not, though I suspect it still would be. If the evidence being witheld is not directly related to whatever they want the other person to reveal then it would definitely be blackmail.
Examples of the above in order:
A. I catch a friend's spouse cheating and threaten to reveal their discretion to their spouse unless they do so on their own.
B. I catch a friend's spouse cheating and threaten to reveal their discretion to their spouse unless they admit to something else that they have done wrong.
I'm not sure that B makes any sense outside of a movie plot. For A I'm not entirely sure it would be called blackmail, but I suppose it still could as the outcomes of being outed for something, and coming out on your own terms for the same thing, usually bear very different consequences for the individual involved. Generally the judicial system looks very poorly on blackmail, even if it's done with good intentions, because keeping evidence of wrongdoing secret from it prevents the system from doing its job properly, or at all.
No, blackmail is when one person of group has evidence of another person or group having done something either illegal or otherwise embarrassing that they would prefer to keep private, the person with the evidence has to threaten to release that information unless their demands are met, usually some personal profit is the demand.
In this case the person holding the evidence passed it along to other parties for use in legal procedings and possibly to the media. They did not try to use it to extort anything out of the person who was the subject of the video.