Wake me when the radical Islamic world demonstrates... -tolerance of others -respect for others -respect for human life
Look back only 300 years in Western civilization to see people being burned at the stake for being accused of not being a faithful Christian. Look back only 200 years ago to see people brutally enslaved by Western civilization with plenty of people twisting the Bible to support it. Look back only 100 years ago to see large portions of the globe carved up in the name of bring "Christendom" to the heathens. Look back only 50 years ago to see the end of a European purge of members of a particular faith. Look back only 20 years ago to see the end of a war between Catholics and Protestants that included terrorist violence.
"Western civilization" has only been out of the grips of madness and poor civilization for a very short time itself. Give the Middle East a couple of centuries to sort themselves out too. I'm not saying that we should give up on holding them to a higher standard but that we should be a little more honest about how much effort it took us to get here and to be careful about our own recent backsliding.
"[Until it becomes possible to have an action without an equal and opposite reaction] any long range space travel is just a hallucination of virtual reality."
I wouldn't say that AI will never get to that level. I like to think in the long-term (100-1000 years) on these issues. We may reach the limits of computer hardware before then that make them impractical to deploy on a massive scale compared to humans (especially genetically and mechanically enhanced humans) but at the very least, it's easy to concede that robots will one day be capable of replacing all unskilled labor.
That is enough to change everything about the way that we view labor rights, unemployment, free time, international trade and the third world, intellectual and physical property rights, education, investment, agriculture, high school jobs, etc.
Instead of spurring innovation into more mechanized farming, we are spurring innovation into getting more cheap labor over the border. I would imagine that eventually robots will take over these jobs anyway and you will go to your automated grocery store in your self-driving car to purchase food grown on an automated farm.
All of the paid for by doing what? Eventually robots will be capable of doing ANY job that human is capable of doing. Not necessarily in our life times, but at some point labor is going to be worthless compared to capital.
That should put shivers down anyone's spine who thinks about economics, politics, and the future.
What are you talking about "no option to do things yourself?" Yes they attack on their own, but there's nothing preventing you from joining in and trying to have fun. It seems your main problem (from all your attempts to stop them from winning) is that you're a control freak who can't be happy unless you push the button to make the thing drop.
Guess what? As far as I could tell from the demo, there is a mode to auto-switch to a character when its their turn to control them. That means you get all the control freakery that you want. (I'll also be using that mode because I don't trust AIs to do the right thing.)
Also, pratically EVERY RPG has some sort of BS battle that you can't win without a deus ex machina. Practically.
Note that every thing you consider as a "true RPG" is a PC RPG and everything you know as not an RPG is a console RPG. They are very different genres of RPG based on what kind of hardware was available in the early days of their development and the difference between the Japanese and American markets.
American/PC RPGs focus on simulation of a world whereas Japanese/console RPGs focus on telling a story, both with gamist combat elements thrown in. You are having a problem with a difference of gaming goals. I suggest reading The Forge for more information.
There are a few console RPGs with branching story lines, but they're either flops on only short branches off of a main plot line like Chrono Trigger's multiple endings.
I wish they'd stop making such feminine lead characters. At least stop making them all look like 14 year olds. These guys look like they spend more time doing their hair than training for battle. It looks like they've cast pop stars to play the lead roles.
The Japanese have a very different attitude about what makes an attractive man. They have long favored androgynous, effiminate males known as bishounen (Japanese for "pretty boys"). It might surprise you to know that the more "masculine" hero types with bulging muscles and a hairy face or body is the Japanese stereotype for gay people. Look up the comedian "Hard Gay" or the shooting game "Chou Aniki" sometime to have your brain a-sploded. Zangief from Street Fighter is flamingly gay to the Japanese. This goes to the point that Japanese cross-dressers and transvestites are far more frequently portrayed for humor with heavy muscles and a 5-o'clock shadow rather than the kind of jokes about the friend who doesn't see the Adam's Apple over here.
It's a flipping of the gender stereotypes. Here, pop culture looks down on men who try to be too close to what women are like. There, pop culture looks down on men who try to be a far from women in appearance as possible. Hence, pretty boy heroes are the norm there while bulging barbarians are the norm here.
Personally, I hated it because it was boring. There was almost no interaction when fighting a monster. You simply ran your characters over to the monster and they seemed to kill it by themselves.
What the heck is with you people who do this? I honestly never even thought of trying this until I read people online griping about it. I guess it just takes a certain mentality to actively try to not have fun with a game.
(And, as anyone who played the demo can tell you, the characters play themselves in FFXII - you just have to manuever them to the monsters you want them to kill, then they'll do it for you. I expect FFXII to be the easiest in the series, as you won't actually have to actually pound the Accept button to continually attack, they'll do it automatically.)
Sure, if you want to deliberately try to suck all the fun out of the game for yourself, you go right ahead and do that. You know what, you can also over-level yourself in the Nippon Ichi strategy games (or really any RPG) to remove all actual gameplay from the games if you want too. At least it's not like the.hack//SIGN games where you actually HAD to sit back and let your party attack to beat the boss of the first game.
In other news, gormet magazine reviewing best restraunts to get beef at picks only steak places and no fast food burger joints in an obvious show of elitist bias.
Wake us up when some relatively unbiased gormet restraunt reviews rate eating establishments.
[The] new system is a good change for the series that needed to reinvent itself to avoid grow more stale.
I don't know. Personally, I thought that FF X was the absolute peak of the FF series for combat systems. It was the good old ATB system made more transparent and strategic by showing the resulting attack order. It also just flowed more smoothly thanks to the animations and quick responses.
I have mixed feelings about the system in FF XII. I'm almost certainly going to turn the system to wait mode like I do in all the other games and put the NPCs under player control because no one has ever written a good AI for RPGs that intelligently focuses on the right enemies at the right time with the right level of force for maximum efficiency.
At least the series isn't jumping on the Adventure RPG bandwagon. I don't play RPGs to test my reflexes.
Re:Badly written review of a review
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· Score: 1
Come on, writing is easy when you don't try so hard, and when you proofread.
Ah, irony. That sentence has a comma splice. There's no need for a comma after "hard."
WTF does that mean? As somebody who doesn't read DailyKos, I have no idea.
A quick Google search would clearly reveal that the DailyKos is a left-wing partisan blog. If you're online, and you have access to Google while reading, then there is no real need to coddle the ignorance of the lazy.
"I knocked this puppy off over three afternoons, including note taking."
What does that mean?
"To knock off" is slang for "to finish." "This puppy" is slang for "this thing." Get out more.
This sentence is impenetrable.
It's written in a conversational tone. Imagine that someone excited is speaking to you, and it becomes very easy to read. It's not what I'd consider good style, but it's hardly impenetrable.
A good summary would be: Out of left field, the book calls Republican strategies "brilliant" and contrasts the way that Republicans groom and compensate their aides while Democrats portray an attitude that theirs should be thankful for the opportunity to serve.
A "hint" was an element of major distraction? Really? And what does it have to do with the website?
Are your reading comprehension skills that utterly poor? Let's break this down. There was a portion of the book that felt like a major distraction to the reviewer. That portion hinted of bitterness. The "hint" was not "an element of [a] major distraction." They are both descriptors for a segment of the book.
What does this have to do with the website? Well, you quoted the exact sentence that answered your question in your reply! He felt that the pages that bothered him were reminiscent of the sort of "web diatribe that the authors are associated with."
I'm happy you're happy. But that sentence means nothing if you haven't read this website.
The purpose of a review is to inform. If you start off by assuming that people reading the review know what you know, then it defeats the purpose of writing the review in the first place.
Honestly, is it that hard to go read the front page of the website yourself? Frankly, if you don't know who the DailyKos is, then this book wasn't really meant for you. It's meant for young people who want to be politically active, and it doesn't matter whether your left-wing, right-wing, or just a wing-nut. If you care, you've at least heard of the DailyKos. If you can't be bothered to do a Google search for it, then why can you be bothered to rant about the review?
Honestly, I have little tolerance for militantly angry ignorance and nit-pickers who betray their own sloppiness while decrying that of others.
My (anti-^3)Libertarian (counter-^4)points
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I'll counter with a quote from Milton Friedman
That's an Appeal to Authority argument. Even Friedman's quote does not say exactly how the free market will deal with a natural monopoly. He just says that he prefers it to not be regulated "where this is tolerable." You simply state then that it's better to be without regulation.
Natural monopolies can still be defeated using market techniques if you really want to defeat the monopoly. Regulated monopolies are government sponsored and can never go away. We don't want nationalized or heavily regulated industries; they hurt the economy and the consumer more than an unfettered natural monopoly does.
You state that natural monopolies can be defeated by market techniques, but you don't state how. That's what I asked. Blind assertions that it can happen are pointless. How exactly does the market defeat a natural monopoly which is what happens when economies of scale make the largest player capable of under-cutting all competitors due to having less fixed costs (and not having to charge as little as possible due to the fact that competitors can't match them)?
Also, you seem to be confusing regulation with state ownership. There's a difference between the government saying that only one company can do the job and the government saying that you guys all have to share access to customers and justly compensate one another for the privilege, that you can't collude with each other to avoid competition, and that you can't use control of a resource vital to the industry (like oil barrels) to force out competition. You seem guilty of the same sin of confusing the opponent's argument that I did.
Libertarians recognize that the government has a monopoly on force. Libertarians, however, recognize that there are legitimate usages for using government power (the military and law enforcement are big examples). That is what separates libertarian from anarchocapitalism.
My bad. The Liberatarian Party is currently infested with anarchocapitalists, so it gets really hard to determine who you're arguing with when you talk Liberatarian politics. You had derided government for possessing that power earlier, so I incorrectly assumed that you were of that bent.
If you wan't a Liberatarian ideal state, you're correct in saying that none has ever existed. The closest we've had is industrial revolution America -- the so-called Guilded Age. It was a time of unprecedented consolidation of power and wealth into the hands of a few men thanks to anti-competitive business practices, and it saw a lot of workers put through such misery that it birthed socialism and the labor movement as a backlash.
Getting back to the topic, redistribution of wealth doesn't help the poor improve their economic situation; it only keeps the poor impoverished, and the poor remain dependent on the "safety net" forever. Poor people are also hurt by lack of capital, lack of property (real estate), and lack of education. Egalitarianism makes everybody equally poor, and egalitarian goals like redistribution of wealth are completely opposite to the goals of liberty.
No, I'm afraid I'll have to strongly disagree here. Wealth is Power.
Let me repeat that: Wealth is Power. Concentrations of Power are inherently in opposition to liberty. When the people are marginalized, uneducated, and worn-down, they become non-participants in a political process that leaves them jaded until at some point they boil over into revolution.
There have been essentially only three distributions of wealth on the planet and they've all been strongly correlated with certain types of government -- pyramid shaped, diamond shaped, and flat. Pyramid-shaped happens in societies with a controlling elite and has been the shape of monarchies and dictatorships both rich and impoverished. Flat-shaped happens in anarchy and in early communism (before it goes pyramid-shaped due to corruption) where no one has power. Diamond-shaped is the shap
Actually, I was a big Dean supporter based on his policies and aggressive "give 'em hell" attitude, but I have to mostly agree with you. Even though he didn't come out and make the accusation, giving any recognition to the conspiracy idea was a really, really bad move.
However, the "Dean Scream" shouldn't have been all that bad at all. I mean, honestly, go back and listen to last bits of the speech he was giving. He was just doing some good old-fashioned rabble rousing and cheerleading. I blame the media (in particular the right-wing dominated elements of the media) for making a big scandal out of little more than a really nerdy cheer. I don't think he shot himself in the foot so much as hand the shotgun to hungry partisans eager to shoot it for him.
To be more technical, I'd put Chomsky firmly in the corner of the anarcho-syndicalist. He distrusts all top-down structures, from government to corporations, and supports just enough government to prevent the private sector from turning into top-down fiefdoms.
I will continue to beat this drum for life.
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What we need are publicly funded elections. To pass Constitutional muster (thanks to a disastrous Supreme Court decision equating spending disproportionate money with free speech), the law does not restrict people from taking money the old-fashioned way.
Instead, a candidate agrees to forgoe traditional funding and gets a long list of signatures in support of his campaign to prove he's a serious contender (instead of raising a certain amount of money before the election). Once qualified, he is given what the government estimates the election campaign should cost. If his opponent raises more money, he gets a matching amount so that the race is even.
This means that a traditional candidate is free to take money from special interest groups who are free to spend as much as they want. However, this will not buy their candidate a disproportionate advantage of the opponent which reduces the value of such an "investment." In the mean time, the public funded candidate is free to spend all their time talking to the people instead of fund-raising.
What you get are politicians who are more interested in attracting voters than attracting lobbyists. They have more time to meet with the people more often, and they don't have to beg and scrape for money from powerful interest groups. They are beholden only to the people -- the way representative democracy was intended to work.
I love this idea. I am seriously considering moving to a state that has already passed laws like these at some point later in life, and if a state possessed both this an some sort of non-partisan redistricting scheme that prevented the kind of gerrymandering that locks in uncompetitive races, I would start making my plans today -- even if it's one of those God-forsaken frozen northern states despite my hatred for cold weather. It would totally be worth it.
Excellent taste, by the way. Zelanzy is one of my absolute favorite authors. If you love Zelazny, I'd suggest also checking out Alfred Bester some time. In particular, read "The Demolished Man," and "The Stars My Destination" (aka "Tiger, Tiger") if you can find them.
I have so many friends who label themselves Progressive, when they don't realize that the Progressive ideaology is no different than the political agenda of both the Democrats and the Republicans: to control others against their will in hopes of creating a better world.
You could make the same argument about anyone who supports any laws -- anti-drug laws, anti-fraud laws, anti-murder laws, anti-rape laws, etc. That's the point of government -- to prevent people from inflicting their will on others in bad ways in order to produce a more just and equitable world.
The central thrust of Progressive ideology was summed up very nicely by Howard Dean in a Daily Show episode from last year that I watched last night: "Love thy neighbor. And you don't get to pick your neighbor." This means two things: Don't hate people because they're different; we're all Americans and all Humans. Don't hurt people through malice or selfish indifference. That's all it really is.
You guys don't trust government. We don't really it either, but we trust it more than we trust corporations. A democratic government is at its highest level meant to serve the benefit of the whole people of the nation. A corporation is at its highest level meant to serve the benefit of only its shareholders even at the expense of all non-shareholders. That's a whole different height to fall from and a whole different set of people with the power to do anything about it.
We see other people suffering, and we wish to build institutions to give them a helping hand because that could one day be us after one job loss or one family illness or some other disaster. We don't want other people to be allowed to abuse others because they might be able to abuse us. We don't like concentrations of unaccountable power whether it be in our executive branch or in a newly merged boardroom.
Now that you can't use your money to speak for you, the minority view is reduced to only a few hundred dollars per person.
As opposed to the millions of dollars per person that we all previously had to voice our popular opinions with? Honestly, you should be ashamed if you think that restricting the power of the elite to have disproportionate speech over the masses is a bad thing.
Destroy the power of the federal government, and you'll see the big money disappear.
No, no you won't because the big money will prevent the parts of the government that favor them from being destroyed. Why do you think we spend so much money on crop subsidies, no-bid reconstruction projects, and private security companies? Deregulation means simply that every one can have as much say with the politicians as they want so long as they're fantastically rich. We can go back to the bad old days of Congressional patronage.
If you want to see the big money disappear, you have to make it worthless to spend. You need Clean Money Clean Elections laws. Big Corn wants to donate $300,000 dollars to an incumbent Senator? Okay, the state matches their opponent for $300,000 who instead spends all their time talking to the people instead of the lobbyists. Advantage lost unless the indebted Senator still wins. However, by eliminating the fund-raising advantage that all incumbents have, you make the race significantly more competitive than it was before. With publicly financed elections, the only "customer" of a politician is the people instead of the lobbyists.
Re:Right and left are false dichotomies
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Netroots Politics
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Pure communism is anarchy, but no country has voluntarily adopted a voluntary communist system.
Actually, the Soviet Union did in its first two decades. The word "Soviet" is Russian for "council." In the early days, workers and communities got together and formed councils. These councils ran the local businesses and communities and elected leader to send to larger regional and national councils that voted on issues. The entire system was bottom-up.
During the Russian Civil War, the White Army (made up of former tsarist forces and backed by many foreign powers including France, Britain, Japan, and the US) fought against the revolution to reestablish the old government. The revolutionaries formed the Red Army to fight back. In the early days, the Red Army was so anti-authoritarian that they eschewed ranks and saluting, elected their leaders, and voted on actions to take. Unfortunately, this egalitarian and democratic system was horribly ineffective in actual combat, so they had to establish a more traditional command structure and discipline.
Eventually, though, Stalin would rise to power and destroy the bottom-up power structure in the Soviet Union to turn it into the harsh authoritarian government we all know, but that's a much longer story.
Incidentally, I mostly agree with the rest of your post, though I deeply distrust a lack of public education and healthcare due to the way their lack becomes a poverty trap, and I think that a lot of valuable fundamental theoretical research would not be done by the free market which favors marketable inventions and disfavors health and safety research that threatens products.
The main reason that I support government is the environment, but I too support primarily regulations that commoditize external costs like pollution with the occasional outright ban for something that has no business in the market (like asbestos or mercury emissions) over mandated technologies.
My anti-Libertarian counter-counterpoints
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· Score: 1
A libertarian economy is one where anyone is allowed to compete. Regulated markets usually end up as government protectionist schemes which stifles competition and thus decreases intention.
As with most Liberatarians, you seem to be in denial about the existence of natural monopolies. Let's start with a though exercise: a world where no government power monopolies were established and a bunch of hard-working private power companies start up business.
Each business will build power lines to their customers from their power plants up until they butt up against each other. At that point, they must determine how to compete. Any business following their own rational self-interest will pursue vendor lock-in and refuse to let the other company use their lines to reach customers in their territory. As a result, the other company is forced to build a parallel infrastructure in their competitor's territory. Not only does this make their costs higher than their competitor to reach customers, but it also may be impossible due to the fact that building a parallel infrastructure may require land rights that have been snapped up by the competitor. All the incumbent has to do is price their power in between their costs and their competitor's costs, and unless the customers are spiteful and angry at the incumbent, the vast majority will stay with them.
Inevitably, though, both companies will look at each other and realize that they could have lower operating costs if they simply merged into one entity that didn't compete. They'd be able to fire redundant repair and home office staff and pass the savings on to themselves. In the meantime, the customers still don't have a choice, and the monopoly is free to charge above competitive rates because there is no one else with access to the customers.
In a regulated environment, the companies must share their lines and thus grant access to each other's customers. This means that the companies actually have to fight to bring down prices to beat out each other instead of just soaking the market for whatever it can bear to pay for an essential good. This is good for customers (i.e. the average citizen). This is one way in which regulation fosters competition that could not exist due to the realities of the difficulty of competitors in reaching their customers.
Of course, when advocating for an end to government regulation on utility monopolies, Liberatarians place all the blame for their existence on the government and offer no concrete ways in which total deregulation will get past the problem of entrenched infrastructure and economies of scale.
[What] "libertarian" state will you point to to show your point? There has never been one...
Somalia -- the world's only free market economy. This is the "paradise" you dream of when you wish to eliminate the government monopoly on deadly force. It's not a happy place, because when there is no monopoly on force, rule of the strong becomes the rule of law.
Anarchy/minarchy/liberatarianism cannot work because Power abhors a vacuum. I call this [Valdrax]'s Principle #1.
Why does individual liberty (including your hated individual right to property) necessarily lead to static social classes and the implied lack of social mobility?
Power attracts Power. Weakness attracts further Weakness. Without certain controls on society, the rich will accumulate wealth much faster than the poor and have significantly greater leverage to cause other people to part with their wealth. If I own all the power plants in a state, there's nothing that anyone can do in a Liberatarian society to prevent me from impoverishing anyone who can't afford the inefficiencies of localized power generation. This is even easier if I'm not the only essential monopoly in town trying to get as much out of people as they can. As the cost of ess
Seriously, some varieties of mango have in their flesh lots of annoying fibrous hairs connected to the seed. If you try to eat the fruit directly, those hairs get stuck in your teeth. Did I mention those mango varieties are absurdly cheap?
How the heck are you supposed to eat those fibrous ones anyway? I got one recently and ended up spending about 10 minutes afterwards trying to floss the bits out from between my teeth. It was not pleasant.
Slashdot Mirror
Wake me when the radical Islamic world demonstrates...
-tolerance of others
-respect for others
-respect for human life
Look back only 300 years in Western civilization to see people being burned at the stake for being accused of not being a faithful Christian. Look back only 200 years ago to see people brutally enslaved by Western civilization with plenty of people twisting the Bible to support it. Look back only 100 years ago to see large portions of the globe carved up in the name of bring "Christendom" to the heathens. Look back only 50 years ago to see the end of a European purge of members of a particular faith. Look back only 20 years ago to see the end of a war between Catholics and Protestants that included terrorist violence.
"Western civilization" has only been out of the grips of madness and poor civilization for a very short time itself. Give the Middle East a couple of centuries to sort themselves out too. I'm not saying that we should give up on holding them to a higher standard but that we should be a little more honest about how much effort it took us to get here and to be careful about our own recent backsliding.
Think of it as a simple scheme, aimed at preventing us from making the same mistake twice, don't read to much into it...
No, actually, please do read into it! Otherwise, what was the point of having written it in the first place?
I fixed your statement for you:
"[Until it becomes possible to have an action without an equal and opposite reaction] any long range space travel is just a hallucination of virtual reality."
Does anyone else notice that those with extreme reacist views never have the moral courage to put their names to them.
Of course not. They're afraid of the majority.
Now, that's irony for you.
Of course not, but finding a proper taxidermist may be a little hard depending on your jurisdiction.
What kind of engineer makes a house of nothing but curved rooms?
What are you supposed to put your furniture up against?
I wouldn't say that AI will never get to that level. I like to think in the long-term (100-1000 years) on these issues. We may reach the limits of computer hardware before then that make them impractical to deploy on a massive scale compared to humans (especially genetically and mechanically enhanced humans) but at the very least, it's easy to concede that robots will one day be capable of replacing all unskilled labor.
That is enough to change everything about the way that we view labor rights, unemployment, free time, international trade and the third world, intellectual and physical property rights, education, investment, agriculture, high school jobs, etc.
Instead of spurring innovation into more mechanized farming, we are spurring innovation into getting more cheap labor over the border. I would imagine that eventually robots will take over these jobs anyway and you will go to your automated grocery store in your self-driving car to purchase food grown on an automated farm.
All of the paid for by doing what? Eventually robots will be capable of doing ANY job that human is capable of doing. Not necessarily in our life times, but at some point labor is going to be worthless compared to capital.
That should put shivers down anyone's spine who thinks about economics, politics, and the future.
What are you talking about "no option to do things yourself?" Yes they attack on their own, but there's nothing preventing you from joining in and trying to have fun. It seems your main problem (from all your attempts to stop them from winning) is that you're a control freak who can't be happy unless you push the button to make the thing drop.
Guess what? As far as I could tell from the demo, there is a mode to auto-switch to a character when its their turn to control them. That means you get all the control freakery that you want. (I'll also be using that mode because I don't trust AIs to do the right thing.)
Also, pratically EVERY RPG has some sort of BS battle that you can't win without a deus ex machina. Practically.
Note that every thing you consider as a "true RPG" is a PC RPG and everything you know as not an RPG is a console RPG. They are very different genres of RPG based on what kind of hardware was available in the early days of their development and the difference between the Japanese and American markets.
American/PC RPGs focus on simulation of a world whereas Japanese/console RPGs focus on telling a story, both with gamist combat elements thrown in. You are having a problem with a difference of gaming goals. I suggest reading The Forge for more information.
There are a few console RPGs with branching story lines, but they're either flops on only short branches off of a main plot line like Chrono Trigger's multiple endings.
I wish they'd stop making such feminine lead characters. At least stop making them all look like 14 year olds. These guys look like they spend more time doing their hair than training for battle. It looks like they've cast pop stars to play the lead roles.
The Japanese have a very different attitude about what makes an attractive man. They have long favored androgynous, effiminate males known as bishounen (Japanese for "pretty boys"). It might surprise you to know that the more "masculine" hero types with bulging muscles and a hairy face or body is the Japanese stereotype for gay people. Look up the comedian "Hard Gay" or the shooting game "Chou Aniki" sometime to have your brain a-sploded. Zangief from Street Fighter is flamingly gay to the Japanese. This goes to the point that Japanese cross-dressers and transvestites are far more frequently portrayed for humor with heavy muscles and a 5-o'clock shadow rather than the kind of jokes about the friend who doesn't see the Adam's Apple over here.
It's a flipping of the gender stereotypes. Here, pop culture looks down on men who try to be too close to what women are like. There, pop culture looks down on men who try to be a far from women in appearance as possible. Hence, pretty boy heroes are the norm there while bulging barbarians are the norm here.
Personally, I hated it because it was boring. There was almost no interaction when fighting a monster. You simply ran your characters over to the monster and they seemed to kill it by themselves.
What the heck is with you people who do this? I honestly never even thought of trying this until I read people online griping about it. I guess it just takes a certain mentality to actively try to not have fun with a game.
(And, as anyone who played the demo can tell you, the characters play themselves in FFXII - you just have to manuever them to the monsters you want them to kill, then they'll do it for you. I expect FFXII to be the easiest in the series, as you won't actually have to actually pound the Accept button to continually attack, they'll do it automatically.)
.hack//SIGN games where you actually HAD to sit back and let your party attack to beat the boss of the first game.
Sure, if you want to deliberately try to suck all the fun out of the game for yourself, you go right ahead and do that. You know what, you can also over-level yourself in the Nippon Ichi strategy games (or really any RPG) to remove all actual gameplay from the games if you want too. At least it's not like the
In other news, gormet magazine reviewing best restraunts to get beef at picks only steak places and no fast food burger joints in an obvious show of elitist bias.
Wake us up when some relatively unbiased gormet restraunt reviews rate eating establishments.
[The] new system is a good change for the series that needed to reinvent itself to avoid grow more stale.
I don't know. Personally, I thought that FF X was the absolute peak of the FF series for combat systems. It was the good old ATB system made more transparent and strategic by showing the resulting attack order. It also just flowed more smoothly thanks to the animations and quick responses.
I have mixed feelings about the system in FF XII. I'm almost certainly going to turn the system to wait mode like I do in all the other games and put the NPCs under player control because no one has ever written a good AI for RPGs that intelligently focuses on the right enemies at the right time with the right level of force for maximum efficiency.
At least the series isn't jumping on the Adventure RPG bandwagon. I don't play RPGs to test my reflexes.
Come on, writing is easy when you don't try so hard, and when you proofread.
Ah, irony. That sentence has a comma splice. There's no need for a comma after "hard."
WTF does that mean? As somebody who doesn't read DailyKos, I have no idea.
A quick Google search would clearly reveal that the DailyKos is a left-wing partisan blog. If you're online, and you have access to Google while reading, then there is no real need to coddle the ignorance of the lazy.
"I knocked this puppy off over three afternoons, including note taking."
What does that mean?
"To knock off" is slang for "to finish." "This puppy" is slang for "this thing." Get out more.
This sentence is impenetrable.
It's written in a conversational tone. Imagine that someone excited is speaking to you, and it becomes very easy to read. It's not what I'd consider good style, but it's hardly impenetrable.
A good summary would be:
Out of left field, the book calls Republican strategies "brilliant" and contrasts the way that Republicans groom and compensate their aides while Democrats portray an attitude that theirs should be thankful for the opportunity to serve.
A "hint" was an element of major distraction? Really? And what does it have to do with the website?
Are your reading comprehension skills that utterly poor? Let's break this down. There was a portion of the book that felt like a major distraction to the reviewer. That portion hinted of bitterness. The "hint" was not "an element of [a] major distraction." They are both descriptors for a segment of the book.
What does this have to do with the website? Well, you quoted the exact sentence that answered your question in your reply! He felt that the pages that bothered him were reminiscent of the sort of "web diatribe that the authors are associated with."
I'm happy you're happy. But that sentence means nothing if you haven't read this website.
The purpose of a review is to inform. If you start off by assuming that people reading the review know what you know, then it defeats the purpose of writing the review in the first place.
Honestly, is it that hard to go read the front page of the website yourself? Frankly, if you don't know who the DailyKos is, then this book wasn't really meant for you. It's meant for young people who want to be politically active, and it doesn't matter whether your left-wing, right-wing, or just a wing-nut. If you care, you've at least heard of the DailyKos. If you can't be bothered to do a Google search for it, then why can you be bothered to rant about the review?
Honestly, I have little tolerance for militantly angry ignorance and nit-pickers who betray their own sloppiness while decrying that of others.
I'll counter with a quote from Milton Friedman
That's an Appeal to Authority argument. Even Friedman's quote does not say exactly how the free market will deal with a natural monopoly. He just says that he prefers it to not be regulated "where this is tolerable." You simply state then that it's better to be without regulation.
Natural monopolies can still be defeated using market techniques if you really want to defeat the monopoly. Regulated monopolies are government sponsored and can never go away. We don't want nationalized or heavily regulated industries; they hurt the economy and the consumer more than an unfettered natural monopoly does.
You state that natural monopolies can be defeated by market techniques, but you don't state how. That's what I asked. Blind assertions that it can happen are pointless. How exactly does the market defeat a natural monopoly which is what happens when economies of scale make the largest player capable of under-cutting all competitors due to having less fixed costs (and not having to charge as little as possible due to the fact that competitors can't match them)?
Also, you seem to be confusing regulation with state ownership. There's a difference between the government saying that only one company can do the job and the government saying that you guys all have to share access to customers and justly compensate one another for the privilege, that you can't collude with each other to avoid competition, and that you can't use control of a resource vital to the industry (like oil barrels) to force out competition. You seem guilty of the same sin of confusing the opponent's argument that I did.
Libertarians recognize that the government has a monopoly on force. Libertarians, however, recognize that there are legitimate usages for using government power (the military and law enforcement are big examples). That is what separates libertarian from anarchocapitalism.
My bad. The Liberatarian Party is currently infested with anarchocapitalists, so it gets really hard to determine who you're arguing with when you talk Liberatarian politics. You had derided government for possessing that power earlier, so I incorrectly assumed that you were of that bent.
If you wan't a Liberatarian ideal state, you're correct in saying that none has ever existed. The closest we've had is industrial revolution America -- the so-called Guilded Age. It was a time of unprecedented consolidation of power and wealth into the hands of a few men thanks to anti-competitive business practices, and it saw a lot of workers put through such misery that it birthed socialism and the labor movement as a backlash.
Getting back to the topic, redistribution of wealth doesn't help the poor improve their economic situation; it only keeps the poor impoverished, and the poor remain dependent on the "safety net" forever. Poor people are also hurt by lack of capital, lack of property (real estate), and lack of education. Egalitarianism makes everybody equally poor, and egalitarian goals like redistribution of wealth are completely opposite to the goals of liberty.
No, I'm afraid I'll have to strongly disagree here. Wealth is Power.
Let me repeat that: Wealth is Power. Concentrations of Power are inherently in opposition to liberty. When the people are marginalized, uneducated, and worn-down, they become non-participants in a political process that leaves them jaded until at some point they boil over into revolution.
There have been essentially only three distributions of wealth on the planet and they've all been strongly correlated with certain types of government -- pyramid shaped, diamond shaped, and flat. Pyramid-shaped happens in societies with a controlling elite and has been the shape of monarchies and dictatorships both rich and impoverished. Flat-shaped happens in anarchy and in early communism (before it goes pyramid-shaped due to corruption) where no one has power. Diamond-shaped is the shap
Actually, I was a big Dean supporter based on his policies and aggressive "give 'em hell" attitude, but I have to mostly agree with you. Even though he didn't come out and make the accusation, giving any recognition to the conspiracy idea was a really, really bad move.
However, the "Dean Scream" shouldn't have been all that bad at all. I mean, honestly, go back and listen to last bits of the speech he was giving. He was just doing some good old-fashioned rabble rousing and cheerleading. I blame the media (in particular the right-wing dominated elements of the media) for making a big scandal out of little more than a really nerdy cheer. I don't think he shot himself in the foot so much as hand the shotgun to hungry partisans eager to shoot it for him.
At any rate, the Troll mod is totally unfair.
To be more technical, I'd put Chomsky firmly in the corner of the anarcho-syndicalist. He distrusts all top-down structures, from government to corporations, and supports just enough government to prevent the private sector from turning into top-down fiefdoms.
What we need are publicly funded elections. To pass Constitutional muster (thanks to a disastrous Supreme Court decision equating spending disproportionate money with free speech), the law does not restrict people from taking money the old-fashioned way.
Instead, a candidate agrees to forgoe traditional funding and gets a long list of signatures in support of his campaign to prove he's a serious contender (instead of raising a certain amount of money before the election). Once qualified, he is given what the government estimates the election campaign should cost. If his opponent raises more money, he gets a matching amount so that the race is even.
This means that a traditional candidate is free to take money from special interest groups who are free to spend as much as they want. However, this will not buy their candidate a disproportionate advantage of the opponent which reduces the value of such an "investment." In the mean time, the public funded candidate is free to spend all their time talking to the people instead of fund-raising.
What you get are politicians who are more interested in attracting voters than attracting lobbyists. They have more time to meet with the people more often, and they don't have to beg and scrape for money from powerful interest groups. They are beholden only to the people -- the way representative democracy was intended to work.
I love this idea. I am seriously considering moving to a state that has already passed laws like these at some point later in life, and if a state possessed both this an some sort of non-partisan redistricting scheme that prevented the kind of gerrymandering that locks in uncompetitive races, I would start making my plans today -- even if it's one of those God-forsaken frozen northern states despite my hatred for cold weather. It would totally be worth it.
I'm busy revisiting Zelazny's Amber right now.
Excellent taste, by the way. Zelanzy is one of my absolute favorite authors. If you love Zelazny, I'd suggest also checking out Alfred Bester some time. In particular, read "The Demolished Man," and "The Stars My Destination" (aka "Tiger, Tiger") if you can find them.
I have so many friends who label themselves Progressive, when they don't realize that the Progressive ideaology is no different than the political agenda of both the Democrats and the Republicans: to control others against their will in hopes of creating a better world.
You could make the same argument about anyone who supports any laws -- anti-drug laws, anti-fraud laws, anti-murder laws, anti-rape laws, etc. That's the point of government -- to prevent people from inflicting their will on others in bad ways in order to produce a more just and equitable world.
The central thrust of Progressive ideology was summed up very nicely by Howard Dean in a Daily Show episode from last year that I watched last night: "Love thy neighbor. And you don't get to pick your neighbor." This means two things: Don't hate people because they're different; we're all Americans and all Humans. Don't hurt people through malice or selfish indifference. That's all it really is.
You guys don't trust government. We don't really it either, but we trust it more than we trust corporations. A democratic government is at its highest level meant to serve the benefit of the whole people of the nation. A corporation is at its highest level meant to serve the benefit of only its shareholders even at the expense of all non-shareholders. That's a whole different height to fall from and a whole different set of people with the power to do anything about it.
We see other people suffering, and we wish to build institutions to give them a helping hand because that could one day be us after one job loss or one family illness or some other disaster. We don't want other people to be allowed to abuse others because they might be able to abuse us. We don't like concentrations of unaccountable power whether it be in our executive branch or in a newly merged boardroom.
Now that you can't use your money to speak for you, the minority view is reduced to only a few hundred dollars per person.
As opposed to the millions of dollars per person that we all previously had to voice our popular opinions with? Honestly, you should be ashamed if you think that restricting the power of the elite to have disproportionate speech over the masses is a bad thing.
Destroy the power of the federal government, and you'll see the big money disappear.
No, no you won't because the big money will prevent the parts of the government that favor them from being destroyed. Why do you think we spend so much money on crop subsidies, no-bid reconstruction projects, and private security companies? Deregulation means simply that every one can have as much say with the politicians as they want so long as they're fantastically rich. We can go back to the bad old days of Congressional patronage.
If you want to see the big money disappear, you have to make it worthless to spend. You need Clean Money Clean Elections laws. Big Corn wants to donate $300,000 dollars to an incumbent Senator? Okay, the state matches their opponent for $300,000 who instead spends all their time talking to the people instead of the lobbyists. Advantage lost unless the indebted Senator still wins. However, by eliminating the fund-raising advantage that all incumbents have, you make the race significantly more competitive than it was before. With publicly financed elections, the only "customer" of a politician is the people instead of the lobbyists.
Pure communism is anarchy, but no country has voluntarily adopted a voluntary communist system.
Actually, the Soviet Union did in its first two decades. The word "Soviet" is Russian for "council." In the early days, workers and communities got together and formed councils. These councils ran the local businesses and communities and elected leader to send to larger regional and national councils that voted on issues. The entire system was bottom-up.
During the Russian Civil War, the White Army (made up of former tsarist forces and backed by many foreign powers including France, Britain, Japan, and the US) fought against the revolution to reestablish the old government. The revolutionaries formed the Red Army to fight back. In the early days, the Red Army was so anti-authoritarian that they eschewed ranks and saluting, elected their leaders, and voted on actions to take. Unfortunately, this egalitarian and democratic system was horribly ineffective in actual combat, so they had to establish a more traditional command structure and discipline.
Eventually, though, Stalin would rise to power and destroy the bottom-up power structure in the Soviet Union to turn it into the harsh authoritarian government we all know, but that's a much longer story.
Incidentally, I mostly agree with the rest of your post, though I deeply distrust a lack of public education and healthcare due to the way their lack becomes a poverty trap, and I think that a lot of valuable fundamental theoretical research would not be done by the free market which favors marketable inventions and disfavors health and safety research that threatens products.
The main reason that I support government is the environment, but I too support primarily regulations that commoditize external costs like pollution with the occasional outright ban for something that has no business in the market (like asbestos or mercury emissions) over mandated technologies.
A libertarian economy is one where anyone is allowed to compete. Regulated markets usually end up as government protectionist schemes which stifles competition and thus decreases intention.
As with most Liberatarians, you seem to be in denial about the existence of natural monopolies. Let's start with a though exercise: a world where no government power monopolies were established and a bunch of hard-working private power companies start up business.
Each business will build power lines to their customers from their power plants up until they butt up against each other. At that point, they must determine how to compete. Any business following their own rational self-interest will pursue vendor lock-in and refuse to let the other company use their lines to reach customers in their territory. As a result, the other company is forced to build a parallel infrastructure in their competitor's territory. Not only does this make their costs higher than their competitor to reach customers, but it also may be impossible due to the fact that building a parallel infrastructure may require land rights that have been snapped up by the competitor. All the incumbent has to do is price their power in between their costs and their competitor's costs, and unless the customers are spiteful and angry at the incumbent, the vast majority will stay with them.
Inevitably, though, both companies will look at each other and realize that they could have lower operating costs if they simply merged into one entity that didn't compete. They'd be able to fire redundant repair and home office staff and pass the savings on to themselves. In the meantime, the customers still don't have a choice, and the monopoly is free to charge above competitive rates because there is no one else with access to the customers.
In a regulated environment, the companies must share their lines and thus grant access to each other's customers. This means that the companies actually have to fight to bring down prices to beat out each other instead of just soaking the market for whatever it can bear to pay for an essential good. This is good for customers (i.e. the average citizen). This is one way in which regulation fosters competition that could not exist due to the realities of the difficulty of competitors in reaching their customers.
Of course, when advocating for an end to government regulation on utility monopolies, Liberatarians place all the blame for their existence on the government and offer no concrete ways in which total deregulation will get past the problem of entrenched infrastructure and economies of scale.
[What] "libertarian" state will you point to to show your point? There has never been one...
Somalia -- the world's only free market economy. This is the "paradise" you dream of when you wish to eliminate the government monopoly on deadly force. It's not a happy place, because when there is no monopoly on force, rule of the strong becomes the rule of law.
Anarchy/minarchy/liberatarianism cannot work because Power abhors a vacuum. I call this [Valdrax]'s Principle #1.
Why does individual liberty (including your hated individual right to property) necessarily lead to static social classes and the implied lack of social mobility?
Power attracts Power. Weakness attracts further Weakness. Without certain controls on society, the rich will accumulate wealth much faster than the poor and have significantly greater leverage to cause other people to part with their wealth. If I own all the power plants in a state, there's nothing that anyone can do in a Liberatarian society to prevent me from impoverishing anyone who can't afford the inefficiencies of localized power generation. This is even easier if I'm not the only essential monopoly in town trying to get as much out of people as they can. As the cost of ess
Seriously, some varieties of mango have in their flesh lots of annoying fibrous hairs connected to the seed. If you try to eat the fruit directly, those hairs get stuck in your teeth. Did I mention those mango varieties are absurdly cheap?
How the heck are you supposed to eat those fibrous ones anyway? I got one recently and ended up spending about 10 minutes afterwards trying to floss the bits out from between my teeth. It was not pleasant.