I hope you also realize though, that the programs we do today are also much more complex than you could do on punched cards back then. Even small-ish programs can have a million lines of code or more. (Larger ones, more. Windows XP was some 35 million lines, Vista over 50 million, and that's not counting such stuff as C libraries and whatnot.)
Even at 1 gram per card, and each card being a line of code, a 1 million line program would weigh literally a metric ton. Did you see many people carrying their program to the computer with a small truck?
Even the kind of internal complexity that went into programs those days was actually a lot lower. E.g., you didn't need to optimize access to shared data for 1000 web sessions at the same time, when the program is run as a sequential batch. (Yes, concurrent stuff did come around too, but later, but not in the days of paper cards.)
Most such batch programs I've seen actually are just doing some fairly simple calculation in a loop, that nowadays you wouldn't even write a program for. It's stuff that the PHB would do directly in Excel.
In other words, yeah, I love reading such posts that tell me that someone is too fucking stupid to even understand the difference between programs these days and most programs that were done on punched cards. And probably the 50's-60's and punched cards were the last time they were competent. I really love that kinda PHB, who thinks that because he once did some piss-poor two-level loop on punch cards back then, it means he's qualified to judge modern programs and deadlines. No, really.
No, not really. A cow would actually have the digestive tract that can break down cellulose walls and extract a lot more nutrient from that bamboo. A panda is more like an overgrown carnivore, with a carnivore digestive tract, which eats bamboo, and shits most of it undigested.
It gets extremely little protein or energy per pound eaten, and in fact ridiculously so. It has to spend most of its day eating, and avoid moving too much or too fast, or it will literally starve to death. It can't even walk up more than very gentle slopes, because it just doesn't have the energy budget for that. Chasing prey or running away from a predator is right out.
Even the low reproduction rate may well have to do with just not having the energy or protein to produce or feed larger litters. It has nothing to do with some clever design that protects the environment (there isn't any conceivable evolutionary pressure that takes that into account), but simply with the fact that it's so piss-poor at feeding itself, that it just can't do more than a cub in a blue moon.
Truth is, it's not very fit, in the survival of the fittest sense, and it doesn't have an isolated niche like the animals in Australia had. I mean, it is isolated by mountains and deserts, which posed a barrier to other species coming in, but it's not nearly as insurmountable as thousands of miles of ocean are. In the wild, it would be only a matter of time before some predator evolves or manages to get over the mountains to fill the niche of feeding on all those juicy pandas, or some bigger herbivore comes to out-compete them.
It's also a very new species, at evolution scales. The earliest thing even remotely recognizable as a panda lived some three million years ago (though the intermediate links evolving in that direction are, obviously, older.) By way of comparison, our split between us and chimps is 6 million years ago.
It's too early to say it would be such a viable species without us.
And either way, it was a piss-poor species which existed there just by virtue of being isolated from either predators or prey or competing species. It's a carnivore who had to start eating bamboo just for lack of prey, never got any good at it, and survived in that niche only for lack of competition. In a sense, it was already living in a natural zoo, and it would become extinct within decades of those barriers around it failing in any way.
Dunno if it's just the summaries a bullet points, as just the idea that the more stuff there is in, the better. That if a game/car/phone/product has X and Y, it's obviously worse than one which has X, Y and Z. Something with just two bullet points is worse than something with three bullet points, and both are worse than something with four bullet points. You're getting less for your money, right?
Basically the difference I'm getting at is that people often don't even as much care what those bullet points are and what's the implication, as basically are just acting like hoarders. The more the better, no matter what they say.
E.g., I remember in ye olde days, when MS Office hadn't quite won yet and there still was some choice, I was trying to tell someone that he doesn't really need to ditch their old editor and buy the whole MS packet for what that small company does. There were far cheaper alternatives, not the least being to just keep what they already had. His answer, and nothing would move him, was "but it has more features!" He wasn't going to use something with less features.
Now I'll be the first to admit that some of the features there would actually be useful... if anyone there were actually using them. The thing is, they weren't using even what they already had. I actually watched him and a few others write stuff, and really there was nothing they did that required more than WordPad. They didn't even use styles, or even any formatting above the bare basics, much less stuff like macros or whatever. All they did was type some text, select and bold or underline such parts, and at most copy and paste. That's it. If they even wanted some paragraph indented, they'd actually hit tab.
But God forbid doing the same in a program which has less features.
I think many people do the same with games. Even if they don't play much multiplayer, it has to be there on the box, because otherwise they're getting less bullet points for their money.
The first problem is that basically there's no such thing as a free meal. Especially for games, where budgets are finite and already spiraling out of control, and basically doing three things instead of two, is often still on the same budget as doing two. It's basically like getting the same builder team and for the same cost to build you house, a garage and a pool, instead of just a house. It may sound like you're getting more for your money, but in reality don't be surprised if it's a smaller house than if they were building just that.
Actually, the results in the link I provided are not all that dramatic. It doesn't say that the smokers die at 30 years old.
The actual numbers are more like live to an average 84 years old for healthy non-smokers, 80 for obese non-smokers, and 77 for non-obese smokers.
Even allowing for a bell curve distribution around that point, the fact is that most smokers will reach pension age and do their full stint in the workforce. The only ones which may have their 50/50 point around pension age are presumably the obese smokers, but I suspect that even of those most will (barely) make it past the hurdle before dying horribly.
As Aepervius was mentioning in another message, the average age for getting diagnosed with lung cancer is at 68 years old, and less than 5% are diagnosed with it before the age of 40.
So, really, even the argument about years contributed to society is bunk. The vast majority of either obese or smokers will do all or most of their years in the workforce, same as the lean guys. They just won't "suck from the collective teet of society" (to borrow your expression) for as many years afterwards.
I dunno, ugly and old people could get plastic surgery, couldn't they?
But generally, that was supposed to be sarcasm, rather than literally an argument. I find the very idea of taxing someone because you don't like their _looks_ so freaking stupid, that I assumed (and still hope) it was going for +5 Funny.
This is of course one (of many) instances where the profit model is in conflict with the interests of people. How about taxing unhealthy food and use the revenue in order to subsidize healthy food, not to reduce total healthcare costs, but to encourage a healthier lifestyle leading to higher overall longevity.
Of course, the flip coin is: who died and left you the judge and jurry of what should be imposed on other people for their own interest? How about accepting that they're adult people who can make their own choices?
Yes, some of their choices may shorten their lives. But judging everything from that criterion would also say you should discourage them from driving to a movie, since accidents happen on the road, or living far from work in the suburbs (more driving = more accidents), or letting teenagers drive at all (it's a major cause of mortality for teenagers.)
Ultimately everyone makes their own choices for how they want to live their lives, or to what end. Arguments which boil down to postulating they should live their lives towards one criterion someone else postulated, are stupid. Reardless of which criterion that is. Nobody signed a contract when they got here that they agree to have only maximizing their life span (or producing the most money for society, or whatever) as their sole goal and guiding principle.
Who the heck basically gives someone the right to tell another adult, "Your choices and goals are wrong. I know better than you what you should want. Lemme just shove my choices down your throat, for your own good."?
Even shorter version: It's called free will. Learn to live with it.
You are heartless, selfish, cruel and without love for your fellow man. Congratulations, you are the perfect human being for these troubled times.
Hmm? I mean, thank you, I didn't think you cared, but how do you deduce that from what I wrote?
How is calling a BS argument BS, equivalent to being "heartless, selfish, cruel and without love for your fellow man"? Does a kind and selfless person rather say one should tax an unfairly demonized group, based on misconceptions and lack of data?
But generally, my biggest problem is, basically, bullshit. And all sorts of arguments boiling down to group A telling group B "not on MY money!" are bullshit when group A who isn't actually paying that money, but is actually receiving money from group B.
The image that comes to mind of someone going to a soup kitchen and, upon receiving their bowl, going "this is crap, for MY money, I want a steak!" Fuck off. You're not the one paying for it, you're someone receiving stuff that someone else paid for.
That goes for anti-smoking arguments, subsidized mid-west farmers going "not on MY money!" at the groups actually paying their subsidies,
Heh. Well, off the top of my head, also not easy on the eyes are:
- old people (Fuck off, Grandma, I came to the park to see young chicks.)
- ugly people (I actually went to school with someone whose face was strangely reminiscent of a skull.)
- people with bad makeup (Especially old ladies whose bad eyesight is probably why they look like they buried their face in half an inch of cream and powder.)
- people with bad fashion sense
- people with various medical problems ranging from bad cases of acne to physical deformities
Etc.
And that's not even counting those who are not easy on other senses like:
- smell (and I don't just mean the nerds who last used soap for Christmas, but also the kind of women that smells like she's been dunked in cheap perfume and stinks up the whole train car of that cheap perfume.)
- hearing (people who talk loudly, people whose MP3 player is turned up so loud you can hear it from 3 rows of seats away, or just the kind of idiot who screams "I'M ON A TRAIN! DO YOU HEAR ME?! ON A TRAIN! YES, TRAIN!" into their mobile phone)
Or who insult your intelligence with idiotic conspiracy theories, or with the crackpot idea that a work of fiction can be taken as proving the applicability of a social or economic model to the real world, or whatever idiocy, really.
I'd say tax them all, but then it dawns upon me that we're already taxing everyone, aren't we?:p
The costs and prevalence of diseases are still taken from actual insurance data. I'm not sure how that counts as "pulling numbers out of your ass". Much less how it would be less reliable than bare postulates that aren't supported by any numbers, which is what most political BS on the topic actually is like.
Working on either solutions or explanations before knowing if there is an actual problem, is called Tooth Fairy Science. You know, the kind where you figure the market value and profits/losses per tooth type, before even knowing if there is a Tooth Fairy.
I don't just mean on the total with pensions and all. Even just the healthcare taken separately, actually cost less. Why? Because they die earlier and need less medicine in the long run.
The problem is that you don't need the most care when you're 30. You need the most care when you're 70, and the latter is for decades if you prolong it.
The fat smokers need expensive chemotherapy or surgery for maybe a year, then die. That is, if they don't just keel over and die of a heart attack. If not the first time around, the second will get them. And that's that. While the guy who was fit and lean and never had any vices, if he lives to 100, will likely be on expensive anti-Alzheimer medication for two decades. Plus various other trips to the doctor as their body is barely functioning and getting worse by the year. The guys who died a horrible death in their 50's just saved you all those costs.
So, really, the smokers and obese actually subsidize healthcare for everyone else just by biting the dust earlier. And that's in addition to paying for a pension they won't get as much of, or at all. And subsidizing the government via tobacco taxes.
So, really, WTF? You'd think someone would at least say, "hey, thanks fatty";) The notion that, OMG, let's tax them some more 'cause they cost us money, is provably false, and fucking stupid too.
But it keeps happening because it's two overlapping groups of people who already feel bad and guilty about it, and have been amply proven to be easy to guilt trip some more into paying even more.
You know, I was just thinking how you'd teach a kid that they're not supposed to do that. And then I look at the whole "no consequences for actions" idea again, and I'm thinking... as opposed to what? As opposed to their just needing to not live under a rock to notice that there are no consequences if a few bankers cause yet another bubble, and they even get to congratulate themselves and give themselves millions of dollars each in bonuses for a job well done, just as the government is taxing everyone else to bail them out? Getting to watch them give interviews to the effect of, "the computer is to blame! We just fiddled with the parameters (e.g., risk percentage) until the computer gave us the answer we wanted (yep, give money to no-income no-job applicants), and then only did what the computer told us, so we're not to blame"... and still keep their lofty posts and bonuses in spite just having admitted that they're too fucking stupid to even be trusted to tie their own shoes, much less handle the world's finances? Watching CEOs getting paid tens of millions and actually get bonuses, for driving a company into the fucking ground and selling it at bargain basement prices? Yeah, great message about personal responsibility and consequences for actions that gives.
Oh, wait, stupid me... that's only for the rich enough guys, isn't it? If as a shitkicker from Bronx you drive your finances into the ground, you get the collection agency at your door. You have to be too big to fail to get bailed and get a bonus.
So here's my plan: any violent game will have to have the protagonist be a multi-billionaire. Iron Man and Batman are still ok to make games about because they're loaded. Guys like The Punisher or the Postal guy or the humble delivery guy from Fallout New Vegas are, sad to say, out. The next Duke Nukem instalment (which probably will happen around 2085;) will have to feature a Duke who inherited a bank. Or an actual duke. Actually the latter would work for the next The Elder Scrolls too. Or for that matter, just make a game where Scrooge McDuck is mowing down gangsters. Seeing him dive into a vault full of money should drive the point home that whatever stuff he gets away with, is totally not the kind of stuff you get away with.
Have you RTFA, thought? Their examples of a generated dress left me thinking, "hey, cool, it's the stealth dress";) Actually even that's unfair, as stealth ships and planes may have all sorts of angles and polyhedra, but they don't get them jutting at seemingly random angles and positions.
I mean, seriously, the first dress looks like, umm, you're wearing some kind of mis-shapen backpack. As a dress, not on your back. The second is only marginally better.
And I mean, really, it's not just that they're made of triangles. So are the high-def models in the latest games and they don't look that bad. This thing looks like it made the dress out of 1 ft big triangles, and extrapolated the third dimension to basically some wildly random value. So you get pretty much a dress made of giant D4 dice (tetrahedrons), with random sized heights and jutting out at weird angles.
I'm not sure a model accurate to myself could be worse than that even if it caught me before having my morning coffee and shower.
Plus, if you're making a fashion dress, you probably wouldn't use me as a model, but one of the models such a fashion designer studio employs. And if you could actually take a 3d view and fit the dress to her body instead of producing what looks like random heights, that has to be a huge step forward.
... I think some of the fashion designers that made the news recently by posting some ads where they photoshopped some model into stick-figures -- or, for that matter, who made the news by firing a ridiculously thin model for being too fat for their fashion -- would pay good money for something like that. On second thought, wait a minute, if anyone could just run an XKCD strip through an app for the same effect, that would put them out of business;)
Barbaric to suggest that someone who wittingly and deliberately took the country to the brink of insolvency and then lied, deceived and manipulated the so-called democratic process in the country to divert billions if not trillions of dollars to his industry (if one can call banking an industry), himself and his colleagues should be held accountable??
Heh. *WHOOSH*
Now we know who can't read more than one sentence, eh?:p
The whole joke setup is that I start as if I were going to protest the executions, but then it turns out I was protesting the "instead of football" part. The "barbaric times" I was talking about were obviously those without football.
Of course, if you could read up to the third sentence, you'd already know that. So I doubt that this message will do any good either.
Now now... I know those guys are hated, and caused a global recession to line their pockets, and were giving themselves gigantic bonuses just as they were being bailed out by the government, and all, but that's no excuse to go back to barbaric times. Two wrongs don't make a right, ok? There's no reason to deprive the people of football for that.
Do what the Romans used to: have the executions at halftime:p
You think they don't covertly spew propaganda at US citizens already?
I think they don't have to bother all that much.
For a start, you can always play the "patriotism", "supporting the troops", "if you have nothing to hide", etc, cards and have idiots chest thump for your side of the story just to not, God forbid, come across as unpatriotic. Groupthink at its finest, really.
Or to quote Hermann Goering, "Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship....voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
You've already seen it happen verbatim in the USA. If you're not for anything from war to no-fly lists to suspending habeas corpus and waterboarding suspects, you're unpatriotic and hating your country. Sound familiar?
And if you get enough idiots doing that group think, it turns out that far from being a part of the checks and balances, a large part of the press just joins in the propaganda. Just to not look unpatriotic to their viewers.
Net result: you don't have to pay 200 million for sock-puppeteers to post crap to every single site and brow-beat everyone who says otherwise. You get idiots doing it for free. Just, you know, to be "patriotic".
Second method, make it a party talking point. There'll be enough fanboys who just have to be, you know, fanboys. Same net effect.
Third, well, if you happen to be the party whose opinions suspiciously are those of the rich, and range from "let's take loans in a war so the rich can buy bigger yachts" to "let's have the poor pay more so the rich can buy bigger yachts", it turns out, those guys don't wait for the government to do their propaganda. They just pay their own lobby groups and "think tanks" and PR agencies and private armies of sockpuppeteers to do it for them.
Not that they'd mind it if your taxes went into paying for that, instead of their own money, but the latter is for now more reliable.
Fourth, be the party who lets one asshole gobble up almost all media. He'll sing you all the praises in the world... at least until he or maybe his successor figures out that he can just use that propaganda juggernaut to get himself elected instead of relying on others to get what he wants. See, Berlusconi.
If you've read more than those two lines, you'll see that I did mention how most of them got good: by being apprentices to another artist, and helping churn commercial paintings or sculptures for those.
And for those cavemen, likely they weren't thinking they're making art for art sake either. Or even art at all. A lot of those cave paintings and venus figurines and totems and whatnot seem to be religious, or recording important historical events (from the narrow world horizon of that tribe) or myths, and the like. Most of them probably couldn't give two shits about expressing themselves and artistic vision and other such fancy ideas. Appeasing the spirits of the prey, or fertility amulets, or such practical purposes, would be a lot more important to a tribe whose life is centered around those and who is facing periodic episodes of severe starvation (because, for all they know, the spirits of the prey weren't appeased enough.)
Sorry to burst your bullshit bubble, but art for art sake, untainted by utilitarian or monetary or other practical interests, is far less common than you seem to think even in the modern day. And it certainly was even less common in ages when, as I was saying, you didn't have the luxury of getting a dole while you dick around pretending to be a true artist. For most people who ever lived, having something to eat for dinner was hit-and-miss even when working full time towards that end.
Even as we moved towards more well-off societies, a lot of the "art" was really religious and not primarily aesthetic or anything at all. Probably 99% of the art of ancient Egyptians, for example, was utilitarian, not just decoration, and probably the majority of it religious. When you find statues or murals, they're support for the Ka (soul) and painted to fit the soul rather than even represent the actual person, or memory aid for the deceased when they start their journey to the underworld, or spirit gates for the soul of the deceased to pass through, or the like. The few decorations for decoration sake are strictly for the nobles and priesthood, and paid for by the nobles and priesthood.
As for the artists who died broke... well, how about the smiths that died broke, or the builders that died broke, and the like? Do you have any indication that those _weren't_ trying to sell their work, as opposed to being unsuccessful at it? Especially for painters, it was more side effect of, basically, capitalism hitting that market instead of doing work by commission.
Ironically enough, a bunch of art we still have from, say, the Romans was essentially "No Trespassing" signs. Early Romans used to use a statue of Priapus with an enormous erect dick as just that. Often accompanied by a bit of poetry too, to remind would be thieves and trespassers that they're getting it in the ass if caught.
The Romans, see, were as practical as ever. They didn't mope and wish you ass-rape in prison, they'd just get the job done themselves. That's Romans for you. When they wanted something done, by Jupiter, they'd pull up their sleeves and their tunic and get the job done personally. It's no coincidence that such people built an Empire;)
But at any rate, they placed images of Priapus near fences as some kind of "Trespassers will be prosec... err... fucked" sign, in some bars and shops as a reminder for would be shoplifters, and so on. It was the ubiquitous "don't even think about it" sign. Where nowadays you'd have a "no trespassing" sign or a "this store uses video surveillance" sign, you'd have the image of a guy with a giant erect dick.
So, yeah, even a no-trespassing sign can be art. We have a bunch of those in museums, even.
I'm certainly not limiting art to that. I'm just using those as clearly recognizable examples of famous artists, which, I hope, nobody is prepared to say "it's not art", although they did the exact same things quited as capital sins that make games not art. I could have used a more modern artist as an example, but then some snob _could_ say with a straight face "yeah, but that's not art either." I'm using Michelangelo, Titian and da Vinci to, basically, head them off at the pass. I don't think many from the snob segment are prepared to say "yeah, but Michelangelo isn't art";)
Almost all art ever made, was made to be sold and most of it was commissioned by some rich client.
Probably the best example is the Sistine Chapel. It wasn't done as some work of vision and love by Michelangelo. Michelangelo was good at painting, to be sure, but he considered it an inferior art form and he preferred sculpture. He only did that epic fresco because he was offered a shitload of money to do something he didn't like. I.e., he sold out. And even then he hid various FU-s at the pope's expense in it, sorta the renaissance painter's version of hiding a "fuck the pointy haired boss" comment in some obscure source file.
Is anyone prepared to say that that's not art, because it's commercial? WTF? When did that idiotic notion originate, anyway?
Art done as an industry, again, is as old as recorded history. There were plenty of professional sculptors and painters who did it as a full time job, and as their way of earning their bread. In fact, the vast majority of them were, by sheer virtue of living in poorer times when you didn't have the luxury of sitting around on the dole and creating art not tainted by commercialism.
Many made it into an extremely profitable trade, and were very much aware of money and of what the clients want. E.g., Titian is a prime example of that. He even diversified into grain trade in between painting masterpieces. Is anyone prepared to say that Titian isn't art? You know, THE fucking Titian?
Many had studios where they created a ton of paintings with apprentices. E.g., since I mentioned Titian already, he started as such an apprentice for Giorgione, and apparently quite a bit of Giorgione's art is now considered to be most certainly done by his apprentice Titian. And when he started working in his own name, Titian too in turn took such apprentices to help churn commercial art to be sold, e.g., copies of his earlier paintings.
He's not even the only one. Leonardo da Vinci is for example another guy who financed his other studies with selling art, started as a worker in such a painter's workshot, and later had one of his own. Mona Lisa, you know, THE famous painting, is heavily "photoshopped", or rather the renaissance equivalent of that: it appears that what was first painted was rounder face, and then he made her thinner and sexier. Presumably because that's what the paying customer wanted. And in the end it was used by Leonardo as basically a way to sell himself, as a sample of what quality shit he can paint. Is anyone prepared to say that Leonardo's stuff isn't art because he sold out? Or WTH?
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I hope you also realize though, that the programs we do today are also much more complex than you could do on punched cards back then. Even small-ish programs can have a million lines of code or more. (Larger ones, more. Windows XP was some 35 million lines, Vista over 50 million, and that's not counting such stuff as C libraries and whatnot.)
Even at 1 gram per card, and each card being a line of code, a 1 million line program would weigh literally a metric ton. Did you see many people carrying their program to the computer with a small truck?
Even the kind of internal complexity that went into programs those days was actually a lot lower. E.g., you didn't need to optimize access to shared data for 1000 web sessions at the same time, when the program is run as a sequential batch. (Yes, concurrent stuff did come around too, but later, but not in the days of paper cards.)
Most such batch programs I've seen actually are just doing some fairly simple calculation in a loop, that nowadays you wouldn't even write a program for. It's stuff that the PHB would do directly in Excel.
In other words, yeah, I love reading such posts that tell me that someone is too fucking stupid to even understand the difference between programs these days and most programs that were done on punched cards. And probably the 50's-60's and punched cards were the last time they were competent. I really love that kinda PHB, who thinks that because he once did some piss-poor two-level loop on punch cards back then, it means he's qualified to judge modern programs and deadlines. No, really.
No, not really. A cow would actually have the digestive tract that can break down cellulose walls and extract a lot more nutrient from that bamboo. A panda is more like an overgrown carnivore, with a carnivore digestive tract, which eats bamboo, and shits most of it undigested.
It gets extremely little protein or energy per pound eaten, and in fact ridiculously so. It has to spend most of its day eating, and avoid moving too much or too fast, or it will literally starve to death. It can't even walk up more than very gentle slopes, because it just doesn't have the energy budget for that. Chasing prey or running away from a predator is right out.
Even the low reproduction rate may well have to do with just not having the energy or protein to produce or feed larger litters. It has nothing to do with some clever design that protects the environment (there isn't any conceivable evolutionary pressure that takes that into account), but simply with the fact that it's so piss-poor at feeding itself, that it just can't do more than a cub in a blue moon.
Truth is, it's not very fit, in the survival of the fittest sense, and it doesn't have an isolated niche like the animals in Australia had. I mean, it is isolated by mountains and deserts, which posed a barrier to other species coming in, but it's not nearly as insurmountable as thousands of miles of ocean are. In the wild, it would be only a matter of time before some predator evolves or manages to get over the mountains to fill the niche of feeding on all those juicy pandas, or some bigger herbivore comes to out-compete them.
It's also a very new species, at evolution scales. The earliest thing even remotely recognizable as a panda lived some three million years ago (though the intermediate links evolving in that direction are, obviously, older.) By way of comparison, our split between us and chimps is 6 million years ago.
It's too early to say it would be such a viable species without us.
And either way, it was a piss-poor species which existed there just by virtue of being isolated from either predators or prey or competing species. It's a carnivore who had to start eating bamboo just for lack of prey, never got any good at it, and survived in that niche only for lack of competition. In a sense, it was already living in a natural zoo, and it would become extinct within decades of those barriers around it failing in any way.
Dunno if it's just the summaries a bullet points, as just the idea that the more stuff there is in, the better. That if a game/car/phone/product has X and Y, it's obviously worse than one which has X, Y and Z. Something with just two bullet points is worse than something with three bullet points, and both are worse than something with four bullet points. You're getting less for your money, right?
Basically the difference I'm getting at is that people often don't even as much care what those bullet points are and what's the implication, as basically are just acting like hoarders. The more the better, no matter what they say.
E.g., I remember in ye olde days, when MS Office hadn't quite won yet and there still was some choice, I was trying to tell someone that he doesn't really need to ditch their old editor and buy the whole MS packet for what that small company does. There were far cheaper alternatives, not the least being to just keep what they already had. His answer, and nothing would move him, was "but it has more features!" He wasn't going to use something with less features.
Now I'll be the first to admit that some of the features there would actually be useful... if anyone there were actually using them. The thing is, they weren't using even what they already had. I actually watched him and a few others write stuff, and really there was nothing they did that required more than WordPad. They didn't even use styles, or even any formatting above the bare basics, much less stuff like macros or whatever. All they did was type some text, select and bold or underline such parts, and at most copy and paste. That's it. If they even wanted some paragraph indented, they'd actually hit tab.
But God forbid doing the same in a program which has less features.
I think many people do the same with games. Even if they don't play much multiplayer, it has to be there on the box, because otherwise they're getting less bullet points for their money.
The first problem is that basically there's no such thing as a free meal. Especially for games, where budgets are finite and already spiraling out of control, and basically doing three things instead of two, is often still on the same budget as doing two. It's basically like getting the same builder team and for the same cost to build you house, a garage and a pool, instead of just a house. It may sound like you're getting more for your money, but in reality don't be surprised if it's a smaller house than if they were building just that.
Actually, the results in the link I provided are not all that dramatic. It doesn't say that the smokers die at 30 years old.
The actual numbers are more like live to an average 84 years old for healthy non-smokers, 80 for obese non-smokers, and 77 for non-obese smokers.
Even allowing for a bell curve distribution around that point, the fact is that most smokers will reach pension age and do their full stint in the workforce. The only ones which may have their 50/50 point around pension age are presumably the obese smokers, but I suspect that even of those most will (barely) make it past the hurdle before dying horribly.
As Aepervius was mentioning in another message, the average age for getting diagnosed with lung cancer is at 68 years old, and less than 5% are diagnosed with it before the age of 40.
So, really, even the argument about years contributed to society is bunk. The vast majority of either obese or smokers will do all or most of their years in the workforce, same as the lean guys. They just won't "suck from the collective teet of society" (to borrow your expression) for as many years afterwards.
I dunno, ugly and old people could get plastic surgery, couldn't they?
But generally, that was supposed to be sarcasm, rather than literally an argument. I find the very idea of taxing someone because you don't like their _looks_ so freaking stupid, that I assumed (and still hope) it was going for +5 Funny.
Duly noted, but their data didn't say that the smokers die young as in literally young, just that they die earlier than the others.
Of course, the flip coin is: who died and left you the judge and jurry of what should be imposed on other people for their own interest? How about accepting that they're adult people who can make their own choices?
Yes, some of their choices may shorten their lives. But judging everything from that criterion would also say you should discourage them from driving to a movie, since accidents happen on the road, or living far from work in the suburbs (more driving = more accidents), or letting teenagers drive at all (it's a major cause of mortality for teenagers.)
Ultimately everyone makes their own choices for how they want to live their lives, or to what end. Arguments which boil down to postulating they should live their lives towards one criterion someone else postulated, are stupid. Reardless of which criterion that is. Nobody signed a contract when they got here that they agree to have only maximizing their life span (or producing the most money for society, or whatever) as their sole goal and guiding principle.
Who the heck basically gives someone the right to tell another adult, "Your choices and goals are wrong. I know better than you what you should want. Lemme just shove my choices down your throat, for your own good."?
Even shorter version: It's called free will. Learn to live with it.
Hmm? I mean, thank you, I didn't think you cared, but how do you deduce that from what I wrote?
How is calling a BS argument BS, equivalent to being "heartless, selfish, cruel and without love for your fellow man"? Does a kind and selfless person rather say one should tax an unfairly demonized group, based on misconceptions and lack of data?
But generally, my biggest problem is, basically, bullshit. And all sorts of arguments boiling down to group A telling group B "not on MY money!" are bullshit when group A who isn't actually paying that money, but is actually receiving money from group B.
The image that comes to mind of someone going to a soup kitchen and, upon receiving their bowl, going "this is crap, for MY money, I want a steak!" Fuck off. You're not the one paying for it, you're someone receiving stuff that someone else paid for.
That goes for anti-smoking arguments, subsidized mid-west farmers going "not on MY money!" at the groups actually paying their subsidies,
Heh. Well, off the top of my head, also not easy on the eyes are:
- old people (Fuck off, Grandma, I came to the park to see young chicks.)
- ugly people (I actually went to school with someone whose face was strangely reminiscent of a skull.)
- people with bad makeup (Especially old ladies whose bad eyesight is probably why they look like they buried their face in half an inch of cream and powder.)
- people with bad fashion sense
- people with various medical problems ranging from bad cases of acne to physical deformities
Etc.
And that's not even counting those who are not easy on other senses like:
- smell (and I don't just mean the nerds who last used soap for Christmas, but also the kind of women that smells like she's been dunked in cheap perfume and stinks up the whole train car of that cheap perfume.)
- hearing (people who talk loudly, people whose MP3 player is turned up so loud you can hear it from 3 rows of seats away, or just the kind of idiot who screams "I'M ON A TRAIN! DO YOU HEAR ME?! ON A TRAIN! YES, TRAIN!" into their mobile phone)
Or who insult your intelligence with idiotic conspiracy theories, or with the crackpot idea that a work of fiction can be taken as proving the applicability of a social or economic model to the real world, or whatever idiocy, really.
I'd say tax them all, but then it dawns upon me that we're already taxing everyone, aren't we? :p
The costs and prevalence of diseases are still taken from actual insurance data. I'm not sure how that counts as "pulling numbers out of your ass". Much less how it would be less reliable than bare postulates that aren't supported by any numbers, which is what most political BS on the topic actually is like.
Working on either solutions or explanations before knowing if there is an actual problem, is called Tooth Fairy Science. You know, the kind where you figure the market value and profits/losses per tooth type, before even knowing if there is a Tooth Fairy.
In this case, last I've seen a study based on data from an actual health insurance company, it turned out that smokers and the obese actually cost LESS. Summary, for example, here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht-obese.1.9748884.html
I don't just mean on the total with pensions and all. Even just the healthcare taken separately, actually cost less. Why? Because they die earlier and need less medicine in the long run.
The problem is that you don't need the most care when you're 30. You need the most care when you're 70, and the latter is for decades if you prolong it.
The fat smokers need expensive chemotherapy or surgery for maybe a year, then die. That is, if they don't just keel over and die of a heart attack. If not the first time around, the second will get them. And that's that. While the guy who was fit and lean and never had any vices, if he lives to 100, will likely be on expensive anti-Alzheimer medication for two decades. Plus various other trips to the doctor as their body is barely functioning and getting worse by the year. The guys who died a horrible death in their 50's just saved you all those costs.
So, really, the smokers and obese actually subsidize healthcare for everyone else just by biting the dust earlier. And that's in addition to paying for a pension they won't get as much of, or at all. And subsidizing the government via tobacco taxes.
So, really, WTF? You'd think someone would at least say, "hey, thanks fatty" ;) The notion that, OMG, let's tax them some more 'cause they cost us money, is provably false, and fucking stupid too.
But it keeps happening because it's two overlapping groups of people who already feel bad and guilty about it, and have been amply proven to be easy to guilt trip some more into paying even more.
You know, I was just thinking how you'd teach a kid that they're not supposed to do that. And then I look at the whole "no consequences for actions" idea again, and I'm thinking... as opposed to what? As opposed to their just needing to not live under a rock to notice that there are no consequences if a few bankers cause yet another bubble, and they even get to congratulate themselves and give themselves millions of dollars each in bonuses for a job well done, just as the government is taxing everyone else to bail them out? Getting to watch them give interviews to the effect of, "the computer is to blame! We just fiddled with the parameters (e.g., risk percentage) until the computer gave us the answer we wanted (yep, give money to no-income no-job applicants), and then only did what the computer told us, so we're not to blame"... and still keep their lofty posts and bonuses in spite just having admitted that they're too fucking stupid to even be trusted to tie their own shoes, much less handle the world's finances? Watching CEOs getting paid tens of millions and actually get bonuses, for driving a company into the fucking ground and selling it at bargain basement prices? Yeah, great message about personal responsibility and consequences for actions that gives.
Oh, wait, stupid me... that's only for the rich enough guys, isn't it? If as a shitkicker from Bronx you drive your finances into the ground, you get the collection agency at your door. You have to be too big to fail to get bailed and get a bonus.
So here's my plan: any violent game will have to have the protagonist be a multi-billionaire. Iron Man and Batman are still ok to make games about because they're loaded. Guys like The Punisher or the Postal guy or the humble delivery guy from Fallout New Vegas are, sad to say, out. The next Duke Nukem instalment (which probably will happen around 2085;) will have to feature a Duke who inherited a bank. Or an actual duke. Actually the latter would work for the next The Elder Scrolls too. Or for that matter, just make a game where Scrooge McDuck is mowing down gangsters. Seeing him dive into a vault full of money should drive the point home that whatever stuff he gets away with, is totally not the kind of stuff you get away with.
That should work, right? :p
And I'm saying I'll take even that over something that looks like a cluster of tetrahedral crystals grown in random directions.
In all fairness, though, I can't imagine a lego version looking any worse than this :p
Have you RTFA, thought? Their examples of a generated dress left me thinking, "hey, cool, it's the stealth dress" ;) Actually even that's unfair, as stealth ships and planes may have all sorts of angles and polyhedra, but they don't get them jutting at seemingly random angles and positions.
I mean, seriously, the first dress looks like, umm, you're wearing some kind of mis-shapen backpack. As a dress, not on your back. The second is only marginally better.
And I mean, really, it's not just that they're made of triangles. So are the high-def models in the latest games and they don't look that bad. This thing looks like it made the dress out of 1 ft big triangles, and extrapolated the third dimension to basically some wildly random value. So you get pretty much a dress made of giant D4 dice (tetrahedrons), with random sized heights and jutting out at weird angles.
I'm not sure a model accurate to myself could be worse than that even if it caught me before having my morning coffee and shower.
Plus, if you're making a fashion dress, you probably wouldn't use me as a model, but one of the models such a fashion designer studio employs. And if you could actually take a 3d view and fit the dress to her body instead of producing what looks like random heights, that has to be a huge step forward.
... I think some of the fashion designers that made the news recently by posting some ads where they photoshopped some model into stick-figures -- or, for that matter, who made the news by firing a ridiculously thin model for being too fat for their fashion -- would pay good money for something like that. On second thought, wait a minute, if anyone could just run an XKCD strip through an app for the same effect, that would put them out of business ;)
Sadly, that's no longer practicable. If you started feeding bankers to some hungry lion, you'd have the PETA on your case ;)
Heh. *WHOOSH*
Now we know who can't read more than one sentence, eh? :p
The whole joke setup is that I start as if I were going to protest the executions, but then it turns out I was protesting the "instead of football" part. The "barbaric times" I was talking about were obviously those without football.
Of course, if you could read up to the third sentence, you'd already know that. So I doubt that this message will do any good either.
Now now... I know those guys are hated, and caused a global recession to line their pockets, and were giving themselves gigantic bonuses just as they were being bailed out by the government, and all, but that's no excuse to go back to barbaric times. Two wrongs don't make a right, ok? There's no reason to deprive the people of football for that.
Do what the Romans used to: have the executions at halftime :p
I think they don't have to bother all that much.
For a start, you can always play the "patriotism", "supporting the troops", "if you have nothing to hide", etc, cards and have idiots chest thump for your side of the story just to not, God forbid, come across as unpatriotic. Groupthink at its finest, really.
Or to quote Hermann Goering, "Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. ...voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
You've already seen it happen verbatim in the USA. If you're not for anything from war to no-fly lists to suspending habeas corpus and waterboarding suspects, you're unpatriotic and hating your country. Sound familiar?
And if you get enough idiots doing that group think, it turns out that far from being a part of the checks and balances, a large part of the press just joins in the propaganda. Just to not look unpatriotic to their viewers.
Net result: you don't have to pay 200 million for sock-puppeteers to post crap to every single site and brow-beat everyone who says otherwise. You get idiots doing it for free. Just, you know, to be "patriotic".
Second method, make it a party talking point. There'll be enough fanboys who just have to be, you know, fanboys. Same net effect.
Third, well, if you happen to be the party whose opinions suspiciously are those of the rich, and range from "let's take loans in a war so the rich can buy bigger yachts" to "let's have the poor pay more so the rich can buy bigger yachts", it turns out, those guys don't wait for the government to do their propaganda. They just pay their own lobby groups and "think tanks" and PR agencies and private armies of sockpuppeteers to do it for them.
Not that they'd mind it if your taxes went into paying for that, instead of their own money, but the latter is for now more reliable.
Fourth, be the party who lets one asshole gobble up almost all media. He'll sing you all the praises in the world... at least until he or maybe his successor figures out that he can just use that propaganda juggernaut to get himself elected instead of relying on others to get what he wants. See, Berlusconi.
... why your mom never was put on the candidates list by any party, much less elected, huh?
If you've read more than those two lines, you'll see that I did mention how most of them got good: by being apprentices to another artist, and helping churn commercial paintings or sculptures for those.
And for those cavemen, likely they weren't thinking they're making art for art sake either. Or even art at all. A lot of those cave paintings and venus figurines and totems and whatnot seem to be religious, or recording important historical events (from the narrow world horizon of that tribe) or myths, and the like. Most of them probably couldn't give two shits about expressing themselves and artistic vision and other such fancy ideas. Appeasing the spirits of the prey, or fertility amulets, or such practical purposes, would be a lot more important to a tribe whose life is centered around those and who is facing periodic episodes of severe starvation (because, for all they know, the spirits of the prey weren't appeased enough.)
Sorry to burst your bullshit bubble, but art for art sake, untainted by utilitarian or monetary or other practical interests, is far less common than you seem to think even in the modern day. And it certainly was even less common in ages when, as I was saying, you didn't have the luxury of getting a dole while you dick around pretending to be a true artist. For most people who ever lived, having something to eat for dinner was hit-and-miss even when working full time towards that end.
Even as we moved towards more well-off societies, a lot of the "art" was really religious and not primarily aesthetic or anything at all. Probably 99% of the art of ancient Egyptians, for example, was utilitarian, not just decoration, and probably the majority of it religious. When you find statues or murals, they're support for the Ka (soul) and painted to fit the soul rather than even represent the actual person, or memory aid for the deceased when they start their journey to the underworld, or spirit gates for the soul of the deceased to pass through, or the like. The few decorations for decoration sake are strictly for the nobles and priesthood, and paid for by the nobles and priesthood.
As for the artists who died broke... well, how about the smiths that died broke, or the builders that died broke, and the like? Do you have any indication that those _weren't_ trying to sell their work, as opposed to being unsuccessful at it? Especially for painters, it was more side effect of, basically, capitalism hitting that market instead of doing work by commission.
Ironically enough, a bunch of art we still have from, say, the Romans was essentially "No Trespassing" signs. Early Romans used to use a statue of Priapus with an enormous erect dick as just that. Often accompanied by a bit of poetry too, to remind would be thieves and trespassers that they're getting it in the ass if caught.
The Romans, see, were as practical as ever. They didn't mope and wish you ass-rape in prison, they'd just get the job done themselves. That's Romans for you. When they wanted something done, by Jupiter, they'd pull up their sleeves and their tunic and get the job done personally. It's no coincidence that such people built an Empire ;)
But at any rate, they placed images of Priapus near fences as some kind of "Trespassers will be prosec... err... fucked" sign, in some bars and shops as a reminder for would be shoplifters, and so on. It was the ubiquitous "don't even think about it" sign. Where nowadays you'd have a "no trespassing" sign or a "this store uses video surveillance" sign, you'd have the image of a guy with a giant erect dick.
So, yeah, even a no-trespassing sign can be art. We have a bunch of those in museums, even.
I'm certainly not limiting art to that. I'm just using those as clearly recognizable examples of famous artists, which, I hope, nobody is prepared to say "it's not art", although they did the exact same things quited as capital sins that make games not art. I could have used a more modern artist as an example, but then some snob _could_ say with a straight face "yeah, but that's not art either." I'm using Michelangelo, Titian and da Vinci to, basically, head them off at the pass. I don't think many from the snob segment are prepared to say "yeah, but Michelangelo isn't art" ;)
No, it's bullshit.
Almost all art ever made, was made to be sold and most of it was commissioned by some rich client.
Probably the best example is the Sistine Chapel. It wasn't done as some work of vision and love by Michelangelo. Michelangelo was good at painting, to be sure, but he considered it an inferior art form and he preferred sculpture. He only did that epic fresco because he was offered a shitload of money to do something he didn't like. I.e., he sold out. And even then he hid various FU-s at the pope's expense in it, sorta the renaissance painter's version of hiding a "fuck the pointy haired boss" comment in some obscure source file.
Is anyone prepared to say that that's not art, because it's commercial? WTF? When did that idiotic notion originate, anyway?
Art done as an industry, again, is as old as recorded history. There were plenty of professional sculptors and painters who did it as a full time job, and as their way of earning their bread. In fact, the vast majority of them were, by sheer virtue of living in poorer times when you didn't have the luxury of sitting around on the dole and creating art not tainted by commercialism.
Many made it into an extremely profitable trade, and were very much aware of money and of what the clients want. E.g., Titian is a prime example of that. He even diversified into grain trade in between painting masterpieces. Is anyone prepared to say that Titian isn't art? You know, THE fucking Titian?
Many had studios where they created a ton of paintings with apprentices. E.g., since I mentioned Titian already, he started as such an apprentice for Giorgione, and apparently quite a bit of Giorgione's art is now considered to be most certainly done by his apprentice Titian. And when he started working in his own name, Titian too in turn took such apprentices to help churn commercial art to be sold, e.g., copies of his earlier paintings.
He's not even the only one. Leonardo da Vinci is for example another guy who financed his other studies with selling art, started as a worker in such a painter's workshot, and later had one of his own. Mona Lisa, you know, THE famous painting, is heavily "photoshopped", or rather the renaissance equivalent of that: it appears that what was first painted was rounder face, and then he made her thinner and sexier. Presumably because that's what the paying customer wanted. And in the end it was used by Leonardo as basically a way to sell himself, as a sample of what quality shit he can paint. Is anyone prepared to say that Leonardo's stuff isn't art because he sold out? Or WTH?