If Marx is correct, socialism will develop into communism. If he is not, then another system will develop based on the political interactions of the people involved. Communism was a reasonable conceptual framework in an industrial economy that was still scarcity-based; a post-scarcity, low-labor society where the constraints are on housing and threats to sustainability, esp. when micro- and nano-fabrication becomes ubiquitous and marginal costs for producing objects drop to near-zero are too far off of Marx's radar to use his framework uncritically, The main insight that I maintain from Marx is the one I allude to above: that the division between Homo Economicus and Zoon Politikon is an artificial one convenient mostly to those who dominate economically.
That is actually less true than you think. Many people work, hard, even though they don't need to. But while there will always be work to be done, we need to transition away from thinking that everyone needs to work: there are many people who should be paid *not* to work.
Socialism is not necessarily the coordination of all economic activity by a centralized national state. It is the end of the artificial distinction between political citizenship (where we have rights, and everyone is equal) and economic function (where you have no real rights except the "right" to compete, and we are not equal.) This artificial distinction was useful for a time, but I believe it has outlived its usefulness.
Many of us on the left have long argued that socialism was the only way to deal with the consequences of rising productivity and automation: that in a world in which we have permanently moved beyond labor scarcity, the current system is unworkable.
Indie devs aren't poo-pooing Portal or Portal 2, which is incredibly successful. They aren't poo-pooing Rock Band, or Little Big Planet, or even L.A. Noire. They are poo-pooing FPS-of-the-month tedious clones. I am reading what the man is saying, and holding him accountable for it.
Well, I'm glad that the game worked for you. It's not like I need coherent fictions in all my games: I'm fine with the mysterious design of Mario World, the weird botany of its fungi, etc. Doom 1 (and Quakes 1 and 2) worked for me. But stylistic/expressionist elements aside, I - and a lot of others, apparently - found the visuals inconsistent with world design in Doom 3 and others of its ilk. High graphic fidelity, esp. with naturalistic grit (a la Gears of War) makes some claim on us that we think we're in a "world" of some kind, not just in a playground with funny doodles. The sense of fantastic dread and suspense vanished quickly for me, and what was left was boring.
I think this should tell game designers something.
Also, not sure where the so-called personal attack came. (The "I almost collapsed" should be "It almost collapsed" in my OP - is that what you interpreted as an attack?)
Just because Keynsianism is correct doesn't mean that 1. there isn't still a Laffer curve, or 2. it's impossible to spend yourself into the shitter. But there is a lot of room between not using tax money to do anything risky outside of national defense and being-Greece.
Although you have a limited point that there's a certain amount of "shut up, it's just a game" that's necessary, if you're going to be spending thousands and thousands of dollars to be visually realistic, why then break the illusion with elephant-in-the-living-room absurdities? The amount of disbelief required couldn't be suspended with a forklift.
Also, Portal 2 actually makes sense: they're all tests, remember?
The vast majority of indie games are bad, given. That's because there is no distinction between a prototype and a finished project: it's a fail-early-and-often-until-you-get-it-right sort of thing. The nice thing about indie games is that there aren't huge marketing campaigns trying to get you to play the games that suck, and a lot of the indie designers will even admit that many of their own games sucked (but were valuable for trying out ideas or even just learning basic techniques.)
I will disagree with you on the record of the majors, though: almost every great, innovative title from a major publisher swims in a sea of predictable, boring crap.
His rant is really petty. Essentially, he's butthurt that people actually are designing games with higher artistic (and conceptual) goals in mind than just pushing the graphical power of another FPS, and he's taking it personally that they find his games boring. The "snootiness" that Carmack detects is a by-product of his commitment to commercial games. Well, John, you can console yourself with the money you get for the "value" that your are bringing, making your product. You chose your road, live with it, and let people who have other ambitions do what they do.
It is actually another chapter in the are-games-art saga: Carmack is one of those generation of game designers who were artistically unsophisticated, yet craved the credibility of "art." Now that sophisticated game designers are doing stuff, Carmack is perplexed that his stuff isn't getting past the velvet rope. Even though "games are art" now, it doesn't mean the games that old-school gamers liked are going to cut it as good art.
I think that if the state of Massachusetts is OK with a few false positives, it should be OK with paying out a few tens of thousands of dollars each time a false positive dramatically inconveniences someone.
Remember when Google said, "oh, you know that offline support for Gmail and Google Docs? We're stopping it. Should have something to replace it in a few months."
An IT manager that went with a Chromebook solution for their business in that situation would be calling themselves a "consultant" and trying to sell hand-woven laptop cozies on Etsy today.
Cloud works if you are running your own cloud. A thin client to enterprise-hosted virtual PCs and web apps? Maybe. A thin client to... the web? For business? Nuh uh.
Wars are generally fought for resources, especially land. "Religion" is just one of the features by which different ethnos and cultures differentiate themselves from each other. When there is no conflict over resources, religions seldom fight. When two different power-groups/ethnicities/polities are struggling over a resource, religion seldom matters.
The Nazis were generally Christian (both Protestant and Catholic) and invaded Christian countries. Some of the most violent wars of the 19th century were fought in Latin America with Catholics on all sides (the War of the Triple Alliance killed about 90% of Paraguay's male population.) Religion was not a factor in Japan's Imperial expansion - they weren't trying to convert anyone to Shintoism, even if state Shintoism was used as a way of reinforcing national identity.
Your mistake is that you think that religion has always been separate from culture and politics: the idea of "a religion" as something distinct is a recent one, so in pre-modern conflict - the expansion of Islam, for example - you might think that "religion" was the motivation. It seldom was.
That's why we're not a pure democracy but a republic.
Individual people might be smart, but crowds are reactive, mirroring and stupid.
Oh, God, not this again.
The US is a democratic (people get to vote for their representatives and some other things) republic (the country belongs to the people, not to a monarch.) The UK is a democratic monarchy: technically, the country "belongs" to the crown. North Korea is a non-democratic republic. Got it?
Slashdot Mirror
If Marx is correct, socialism will develop into communism. If he is not, then another system will develop based on the political interactions of the people involved. Communism was a reasonable conceptual framework in an industrial economy that was still scarcity-based; a post-scarcity, low-labor society where the constraints are on housing and threats to sustainability, esp. when micro- and nano-fabrication becomes ubiquitous and marginal costs for producing objects drop to near-zero are too far off of Marx's radar to use his framework uncritically, The main insight that I maintain from Marx is the one I allude to above: that the division between Homo Economicus and Zoon Politikon is an artificial one convenient mostly to those who dominate economically.
Lotteries are played by most people as entertainment, not as investments.
But aren't things in Russia shoddier now than they were during the USSR? Most every Russian over the age of 40 I know seems to think so.
That is actually less true than you think. Many people work, hard, even though they don't need to. But while there will always be work to be done, we need to transition away from thinking that everyone needs to work: there are many people who should be paid *not* to work.
Socialism is not necessarily the coordination of all economic activity by a centralized national state. It is the end of the artificial distinction between political citizenship (where we have rights, and everyone is equal) and economic function (where you have no real rights except the "right" to compete, and we are not equal.) This artificial distinction was useful for a time, but I believe it has outlived its usefulness.
Many of us on the left have long argued that socialism was the only way to deal with the consequences of rising productivity and automation: that in a world in which we have permanently moved beyond labor scarcity, the current system is unworkable.
I hate the word "hubby". It's the linguistic equivalent of shopping for groceries in slippers and a mumu.
Indie devs aren't poo-pooing Portal or Portal 2, which is incredibly successful. They aren't poo-pooing Rock Band, or Little Big Planet, or even L.A. Noire. They are poo-pooing FPS-of-the-month tedious clones. I am reading what the man is saying, and holding him accountable for it.
Well, I'm glad that the game worked for you. It's not like I need coherent fictions in all my games: I'm fine with the mysterious design of Mario World, the weird botany of its fungi, etc. Doom 1 (and Quakes 1 and 2) worked for me. But stylistic/expressionist elements aside, I - and a lot of others, apparently - found the visuals inconsistent with world design in Doom 3 and others of its ilk. High graphic fidelity, esp. with naturalistic grit (a la Gears of War) makes some claim on us that we think we're in a "world" of some kind, not just in a playground with funny doodles. The sense of fantastic dread and suspense vanished quickly for me, and what was left was boring.
I think this should tell game designers something.
Also, not sure where the so-called personal attack came. (The "I almost collapsed" should be "It almost collapsed" in my OP - is that what you interpreted as an attack?)
Just because Keynsianism is correct doesn't mean that 1. there isn't still a Laffer curve, or 2. it's impossible to spend yourself into the shitter. But there is a lot of room between not using tax money to do anything risky outside of national defense and being-Greece.
Although you have a limited point that there's a certain amount of "shut up, it's just a game" that's necessary, if you're going to be spending thousands and thousands of dollars to be visually realistic, why then break the illusion with elephant-in-the-living-room absurdities? The amount of disbelief required couldn't be suspended with a forklift.
Also, Portal 2 actually makes sense: they're all tests, remember?
The vast majority of indie games are bad, given. That's because there is no distinction between a prototype and a finished project: it's a fail-early-and-often-until-you-get-it-right sort of thing. The nice thing about indie games is that there aren't huge marketing campaigns trying to get you to play the games that suck, and a lot of the indie designers will even admit that many of their own games sucked (but were valuable for trying out ideas or even just learning basic techniques.)
I will disagree with you on the record of the majors, though: almost every great, innovative title from a major publisher swims in a sea of predictable, boring crap.
Actually, it sounds like Carmack is whining, and the indie developers are just making games. Which don't suck and aren't boring.
The argument "the market has spoken" applies also to McDonald's, Microsoft and tract housing.
His rant is really petty. Essentially, he's butthurt that people actually are designing games with higher artistic (and conceptual) goals in mind than just pushing the graphical power of another FPS, and he's taking it personally that they find his games boring. The "snootiness" that Carmack detects is a by-product of his commitment to commercial games. Well, John, you can console yourself with the money you get for the "value" that your are bringing, making your product. You chose your road, live with it, and let people who have other ambitions do what they do.
It is actually another chapter in the are-games-art saga: Carmack is one of those generation of game designers who were artistically unsophisticated, yet craved the credibility of "art." Now that sophisticated game designers are doing stuff, Carmack is perplexed that his stuff isn't getting past the velvet rope. Even though "games are art" now, it doesn't mean the games that old-school gamers liked are going to cut it as good art.
The problem is that Keynesianism has been around for so long, people have forgotten what capitalism was like without it.
It was nasty. It was unstable. I almost collapsed several times.
Just before Christmas was had a massive hail storm (some as big as cricket balls)
I've tried to determine how big cricket balls are, but the little critters just wouldn't sit still long enough.
I think that if the state of Massachusetts is OK with a few false positives, it should be OK with paying out a few tens of thousands of dollars each time a false positive dramatically inconveniences someone.
Unfortunately, Netflix doesn't run on Chromebooks yet.
Remember when Google said, "oh, you know that offline support for Gmail and Google Docs? We're stopping it. Should have something to replace it in a few months."
An IT manager that went with a Chromebook solution for their business in that situation would be calling themselves a "consultant" and trying to sell hand-woven laptop cozies on Etsy today.
Cloud works if you are running your own cloud. A thin client to enterprise-hosted virtual PCs and web apps? Maybe. A thin client to... the web? For business? Nuh uh.
It won't run Netflix yet. It doesn't do java or the (admittedly about to be deprecated) silverlight. It really doesn't do all the web.
I was on the CR-48 pilot. ChromeOS is a nice thought experiment, but... no. This one is going down with Google Wave and Google TV.
I'm an atheist, but: it's simply not true.
Wars are generally fought for resources, especially land. "Religion" is just one of the features by which different ethnos and cultures differentiate themselves from each other. When there is no conflict over resources, religions seldom fight. When two different power-groups/ethnicities/polities are struggling over a resource, religion seldom matters.
The Nazis were generally Christian (both Protestant and Catholic) and invaded Christian countries. Some of the most violent wars of the 19th century were fought in Latin America with Catholics on all sides (the War of the Triple Alliance killed about 90% of Paraguay's male population.) Religion was not a factor in Japan's Imperial expansion - they weren't trying to convert anyone to Shintoism, even if state Shintoism was used as a way of reinforcing national identity.
Your mistake is that you think that religion has always been separate from culture and politics: the idea of "a religion" as something distinct is a recent one, so in pre-modern conflict - the expansion of Islam, for example - you might think that "religion" was the motivation. It seldom was.
That's why we're not a pure democracy but a republic.
Individual people might be smart, but crowds are reactive, mirroring and stupid.
Oh, God, not this again.
The US is a democratic (people get to vote for their representatives and some other things) republic (the country belongs to the people, not to a monarch.) The UK is a democratic monarchy: technically, the country "belongs" to the crown. North Korea is a non-democratic republic. Got it?
As a dilettante gadget consumer with a 4-digit user ID, I resent that.
Or Newt Gingrich, Mark Foley, Ted Haggard and Larry Craig extolling traditional family values.