MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
20d ago
I generally think time limits are bad in games, with a few exceptions. The fundamental problem is that it's a threat. It's a threat that, if you do poorly, you're going to have to restart the entire game from scratch. Like a final boss that, if it kills you, deletes your save file (though less volatile). I don't want to get 90% of the way through a 20 hour game only to have to start over from scratch. I rarely play games a second time unless they are exceptionally good, I'm not replaying the entirety of your game over again just because I wasn't quite good enough the first time.
The main exception I have to this is if there's meta-progression, like in Roguelites, or like Dead Rising. If you've got a 1-2 hour turn around, and I unlock new stuff every time, and the entire game is built around randomized content so it's not just the same thing again, then we're good. Or like in Dead Rising if I get stronger and it's basically a new game plus where I can solve all the problems that happened the first time around there's wayyy less risk of failing the second time around, I can take that. What I don't want is the game to tell me that the last 20 hours of play time were pointless and none of it counts for anything.
That said, I didn't have to replay Pikmin 1, because I didn't fail. If the time limit is generous enough then the majority of players don't run afoul of it. The threat looms in the background, but isn't implemented. If it's set just right then it creates stakes and pressure: the player has to act strategically and not mess up and get their party slaughtered too many times or it'll take too long to repopulate, so it feels more important to perform well. But if it's too generous then players don't feel this pressure and the time limit might as well not even exist. But Pikmin 2 was able to have a lot more content in part because of the lack of a time limit: you can keep playing the game after you "beat" it and go explore and get every last piece of treasure because there's nothing stopping you from continuing to play.
I have not yet played Pikmin 3 or 4, so I can't comment on it there, though I intend to eventually. I anticipate that the time limit in 3 will either be obnoxious if its strict, or superfluous if it's easy. There's very rarely middle ground.
MathWizard
Good things are good
23d ago
That never held water. All people, regardless of their sex or sexual orientation, can marry someone of the opposite sex of any sexual orientation. Gay men are just as free and equally allowed to marry a woman as any straight man. If the gay man doesn't want to marry a woman, that's his choice, but he's legally allowed to.
And pretty much all of the equality under the law anti-discrimination stuff has carveouts for compelling state interests. Like, say, bearing and raising children and ensuring the survival of the species.
Telling gay people that it's illegal to have sex with each other would be one thing: the state intervening in a place where it has little compelling interest or jurisdiction (an argument could be made about preventing the spread of STDs, but it's weak, and promiscuous straight people do that too). But marriage, at least from a legal perspective, is a privilege the state recognizes for people to incentivize the formation of healthy and stable families, which gay people do not do. Arguing it's "equal protection under the law" is like arguing that childless people should get the same tax deductions and/or welfare aid as people with seven children because otherwise you're discriminating against the childless.
MathWizard
Good things are good
25d ago
Treating people kindly and with love and trust is always the solution to any is-ought problem in any culture I've been to because it absolves yourself of the guilt of having acted unkindly or unlovingly and if someone interprets it incorrectly it is not because your underlying intentions were wrong.
This is only true if you tautologically define the term "kindly and with love and trust" to contain all of the complexities and nuances of the broader "is-ought".
Is it kind, loving, and trustful to lock your house or your car? Well, it's kind to the people inside the house, less kind to the thieves that want your stuff.
Is it kind, loving, and trustful to guard your wallet from pickpockets in a crime-ridden area and stop one if you catch them mid-theft?
Is it kind, loving, and trustful to punish someone for a crime? You can argue that it's kind to the victim, but unkind to the perpetrator being punished. Or you can make a complicated argument about how it's ultimately "kind and loving" to the perpetrator because the punishment will help them learn the error of their ways and become a better person which will ultimately be for their own good.
I'm not saying generally acting with kindness, love, and trust is wrong. They're good guidelines when to look to when trying to ground your decisions, but those words alone do not automatically solve all of the potential ethical dilemmas and tradeoffs inherent to the complexity of the real world.
MathWizard
Good things are good
27d ago
How easy is it to smuggle a nuke, and how long would it remain viable once smuggled?
My impression of nuclear prevention and watchfulness is that it takes a lot of science and infrastructure to refine uranium into a usable state for weapons, and you can't really build all of that stuff without a lot of commotion that foreign powers will notice.
But lots of nations already have all of that infrastructure, and the country wanting nukes only needs the end product. If country A without nukes allied with country B with nukes, would country B be able to use their own infrastructure to do most of the work and then secretly pass them enough weapons grade uranium and/or assembled nuclear warheads to stick into missiles that everyone else thinks are non-nuclear? And then several years later when it became relevant they announce "Tada! We have nukes!"
Or would this be immediately caught while happening and result in massive international penalties for countries A and or B?
MathWizard
Good things are good
27d ago
The ideal temperature for human comfort is around 20C, which is why people set their thermostats around there. Anyone setting their thermostats to anything meaningfully distant from ~20C is doing it to save money. If you're outdoors, you maybe want a bit more if it's windy, or a bit less if it's sunny or you're doing a lot of physical activity, but you want the sum of all effects to average you back so your individual subjective feeling is around 20C.
Whatever combination of sunny/cloudy/rainy gets you closer to 20C is the ideal weather for your region.
MathWizard
Good things are good
29d ago
On an economic level, I agree. This is a very very hard problem. In the case of orphans, you can resolve it by sending them to foster families or other forms of government housing instead of just handing a check to reward every kid that runs away from home. The state still pays lots of money, but the kids don't directly benefit because they get substitute parents instead of just money. But you can't really do that with single parents. You can't realistically assist single mothers with state-funded foster-fathers who come and act as the missing parent for the kid. Because she's an adult and has rights, there's a lot less coercion and control that you can't use to force compliance in the same way you can with a runaway teen (and if you tried it would turn out horribly dystopian). So we're kind of stuck handing out checks and trying to make them exactly the right size: not too small or the kids suffer poverty and neglect, not too large or the mothers have more kids and avoid marriage.
On a social level, there is so much more we could be doing to incentivize marriage. Stay at home mothers used to get respect and praise for their parenting. Single mothers used to be shamed and looked down on. Now we do the opposite. People respond to economic incentives, but they also respond to social ones too. Even if money incentivizes more single mothers, turning the dial on the social pressures in the opposite direction could help mitigate this.
MathWizard
Good things are good
29d ago
Do you believe that it's actually truly subjective? As in, it's okay for someone to kill someone else as long as they don't consider the victim to be a person? There's absolutely nothing wrong with people slaughtering "non-persons" as long as the non-person is sincerely believed by the slaughterers, and if people go around doing that you will have no complaints?
Or do you perhaps have a more nuanced and less genocidal belief about personhood grounded by something beyond mere subjectivity?
MathWizard
Good things are good
29d ago
Framing things in terms of "pro-single-mother" vs "anti-single-mother" makes about as much sense as being "pro-orphan" or "anti-orphan". You can believe that a situation is bad to be in and therefore want to help people who happen to be in that situation AND try to prevent people from falling into that situation AND not Goodhart the numbers by killing them.
DO: Help kids with no parents with money and support structures (without actively incentivizing the status)
DO: Try to prevent people from becoming orphans.
DON'T: Reduce the number of orphans by killing them
Really, a child of a single parent is just a half-orphan. Therefore
DO: Help single parent families with money and support structures (without actively incentivizing the status)
DO: Try to prevent people from becoming single-parents.
DON'T: Reduce the number of single-parents by killing them (or the children)
All of this follows trivially from the quality of life the child can expect, on average, in each state:
Full family > Single Parent Family > Orphan > Death
Whether you want more or fewer single parent families then depends on which direction you're coming from. Trying to pin people down into "pro" or "anti" single parents only makes sense if these were terminal ends rather than proxies for quality of life.
MathWizard
Good things are good
29d ago
A good rule of thumb to predict a pro-life person's opinion on something is to mentally replace the fetus with a 1 week old (post birth) baby. Or, if you don't think babies should have rights either, maybe a two or three year old. That is the logical implication of believing fetuses are people.
Would you have sympathy for a mother who killed her 1 week old baby because her husband committed suicide? Would that sympathy extend far enough to excuse the act?
Is $200k the limit on the amount that Keith's insurance would cover? If not then Keith is entirely in the right here, and the bankruptcy judge should not have required the limit of 200k in the first place. There's no reason the amount should have been relevant for this ruling except if it would be dis-chargeable via the bankruptcy.
If it is the insurance limit then the best outcome would be the $1.6 M being the official amount awarded and the $1.4 M being retroactively discharged by the bankruptcy.
It's unfortunate that the laws aren't smart enough to do the obvious thing.
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