Bay 12 Games Forum

I don't see why you present destroy the wind turbine as a bad solution. Getting rid of the problem entirely should be the goal. A violent revolution is one way to do it, and though peaceful reform would obviously be preferable, it certainly doesn't seem like it's going to happen any time soon.

I present it as a bad solution because I kinda' see violent revolution as something one wants pretty hard to freaking avoid. Murder, violence, and societal destabilization are all pretty g'damn huge negatives.

Or to put it another way, if you have to resort to violence someone's already fucked up huge somewhere in there. There's nothing positive to that, only an amelioration of present negative (if that, if you're lucky.).

No, what I was getting at was that it's fairly pointless to sit around insisting that "it would be better if" things were different without being willing to take action to make things better. If person A asserts that it would be better if he didn't get killed by a car...and person B gets out of the way of the oncoming car...who's going to get the better result?

You've made a statement of preference. Ok. That's fine. But making statements of preference is unproductive compared to gaining understanding of a situation and acting in a manner likely to produce desireable results.

The rest of the statement, LB. Discussion and communication is part of getting out of the way of the bloody car. Not only does it not preclude taking other action, it's part of the necessary action needed to enact change without overt violence. You can see the above why trying to do that can be considered a good thing.

Don't fly into turbines.

... did you just not read the bits above "What's your preferred solution"? Some don't have that option. What then?

Waffle fries. Mmmmm.

I seriously need to get around to learning to cook those

... lua's pretty easy to read, though, even for the non-matrix enabled.

This is the totality for the bit of code you were asking about, actually: No qualifiers for anything special, so it's just throwaway fluff. Until someone makes an addon fleshing it out, anyway

You can check out the whole thing in ...\data\chats\arena.lua. The .team file in ...\game\modules\ is mostly just a renamed zip file, you can open it up with pretty much any archival tool (winzip/rar, .7zip, etc.).

Quote from: Scelly9 on September 04, 2012, 12:26:33 pm

I have more of a problem with the bastards if they are wealthy. I'm not sure why, it just seems wrong.

Ahh....honesty. Thank you. This is very good. You have more of a problem with bastards when they happen to be rich. It's very healthy for you to be able to come to terms with that. Now...just ask yourself why you feel this way. You don't need to tell me, you don't need to try to explai it to bay12, but you, personally, in your own life will probably benefit from examining why you feel this way.

Is it for the reasons I suggested above? That on some level you believe that money is evil? Is there a religious motivation? "it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven." (Matthew 19-24) (Which, incidentally, is  mistranslation.) Did you grow up with parents who complained about rich people and that rubbed off onto you? What is it? And do these feelings negatively affect your life? Again...if on some level you feel that being rich is wrong...your own emotions will be working against you if you ever try to become rich yourself.

Can ignore the "just seems wrong" bit, but I definitely have more of a problem with bastards when they're wealthy, and it's not really a moral issue. It's because their wealth gives them a hell of a lot more power to inflict their bastardry upon other people. Jackass down the road you can punch out or avoid, jackass sitting on top of an inherited multi-billion dollar business can destroy your entire livelihood and your local area's economy and there's not shit you can do about it. That is a problem.

Money isn't a priori evil, but there's a morality to resource acquisition and use, and it's one that seems to be ignored by the wealthy to a disturbing degree -- mind you, it's ignored by almost everyone to degrees, but it seems to be worst among those who have horded the most. Even if you want to say "fuck it, hypocrisy" to the morality aspect, there's direct and observable issues regarding societal stability that occurs when these folks do what they do, and we don't want that -- no one does if they're thinking straight, unless there's something up with them that would normally make the general human population stick them into either a jail cell or a mental institution -- because it makes the situation worse for everyone in the long run.

Bigger problem is that the more numerous of the population is too moral to do the obvious thing, i.e. what DF players tend to do to particularly deleterious nobles. When these folks become a massive net malus on society, well, it's really time to get rid of them if you're going for maximizing personal, or even societal, benefit, or even minimizing detriment. Success isn't a problem, but wealth (cum resource) hording -- which you have to do to become the sort of wealthy we're mostly talking about -- is.

Quote from: scriver on September 04, 2012, 03:15:31 pm

For me, it depends on what they spend the money on. There is no way in hell I can ever
see buying, say, a golden diamond'd chandelier for several millions as something moral.

Why? What's "immoral" about gold/diamond chandeliers? Nobody is being harmed by such a purchase. What could possibly be "immoral" about using one's energies towards ends of one's own choosing in manners that cause no harm to others?

It's very dangerous ground to say that X is "wrong" because it's too decadent. Where do you draw the line? Wealth is relative. You're probably sitting in a nice chair in a house with a computer, yes? Somewhere in the world there's somebody who doesn't have any of those things and hasn't eaten in days. To them...you, your clothes, the food you eat, the car you drive....probably all seems fantastically decadent and rich beyond reason.

Hup. The problem is the bolded part. What we're seeing is that all that decadence is rarefying the resource situation; concentrating material power (via wealth, goods, etc., so forth) into an increasingly small percentage of the overall population. That is bad, from a moral perspective (they're basically stealing -- or if you prefer, obtaining a disproportionate amount of -- resources from the overall pool, which is immoral because it worsens the overall situation) and from a societal perspective (it's unsustainable and causes escalating social unrest, because the 'have-nots' grow larger). It's bad business, really.

But you don't see it that way.

Why should you expect someone else to see it that way just because they can casually buy a gold/diamond chandelier with the same casualness that you might buy a floral centerpiece for your kitchen table, or hanging bells for your backyard, or any other purely decorative thing you have around your house? None of these purchases are essential. They're all cosmetic. One is simply more expensive than the others, and the only difference between them is your own relative position as an observer.

Heeeyyy... I actually do harangue my family about buying useless decorative crap they could just make out of local flora, and don't buy it myself. No purchase is casual because I equate everything to food and that makes getting fancy crap considerably harder to justify: Useless bell thing could be two days worth of food. Even the decorative stuff my family does have, most of it we've been reusing for years, if not outright decades.

Quote from: Eagle_eye on September 04, 2012, 06:05:22 pm

As for my opinion on the wealthy; They're all bad people, or ignorant. If you allow people to starve, live in dirty hovels, and die of easily treatable diseases while you eat whatever you want, have multiple houses, and get a heart transplant when you're seventy, you are a terrible person and a parasite on society. I don't care how much of a contribution you make, noone has the right to put their own comfort over another's survival.

I see. So then, are you a terrible person?

Because I'm pretty sure there are some children starving in africa right now. Or if that's too far, there are still plenty of homeless in america. There are probably people in your home city right this very moment who are going hungry.

Why are you not helping them? Why are you sitting in the comfort of your chair reading posts on bay12 rather than helping those people meet their survival needs? You could. You could sell your chair and sit on a box. You could stop buying starbucks coffee every day. You probably don't really need an iphone. You could sell your car and take the bus.

Hey, if there was a bus to take I damn sure would be taking it. I don't actually own a chair and haven't had use for one in a long time; computer goes on the floor or the bed, and if people would stop giving me the latter I'd be sleeping on the floor. Have a computer only because it's pretty necessary for what I do (and considerably cheaper than trying to go about it non-digital), and even then I've been subsisting on many-years out of date computers for over a decade now. I drink mostly water, and only get more expensive stuff when it's on sale. I volunteer, and help out with local education programs (largely via aiding my mother, who's an adult educator and active in the local education system). My luxury bits are almost entirely only indulged in to a point that keeps me sane, and no further.

All of these things are "comforts" that you choose instead of helping homeless, starving people.

Are you a terrible person?

I'm definitely not as moral an individual as I could be, and the fact that I don't actively campaign and dedicate my life to preventing the existence of the homeless and the starving is a strong part of that. I am, indeed, an immoral actor by aiding and abetting a system that is categorically causing terrible things. I call myself on it regularly, and welcome anyone else to do the same -- it's nothing but flat truth.

Oh, you're not? Ok, well...if you made $10,000/yr more than you do right now, and spent that money on a nicer car, better food, and presents for your girlfriend...then would be a terrible person? Oh, still no? Ok...$20,000? $100,000? Where's the line? At what point does one suddenly become a "terrible person" for spending one's money on one's self rather than others?

There is no line.

Yeah, except there is. It's when the practice, especially writ large, starts quantifiably worsening the lives of other people, especially in excess of what benefit it supplies -- utilitarianism buggers up a lot of things, but it's still a damn good measure to judge some things by. This is a good place for it, I'd say.

Right now, odds are good that you're fantastically wealthy by the standards of a large portion of the world. You have food. You have clean water. You live in a house. You probably own a car. Much of the world doesn't have these things. Even in your own city there are probably starving homeless people who don't have these things.

But you don't perceive yourself as being rich. And you probably feel you deserve the things you have. Maybe you feel you deserve a little better than what you have. Well, guess what? People with more money than you feel the same, and there's no magic, arbitrary point of "I have X, and therefore I'm now bad if I don't give my money away."

Yeah, frankly I do consider myself and a large portion of my people to be sincerely frakking immoral bastards because of what the states have been doing to the rest of the world and how we handle the wealth we have, and to the extent I'm able to (which isn't nearly as much as I'd like, because I'm in a pretty poor situation myself, and teetering toward getting into a worse one) I do what I can to counteract that -- problem being I'm a poor sumbitch and don't have much in the way of force projection, so to speak. I don't feel I deserve what I have, I am fully cognizant that I'm a rich whoreson compared to most of the world, and while I'd like a bit better in some ways, I damn sure don't think I deserve it. Pretty much any benefit that comes to me in the future and is mine in the present is built at least as much on the suffering of others as it is on anything else.

I'll agree there's not a magic arbitrary point where your line becomes a true thing, but there is a line after which misusing the resources you've accrued becomes a net malus that outstrips the benefits you may have managed to generate while accruing them. If you'd prefer we use a different word than immoral for that, I'd welcome one, heh.

Power is power. Money is merely one form of power. Power is not inherently evil. I can already imagine some of you reading this and angrily concluding that I'm suggesting that you should run out and go stomp on everyone else to get ahead. If that's really the message you're getting out of this, you're totally missing the point.

Power is not evil. It's ok to have power. If that power takes the form of money, so be it. People who have power...have power. And that's it. There's no "...and they're evil." There's no "...and they should give that power away." They just "...have power." And that's ok.

And if you want to have power, that's ok too. Maybe you don't know how to get power. That's ok. Maybe some people had an easier time getting power, or were given their power through family circumstances or luck. That's all ok. Winning the lottery would not make someone evil. Being born into wealth doesn't make them evil either.

I advise you all to let go of the emotional baggage you have about money. It's not helping you.

Largely agree here, though. I don't have any problems with power qua power; it's a resource like any other. The problem is how the power's being used. When I have issues with the wealthy, it's not with the fact that they have power, it's with the fact that many of them are horrifically misusing it to the plain and obvious detriment of many, many other people. That? That pisses me off, and worse, it causes a gradual (usually -- sometimes it's damn quick) destabilization of the society that it's being inflicted on. I'll admit I have trouble seeing how that can be construed as anything but a negative thing. Bad, if you will.

... isn't that still pretty terrible odds, on the net?

Find somewhere local to volunteer? There's usually something or another beneficial that could use an extra hand gratis, and it tends to make your resume a little better looking. Also, possibly doing a good thing.

Yeah... it's a pretty messed up thing to say, and I definitely realize it, but I do actually support sterilizing people that have a high chance of passing on certain genetic diseases, at least until we can gene-engineer them away. Frankly, there's some shit that if you're willing to risk passing it on to your kid, you need parenting privilege revoked, flat out. I'm not quite sure if it's something I'd criminalize (breeding when you've got over X percent -- 15, 20? Odds need to be a damn sight lower than one in ten or one in five before it's an acceptable risk), but I'd be pretty close to accepting that, too. There are levels of risk to reproduction that, if a person is willing to give it a go anyway, immoral is the kindest of words of them. And not knowing the risk beforehand...? In some ways, that's even worse.

It'd not something I'd have on the "the list", so to speak, but on a personal level one of the major reasons I'm not going to have children is because my family has a very strong history of depression and related mental illness. I'd consider myself a monster if I risked inflicting that on another human being Now, adoption? That's a possibility, but I'm getting m'self physically sterilized as soon as I have the income to afford the operation.

It would be nice if we had an easier and more reliable on/off switch for that, though, for both genders. We're probably working on it, somewhere or another.

Helluva' derail, though.

But society cannot function using need as its sole means of valuation; it leads to hate as all you create is taken away because someone else needs it.

Largely bullshit, sorry. Needs are a fairly small subset of all we produce, and we as-a-species are more than capable of providing for our needs far above and beyond what we currently require. Even with limiting yourself to, say, the US, it's entirely possible to produce what we need to feed, shelter, and care for our population and still have a tre-freaking-mendous mountain of leftover productivity -- it is a small fraction of all that we create that would taken for someone else, if we decided such a project was worth it. But we don't, because