Exactly, that's why runescape and world of warcraft have adopted the marxist game mechanic of automatically redistributing all resources and exp between all players at the end of every day.
That's funny that to you "turning off cheating" somehow becomes fully automated communism.
If I were a kid and there was some game where my one of my peers always won because their parents let them spend literally hundreds of dollars on advanced gear that would cost me months of gameplay hours, I wouldn't want to play it. The game's updates and design would probably drift towards rpping off that kid's parents instead of maximzing fun. For some people, this is already real life for them.
In WoW, if my peer has a rare sword, it's not because his mom bought it.
Warcraft is nearly a pure meritocracy. I might not have very much when I start, but there is a clear path that I can take to level up. In short, Warcraft is fair.
It is exactly that dynamic of actually being predictably rewarded for hard work that people are finding in these games.
Redistribution schemes may seem just but they are very seldom anything approaching fair. Its no surprise that they almost never appear in any game mechanics.
There is a debate, it's just not on the questions you're looking at.
Climate Change is by no means a 'settled' science, one of the most important questions scientists must answer is what the Climate Sensitivity is to CO2. There's a wide range of answers to this question by scientists, depending on which climate model you use, as well as many other factors.
The only debate is over the degree of how bad CO2 is, but we know it is 'bad enough' to be avoided. Whether it's really bad or just bad, we should move on to alternatives without that problem. As someone else said below, this is roughly like asking if there will be millions of climate refugees or billions?
Whether we are looking at 1.5C vs 8C is absolutely enormous in terms of what policies we should be looking to enact. Everything in this discussion is shrouded in a cloud of uncertainty due to the complexity of weather, and the thousands of negative and positive feedback loops which can take thousands of years to stabilize.
Popular science articles misrepresent the science and ignore the variance/complexity, in the end hurting the cause in the eyes of those who don't agree with the prescribed policies to address it.
> On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.
--Stephen Schneider in APS News, Aug/Sep 1996, p. 5 [0]
Note especially: "So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."
He necessarily implies that one must be dishonest in order to be "effective." This raises the question: effective at what? The answer is obvious: effecting their policy goals.
This raises other questions: If a policy goal requires dishonesty to garner public support, is it a worthy goal? Is it backed by sound reasoning and evidence?
Most importantly, why should the public trust such sweeping policy to a few people who have decided that they know better than everyone else, and are therefore entitled to lie to the uneducated masses, for their own good? Is that not authoritarian? Does not madness lie down this path, or are climate scientists immune to lapses in judgment and ethics and morals?
To be clear, I'm talking about this specific headline and trying to make a case for using the word "threshold" to capture attention. It's (mostly) a semantic issue. I do not advocate misstating scientific findings.
That's good to hear, because whether people want to admit it or not, journalists misreporting studies constantly is one of the reasons why trust has eroded.
> theoretically, everything could be reduced to physics
Is there a thing as free will, and if so, is it explainable in terms of physics? And with consciousness (if you believe there is such a thing)? Is morality and ethics reducible to physics as well? There's a lot of presuppositions to the statement that everything is reducible to some purely mechanical process.
I have no doubt that many serious people believe as you have stated, but it's not a self evidently true claim.
Right but randomly posting in a link to Veblen good on Wikipedia because it's one example of when raising prices doesn't lower demand doesn't mean it's in any way relevant to this discussion. Almost no one would argue that this kind of travel is a Veblen good.
Right. And in some cases, that would be apt, but here it's not because travel is almost never a Veblen good.
> unqualified assertion that raising prices lowers demand
An inverse relationship between price and demand is normal. Veblen goods are noteworthy precisely because they are exceptional. The demand of assertion, then, should fall on the poster of the Wikipedia link.
This article conveniently redefines the definition of blue collar work. By similar thinking, are typists, receptionists, data-entry folks all blue collar?
> Coal miners are really technology workers who get dirty
Really?
I even agree with the premise that were going to see an increase of 'trades' style programmers assuming a certain classification of programming jobs, but the article is sensationalized.
A lot of people in finance spend their entire life doing the same work over and over. Same goes for programming. There is more to work than years of experience. Though no doubt there is a correlation, not everyone gets better with age.
