I honestly don't think XKCD is funny. What're some opinions you have that usually get you downvoted to oblivion?

drakeblood4 · 2012-05-25T20:52:35.346216+00:00

Reposting old content and jokes and memes is bad. It's bad for the quality of the site and it waters down the community. There was even a time when this was the consensus of most redditors. But that changed around the time of the Digg redesign (not saying it was all diggers, but I believe it was around that time.)

YouWantMyBacon · 2012-05-25T04:49:45.270651+00:00

I had to click away. That could be a setup for the most horrifying screamface ever.

HouseSpeaker · 1 day

I am very surprised that you responded with a comment I agree with. I agree: spending as a % of GDP needs to go down from what it currently is, and revenue needs to go up.

Fortunately, if GDP grows (which it will) and spending remains stable that by itself will reduce spending as a percentage of GDP. Secondly, because of the financial crisis a large part of the spending increase came from automatic stabilizers like unemployment and food stamps that kicked in not becamse Obama signed a law, but because people lost their jobs and availed themselves of existing programs. If we do nothing, the budget balances in eight years.

If you really want to blame someone for our deficits, blame the ratings agencies that issued fraudulent ratings to junk securities, instigating a one-in-a-generation financial crisis.

Anomaly100 · 1 day

You also found Joe Lieberman delivered a keynote speech at the republican national convention. Would you also argue that was a bipartisan event based on him attending?

Yes.

WTF? That just means your definition of bipartisan is so watered down as to be meaningless.

HouseSpeaker · 1 day

Historically we've always been running up deficits. And since we're talking about federal deficits perhaps we should talk about federal revenue which is at 15.4% of GDP. Historically, we've needed more than that to maintain surplusses:

the last five times the budget was in surplus (in 1969, 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001), revenue was near 20 percent of GDP

Again, it's only at 15.4% of GDP now. Federal revenue is too low, not too high.

HouseSpeaker · 1 day

I love how they're "my" estimates, even though they're the numbers used by (to name a few) Congress, the president, the Tax Policy Center and the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Secondly, how is that estimate unreasonable? GDP growth is at 2.2% now, but many expect it to be to be 2.5% for the full year and 2.9% next year. And CBO's forecast isn't based on todays growth, but rather a span of time that goes out to 2019.

And I'm not even sure how relevant that is to health reform's savings in the first place because its revenue isn't directly dependent on GDP but on savings derived from specfic things such as ending Medicare Advantage overpayments, and taxes on specific aspects of the health care industry- an industry everyone accepts is going to continue to grow. If GDP grows too slowly it's not like Medicare Advantage payments will awake from the dead and claim the revenue set aside for the ACA.

And the larger point, the central point is that we're haggling over the degree of savings, whereas the parent commenter wasn't even acknowledging that any savings existed to counterbalance new spending.

HouseSpeaker · 1 day

Obama has committed to spend a lot more money due in part to the heathcare law that he pushed for

How are there this many replies, with no one pointing out this claim is dead wrong? The claim above is dead wrong. The CBO estimated that the health care bill reduces the deficit. Reduces, not increases. It doesn't increase deficits because it reduces spending on other things to compensate.

Sugar_Skull · 2 days

Seriously? A nurse would be concerned enough to protect his privacy but not his life? And I don't believe a single person said anything about wanting to watch a kid die.

The most likely explanation is that she was simply not competent enough to recognize the gravity of the circumstances, thinking either that what was happening was not dangerous enough to merit response or perhaps was being exagerrated by the student.

In school context where the daily grind is characterized by constant student agitation against the schools authority in all of its form it would not at all surprise me if locking the door was her own petty way of maintaining control over the situation.

Sugar_Skull · 2 days

Is it really school proceduce to lock the door when a kid goes unconcious from an athsma attack?

Colin_Oscar_P · 2 days

I don't know which is better- the fact that you've basically curled up in a fetal position screaming insults at me, or the fact that you're not even trying any more to touch the subject with a 40 ft pole.

Listen. I've been clearly acknowledging the complexity of cancer research since my very first comment. The fact that it only just got through your head after all this time is no ones fault but your own. Don't sleepwalk through the conversation next time.

josefjohann · 3 days

I've played each of those, except MotB. I'll keep it in mind.

Colin_Oscar_P · 3 days

Heaping insult upon insult isn't going to make the valid point go away.

The author quoted others as saying there will never be a cure for cancer, not that he thinks that.

I hesitate to even grace this with a response, but obviously the author included it because it contributed to a point he intended on making. That's why he included it in the comic in the first place. So my point stands.

The rest is just you trying to wrestle a straw man to the ground. I said in my previous comment:

I will not be surprised if I have to continue clearly acknowledging it in the face of erroneous comments that I don't appreciate the complexity.

And then, as if on cue, you did exactly what I thought you would:

because "cancer" is too many different things that calling the different treatments a "cure" would be inaccurate, but since you're clearly retarded I can understand how you might miss that nuance.

You know, it's funny. Because I just watched Dr. David Agus' google talk on The End of Illness. His major point is that illnesses should be thought of as verbs, not nouns. You're cancering, you're heart diseasing. That health should be thought of as massive complex systems with multiple moving parts, not indivdual things that can be diagnosed, paired with a single drug, and then solved. I've even tweeted links to his talk and am putting together an AMA request to get him to talk more about his book. His perspective is, taking this big picture view is precisely how we can bring these illnesses to an end.

So it's always amusing to see mr. Random Joe Internet come up to me, confident as can be, and yell at me about how I supposedly don't understand something that I've in fact been thinking about quite explicitly on my own time.

Inferring impossibility from complexity is antithetical to the spirit of science. That's still going to be true no matter how many times you insult me.

Now this is the part where you try and tell me I don't realize cancer is multiple things.

josefjohann · 3 days

It's not that games based on the modern world are unoriginal per se- the gameplay, the art, the depiction of landscapes, the story, how they all come together, can all be highly original.

I seek to exclude "modern world" games from this discussion not because they are "unoriginal" in a general sense (Deus Ex is my favorite game of all time and highly original), but because they take place in a game world that shares enough relation to the modern world as to not be completely independent from it.

Colin_Oscar_P · 3 days

Good work with the insults. They give +10 to persuasiveness. It feels a little weird that I even have to explain this to someone, but the comic has a massive amount of despair in it. The point is definitely to scale back the hope of people as to the extent of possible progress, and indeed the possibility of a cure, citing the gulf in perspective between givers to cancer research and those who conduct the research.

not to get them to give up hope on thinking there's any progress to be made about cancer research

You appear to be pushing back on this view. But it's held only by an imaginary person. And before we get into the sleepy accusations that "hey man you don't realize how complicated the research is!" I'll note that I in fact acknowledged the complexity of the research in my first comment. The internet being what it is, I will not be surprised if I have to continue clearly acknowledging it in the face of erroneous comments that I don't appreciate the complexity.

It's just wrong to infer impossibility from complexity. Yet this is what the comic's author did. He might have creationists on his side when it comes to that last point but it's antithetical to the spirit of science.

Colin_Oscar_P · 3 days

Which is just an expression of despair, not a comment on the limits of possible research.

edit: "Hey guys! There's this jerk over here making a valid point! Let's downvote him!"

Colin_Oscar_P · 3 days

Yeah that whole comic was weird. I think "there will never be a cure for cancer" sure sounds like an adult leveling with you about how things really are- but it reeks of despair and anti-intellectualism. "Hey it's complicated. No, like really really complicated. Let me show you how complicated it is... see? Therefore it's impossible."

Ugh. Never ever ever ever say something is impossible unless it actually is.

dallashoosier · 4 days

I think people are also basing this on Trout's scouted talent level.

PizzasarusRex · 4 days

But it might take having a large audience on your side to persuade the couple not to get married (if you can get them on your side obviously).

In general it seems like objecting is a dick move- but the circumstances of peoples lives are so infinitely complicated that someone might have had reasons to object at least once in the history of the world.

josefjohann · 5 days

I actually agree with you and upvoted you. I think others glanced at the first half of your sentence and took you for a Rand apologist or something.

I would just say, that insofar as the game environment itself reflects on objectivism it reflects negatively. It just happens to be incidental; for the designers, making any substantive comments on objectivism was probably not a priority.

josefjohann · 6 days

Myst is a fantastic suggestion. Is it clear what time period, relative to real life, Myst was supposed to be in? One thing this thread has got me interested in is game worlds with ambiguous temporal relation to the present day. That's helpful to me because it clearly stakes out a point in the imaginative space, that tells you there is much more to the construction of game worlds than whether they exist in the future or the past.

I can think of other examples, like Mario, Square's Final Fantasy series and perhaps Spore. But Myst seems like a perfect example.

josefjohann · 6 days

I'm sorry but you have me completely wrong. Whatever you think of my examples, fictional universes about the future do not have to represent your standard high-technology space opera. Fictional universes relating to the past do not have to be LOTR-style medieval fantasy.

You could come up with scenarios about technically advanced civilizations that existed in the past, which could properly be called science fiction. You could come up with scenarios about the future which do not feature technical advances. Since we've been talking about Ayn Rand in this thread, one example of the latter is her novella Anthem- a future with little to no advanced technology which doesn't fall under the science fiction label.

And beyond that, still more fictional universes can exist where their temporal relation to present day doesn't even matter, because the worlds are driven by content that's so unique it doesn't even relate in any clear way to a time period in human civilization.

And beyond that, you could still come up with numerous kinds of science fiction that are completely unique from anything that's ever been imagined or implemented in a game before, and you can even come up with medieval fantasy that's radically different from wizards and goblins.

And there are plenty of examples of imaginative universes throughout this thread. Picking one that happens be near the part of the page I'm on, Flooopo mentions a world driven by the ideas of Buckminster Fuller. Which would be awesome. Others have mentioned the worlds of Grim Fandango, Warhammer 40k, the JRPGs, steam punk, and various radical alternate histories. I even proposed one which is the flip side of steampunk, a civilization with essentially mechanical, non-electric technology but thousands of years into the future.

You're working with your imagination, which has an infinite movie budget. If you can't think of anything besides space opera or elves with the unlimited budget of your imagination, it's sure as hell not because I'm being too restrictive.

josefjohann · 6 days

I was using Tolkien-style as shorthand for the larger genre of medieval fantasy or high fantasy, but you're right. Nevertheless, gnomes & golems abound elsewhere in the genre and I think the underlying point is more or less th same.

josefjohann · 6 days

It's working for me. Here is a link to access it via google docs:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.defense.gov/pubs/pdfs/2012_CMPR_Final.pdf&pli=1

josefjohann · 6 days

The fact that Rapture becomes a broken, dystopian nightmare , together with the fact that the bad guy in the first game is a strong follower of an objectivist-like philosophy, might suggest they didn't think highly of the philosophy.

However, I agree with you that the decision had to do with "hey, teenage boys, play this!" more than any sort of desire to criticize the ideas of objectivism itself.

Also, I'm not sure the Witcher is very distinct from Tolkien-style fantasy worlds I was talking about. It has spellcasting, dwarves, gnomes, golems, and dragons.

josefjohann · 6 days

Could be- but I associate steampunk with mid-1800's in the heart of the industrial revolution, a setting it iterates off of in an extremely creative direction.

I'm trying to imagine something spectacularly advanced, almost at the level of say, the aliens that appear at the end of Speilberg's film A.I., but only with mechanical devices; no leather or steam or goggles.

josefjohann

TROPHY CASE

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