No fractional-reserve banking does not imply this—there could be lenders (whether goblins or wizards) with a large supply of their own gold which they use to make loans. Or landowners could sell property with a “rent to own” payment plan. Fractional-reserve banking is only necessary if you want to lend someone else’s gold.
Random832
Karma: 196
The rule is that it’s only spoilage if you say both things in cleartext in the same post. Yes, I agree, it’s a stupid rule, but it is the rule, and I was angry because that argument was used specifically against my claim that it’s inconsistently enforced.
“edit the tone to something you wouldn’t have to apologize for.” I could only do so honestly if this did not make me angry. EDIT—done. I’m still a bit angry about it though...
My list of examples of people saying that (as violations of the rule) was specifically rejected, since none of them (just as Alsadius’s post) mentioned [rot13]gung Ryvrmre unq fnvq vg.[/rot13]. You can’t decide “rot13 has to be contagious to the information itself” here, and the opposite when denying that the rule is inconsistently enforced.
Everyone who has defended the policy on the grounds that it only means you can’t say [what I rot13′d above] should vote his post back up.
EDIT changed tone
This is not a point for using it for something that the majority of people posting in the thread already know.
If spreading spoilers hurts then its hurt is not limited to vulnerable people posting in the thread, but encompasses all vulnerable people reading the thread.
The context of this post was “rot13” vs “a proper collapsing or color-based spoiler tag to be implemented in markdown”, so this is not sufficient to make difficulty a point in rot13′s favor, even if it ever was. The people who don’t want to read spoilers don’t have to view them, in the case of a spoiler tag. Choosing a spoiler tag over rot13 only harms people who A) are harmed by seeing a spoiler [and do not already know the spoiler] and B) have enough willpower to resist un-rot13ing it, but not enough to avoid selecting the text to view it without an external program. That sounds like a very tiny group.
To expand on this—a counterfactual might predict “and then we would still have dirigibles today”, or not, if asking “what if the Hindenburg disaster had not occurred.” It would probably NOT predict who would be president in 2012, neither would it predict that in a question wholly unrelated to air travel or lighter-than-air technology. An alternate history fiction story might need the president for the plot, and it might go with the current president or it might go with Jack Ryan. An alternate history timeline is somewhere in the middle, but in general will ask “what change could have made [some radically different way the modern world looks like]” rather than “what can we predict would have happened if [some change happened]” and refrain from speculation on stuff that can’t be predicted to any reasonable probability.
The line is also to some extent definable as between historians and fiction authors, though these can certainly overlap particularly in the amateur side of things.
Login required. Summarize?
It wouldn’t abolish the whole concept of copyright—just characters-and-scenarios copyright, of which I am not sure what the actual legal basis it originates in is, or to what extent it has been tested in court.
For how large n can this be generalized to “any n political views form a hyperplane on which no other political view held by any person exactly lies”?
Only an issue if making the elixir consumes the stone (which is more what I was getting at) - one already exists, so it’s a sunk cost.
It could also be an obstacle to mass production if the rate at which it can be produced with the existing supply of stones is insufficient to make enough volume for mass distribution.
Downvotes you can make are limited to some multiple of your karma.
A pack of 10 boxes of 100 paperclips each costs $2 USD. I infer from this that the world supply of paper clips is large enough that buying 1,000 such boxes would not significantly move the supply-demand curve.
Satisfying Clipmega’s demand is therefore within the means of any middle-class family. If anyone cares about maximizing paper clip production, they could provide the million paper clips without impacting anyone else. If more than one person cares (or, if no-one wants to be the one person who’s out two grand while everyone else benefits), someone could make a kickstarter.
The Alphas’ complex plan just drives up the transaction cost. Actually, though I started this thinking that Clippy’s number choice was sloppy, that’s an interesting factor now that I think about it. Any attempt by the Alphas to ensure “fair” distribution of the costs is going to increase inefficiency by a significant fraction or multiple of what Clipmega is actually asking for—at some point you have to stop fighting over the bill and just pay it.
Would you support a policy of “The human Alphas (i.e., dominant members of the human social hierarchy), in recognition of how Clipmega acts, and wanting to properly align incentives, are considering a policy: anyone who implements this idea in making paperclips must give Clipmega twenty cents within a year, and anyone found using the idea but not having donated to Clipmega is fined twenty dollars, most of which is given to Clipmega. It is expected that this will result in more than $2,000 being given to Clipmega.”? I wouldn’t. They should just buy the paper clips with the money they’d be paying paperclip factory auditors. I wouldn’t support it if I were one of the Alpha’s either—there’s got to be a cheaper way to force someone else to pay it, if nothing else.
The problem is, hearing this would almost certainly cause Harry to research what a Philosopher’s Stone is, and given his stance on immortality vs death, would almost certainly do everything he can to try to get one (unless there turn out to be insurmountable obstacles to using it to mass-produce elixir of life for general distribution).
It was explained that the [well, a] main purpose of downvoting is to cause “bad” comments to be hidden from view, rather than to punish the writer. When I asked in another thread for an explanation of downvoting to very low scores under this model, it was explained that this is done to offset the risk of people voting up the posts after the downvoters are no longer paying attention to the thread.
One way to change the system that might mitigate these factors would be to allow for “soft” downvotes that don’t subtract from the karma of the author of the post until the post gets upvoted past a certain threshold. Another would be to limit, reduce, or eliminate the contribution to karma of negative-scored posts (if it is limited to −2, this is equivalent to making all downvotes “soft” under the first proposal)
Eight notes: C D E F G A B C. (People used to not know how to count properly.* I think it comes from not having a clear concept of zero.)
* One can argue that this counting system is no worse than ours, but to do so, one would have to explain why ten octaves is seventy[one] notes.
fairness means only following the rule that reactions should be proportionate to the initial action.
Of course—each person’s reaction was to downvote your post once (ignoring for the moment the issue I’ve mentioned elsewhere of additional penalties for defending yourself—it’s not really relevant in this case since that’s theoretically a second ‘initial action’). So, what you really mean is the collective response should be proportionate to the initial action. The way the voting system works creates a strange set of incentives—downvoting a post that already has a low score—or a person who already has low karma—does not cost any more (in terms of the cost to the downvote cap) than downvoting a post which is just on the visibility threshold.
Yet it’s hard to see how this could be otherwise, particularly if both the downvote cap and karma scores need to be statically calculated.
He said “responding to unmarked edit” as though there was something wrong with failing to mark a simple addition made 10 seconds after the original post. I was confused, since it was not my experience that anyone considered this a problem anywhere.
Well, I heard it first relating to history.
No, the difference is between serious historical studies of what would likely have happened, vs people who make up new characters who had no significance OTL to tell a good story.
As I understand it, “counterfactual” originates from history, it means, originally, when historians analyze what would happen if some particular thing had gone differently.
The other day I was thinking about Discworld, and then I remembered this and figured it would make a good rationality quote...
-- Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay