legend

20 minutes ago, Jason said:

 

Well at least you're not Gen Z I guess, little gif-hating shits.

Beyond my grumpy old man laughing at things they do like the center part, I think Gen Z is the best generation and they give me some very small amount of hope for mankind.

15 minutes ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

In regard to the topic, I'm in agreement with @legend's contention that our system already implements a fair number of inherently "anti-democratic" measures (and probably, not nearly enough!) that have become the generally-accepted, relatively non-contentious means of conducting political business, so I'm not exactly sure why this one would be so very beyond the pale.

 

The strongest argument that I comes to my mind in comparing these "anti-democratic" measures to those for the minimum age requirements for holding political office is that those particular "anti-democratic" measures can be overcome through the natural process of getting older thereby negating their "anti-democratic" nature.  This is simply not the case for the "anti-democratic" nature of age ceilings as it's simply impossible to "age younger".

That's true, you can't go backwards. Though the inability to run for office after an age would probably be the least "unfair" outcome of aging  Sadly aging just sucks and we have to accept that reality until my AIs solve it.* That or just think of time as happing all at once from a different perspective in which case it doesn't really matter.

^{* Do my AIs still have trouble walking straight and being confused by a bit of noise in the image? Yes, but I'm sure they'll crack the aging problem for us any moment now...}

1 hour ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

 

I'm solidly part of Generation X, thank you very much!

You have my condolences  

42 minutes ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

OpenCritic's 2023 Hall of Fame is really quite delightful!

 

The first two on the list occurring in the same year is enough to make 2023 a very memorable year for gaming. Both Tears and BG3 are generation defining games. But then there just continues to be a lot of great stuff beyond them.

18 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

Nobody should watch One Piece unmolested.

 

One Pace | The Definitive One Piece Viewing Experience

ONEPACE.NET

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One Pace is a fan project that recuts the One Piece anime in an endeavor to bring it more in line with the pacing of the original manga by Eiichiro Oda. The...

 

I like One Piece, but it is very overdone. Too many characters and often times too many things going on at once. Multiple plot lines is fine, but One Piece has never had good pacing. It's the number one reason I don't watch the anime. I read manga and then dip into the anime anytime I feel like seeing a particularly good scene or event in motion.

Thanks for the link! I'll definitely keep this mind if I decide I want to take the plunge!

3 hours ago, TheLeon said:

Just watched the first episode. Never paid much attention to One Piece because I’m never going to watch a 1000 episodes of an anime or read 100 volumes of a manga, but this is fun. 

Same situation for me. Giving it a try since it feels more bounded. I'm enjoying it and at least considering trying the anime, but I still dunno about that length  

I don't even have a problem with playing devils advocate, if that's even what he was ever doing. I never felt frustrated disagreeing with sbl and I appreciated his viewpoints on lots of things.

Maybe there existed times and I'm forgetting, but if you asked me right now, I couldn't tell you a single time I've had a bad interaction with sbl.

4 minutes ago, CastlevaniaNut18 said:

Check the Nazi  thread.

Well that sucks. I'm taking the time to argue with sblfilms more substantively because I like him

1 minute ago, CastlevaniaNut18 said:

He's gone for good @legend

Oh shit. Wtf just happened?

3 hours ago, sblfilms said:

What part of serving as a senator is impacted by these two episodes? Please be specific.

 

But if you don’t want to bother explaining that point, I’ll gladly concede McConnell as an example of a person unable to perform their duties due to complications of aging (though it seems more likely it is due to the concussion he sustained, but that is speculation on my part!), because that raises our total examples to…2.

 

Is your position then that we should make anti-democratic policy for an entire class of people because of 2 examples of older public servants who lost it at the end of their political careers?

Answering questions for the public is very much part of being a senator. "Sorry the senator can't take any questions right now because they're having a brain failure" is uh, not good  

But even that aside, these are simply the most publicly visible and indisputable examples of how aging is impacting some of these people. Great lengths are taken to cover up problems. We've heard the whispers about Feinstein being problematic for years, but only now is it so extreme that you just can't hide it at all anymore. So, no, I don't think it's reasonable to conclude that these are the only two age-related problems. I've also had concerns about the aging government long before McConnel was shutting down in font of the public.

Sadly, aging sucks big time and has many residual effects well beyond these very visible examples. There are also health risks that come with aging beyond mental degradation too. The chance for serious health problems goes way up. It's one of the reasons why I very much didn't want Bernie to run for president -- it's a big gamble when the next major health issue comes and I don't want to roll that dice with a president or any serious position (I'm not happy about Biden's age either even though he seems to be in decent shape). We can add RBG to the list of the how horrible the outcome was for her sticking in there all the way to the end too if you want another very visible example though.

You can label a maximum age as "anti-democratic" and while under some definitions that could be technically correct, I think it fails to represent the proposal of a maximum age restriction faithfully. We usually don't label any policy with any restriction as anti-democratic. I would have never used the term "anti-democratic" to describe the various minimum age requirements even though I think some of them maybe should be lowered and are too high. By calling it that, it feels like you're trying to get an emotional reaction from the associations rather than assess the situation at hand. Though I don't think you're doing that deliberately and manipulatively, it's an easy thing to fall into doing without that explicit intent.

Words and terms are vague, often by design, but you can't let that vagueness be a substitute for argument. I'm happy to hear an argument about why adding a maximum age restriction might be bad. I'm not convinced it's the right thing to do even though I do absolutely believe some of these people in government should have left, because every additional rule makes the analysis of how that rule can be gamed more complex to analyze. Maybe a maximum age restriction would open the door for abuse of some kind that I'm missing. Seems like not given it applies to everyone and every person would have a very long opportunity to serve, but I'd love to have that conversation! But saying "no because by some definition it's anti-democratic" just shuts down conversation, closing the door to finding better ways to govern.

And maybe we're closer to agreement than it seems. If your position is "maybe it's fine, but I'm hesitant to add more rules because I'm unsure of the consequences" then I can understand that more. But it seems like you're coming out very hard against the idea, rather than just being unsure.

On 9/2/2023 at 1:37 PM, sblfilms said:

I don’t think the current minimums are sensible. You could certainly make the argument that the brain development of all children still being deeply in process makes them unsuitable as a class, but the opposite is not true for the elderly. The particular areas of brain development that continue into the late teen and mid 20s are directly connected to decision making.

 

It is notable that in this thread filled with people who are certainly above the average intelligence of an American have yet to describe how the existence of decreasing mental acuity in and of itself hampers the ability of elderly legislators to do their job. Relative drops are of no consequence. The question is whether or not the actual decline in mental fitness is large enough to cross a threshold where an entire class of citizens shoulder be rendered unfit.

 

Even the person this thread is about has thus far not shown a decrease in ability to serve the interests of his constituents!

 

At least in the Feinstein case you can point to examples where she was supposed to be casting a vote in committee and instead starts reading a speech. But we shouldn’t make anti-democratic policy over one awful situation.

 

 

If you think McConnell being unable to answer questions does not represent an inability to serve adequately then, no, we're never going to find common ground on this one!  

I think it might be the best, beating the epic gaming year of 2007.

13 hours ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

It's Official: Baldur's Gate 3 Companions Are Too Randy Because Of A Bug

WWW.THEGAMER.COM

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Swen Vincke tells us that Baldur's Gate 3 romances were bugged at launch, "especially Gale".

 

 

 

Petty sure the internet thinks of this as more of a feature.

1 hour ago, Kal-El814 said:

 

Yup!

Yeah. It's... big  

8 minutes ago, thedarkstark said:

🤣 Halo was a disaster. 🤣

Naa, Halo Infinite's campaign is the first non-Bungie Halo campaign to deserve the name.

17 hours ago, Kal-El814 said:

Act 1 is huge. Went into what i guessed might be a cellar; no, it's almost the size of the overworld.

Was it the 

1 hour ago, sblfilms said:

We aren’t talking about government, we are talking about who is allowed to be elected as a representative of the people.

We are. The very notion that we elect people to represent is a choice of government and we're discussing what the structure of that should be. But I'm not sure this matters all that much. We can argue semantics, but I don't think the distinction you're making here changes the point I'm making.

1 hour ago, sblfilms said:

Anti-democratic policies need to have really good reasons to exist. I’ve said this many times already! It is fine if you don’t hold the same principle, but that is why it matters in and of itself. No further consequences are needed to say anti-democratic policies should be avoided.

Consequences of policy are necessary to make a persuasive argument. Otherwise it's just an arbitrary position that can be ignored as easily as it can be made. There are plenty of legally established rights that can be argued for because of the consequences holding them (or not holding them) entails.

1 hour ago, sblfilms said:

What does an age cap achieve other than to deprive the represented of their preference for representation? Why shouldn’t people be able to choose an 80 year old if that is what they want? What does being 80 necessarily indicate, or even more likely than not indicate, about a persons ability to carry out the role of a legislator.

Reduce the chance of people incapable of serving office due to mental degradation or other health issues that prevent them from doing so holding office by default and preventing people who can serve from doing so. This isn't hypothetical. This is happening right now.

9 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

Choice in a democracy also includes just voting for your team no matter what, not voting at all, and any number of actions you or I may not like. If voters make a poor decision, that is on them and they will suffer the consequences of choosing poorly.

But governments are almost never pure democracies precisely because pure democracy doesn't work in large modern societies.

You seem to be appealing to some kind of right of people, but that's not really a useful argument because anyone can dismiss a so called right as easily as someone can assert it. So what are the actual negative consequences you're imagining? What are the negatives facts you believe would be true if the policy was enacted?

9 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

But again, not a single person is making an actual argument for why capping the age of elected representatives is a good idea due to the mental capacity issue. Feel free to attempt it in a way that stands up to the barest of logical challenge  

You mean because younger people can have cognitive or other debilitating health problems too? Who said I'd be wholly opposed to other restrictions?   (I also didn't say I'm completely for age restrictions -- I haven't thought about it nearly long or rigorously enough to say that confidently -- but I'm not seeing why it's bad either)  Age is a very simple policy that doesn't discriminate between people though and simple policies to enforce that are not easy to abuse have a massive advantage in practice. If similar restrictions that are not susceptible to abuse can be made, I might be in favor of those too!

3 hours ago, sblfilms said:

People should be allowed to choose the representative they want, and there needs to be a really good reason to disallow them from choosing.

I think this sounds good in the abstract, but to make sense requires assumptions that don't pan out. For this to make sense, people have to be actively considering and voting for people based on their individual merits. But they don't. People are largely uninformed and very many (most?) people just tick boxes for incumbents of their party.  I'm not even saying that's entirely wrong: parties exist for this reason because not everyone has time to investigate all the candidates, but it is the reality and its probably the main reason people aren't voting out old people: because they're just on autopilot voting most of the time.

And given that reality, I don't think appealing to people's actual wants is a reason against age restrictions.

I'm not sure I'm completely sold on age limits, but it doesn't seem out of hand bad to me. Restrictions that happen to correlate to filter out certain kinds of people are bad restrictions. Age isn't one of those things. It's something we universally must face eventually and all the people who get filtered had a chance to be in government already. It's not like they were denied from ever serving.

So what's the actual cost here? Suppose we implement it; how do things fall apart? Are you thinking that some politicians are so rare and uniquely good that sometimes you really need to stick to someone aging who is at risk of health complications? That there are not good younger alternatives to elderly people? Maybe if we were a very small country that might be true on an occasion, but we're not. There will always be equally good younger people for every old member who has been serving a long time.

Lot's of games. What does "is art" actually mean? Every game is an authored medium that evokes emotions and reflection, but I guess in this definition we'd be excluding "fun" and "exhilaration" as a valid emotions for art? If so, still lots of games  

But some stand outs for evoking hoity toity emotions and reflections might be:

Ico

SOMA

The Witcher 3

Senua's Sacrifice

The Last of Us

God of War (new ones)

Persona 5

Pentiment

Disco Elysium

etc.

Skyrim in space with fewer bugs and enjoyable combat sounds solid enough to me!

Well invent technology that might as well be magic and use it to build a hellscape.

7 minutes ago, unogueen said:

Cause they're stupid. old people don't get that pass.

I'd tell you to remember you said this when you're old, but there's the rub.

1 hour ago, Spork3245 said:

So you want like… 90% of the senate to retire?

1 hour ago, Bacon said:

I know, but it really doesn't matter. All that matters is that you hit the DC or get a Nat 20. If I hit a 20 on a 10 DC strength check, it's no different than getting an 11. And if I hit a 1 I don't fail in an extra spectacular way, I just fail.

 

Like, if kick open a door, and I pass with a nat 20, have that shit explode open. Do something special. You passing a 30 DC check cuz you hit a 20 doesn't feel like a crit. It just feels like not a fail.

Feels like you're just arguing that it should be called something different. Regardless of name, rolling a 20 and 1 still have important unique impacts on outcomes separate from the other dice number rolls.And while combat crits also have an affect on damage, its core function is on the hit success/failure: like in DC checks, for an attack roll it's possible for it otherwise to be impossible to hit or inversely miss a target *unless* you get a crit success/fail. E.g., if an enemy has a 22 AC and I have +0 attack, the only way I'm hitting them is via a crit. And if an enemy is wearing robes with 10 AC and I have a +10 attack bonus, then the only way I'm missing is with a crit fail.

Given all that, it's much simpler to refer to the unique role of 20 vs 1 in dialog DC and combat attack rolls as critical success/fail rather than make up a whole new name for each setting