I wish more people understood this. Insurance is an extra cost paid to protect from catastrophe. Anything that saves you money on a regular basis is not insurance: where does the extra money come from?
Pet insurance is another bizarre misunderstanding of this nature. Unless there are procedures you are unwilling to forego to save your pet, but completely unable to afford, you are throwing money away in the long run. The entire actuarial profession exists to ensure this fact. Take what you’d spend on premiums, and invest it in a good savings vehicle instead.
insurance is part of health plans. There is a deductible and an out-of-pocket max, which are both designed to protect you from those catastrophic risks. But because those catastrophic risks are best addressed by preventative care, and regular checkups, and freakin' gym memberships, so the economics of insuring health becomes the economics of health incentivization, fucking around to figure out what it takes to get people to take care of themselves in advance rather than waiting but not getting people to go to doctors for frivolous issues.
Young people are people and deserving of rights, including but not limited to the vote. There is no stupid thing a young person could do with their vote that old people don't already do and we don't require them not to in order to keep their vote.
I agree. I wish the voting age was 16. (Or even younger, but 16 would be a big step in the right direction.)
At 16, students could take half the day off to go vote. Hell, it should be a grade-level field trip. Research shows that those who vote in their first eligible election are likely to continue voting, and democracies are dying from a lack of political engagement.
Young people will typically just vote how their parents tell them to. They typically just repeat what their parents say without critically thinking about things. They typically haven’t fully developed the mental capacity for things like empathy. They haven’t experienced what it’s like to work or struggle to survive.
Plenty of people vote how their parents did; that's just how values work.
Plenty of people vote against how their parents did; that's just how having your own identity works.
Plenty of people vote who think critically about nothing despite their so-vaunted capacity to; those people are idiots, but we don't require them not to be. And really, most of our politicians could use some lessons in empathy, technically capable or not.
None is a reason for denying suffrage.
And nobody should have to struggle to survive; that's a failure of modern society. And again, it's not something we require old people to be tested for; silver spoon trust fund kids who will never know what "struggle" means aren't kept from voting.
We don't require old people to justify their votes. They don't have to be rational enough, empathetic enough, or anything else enough. Old people can vote by rolling dice and nobody will stop them.
Hell yeah! People say that kids and teens don’t have enough life experience to make decisions, but also it’s really difficult to gain life experience when you’re constantly shielded from everything.
That's part of my point. We don't require old people to do anything other than... exist for a while? And yet when you start taking about young people all these qualifications start coming out. But stupid people get old too, and nobody keeps them away from the polls.
If you are too young to work you shouldn’t have to vote I think, but if you can get a job you should be able to vote. This of course won’t solve all the parties being shit tho.
If you are too young to work you shouldn’t have to vote
Makes it sound like a chore, not sure if that was intended. The phrasing however somewhat leads to another completely different discussion, whether or not it would be a good idea to require everyone to vote (even if they just mark their ballot invalid) to combat low voter turnouts.
But as with other arguments, we again don’t tie voting rights to having a job otherwise we would deny them from the elderly or sick aswell. I think in this context the argument is sometimes made that when you have a job you are forced to pay taxes and therefore should be allowed to vote, but there are other taxes like sales tax that everybody pays earlier.
This of course won’t solve all the parties being shit tho.
I feel like this reasoning would change character of the right to vote from something inherent, to something that has to be earned. Which i am not really a fan of.
I agree with you, but a baby can’t read a ballot or pull a lever. Help is always available to anyone who asks, so I suppose we could just eliminate the age requirement altogether and let anyone who is able to register go to the polls.
I would be concerned about a certain type of person trying to make as many little voters as they can crank out, but I suppose some people do that anyway and just wait until they turn 18.
I agree with you, but a baby can’t read a ballot or pull a lever
I absolutely get the sentiment, but with arguments like these i always end up running into hypocrisy and double standards. There are plenty of illiterate adults and we are rightfully allowing them to vote, so do the blind. Paralyzed people are also voting despite them not being physically able to move a lever. As you said, there should always be help available.
In practice i doubt many babies will articulate a desire to vote and the number of extremely young children will also be limited. So to me if a 6 year old comes up and says “i want to vote” i say let him, he certainly is affected by the consequences of the elections regardless.
let anyone who is able to register go to the polls.
I would note that depending on the implementation this can also be a unneccesary hurdle and be abused as seen in the US.
As an inherent right it really should be as automatic as practial limits allow it to be (some sort of register is ofc needed to prevent voting multiple times).
Here in Germany for example it’s simply tied to your registered primary residence, which means that only people without such have to actively seek out registration wherever they live.
I would be concerned about a certain type of person trying to make as many little voters as they can crank out, but I suppose some people do that anyway and just wait until they turn 18.
And that’s the slippery slope: Who gets to decide that “certain type of person”?
To go with your example of the number of children: I think statistically poor people have more than the rich. Is that what we want to fight? Also who is to say that children vote the same as their parents?
Children are not autonomous and are beholden to another citizen for their existence. That’s a civic relationship too easy to abuse with, what I see to be, very little net benefit.
I’m in support of not taxing children, but how will you distinguish an intentional purchase made by a child vs a purchase made on behalf of someone else for the benefit of a tax-free purchase?
An illiterate or blind adult can ask for help. A poll worker will read the ballot or provide a braille version to help them, and will fill out the ballot with them if requested.
I’m still agreeing with you, you’ve convinced me that any age barrier is arbitrary and hypocritical.
As for registration being a hurdle, the courts have long held that the effort to be registered is minimal, as again there are resources to help people get registered. There are outreach programs, and you can actually go to your local post office or dmv and they will help you register. Children would have an even easier time, since anyone in school could have a teacher or school staff help them.
Children are particularly beholden to their parents for support, though, and by “certain type” I mean the type of person who thinks that having a child is a means to an end. There’s a whole spectrum of quality parenting decisions, but as a general rule, anyone who is having more kids to have more votes is probably a bad parent.
I just want to say thank you. It's... so unbelievably rare to find someone else on the right side of this in the wild. To not have to fight this fight alone.
Thank you for stepping up, for speaking out, for... all of it.
You go in the booth, it's Option A or Option B. You fill in the box. Nobody cares why.
What you've said here is a meaningless non-answer based on culturally ingrained prejudice.
In reality, we already don't require old people to actually have or demonstrate either of those things.
Sheltered people and hermits aren't denied the vote. They don't have to have experienced anything but the passage of time, regardless of how little they've filled it with.
People who watch lies on purpose aren't denied the vote. They might have no understanding but misunderstanding and still are able to steer the course of the country based on delusions and propaganda.
Think of every garbage politician you've seen get elected. All the damage they've done. And realize that old people elected every single one of them.
When I was mid 20s I thought young kids were too naive. I got older and saw how fucking stupid most adults are and think young kids are much smarter than their predecessors. They should absolutely have a voice in elections. 16 seems like a good age to me
Force damage in D&D 5E is too poorly-defined to be a good part of the game and exists solely for when the designers don't want any characters or creatures to have access to resistance against the thing in question. Either we need an actual description of what happens to a thing that gets hit by it or it should be cut; the vast majority of the things that deal it could perfectly easily be magical bludgeoning / piercing / slashing. Spiritual weapon and Bigby's hand are particularly egregious
I dunno, I think it makes sense. B/S/P all imply a physical impact of some sort, force is just a wave of energy, magic or not. Like a nonmagical example would be microwaves or radiation from nuclear materials (I know sickening radiance says it does radiant damage but that’s 100% wrong, radiant implies holy or positive as the inverse of necrotic, which is unholy and negative, I will kill on this hill, the devs fucked it up just like they fucked up T3/T4 play.)
There's also armour of resistance and potion of resistance in the DMG, which can be force resistant. But that's very few items, and in 5E the magic items you get are entirely dependent on your DM giving them to you. Note how they're all in the DMG, after all. Compare this to, say, fire damage. Three player races have resistance, the 1st-level absorb elements spell gives most casters easy access to fire resistance, and two barbarian subclasses and two sorc subclasses can get it regularly. With force damage, I think the only option presented to the player is one of the aforementioned barb classes and a couple of abilities that give general resistance to all damage.
On the DM's side, of the literally several thousand creatures published for 5E, there are 5 with immunity, 12 with resistance, and 2 with vulnerability. 19 total creatures out of over 3,000 have any unusual interaction with the damage type. Compare this to 90 for radiant, another very low one; 552 for fire; 671 for bludgeoning (including the ones that only interact with mundane bludgeoning). 19 creatures is so vanishingly rare that I don't think my description is an unreasonable one.
I don’t know what or if there are any cannon explanations, but I always had understood force as well… force. Bludgeoning, piercing, slashing are damage amplifiers that make do with limited force. But if you trying to damage say, a rock, they are basically irrelevant. But you put a rock in a hydrolic press and apply a enough force, and boom it cannot withstand. So being hit by an eldritch blast is less like being shot and more like being hit with a high pressure oil leak.
We know what the damage type of a crushing force is in 5E, though. It's bludgeoning. That's why the grasping hand effect of Bigby's hand does bludgeoning, as does any constricting attack from the likes of giant snakes.
High-pressure fluid jets can cut through things if sufficiently narrow and fast, but at that point you're still just looking at piercing or slashing. The injury isn't different to being poked with a sharp stick other than that you are also wet now. If it's not enough to cut with... well that's bludgeoning again
High pressure fluid injuries are significantly different, but we’re moving off track.
Let’s come from the other direction. Bludgeoning, slashing and piercing all do damage through the application of force. However, the damage they do is amplified and relise on a particular susceptibility of the victim.
Bludgeoning amplifies is force through rapid impact time.
Piercing amplifies is force through a sharp hard single point.
Slashing is more complex, but it amplifies with a sharp hard edge kinda.
But these ‘tricks’ to deal more damage don’t work on everything. For example bludgeoning requires ‘inelastic deformation’ before movement. I.e. a bat breaks a skull but not a tennis ball. I can see why crushing is put in this category, it recognises that damage is due to the susceptibility of the target to be inelastically deformed (bruised, broken bones, crushed organs w/e). Everything has an inelastic deformation point, put a tennis ball in a press and you can crush it. But in this case it’s not that the ball is susceptible to bludgeoning damage, it’s just that you have applied lots of force.
Same with piercing, the effectiveness of a spear is reduced by something that can distribute its force over a larger area. Which doesn’t matter if the ‘spear’ has a huge amount of force behind it. At which point it doesn’t matter if it was a spear with a sharp point or just a rod (or jet of fluid).
Bludgeoning clearly doesn't have to be rapid, since it is used to represent plenty of slower crushing damage. Every constrict attack is bludgeoning and so is the rug of smoethering's smother attack, the rolling sphere trap in the DMG does bludgeoning when it runs someone over (it has to enter the creature's space to do damage, it knocks them prone, and it's going way too slowly for it to be the impact), Bigby's hand does bludgeoning when you use it to crush someone with grasping hand, and Maximilian's earthen grasp also does bludgeoning while restraining. So given the significant precedent, it seems far more reasonable to describe the tennis ball as having a higher AC than the skull, and maybe resistance to bludgeoning damage. You can absolutely still do bludgeoning damage to it.
So based on that, bludgeoning damage is just any physical force applied in a way that won't typically pierce or cut a target; I can cut a block of soft butter by pressing a rolling pin through it, but edge cases (no pun intended) like aren't really useful for general purpose rules, so we say a rolling pin does bludgeoning damage when you hit me with it. We can apply this to the oil jet just the same: is it focussed enough to cut in to most targets? Piercing damage, maybe with some necrotic damage if it's some nasty oil that would be very bad to have getting inside you like that, as is often a complicating factor in high pressure fluid injuries. If it's less focussed than that but still hitting with enough force to hurt you, then we say it's bludgeoning, just like a marid's water jet attack or the tidal wave spell. Either way it's not doing some mysterious force damage that doesn't have obvious parallels in the other mundane damage types.
Ok, so I don’t think I explained my thoughts on crushing well. It’s not, in the real world, bludgeoning damage. I can see why they chose to not have a crushing damage type and just use bludgeoning though, as anything susceptible to one would be susceptible to the other.
Ugh, bringing AC into it is a mess. But I think your approach results in the tennis ball lasting an average of 20 hits in a game between two strong opponents. And less time the better they are at playing tennis?
I think you’ve moved the goal post, but perhaps in an interesting direction. If the goal is to simplfy the damage types, what do you lose by replacing force attacks with other types? I think you lose an impact type of damage like damage to creatures you can’t hit with a hammer. Magic missle goes from best to worst spell.
You'd only treat playing tennis as attack rolls on the ball if you were trying to damage it, which I presume you're not. What it would actually mean is that anyone coud eventually break a tennis ball by trying to crush it. But tennis balls do eventually break with enough use anyway, so if you do want to handle it that way then the problem just lies with the fact that we don't have a way to make attacking something have a chance of success between 0% and 5%. That seems more reasonable to me than a brontosaurus being completely unable to squash a tennis ball by stomping on it, which is what immunity would mean
I don't think it's fair to say I've moved the goalposts. My original point was that force damage is poorly defined and described in game, which I stand by whether it should be distinct from bludgeoning or not; I'm not saying all force damage should just be bludgeoning. Only the examples where it's clearly extremely similar to stuff that already does do bludgeoning. There is no actual description of the effects of force damage available, and many notable things that deal force damamge seem to be described in a way that would imply B/P/S damage. Bringing up AC is just me explaining why I think your example doesn't work. What you're describing already has a mechanic in game that is not related to damage types.
Magical B/P/S damage is pretty reliable. Magical bludgeoning is only resisted by about 50 published creatures, a good number of which are swarms, so it's still almost as reliable as it is with force damage. Not to mention that the best part about magic missile is causing multiple guaranteed concentration saves, and that still happens if the target has resistance. A bludgeoning magic missile would even get to work with the vulnerability to that damage type that most skeletons have! And if that really does make the spell too weak to be useful... okay, buff it? Have it do 1d6+1 instead of 1d4. I don't think you'd need to, but it's clearly no trouble to make it stronger. Of course, you don't need to make everything that does force damage into bludgeoning anyway. Have eldritch blast do different damage types depending on who your patron is, that'd be cool.
If you really think that losing a specific damage type that almost never interacts with resistance, immunity, or vulnerability, you could just give whichever attacks and spells you wanted a trait that says it ignores those things. That way everyone is actually clear about what it does too, rather than just expecting players to gradually learn enough of the Monster Manual and other books to realise that force does that. What we gain by dropping force damage is an easier time for DMs to properly describe injuries and more reason for everyone to actually pay attention to what damage types work against different targets (indirectly buffing sorc's metamagic feature to change damage types too, since the elemental damage types are no longer strictly outclassed by force damage). All I want for this option is a clear definition of what the damage type does that is actually supported by the flavour text and mechanics. At the moment it's weird that I'm not "supposed" to desribe steel wind strike, which literally requires the caster to wield a melee weapon, as actually cutting anything
You’re not really arguing against the whole crowd there, a lot of people (wrongly) hold the same opinion. The problem is thinking of the door swap as an independent event when it’s not; the result is directly related to the original choice of door. If we label the doors A, B, and C and put the prize behind door A, here’s the possible options:
Edit: I see you added a table to your comment, but you’re miscounting pretty badly there. You’re giving double weight to initial choice being correct.
It is technically true that when you pick A the presenter can open either B or C, but then you need to account for that in your odds; it’s 50% either way so the win/loss rate is halved. In other words:
As shown, including which door the presenter opens does not affect the odds. When sticking, you win (16.5% + 16.5% = 33%) and lose (33% + 33% = 66%), when swapping you win (33% + 33% = 66%) and lose (16.5% + 16.5% = 33%).
I was stubborn about this for so long, and I’m still not entirely sure I understand it, but here is a perspective that made me doubt my belief.
Imagine the Monty Hall Problem, but with 100 doors and only one grand prize. You pick one; it obviously has a 1/100 chance of being a grand prize. Then Monty reveals 98 doors without grand prizes in them such that the only doors left are the one you chose and one that Monty left unopened. Monty obviously arranged for one of those two doors to have the grand prize behind it. The “choice to switch” is really just a second round of the game, but with a 1/2 chance of winning (wrong, your odds change only if you “participate” in round two).
If you stick with your door, you are relying on your initial 1/100 chance of winning. If you switch, you are getting the 1/2 odds of the “second round”.
Apparently with three doors, switching gives you a 2/3 chance of winning, but I don’t understand the math of how to get that answer and I wouldn’t be able to calculate the odds of the 100 door version. I just know intuitivey that switching is better.
The “second round” of the game is always just, “flip your odds of winning if you swap”. That’s all it is.
Monty will always open the proper doors to ensure this happens every time. Did you pick the winning door in the first round? Monty will eliminate all other doors but leave one of the losers. Did you pick a losing door in the first round? Monty will eliminate all the other losers and only leave the winner. It’s always the opposite of what you picked. Therefore, if you swap, you will simply get the opposite odds of the first round.
100 doors to pick from, only 1 winner? 1/100 chance to win if you just picked at random and ended it there. Now Monty offers a swap. Without the swap, you have 99 different ways to lose this. But with the swap, all 99 of those ways become winners, because Monty will always swap the opposite with you.
Say there are 100 doors, you choose one, then 98 are knocked out randomly (likely including the prize) - Now each of the 2 doors has the same chance of winning, so there is no reason to change
But starting with 100 doors and a knowledgeable Monty Hall, once you’ve chosen a door, the only reason Monty Hall leaves your door alone is because you chose it, whether it is the 1/100 winner, or one of the 99/100 losers
Either you chose the right door the first time (1/100 chance) or the other door has the prize behind it - those are the only options - the other door literally represents the 99/100 other doors in a single choice
but I don’t understand the math of how to get that answer
There’s four total outcomes of the problem:
Scenario 1: you originally pick the winning door (1/3) and don’t switch (1/2), therefore winning. Probability = 1/6
Scenario 2: you originally pick the winning door (1/3) and did switch (1/2), therefore losing. Probability = 1/6
Scenario 3: you originally pick a losing door (2/3) and don’t switch (1/2), therefore losing. Probability = 1/3
Scenario 4: you originally pick a losing door (2/3) and do switch (1/2), therefore winning. Probability = 1/3
Now consider scenarios 1 and 3 together, these two are when you don’t switch. P(S1) is 1/6 and P(S3) is 1/3, meaning S3 is twice as likely than S1. So if you don’t switch, you are twice as likely to lose. And now consider scenarios 2 and 4 together. P(S4) is 1/3 and P(S2) is 1/6, meaning if you switch you are twice as likely to win than to lose.
I have no clue what this actually is about. But I always remember watching Deal or No Deal and thinking “If it was down to two boxes, £1 and £250K, I would absolutely swap my box.” There is no way I would believe that all along I’ve been holding the 250K box. In my mind it makes more sense that I’m holding the £1 box and I need to swap.
With 100 doors switching should give you a 99% win rate.
You're essentially concentrating the entire thing into this one vs not this one, and when you initially chose there was a 99% chance it was not this one.
After Monty opens all the other doors, the odds that the right answer is not this one is still 99% except that now the entirety of not this one is represented by that single other door. The Grand Prize has nowhere else to be, and the odds that you picked it first is still only 1%.
So, to bring it back down, with three doors, the odds that the right answer is not this one 66%, and we end up exactly where we expected to be.
Extreme authoritarian “leftists”, A.K.A. “tankies” (i.e., apologists for Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the CCP, the DPRK, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Xi Jingping, etc.), are threats to a free, egalitarian, and open society, are just as violently authoritarian as their religious, corporatist, and fascist competitors, and should be treated with the contempt, distrust, and ridicule they deserve.
They claim to speak and fight for the proletariat, promising a new utopia, never before seen, once their revolution executes the last “class-traitor”. In practice, once they’re finished with “seizing the means of production”, they’ll never relinquish control and become the new ruling class.
They’ll assume the mantle of an enlightened elite post-revolutionary administration to guide the proletariat to their promised utopia of “each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. In practice, "the party leadership needs the most, because they’re obviously the most able” in reorganizing the economic and political structure of society. The utopia of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” will never exist, only the dictatorship of the “revolutionary party”. Repression and execution await those who question their claims and decisions. These supposed champions of labor are really harbingers of death - of the mind and the body.
Your liberty and self-determination are assailed by many threats: the religious, the nihilists, the corporatists, the fascists, and these alleged “collectivists”. They all claim to be the true authoritative “voice of the people”. Beware of their cults. Understand what they really are; power over everything and everyone, forever, is what they seek. They want you either as a true believer (a willing pawn) or dead, just like all of the other supposedly benevolent dictators who promised utopias throughout history.
They’re akin to the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm, the loudest voices in the revolution, usurpers of a righteous cause, but a bit “more equal” than everyone else after the farmer is done away with. Fortunately, the pigs, like the farmer, got their comeuppance in the end of the story. Make these pigs squeal.
Parents who purchase animal products care more about their “personal choice” than the world they’re leaving for their children. Bacon is more important to them than their own kids.
C and C++ are awesome and I hope they survive for another 50 years. Sorry Python folks. I just can't get past the strange syntax. Gimme my curly braces, away with this function block spacing crap.
The stock market should not exist. Investing in companies is fine, but we shouldn’t be able to buy our sell investment shares like a commodity.
All subsidies should not exist. They only alter the supply/demand in unnecessary and damaging ways. This must come with ending commodities trading like stock market investing.
Great let's do it through secular public means, where it can be done at scale, without dogmatic strings attached, and it can cover everyone and not be an ad hoc patchwork that causes some people to fall through the cracks
Grants to faith based charities are just a backdoor for siphoning public funds to religious groups. We already subsidize their absurdity and disinformation via tax breaks.
I don’t want to get rid of daylight savings, because it’s still a better option than keeping either summer or winter time.
Edit: another one: not having kids does not in any way contribute to solving environmental problems, we need MORE young, educated minds who have a chance to figure it out (as terrible as it sounds to push problems on the new generation), and we should ensure that in the event that we do manage to stabilize the situation, we won’t instead have fucked up demographics to deal with.
Not having kids to solve the environmental problem is like killing a homeless dude to solve his hunger problems. Sure, you’ve gotten rid of the problem, but along with it, you’ve also gotten rid of the entire reason for wanting to fix the problem in the first place.
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