Skaruts

This is cool, also for tweaking 3D models. I never learned how to do this kind of thing in python though. Interacting with other programs and that sort of thing. I wonder what that script looks like. EDIT: maybe I should look into the automation thing in the wiki, I suppose. Will do that. Hmm, it's not obvious what I should look for... I suppose this isn't a 2.06 thing, as you mention "the most recent TDM".

I'm not speaking in terms of "everybody for themselves". Not even close. I did mention family and friends, and that there's a place for state police. But perhaps there's something to that american dream, actually, though it died way before the 70s. America was ahead of what it was in the 70s almost a century before. And so was Sweden up until ~3 decades ago, and the UK in ~1800s. Those three nations were at different points in time ahead of the world at their most libertarian phases. At the points where people were the most free, and their states were smallest, not at the points where their states coddled them the most. Do take a moment to consider why the West is ahead of the rest, and why the US and Switzerland are economically better than anyone else. Or why Sweden was, up until the 70s or 80s (iirc), and why it isn't now. Or why Chile is the most prosperous nation in Latin America today, and why Venezuela, which once was, is now the poorest of them all, despite oil. The West is also the most healthy and least polluted. Our individualistic nature is not irrelevant in the least. You can't expect people to care about the rest of the world before they care about themselves and their own. A system that doesn't play along with what we are, doesn't end well. There is this thing called Spontaneous Order that is often explained using clouds of starlings. Each starling in the cloud cares only about himself and 5 or 6 other starlings around him, and he follows them as they follow him and each other. Everything else is irrelevant to him. And that results in the clouds we see where thousands of birds don't collide with each other. Spontaneous Order applies to human societies as well. Each person tending to themselves and the people around them, doing what they need to do for themselves will inherently be useful to everyone else and contribute to the functioning of society. I'm not american though, by the way. You seem to be thinking I am. I'm an ocean away, in portugal.

Sorry Judith, but that's a lot of bullshit. Yea, my father's a cab driver and my mother owned a store. I'm not gonna go into the details of my life, all I can say it's that it isn't pretty. I'm still saying what I'm saying. It amuses me that you think there's any lie in it. Unless you're severely mentally or physically incapacitated, you are responsible for yourself. You make yourself. There's no way around that, and your financial status is completely irrelevant. No amount of people wanting to not take responsibility for themselves will ever change that. No amount of government coddling people will ever change that either. Everyone has problems. Everyone has obstacles and hardships in life. Money makes no difference in that. Most of the richest people on earth came from poverty. Problems breed problem-solvers. Wealth doesn't make a family happier than poverty, and wealth goes away every third generation for a reason. I've met quite a few people in wheelchair, for example, and they were grabbing life by the balls and making it their own. Possibly because everyone around them were strengthening them and treating them like normal people, rather than making them feel useless poor things. I may sound blunt, but this is the real world. That's not how humans function. We care about ourselves and our own, not about everyone else. We care about everyone else to a much smaller degree, and that's the main reason why collectivist mindsets don't work. We're not ants or bees. Altruism isn't realistic.

I had a go at this a long time ago but couldn't overcome a few problems. This time I found a bit of workaround that seems to work. I may post it maybe later today or tomorrow morning (europe time).

Oh! Never realized that spawnarg exists. Thanks.

What entity can I turn a brush into to make it a wall the player can go through?

I heard nothing but praise about this game so far. And I've seen nothing but praiseworthiness too. Lukas Pope really brings Art into Game Development.

Precisely because I'm not other people I can't decide whether certain things are really that bad. Casinos, yea they're scams in my assessment, as are poker leagues and online poker, and any game of luck that involves money and you get nothing back. Loot boxes, not really. Maybe some people are really happy with a TF2 hat. That's great. If they're being taken too much by it, that's for their own families and friends to decide, and to tell them, and help them if they need. But even if they're being outright scammed, it's still up to them, not up to me. All I can do is warn them. After that it's their money, their lives, their decision. Unless you can prove those things are fraud. I wouldn't mind being able to prove casinos are. (There's a book called Adicting By Design, that is about that). With certain politicians I can see their outright lies, the outright fallacies, the outright weasel wording, etc. That's not exactly what I see in advertising. And ultimately people are responsible for themselves. With politicians is different because people's votes may affect everyone else. And I didn't focus on explosives, I used nitroglycerin and explosions in a figurative way, though maybe it wasn't clear. And I don't care about the tone in a EULA. Why would I? I care that the product is worthy of my money. And yea sometimes they contain dumb things, or maybe they're not so dumb, it depends on what we're talking about. Opinions are divided on what makes more sense with regards to many stuff. Things are evolving. I wonder what are you're referring to as harmful or illegal, though, that could be found in a EULA.

I also noticed the stock manholes were kinda awkward (one of them has the valve-wheel thingy misplaced too), and I was intending to remake them, but never got around to doing it yet. Gotta check that one on The Elixir, though.

I had to edited the textures and added some stuff to their materials file. I've been thinking of posting it around here at some point.

Doesn't seem to be anything wrong with it, but take my word with a grain of salt. I'm not that experienced in this engine yet. Indeed it's the one advantage I see in this, is that the player has to be even closer to the corner for the portal to open. So the engine will be making less calculations for longer. This is also possible: two visportals that intersect the corners, in game each of them will be divided in two (ignore the different textures there, I'm making experiments with transparency). Also, that they're facing away from each other isn't accidental in this specific case. When I first tested this the bottom portal (on the 3D view) was facing the other portal, and the half that converges with the other portal was being discarded by the engine (so I ended up with 1 less portal).

In the same way politicians advertise their policies in ways to convince people to vote for them (psychology plays a part there too), so too do businesses advertise their products in ways convince people to buy them more. But then, what do you do about that? I don't know of a good solution for that. We're all learning in this. I think it's up to each person to learn to be responsible. And I'm not saying the current phase of capitalism is rational. In fact, rationality is irrelevant. The way the market corrects itself, is that if I'm selling rotten fish, that opens a window of opportunity for anyone that wants to sell fresh fish. There's no amount of government intervention that can substitute for letting the market weed out the rotten fish completely. Regulations may stop one from selling rotten fish, but then he's still in the market, and since regulations don't change his reasoning, he's gonna find loopholes and work around those regulations as much as he can so that he can still sell some rot. You only have reasons to be concerned about a company taking hold of the entire market if there's government involvement. It's extremely hard to have 100% of a market; the less gov the meddles in it, the harder it is. I don't want healthcare to be privatized, as that would probably give one single company the whole healthcare burden, and it would likely not be sustainable (the bigger a business is the harder to sustain it becomes -- this on top of that fact that healthcare was created by the state at a loss). There's no easy way to turn the ship around. My hope is that private independent (specialized) clinics will eventually be numerous and public healthcare will be falling into oblivion. It will take a long long time, though. There's no way to produce perfect products that are guaranteed to never explode. If you sell nitroglycerin, you can't be held responsible if it blows up in their hands. They buy knowing the risks. Their purchase has to be an acknowledgement of them. Besides, if the product explodes, how can you tell it wasn't because of irresponsible usage? However, the fact that exploding products aren't conducive to consumer preference, that in itself leads companies to perfect their products as best as they can. But their EULAs have to still account for potential court cases from people who may or may not have used hammers to wield their products.

@Judith, I can try to lay out my reasoning. A private business (not necessarily corporate) will always be better than any public one. There are a few notions that make it easier to see how that's the case: 1- Anything non-competitive can never be as efficient as anything competitive. 2- A thousand or a million heads think better than a few hundred. 3- No one manages other-people's-money as efficiently as they manage their own. To elaborate: 1- The state is non-competitive, it doesn't go out of business, it doesn't get severely punished from failing to provide, etc, thus it has no real incentives to excel, except for the off-chance that people will protest about its failures, in which case the solution will invariably be to neglect some other service of its funding in order to compensate for this one and shut people up, which takes us to that vicious cycle I mentioned before, where they then have to compensate for whatever they neglected. It's only in public services that you see workers going on strike. 2- Central planning is very small, contained and restricted, unlike the market in which many entrepreneurs and enthusiasts all over the place are free to try new things (even useless things, that sometimes turn out to be useful!), test their ideas, etc. Perhaps the best example of this that I saw was the tech workshops that went on in the 70s (iirc, or maybe the 60s), where many hackers and enthusiasts from all over the place would gather up and show off experimental gadgetry and share and discuss all sorts of weird ideas. Iirc, the more compact computers originated from that. 3- The state is not dealing with its own money, so there's an inherent slack, and it attracts corruption. This also removes or mitigates the liberty to invest in uncertainty or in what may seem unnecessary or even luxurious. This means the state is limited in what ideas it can test. Well, not like the ideas are tested; they are discussed and implemented, and then they're extremely hard to remove if shown to not work. On top of all of that, as you mentioned, the money is spread thin across many things, so it's always a juggle and something is always lacking funding, and the more things the state does the worse it gets. The gov also operates financed by debt, which is a huge problem, and the businesses it runs are run at a loss, so they can't finance themselves, let alone anything else. As I told Destined, if railroads were built from the ground up in the private market, that would've only been possible if they were made profitable all the way up, while at the gov businesses are grown by compensating losses with tax money all the way, so it inherently builds inefficient businesses, and that's why privatized railroads are still financed by the gov. ------- On the other hand, the only way you can be successful in the market, is if what you sell is useful or helpful to enough people. A private hospital wouldn't survive if it had half the problems public healthcare has. Any competing hospital that was better than that would get ahead, because that's where people would rather get treated in. The concern that businesses are doing it for themselves is moot, then. They may or may not be, but it really makes no difference if they are. A psychopath that doesn't feel sympathy for anyone and is egotistical to the core, still has no way to make money in the private market other than by selling a product/service that people think makes their lives better enough that they're willing to buy it. Fundamentally there's only two ways to make money: - by offering something people want in return for the money they're willing to give for it. - by taking people's money, offering nothing in return (aka stealing -- either by force or by deceit, and I'd argue casinos and similar things are included in the latter). So if they're not stealing, they're engaging in the market, and can only be doing something positive. Well, "positive" isn't the best word to use, and the tobacco companies are the best examples of why. But then governments can't and don't make any difference in that regard. (As far as tobacco goes, govs even capitalized on it, likely for political interests, as those corps probably lobbied). However, eventually it was the market that invented vaping, which is having a greater effect than nicotine patches (I suspect because nicotine patches don't address the physical habituation problems), and it's been gov institutions that have shown the most opposition to it. The notion to take away from it is that people decide for themselves what makes their own lives better. Some people like smoking. Well, let them have it, but let them have their own health bills too. If we think they're being stupid we can always speak up and spread information, or become entrepreneurial in tackling problems, like is the case with vaping. If you're concerned about democracy, then that should mean you're concerned about empowering individuals, and that's precisely what the private market does: consumers drive the market, not businesses; and not what the government does: the government empowers groups. None of this is to say that private markets are perfect. Nothing is. Private markets and the economy are but an extension of ourselves: markets naturally originate as you put people together, as they will naturally trade and separate tasks, etc. And people aren't perfect. But that doesn't mean problems can't be solved. As far as I'm concerned, governments often only cause more problems on top of the problems that arise. You end up with people dying from a healthcare service that is supposed to prevent people from dying, you end up with prohibitions that inflate crime rates (since lots of crime originates around whatever is criminalized), unsafe schools that perpetually do a horrible job at making students (and teachers!) happy to be in school, and that perpetually use absurdly tedious teaching procedures, among many other things. More often than not the concerns I hear people talking about aren't actually related to the private market. Monopolies are a good example. They are always created/boosted by government intervention, not by free competition. Free competition is the worst fear of any business, big or small. Big corps are often in favor of gov intervention because it usually helps consolidate their dominance on the market. None of this is also to say that there's no place for government. Perhaps if governments had incentives to improve upon the flaws of the political systems they run under, instead of perpetuating them or inflating them due to all sorts of political interests, then perhaps we could be progressively more reassured that we aren't voting for the end of democracy, or into becoming criminals of victim-less crimes ourselves, or for crashing the economy once again. Maybe there's a place for government as an entity that enforces and actually respects the non-aggression principle and protects us against fraud, catastrophe and foreign threat.

Wait, I'm actually not thinking straight here... I'll need to use the same texture (diffuse) for the hinge and rivets, since the goal is to remove the tris from the rivets, and just keep the flat hinge, but with the rivets painted on its texture. I think I really need to create my own custom diffuse and a normal map to go with it...

Can I apply one normal map for the model regardless that the model uses several materials? Or is each normal map tied to each material as I'm thinking it is?

I find the black one really appealing.

You don't have to trust it, though. You can if you want, but you don't have to. This is what I mean, that a system is better the least Trust/Hope/Faith you have to have in it. If the current model is wrong, and the earth is flat, then when you try to send out a satellite it won't work reliably or at all, and that'll tell you something's wrong about the current data. I can see why you can think "distrust" seems like an overstatement, but I don't think it is. You can't trust your senses, so you use a measurement mechanism, but you can't trust that mechanism because you built it, so you find a point of convergence between several independent measurement mechanisms, etc etc. Critical thinking/inquiry/scrutiny etc, also have a major role in that, but those were also developed out of the notion that you can't trust your own perception of reality and should always try to find the holes in it. As I understand it, all of these things were developed to mitigate as much as possible the need to work on the basis of trust/faith/hope/etc. Maybe in some cases the motivation wasn't outright distrust, maybe it was some other realization. But thinking back to the times where frauds walked among scientists thumping their fists on the table yelling "preposterous!" at accusations of misconduct, thinking of all the weasel methods of pseudoscience and all the scams that were weeded out of science over the centuries, distrust seems like a very apt word for it. Extrapolating it to the rest of the world, we can find more of that. - Journalism started from distrust for power - Police exists because we can't trust that everyone respects the non-aggression principle - the judicial system exists because we can't trust that individuals will deliver proper justice, or even justifiably so - and it enforces the principle of "guilty until proven innocent" because we learned people lie - Contracts, because we learned we can't trust that people lie as well - Security systems, because we can't trust that everyone will respect our property - vetting systems, because we can't trust everyone does a good job at things - etc... I'm blanking out... I'd say one of the major flaws of democracy is that it's based on either the trust that votings will reflect the side of reason, or the hope that it won't be the end of the world if they don't. Democratic Republic tries to mitigate the problem of the "tyranny of the majority" that obviously originates from there, so that's a step forward, but still... It may be by the same token that you think Distrust is an overstatement, that I think Trust is an overstatement regarding informed conclusions or decisions and critical thinking. Even with your distinction between Trust and Gullible Trust in mind, I can't help but remind myself that Trust is still a direct synonym of Belief/Faith/Hope, just not Blind Belief. I disagree with the popular notion that relationships are built on Trust; but rather on predictions based on a conceptual graph of observations, and in some cases assumptions, where you lay out the dots and draw a trajectory on them (like astronomers do to find out the trajectory of comets and meteors). That conscious or subconscious reasoning happens regardless of whether the relationship is going in good faith or in bad faith, though I wouldn't necessarily call it distrust in the former case. But distrust doesn't have to be in bad faith. Trust is very much a thing though. People think and even vote with their hearts a lot of the time, among other things. Scientists are also bound to trust some of their peers and many other people. I think it's a biological bias. So I don't think I could answer the question laid out in those terms. I think I'd rather have the option "Less Reliance On Trust", regarding the systems we built. Or maybe there's not a perfect all-encompassing word for what we're talking about. Very true. The only thing keeping me hopeful (ahhem ) is that more and more people (philosophers, scientists, economists, etc) are having public discussions, especially in friendly terms, and attracting more and more attention, so maybe we're into something. They've been also highlighting the notion that we should hear all sides and we should disagree and discuss our disagreements. I suspect the cause of the divisiveness we're living may be premeditated political subversion (not from russians, I also suspect -- from the inside). You might find interesting to watch (if you never watched) the lectures and interviews from the ex-KGB spy, Yuri Bezmenov. Subversion tactics was his expertise, and he explains how it's done. The most chilling point he made was that anything people strongly believe can be used to herd them to do what you want them to, or to cause social chaos which is more likely the desired outcome. Might be a stretch. I don't know. But when I look at political divisiveness I'm always reminded of the old saying "divide and conquer".

Yea, in my country I think they're both voluntary and state funded too. And yes, I meant French Foreign Legion. I had forgotten it was french lol. As for courts, it's the same thing I just told Destined, you can't predict when someone will find a way to make it profitable, or, now that I think about it, ways to make something profitable around it that finances it. Who would've thought in the 90s that you could profit from developing free software. EDIT: when I was thinking about it some time ago, one concern I found was that corporate interests might be a problem from privatized courts or police. But then, at the level of the state you still encounter political interests, which may be worse, since they're tied to a system of power. Although maybe there's something about the private equivalent that I'm missing that cancels that out.

That's pretty much what I'm saying. However I'm also saying that it's not in the interest of many politicians to close loopholes, but to open even more loopholes. I'm not ready to dismiss government as stupid and all regulations as harmful and unnecessary, but there's an absurd of amount of it that is doing more harm than good, getting in the way of people's economic growth at the same time they're paying for it, and feeding the vicious cycle of breeding entitlement and dependency in people, which also inflates gov, gov spending and gov power. EDIT: the implications of "people will always find loopholes in any system and use it to their advantage" are also a whole new discussion in themselves, and usually a very hard pill to swallow. That actually depends on who's driving what. Hardcore socialists would want to nationalize everything. But it's not just them. The British gov took the chance to nationalize some banks during the 2008 crisis, for example. I heard Bush bailed out some. Google&Friends have had plenty of financial perks. There's a huge history of gov enforced monopolies. (There's two kinds, those where gov outright forbids competition (postal service, electrical companies, etc) and those where the gov aids them and/or hinders their competitors.) But ultimately it doesn't matter at all what the gov wants, what matters is what the gov is doing, and what is the trajectory the points on the graph are showing you. Also, what that licencing thing means in that case is that gov gets in the way of medical advancements. There should be no such thing as intellectual property in research, much less in medical research. You're also telling me it further backs up my points. Gov intervention was the problem there, not deregulated markets, as the implications were that I was responding to. I know what unmarketable is, but it wasn't in conformity to what I was reading. Art has been marketed all along since after feudalism, and gov hardly allocates any funds to it. Were universities always financed by government? Because that's the main places that would hire philosophers and historians. Also museums, for the latter. But there's a more important point I didn't make before: even if something isn't being profited from, doesn't mean it can't be. It just means no one yet figured out how to do it. That includes fighfighters, courts, etc. (And don't confuse this with an Argument From Ignorance. Milton Friedman stated he never figured out a way to privatize the army, and sadly no one seemed to remind him about the existence of the Foreign Legion.) That's actually true, at least for the railroads here, afaik; I'm not sure about buses, I'd have to find out somehow. But that's a natural consequence, unfortunately, of it having been public, rather than having been built from the ground up privately. You can't turn titanic 180 without an absurd amount of resistance. I'm not sure it's even possible in this case. Time will tell. Perhaps the only solution is actually to let it sink, and let new buyers try new things. Maybe even having more buyers getting smaller parts of it would be more viable.

Democratic socialism is a thing. Venezuela adopted it in 1999. The state running the police and the courts isn't socialism because none of that was ever put in place following any socialist reasoning. I agree. But most of the time democracy means the same thing for everyone, the different concepts of democracy are usually specifically preceded by some other concept: The US is a democratic republic and so is portugal. Fidel Castro always insisted Cuba was some other form of democracy, I forgot which. What tells you Stephen Hawking didn't actually get unequal perks for being Stephen Hawking? But your concern there is rather moot. It depends on what the ministry of education decides should be taught about the state, doesn't it? One can only hope that government doesn't approach the far left or the far right enough that public schools are turned into indoctrination camps. It's not an agenda. There's nothing in it for me. It's not altruism either. Somehow I still care because I, like most, would like to live in a better world. It takes a huge amount of effort to build something good. Like a house of cards. Yet to destroy it, that's easy. You just nudge the table. It's not that governments are out to get you, it's that systems of power inherently attract power hungry people (one would think that's a given). It doesn't matter how great the intentions were of the people who built that system, if it can be exploited, it will be. The reason why you don't live under a tyrannical state is because democratic nations have limited the powers of gov to the extent that it prevents that, but none of them has limited the possibility of getting voted back into tyranny. I don't believe for a second you've never encountered plenty of news about corruption in your own gov. There's no place on earth where that can happen. But the thing is, even if everyone in gov was well intentioned, that doesn't mean they'll favor your freedoms and your interests. The primary motivation of communism is compassion. The primary motivation of fascists who want to forbid you from having good things, is good will: they believe it's the best thing for you. Not sure what's your point there. Ed Sheeran isn't a corporation, and the corporations in the article are paying less taxes than him. Which is in line with what I've been saying all along.

To be clear, the image I showed wasn't supposed to represent my vision or anything. I just couldn't find anything better from the same perspective as your original concept. Was mostly just to illustrate the movement thing.

Maybe you already thought of this, but just in case, it might be worth arranging and slanting the shards (in a 3D kind of way) to give the impression of movement. As demagogue said, they could also fit the shape of the window in some recognizable way. Unless they're made smaller. Just some other ideas that came to mind: the shards don't have to not overlap the window, and maybe a shard or two could even remain in the window. Might be worth making a rough simulation in 3D and use it as reference, if you can.

Just want to address two things I didn't before: Indeed it still works, but it's distrust what keeps it working. Distrust is what will make you go out of your way to corroborate what you're told, instead of simply believing unquestioningly. And sometimes you find you were being deceived. Distrust is the reason why contracts exist. Take a look at the Scientific Method. It's 100% built on distrust (the same can't be said about pseudoscientific methodologies), and that's because scientists learned over the centuries that some people will abuse and jeopardize a system that trusts. In fact, one important aspect of the scientific method is that after laying out a hypothesis you don't run experiments to try to prove it, you run experiments to disprove it. Which is what protects scientists from even trusting their own flawed faculties, which will be wrong a lot of the time. Another important aspect of it, is that scientists, moved by adamant contrary biases, principled skepticism or dutiful professionalism, will distrust each other's faculties, such that they will repeat each others' experiments to try to disprove each others' hypothesis, and scrutinize each others' essays and reports, etc. We, laymen, tend to trust scientists. What else can we do, we don't know how to work the math and the test tubes. But while many of us trust them, many others don't, and those that don't will read their reports and scrutinize them and will be happy to blow the whistle if they find any red flags. Indeed whistle blowers should be celebrated. Distrust is actually what built Western societies, not trust. Distrust is what moved us beyond authoritarianism. There's never been societies in the past as free and prosperous as these. That there may not be enough distrust is what may be the problem. Trust doesn't build trust. It's one thing to trust your lover or a close friend, and in those cases maybe your statement applies. But it's another thing to trust people in general. So generally speaking, what trust builds is opportunities for liars and scammers. Hence what I was saying before, the more you trust people the higher the chances you'll be deceived. And if you build a system based on trust that has power over people and which deals with other-people's-money, then you can be sure the worst people on earth will push through the crowd to try to get their hands on it. EDIT: To be clear, I'm not saying one should be obsessively paranoid about it. You can live your life trusting that most people like you won't try to screw you. If Humans were not generally predisposed to be good or neutral to each other, we would be an extinct species. What I'm saying is we should be vigilant about those in power, about speakers with the power to influence other people, and even about whistle blowers for that matter.

@nbohr1more, the problem is if they speak in favor of wikileaks (and inherently against representatives of certain political parties), they can get their journalist licences revoked (and perhaps other licences) or favors-money withdrawn. I don't know what else can be making them affiliated with politics, but the simple fact that they are pretty much says they're no longer journalists but propagandists. (EDIT: and that applies to media on all sides of politics.) A journalist should be the nº1 enemy of the state, not a vassal of it. Fortunately things are changing with the internet, as people are doing journalism all over the place, not giving a damn about licencing or whatever other regulatory measures govs have in place that, purposefully or not, allow them control over information. (I know I'll probably piss someone off, but hey, the free market is working to solve the problem of government intervention! )

I'm not just denying things, I'm explaining how they work. It's not my standards, it's what can be observed. I don't have a political affiliation. I don't have a bias on some kind of government conspiracy; it's a historically observable fact that power corrupts. It's a demonstrable fact that governments are riddled with corruption, it's a demonstrable fact that people lie, cheat and deceive to get in power, and it's a demonstrable fact that people abuse power. No political system can ever be perfect, and none of them so far evolved beyond being easily exploitable for the purpose of making money or gaining power over other people. What part of that do you think is untrue? I didn't say cartels never existed, I said cartels don't work unless they have government protection against competition. Never heard of Coca Cola Park case. Standard Oil was on the brink of collapse when Thomas Edison invented electric light. That man single handedly almost made Standard Oil defunct. One single idea is all it takes for the market to kill a mammoth corporation. The only reason why Standard Oil survived was that luckily for them combustion engines were invented and Henry Ford became their best "friend". What about Bill Gates? I'm not aware that he colluded with anyone. Microsoft was coerced under the threat of antitrust to bail out Apple -- which should never happen -- but that's another story. And that was the hand of the gov. Just in case you may be confusing or conflating "collusion" with "cooperation", though, don't. They're different things. Cooperation and competition aren't mutually exclusive, so companies can and do cooperate. Your concern should be focused on whether the consumer benefits from whatever they're doing or not. Cooperation usually benefits the consumers if it benefits the companies mutually (they only cooperate if that's the case -- or if the state coerces them with antitrust, like they did to Microsoft). An example of actual collusion (an actual cartel) were the Robber Barons. I didn't deny the story, I pointed out that it didn't make sense as it was described. But so he was a fraud and a scammer, and he is in prison for it. I'm not exactly sure why you brought him up, then. These things happen regardless of markets and also regardless of regulations. He did what he did in a regulated market: "In September 2015, Shkreli received widespread criticism when Turing [Turing Pharmaceuticals] obtained the manufacturing license for the antiparasitic drug Daraprim and raised its price by a factor of 56 (...)" - wikipedia: It surely wasn't the free market that put that license in place and decided he was eligible to have it. Obviously I don't know much about it besides this cursory look at it, so maybe you could tell me something relevant that I don't know that might make a difference. I would think I pointed at enough things that demonstrate the opposite. I know enough about democracy to know you're lumping in a lot of baggage on democracy that it doesn't originally bring with it. Let me see what wikipedia says: "According to American political scientist Larry Diamond, democracy consists of four key elements: a political system for choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections; the active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life; protection of the human rights of all citizens; a rule of law, in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens.[5] Todd Landman, nevertheless, draws our attention to the fact that democracy and human rights are two different concepts and that "there must be greater specificity in the conceptualisation and operationalization of democracy and human rights".[6]" -- Wikipedia What do you mean by "equality" though? I don't want to be going on assumptions. That's all very nice, but we came out of medieval times a long time before socialism was even a thing, and all the industrial and scientific revolutions of the last ~400 years happened regardless or because of the circumstances where people were born. The unfortunate reality is that what breeds problem-solvers is problems. The majority of the richest people on earth came from poverty. On the other hand over 70% of family fortunes don't last more than 3 generations. The poor grandfathers had to learn to make money, the rich grandkids don't. That doesn't mean there aren't things we can control and remove from people's way as we can, but we must acknowledge the reality that we can't make things perfect. What do you mean unmarketable? All of those things you enumerated have been and are being marketed all over the place. Art, philosophy, history, literature... all of them. For centuries. And you can't take competition out of something that's naturally competitive. All life is competitive. We are competitive. It's a biological imperative. You're trying to go straight on a curved railroad if that's really what you want. If your solutions aren't based on reality and don't play along with it, then you're gonna take things off the rails down the abyss. On a side note, that's essentially the track-record that socialism has. Buses in my country have been privatized some 15 or 20 years ago, and railroads have been privatized some 5 years ago, and your predictions don't hold true. There's even an hourly bus dedicated to coming all the way into my little cul-de-sac neighborhood. The irony is that tax money is totally hinged on the markets. And you don't seem to realize that if you have economic growth, that means you're making poor people richer and able to fend for themselves. My father started working at age 10, and his wage was barely enough to buy bread. Ten years later he was driving a Lotus and a Beetle, working as a barman at the airport, and I was born 2 years later and children didn't have to choose between working or starving anymore. Who told you that? Really, who got that kind of rubbish in your head? Capitalism and consumerism may be related but they're two different things. Capitalism is a naturally occurring system of free trade and private ownership. Free as in voluntary, devoid of coercion: you're free to trade with whoever you want in whatever ways you want, provided that you're not breaking the non-aggression principle or committing fraud, and you're entitled to the money you make, etc. That's all. Consumerism is not inherently a bad thing either. It's what makes the economic wheels turn. There is such a thing as too much consumerism, and indeed some people are dumb enough to let themselves be taken by advertisers. And I think there's a case you can make for blaming advertisers (although banks (which are heavily regulated and entangled with gov, I might add) do much worse than them) for being manipulative to some extent, and in some cases to a great extent, but... hold on a minute, what is the socialist government doing about them? Why aren't they regulating advertisers? Oh... they're funding them...