Skaruts

Sounds like a problem with that woman being rather dumb, than a problem with that company. At least in that story. Ominously? I was just mentioning it because, unless I'm missing something, it's a profitable private market example of an actual army, that seems to work well enough that it still exists (and now that I think about it, I don't think it ever exerted its power under the hands of tyranny either). This was in response to a full-certainty that some things can't possibly be handled by the market. I personally just never found market equivalents for courts of law and firefighters.

Trust isn't what you want at all. Trust is a dangerous trap. Trust will only get you to fall prey to scammers, con-artists, opportunists, and corrupt politicians, as they all exploit your good-will and trust and compassion. What you want is a system that works without the need for any of that. In a video from the economist Walter E Williams that I linked yesterday to someone in that thread he briefly illustrates how the free market works precisely in that way, without the need for trust or as he mentioned good-will: People from on one side of the earth will be extracting resources and selling them so they can get food on their table, which in turn will get food on the tables of those that bought them when they sell products made with them, and will better the lives of the people who buy the end products. All of the people involved in this trade may hate each other's guts, they may have conflicting political or religious interests, they may not trust each other one bit, and still, by working to provide for themselves they can't help but also provide for everyone else. That's what you want. There's also this one by Milton Friedman, which I think is a more complete explanation of how markets naturally work like that: Of all things, the state is the entity you should never, ever trust. Trusting the state leads to tyranny. You should always hold it to scrutiny, because power corrupts. The police won't help you in a tyrannical state that doesn't like your ideas.

That's not entirely untrue. You always get people trying dumb things, and cartels are a dumb thing to do. Because they don't work, because other competitors will thrash them. Unless protected by government from competition, then they can work. So if cartels exist, the problem isn't the market, it's the state involvement in it. Cartels (or oligarchies) are a variant of state monopolies, which are the only monopolies out of the three types of monopolies (natural monopoly, state monopoly and cartel) that you have to worry about. Free competition doesn't allow for long lasting monopolies. The market eventually kills even state monopolies (which are the only kind of die-hard monopolies). The postal service is a good example: it's pretty much dead since emails arrived. The taxi monopoly is another. Uber is just tearing it to pieces (my father's a cabbie, and of course he's not happy about it, but he can only blame the gov for the licensing and regulations that make his cab more expensive than Uber's). It's even debatable whether the "Natural Monopoly" is a monopoly in the first place, since at any given point in time someone will hold the majority of any given market. But that doesn't mean they will be holding it next year, or even next month. The tech industry market is a good example: it's been mostly deregulated so far, its graveyard is vast and crowdy, and only in recent years have the US gov (and some others) started handing out tax breaks and funding to certain corporations. "Coincidentally", it's also in the recent years that we've had longer lasting monopolies in this market. https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/07/03/google-tesla-apple-facebook-rake-in-massive-subsidies-report/ https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/why-are-taxpayers-subsidizing-facebook-and-the-next-bubble/ https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-governments-are-giving-billions-in-tax-breaks-to-apple-amazon-and-other-tech-giants-2016-10-13 What I think it's more amusing is to see the same people who are against monopolies, defending the state monopolies of public healthcare and public education... (which would also, under different circumstances (if they were private), be hammered with antitrust for predatory pricing -- unless they were obediently enacting lobbying; then they'd be fine). I don't know who Martin Shkreli is, but either that story is false or there was government involvement prohibiting or thwarting competition or something of the sort. Come on, use your head: if the market is free and you ramp up your beer from $2 to $500, do you really think people will buy it when they can buy mine for $2? Come on... It's only if the market is not free, either because the state prohibits me from selling beer, or because it's imposing high costs of licencing, regulation, taxes and bureaucracies to deter me and others from entering or staying in that market, only in that case will people have no choice but to pay $500 for a beer. But even in that case, doubtfully the costs of all those things will force me to raise my price that high, so if I can still sell beer for $20, people won't buy any beers for $500. That's a claim that has yet to be demonstrated. In fact, the opposite of that is being demonstrated all around us as we speak: First, the markets are providing you with EVERYTHING except those very few things you think can't be provided by the market. Why are they exceptions? Well, they aren't actually, and you know that because: Second, the market is actually providing those things too as we speak. Private clinics and private education exists. They can't really compete with "free", so they're more expensive. Well rich people seem to prefer them. And it's not just because they can afford them, it's because they get better served there. I'm not an anarcho-capitalist, but I'd like to also point out that the market also provides security (within the limitations imposed by gov), and the Foreign Legion has been a thing for a long long time.

It wasn't supposed to be accurate, it was just supposed to illustrate a point, that we might as well be paying for our own beers. When it comes to taxes it's more like you pay for 75% of my bear, and I pay yours and the rest of mine, because you are by some arbitrary threshold which was devised under some arbitrary criteria, not able to pay those 25%. You're still paying. And you know the criteria is arbitrary when the same rule is applied as one-size-fits-all to everyone poor in the entire nation. 2- When we were polluting even more, the rest of the world was polluting even more than that. In the soviet union, for example, there were places you could barely breed, or even ever open your windows. Go a few more decades back in the West, and people could be sued for polluting (you could sue businesses or individuals (neighbors) for polluting the air in your frontyard). When regulations started being imposed on companies those laws were changed and made practically useless (and if there's a pollution problem, that's why). Go a century back and people were making a business out of picking horse poop from the streets. Eventually they also figured out how to made a business out of channeling people's waste away from the streets. The reason why the West is cleaner is because you can profit from cleaning it.

Sorry for the long posts btw. I don't mind agreeing to disagree, if by any chance you guys would rather do that. It wasn't my intention to be derailing the topic this far, but these conversations can last forever...

How is that possible though? I can't conceive of even bureaucrats being as thick headed as to buy from that drug company for such a price when they could just go to the pharmacist and buy it cheaper, or choose another supplier. EDIT: Unless there's some thick headed regulation mandating that the buying gov entity can only buy from specific suppliers. Which is not hard to believe. I think something like that was mentioned in an article Anderson linked to a few posts back.

It's the same as every other kind of healthcare, it's just specialized in one part of you. It may or may not be a matter of life and death just like the rest of healthcare. And it's certainly not a luxury. Dentistry is a part of healthcare that either got privatized or never got nationalized. Maybe it cropped up after the rest was already public. But making a distinction between dentistry and healthcare would be like making a distinction between kung fu and martial arts. Well some parts of it can be luxurious. Getting extra-super-duper-white-teeth, or like in Japan there are girls who turn one canine tooth outward because they find it attractive. But then that's a cherry on top. One that would never exist if dentistry was public, because the state wouldn't be using tax money for luxury. You can think of it much like candy. Food isn't a luxury, but the industry grew such that candy was made possible. Govs would never develop candy. It's only the private market that develops luxury on top of necessities. Just by the way, luxury items are actually also a necessity. Think how your sanity would be like if you lived your life without a comfy bed, a comfy sofa, tasty succulent food, hot water to taste, a car that looks cool, a computer that runs TDM, etc etc. Government would never develop TDM. People don't complain because they get treated. And quickly so. Well science, despite being state funded, isn't regulated against pseudoscience. To my knowledge, it's the Scientific Method that weeds out fraud and fraud can be taken to a court of law, and a fraudulent "scientist", even if not prosecuted, loses credibility and reputation, which is carrear suicide. Science is self regulated in that way, and that's pretty much what I would expect from medicine as well. Much like in the internet people gang up on liars and scammers, so do people in real life. Also, not all science is publicly funded; much of it takes place within private companies that need to improve their own products, and you don't find pseudoscience there either. People themselves developed ways to make pseudoscience pretty much as clandestine as it can be in its own little corner. I don't think doctors like being sued to begin with. But I'm wondering: I don't know a place that has actual privatized healthcare, aren't the regulations that exist made to prevent those failures in public healthcare? You can ban stuff regardless of whether they're performed in public or private enterprises. Lead was banned from the market, and uranium too I think. I don't dismiss all regulation as harmful or undesirable, although there's a distinction to be made between regulations and protection from aggression and fraud. In either case, it's indeed the duty of the gov to be the arbiter in the competition. The problem I see is just with when the gov gets in the way of free and fair competition. Neither do I... But then, no one's trying to find out, because they're not permitted to. Working in two places doesn't cancel their competition. Although the gov doesn't compete either way, so in that case, the private clinics compete with gov, but that's it. I don't see anything wrong with them having two jobs, though, but you mentioned corruption, so if there's a problem it's likely in that. I don't think their two jobs is what prevents growth, what seems to do it is that one of them is "free", but I don't think that's the doctor's concern.

Well, it's socialism, specifically. I'm happy to make a distinction, as you can have a socialist that isn't communist, just not the other way around. That doesn't make it any less questionable. But I don't consider things through ideological lenses, so I rather discuss ideas on their own merits, rather than on the basis of which particular ideology they come out of. At least insofar as the discussion is being that specific. We haven't been discussing the big picture of socialism, but rather the finer details, the feasibility of these socialist policies, specifically. Indeed. They are two different things, the Robin Hood Effect and Robin Hood. It's the way you put it before: "So the art of building a welfare state is to get the rich pay for the poor." Is a mindset that leads, or can lead, to it. What if no one's actually dying of starvation or with lack of healthcare in the first place? What if the state is going off of hypothetical scenarios and appeals to emotion to convince people that there is? What if that's all just appealing rhetoric for socialist sophists (or more likely actual communists) to win elections? Just like foreign aid is (that video has the longest appeal to emotion I've ever seen: 42 seconds of fallacious hot air, starting at the 04:08 mark). Does that sound far fetched to you? Aren't you keeping in mind they pay loads of salaries? And don't you think that's rather unfair? It's one thing to want to help poor people, it's another thing to screw everyone else doing it. Let me put it this way: why don't we go to a pub and have a bear. I'll pay for yours and you pay for mine. But I just happened to be born here. And I was never asked if I wanted to take part in any of it, and if I don't take part in it they'll come at me with guns. And what if I'm too poor to travel? What if I'm one of the people you're purportedly trying to help? All I want is to make my living and be left alone. The rich are actually the ones that agree with that (while they don't realize what's happening). They often feel guilty for being filthy rich and vote in favor of being taken money away, instead of feeling happy to have moved the world forward and made the economy boom. Bill Gates is one of the best examples (which is why the economist Yaron Brook uses it) of someone who created tons of new jobs and wealth for tons of other people. You're forgetting all the youngsters that just turned 18 and have no experience or skills, all the people who switch jobs to industries they never worked in, all the physically hindered or incapacitated people. Indeed, but the difference is that only those who need it pay for it. It bears no cost to a nation, only to its consumers, and it has no bureaucrats and bureaucracies making it even more expensive (unless of course the state decides to make it so). It's interesting you mention that, because the most capitalist parts of the world are also the least polluted. Also money exists because it's inconvenient and hard to be trading 0.75 cow for 12.25 rabits. It's also interesting that it's also in the most capitalist parts of the world where poor people are fat. And it turns out the states in those parts aren't providing any food at all to anyone and no one is concerned with it. You call it greed, but perhaps you're not talking about greed. Perhaps you're making the same mistake Walter Williams made when he called it greed: he was right, but he wasn't talking about greed. I call a failure to a system where one too many die waiting to be saved. People are dying for lack of healthcare under the very system that is purportedly built to prevent people from dying for lack of healthcare.

What language should scripts be in?

You're seriously underestimating the seriousness of dental problems that can originate in many ways, one of which is old age. You can't go through life without really needing a dentist at some point the same way you can't without really needing a doctor at some point. You can't buy fake teeth at the local convenience store, and most teeth don't fall out peacefully and quietly in the first place. And yet, the gov doesn't provide dentistry, and, I don't know about you, but I never heard anyone complaining they couldn't afford their dental treatment or that there was no affordable way for them to pay for it. I also never heard anyone complain they had to wait months to be treated. Which is one of the things that makes it so expensive. Regulations always bear a cost. And many regulations like these are largely derived from the apparent conviction that harming clients is a viable business strategy that private companies take. In reality private doctors wouldn't want to be sued either, and no business is successful with such a strategy. You can't look at the costs of a highly regulated, highly bureaucratic, centrally planned public healthcare (with the added cost of the salaries and subsidies of hundreds of bureaucrats) and conclude that's what people would have to pay for if it was private. The most fundamental problem with these things is that they breed dependent and irresponsible people, and that means they can't be just abolished overnight, but it also means it only tends to get worse in every aspect. Not sure who you mean is colluding. It seems doctors aren't being paid enough though, and it should be fine that they work on private clinics. As for wages, in the private market they always tend to go up over time, unless automation comes into play, or unless the gov gets in the way with regulations.

The problem with the robin hood effect (besides its relation to the misconception that he stole from the rich to give to the poor) is that it's based off of a mindset that neglects to see that the rich already redistribute their wealth on their own (think how many people get paid and how many businesses flourish each time they buy a yacht, or when Elon Musk makes silly absurdly expensive experiments), and in doing so they give a serious push to keep the economic gears turning, which is ultimately what actually keeps raising the living standards of everyone else including the poorest. The robin hood mindset also tends to upset the rich, who, if they can afford to move away (if they're not stuck to localized business infrastructures or something), will then look for tax havens and take their wealth with them and invest and pay salaries elsewhere, in turn raising the living standards of other nations and lowering those of their own. Or they find ways to build their infrastructure in other countries and transport the goods from overseas (f. ex. China) if it turns out to be cheaper and less of a hassle. Prices are directly related to living standards. Lower prices means money is worth more, for example, which means wages are worth more, including the lowest ones, of course. The price on their labor is also directly related to their living standards. Minimum wage, among other problems it creates, removes the competitive aspect of the lowest wages, though, which would otherwise make them tend to rise over time as low wage workers became more demanding in accordance to their growing experience and skills.

Well from Destined's description it seems like RDR2's devs are making sure not to make that mistake. Hopefully they've designed the game the other way around, with no markers in mind first.

I said "most", not all. I wasn't disregarding things that are out of our control. Well that article pretty much shows how the US healthcare is mostly run by the government, and not a private enterprise. So I'm not really surprised that it costs a lot, now. The reason why I'd like to look deeper into it is because I know (well, I've heard) some parts are privatized, others aren't, and I have no clue which are which, so it's hard for me to visualize what exactly makes it cost whatever it does. That article doesn't make US healthcare system an example of a failing private healthcare, though. It makes it seem like it's a regulated market to an absurd degree. It makes it seem like an expensive public healthcare. Points 1 and 2 amusingly boil down "too many bureaucrats cost too much money" and "bureaucrats get in the way of free trading", point 5 pretty much says it's the gov who's controlling wages, and the other points could be down to bad management, which is something to be expected from governments. Though it's not clear from the article what causes the problems in those points. Point 3 can be a necessity. Imagine what the costs would be if that article was only all about 3. Poor people are paying too. Which is what makes all of this stuff ironic. In some places perhaps there's a flat tax, or maybe they don't pay income tax or something of the sort, but they're still paying all the other taxes. Like I said before, those who can't afford college educations are still paying for the college educations of those who can, and they're still paying for the schools they're never gonna use again, and they're still potentially being payed less wherever companies have to cover half of people's social security (because costs (and taxes) imposed on companies are always reflected on prices, worker wages or on market shares), etc, etc.

I had forgotten about this. r_shadowMapSize seems to be an unknown command. As for the others, don't they depend on soft shadows being turned on? I have them off. I seemed to get no lighting at all with them on when I tried. Or is r_shadows 2 soft shadows? It makes the lighting very dim for me. And I actually seem to lose about 2-3 fps with that and those other two commands.

Well I've ran through the options suggested here and it seems the only thing that significantly raised performance for me was those suggested by nbohr1more in the thread HMart linked to. Specifically tdm_lg_interleave 3 and tdm_lg_interleave_min 1, it seemed. This is apart from what I had already done before, like lowering everything in the video settings menus. r_useMapBufferRange 1 actually made it significantly worse (with or without tdm_lg_split -- lost about 10 fps iirc) so I dumped it. I notice no difference in frame rates on the lowest resolutions, fullscreen or not, or with lower image_downSizeLimit (and lower image_downSizeBumpLimit/SpecularLimit), or with everything else I tried. Turning off anisotropic filtering seems to make no difference at all (I still have it off). I disregarded certain settings like turning off fog and lip-sync for now, as those are situational and not really relevant for the overall performance. The sense I got is that if I use all those settings -- considering that everything has its cost, which means I have to gain something by turning them off -- I'd gain like 1 fps... Well, g_fov does make some difference, but there's no way I'll ever go under 90. I still have a thing or two to try, like the ATI tray tools (I've used those once, I can't remember why I stopped using them). To test it I essentially sat in a corner of The Bakery Job looking at the oven thingy (hearth?), where I'm currently at a fluctuating 34-37 fps. Seems like that's as far as it can go.

You can say the same about your overall health. You can argue certain things like old age affect people to the point they really need doctors, but then so does it affect them to the point they really need dentists. How can your lemonade not be expensive when people are flocking to the other one that makes it seem like it's free? You're not gonna be getting enough profit to compensate for the costs of production, distribution, staff, etc, etc, by selling it cheap. There are probably other factors at play that I'm not thinking of too, but that should give you an idea. Again, there are affordable ways to pay for things, there are loans; there are solutions to these things, and as a last resort you can always ask for help. People like to help each other. You can even try to crowdfund it these days. Also, they can't charge whatever they want. Prices aren't under the control of businesses. Put simply, if you start overcharging for your lemonade, then you're making my job of stealing your customers easier. I can just simply under-price it (assuming the quality of the lemonade is about the same), thus forcing you to lower your prices. Prices are set naturally by the market, not by any of the businesses in it. You can set a starting price if you're introducing a new product to the market, but even that will be based off of what the market will reasonably accommodate (what people will agree to pay, for example), and it'll bend over time to consumer and competitive forces. Of course they think about themselves first. It's their own lives that are at stake when having to pay more taxes. This goes both ways: In order for me to pay something for your health, I have to be taking something from what I can pay for my own. And why should I have to be pay for other people's needs when I have needs of my own and I'm already barely scrapping by too? And that's a biological imperative. We're not collectivist creatures like ants and bees. We care differently for people depending on what they mean to us. We care for ourselves and our own, then for our friends, then for our community, then for our state, then for our country. At each step we care less and less, and that's a natural thing (it's actually related to our evolutionary survivability). There's no point building a system under some premise like "people should care equally about everyone" because that's not real and will never be. That system is bound to fail. But the concern is not even that superficial. The concern could be better phrased as "why should I be paying for the health issues of some person that didn't take care of their health in the first place?" Most medical issues are related to things they could've controlled, like smoking or eating crap, etc.

I have to take a deeper look at US healthcare one of these days. On one hand I see people traveling to the US for a better healthcare, to avoid waiting in line in their own countries and that sort of thing, and then I also see many people complaining that US healthcare is bad. Something's not quite right. ObamaCare was pretty much a scam, as far as I've heard. But there you go, if people don't have health insurance, that's on them, not on their healthcare system.

I barely watch any TV... I heard about it, but I had no clue what it was about. But I'd rather be given actual IRL examples than a fictitious situation as an argument for how public healthcare is necessary. Cancer unfortunately affects a whole lot of people, and yet I never see people talk about people being unable to pay for treatments, and the only time I hear about it, turns out to be fictional. There you go. That's one way the private sector can help you. Like I said, people find ways to make things affordable, as well as dire circumstances survivable. Nothing is perfect so there's obviously always going to be flaws and problems, but people also keep trying to improve things as they learn what works and what doesn't. I don't expect healthcare to be privatized in a near future. My expectation (and prediction, I guess) it that the private sector will eventually grow and take over. The free markets kill every monopoly. It's hard to sell cheap lemonade when there's another lemonade stand that makes it seem like they're giving it for free, so it will likely take a long time, but eventually the quality and affordability of the paid lemonade will speak for itself. Or else the over-spending riddled-in-debt government collapses the economy as usual, and public healthcare goes with it (I think that already happened in Venezuela), and private healthcare naturally takes over from there.

You just can't go wrong with that and a minimap.

Can't a pressure plate trap be made using a door? I tried making it and the pressure plate part works, I'm just not yet knowledged enough to make it trigger something else. I did this a week or two ago, I'm not sure I made it activate through touch or with a flat trigger brush on top of it.

This is true. Although I would say free tools are also made with usability in mind, as many or some of the people who develop it are also actively using it. I always thought the most influential difference to the efficacy of the tools might be in that the one that costs money is made by people working full time on it, from the planning department to the development departments, so the level of commitment is much higher. Although I would agree that the fact that their livinghood depends on excelling on the results makes it also majorly influential. I would say that free apps are also naturally competitive, though. They may be free and the developers may not be getting anything from it, but the success and continuity of the tool hinges on it being capable of competing with the paid ones. And there's also a whole bunch of people making money around it who depend on it, and its in their best interest that the tool is and remains a competent one. However, I think in the case of Blender, there's the perhaps detrimental factor that it tries to be good at everything, and I think we all know how that usually goes... jack of all trades master of none. I would say it's actually surprisingly good for a jack of all trades. Well, I'm only mostly experienced in modeling, not really in animating or any of the rest. I delved into camera tracking at some point (and loved the whole thing!) and Blender seemed pretty competent at it. My biggest peeve is really the UI... Especially the Tool Shelf (T) and the Properties panel (N). I'm also not too fond of context sensitive UIs, tbh. Blender 2.8 is getting my mouth watering a bit though.

I'm having a little issue with it finding me a wrong texture. The shader name is textures/darkmod/stone/brick/rough_big_blocks02 (copied from DR), but it chooses the texture from the file rough_big_blocks02_cornerstone_light.dds, instead of rough_big_blocks02.dds. Meanwhile, is there a way to lock a texture so it doesn't change it when I load textures for new materials? EDIT: I just installed the new version, btw, but it still chooses that wrong texture.

Healthcare in my country (Portugal) is depressingly bad. I see occasionally on the news people dying while waiting, or stuff like a friend of mine who waited 7 months with broken ribs from a bike accident only to then be told it was too late to do anything. And I see all the old timers periodically waiting for hours and hours on the local clinic... Why couldn't that teacher afford it though? I can't say I'm particularly convinced. I could swear I've seen american working class people being able to afford cancer treatments before. How high are taxes in America (or in his state) -- or In other words, what percentage of his wage was he not saving because he was forced to give it away every month? (Don't forget VAT.) What treatment price are we talking about exactly? And was there no affordable way for him to pay, and if so why not? That's a common thing in the private sector, it's very odd if there wasn't. Or are we talking about something that happened in the 70s or 80s? Are we talking about private healthcare here? I don't think American healthcare is fully privatized. Not that I know that much about it, to be fair. I'm asking all those questions because I think they're relevant. Also because I don't want to be assuming stuff or talking past you. If by any chance public-sector teachers are being underpaid, keep in mind wages in the private sector tend to go up over time (well, minimum wage tends to keep low wages low, as it removes the competitive aspect of those). I don't think that's true for the public sector, as wages there are conditioned by how bureaucrats prioritize spending. In my country, lately, teachers seem to go on strike every other month... That's what government spending cuts of this sort do. You take money from something so that you can put into something else, but that's to the detriment of what you took money from, and then you also need to compensate for it, to the detriment of something else. It's a never ending juggle. On a perhaps funny related note, ironically public employees are partially paying their own salaries in taxes.

I still have a pentium 200 MMX lying around (with a Voodoo2), but sadly it's dead... I used to use it to play old games.

I'm not sure image_filters and that stuff aid performance, as I played around with that but wasn't quite paying attention to performance (but it was what made me think of making this thread). However, it's worth a try as well. I'm also interested in image_filters, is there a place where I can see which are the options I can use there? So far I only know about GL_NEAREST, besides the default one.