There’s also short sellers who eventually have to buy the stock to fulfill their obligation. A stock in terminal decline can go through many rounds of short selling which creates these bounces.

Stocks never just plunge straight to zero. Stocks in decline can have many bounces on the way down.

If you’re revisiting BG1 via the Enhanced Edition it’s actually been changed a lot from the original game. One of the biggest differences is that summoning spells don’t scale in the number of minions you get the way they did in the original. I remember summoning great big walls of skeletons with Animate Dead and just having my entire party pelt the enemy with slings and arrows from relative safety. Can’t do that anymore!

I actually prefer walls of text these days. I find myself too impatient to sit through long, voice-acted diatribes. I can read 10 times faster than the voice actor can speak, so I just end up turning on subtitles and skipping most of the voice acting anyway.

I also just find that voice acting tends to compromise the amount of writing. They just won’t have the VA read a wall of text and instead they’ll cut it right down, removing tons of nuance. Voice also similarly compromises the amount of dialogue options available to the character. I have yet to see a voice acted game with the sheer breadth and depth of dialogue option choices as games like Planescape Torment or Fallout 2.

Yes and men are better at recovering from injury. Testosterone causes both effects. It’s a tradeoff!

It’s Synecdoche, a figure of speech where a part of something is used to refer to the whole.

A few of the things were explicitly designed (such as the rules for elections, the composition of parliament) but a great deal of it evolved (English common law system, electoral districting/Gerrymandering, and many decades of legislative processes by many different people).

That last one I want to highlight because it seems like it is something explicitly designed. It is not. It’s like a soup pot many chefs walk past and add their own ingredients to. The fact that the soup is not very good can’t be blamed on one particular chef. Thus there is no real designer of our body of laws.

I also want to further point out that laws are not systems, they’re just words on paper. The system is the combined effect of all the people in society acting to produce an outcome. This outcome may be strongly informed by society’s laws (and also by social norms such as respect for the rule of law) but it’s not determined by them the way a computer’s actions are determined by its programming.

One need look no further than the Trump administration which has severely undermined the rule of law in the US. Without the rule of law the system turns into chaos. But that is also an outcome of the system itself, since social norms are the product of social forces (which are themselves highly chaotic).

Oh I don’t doubt that another violent revolution is coming. But each violent revolution proves the failure of the one that came before. Violence begets more violence.

Building a stable system that works for everyone is much more difficult. It takes many years of careful work. Flipping the table never gets you there. Table-flippers love to take all the credit, however.

As for your premise on “non-violent versus violent revolutions”, I reject it entirely. I’m an advocate for careful reforms, not revolutions.

The main takeaway I would hope people get from the idea (one that I heard from a forgotten source and then began using in the light of my own understanding I have to confess) is that we are living under a system that has been disproportionately and consistently shaped over much of its history by moneyed interests in various ways for the specific aim of winning the class war for the wealthy. That’s what the system is doing, that is its purpose.

Another objection to “the purpose of a system is what it does” is that it implies that systems have purposes in the first place. Many systems don’t have a purpose because they were never designed. Ecosystems are the biggest example of this.

Talking more specifically about our political and economic systems, I think the ecosystem view is helpful. Believing that an elite have conspired over centuries to create a system which entrenches their interests is dangerous, conspiratorial thinking which most importantly does not lead in any positive direction.

Violent revolutions rarely work, yet Americans have a peculiar affinity toward them, perhaps due to their history. It’s a particular sort of societal sickness which I believe leads to perfectionist, radical thinking and shuns graassroots, reform-oriented work.

The original topic of discussion (for this thread) was voting systems and two party systems. Grassroots political work can and has been proven to work at solving problems like this. There are many cases around the world where such voting systems have been changed thanks to the efforts of grassroots politics.

Which tells you that all creative energy has long since departed the company.

buried deep in the American zeitgeist

I think you mean American psyche. Zeitgeist means the spirit of the times. It usually refers to the present way of thinking or the way things were at one time.

The American psyche is much more of a timeless thing, stretching all the way back to the attitudes and beliefs of the founding fathers when they drafted the Declaration of Independence. Norman Rockwell’s paintings, Robert Frost’s poems, John Steinbeck’s books, the games of baseball and (gridiron) football. These are just some of the cultural artifacts said to be part of the American psyche.

Europe is saying all the right things but actions are another matter. When it comes to war, you can’t defeat the enemy by throwing money at them. You actually have to build the factories and manufacture weapons. Europe has been extremely unwilling to do that, instead preferring to buy weapons from the US.

Ukraine to their credit have been going all out to build their own military industrial base. Their domestic drone production is accelerating. They still need a lot of help with air defence systems, artillery shells, small arms, training, and logistics.

Oh I agree! I loved that startup sound! Compared to the SNES I was used to it sounded sooo next gen!

Without the gargantuan 3-dimensional death maze dungeons it’s not really going to appeal to the hardcore Daggerfall fans.

Wow I’m really surprised to hear people actually played with vanilla Morrowind and Oblivion leveling. I modded both games to fix that issue almost immediately after realizing how bad the system was.

Not a woman but I just turned 41 recently. Here’s the secret to life from here on out:

While your body keeps changing (slowly) your mind really doesn’t. So you’re going to feel the same as you always did! This is pretty cool!

Oh I was going to say he paid a rich guy way too much $$$$ for a NOS (new old stock) vintage Mac!

Yeah I don’t like banging my head into a wall either. What I mean by enjoying getting lost is being in a dangerous area where I don’t know how to get back to safety. It’s a mini adventure within an adventure to figure out how to escape without dying.

One game I play, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, has a built in mechanism to create situations like that: shafts you can fall down that put you into an unexplored level that’s deeper and more difficult than the one you were on. It’s pretty effective at creating these mini adventures though fans of the game complain about them all the time.

Does it have an auto-map feature? That’s the biggest difference for me. I enjoy the newer MVs but the auto-map feature makes it impossible (for me) to get lost. I’m used to games without any kind of auto-map.

Edit: I checked it out on steam. Looks really cool!

Getting lost is definitely a love it or hate it kind of thing. I love getting lost in games. I wish more games had it as a feature. It’s extremely rare these days. Most games hold your hand like a toddler at Disneyland.

It’s okay to hate getting lost. There are loads and loads of games out there for you. I just cross my fingers for a few more games for me!