I think the key point is that the FSL is necessary when profit is required. The GPL is a philosophy of social distribution more than a way to build a capitalist enterprise. Using GPL software ensures that software stays socially distributed instead of privately; but that can lead to issues for private profit.
> over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”;
just because missiles do not fly, does not mean there is a positive peace.
I don’t think you’re claiming that when MLK said “direct action”, he meant things like launching missiles, killing & raping, etc. I don’t think you believe that.
Right, only Israel should be allowed to launch missiles and rape and kill Palestinians in its prisons where they are kept for years without charges. That's obviously what he meant.
You've broken the site guidelines quite badly in several of your comments in this thread. (Though not all of them - for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38577923 was fine.)
If you would please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, no matter how wrong others are or you feel they are, we'd appreciate it. We don't have much choice but to ban accounts that keep breaking them.
Everyday Utopia was certainly a beautiful read, it is ultimately a book about hope and how we should be experimenting more in our world. The Persuaders had some really good insights into contemporary political persuasion tactics. No Bosses is very provocative in its argument for a change in the fundemantal division of labor in our age.
Also I would recommend the "Monk & Robot" series by Becky Chambers. It takes place in a solar-punk style world that is more character driven and less conflict driven.
1) Do not give too much wealth to PCs. Keeping the heroes poor is a kind of dramatic tension that not many campaigns explore!
2) Give them ways to spend their money! If the PCs need to go to an island, make the waters dangerous, and drive the price of the safer boat up. The danger is not fully evaded, but perhaps now they have a crew to help in any encounters. The party of course is always free to think of more creative ways around.
Make sure you as a DM always have an idea of the goals of the PCs, that includes economically. If a PC is aiming to purchase a nice item, keep that in mind when doling out gold, but always be sure to keep dramatic tension of the economy in place.
An alternative to keeping PCs poor is to make them "rich-poor." They are effectively so rich that money does not matter, but the setting is such that there is nothing they can buy that will make them better off. When they reach a town, they can always afford to do whatever they like (when it comes to coin), but they might not be able to afford the narrative consequences of their choices.
The key aspect of "keep them poor" is really just "limit the availability of upgrades." In a desolate world, there's nothing to buy. With super-hero tier PCs, even in an abundant city, there's nothing to buy that matters that doesn't also come with knock on consequences.
This is 5E's default strategy, but I don't think it works well - it means that the PCs becoming rich will remove, rather than add, gameplay. They won't spend any time thinking about paying for necessities of life, but there won't be much else to do with gold, nor any reason to go after it.
(It's sort of like the 5E Ranger. 5E has a bunch of wilderness survival rules, spells, etc. that can be used for campaign gameplay - but one Ranger in the party makes most of them irrelevant. The Ranger player will get personal satisfaction from using those abilities for a handful of minutes per campaign, then all of it will be forgotten.)
Money in a total wasteland is completely worthless of course. But if there's people, money will at the very least let you hire people. Hirelings were a big thing in earlier editions of D&D that kinda got forgotten at some point, but there's certainly something to the idea of high-level PCs hiring people to form an army to take on the army of the evil lich-king.
I guess it kinda depends on the type of role playing the party is looking for. If you want to role play the survival then great, probably don’t use a rich-poor dynamic where survival is handled by coin. I tend to think most parties prefer to just get to the dungeoneering and not spend too much time haggling with the shopkeepers and in-keepers for affordable rates on amenities, though.
This sort of thing only works with relatively inexperienced PCs, who don't realize that 1000 GP can hire all of a typical town for a few weeks to do almost anything, no questions asked. That quantity of hirelings is a relatively effective replacement to magic items. All you have to do afterward is turn combat problems into non-combat problems, which is relatively easy if you can think outside the box.
Need to clear a dungeon? Divert the nearest river to flood it and then use some other means (magical) to clear out the water.
Need to cross a bridge guarded by trolls? The new bridge you build won't be guarded by anyone.
I like that both of your suggestions include spending money and time.
You can flood a dungeon or build a new bridge, but both will take at minimum weeks, if not months.
If the King's daughter was kidnapped by those who live in the dungeon, or if the outcome of a battle hinges on you being able to cross that bridge over a chasm, they're not going to be happy when you come to them with a three-year plan for civic improvements.
Just use a little bit of magic or a different solution if you want things to go faster. I trust a set of clever players to be able to come up with something to totally fuck up the DM's plans.
Also note that Caesar's crossing of the Rhine (a notoriously tough river to bridge) took 10 days, and several similarly amazing feats of quick river diversion have occurred in Chinese history. All without magic. If you don't care whether your works are permanent, the work can be done very quickly.
> Need to clear a dungeon? Divert the nearest river to flood it and then use some other means (magical) to clear out the water.
In a future setting (Eclipse Phase), the party was sent out to investigate rumors of a downed spaceship.
We bought a rover, bought a wagon to go behind the rover. Filled it up with the setting's equivalent of C4. The GM tried to stop us on route, we planned very far and ended up hauling the trailer by hand (the rover got destroyed by a landmine, we specified a 10m rope between the rover and the wagon full of explosives just for such an occasion, the GM had forgotten about that, we didn't, we wrote it down).
We kept lobbing explosives into the ship (low G) until bits of alien started flying out. The GM looked... a bit sad.
High lethality games encourage creative problem solving.
Best story I've heard about clearing a dungeon was a group that drove a flock of sheep into the dungeon. Later, while exploring the dungeon, they'd find tons of traps with dead sheep in them.
In practice I've found this strategy to be pretty frustrating as a player. If treasure is going to be part of the campaign, give me something to spend it on. If it isn't, don't bother -- but in a system like D&D, you need to then provide an alternate method for obtaining equipment and upgrades.
This unfortunately can kill a great deal of incentive for the player. If there's nothing to look forward to, there's no dopamine hit. While too many dopamine hits are clearly bad, the absence of a reward can lead to a very boring game. There's a balance there somewhere.
I'm thinking about a system where you slowly accumulate stress and money, and you need to spend the money (on carousing, helping the poor, or other expensive habits) to get rid of the stress.
My goal would be to have lots of money moving through their hands without them being able to hold onto it for long.
I also remember an article from the 1980s that recommended having thieves steal their money if they got too rich. That sounds a bit unfair to me, although maybe it could work as part of a system there they stay at increasingly more expensive lodgings in order to keep their accumulating wealth safe.
> an article from the 1980s that recommended having thieves steal their money if they got too rich. That sounds a bit unfair to me, although maybe it could work as part of a system there they stay at increasingly more expensive lodgings in order to keep their accumulating wealth safe.
IIRC this was a frustration of mine with Rimworld. It was annoying and made wealth very toxic. The more you had, the more frequently (and more powerful) thieves showed up and wrecked your shit.
I didn't even have nice things, I just polished the floors so colonists wouldn't be so miserable with bunker life but apparently that raised collective wealth to the point of inviting raids.
I've played Blades in the Dark, and while you accumulate stress, you roll to get rid of it. I don't think it costs actual money, although they do call it vices. My plan was to really tie it into the excessive accumulation of money in D&D-style games, which is a problem BitD wouldn't have even if it didn't have the stress mechanic.
Money in BitD is very abstract, and a single coin represents a serious amount of money. And you don't buy stuff with it because you can only take so much stuff with you, and what that is depends on your character. Instead you use it to upgrade your lair or bribe people, I think.
So it's not quite what I was thinking of, although it certainly has some of the elements. Maybe it has shaped how I'm thinking about it now.
I remember how longer ago, I was thinking of a Robin Hood game where character progression depended on how much money you gave to the poor. That way you can still buy stuff for yourself and not level up, or give to the poor and level up.
For the games I've DM'd there's almost always been too much Stress and not enough Downtime Actions. The players would spend a good chunk of their Payout on downtime actions for stress reduction/healing. I don't know if I ever saw a player actually put a coin into their retirement stash.
A game centered around moving money, but not acquiring it, could be very interesting. You could tease out a few interesting scenarios and have meta-progression where helping others can create a network of skills. (i.e. you helped the baker pay her debts, now she will bake bread for you at cost.)
Can you get extra downtime actions for coin? I don't think I've ever done it. If I start spending it on that, I'll never accumulate any coin. Because to be honest, that stress mechanic is giving me stress. It really felt to me like a game that you're always going to lose. But maybe spending coin on it helps.
> A PC can make time for more than two activities, at a cost. Each additional activity from the list costs 1 coin or 1 rep. This reflects the time and resulting resource drain while you’re “off the clock” and not earning from a score. When you complete a new score, you reset and get two “free” activities again.
Spending coin on stress reduction certainly helps. If a player gets a 2-coin reward for a score, I'd hope they stashed one and burned one on something.
>having thieves steal their money if they got too rich
Money attracts that kind of thing, even in the real world. There's a reason rich people have guards. Also bodyguards - I was just listening to a podcast about how a fairly rich (and flashy) drug dealer got kidnapped and ransomed because he didn't think about what a target he was. Obviously more challenging when you're talking about heroes who are personally formidable, but think about friends, family members, retainers, etc.
I've always wanted to run a campaign that does the opposite: give them an obscene amount of wealth.
First problem would be how do they even transport, store, and guard it without being jumped, ripped off and robbed? Did they think millions of coins would fit in a few sacks?
Maybe a "No Country For Old Men" type situation? Sure they're rich as kings but there are more powerful beings that know about their wealth and they are coming.
I believe that the matter of their defense is irrelevant. The truth is that real people were harmed by this, and they deserve reparations today. As to who pays, it must be the landlords. This is the supposed 'risk' they take on by being landlords, which everyone tells me is so great to bear.
Also to get on a soap-box, this is the truth of reparations, it is not in relation to a single event, it is an attempt to solve injustices that exist institutionally in our world today.
This approach is at odds with rule of law and historically has not redressed injustices but rather created societies where power is even more concentrated and even less accountable.
The primary purpose of any and all reparations rhetoric in the US today is to divide the electorate by anything other than economic position in order to maintain a status quo whose legitimacy is beginning to erode. And it's working quite well, since you're delivering grandiose proclamations while advocating for nihilism and ignorance towards the existing legal processes that will actually impact the lives of millions of people in the coming years.
divide the electorate by anything other than economic position
Punishing landlords for colluding against tenants by forcing them to give back the money is pretty much the opposite of the status quo and about as focused on pure economics as you can get.
I would disagree in very strong terms. The entire economic, legal, and taxation system of the US are organized in a certain way that's only a couple of hundred years old.
Returning some money to some tenants as a one-off and restricting some forms of landlord collusion is about as far as you can get from pure economics or structural reform. Both capital R reparations and reparations as a social justice hobby horse are ultimately intended to preserve and legitimize the existing system, even in their maximalist demands which tend to deflect and discredit more concrete advocacy.
Economics is a vast field with a long history and many possible futures so it's quite sad that the horizon for many people is "american neoliberalism with more regulation and redistribution" or "american neoliberalism with less regulation and redistribution."
I can think of at least three actual opposites of the status quo: one would be a georgist tax that makes holding land speculatively unprofitable, one would be a singapore style nationalization where the government purchases all of the apartment buildings at their tax-assessed rate but allows for a market in 99 year leases, and still a third would be ex post facto arbitrary expropriation without compensation in the style of many communist revolutions.
"Some landlords return .01% to 15% of their last 2-3 years of passive revenue increases and promise to raise rents more arbitrarily" is not a bad thing for those renters, but in terms of economic trends and policy it's quite literally using existing law to _return_ to the status quo.
I agree that contemporary rhetoric on reparations is quite poor. But, scholars today agree that reparations are a way of understanding our government's position on change and not on giving money to people (Reconsidering Reparations by Olufemi Taiwo is about this). You give some good stuff to think about with the historical point, but I still believe it must be tried again, and better this time.
So I don't discount the legal processes, I am saying they must be changed. That is how we can actually solve issues like this, instead of simply putting a band-aid on each time we have systemic issues like this.
I find myself to be an anti-nihilist as a matter of fact. Reparations is not an _ideal_ for which I have grounded in nothingness (nihilism). Reparations must be a state of being for our government, whose material being should be solving injustice and not propagating it.
Anyone who wants to change the legal system to deliver a specific outcome instead of follow a specific process is always going to be my enemy.
I would be happy to die for habeas corpus, the right to face your accuser, the right to a trial by jury, freedom from ex post facto expropriation, public trials, the right of appeal, and countless other things which literal wars were fought over for a good 700 years of hammering out common law.
To be ignorant of the protections this brings and the costs its absence imposes is legal nihilism, the focus on a single outcome in the present with no provision for the future.
I hope the prosecutor makes their case well and the jury follows the judge’s instructions and returns a verdict favorable to tenants. But if the prosecutor drops the ball or the jury makes a decision that baffles me, upholding that process is more important to justice than any single outcome.
Many Americans are not only willing to die to uphold this, but part of their job is also to kill in its defense. The pseudo-heidigerian stuff about government having a state of being just reads like you’re gearing yourself up to rationalize imposing your beliefs through nominative positioning.
This is a good example of why most people don’t belong in politics or management.
You’re basically saying that because this violates your code of ethics, it should be punished by the legal system wherever or not they’ve actually broken a law. So the system of laws is meaningless, what’s important is how you feel, and your moral code.
And I get it, we probably all feel this way on some level. But I’m glad society doesn’t operate that way.
This software is collusion, and anyone using it today should be penalized. I don’t care what excuse they have, it’s clear to someone with half a brain (most landlords have at least half) should realize software that fixes prices for you based on local demand is going to be collusion. It’s pretty clear how that stuff works, the only unclear thing is if there is a loophole or judge which will let the landlords off in favor of the zombie economy over actual humans.
The collusion here is what, that they all agreed to use the same software?
What if I create software that recommends rates to charge, and I market it. Proven to get you up to 20% or more extra rental income! Then everyone just happens to use my software, and the rates are then 'recommended' to everyone based on an analysis of what the market will bear. No collusion. Is a law broken in this case? Or is the market just lacking in competition.
The software isn't making landlords do anything, it's recommending an optimal market price. Is it any different than a quote from a commodities futures exchange being used to price corn at the local grocery store?
knowing what it does, yes that is collusion. Look at the etymology of the word: it literally means 'playing together'. It doesn't require people to meet up in a smoke filled room in supervillain outfits and say 'let's collude, heh heh heh'. Everyone is sharing their rental data to help the software calculate the optimal price, and everyone wants to get extra rental income, per your scenario. The diffrence from the commodity exchange is that exchange operators are not promising specific price outcomes for commodities.
The whole point of pro-competition laws is to stop large corporations or a cartel from using market power to control pricing, which is the scheme you just laid out. So, yes, that would be illegal. You can say "no collusion", but you (the operator) have effectively organized a cartel. Each individual landlord may escape liability, but you will not.
Commodities exchanges (I believe) work on a competitive bidding system, which is basically the opposite - you have willing buyers and sellers with roughly equal power/information.
> The whole point of pro-competition laws is to stop large corporations or a cartel from using market power to control pricing, which is the scheme you just laid out. So, yes, that would be illegal.
How is a Zestimate or Redfin home value estimate legal then? Or a Redfin rental estimate? [1] Would it become illegal - or a cartel - if too many people started using it to set rents?
Should we forbid tools to help landlords figure out how much their places should rent for?
It might be. RealPage's definitely is because they've clearly accrued market power in order to control pricing. In Redfin's case it seems like more of a marketing gimmick, but if you could prove it had a meaningful effect on driving prices up, then yes, the FTC should order its' removal.
> Should we forbid tools to help landlords figure out how much their places should rent for?
It depends? Playing moneyball (i.e. charging the maximum the market will bear without a serious, violent response) with a necessity like rent should be illegal, and many of these tools seem designed to do that using market power, which is explicitly illegal. If the tool just gave some local averages based on things like amenities, that might be ok.
Yes, if it causes harm to people. Being a landlord is a job (so I'm told), do some math, figure out how much is fair (cost:labor calculation) then ask on the open market if people want to pay that. The problem is that the underlying system here did NOT do this calculation, hence price-gouging. It is the lack of free market that is the problem, thanks to this price centralization.
Today, we punish people by taking away their money. Taking away someones money should not doom people to poverty over this kind of stuff! I am not saying kill all landlords here. I am saying that the landlords profited too much and it must be made fair.
There should be no 'punishment' of the landlords truly, I am saying we make a system where landlords can not unjustly profit from us (and I do speak generally here).
Stuff like this is what causes the housing crisis, it must be dealt with systemically, not by giving a few people none-the-wiser a lesser life.
> I am saying that the landlords profited too much and it must be made fair.
There's for better or worse no law against 'too much profit' in the general case. How would one define 'too much'? A certain margin? That has historically led to merchants increasing their costs so they can profit more in absolute terms once the relative profit cap is met.
Seems like the answer is just to allow more construction and densification, which in turn creates a more competitive market for housing. If they then tried to aggregate, roll-up and collude they would fall under the Sherman act no?
> Seems like the answer is just to allow more construction and densification
The system very often doesn't actually support that in fact, so I don't find it a particularly compelling argument.
Sometimes systems suck from the get go, sometimes they degrade over time. Some of us are getting tired of the heads I win tails you lose "democracy" magic show, and the runtime we are in supports recourse outside of the "agreed upon" (wink wink) legal conventions, and I suspect it is more of a coordination problem than a consensus or will problem.
Well the problem is that with these software systems, we have already answered your question. If we do not change something (after seeing this!) then we have allowed 'dumb' collusion. Where these landlords can profit exceedingly and then claim complete innocence.
The landlords see their rent prices increase in their checks each month, it is not as if they have not noticed increased profit over the last years due to this.
So if this is allowed, we will start to see increased centralization and then passive acquiescence to gross profit.
> Where these landlords can profit exceedingly and then claim complete innocence.
Define 'exceedingly.'
> So if this is allowed, we will start to see increased centralization and then passive acquiescence to gross profit.
The market is already fairly efficient, except where laws like rent control forbid market efficiency.
The issue is that while demand exceeds supply of housing in metro areas, the cost to acquire/rent will tend towards the maximum amount a renter/buyer can bear. On the other hand, when supply exceeds demand, it tends towards the cost of construction.
This software just makes the market more efficient in the same direction it was already heading.
More houses solves this. Suing the pricing tool for existing does not.
To define exceedingly. Well I guess I just see this as a natural partner in the housing crisis. To combat things like this is to help solve the housing problem today. The prices are not going up like this because there are too many people, the prices are going up because of economic centralization.
> The prices are not going up like this because there are too many people, the prices are going up because of economic centralization.
Well no, they're going up because there's not enough houses near the jobs. Studies show the US is short 2-6,000,000 homes. Until that changes, prices will only keep going up. The centralization here is making it move faster than it otherwise would but the bounds and direction remain unchanged.
Oh please, you're ignoring contrary evidence, like the fact that landlords were using the existence of new housing as a justification for raising their own prices in order to stay 'competitive' (in terms of profit, rather than in terms of price). There's a simple and easily understood argument about why the behavior is illegal and anticompetitive.
Coming in and harassing people for definitions and quoting economics 101 while ignoring the empirical evidence isn't a good way to discuss an issue.
It does operate that way, whether you want to believe it or not. Every political decision is influenced or directly related to the ideology of those in power.
Funny how feelings are brought up and mocked when it’s about the disenfranchised. Meanwhile, the ruling elite gets their fee fees hurt by socialists and it’s how it should be.
People like you are why frivolous lawsuits like this exist, because they simply feel that "harm" occurred because something you they didn't like happened.
My argument is that if harm can be proved, those harmed must be made whole. I don't understand how that is frivolous. I am not the one saying that a collusion suit should move forward here.
It’s also just impossible. To pay an amount that even meaningfully improved the lives of 10% of the people it was aimed at, we’d bankrupt ourselves. If your government printed enough money to give let’s say 12% of the population an amount to make up for lost income over several generations, it probably wouldn’t help much, and even if it did, that money would be worthless due to hyperinflation and government bankruptcy.
It’s a well-meaning idea that’s proven stupid by even elementary school math. Anyone who suggests it is clearly incapable of rational though.
I am not saying the solution here is by giving people dollars. But creating a system where landlords (by disallowing this kind of price centralization) can't screw over their tenants.
And saying that people who argue for reparations are incapable of rational thought is quite rude.
You may be right that it’s rude, I apologize. But it’s not incorrect if we’re talking about reparations the way, it is typically used in American discourse, but perhaps you meant it some other way also
I'm using reparations as a general term of making people whole. The landlords, whether or not they did anything morally wrong, have taken what they should not have (collusion). Therefore, reparations are called for. This is the argument I am making, predicated on the Justice Department's agreement of the complaint given leading to this case.
Reparations in the context of this antitrust lawsuit == a settlement of the class action lawsuits that will inevitably happen. Same word, but nothing to do with other the other kind.
I have been listening to Yanis a lot lately. His ideas are quite provocative. His economic ideas are quite refreshing, to hear an economist talking about what a post-subjective-money world may look like.
Today, we have a new class of people, who to borrow Yanis's metaphor I would call Techno-peasants, who exist in a grand subjugation. Any reader of these comments would do well to listen to a few interviews of his.
Let this be a reminder that our avenues for change in the world are artificially limited. Due to that, we must not wait for some allowed moment to ask for change, but demand it every day.
> Due to that, we must not wait for some allowed moment to ask for change, but demand it every day.
Sadly we're mostly wage slaves in the US and so while we might like to spend all day every day standing outside of the police department shouting or marching in protest we'd quickly lose our jobs, our homes, and perhaps die from the lack of employer provided insurance that makes the medications we need to survive barely affordable.
The system is rigged very well to prevent meaningful sustained protest by keeping us chained to our work for 40+ hours a week, keeping us eating and surrounded by poison to make us sick, and by only giving most people enough money to get by paycheck to paycheck. We're allowed to accumulate debt to keep ourselves entertained though so that when we're too tired to protest from overwork we can still sit in front of large TV screens while we stare at our tiny phones designed to keep us distracted and disconnected from the people around us.
Our best bet is to wait for those brief moments when we're allowed to cast a vote for someone else who doesn't represent our interests.
there are enough homeless in LA that we could probably pay them to act as proxy protestors (https://www.proxyprotest.com/) while we sit at our desks making money for the boss.
This article asks a good question. What is the point of capitalism? If these acquisitions exist simply to make the line go up, why? Bandcamp will NOT be better off under this new rule, we will all be worse off as listeners of music. Why allow this at all?
The same words as 'Not sustainable systems'. This does nowhere near enough to create true sustainability. As long as we allow drivel corpo-blogspam like this, we will never be sustainable.
You don't build things that must be changed to be sustainable, you build things TO BE sustainable. That is true human centric design.
Also, “trusted,” but there is no mention of “trustworthy.”
Those are terms of art. Given the author of the blog post, I think they actually mean they are building regulatory infrastructure to get (coerce) people to trust stuff based on external / top-down policy, regardless of whether the stuff you have to trust is secure.
This is a great feature for state actors, regulatory compliance shops and Google shareholders, but it’s an anti-feature for end users and businesses that actually care about security.
I think the key point is that the FSL is necessary when profit is required. The GPL is a philosophy of social distribution more than a way to build a capitalist enterprise. Using GPL software ensures that software stays socially distributed instead of privately; but that can lead to issues for private profit.