The disconnect here is that they built it this way, but still call it a question and answer site and give a lot of power over to the person who created the question. They get to mark an answer as the solution for themselves, even if the people coming from Google have another answer as the solution.
If they were to recreate the site and frame it as a symptom and issue site, which is what the interview described, that would yield many different choices on how to navigate the site, and it would do a lot better. In particular, what happens when two different issues have the same symptom. Right now, that question is closed as a duplicate. Under a symptom and issue site, it's obvious that both should stay as distinct issues.
This argument is that the match-making software is incompetent. If what you say is true, and the match-maker could determine skill with any ability, then the cheaters would quickly find that the only people they match-make with is other cheaters. The non-cheaters don't care that the cheaters exist if they never play against them.
Most competitive games these days are free to play. A cheater gets banned, makes a new account, and gets placed on the competitive ladder level of a new player, and stomps their way up the ladder against unskilled players until they get banned, and repeat.
For players that cheat less egregiously and don't get banned, it's still obvious many times when someone has no skill but is using cheating as some form of assistance. It's not fun to play against a player who has a similar K/D ratio as you because they suck at aiming but can see through walls, or because they can instantly headshot people but have bad positional awareness or understanding of other game objectives like capture points etc.
It's like telling a high level chess player that playing against a child with poor chess knowledge but they're allowed to just ignore checks and flick your pieces off the board is similar to playing against an equally skilled non-cheating player just because they're capable of beating you only 50% of the time. A victory doesn't feel earned, a loss doesn't feel like an actionable learning experience.
The problem here appears to be the banning. If the cheaters are never banned then they will continue to only play with other cheaters, and everyone is happy. And in fact, to a normal player I doubt they care very much if the player is legit and smurfing or if they are not legit and cheating. That player ruins the game they are in.
The ranking system needs to be a better determinate of skill, especially early in a new accounts life, so that they can stop harming normal players games. This might mean changes to the rules of a game to allow this to be done better. The match-maker should take this into account, so that if a player does go up against a player that was far from the skill level that they end up at, it should protect that account from being placed with new players for a time so that they can forget about it.
For the example you choose for Chess, you might force players to do Chess Puzzles before they can queue for their first match. A normal player would then never see any cheaters.
Cheaters don't want to play against other cheaters. If they end up against only cheaters that's a kind of soft-ban or shadow-ban and once they figure out that's the case they'll do the same steps as if you had actually banned them. It also angers legitimate players to know that the top ladder tier is for cheaters only. If you're 200th in the world and legitimate, other players will say you only got that rank through cheating.
And the very best cheaters are still good at the games they cheat in, they just want to use cheats to be even better. One famous example in a game I play is Riolu in Trackmania. He was probably one of the top 10 players in the world. But he wanted to be #1. When he was accused of cheating it took a mountain of evidence for anyone to believe the accusations because he could set a world record live in-person. He just used cheats to be able to do it with fewer attempts.
Riolu is a uniquely terrible example. While he used Cheat Engine to slow down gameplay, he could have just as easily used TAS to record and replay his inputs since TrackMania is deterministic. This is still possible today. This will always be possible even with Kernel level anti-cheats.
I'll note here that the work that Nadeo has done on the matchmaking aspect is in line with what I'm thinking and should be expanded throughout the online gaming space. A division 10 COTD player will never see a cheater. If cheaters do show up, as they commonly do in Weekly Shorts leaderboards, the community ignores it. Their region leaderboards do a much better job than typical games of bringing the community together and they promote continuity. When top players smurf COTD on a new name, the community sniffs it out within the hour. TM doesn't need anti-cheat.
Yeah, this is pretty clear. The community for any competitive game if you are a member of the top 100 players is always amazing. These players play the most, they end of seeing each other over and over, and you build up a rapport with the other players and can start to play against specific peoples play-styles.
However, for the vast vast majority of the player-base who is top 50% in skill, the fat normal distribution nearly guarantees that most of the people they play against will never be seen again. And therefore there is no harm for them not to be toxic to them, so most people only ever experience toxicity in online competitive games.
Server browser games solve this because players end up with "home" servers where they come back to over and over, and over time build communities who do the same. This was taken away from the players when we moved to matchmaking, and many in the player-base have a bias against matchmaking because of it.
But this is in no way required, and merely a result of gaming companies to do any work on this front. It would be extremely easy for these games to add an arbitrary community tag to the matchmaker that would attempt to put people in games with players that they have not previously reported. The matchmaker might take a little bit more time, but since these players are in the fat normal distribution, their average matchmaking times will still be incredibly low.
This is why the best form of UBI is a Citizen's Dividend funded through a Land Value Tax. Any increase in rents through the CD just make their way back into higher taxes that then raise the CD.
The abstract states that there are 2.7% less fast food jobs, not 2.7% less jobs. There might be 2.7% less fast food restaurants as a result of this change, but in their place will be other businesses that employ people of higher than minimum wage. Those businesses might hire the best fast food workers while the average fast food worker continues to be employed doing fast food. As a result, there may be no people who have now become unemployed as a result of this change, and only increases in wages. The data is inconclusive.
Regardless, instead of arguing over which commercial property takes which spot and trying to engineer the perfect fit with the limitations we are dealing with, we should be increasing the amount of places that are zoned for commerce. This will bring increased demand for labor, which will increase wages.
If one of these fast food places shuts down, it's not like the lot is just going to sit vacant forever.
The primary effect of these types of laws is that businesses that employ fast food workers are less profitable, and thus when they compete against other businesses for a given lot, will bid less for the land. If the marginal buyer changes, it would have to do so to a business that relies less on minimum wage fast food workers.
That isn’t what’s happening. A lot of these areas are permanently hollowing out far beyond fast food, at least with respect to local businesses. Lots of places in decent neighborhoods are boarded up and stay that way. This is an issue even in some cities with strong population growth.
I recently had the mayor of a major west coast city tell me this was a permanent trend, that there was no way to reverse the loss of these small businesses and that the disposition of all that real estate was a major issue, compounded by a loss of basic neighborhood services like groceries that used to operate out of this real estate.
The future isn’t other businesses that somehow magically pay higher wages. The future city planners are seeing is all delivery all the time from warehouse districts, and ghost towns of commercial real estate for which there is no purpose. Even city centers are starting to turn into suburbs in terms of occupancy density.
Sure, but this has nothing to do with the land values which are still extremely positive. It has everything to do with Prop 13 allowing speculation. Repeal Prop 13 and all of those lots will be better cared for and rented out.
It's impossible to know with the data we collect. Census tracks the homeownership rate, which tracks if the house is owned by someone living in it. However if you are a tenant living in a house that someone else owns and lives in it as well, for example if you are an adult renting in your parents house, that counts as a homeowner owned home. We do not collect the tenant non-ownership rate, but it would be much higher than the inverse of the homeownership rate.
Mostly agreeing with you here but I've been through this journey and this shocked me when I ran the numbers one time so I'm sharing.
A better way to be thinking about this is at what point will you stop gaining weight? If you are someone who burns 2000 calorie a day but eats 2170 calories a day, you will be gaining 170 calories on that first day. But then you will add some fat, and you will burn 2001 calories, and only gain 169 calories the next day. Eventually you will reach equilibrium where you burn 2170 calories. But fat isn't like muscle, it's very efficient because that is it's main purpose - it just sits there. So it actually takes a lot to reach that new equilibrium.
The rule of thumb is 100 calories surplus will lead to a long run gain of about 15 pounds. So the 177 calorie average would end up yielding about 25 pounds of fat above what they should have.
Then the next question is if you will ever reach equilibrium, or if when you start burning 2001 calories, you start eating 2171 calories...
Note that a Georgist tax on 100% of land rental value does not stop the landlord from earning a return on their improvement values. The land tax of a property with a 100% land tax will decrease the land price down to $0, and thus instead of for instance putting $500k into buying land and $500k buying apartments, they could instead buy 2 $500k apartments for the same capital cost. The end result of this will be more apartments, which will bring down rents, but this will yield a higher ROI than they currently achieve, since they have to pay less rents to the banks.
I understand this is a tangent but you picked a really bad example. We should be trying to remove every single speed limit that we can.
If the design speed of a road does not match the speed limit of the road, people will drive the design speed, cops will learn to sit there all hours of the day waiting for people to mess up, and get ticketed. Instead of just putting up the speed limit sign, city planners should design for the road to be safe without need for the speed limits to be in place. This can mean things like reducing the width of a lane, could mean speed bumps, to purposeful non-straight sections.
There will always be people who go much faster than the design speed. They are ignoring their and everyone else's safety.
I live on major street where the speed limit is 25 to slow people down. It used to be 35, and people normally go 35-45. The problem is that people go much faster when there is no traffic because the street feels wider. I would love if they redesigned for a slower speed. But there are cars in the middle of the night that drive over 60. It doesn't matter if street is calmed, they will go super fast and only tickets with slow them down.
There will always be people who go much faster than the design speed. They are ignoring their and everyone else's safety.
Those people don't care about speed limits, in part because they are generally set significantly too low. This has the effect of normalizing the scofflaws' attitude even when carried to a genuinely reckless extreme.
Conversely, if you raise the speed limit to the 85th percentile, anyone exceeding it significantly will stand out enough to catch easily.
Speeding is a victimless crime anyway. If you hit something or someone, you were doing something wrong besides speeding.
There's a third choice, though. It's bad when speed limits are much lower than the natural speed of the road, for the reason you describe. And it's good when the natural speed of the road is the safe speed of the road. But in addition to those two, it's also possible to introduce fast, automated enforcement— speed cameras.
This, of course, applies just as much to the actual topic of the Economist article; new inheritance taxes are just and good, but they should be written to be enforceable, and then they should actually be enforced.
If the safe speed of the road is 25mph, and the design speed of the road is above 25mph, you will not have safety no matter what the speed limit is. Vision Zero strategies take these factors into account to ensure safety.
Bollocks. The only thing that gets you is young and reckless drivers going 200mph on the highway, endangering everyone around them. There are limits to increasing safety in road design, and limits in the reaction speed of humans.
It's useful here to split up these people into different categories. Terrance Tao was a prodigy and was allowed to succeed within the school system beyond what others are given access to. Zuckerberg and Gates succeeded and didn't require finishing college - not really dropping out.
Indie Gaming slant on these following examples, and I suspect that this sector is above average for this type of thing, but I suspect if I looked I could find many dropouts in other fields. On the other hand, Carmack dropped out of college, Jonathan Blow dropped out of college. Markus Persson dropped out of high school. Eric Barone never found a job despite graduating from college. All of these people are out-of-this-world fucking good, but were not at the time that they dropped out, which means according to your guide should not have gone on to create what they did.
They shouldn’t have. Not everyone needs fit an example.
Let’s take Markus: before he made Minecraft, he made relatively mediocre games that didn’t get much traction. Minecraft was an exact copy of someone else’s game (Infiniminer) that was posted on the same forum that he went to. He saw potential when its original creator did not (the creator of Infiniminer got angry that people extended his game so he shut it down). Minecraft blew up. The games that Markus made after Minecraft? Relatively mediocre again.
So what can you learn from the example of Markus? Nothing. Nothing at all. Sometimes you just get lucky.
What do people on here say, luck favors the prepared? Had he gone on to college, the odds that he was on that forum go down, and thus he would not be the one strike when the opportunity arose.
Confirmation bias is very tricky here. A quick look at top essentially single games of all times shows that a full 50% or so of them were created by drop outs, a number way outside of what we would expect. But how many dropped out and failed?
All of these guys clearly had the capability to create greatness within them their entire life, but were stuck in an environment that did not fit their talents or did not otherwise give them the support that would allow them to thrive, like Tao got.
And yet, all of the people whom were failed by the system will never be heard of, and we have no idea the numbers of these people either. I expect that there are way more of them than unsuccessful dropouts.
It wasn’t a copy of Infiniminer, despite the name that game wasn’t about infinity or really mining. It was more a team fps with blocks and a bit of digging in a small arena.
While yeah his early games are very weak seeing Infiniminer‘s engines potential as a survival game and creative game rather than a team fps deserves credit.
Carmack is probably the only one who sticks out as he wasn't rich, connected or have early access.
Gates had super-early access to computers via his prep school. By the time he left high-school, he probably had more computer experience than almost all college graduates.
Markus Persson--(By 1994, Persson knew he wanted to become a video game developer, but his teachers advised him to study graphic design, which he did from ages 15 to 18. ... He never finished high school, but was reportedly a good student.) That's hardly a high school dropout. And, IIRC, studying something like graphic design in the system in Sweden is akin to an apprenticeship, no?
If they were to recreate the site and frame it as a symptom and issue site, which is what the interview described, that would yield many different choices on how to navigate the site, and it would do a lot better. In particular, what happens when two different issues have the same symptom. Right now, that question is closed as a duplicate. Under a symptom and issue site, it's obvious that both should stay as distinct issues.