It's a completely different style of play, and it is much more focused on play and having fun, than winning at all costs. And it means one person doesn't always win the game, and everyone else decides they have better things to do.
Indeed! I'm a big fan of German style games specifically to avoid Monopoly like situations.
Dominion! This is an excellent card based game. Not difficult to pick up, a warmup game clears up things quickly, and as a bonus they've got an official electronic version online at http://playdominion.com built using html and js, and there is a chrome extension too. You can play without signing up or logging in and against bots or other players not to mention the entire base game is free. You are not hindered with the "base game" and there are several expansions which add additional cards to the game. The game itself uses 10 cards at a time which you can randomly draw to keep things interesting or if you prefer you can build decks. Dominion shines with 3+ players and maxes out at 8. Games last anywhere from 10-45 minutes. I'm actually working on an IRC port of this since everything is better on IRC >.>
Munchkin is another great party game.
on a par with second world countries (which is what Russia really is these days)
The Second World refers to the former Socialist, industrial states (formally the Eastern Bloc), mostly the territory and the influence of the Soviet Union. Following World War II, there were nineteen communist states, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, only five socialist states remained: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam. Along with "First World" and "Third World", the term was used to divide the states of Earth into three broad categories. In other words, the concept of "Second World" was a construct of the Cold War and the term has largely fallen out of use since the revolutions of 1989, though it is still used to describe countries that are in between poverty and prosperity, many of which are now capitalist states. Subsequently, the actual meaning of the terms "First World", "Second World" and "Third World" changed from being based on political ideology to an economic definition.[1] The three world theory has been criticized as crude and relativity outdated for its nominal ordering (1, 2, 3) and sociologists have coined the term "developed", "developing", and "underdeveloped".
Certainly the electorate needs to get off their collective asses and change things, but at present there is no effective mechanism for them to do so. The election system has been gamed to the point that it's virtually impossible to wrest control from the two-faced party currently in control, short of a major grass-roots campaign to toss the bastards out, and such campaigns inevitably need leaders and organization to give them focus, which the NSA is quite likely doing their best to disrupt (we have documented evidence that the intelligence organizations have been infiltrating and undermining potentially powerful citizen groups since at least the McCarthy era, do you really think anything has changed?)
America is an Oligarchy interview with the paper's Author. Another analysis which I would recommend skimming over.
What is most incredible to me is that the data under scrutiny in the study was from 1981-2002. One can only imagine how much worse things have gotten since the 2008 financial crisis. The study found that even when 80% of the population favored a particular public policy change, it was only instituted 43% of the time . We saw this first hand with the bankster bailout in 2008, when Americans across the board were opposed to it, but Congress passed TARP anyway (although they had to vote twice).
Unless you get the "elites" involved you're doomed.
The study found that even when 80% of the population favored a particular public policy change, it was only instituted 43% of the time.
The solution of this problem is trivial and is left as an exercise for the reader.
