Gaming typically relies on skill, not chance. If you play most games long enough, you'll be able to consistently beat certain levels. If you win at the roulette wheel, you're no more likely than before to win again. That's the difference. Otherwise, "exploiting pleasure-seeking behavior" could be stretched to describe every last industry in existence beyond the sales of food, water, shelter, and basic utilities.

With the model of directly purchasing the game itself (and no in-game purchases, like standard PC/console gaming) you can at least read about the game and have a reasonable expectation about what you are paying for. The real problem with in-game purchases is that the game is "free" or low-cost in the most technical sense, but after you invest many hours advancing the game you find that you can't really prosper without making additional purchases. It could be construed as a form of bait-and-switch.

The other problem would be that many of these games are aimed at children who make purchases the parents later get stuck with, but this problem begins in the home and should be solved within the home by actual parenting. That's not as convenient as using the tablet like a cheap babysitter but it would certainly be more worthwhile. If you wanted to solve this by government action, that's simple too: declare that these purchases are contractual in nature (the parent agreed to pay charges made to the phone bill or whatever) and that minors who make them cannot be held to a contract, therefore the companies cannot collect money when children make them. *Poof* - end of shitty business model.

Reading your kind words is humbling, sir. You honor yourself by being one of the minority who read something like that and try to understand where it is coming from and how it could work, rather than playing the hostile audience and trying your best to tear it down because it opposes a common notion.

Rather than patronizingly talking down to me like this, try to understand where I'm coming from. I'm not talking about crimes that have victims here, like robbery and murder. Preventing those is legitimately within the purpose of having a government and a society. I'm talking about the wrong of trying to dictate lifestyles, of trying to micromanage the way others live based not on crimes but on approval. It's not terribly different from dictating to people what they may read, listen to, watch, and discuss.

American tyranny is what they call a soft tyranny. It's not so much jack-booted thugs waving guns around, demanding compliance. That's hard tyranny. Soft tyranny is when you no longer treat adult people like responsible adults because "you know what's good for them". The only way to have a healthy, long-term viable society is to expect adults to be responsible, to make their own decisions in any instance that does not involve a crime with a victim, and then (importantly) to accept the consequences of those decisions. Any effort to circumvent this will eventually destroy the very society itself.

Yes, at some point it's quite rational to decide "this one entity has enough power". He's really very smooth, though. I'll hand him that:

That's a very diplomatic way to go about it. People often mistake that for honesty and openness in fact. It's basically a highly polished way of saying, "if you were educated you would agree with me."

There's nothing more profoundly anti-social than trying to control other people and force them to live only the way that you want them to.

GP has the right idea. "I don't care if you ... " means "I don't care to force my will on you". If you want advice from someone, you're free to ask.

The one thing they both have absolutely in common: the implicit assumption that inanimate objects are the cause of social problems, and the belief that controlling those inanimate objects will magically make social problems go away. Perhaps you can see how childish this viewpoint is?

The way I see it, the underlying cause of the social problems is a form of energy. It doesn't ever really go away, it just changes form. Guns and booze happen to be powerful, readily available tools allowing this energy to express itself. It can't be done, but if you somehow could make absolutely 100% of all guns and booze disappear overnight, you would find that this energy will move on to the next most convenient methods of expressing itself. Perhaps stabbings and abuse of some other drug would rise. Perhaps some other, unforeseen methods would emerge.

What no one really seems interested in doing is really understanding the underlying causes for why people want to abuse alcohol instead of using it responsibly, why people want to shoot either themselves or others absent provocation, and what can be done to transform this energy into something better. Actually understanding and beginning to change this would start with a complete restructuring of governments, corporations, educational institutions, and other institutions to make them adhere to their true purposes and to treat people like human beings rather than automatons. Where it would end, I couldn't tell you.

The real obstacle is that no one with the power to move in that direction has any incentive to do it: the current model is too profitable for them. But blaming our problems on objects that have no volition and no desire of their own certainly makes for a great distraction! It lets us waste time debating frivolous non-solutions with no hope of convincing "the opposition" of anything, meanwhile we avoid all these uncomfortable questions about the way we live, whom that serves, and precisely how we were taught to live that way.

The amount of regulation and consideration is driven by who can write the best, most emotional propaganda and purchase the finest access to mass media while operating through various PR firms and front groups to make it less obvious that they are doing so.

Fixed that for you. It's been that way for a long time, ever since Sigmund Freud's nephew decided that calling propaganda "public relations" was much more euphemistic than Woodrow Wilson and Walter Lippmann's term for it which was "manufactured consent".

The best way to change that is to legalize all personal drug use. If the War on Drugs was successful at accomplishing any of its stated goals then we could have a debate about this, but it isn't, and no honest person who looks into the matter would conclude otherwise. Anyone who wants to do drugs can easily obtain them.

The only things we can control are whether criminal gangs or legitimate businesses will profit from this, and whether law enforcement gets to keep its single biggest excuse for militarizing itself. The idea that we can stop people who want drugs from using them is a dangerous fantasy with staggering social costs and always has been.

If you really want to minimize the impact of the portion of drug users who are irresponsible, a small fraction of what we spend now could be put towards treating it as a public medical/mental health issue, not a criminal/law-enforcement issue. Treatment can be offered to those who need it. Legal drugs would be cheap, plentiful and unadulterated, making their use safer and removing the incentive for the worst of addicts to rob and steal to obtain them. It would also go a long way towards creating the expectation that people should be responsible adults who do not need to be told how to live by a paternalistic government that parasitically profits from their problems.

I can't speak for that poster but I can guess why he spelled it that way. "Liberal" used to mean something more like "libertarian" before its meaning was perverted and distorted from "liberal exercise of civil rights" to mean "liberal imposition of government power". Sometimes the term "Classical Liberal" is used in an attempt to reverse this deliberate and underhanded confusion.

Even "libertarian" itself has been deliberately distorted from "advocates a small government limited to a) public works, b) national defense, and c) law enforcement and those things only, imposing only those restrictions which are truly necessary for a healthy society" to its new co-opted meaning of "anarcho-capitalist who wants even police to be private security that not all can afford". The intent there is obvious: change it from something hard to really argue against to something easily demonized that most people will learn to dismiss without thought or examination.

You'll find that the more an ideal threatens the use and expansion of power, the more propaganda is applied to change the meaning of words until they finally represent the very opposite of what they once stood for. It's the real-life equivalent of George Orwell's Newspeak. The "languages evolve so absolutely every change is totally legitimate and should never be resisted!" crowd are more or less Satan's little helpers here. Like most of Satan's little helpers, they think they're doing a good thing and would be horrified to see the money changing hands, the intentional authors of propaganda (called "PR"), and the concept of "manufactured consent" that established itself in this nation during the days of Woodrow Wilson.

So anyway, I read that to mean "ill-liberal" as in "not liberal" and certainly not "Classical Liberal" like what that word once meant.

That's generally a bug, not a feature. You seem to like this show so you are probably inclined to tell us how they got it right, but still. This aspect is rarely done well in any show.

But to comprehend that, people would have to actually read and understand something before deciding to be against it ...

How much of a gravitational pull would there be on this object? Could you approach it closely or would that be a bad idea?

So a whois.net domain name lookup on their site yielded nothing. And there are suspiciously no patents mentioning "wetag" or "ifind" and the names they listed (Dr. Paul McArthur) are in patents but for cold fusion BS in California.

Surely, though, they must have registered the "iFind" trademark? And if you search on TESS we find:

With an attorney listed as "Richard G. Eldredge" which corresponds to a local attorney. Before you deploy the door kickers to lynch somebody, that address is just somebody's $200,000 house and could possibly be a random address used by a jerk. Remember that it's entirely possible that this is all a front by some other actor and someone was paid western union/bitcoin to register this trademark through this attorney without realizing they were just being used by literally anyone in the world ... of course, kickstarter should have even better transaction details (hopefully).

With a few rare medical exceptions, people who can take responsibility for their own actions generally don't get fat in the first place. If they do at all, it's only a little, then they say "oh guess I need to correct this" and it never becomes a real problem.

It's a truly weak and spineless person who cannot take charge of their own life, including identifying and effectively working to change one's own weaknesses and shortcomings. Excuses and explanations for why something's not your fault (as though fault and blame had anything to do with what needs to be done) are so much less effort. This childish preoccupation with blame and how to escape it prevents people from realizing how much an individual can change.

This is one of those things the older generations generally understood that the younger ones generally do not. This represents a devolution of the society. And yes, I have personally made major changes in my life. I did this more than once precisely because I didn't give a shit about blame and fault. What I cared about is what actions I could take to manifest real change. I was proud to call something "my fault" because that meant I had the power to change it. What I can do, I can also learn not to do. I didn't have this infantile desire to escape blame and garner sympathy from others to make myself feel better. I felt better by fucking doing something about it.

It's called growing up and being a man or being a woman, taking responsibility like actual adult people do. Why, this might even include the foresight to take a hint and embrace a healthier lifestyle when you're only a little overweight, instead of waiting until you're morbidly obese to conclude that what you are doing isn't working. This kind of adulthood is an increasingly rare sight. This does not bode well. You now have an entire culture that rejects this idea rather than viewing it like a best friend and an ally. The culture can feel however they want; no one escapes the actual cause-and-effect. There is no way a morbidly obese person feels better day-to-day than a healthy person. All of the "fat acceptance" in the world won't change that reality. But you can work with reality instead of demanding that people make you feel good about denying it just for the sake of inoffensiveness and phony blamelessness.