Ross’s Game Dungeon: Follow-up Episode #3

Invisible War has that same problem as Human Revolution when you shoot up the police station. If you murder Nicolette DuClare and Donna Morgan at the Black Gate facility, Chad just kinda... scolds you for it. He doesn't arrest you or see you as an enemy or anything, he just gets mad at you. He keeps working with you because he still needs a Denton, but realistically he could probably use Klara Sparks instead. He says he has reason to doubt her loyalty, but, come on. She has to be more trustworthy than Alex at that point.

17 hours ago, Ross Scott said:

Well you JUST SAID you don't hold out hope for political solutions, that's 100% a political solution. 

I meant "political" in the sense of "structural changes that will significantly decrease the quality of life of their citizens". Getting countries all over the world all agree to do that kind of shit is hard.

Having countries agree to pay large amounts of money to move millions of tons of rock around? A lot easier, and it fits better into existing economic structures. For instance, the EU ETS could be one of the schemes used to fund these carbon sinks. As long as the price of a ton of carbon is higher than the cost of offsetting it, these kinds of schemes can actually work.

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I could almost be willing to do a debate on that.  At some point, you run into Newton's conversation of energy being issue.  I guess if you got into real sci-fi territory, like the mass generators in Supreme Commander, you open up options, but I think ultimately there are limits.  I think of Moore's Law.  It held true a LONG time, but eventually stopped working due to physical limitations.

Yeah, but by the time we hit hard limits like conservation of energy, we'll have been through a few Singularities and the economic landscape will look completely different. We're not even leveraging the full power of nuclear fission, let alone nuclear fusion.

Also, the economy doesn't actually need infinite growth. Like you said, at the end of the day people want goods and food to eat. At some point the economy has grown enough that you're essentially in a post-scarcity society with regards to the bottom of Maslow's pyramid. We're arguably already there: being homeless in a 21th century western country is not the same thing as being homeless in the 18th century. Demographic growth creates a demand for economic growth, but demographic growth also plateaus as contraception becomes cheaper and social systems become stronger.

Someone on reddit put in a way I really liked: "The only resource that's actually scarce for this century is how much we can afford to fuck up the planet before it becomes unlivable". For everything else, we haven't even scratched the surface.

(well, technically we're running out of oil and some rare earths, but alternatives exist, and eg hydrogen is not running out any time soon)

It's worth noting that the IPCC's recommendations on fighting climate change mostly amount to "sky high carbon taxes". Which is probably one of the easier things to actually get done, all things considered.

On 8/11/2020 at 11:23 AM, PoignardAzur said:

 

Also, the economy doesn't actually need infinite growth. Like you said, at the end of the day people want goods and food to eat. At some point the economy has grown enough that you're essentially in a post-scarcity society with regards to the bottom of Maslow's pyramid. We're arguably already there: being homeless in a 21th century western country is not the same thing as being homeless in the 18th century. Demographic growth creates a demand for economic growth, but demographic growth also plateaus as contraception becomes cheaper and social systems become stronger.

 

The way our current economy is structured, I think it does.  Publicly traded corporations earn most revenue in the economy.  Their CEOs have fiduciary duties to maximize profit.  If they're lax in that duty, they can be sued or fired.  This means there's no "enough" revenue.  They need to increase it year after year to satisfy shareholders.  If growth STOPS or REVERSES for most companies, we have a recession or depression which can affect billions negatively, leading to more homelessness, hunger, inability to afford basic goods and services, etc.  So in order for things to be "okay" under the economy, there has to be ongoing growth.  Our economic system simply isn't designed for anything else.  I'm not saying you can't design an economic system that doesn't rely on growth, I'm saying that's not what we currently have, at all.

Regarding the homelessness comment, we've also had the greatest extraction of resources at any point in history also.  This makes anything look better by comparison for the short term.   As demand outstrips supply for essential resources, this could unleash poverty like we've never seen before.  My point being is you say homelessness now isn't as bad as in the 18th century.  That may not be the case by the end of the 21st if enough systems collapse.

Demographic growth may be leveling off, but my understanding is it would settle at 11 billion.  If that's still WAY past the carrying capacity of the Earth, that's still unsustainable.  A figure I remember when I did Oil's Well is that without oil, the carrying capacity of the earth is about 1 billion.  Now technology may have made that number better, but considering the ecological impact we're having on the planet right now, I think all signs point to us being overextended.

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Someone on reddit put in a way I really liked: "The only resource that's actually scarce for this century is how much we can afford to fuck up the planet before it becomes unlivable". For everything else, we haven't even scratched the surface.

 

(well, technically we're running out of oil and some rare earths, but alternatives exist, and eg hydrogen is not running out any time soon)

We're collapsing ecosystems also and many biologists argue we're in the sixth mass extinction.  I honestly don't know how that plays out for the survival of humanity other than "probably not great."  Even without that though, much of the progress and breakthroughs and population explosion we've had for the past 150 years or so can largely be traced back to oil.  It's what fueled the machines we used to develop better technology and even now, is absolutely essential for transportation.  Alternatives do exist to oil.  However, there's nothing even CLOSE as far as the SCALE we use it at without massive, massive infrastructure changes that are decades off in good times.

I mean I think I get what you're saying.  We have absolutely copious amounts of resources that if they were wisely managed, could probably last us millennia.  That's not what we're doing though.  An analogy I make is to imagine a pioneer colony like Jamestown.  Imagine they hunted all the game in the area and harvest all edibles and had enough food to last the winter if they were careful about it.  Now imagine instead of rationing, they decided to have massive feasts every day in celebration and ended up going through all their food stores in a month.  Things would look GREAT and promising in that first month.  They would probably all be dead by the third month.  Even though the situation is more complex, I see that general kind of dynamic playing out on a much larger and longer scale.

6 hours ago, Ross Scott said:

Their CEOs have fiduciary duties to maximize profit.  If they're lax in that duty, they can be sued or fired.  This means there's no "enough" revenue.  They need to increase it year after year to satisfy shareholders.  If growth STOPS or REVERSES for most companies, we have a recession or depression which can affect billions negatively, leading to more homelessness, hunger, inability to afford basic goods and services, etc. 

to piggy back off of this, companies and corporations are not really allowed to save money for a rainy day. that's why there are so many multi million dollar corporations that just seemingly drop off the map and go bankrupt the second something goes wrong. unless you're one of those companies where you and your company's taxes are the same, all of your profits have to be spent in some kind of capacity like a non profit.

i heard a good quote once; "If all truck drivers decided to go on strike indefinitely, all grocery stores would be empty after a couple of weeks." our very way of life as a species is dependent on day by day tasks that absolutely cannot under any circumstance be compromised. foundations are made of string and all it takes is one kid jumping and the bridge falls.

5 hours ago, cutiepyro said:

to piggy back off of this, companies and corporations are not really allowed to save money for a rainy day. that's why there are so many multi million dollar corporations that just seemingly drop off the map and go bankrupt the second something goes wrong. unless you're one of those companies where you and your company's taxes are the same, all of your profits have to be spent in some kind of capacity like a non profit.

 

i heard a good quote once; "If all truck drivers decided to go on strike indefinitely, all grocery stores would be empty after a couple of weeks." our very way of life as a species is dependent on day by day tasks that absolutely cannot under any circumstance be compromised. foundations are made of string and all it takes is one kid jumping and the bridge falls.

I think everyone here is viewing contemporary issues from a contemporary lens. Yes, all things remaining equal the system will collapse. But if we scroll back a hundred years we be holding the same douer discussion, and only the nature of the great doom would change.  For example, the enlightened folk at the twilight of the 19th century thought that every growing metropolis would eventually drown in horseshit. I mean why wouldn't they- all the census data pointed that way. 

The oil crisis of the 21st century is nothing more than the evolution of the horseshit problem from a century ago. Mankind will adapt and evolve, and if it doesn't, it'll ust have another dark age and rebound later. 

19 hours ago, Im_CIA said:

I think everyone here is viewing contemporary issues from a contemporary lens. Yes, all things remaining equal the system will collapse. But if we scroll back a hundred years we be holding the same douer discussion, and only the nature of the great doom would change.  For example, the enlightened folk at the twilight of the 19th century thought that every growing metropolis would eventually drown in horseshit. I mean why wouldn't they- all the census data pointed that way. 

 

The oil crisis of the 21st century is nothing more than the evolution of the horseshit problem from a century ago. Mankind will adapt and evolve, and if it doesn't, it'll ust have another dark age and rebound later. 

 

yeah, i guess i really do need to remember that we don't 100% know for sure if something like this is going to happen. we should definitely prepare, but we shouldn't be focuses on doom and gloom 24/7

On 8/12/2020 at 8:58 AM, Ross Scott said:

The way our current economy is structured, I think it does.  Publicly traded corporations earn most revenue in the economy.  Their CEOs have fiduciary duties to maximize profit.  If they're lax in that duty, they can be sued or fired.  This means there's no "enough" revenue.  They need to increase it year after year to satisfy shareholders.  If growth STOPS or REVERSES for most companies, we have a recession or depression which can affect billions negatively, leading to more homelessness, hunger, inability to afford basic goods and services, etc.  So in order for things to be "okay" under the economy, there has to be ongoing growth.  Our economic system simply isn't designed for anything else.  I'm not saying you can't design an economic system that doesn't rely on growth, I'm saying that's not what we currently have, at all.

There's a difference between actual productivity, i.e. how much stuff you are making, and accounting. I see a lot of confusion between the two and it's important to separate them. Productivity is what puts a roof over your head and food on the table, accounting is assigning a monetary number to those products. As governments become more and more Keynesian, the price of goods and services become more and more warped. It's gotten to the point where the prices of things like food, college, health care, automotive, real estate, electronics, and oil, are completely decoupled from their actual value. Because of that, it's hard to know how much work in the economy is being done versus how much people are paying for that work. What we're seeing right now I wouldn't call The 2nd Great Depression, but The Great Correction. As you've seen, stock prices are in la-la land and The Fed is running the money printer as fast as it can trying to keep it up just a little bit longer. The accounting part of the economy is coming to terms with the fact that productive growth since the 1990s has actually slowed or completely stalled while the number of people it's had to serve has gone up. 

The point to all this is: accounting wants to see growth YoY forever but if it doesn't it's going to cause problems for accounting, not necessarily productivity. The 2 are sort of tied together since accounting is what invests in productivity so we'll see some shortages, but productivity isn't going to fall off a cliff just because it hit a ceiling. The two will realign but it'll probably take a decade or two, probably a world war as well. 

For the reason I stated above, this is why looking at the fiscal situation US shale oil and coming to the conclusion that it takes too much effort is disingenuous. Back around the mid-2000s, the US heavily subsidized shale, to grow it as fast as it could, to meet the strategic needs of the country. As a result, on paper, it looks very expensive because the government wanted oil independence from S.A. and wrote those oil companies a blank check to make it happen. But now that the technology has matured greatly it's now profitable, until oil prices went negative anyway. Either way, the investment in shale technology has been made, it eventually it'll pay back. Had it been allowed to grow organically, shale wouldn't be as debt laden as it is now. As of 2018 I think, the break even cost of a barrel of shale oil was on-par with the break even cost of Saudi oil. 

My understanding is that the estimated shale reserves in just the US and Canada is enough to meet our oil needs for hundreds of years. Probably longer since exploration is still on-going. An honest to God peak oil situation is far off the horizon. 

I'm out of time now but later I'll post about climate change and CO2 and how our predictions for global surface temperature and measurements don't align at all and really call into question the link between CO2 and the greenhouse effect.

14 hours ago, A Satanic Panda said:

There's a difference between actual productivity, i.e. how much stuff you are making, and accounting. I see a lot of confusion between the two and it's important to separate them. Productivity is what puts a roof over your head and food on the table, accounting is assigning a monetary number to those products. As governments become more and more Keynesian, the price of goods and services become more and more warped. It's gotten to the point where the prices of things like food, college, health care, automotive, real estate, electronics, and oil, are completely decoupled from their actual value. Because of that, it's hard to know how much work in the economy is being done versus how much people are paying for that work. What we're seeing right now I wouldn't call The 2nd Great Depression, but The Great Correction. As you've seen, stock prices are in la-la land and The Fed is running the money printer as fast as it can trying to keep it up just a little bit longer. The accounting part of the economy is coming to terms with the fact that productive growth since the 1990s has actually slowed or completely stalled while the number of people it's had to serve has gone up. 

I get what you're saying, but I don't see how it matters outside of theory.  Yes, there's a difference between not being able to produce enough food v. mismanaging the economy so that vast numbers of people don't have resources in order to purchase food.  In either scenario, people go hungry.  Housing is a good example of this.  We're projected to evict 40 million people in the USA.  Do we just not have homes for them?  No, of course we do, but we're managing things so we don't.  Unless there is a major intervention, that throws tens of millions of people out on the street.  This raises instability for society all around and I honestly don't know how that plays out, but probably nothing good.

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My understanding is that the estimated shale reserves in just the US and Canada is enough to meet our oil needs for hundreds of years. Probably longer since exploration is still on-going. An honest to God peak oil situation is far off the horizon.

I think you may not understand how peak oil works.  We could have oil for thousands of years or even infinite in theory, that's actually irrelevant.  Peak oil is when we hit maximum rate of production.  Yes, there's tons of shale oil, but it's more energy intensive to get out of the ground.  So, regardless of the cost, we get less oil back for the amount of oil we spend extracting it compared to traditional wells.  Peak oil is all about the RATE of production.  So say in order for us to be functioning as normal, we need X oil outputted each day.  We could have infinite fields, but if we can only extract them at a rate of X - 1, then we start having problems and that contracts the economy.  Since our economy is fragile and we're incredibly dependent on oil, this causes job losses, increased prices in essential goods and almost inevitably causes a depression.  I think my analogy to a car engine overheating in the video is an apt one.  We can go through a depression, which causes a drop in demand of oil.  As soon as we try to recover because demand has dropped, if we're successful, we'll slam up against the limits of supply again, over and over.  I don't see a way out of this with our current economic system.

As for CO2 relationship, that almost is irrelevant also.  I think you might be mistaken on that and the reason that projections have been off is the oceans absorb more heat than we anticipated, but again, it's almost besides the point.  Increased CO2 in the atmosphere reacts with saltwater to make it more acidic, thus killing off large swaths of the ecosystem.  Maybe fossil fuel burning is the main culprit, maybe it's a loss of biomass from human activity, maybe it's mass cultivation of cattle that's increasing the temperature.  Again, in my eyes, we're still headed to the same destination.  So even if increased CO2 isn't the main culprit for the warming itself, we ARE still warming and the CO2 IS raising hell with the health of ocean.

You can call me closed-minded, but I'm not interested in a debate on whether man-made global warming is happening or not.  Speaking purely anecdotally, I haven't seen snow for the past couple winters in Poland and summers are more intense than what used to happen.  I tend to trust the bulk of evidence by the scientific community to be the closest thing we have to truth, it's not like this is all based on one fringe study.  I'm a fan of Carl Sagan's quote of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."  At this point, I think humans NOT warming the planet is the extraordinary claim.  Think what you want, I'm convinced we have huge problems.  Now the EXTENT of how bad this will all be and by when is a complete unknown to me, I'm definitely interested in theories along those lines.

15 hours ago, A Satanic Panda said:

I'm out of time now but later I'll post about climate change and CO2 and how our predictions for global surface temperature and measurements don't align at all and really call into question the link between CO2 and the greenhouse effect.

I'll just put this here again as a reminder

On 8/13/2020 at 5:10 AM, Im_CIA said:

I think everyone here is viewing contemporary issues from a contemporary lens. Yes, all things remaining equal the system will collapse. But if we scroll back a hundred years we be holding the same douer discussion, and only the nature of the great doom would change.  For example, the enlightened folk at the twilight of the 19th century thought that every growing metropolis would eventually drown in horseshit. I mean why wouldn't they- all the census data pointed that way. 

 

The oil crisis of the 21st century is nothing more than the evolution of the horseshit problem from a century ago.

This is a classic fallacy that I've seen hundreds of times before.

You (and people like you) do not realize the meta effect of science, i.e. its effect upon itself. The scientific progress does not only allow us to move from horses to internal combustion engines. It also allows us to more clearly see what's on the horizon - what we can and cannot expect from the future.

As times goes by, cases when reputable scientists make fundamentally wrong predictions or wave aside ideas that later become successful become exceedingly rare.

Thinking that just because scientists made bad forecasts a couple hundred years ago they are still as bad at making forecasts now is like thinking that because scientists could not make combustion engine a couple hundred years ago they still cannot make it now.

You can think of science and technology as of the Terra Incognita. As long as you had blank spaces on the world map, there was room for assumptions. You could assume that dragons or unicorns are real - you just did not discover where they live yet.

As Earth became more explored, this room was shrinking and shrinking, until there was none. Now pretty much every nook and cranny is painstakingly analyzed and photographed.

Saying that we will have Dark Energy reactors like in Half-Life 2 in the future and we just haven't researched them yet is like saying that dragons or unicorns are real and we just did not discover where they live yet.

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Mankind will adapt and evolve, and if it doesn't, it'll ust have another dark age and rebound later. 

Heh, "JUST another dark age". If we are considering billions of people dying and the lives of the rest deteriorating into utter misery a normal and acceptable future, then we have nothing to even worry about.

It's just that personally, I always despised the "after us the deluge" worldview.

14 minutes ago, ScumCoder said:

This is a classic fallacy that I've seen hundreds of times before.

You (and people like you) do not realize the meta effect of science, i.e. its effect upon itself. The scientific progress does not only allow us to move from horses to internal combustion engines. It also allows us to more clearly see what's on the horizon - what we can and cannot expect from the future.

As times goes by, cases when reputable scientists make fundamentally wrong predictions or wave aside ideas that later become successful become exceedingly rare.

 

Thinking that just because scientists made bad forecasts a couple hundred years ago they are still as bad at making forecasts now is like thinking that because scientists could not make combustion engine a couple hundred years ago they still cannot make it now.

 

You can think of science and technology as of the Terra Incognita. As long as you had blank spaces on the world map, there was room for assumptions. You could assume that dragons or unicorns are real - you just did not discover where they live yet.

As Earth became more explored, this room was shrinking and shrinking, until there was none. Now pretty much every nook and cranny is painstakingly analyzed and photographed.

 

Saying that we will have Dark Energy reactors like in Half-Life 2 in the future and we just haven't researched them yet is like saying that dragons or unicorns are real and we just did not discover where they live yet.

Heh, "JUST another dark age". If we are considering billions of people dying and the lives of the rest deteriorating into utter misery a normal and acceptable future, then we have nothing to even worry about.

It's just that personally, I always despised the "after us the deluge" worldview.

Don't think I'm some kind science denier. Science doesn't make bad forecasts, it reaches the best conclusion based on current knowledge. The horseshit apocalypse was a 100% correct, but it couldn't account for outside variables skewing the results- that's virtually impossible to predict and outside scope of what science does. Which is fine, science is a tool, and measurements are only as good as the tool that you're using and science ever-changing.

Science *is* a tool, not way of life or mantra or a prophet, and shouldn't be used that way. In order to live, we need to consume, and science should only be used to facilitate that consumption. 

On 8/10/2020 at 11:30 AM, Ross Scott said:

I KNEW somebody was going to draw that conclusion and was hesitant whether I should spell it out in the video.  Answer: no.  I'm saying it should be illegal for contracts to state that the developer can NOT release on another platform.  If they don't want to port to another platform by their own volition, that's fine.  I'm not saying they should be REQUIRED to release on something else.  I realize this is a really radical stance to take, but it's literally what was in place for movies for a long time.

Won't platform holders just get around this by outright buying the publication rights to any game they want exclusivity on? Because it's one thing to ban them from cutting deals, but it's another thing to force them to port what is legally their own game to a competitor's platform. In fact, I'd say the vast majority of the time a game is exclusive to a single console platform even now, it's because that's exactly what the platform holder did.

By the way, something else I forgot to mention: That bit about Skylords Reborn still making you beholden to somebody else who may or may not choose to continue maintaining it reminds me of the kind of crap I've had to deal with many times in the Team Fortress 2 mapping community. We've become reliant on a number of third-party tools to fill the (significant and kind of pathetic) gaps in our toolset, from exporting custom textures and models to improving the compiling process. And multiple times now, one or more of those tools has been broken by an update to the game or the existing tools, and lo and behold, there's nothing anyone can do because the creator had stopped maintaining it.

That's why I'm a big proponent of open source now, and why my philosophy is "Don't make yourself indispensable unless you've discovered the secret to immortality."

3 hours ago, Camacho said:

i just hate the whole "anti repair" movement, WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO FIX, EVERYTHING, NO MATTER HOW OLD IT IS - like i tried fixing some old monitor, but i can't, there's no way to fix the power supply board, without replacing the whole damn thing, and there are no other options at this point, beyond throwing the whole thing away, which is insane, the panel in itself is perfectly fine, and hell my computer even detects it, but it just won't turn on properly for some god forsaken reason, but i'm looked at like i'm some kind of criminal, for trying to fix, something which was never supposed to be broken in the first place

Then you're gonna love Louis Rossman and his right to repair initiative he's trying to get passed in as many states in the US as possible.

6 hours ago, Camacho said:

no wait, better, they can rot in antartica for all i care

If they're in Antarctica, they'll freeze, and be preserved for a very long time, not rot.

4 hours ago, Camacho said:

how do you fix that by yourself???

 

Louis probably has a tutorial for that, try asking on his comments

well, at leat we know the world is ending.

58 minutes ago, RaTcHeT302 said:

i hope not, i mean things will get bad but i enjoy my existence and i'm curious where humanity will go next

 

i would be pretty mad if i died or if was crippled for life to be honest

 

it's more your grandkids or great grandkids who are going to suffer rather than you personally

3 hours ago, RaTcHeT302 said:

i enjoy my existence and i'm curious where humanity will go next

Consider yourself lucky then, because you live in the best time to be alive.

If you were born earlier, you wouldn't be able to enjoy the cornucopia of entertainment, pleasures, and comfort that the technological progress brought.

If you were born later, you'd be witnessing the miserable collapse of human civilization that right now is merely starting to manifest itself before our eyes.