When a car is repaired after a crash, the GDP goes up.
When a fruit or vegetable is grown only to be thrown out by a supermarket as food waste, the GDP goes up.
When you replace a phone that still works because of planned obsolescence, the GDP goes up.
When you throw out a perfectly good coat because it's no longer fashionable, and buy a new one in this season's style, the GDP goes up.
When a bridge has to be replaced because it wasn't built right, the GDP goes up.
When a piece of packaging is manufactured only to be thrown away straight away, the GDP goes up.
When a site needs to be decontaminated because chemicals weren't stored correctly, the GDP goes up.
In each case, society has no more usable wealth than it would have had if the car didn't crash, the vegetable wasn't grown, the phone wasn't replaced, the old coat was still being worn, there was less packaging, or the chemicals were stored correctly. Yet the GDP goes up.
Meanwhile, most of the wealth that is generated ends up in the top one percent's pockets.
The truth is that GDP isn't a useful measurement. It's just a convenient one.
I'm intrigued to try the Flesh and Blood trading card game in person, but I'm scratching my head at the publisher's unwillingness to teach people how to play. There are no rules included in the starter set -- just a thick booklet of inconsequential lore.
Yes, the website has a brief "how to play video" and quick start rules, but they don't cover some things that you'll need to know for your first game with the "ready to play" decks. For example, one of Dorinthea's cards*, Quicken, is NOT meant to be shuffled into her deck. The rules say nothing about this, and a literal reading of the quick start rules suggests the opposite.
There's no bridge from the incomplete overview to the 104-page comprehensive rules. How easy are those to read? Let me give a sample:
"1.6.2. An attack-proxy is an activated-layer (activated-attack) or triggered-layer (triggered-attack) with the
attack ability (see Rule 8.3.1), and represents its source as an attack on the stack before the source
becomes a chain link on the combat chain."
I've read programming language specifications that were clearer.
There is an excellent interactive tutorial, but it was developed by a third party:
*Bonus fun from the comprehensive rules: Quicken is also a token, and "A token is not a card, even if it is represented by an official Flesh and Blood card."
The tagline in the Fast X trailer is "The End of the Road Begins".
Does that suggest it will be followed by Fast XX and then the crossover Fast XXX, where Vin plays two different(ish) characters?
When #JohnMastodon asked his engineers why his feed wasn’t getting a lot of toots in the past month, they reminded him that he’d spent it offline building schools for refugees. That made sense to John. Then they went out and got ice cream.
Things you as a US white person have to deal with because of #racism.
- student loan debt
- credit scores
- today’s disinformation climate
A brief explanation with some links follows as I don’t have all day 😂
#BlackHistoryMonth
#BlackHistory
I walked into the math student lounge and five of them were preparing to play Bananagrams ("the word game for people who think Boggle takes too long"). They foolishly invited me to join.
In the first game, nobody else even called Peel.
I also won the second game. Not the same kind of shutout, but this time I was playing with one hand.
Remember, in a queue, items go in the back and come out the front. With a llama, it's the other way around. #DataStructures #ComputerScience #llama #llamas #LlamasOfMastodon #llamadon #mnemonic #pedagogy #drawing
CS professor, game designer, and fire dancer ordinaire.