Kobolds with a keyboard.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • I’ve said this before (and caught flak for it) but I think the solution to this is to apply a heavy additional tax to vacant homes (as defined as any home that isn’t occupied by a permanent resident for more than 6 months a year), and increase the tax exponentially for each residence beyond the first owned by the same company or individual.

    At some point, you make it so expensive to keep unoccupied properties that they’re better off letting people live there for free than continuing to let them go unoccupied. Use all of the proceeds from this tax to assist homeless people or build new dense housing developments.

    “But Kobold, what about soandso with their summer home?” If you can afford a second home, you can afford to pay a bit more tax on it to benefit the public good.

    “But Kobold, a lot of those homes that are vacant are run-down, or are in places nobody actually wants to live!” Doesn’t matter. If they’re vacant, tax them. Use the money to build dense housing in the places where people do want to live. If the place is too run-down to be occupied, the owner can tear it down and do something else with it.



  • On the morality point, I’d argue that we should spend the money to rescue any person if we have the money/means, and it can feasibly happen without excessive risk to other lives, otherwise we’re assigning monetary value to human lives.

    Resources are finite, though. If rescuing one person requires, say, 10 units of resources, but rescuing 10 others require only 1 unit of resources, isn’t choosing to rescue the 1 over the 10 already placing relative value on human lives, by declaring them to be 10x as valuable as the others? This is obviously operating on the assumption that we don’t have the resources to rescue everyone who needs rescuing.


  • My real wonder would be if the majority of Americans would okay the amount of money it would cost to save that one man?

    Depends where the money is coming from. Military budget? Absolutely. Being taken from social services and whatnot? No. The amount of money that would cost could save so many more lives if it was used for things here. Choosing to spend it on saving an astronaut rather than on, for example, feeding homeless people and distributing medication and disaster relief is like a version of the trolley problem where the trolley is already heading for the 1 person, but you have the option of switching it to the other track to kill more people if you want to. I’d have a really hard time calling that moral by any metric.









  • In all fairness, the instructions you actually need to know to play the game could be summarized in a single page (with the caveat that there will be a lot of edge cases that won’t be adequately explained there); tournament judges and, to a lesser extent, tournament players are the only folks who need to know the majority of what’s in that PDF.

    That said, the game is super archaic and hard to learn, and any player who thinks otherwise is probably either playing only at a super basic level, or just isn’t considering how long they’ve been playing and how much nuance they’ve accumulated. Sorry you had a shitty experience; your friends absolutely should not have tried to throw you into the deep end like that. You sound like you already know, but to reiterate it, this was absolutely not a failing on your part and was 100% your friends’ fault.

    If you actually want to try the game (and I completely understand if you don’t), you can go to a game store that sells MtG products and ask for a (free) intro deck. They’re small decks with simpler cards and a booklet explaining the basic game rules that can be helpful to learn the game.

    There’s also Magic Arena, the computer game version, which really does a pretty good job of teaching the game. If you don’t mind that format, I’d absolutely start there.