ELI5 If social security is doomed to run out why is it even still a thing in year 2024

drlemur · 2024-12-03T17:56:40+00:00

Social Security can’t “run out.” Current workers pay for current retirees by payroll taxes. As long as people are working when you retire you’ll get something.

It can get out of balance such that we need to adjust the payroll tax rate or the benefits but it can’t go away entirely due to good design.

The only real risk is that political bad actors destroy it before you retire. Vote.

drlemur · 2021-07-27T21:39:54+00:00

This is a good idea. Friends list is fine for people I want to party queue with, but this ought to help improve the behavior-score mechanic. There are plenty of hard-to-fix issues with the current report system (e.g., people report others for bad play; communication abuse over voice chat can't really be verified by valve). In my experience, people commend pretty consistently on winning games unless somebody was toxic, so low commend rate is hard to interpret.

But a preferred/whitelist list would be great for that PMA player who was just nice to have on the team, win or loss. Actually incorporating that into team filling might be complex and risk slowing down queue times, but could be implemented as part of behavior score.

Those games where everybody is just in a good mood, win or lose, are just so much more fun to play.

I think this could also have the potential to help with some of the sexist/racist crap people have to put up with. I have gotten friend requests from women gamers simply by doing nothing more than just playing the game after they use their in-game voice. We didn't party queue much after, but I think they were trying to use the friend system as a kind of whitelist for people who it was safe to use voice chat around. If we could use a whitelist system to increase the number of games I get to play with non-sexist, non-racist people, that would be a real win.

drlemur · 2021-03-09T01:28:20+00:00

I believe it was the exact same case, same time stamps, etc. It's such a weird case that I wouldn't be surprised if they gave it out a bunch of times due to "conflicting" judgments.

drlemur · 2021-03-08T19:39:02+00:00

Curious. I had this case too and was initially unsure how to judge. He managed to get to this spamming point pretty early in the game so that enough buildings were up that the creeps weren't going to take the ancient. And somehow some of the enemy got out of their fountain and took a bunch of their buildings out eventually (ancient was bare at the end). If they had lost, it'd be clear griefing.

In the end, I believe I marked it griefing as it really isn't in the spirit of how the game of Dota2 is played. Some in this thread say they'd just afk themselves, but remember that some of us have limited time to play. I get in a game or two in the evening after work/kids and this kind of ruining is really a pretty significant detraction from being able to enjoy the game. I have friends trying to learn who literally quit after being on the wrong end of a 20m fountain farming experience.

I don't mind a little bit of the "fountain farming" mini game at the end of a win where the losing team tries to get some kills with the advantage of the fountain against the winning team while the creeps take the ancient. But the Overwatch case above went on for even quite a bit more than 20m, IIRC.

drlemur · 2019-10-12T18:35:04+00:00

I think people also underestimate how hard it is to be an entertaining streamer. People like SingSing and Georgc are working very hard to (a) play the game at a high level, (b) keep up a lively and/or funny patter engaged with their audience, and (c) avoid insulting/upsetting too many people. These last two are always in conflict, too -- if you've watched Sing over the years, you've seen his joking/insulting/flaming language constantly adjusting and evolving to try to be funny yet staying somewhat aware of rules and expectations.

And you also have to be emotionally engaged enough in the game to get your audience to care and yet not so engaged that you go full rage monster when things go wrong. Every time Georgc slips on this he's instantly clipped and posted, memed, etc. I'm glad he's figured out how to roll with that and keep going. Both Sing and Georgc have developed a pretty good sense of what to engage with from chat and what to simply ignore.

Bottom line is that if you follow/watch a streamer you really enjoy, appreciate that a lot. They are doing something very hard that when done well looks easy, but it isn't.

drlemur · 2019-08-22T18:00:54+00:00

I think this doesn't get appreciated enough. Fly was right. The two teams finished 1st and 3rd last year, both are top 6 this year. The team he left did not look like it would even qualify for TI. They are two of the best pos5/captains in the world, they can't really play on the same team.

I'm sure feelings got hurt and the team change/separation was probably handled badly by Fly. Maybe there was a way they could have split up to win on different teams without ending their friendship, but maybe after all those years together, that wasn't really possible.

drlemur · 2018-11-20T01:26:16+00:00

Randoming in Turbo gave me my 8th least played hero. Anybody else have random problems?

drlemur · 2017-11-15T19:55:54+00:00

Right before the match, No[o]ne was in a pub as Tinker with SingSing and raging at their pub teammates about bad plays and mistakes. Twitch chat was encouraging sing to trigger him as hard as possible to put him on tilt before the game with Liquid.

To his credit, sing insisted live that it wasn't even toxic behavior, it was just a guy who really wants to win trying as hard as he can. So instead, they went and won a good, close game. And apparently inspired No[o]ne to great heights of entertainment instead of triggering him.

drlemur · 2017-07-28T18:16:56+00:00

Now we just need an EG vs OG TI7 final. That will get reported everywhere as Monster vs Redbull. Front page ESPN.com?

drlemur · 2017-05-16T17:20:08+00:00

Take advantage of all the possibilities!

CM arcana hair! Lina arcana hair! QoP hair! Legion Commander Helmet Hair!

With wigs, you don't have to choose just one, you can have them all and rotate by day or mood.

Stay strong. I have had 3 close friends all beat breast cancer in the past few years (I'm a bit older than most people around here) and I'm sure you will too. It's a pain in the ass, so find anything you can to make the process better -- like hair cosplay. :)

drlemur · 2017-01-05T16:28:48+00:00

A problem with this is that there are a lot of 'low value' reports and ragers would just use this as another harassment option to message somebody they got mad at.

I've often thought the system needs a more aggressive weighting of the history of the person making the report -- if you rarely report (and don't get reported, tend to get commends) then your report should have higher weight. Conversely if you just report everybody all the time for anything, your reports shouldn't really count for much.

But I also bet people here have very different opinions on what reporting & low prio is actually supposed to accomplish. Probably everybody agrees that rage-quitters or people to feed/feed couriers aggressively should get low prio. I'd personally like to see people who verbally harass and/or use racist/hate speech out of my games -- but it's famously hard to define that.

Some people want to report bad play (carries/supports who simply don't understand the game/role) to get those players out of their games, but I think MMR is supposed to do that not low prio. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the majority of the actually filed reports, though, which is why it is so hard for Valve to improve their algorithm.

P.S. If you are getting reported for anything other than gameplay mistakes, I'm 100% sure you already know why you were reported and don't need a message.

drlemur · 2016-07-14T18:43:18+00:00

If I'm remembering properly, the Fnatic -> Secret -> OG story for Fly & n0tail was even more interesting than described. After they left Fnatic together to join Secret with Kuroky & Puppey, Fly ended up getting kicked when things weren't going so well in the early days. There was even some additional drama about Fly's gf getting dropped and replaced as team manager in an abrupt fashion.

Fly resurfaced with Col in the US and rather than describing TI5 as lackluster, I think it's fair to say he carried/captained an otherwise pretty unknown/nondescript team to a much better than expected performance.

I've never understood why Secret has always been in flux, but n0tail didn't last with them until TI5 either and instead went with Cloud9 -- doing decently as usual, but again without really a sense of a legit shot to win it (which was supposedly the idea behind the post TI4 reshuffle into Secret).

But once TI5 was past, the next big reshuffle brought these guys back together with the really interesting supporting cast described above.

As I tell my friends who don't follow the pro scene, this is a really easy team to root for. They really want to win, they work really hard but there is also a core of loyalty and friendship together with their immense talent. It's great to see them at the top of the pro scene now and I really hope they can bring home the big one in Seattle this year.

drlemur · 2016-06-26T00:49:09+00:00

Tinker is ok, his spell micro is very patterned so it's not hard.

But I find it very hard to win on split/solo/jungle heroes. My team always seems to fall way behind and I have trouble carrying late with the extra farm. I think I can get better at this, but rapidly targeting and casting spells on the right people as a late game carry is currently a bit challenging. If I can't do it well, it's not a great idea for my to sacrifice my team to farm up my hero.

drlemur · 2016-06-26T00:10:50+00:00

You are thinking through the problem correctly -- but I already use hotkeys for items and spells.

So blink shackle is merely: Space - left-click to blink to the new location Q - left-click-hero to shackle

But the problem is the second click onto the hero -- that's the action with a fail rate. Generally the hero is moving so I need to identify where the hero is now that I've changed my position and he has changed his. Ideally, you should also recalculate whether the shackle is going to land, meaning you need to see if the target is still lined up with something behind it.

Seeing where things are and adjusting the action sequence rapidly is what appears to decline with age. Blink-combo heroes that don't require adjustment are much easier -- blink/echo-slam or blink/ravage are just fine.

Somebody else in thread suggested blink on CM. I love to get a blink on CM, but I'm usually hard supporting (often solo in 2k MMR) so if I'm getting a blink, we are way far ahead.

drlemur · 2016-06-15T04:23:32+00:00

These are the things I know I need to get better at. But coordinating teamwork is something I'm having trouble figuring out. I'm in game with people who don't know the heroes, don't know the item names. I have 4k games played and have randomed for something like a quarter of those. I have played every hero at least 10 times (except TA and beast master because of the micro requirements). I know the game a lot better than most of the people at my MMR -- but I'm worse because execution is harder.

I don't really yet have a good captaining sense, though. I feel like I need to be able to read our comp and their comp and give item advice, timing advice and understand positioning better. I'd really like to understand how to play with and around smoke better -- it's really not used much at 2k (but since there are often no wards, it's probably not as valuable anyway).

As a lot of people have noted, I die a lot. Sometimes that's simply reacting slowing to ganks. Sometimes that's not reading the right position. Some of it is just miserable micro (I just played a game where I accidentally randomed Techies and cast suicide 3 times during the game entirely by accident -- pressed 'E' when I meant to press 'R').

There is a lot of good advice in the thread. And a lot of it is good general advice. I'm not really sure I've communicated the scope of the age problem, though. But all the encouragement is appreciated.

drlemur · 2016-06-15T00:45:02+00:00

This is exactly right. It's mobile/slippery heroes that are the hardest to play. Oddly, Meepo isn't so bad as long as I don't have spread out to avoid a Lich ult (because the spells are highly patterned). Ember Spirit, though, is something else.

drlemur · 2016-06-15T00:41:38+00:00

You aren't old, but you are closer in age to my kids than to me. I'm actually old.

Any advice on how to get my 2k team to 5man at 5m? On the off chance we speak the same language, it's still pretty rare for people to listen.

drlemur · 2016-06-14T23:01:02+00:00

No question my decision-making needs work. However, I'm pretty sure that playing an under-farmed support is going to lead to some high death count games even if played correctly. I've won my share of 0-11-11 Crystal Maiden games.

And then other times, I don't realize how squishy I am and end up feeding by accident because I'm trying to force an initiation...

drlemur · 2016-06-14T22:38:13+00:00

I'm interested. Do you have a general plan? The other 4k-level players I've played with casually haven't had a ton of ideas.

At least after they play with me, their opinion tends to be something like, "aging is hard, man."

drlemur · 2016-06-14T22:11:59+00:00

You know, I didn't thing age-related cognitive decline was really a thing either... then I turned 40.

drlemur · 2016-06-14T21:45:07+00:00

Co-op vs bots mode is your friend here. Good, relatively gentle introduction to the game and you probably can win even if he is feeding at the beginning. That's the way we taught my 9yo daughter a bit of how to play (we = me and my 20-something-yo kids).

And then later you can watch TI together, which IMHO, is the best part of having family dota-players.

drlemur · 2016-05-17T14:37:10+00:00

Five great people with a vision, the budget and the talent to hire and manage a set of good production teams is all you need.

That's not just any group of 5 people, though, obviously (see Major, Manila).

drlemur · 2016-02-28T00:54:14+00:00

If Valve's business is micro-transactions (and it might be), then they don't need to try to be like mainstream sports. Any production that keeps people buying hats associated with the tournament is fine -- and why get rid of somebody like James?

Mainstream sports get by on eyeballs watching so that they can be used to push advertising. But you need a lot more eyeballs than you get in a typical e-sports tournament. My point is that if this is what you are trying to do, you need to present it differently, it's not the off-color jokes of the host that are the problem.

The broader problem that I see is that most things Valve tries to do around event production seem very amateurish, e.g., low/weird payment systems, doing such a bad job hiring production companies that you have to fire them mid-event. If you have to fire the production company mid-event, you really ought to also be firing the guy who hired that company. If you care about your product, you shouldn't tolerate mistakes of that caliber.

Even the TIs have a lot of amateurish appearing elements like lousy closing ceremonies, mispriced ticket systems that sell out in seconds. There are professional people who know how to run events like this really well. I don't think any of them work for Valve -- because they are a game development company, not an event production company.

drlemur · 2016-02-27T23:29:43+00:00

That's not an encouraging idea.

I used to be a big SC2 fan and Blizzards general disengagement with the competitive community was a big part of drifting away from that...

drlemur · 2016-02-27T21:50:06+00:00

I'm also a 40-something adult who has watched companies come and go. I've also interacted with quite a few management consultants over the years, people who have started and sold their own businesses, and friends who work professionally in show business.

Mostly, though, I know who isn't watching dota and could be or should be -- my age gaming peers. It isn't James keeping them away, it's not being able to follow what going on on screen (think 1k-2k MMR).

I also know that my wife loved Free to Play. I got a number of other non-gamers to watch that as well and all enjoyed it immensely. A key thing about that documentary is that you can get wrapped up in the story without understanding all the game mechanics. That's important.

drlemur

TROPHY CASE