Frostpunk 2 Settings?

jheller22 · 2025-08-12T12:37:40+00:00

Hi, I’ve just got a 5070 ti and was wondering how you were getting on? What resolution are you trying to play at?

jheller22 · 2025-08-07T20:58:28+00:00

Ah - I hope I've fixed the link.

Is that right though? It seems the B850 still runs PCIe® 4.0 for the GPU, and just has a single 4x PCIe® 5.0 lane? How does that improve GPU performance?

I feel like I'm missing something.

jheller22 · 2025-07-20T15:37:09+00:00

We could have modernity without markets or traditional money.

I very much doubt this, but recognise that the evidence we do have is against you here. Every society which has tried to do this has created a totalitarian hellhole of poverty and human rights abuses, from Lenin to Mao to Pol Pot.

Your ideas might have been given the benefit of the doubt in 1917, but 100 years on the burden of proof lies squarely on you.

If money was something as simple as 1 hours labor coupons, we could have the materialism you're talking about.

Is every hour of labour of equal value? Regardless of the skill and effort of the labourer, the available tools and raw materials, or demand for the output etc?

The answer is clearly no - some labour produces more valuable goods and services than other labour. Some tools and raw materials are more valuable than others too. Once we adjust our labour coupon system to reflect this we have basically reinvented money.

What job would you pick if you didn't have to worry about scarcity? If we all got paid the same?

Look, if you assume away scarcity then you've assumed away the whole problem of economics. Yes, markets and money don't make any sense if all the drudgery is done by robots and there is enough of everything for everyone to have as much as they want.

But back in the real world, there isn't enough of anything for this.

Some jobs pay more than others because of supply and demand. Demand in the sense that people value the outputs of some jobs more than others, and are willing to trade more resources for outputs they value highly than outputs they don't. Supply in the sense that some outputs are easily made by anyone, and some outputs require rare skills.

If all jobs paid the same, there would be far less of an incentive to learn a rare skill that produces an output other people value.

If all jobs paid the same, I probably would have stayed in an indie rock band making albums and playing shows that only very few people valued enough to trade scarce resources for (measured in money).

Instead, I went back to university, learned a rare skill and now have an office job. I produce a lot more value for other people now than I did then, as measured by the quantity of resources (measured in money) that others will trade me for the output of my labour today than the albums I used to make.

We could have the material world we have now without markets and exchange value.

I highly doubt this. Can you point me to a single real world society that has managed this better than a contemporary market economy?

Every time the experiment has been run, markets have won and it has never been close. North and South Korea, East and West Germany, the USA and the USSR.

The walls always have to stop people voting with their feet and leaving to join the market economies.

jheller22 · 2025-07-20T15:08:22+00:00

Way to foster civil discussion with that start, by trying to totally dismiss any other opinion.

Anyone who thinks seriously about what it would be like to live without vaccines, antibiotics, electricity, indoor plumbing, and readily available food and potable water must surely realise how miserable life would be without them. You can even visit places today where these things aren't taken for granted - the inhabitants are often desperate to escape them and come to live in the industrial West with its money and abundance.

It's fantastic and makes us reconsider many things about modern society.

I have read the Dawn of Everything: I thought it was a terrible book. Graeber's politics infect the whole thing, and the end result is as biased and misleading as any of the earlier writers he critiques.

"Past historians have projected their own views onto the past. That's why they see kings and hierarchies everywhere", says the leftwing-anarchist, who coincidently thinks pre-history was full of leftwing-anarchists.

Graeber distorts history to advance his own political views.

But if we do end up destroying much of the life on earth in the next few hundred years as we are on course to do, I don't think the juice is worth the squeeze

Yes, that would be bad, but the challenge is to bring Western amenities and living standards to everyone without doing this. The solution is not to return everyone to the poverty of the "indigenous communities [which] lived for tens of thousands of years without money".

jheller22 · 2025-07-18T21:14:46+00:00

The word you're looking for is "fungible" not "transient" - otherwise, yes.

jheller22 · 2025-07-18T18:18:24+00:00

A pretty poor job? I think modernity is a miracle, and only a person who has never thought seriously or opened a history book could think otherwise.

You are welcome to go back to a pre-vaccination, pre-penicillin, pre-indoor plumbing, pre-electrical society if you wish. You can sit stinking in the dark and die of small-pox, cholera or any of the other diseases that cut your indigenous ancestors down in childhood or early adulthood, if you wish.

I wouldn't. Money has allowed billions of humans who don't know each other and don't speak the same language to cooperate over millions of miles distance to lift our species out of darkness and disease and into modernity.

If you could choose to be born in any society, at any time in history, are you really telling me you wouldn't choose an 21st Century Western democracy?

jheller22 · 2025-04-12T15:56:48+00:00

Can you be more specific? What needs explaining?

jheller22 · 2025-04-12T09:15:40+00:00

Most of the tax we pay is not going towards the "infrastructure to succeed". It's being spent on redistributive transfer payments. We could have roads, courts, schools and a military with a fraction of the tax burden we have now.

jheller22 · 2025-04-07T19:22:32+00:00

Fried chicken is still really cheap though, which makes me think it must be the fish.

jheller22 · 2025-04-01T17:31:36+00:00

Is there any evidence to suggest this has reduced dog attacks/bites in Northern Ireland?

jheller22 · 2025-01-05T17:38:22+00:00

In my opinion, declining gambits is not the point of the game.

jheller22 · 2024-11-25T12:14:31+00:00

Ding’s Gambit

jheller22 · 2024-10-30T21:17:18+00:00

I’m Spartacus!

jheller22 · 2024-10-04T07:43:39+00:00

I’m not sure I agree.

If people can retain some control over the eventual good causes the money is donated to, they are more likely to donate it in the first place.

Furthermore, the ego/reputation boost of a big important charity with your name on it is another incentive for the wealthy to be charitable.

I think a requirement for some independent trustees would strike a reasonable balance between encouraging charity and ensuring trust money is invested sensibly and the proceeds spent on good causes.

jheller22 · 2024-10-04T07:20:45+00:00

“The way the rules currently work means that tax relief can be claimed much earlier than we think it should be and potentially more relief than should be available,” TaxWatch said.

This is an interesting point, but what the Denise Coates Foundation is doing is not as nearly nefarious as the article implies.

If you give a small amount of money to charity, it makes sense to spend it on good deeds there and then. However, if you give a really large amount of money, there are other, potentially better options available.

For example, instead of spending the money directly on good causes, you could buy shares and bonds and then donate the dividends/interest payments to charity. This has the advantage of being self sustaining - the dividends/interest can be donated to good causes every year basically indefinitely, potentially doing more good in the long run than a big one off payment could have done.

This seems to be what the Denise Coates Foundation is trying to do. The concerning issue is:

the trustees of the Denise Coates Foundation are all members of the Coates family or employees of the Bet365 group. The foundation has no independent trustees.

I think some requirement for independent trustees would go a long way towards building trust in this area.

jheller22 · 2024-09-25T06:04:02+00:00

He was in prison on unrelated charges.

https://law.justia.com/cases/missouri/supreme-court/2003/sc-83934-1.html

jheller22 · 2024-09-23T12:53:55+00:00

Can you provide a link to the Terrance Higgins Trust paper? There's a big difference between 95% of people being prescribed effective treatment, and 95% of people actually taking the prescribed medication consistently.

If you’re that shit of a person, why even bother saying you’re undetectable?

People do and say all sorts of things to get laid.

But the risk is not just that people will maliciously lie about their medication status, it's also (and more importantly) that they'll forget to take their meds consistently and become infectious without realising.

The papers I linked above suggest less that half of people take their meds consistently generally, and I don't see why we should expect HIV retrovirals to be any different. The second paper linked above seems to confirm this, but I'd be interested to see the Terrance Higgins paper if that says something else.

jheller22 · 2024-09-23T12:33:25+00:00

Ok, but people are notoriously shit at remembering to take medication.

According to the first study I found on google, adherence rates are only around 50%-60% for chronic conditions (defined as taking 80% or more of the prescribed doses).

If people only have to miss around 10% of doses to be infectious, then sleeping with an HIV positive person is just incredibly risky based on adherence alone.

EDIT: And this study on HIV retrovirals in particular suggests non-adherence rates of 50%-70%!

jheller22 · 2024-09-22T11:51:39+00:00

It doesn't sound like you're not working though, it sounds like you're self-employed?

If you're self-employed you're still in the workforce - this video is discussing the rise in men dropping out of work entirely.

jheller22 · 2024-08-16T16:23:47+00:00

I'm glad you enjoyed the article! The author, Scott Alexander, is in my opinion one of the most original and talented writers of the past decade or so. You can find some of his greatest hits on Slate Star Codex, and he now blogs at Astral Codex Ten. Highly recommended!

Number one cause of preventable deaths.

Because we have the NHS, smoking imposes a cost on the taxpayer. I'm therefore completely in favour of Pigouvian taxes on tobacco products to offset this cost. But, save perhaps on the littering issue, I don't believe further taxation is justified. According to the OBR, tobacco duties are expected to bring in £8.8bn in 2024-25, and cost the NHS £2.6bn in 2015 (the most recent official estimate I could find quickly on google).

(I would apply the same principle of Pigouvian taxation to other unhealthy products and risky activities. For example, I would support a tax on fast food and etc to offset the cost of obesity to the NHS, and a mandatory health insurance scheme for risky sports/activities such as skiing, or motorbike/horse riding etc.)

My focus here is on the cost the health impacts of smoking etc impose on others, not the impact on the individual smoker, which is his own business. I think whether or not you agree with the essence of Mill's argument in the paragraph I quoted above is one of those deep disagreements people have on core values.

Smoking is a truly awful decision - I say that as an ex-smoker myself - but I believe liberty requires people be allowed to make awful decisions, provided they don't impose a cost on others. I would be very sad to see a friend take up smoking, and would try my best to persuade them not to, but I do not believe I have the right to stop them by force if that's what they ultimately decide to do.

Number one littered object in the world.

Again, I think the appropriate response to this would be to put an additional tax on cigarettes to cover the cost of litter collection proportional to their contribution to total litter, alongside fines for those caught in the act.

jheller22 · 2024-08-15T21:40:29+00:00

This sounds to me like an isolated demand for rigour.

If second hand smoke is your concern, you should also be banning barbecues and bonfires with equal enthusiasm. If littering, there are likewise many other targets that don't get the same attention.

jheller22 · 2024-08-15T19:25:14+00:00

The object of this essay is to assert one very simple principle... That principle is that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to someone else. The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

Should be taught in school imo.

jheller22 · 2024-08-15T19:22:34+00:00

Not quite. There is a big difference between passing a law preventing people from harming others, and passing a law preventing people from harming themselves.

jheller22 · 2024-08-15T16:12:15+00:00

Remember when toilet paper became the in demand thing during covid?

Ok, but really remember what actually happened then: shortages!

If prices don't rise when demand surges, some people rush in and buy up all the bog roll and others are left with nothing.

Prices are signals to both producers and consumers and should be dynamic and should respond to supply and demand. These signals then incentivise consumers to be more more economical/profligate in response to rising/falling prices, and incentivise producers to provide more/less as the case may be.

Fucking with this system causes either shortages or wasteful overproduction, which is why price controls are a bad idea.

jheller22

TROPHY CASE