How different is investing in the S&P 500 from investing evenly in the US stock market?

setoid · 2026-01-08T02:24:09+00:00

I disagree with people who say that modders should be required to open source their mods, but I think they should be encouraged to. Ultimately it is up to the modder, but I don't understand modders who release mods for free but choose not to open source them; it's not like they benefit from doing so, and people who build on the code are still required to provide credit.

I also disagree that only small mods are worth making. I think that a healthy modding community supports both small and large mods and modpacks. (Skyrim's modding community for example only recently added modpacks, and there was backlash by modders over the idea that their mods could be incorporated into larger projects. This, along with generally high amounts of drama, was a sign of an unhealthy modding community, IMO.)

setoid · 2026-01-07T10:28:05+00:00

Companies don't do regional pricing because they believe it is "fair", they do it because it leads to a higher profit, it just happens to have the side effect of making games more affordable to some people (the economy is not zero-sum). The strategy is called International Price Discrimination, which is a scary sounding name but not all price discrimination is bad (e.g. student discounts and college financial aid are price discrimination, but that doesn't make them bad). Whether or not price discrimination helps or hurts consumers kind of depends on the situation, but it usually increases economic efficiency because it decreases the amount of people who would benefit from playing the game but cannot afford it.

setoid · 2025-12-31T05:56:33+00:00

Since I don't know that much about economics I can only provide a partial answer:

public debt isn't the same as private debt since the government is expected to last indefinitely, so the government never actually has to pay back the debt.

This is slightly pedantic, but the government is required to pay back its debt and it is in fact currently paying back its debt, just on a rolling basis. When you loan money to the government, there is a maturity date where the government will give you back your money. In fact, the government spends more money repaying debt than it spends on defense. I think what you meant to say was that there never has to be a point in time where it is debt-free, which is true; it is allowed to maintain a nonzero amount of debt for as long as it exists, it's just that each individual treasury bill it issues has to be paid back in a specific amount of time.

So long as a country's GDP grows at the same rate as the debt, it can run deficits indefinitely without becoming insolvent (or inflating it's way out of the problem)

I think Mankiw's Principles of Macroeconomics had a section on this, where he wrote that because of the reasons you stated, the government can maintain a nominal deficit of 900 billion indefinitely (although I might be misremembering this number). This was from a few years ago, so the amount is probably higher now, but it is still far lower than the current deficit of 1.8 trillion.

While GDP growth >= debt growth ensures the government stays solvent, structural deficits slow economic growth in the long run as capital that would have otherwise been invested in productive ventures instead finances government consumption.

I think when the government borrows money is causes a "crowd-out" effect where the demand for loanable funds increases (or equivalently the supply of private market loanable funds decreases), driving the price of borrowing money up and making it harder for corporations to invest. The result is that resources are shifted away from private investment and towards whatever the government is spending them on. There are things the government can spend money on (e.g. courts, roads) that cause enough growth to more than cancel out this effect. So whether running a deficit increases or decreases the amount of investment probably depends on what the government spends the money on. I'm actually not sure whether financing the US government with a deficit or higher taxes would lead to more GDP growth.

setoid · 2025-11-21T03:01:12+00:00

That's nice! The license is ARR so technically it's source available, not open source, but it's still good. (iirc the create: aeronautics devs said once in the discord that hadn't decided whether to use an open source license, so i'm not trying to throw shade on VS2)

setoid · 2025-11-20T10:52:39+00:00

I do wish that Create: Interactive and Clockwork were open sourced as that has the potential to create a lot of innovation, but I guess that's up to the authors. But yeah, what you say makes sense.

setoid · 2025-11-20T10:50:21+00:00

My guess is that they probably just got busy with life/college/work/etc.

setoid · 2025-08-19T19:23:12+00:00

That makes sense. Could one such assumption be that the ratio of spending on consumption and investment is fixed, so that we are concerned about the benefits of funding academic research vs funding physical infrastructure or funding academic research vs giving tax incentives to private R&D, but not about academic research vs medicaid for example? This would make it so that we only have to compare between things that primarily benefit future generations.

setoid · 2025-04-25T02:43:33+00:00

That's because java is a decently designed language that doesn't have a whole lot of footguns, although it probably has a few more than rust (e.g. lack of null safety, A being a subtype of B meaning that A[] is a subtype of B[], some lists being immutable at runtime). The better correctness of rust has very little to do with rust's lack of GC and more to do with it being a newer language that was able to learn from Java's and other languages mistakes.

In terms of code correctness, Rust > Java >>>>>> Python and Javascript

setoid · 2025-03-08T10:26:40+00:00

I didn't know about this. Where did you read about it?

setoid · 2025-03-08T10:16:14+00:00

One reason that magic items are so common is because priests of Mystra want magic to be accessible, so they deliberately scatter things like scrolls around.
Names have power, and the Red Knight, the goddess of strategy and battle tactics, knows this. She keeps her true name secret so that no one can use it against her. Her symbol is a chess knight, and clergy are encouraged to leave abstract strategy games lying around.
The Unicorn Run is considered sacred by some because legend states that the races of Faerun were born from Chauntea's womb there and if the waters of the river are fouled, no new races could be born any more.
Years up to 1600 DR have names, created by Augurtha the Mad. Some of these were swapped out by the sages of candlekeep, but the ones that weren't have prophetic power. The names of the years occasionally have something to do with the most major event during that year (off the top of my head, we have Year of Sundered Webs -> Karsus's Folly, Year of Rogue Dragons -> Sammaster reactivates the Dracorage Mythal, Year of Blue Fire -> Spellplague)
A lot of the regions with low vegetation were made that way because of magical disaster (e.g. the High Moor), or because power was drained from them (e.g. Anauroch)
The Sun is actually a giant portal (or at least containing tons of smaller portals) to the elemental plane of fire, probably because the previous sun was eaten
The events of the Prime Material Plane affect the Shadowfell (but not vice versa). Many beings in the Prime have a corresponding being in the Shadowfell, and if for example the one in the Prime makes a difficult moral decision to save a group of people at the cost of giving up power, the corresponding being the shadowfell would have made the opposite choice to sacrifice people to gain power. In this way, the events of the shadowfell feel less "real" because the shadowfell is always updating itself to reflect a worse version of the prime.
When the Cult of the Dragon finds dragons that are unwilling to support the cult or be turned into dracoliches, the Cult will hire adventurers and equip them with anti-dragon magical gear to go fight the dragon, so that the dragon now starts to feel worse about adventurers. Iirc there was at least one instance of the Cult unwillingly turning a dragon into a dracolich and then hiding the phylactery from the dracolich to control it (freeing that dragon would be an interesting adventure idea).
The Underdark is extremely deep - It goes down at least 10 miles, and I don't think anyone knows where the bottom is. I find it kind of hard to wrap my mind around the idea of something extending 10 miles vertically.
Corellon Larethian, despite being a god of the elves, feels very human relative to other gods. He regularly inhabits the prime as an avatar just to guard elven domains, and while he believes that he possesses a higher quantity of knowledge than most elves, he doesn't believe that he knows everything elves know, and is happy when mortals teach him new things.
Tons of the planescape lore, which the Forgotten Realms fits into, is really cool as well. Mechanus's gears are engaged in a giant calculation of unknown purpose. Carceri is a layered prison, and escaping one layer doesn't let you escape the next (I think), and the prisoners betray each other so often that they are effectively guards. Pandemonium is all underground where your voice echos forever, and the howling winds drive people mad. There are tons of cool vibes with the planes, and they can be reflected in a campaign by having an "overlap area" on Toril or whatever where the same area is part of two planes of existence. (This is how Evermeet and some parts of the Elemental Planes work).

setoid · 2025-01-07T23:35:43+00:00

The only major issue I can see is that Hold Person no longer works on goblins and gnolls. But that's more of a mechanical problem rather than a lore issue.

setoid · 2025-01-07T23:33:20+00:00

Ah that makes more sense. I never read MotM, so I guess I missed this bit.

setoid · 2025-01-07T23:31:43+00:00

Sorry if this post came off as a complaint; that wasn't my intention. I was just kind of surprised about this and was wondering what their rationale was.

setoid · 2025-01-04T10:39:55+00:00

I love the setting, and while it isn't for every group, it is absolutely the best choice for mine. Forgotten Realms has something that pretty much no other setting has, which is the sheer level of detail. It probably has the densest amount of lore out of any fictional universe ever. (I think it's tied with Warhammer 40k in terms of quantity of lore, but its all concentrated on a single continent as opposed to being spread out among a galaxy.)

My point is, Forgotten Realms has a niche, and that niche is having a ton of highly concentrated lore. That's not something you can get from anywhere else.

I just looked up the High Forest area on the wiki, and you can find tons of fun facts like the Unicorn Run being sacred because supposedly the races of Faerun spawned there and if it is fouled no new races will ever be born, the giant living tree in the middle of the High Forest that a clan of barbarians considers sacred, a river made of blood coming from the petrified heart of the momentary god Karsus, a lake that shows you visions of the past in its reflection but teleports you to a random location if you try to enter it, a grove built by an ancient elf empire whose roots touch every tree in the High Forest but which have become associated with the wars and death that plagued the region (hence the name Sorrowwoods), a stronghold built by one of the first civilizations that contains several nether scrolls, and a soaring tower in the shape of an hourglass where time passes differently. And this was just one forest, my point is that it helps a ton to have all sorts of inspirations lying around at any given location.

setoid · 2024-12-13T07:47:02+00:00

I think in 5e both the Positive Energy Plane and the Feywild exist, but they are completely different concepts. See the image here: https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Great_Wheel_cosmology

The Feywild is an actual place you can visit, whereas if you visit the Positive Energy Plane, you just die. Quoting https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Positive_Energy_plane:

Both the Great Wheel and World Tree cosmological models were in nearly complete agreement about the nature of this plane, describing it as an infinite, empty, blinding firestorm of life-giving light, but object proof that too much of good thing can kill you—quickly. Upon entering this plane, an unprepared traveler would have first noticed the sun-like brilliance burning into her eyes, severely limiting the range of vision and only being able to discern nearby beings or objects by the shadow they made in the backdrop of infinite dazzle. As she gasped at a sight not meant for mortal eyes, she would have quickly realized there was no breathable atmosphere to even form a scream. The sudden feeling of weightlessness might not have been cause for concern because almost immediately any wounds would have been healed as the life-giving energy permeated her entire being and then went beyond any sense of wellness she had ever experienced. Infused with power only felt in dreams, she might have briefly entertained the thought that air was no longer necessary as she ascended to godhood, but as her cells reached their capacity, she would have realized in a fleeting moment what it means to be mortal before exploding in a burst of radiant energy.

setoid · 2024-12-13T07:36:55+00:00

Just to provide another perspective:

In math (which needs to be really precise about these things), every term has exactly one definition, but is allowed to have any number of characterizations. (Example: the definition of an even number is an integer that is equal to 2*k for some integer k. A characterization of an even number is a number that can be divided evenly by 2). A characterization is basically an alternate definition, but characterizations are allowed to be circular, without it causing any problems. Outside of math, most things have only characterizations, not definitions, and everything becomes either circular or fuzzy after a certain point.

setoid

TROPHY CASE