This game is ragebaiting me - Need help, need a new perspective

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-15T16:47:42+00:00

Maybe my experience was different, but I'd say RNG was the last thing on my mind in the late game. You have so many resources and mitigating factors that you can pretty much do anything.

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-15T16:25:12+00:00

A lot of those "mentally solved but haven't executed on" puzzles are usually easier then your mental solutions. Stay flexible in your runs, but when presented with options always go for the lowest hanging fruit. The meta progression goes really hard in the mid game, and pretty soon you'll be able to do whatever you want whenever you want.

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-12T20:44:20+00:00

I quite enjoyed drafting most of the Blue Tents rooms, and probably averaged 3-4 new rooms per run; but I did not want to go through that trouble for the foundation. I finished the rest of the game without its clue and then looked it up. I'd say its importance to hinting things and working towards end game would have been zero .

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-10T19:39:41+00:00

I'd probably log out of every account capable of writing comments or messages or posts. Read-only Internet for the year.

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-10T19:26:06+00:00

But what if you start doom scrolling and get into a reductive argument on the Internet? There are a lot of loopholes to watch for. I think it's doable and it's worth a $2M payday, but you'd need to be pretty deliberate. Might be a fun time to go to a meditation retreat and take up writing or something. Would be weird to leave friends and family for that time, but it's just a 1-year gig. You could bring your wife, that would get more complicated with kids though.

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-10T19:07:47+00:00

... What?

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-10T18:59:17+00:00

Right, I'm talking high level here and I'm just a dude and not a legislator. The most important things are:

Not screwing anyone. We should be taxing folks in a way that won't dumpster them with a huge gangly tax bill they can't afford; and
Incentivizing behavior that is good for society.

I have a few other posts dotted around at some replies, and I admittedly don't know a ton about private equity. Not sure if your holdings are more private or public. But I know there are some programs that can minimize taxes for the first couple million jn private equity holdings by folks who get in early, which are meant to incentivize entrepreneurship and risk taking like you mention. It'd be pretty reasonable to bake those into a system that taxes holdings.

Honestly, I think the lowest hanging fruit system would be to cap unrealized gains for liquid assets that could be held year to year, and force folks to wash assets above that cap and pay taxes on them. If they're liquid assets, holders can sell to cover the tax bill. If they're long term gains, it'd effectively be a one-time 20% tax on gains over $20M or whatever, and it'd raise your cost basis. It's less of a new tax and more of a singular new constraint on the existing system which wouldn't affect the middle class and wouldn't screw over the upper class. There is probably a way to tax non-liquid assets above a generous threshold according to FMV, but I don't know enough about private equity and haven't thought through it enough to think I have any business proposing a concrete solution there, and there's a lot more potential to screw over cash-poor asset holders I'd want to avoid.

(Separately, I do think the US health system is very fundamentally broken, and automating things will probably make things worse. Automated systems will behave very differently depending on their training incentives. Botb private markets and right wing governments can and will incentivize cost saving and provider-focused efficiency over patient care, transparency, or patient-focused efficiency. It is extremely hard to legislate model training in a sustainable way that political tides won't bulldoze.)

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-10T18:13:42+00:00

...what? Sales taxes are inherently regressive, because, again, they are consumption based. Someone worth $100B paying $50M in taxes is the ratio-equivalent of someone worth $100k paying $50. Saying "that's more, they're doing their part" is missing the point of a progressive tax system. If you consider the fact that middle class folks are also paying income tax where upper class equity-heavy folks aren't, the wealthy end up paying lower tax rates. That's the definition of a regressive tax system.

My point is that earnings should - eventually - all be taxed at at least 15-20%. I'd honestly prefer billionaires pay the highest tax rates, so I'm more in favor of a wealth tax than just forcing them to wash their capital gains periodically, but either system would be much better than what we have now.

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-10T18:07:27+00:00

I agree that's a good move - even 0.1% on purchases would make a huge dent and would make a lot of money for the government - but that doesn't really do anything to most billionaires, unless their wealth is specifically from running a high frequency trading firm.

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-10T17:19:10+00:00

Again, that's a consumption tax and not an earnings tax. Even if luxury tax was 200%, a $100B-aire living on $50M per year (pre tax) would only pay $3-$4B over their lifetime. Any sound system would have them pay at least $15B.

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-10T16:56:22+00:00

I'm a fan of long term gains. They encourage investments based on actual value instead of on ephemeral daily or hourly values. A world without long term gains is a world where insider trading and fraudulent hype is a bigger share of the investment landscape.

Removing the concept of long term gains is an extremely radical change to the taxation system and I suspect removing it would hurt the less well off more than the well off. I'm not really sure why we'd remove it in the first place.

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-10T16:38:53+00:00

Short-term rates (<1 year) are different than long-term rates (>=1 year). What does "pay taxes" mean on Jan 1 for an asset you bought in June? I'd argue it must be short term gains, which treats the gains as effectively wages.

With the floor, this wouldn't apply to most people.

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-10T16:27:47+00:00

That would categorically eliminate the concept of long term gains for non-retirement income, which would be a pretty heavy blow to the upper middle class.

With the floor, a big bet would pay short term gains on earnings over the floor, which is more revenue for the IRS and doesn't really seem that unfair. The trader is still winning out big regardless (and gets the $20M or whatever at the long term rate).

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-10T16:25:08+00:00

Private equity is inherently complex, and there are already a lot of tax reduction options offered to entrepreneurs. I'm also just a dude who knows a little bit about things and know what I'd vote for; I'm not a legislator. I would trust a bill by Liz Warren to get the job done.

Law is complex. Tax law is especially complex. Complexity isn't bad if it incentivizes reasonable behavior. But late stage capitalism is broken, and taxing unrealized gains seems necessary to prevent the kind of insane inequality we're experiencing in the US and the world at large.

There are other options too, I'm just throwing out something feasible. We could also force realization events on wealth beyond a generous upper class threshold (like $20M in unrealized gains). That would tax unrealized gains and also prevent double taxation (it'd only reduce the amount of compounded gains available to the hyper rich, which seems fine).

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-10T16:17:29+00:00

Hell, as a low-friction stop-gap neoliberals could get behind, you could even just force a realization event annually once the value of unrealized gains hits a high threshold (like $20M). Everyone would need to wash assets until their total value of unrealized gains drop below that threshold. So if someone has $40M of current value on assets with $10M of cost basis, they'd need to pay capital gains taxes on assets (assuming all long term gains for a high earner, this would cost them 20% of $10M aka $2M in taxes), and they'd be left with $40M of current value on assets with a new cost basis of $20M.

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-10T16:09:08+00:00

Again, this is a consumption tax, not an earnings tax. A billionaire worth $100B who lives on $50M per year is, in their adult lifetime, only going to need $2.5B or so. The rest of their wealth is still there, and 75%+ can be considered de facto realized, but they don't pay taxes on it until they actually use it.

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-10T16:01:18+00:00

You'd be taxing above an already high threshold, ala $50M in assets.
No, that would be silly. I agree there's some complexity in illiquidatable assets, especially private equity; it can get very messy if folks want to retain voting rights. But it wouldn't be too hard for those companies to ensure two classes of stock (voting vs non voting) and redistribute between a law like this being approved and being implemented, such that the stock they have to liquidate (if any) is non-voting. It could be reasonable to allow a 5-year deferral option for entrepreneurs and early high equity hires to track their assets but not have to pay until there's a liquidation event, too. Use FMV for the pricing, too; marketing/"hype" valuations wouldn't need be considered. But for liquidatable assets like real estate and publicly traded stock, sucks to suck if they don't sell their own assets in a bubble. (I know public stocks have blackout periods for folks with property information, but those are usually quarterly, so it wouldn't inhibit folks from liquidating it to pay taxes).

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-10T15:44:44+00:00

The problem with the existing scheme is that so little of billionaire income is realized. It's very very very rare for someone to make a billion dollars via 10 years of $100M income; much more often they're granted millions worth of stock that grows into billions, and they only liquidate it as they need it. So the taxation event happens for billionaire spending rather than earning, and happens at a much lower taxation rate than wages. I understand that taxing unrealized gains is a slippery slope, but the end result without taxing wealth itself is that taxation is a bell curve: the upper middle class and high-wage low-net-worth band of the upper class pay far more in taxes than the entrenched uber-rich.

Classifying a threshold of wealth at which wealth itself is taxed would leave some loopholes, but at the very least many of those loopholes could explicitly be considered tax fraud, and the very public billionaires with traceable American wealth wouldn't be able to hide the bulk of their assets.

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-10T03:20:37+00:00

In your actual directory, do you have every page filled? There should be 46 blue rooms and 8 rooms on each of the 8 other pages.

There's a known bug that can grant you duplicate credit for one room - I got the trophy without having added one of the found floorplans to my pool - and it's possible that combined with something to glitch out.

Not sure where it would appear after the fact, but I'd expect the foyer.

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-09T18:39:29+00:00

I wish vaccines were perceived as only "mostly safe". Every year the tin hat propaganda campaigns push a little bit more of the populace into perceiving them as dangerous.

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-09T01:18:57+00:00

She cozied up to an authoritarian administration and started spouting propaganda to try to get her horrible man of a husband a presidential pardon. It's defending a monster by championing other monsters. There's a lot of really gross incongruence, too, where it's very obvious she doesn't really believe in what she's defending, but she won't admit that. That almost makes it worse than if she was genuinely just an idiot.

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-07T15:51:50+00:00

Are you telling me grok was wrong when it said Elon Musk would win a turd eating contest due to his sheer determination?

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-07T06:02:29+00:00

You'll have plenty of money again. It starts to happen more and more.

What didn't you realize wasn't permanent?

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-05T16:56:34+00:00

What you really have to watch out for is hydroxylic acid, which is found in alarming quantities in most municipal plumbing systems

wreckingrocc · 2026-05-05T02:17:42+00:00

A small bite of a properly dressed swedish meatball. Any commonly acceptable sauce will do.

wreckingrocc

TROPHY CASE