Depending on what you mean by casual, I consider Dead Cells a casual game, because whenever I’m bored I pick it up and play for a while, but it’s one of the hardest games I’ve played, however because it’s rogue like it doesn’t matter if you die a lot. Another similar example would be Factorio with enemies turned off, just go there, fix something, add something new and quit the game near the next thing you want to do so you remember it next time.

If you’re looking for a more traditional definition of casual games I tend to play those in the phone, I really like mini metro and super hexagon (although again, this one might not fit your definition of casual)

The day number moves most frequently, so that should go first.

Are you German? How do you read 35? Is it 5 and 30? Or 30 and 5? Because the most significant number comes first, the one that moves most cones last.

It’s complicated, for me personally having one or two extra properties you’re providing a service, not everyone wants to buy a house at every moment, e.g. I recently moved to another city and wanted to live in a neighborhood for a while before buying something. The more you have, the more part of the problem you become, because when someone wants to buy somewhere they now can’t because people own it for renting. Also, again personally, if the value of rent is higher than the value of the mortgage, then you’re ripping people off, because you’re essentially buying the house with their money while they can’t buy a place of their own. As an example, I want to buy a place of my own, but every place here is so expensive because people buy them to rent, because the rent is higher than the mortgage so if you have the initial money buying a house is essentially free money, however rent is so high that getting the initial money is really hard and people are stuck with paying more to own nothing.

Steam also offers DRM-free games, and they don’t hide them behind a closed installer. I don’t like installers since they’re yet another moving part that can break, e.g. an installer built for windows 95 might not work even though if you were to extract the game binary from it it would work, so having an installer could make a game less compatible.

The ideal form of distributing games is compressed folders, I recognize this is less user friendly, but it is the format that most preservation effort uses (e.g. zip of a ROM, instead of an installer that installs the emulator+ROM like what GOG is doing).

I’m also not shitting on GOG, I believe they’re a good company, although I’m not their target audience since they refuse to sell me games I can play on my Linux machine. I’m all in favor of DRM-free and wished they would be more strict about it, that could convince me to buy some stuff from them. I did bought games from them in the past until I grew tired of almost no game having Linux compatibility and them not offering an official client, plus I noticed that some games had DRM and that was the last straw for me, because of I’m going to be buying maybe DRM-d games, might as well do it while giving money to a company that cares about my use-case.

I think GOG should be praised for some of what they do, particularly by their anti-DRM stance (even though they’re not 100% behind it). But what annoys me is that people seem to praise them as if they were doing this amazing work that no one else is doing, when most of the stuff people get overly excited about is just a marketing move and Steam is usually doing much better work in that regard, but is usually cited as the bad guys by the people who drank the GOG Kool-aid.

preservation efforts that allow me to run the games I know on the hardware I am running will mean more to me.

You mean software, your hardware is perfectly capable of running Linux+Wine. But again, this is a very personal response, my personal computer is Linux, therefore what GOG is doing means less to me by your own definition, which is why I don’t think it makes any sense to try to bring platform into the table. In fact, since apparently they’re responsible for the DOSBox version that a game uses, and there is a native version of DOSBox for Linux, this means that the decision of the game not being available on Linux is entirely on GOG.

Imagine Valve was financing an emulator, and GOG was compromising themselves to keep a binary updated with the latest version of that emulator whenever problems appeared on the old version, which of them is doing more for the preservation of games? The only difference is that the “emulator” Valve is financing is not the same as the one that GOG is using.

I’m not saying that there isn’t value in what GOG is doing just because it doesn’t affect me, but as is they can only help preserve DOS era games, so investing in DOSBox and hosting the ROMs would be a much more valuable approach (half of it they’re already doing, they do in fact host the ROMs, you just get 50 extra copies of DOSBox in the process). What I’m saying is that I don’t understand why everyone thinks they’re so great for doing what they’re doing, they could be investing in getting wine to run on windows which would be a much better effort for the preservation of games for your platform.

Proton is essentially just wine, but:

Backward compatibility in Wine is generally superior to that of Windows, as newer versions of Windows can force users to upgrade legacy Windows applications, and may break unsupported software forever as there is nobody adjusting the program for the changes in the operating system

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)

Valve’s has been financing the development of Proton (and wine), so their efforts are to improve an open source tool that can be used and enhanced by anyone, which among other things provides excellent compatibility. That is a much better commitment to preserving games than choosing a handful of titles and updating their compatibility layer when the old one breaks. In other words, GOG is choosing a couple of games to update their emulator periodically, Valve is financing the development of an emulator for old games. The two things are not even in the same league for how much they help preservation of old games as a whole.

As for the question of windows users, I don’t think wine runs on Windows natively, but I assume one could use WSL as a stepping stone. In any case GOG’s method also doesn’t address Linux or MacOS users, so I don’t see how bringing platform into the mix makes any difference.

Yes… But actually no. For these games, sure, they’re committed to update the dosbox, but for more modern games there’s nothing that can be done on GOG since if the binary breaks for windows lack of backwards compatibility, they’re done because they don’t have access to the code. This works for these games because they’re being emulated, so they can maintain them by extracting the ROM and updating the emulator.

IMO what Valve is doing is leaps ahead, Proton can be used to maintain even broken binaries by providing compatibility with older versions of binaries from Windows. Not to mention the runtime library shipped with Steam for native titles.

It’s always mind boggling to me how GOG does something which Steam is already doing (sometimes, like this, they do a worse job at it), yet they get all of the credit as if they’re revolutionizing the way the industry works. Allowing people to download a game they bought, even if delisted, is the standard, and Proton is a much better preservation tool than whatever GOG is doing behind the stages, because it’s open source and if Steam ever goes under it will continue to exist, whereas on GOG solution you depend on GOG for it to keep working.

Yes, but if you already had it in your account you can still download it, which is the same thing GOG is doing, so not sure what all the fuzz is about.

So only games that are made from scratch can charge full price? What about reusing code? Engine? Animations? Textures? Lighting system? Rendering backend?.. Games are made of everything that came before, being angry about a game using assets that were originally developed for an older game is like being angry about a movie reusing props made for an older movie, should they burn all of the Christmas decorations between one movie and the next? Or can the studio hang the same glass ball on two different movies? Does that detract from the movie? Will you really only consider it’s worth the full price if all props were made exclusively for that movie?..

My guess would be that it happened gradually. Someone living in a place where the minimum temperature is 15 might be willing to move north to a place where the minimum temperature is 13 as long as other factors are better for him. Couple of generations later you have someone who’s living in a place where the minimum temperature is 13 willing to go north to a place where the minimum temperature is 10, so on and so forth.

I’m surprised no one mentioned Spec Ops: The Line yet

That’s a bad idea. First you need to understand that for the government to be able to track every citizen first they must be able to track every phone, and then be able to figure out whose phone is who. You’re trying to break their tracking by denying the second step but in doing so you’ve made yourself a priority target.

Imagine you’re a government trying to track all of your citizens, and you’ve got the GPS data for every phone, and now need to assign them to specific persons and/or decide who you track specifically. Random Joe who goes from home to work and work to home will be last on the list, but a person whose itinerary changes every week, and drastically changes after a couple of months is someone that sticks out. And the moment someone notices this, it won’t be difficult to track other users with the same behavior, and realize they’re switching phones by comparing one phone’s behavior during one week to another phone during another week. And now they have the same information they would before, except they have their eyes on you more closely.

Plus you would probably need to login to your email or some account on the phone, and that would be enough to track that you changed your phone.

The best idea to avoid this sort of surveillance is to only carry your phone from home to work and back. No one will bat an eye about someone going for a run or something without his phone, and from someone tracking you’re just a boring person who only works and goes home.

But you probably received the data anonymized, i.e. you had a code that meant a person, and you could track information on that person, but you couldn’t immediately know who that person was.

Otherwise that company, and whoever sold it its data, are in for a BIG lawsuit from any EU citizen you track. And you might say “who cares, my company didn’t act in the EU”, but whoever sold you the data certainly does, and they would get sued and fined very heavily, so it’s unlikely they would not anonymize the data before selling it.

By that logic you also don’t feel bad for people who die in car accidents because from the first time they got behind a wheel they knew of the possibility. You should also not feel bad about people who are ran over, from the first time you walked outside your parents told you it was a possibility. Every time you go outside you’re risking being hit by a car, so don’t expect me to cry when that happens, right?.. Right?..

No, life is full of dangers, and ODing is just one of them. Most people who OD are in a bad situation and started using drugs to cope, and then it took control of them. Almost none of them made a conscious decision to OD, and one could argue their road to using that amount of drugs was also not entirely their choice, after all lots of those cause chemical dependency. Think about this, someone is stressed at work, they’re offered a cigarette by a friend who smokes daily, they smoke it and feel the stress going away, are able to focus and get through that tough spot, so they do it again next time they’re stressed, and then they start to get more and more stressed, but now they’re hooked, and trying to quit will be extremely difficult… Would you really not feel bad if that person developed cancer because he was stressed once and a friend offered a cigarette? How is ODing any different?

-It requires an arbitrary use-agnostic choice of value. Why 10 million? Why not 5? Why not 50?

Why are tax brackets the value they are? Would you say that tax brackets are a bad system? They also rely on an arbitrary use-agnostic choice of value.

-it requires an arbitrary time scale. Why 5 years? Why not 3? why not 10? Why not limit once in a lifetime?

Same reason taxes are calculated over yearly income and not every 2 years or 6 months. It’s also arbitrary, it’s just an arbitrary you’re used to so you don’t question it.

Both cons you found for my solution are also present on tax brackets, i.e. arbitrarily defined values and length, by that logic you also think tax brackets are a bad idea.

The reason why I said 10 Mil over 5 years is to try to exclude as many legitimate use cases as possible. For starters we’re talking about people, not business, there are legitimate reasons for a business, particularly large ones, to take much larger loans. But for people? The largest expense on a regular person’s life will be the house they buy, and 10 Mil is WAY above the average price for that, if someone is buying a >10 Mil house I’m okay with them getting taxed on the loan, if they managed to get a 40 year 0% loan (impossible) they’ll already be paying 20k per month, might as well pay some more on top of it. But wait, you might say, what about smaller loans that compound to >10 Mil, that’s why there’s a 5 year limit, this means the person needs to loan over 2 Mil per year, which is simply not possible for someone unless they’re mega-rich, because again they would need to be paying >20k per month.

And yes, those are arbitrary values and probably they need adjusting via research and experimentation, but again the same is true for tax brackets, and I think everyone agrees those are a good idea.

This answer you acknowledged my proposal, therefore I now believe that you understood it, on your first answer you suggested I had a definition of income/non-income loans, which is not at all what I’m proposing.

Read my answer before replying, I provided a solution for that’s and it’s a solution based on the astonishing difference between what high middle class people and super rich make.

I’ll repeat it, every dollar you take from a loan gets tallied, and expires after 5 years. Whenever that value goes beyond 10 million you start paying taxes on the loans. You, or any high middle class person, won’t be able to take that many loans in such a short period of time, simply because it would mean that you need at least an income of 2 million per year just to repay those loans, and I think we can agree that’s not high middle class.

This way there’s no loophole on the type of loan.

Vomited tomatoes are also rich in MSG, how can you not like them?

There’s a lot more to flavor than taste, and people are free to not like the flavor of anything regardless of the amount of MSG, salt, sugar or vinager.

Yeah, and this should showcase just how bullshit the system is. IMO every one of those 100 trades in the middle should be taxed, this removes bullshit from the system, you can’t buy a contract saying you’ll buy the stock, because that would be buying something of that value and would be taxed. We need to start seeing those 100 trades, as what they are, i.e. a way to try to rig the system.

But then the value goes WAAY up. Let’s assume you live in a very good house, and mortgage it you’re able to get 5 million out of it. Do you think someone like Jeff Bezos could live for 5 years with that?. You can do it fairly straightforward, everytime you take a loan, the full amount of that loan gets added, after a period of 5 years that value disappears, if at any point that value goes above 10 million, you start paying taxes on it. And the higher it goes the more tax you pay on it, just like how income tax has brackets, and just like how up to certain values are exempt.

For you or me if we were ever loan 10 million over 5 years we wouldn’t have a way to pay it back. For an Uber wealthy they do that fairly quickly, Bezos mention costs 600k a month, so he’ll get into the first bracket from just that in a year and a half.

People need to realize just how big the gap is, there are plenty of ways to tax extremely rich people without affecting the middle class by just putting the bracket so high up that it’s impossible for a middle class to reach it.

That read exactly as a footnote on a Terry Pratchett book, if you have never read Discworld you should, it has the same sense of humor that you do. For example another popular saying being bastardized:

Give a man a fire and he’ll be warm for a night. Set a man on fire and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life."