At least in the remake, I think the dance minigame was randomized, but you could pretty easily play it perfectly. The dance partner does a little hand gesture to show you what to do next, and then you just hit he key in time with the music.
Settlers might have less of a snowball effect than Monopoly, but it's definitely there. Pretty much any resource-gathering game is going to have it. If your resource numbers get rolled early on, you get to be the first one to build a city or a third settlement. Then your income is higher, so you'll get to the 4th point faster. And so on.
Like another commentor said, the intended fix for this in Settlers is social dynamics: the leader is going to be blocked from the best settling spots, isn't going to get favorable trade deals, and is going to get hammered by the robber. The key strategic gameplay in Settlers is not about profit maximization (that's pretty easy to do), it's about minimizing any appearance that you're a threat until it's too late to do anything about it. If players never collaborate to take down the leader, then early gains can definitely beget later gains.
Even with the social fix, there’s usually one person (sometimes two!) in a four-player game who does nothing wrong but is basically out by the second or third time around the board, just hanging around to help the one or two other non-lead players harass the leader but with no viable path to victory short of an insane run of luck with the dice (or, if you’re me, as soon you realize this has happened to you, you help the leader get ahead faster so you can move on to a better game sooner…)
"The ends justify the means" is a horrific way to run a society in any case, but of course it skips over the question of whether the means actually caused the ends, let alone were the only way to do so. Even if torture did save lives, it isn't a great justification - but then pile on top that your only evidence that it actually does work is fiction and it starts to look like the means were what you really wanted in the first place.
> If you really believe your employer's stock will double in value, you can take your cash bonus and buy shares of it.
RSUs aren't quite that deal, because they're "invested" before they vest. Even assuming that the employer would be equally willing to give you either $X/yr in cash or $4X in RSUs over the next 4 years, you can definitely come out ahead if the stock keeps going up. It's effectively a form of leverage through time arbitrage; you get to buy $4X worth of stock at today's prices using money you don't have yet.
Consider a simplified scenario where the stock is flat forever, except that it doubles in a single day when you've been there for a year. If you take the $X in cash and immediately buy your employer's stock with all of it, you only double your money on that first year's paycheck. By the end of the 4 years, you would have $5X (the $4X you earned in salary/bonus, plus one extra X from the doubling). On the other hand, if you take the RSUs, that entire grant, including what hasn't vested yet, benefits from the increase. In this scenario, by the end of the 4 years, you have $8X.
Similar happens with any scenario where the price is monotonically-increasing, but with more arithmetic. If you assume that the stock will go up over time, and that you wouldn't want to be trying to time the market, this starts to look like a pretty good bet. Compound that with the fact that most employers will be willing to offer a much higher number in RSUs than in cash - that is, if they would offer $X in cash bonuses, they'll offer >>$4X over 4 years in RSUs, especially as a starting/signing-bonus offer - for reasons having to do with financial accounting, and it's suddenly a very attractive deal.
The main reason to prefer cash over RSUs is for diversification. But if we're talking about a public company, you can still sell the RSUs as soon as they vest in order to diversify (and the standard advice is to do so). You really only stand to lose if your employer's stock goes down between grant and vest - not just worse than market, but actually down - which, on average, is an easy bet to take. Getting RSUs at a private company is a much dicier prospect, of course, because now you're locked into that lack of diversification in a way that really matters; even after the point where you get the paycheck, you don't get to bail out if the ship starts to sink.
Basically none of it. RSUs at public companies are as good as cash that just happens to be pre-invested. The tax implications are very simple (they're just regular income like getting paid in cash), and so are your legal rights (you're not much different from anyone who bought a share on the stock exchange). You should risk-adjust their value like any investment, but there's are very few if any sneaky things that can happen to pull the rug entirely.
Same, as another former Googler. I worked on a team that had a relatively large amount of data access, and the amount of protection in place - technical and procedural, preventative and remedial - made me extremely comfortable giving Google basically all of my personal data, knowing that only the bare minimum would ever be looked at, and even then securely and in an anonymized or (usually) aggregated format.
as an outsider, Google is one of the companies I trust the most to prevent unintended leaks of my data, but also one of the ones I trust with my data least.
I think there’s a bit of a mismatch here between data Google collects on me as a regular user which they can and due process in a million different ways in order to sell shit to you. This extends to AI unless you’re paying for it in which case it’s a very different ballgame.
Then there is data that I put into a Google service like drive or cloud which genuinely is probably the single safest consumer option I know of in 2025.
> but also one of the ones I trust with my data least.
What thing have they done with user data that you feel will negatively affect you? As far as I know people just don't like that they have a lot of data, nobody every said they did bad stuff with that data.
As found elsewhere on this thread, the rate is based on trade deficit. Trump believes that having a negative trade balance with a country means that they're cheating somehow, as opposed to meaning that you just buy a lot of manufactured or raw goods for them.
And no, that does not make any sense, and you're not missing anything. He believes this because he's a fucking idiot. He's aggressively racist, comically petty and thin-skinned, and overtly authoritarian, and as far as I can tell actively wants to permanently destroy American science and civil society out of spite, but he's also really, really, really dumb. In this case, he's managed to combine his powers to take a goal that's born out of racism and xenophobia and then implement it in the most idiotic way possible, and somehow the result is even worse than the sum of its components.
If you're sane and rational and decided that you liked Trump's promises (with "rational" implying that you were actually listening to what he'd do, and not blindly accepting his nonsense about "I'll make everything perfect immediately!"), that leaves only the possibility that you're evil. Or a Russian operative, I suppose.
His promises on things he can actually do are exclusively for things that are wantonly destructive and incomprehensibly stupid (tariffs, mass layoffs), hateful and incomprehensibly evil (mass deportations without due process), or straight up treason (pardoning J6 insurrectionists, breaking alliances). If you voted for this person, you have to either be so stupid that you believe his obvious lies, or so evil that the things that aren't lies are things you like.
Many people who voted for tribe X voted for tribe Y a few years back. Have these people irredeemably changed in your eyes? Are they stupid for doing so? Is it possible for stupid, easily believing people to choose tribe X again? Does it make their stupidity disappear?
Does choosing a correct tribe increase intelligence and reduce gullibility?
One increasing view we hear today is of the "uneducated ignorant malleable masses". Should we think of our fellow tribe members this way?
The question being asked by people in tribes are "what to do with stupid/evil people" and history shows examples of tribes attempts to answer that.
I don't think you're disagreeing with me. The comment I responded to says that calling Trump voters ignoramuses was -
> trying to find an easy way to avoid the conclusion that the majority of them are sane and rational people who liked what he was saying.
My point is that to vote Republican in 2024 you must either be insane, irrational, or outright evil. It doesn't make you that way, it reveals that you already were.
> Many people who voted for tribe X voted for tribe Y a few years back. Have these people irredeemably changed in your eyes?
I think that Biden->Trump voters, or Obama->Trump voters, are incredibly stupid or short-sighted. There is no good reason to have done that. If you were a consistent Republican voter you might instead be a selfish racist piece of shit, but if you've switched from the Democrats in recent years the only option I have is to assume you're a gullible idiot.
And to be clear, yes, I think this is specific to the time we're in. I don't think I'd say this in 2000, for instance - it was pretty obvious that W was not going to be a good president, but he was not an incomprehensible choice, and you could imagine people who thought Gore's brand was tainted by association with Clinton's various forms of griminess. But Trump and his merry band of lunatics are not simply "the other tribe". They are an obvious and unprecedented threat no matter what your values are, unless your only value is breaking shit for the lulz.
One way perhaps is to think about the permanence of judgements.
Think about how many people would need to switch sides for the next election. Would their status as lunatics and gullible and idiots be instantly revoked and become mentally healthy, rational and intelligent after they are on the correct side?
Many politicians would say they would remain idiots even when they vote for them and that a cynic might say that politics is just about two tribes warring against each other on a battlefield where they seek to manipulate a group of idiots to their side.
I would suggest that thinking about one's allies as idiots isn't a good thing. (Maybe their status does change instantly - in that case the idiots have the potential to be intelligent which weakens the original judgement) However it's also a difficult thing to do as it would compromise one's own group identity. It makes the binary groups more fuzzy. It introduces an overlap in the venn diagram of us vs them. Thinking of an "other" as potentially one of "us" reduces the internal coherence of the "us" group - it opens the borders.
People in groups like to keep the group strong and the borders secure. To open the borders is a difficult and painful thing. It's understandable that the binary tribal politics remains strong as it benefits both tribes.
The Central Valley is an incomprehensibly vast area of incredibly fertile soil, due to its history as a seabed and collection basin of all the mineral runoff from the mountains. It also has California weather, which means one of the longest growing seasons on the planet. Crops grown there grow faster and easier than anywhere else to begin with, and then on top of that you get to grow them twice in one year. It's really kind of unfair when you compare to farmers trying to scratch out a crop anywhere else.
That said... it's not like California is the only place it's possible to grow almonds, or even to grow them profitably. It's just the most profitable place, especially if you're exporting to a US- or Western-centric market. And as with everything related to the environment, that's because the profits are centralized while negative externalities are socialized. We all pay the price of the reservoirs depleting and the aquifers running dry - maybe not monetarily, yet, but in the form of LA needing to ration water in homes, and in the form of possibly causing earthquakes [1] - but only a small handful of people collect the benefits. And because water is available in practically uncapped quantities for such an incredibly cheap price, they have no incentive not to do so.
How much should society value a change in the risk of The Big One happening in the next decade by, say, 1%? Or a similar increased risk of thousands dying of thirst in an increasingly hot summer? Or even just a extra few weeks of water rationing being in place every other year? Probably a lot more than what the almond farms are collectively paying for their water.
I do actually believe that markets can solve a lot of problems - but in order to do so, pricing needs to include the entirety of the transaction. Right now, water - especially bulk use of water - appears cheap, because our future selves or children are unknowingly kicking in part of what's being paid. Non-renewable resources like this need to be a lot more expensive in places where they're scarce, or else they're going to become extremely expensive at some point in the future.
> And as with everything related to the environment, that's because the profits are centralized while negative externalities are socialized. We all pay the price of the reservoirs depleting and the aquifers running dry - maybe not monetarily, yet, but in the form of LA needing to ration water in homes, and in the form of possibly causing earthquakes [1] - but only a small handful of people collect the benefits. And because water is available in practically uncapped quantities for such an incredibly cheap price, they have no incentive not to do so.
Exactly. Capitalism is already a contestable proposition, but capitalism with infinite money cheats for some?
Without proper accounting of externalities, capitalism does not work even in theory. This means water and all natural resources, it means pollution, it means harmful products like tobacco or social media, it means big cars... So on so on
