Unseelie

Insurance Company A has mercenary company B and diplomat C on retainer in case of conflict with foreign nations.

Really, we pay taxes, and taxes cover things like the aforementioned ambassadorial services. It is arguably doable that we could pay some other organization to do the same thing.

Well, I don't want to come off as libertarian, but presumably you could buy insurance against this in an environment where there's a bunch of people who need such a service.

There's more such arguments, like suggestions that you need a nation to subsidize your health care or protect you from every day crime, but all of those are reasonably privatize-able as well.

Vocal pauses are natural, and they happen. Our brains can handle them. Why is it even considered personal betterment to expend energy replacing them with whitespace?

Clearly, if there was fuel left that you could derive motion from the thing, it wasn't quite empty...

I think the whole point of the involvement of computers and the internet as fair godmother in their scenario was to handwave away problem 2 through someone else's very hard work at making a very, very good process for automatically vetting potential employees.

I love the applications of the luddite fallacy to IT..the treatments of code as looms or steel mills hit hard on the fact that economists are historians, and prone to assumptions that past performance will indicate future performance.

Granted that's what games are about. But gamification is about using game mechanics (mechanics being things like -scores- which let you understand your position against that position of other people, and rules, which keep you from doing whatever you like, as something completely aside from the point of the 'fun' of the game) to do something much more functional than make things fun: to make things addictive or otherwise drive the user to pursue things outside of their standard pattern.

Stack overflow's design isn't about making it fun, its about making the users collaborate into something that is easy and valuable to the population. The rules of a game in general aren't about making the games fun, they're about providing a framework for competition.

Yes they do. First of all, saving energy is in itself a reward. Moreover, that's easily gameable by simply comparing yourself to a group of strangers at their energy efficiency house. Airline miles is kinda a hard one, except for the people in that group, competing there (and I'm sure there is), and as far a s random stuff...I'm here in large part because every once in a while I wonder if I can't get a few upvotes on hacker news, hopefully by saying something helpful or insightful, of course.

Devil's advocate for a moment, but every way that I'm aware of Monsanto letting people die is essentially an economical one: They ruin people's ability to buy or labor for food...which makes the comparison to the RIAA just one of a different scale. If the RIAA were even better at taking money from people, people would starve.

Of course, it makes no sense for the RIAA to starve its working musicians, but the ones who have stopped selling above margin?

I do love Avatars for these reasons, and having a signature as an entirely vain engagement. But quite often, I find myself removing the signature because...as shown on that site, they're quite large, gaudy, and bloody repetitive.

Saying that 'engage your users' is a better terminoligy for what's going on here than 'gamification' basically ignores the whole point of the idea, which is that people like to be making progress towards goals..not 'engaged', but metrically shown as advancing.

That is, at the very basic level, what gamification is, its making an activity into an activity with specific measures of progress toward a goal, such that people can rank themselves (and we do).

This isn't a new or faddish idea, its an insight into how people act, and an attempt to use that bit of new understanding, as Atwood did, before being aware of the term, to engage users using what are called 'game mechanics' which are basically motivations outside of the actual reward structures of the activity. I suspect "engage your users" is moving into the much more targeted and practicable mode of "gamify your interface" rather than vice versa.

I don't want to simply reply to a comment, there's a theme flowing through this thread, that capitalism makes everyone better off in a society, that our choices lead to where we are. I think you're ignoring a fundamental truth. There aren't unlimited opportunities for every person who works hard...just opportunities for those who work harder, on the margin, than others. Capitalism isn't about working hard and getting rewards, its about being better on the margins and getting rewards.

You're connecting the two examples too much. While releasing this information may well have malicious intent, robbing a bank to give away money (as this information was hacked -to leak-) isn't exactly malicious. Leaking information that can be a warning or making an example of, now that can be. Intent depends on intent, and the intent of the example bank robbers was to hand out free cash. (and banks are insured...)

Doesn't this UX guy know what he's worth? Isn't it on his head to decide where he's going to work, at what pay? Of course his belief in this founder's dedication plays into that, he's trying to find a job that'll last. But let the UX guy decide what he needs to take, from whom. You don't know him, what motivates him. If he's even -interested- in work at such a startup, money likely isn't what he's running for.

Frictional unemployment is a good way to handwave away the discovery, or not, of new jobs. You just wiped out that whole -type- of job, replaced it with (much lower employment) error checking.

If you assume that for a portion of the people in the transcribing job, that the transcribing job was the best marginal fit, then some of them don't re-enter the job market. Others have to take a worse job. If they could have been in a better job, they likely would have been. So their employment has gotten worse. May be quality, may be compensation, may be available time. Something's worse for them.