If I have a screen with my work stuff on it, and a second, smaller screen on which I want to watch videos or play games sometimes, how could I make it so that I could have the second screen as a window inside my first screen (floating; using xmonad) so I can move it around/toss it in a different workspace, but also actually access the contents inside the first screen if I want, all the while the second screen faithfully renders the window precisely in place?
I see this all the time, people saying “transwomen are risking their lives just by existing!” and bemoaning the high murder rate of trans women, things like that.
But when I actually look at the data, it paints a very different story.
There were 22 trans women murdered in the USA in 2015. There aren’t quality numbers about how many trans women there are in the USA total, but estimates put the total at around 700,000. Assuming half of those are trans women, that’s 350,000 (it’s probably more, but that would help my case). That’s a murder rate of about 6.2 per 100,000 people.
Cis women are murdered at a rate of about 1.95 per 100,000 people. So it looks like trans women are in much more danger than their cis counterparts, right?
Well, yes, if all we’re going to compare them to is women. But if we look at male victims of violence (which folks so rarely do, for some reason), we see that men are murdered at a rate of 6.56 per 100,000 people [ibid].
Which is to say, slightly more often than trans women.
Transitioning from being a man to a woman makes you safer.
So where did this idea of trans women as constant victims of violence come from? Is there something I’m missing in the data? Is it just an issue of nobody caring about violence against men, so they only compare trans women to cis women? What’s going on?
All of those 22 seemed to be black or hispanic, a population making around 30% of the US and thus an estimated 100,000 trans women for convenience. This gives a murder rate of 22/100,000.
Furthermore, that article was in late October, suggesting that if murders happen at a steady pace, they were missing approximately 20% of the year’s murders that would put the total at 26/100,000 instead.
And considering that 19 of the murdered women were black, while those estimates give roughly 40,000 black trans women, the murder rate is something like 50/100,000 when accounting for the couple of expected missing murders.
Then there’s the way male victims of homicide tend to be substantially more likely to…have engaged in activities universally agreed to constitute a lifestyle in which getting murdered is not such an unexpected thing. What I’m saying is that, just like we track combatant deaths and civilian deaths in wars separately, trans women are probably more likely to fall in the category which is the murder equivalent of “noncombatant”. When black men are killed, they relatively often are the same kind of people as the killers while trans women are not. (I won’t try to put numbers on it, but I’m pretty sure everyone knows that eg. gangs tend to shoot members of rival gangs more (per capita) than they shoot random outsiders; not saying it isn’t a tragedy, but it’s a different kind of tragedy and “violent men kill non-violent men and women” tickles people’s justice nerves more than “violent men kill other violent men”.) And when one counts that the homicide rate among black people is something like 17/100,000 and a rough estimate would imply a rate of ~25-30/100,000 for black men, black trans women are being killed at almost twice the rate of black men, and even more if one focuses on “non-combatant” murders of people who weren’t involved in doing violence to others (eg. assuming that 1 in 6 murdered black men were “combatants”, it gives trans women a ratio of approximately or over double that of “civilian” men).
Now, what possible factors could be causing one to overestimate the rate? That estimate on the number of trans women is on the low side and the real numbers are probably twice that. This would mean that black trans women would “only” be killed at the same rate as black men. On the other hand we don’t know how many trans women are murdered but labeled as men and not found out about. Thus the real numbers are probably somewhere vaguely between 25-50/100,000, and I’d guess probably a bit closer to the low side than the high.
In fact, this is something the non-shitty SJ people try to draw attention to: it’s not about white trans people; thus saying that “trans people” are having an extremely high risk of being murdered, when it’s specifically TWoC who actually get killed, is at best disingenuous and at worst completely detracting from the actual issues by glossing over that specificity. And this also suggests that black men are also suffering from massive amounts of violence that society should do something about (instead of doing something that lets it look like it’s doing something), as it’s almost as dangerous to be a black man as it is to be a black trans woman (and when we add class to this it gets even more extreme).
What are the murder rates for trans men? Does transitioning to male make you statistically less safe?
I counted an estimate of 4-6 trans men murdered in 2015 and 2016 (depending on whether one extrapolates for the rest of this year or not) for an annual death rate of 2-3. That’s 1/100,000 by the estimates at the top, and suggests a lot of trans men’s deaths are misreported as cis women’s deaths because I’m not believing that number for one second.
If we take ASAB as our prior it suggests that murdered trans men have 1:1 chances of being recorded as trans men. If we take gender as prior the chances are 1:6. I’m leaning more towards the latter because I find it highly unlikely that men who also have the complicating factor of transphobia would not be getting killed as often as other men, and I find it especially hard to believe that trans men would be just as low-risk as cis women.
This does creepy things to the murder rates of trans women. If we assume trans women are 5 times as visible as trans men, we would expect to be missing ~25 murders a year; if trans women are 10 times as visible as trans men, there would still be ~15 missing murders, pushing trans women’s murder rates up by 50-100%. Holy shit. Even a conservative estimate where being trans reduces a man’s murder risk by half, and trans women are 10 times more visible, the real murder rate would be 30% higher when accounting for the expected unrecorded cases.
Anonymous asked: If UBI was implemented now, before the robot utopia, who would do the lousy jobs that need to be done? I mean, who's going to be a janitor or a plumber when they can get UBI for doing nothing?
Being a janitor or a plumber will have to pay more than the Universal Basic Income and offer some sweet perks. The job market can still exist without the “work or die” threat, it’ll just look very different.
Of course this means that hiring a janitor or plumber will be very expensive, but that’ll be all the more motivation for people to invent robo-janitors.
(Which means that former janitors will take a pay cut when they go from janitor pay to UBI, but the whole point of UBI is that it’s not poverty level and living on it is not a disaster.)
…Yeah, as before, I’m not 100% sure the math works out here, but I like to think there’s some way of transcending “we have clean toilets because we threaten people with starvation!”
I’ve also seen explanations of UBI which I think have some merit, which is just that a janitors salary + UBI is more than UBI which is usually supposed to keep you just above the poverty line, and not much else. So your janitor in a lot of cases would look at the situation and go well, I can quit my job and live just above the poverty line and be okay, but I could also keep working as a janitor and make twice that!
So the really big impact that UBI would make is that people would be more willing to leave jobs where they were being mistreated, or wouldn’t be put in the position of needing multiple jobs to survive.
Okay, this is a slightly different meaning than I thought. My understanding of UBI is “if you make less than $x, UBI will make up the difference,” not “everyone gets UBI in addition to whatever else they make.”
The second interpretation solves some problems, but makes the “where the hell is this money actually coming from” question even harder.
The average person gets a $10,000 UBI and a $10,000 increase in taxes, for a net gain of $0.
The UBI (or a negative income tax, which is a slightly different implementation of the same idea) is phased out gradually, so that you don’t get cliffs with an effective marginal tax rate of 70% or 80%, and so you always earn more money by doing more work. This is hard as hell to do with multiple welfare programs, because you have to coordinate sixty different programs, some of which only apply in some states, and it’s a huge hassle. The simplicity of only having one welfare program to do that with is one of the advantages of UBI.
Or or or or or we could just abolish all the useless and/or outright harmful programs! That way we wouldn’t need to raise taxes that much, if at all, while still being able to give people $10,000. Of course, that’s politically impossible because a lot of those programs buy a massive amount of votes from asshole rentiers, but the US could totally afford to give everyone a “free” $10k a year (compared to the status quo) if it actually tried to solve the problem.
How much do we spend on useless and/or outright harmful programs?
To pay $10k to all residents would require approximately 3.2 trillion.
Department of Health and Human Services spends 1.1 trillion. Healthcare is harmful. The Singapore model could treat the entire population for around 400 billion, of which something like 200 billion would be government spending. This would free 900B.
990B goes to social security. There are 65M beneficiaries suggesting that if all social security payments were cut by $10k a year on average it would free 650B, for a total of 1.55T so far. This would redistribute from the high-receiving people to the low-receiving people but it’s tax money and a ponzi scheme so it’s totally fair.
Defense is 560B. It’s harmful, lots of pork and inefficiency and cronyism, and then there’s also the “going to other people’s countries and killing them for no good reason” thing. Cut by 300B and nothing of value will have been lost. 1.85T
Department of Agriculture is 150B. Most of it harmful. Cut 120B, especially from subsidies. Farms can live or die on the free market, and poor people deserve to get money instead of food stamps; 1.97T.
Department of Commerce is 10B. Let’s cut it by half. 1.975T
Education is 80B. When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Higher education won’t get cheaper by subsidizing it, and children’s education will be affordable with the basic income; remove 65B for 2.04T
Energy is 30B. Let’s say 10B of that is actually easy to cut. 2.05T
DHS is 50B. Kill the evil motherfucker. Cut it all. Reallocate 10B for the not-evil parts from somewhere else, but I just want to see DHS gone. 2.09T
Housing and Urban Development is 30B. Let’s leave them 5B just in case they might have a reason to exist. 2.115T
Department of Interior is small in comparison, at 15B. Cut 5B just because. 2.120T
Department of Labor is 40B. We’re going to drop 35B and downsize it to OSHA, and OSHA alone. OSHA will have its budget multiplied almost 10-fold. 2.155T
Transportation is 80B and produces an oversupply of roads. Roads are harmful. I’m an anarchist, I hate roads. Remove the road moneys of 40B and then there will be no reason for the government to exist. (disclaimer: I’m most likely not serious about that one, only about the number; toll roads paid for by their users are nice) 2.195T
EITC is 70B and its entire point is to be replaced. 2.265T
DOJ needs to end the war on drugs and adopt nordic policies towards prison terms (minimize them), and just cut the fuck out, thus saving 10B for 2.275T
Cut wages of federal employees by 25B to compensate for the free $10k they would be getting; focus especially on the most lucrative (=overpaid) jobs. 2.3T
All in all, we’re only missing 900B from being able to give everyone $10k, and we haven’t even touched state budgets. Since we’re neck-deep in fantasyland already we might as well sail the cutters to the states as well. 20B goes from replacing cash assistance. 150B from removing Medicaid as Harmful. 10B from other forms of social spending. We’re now at 720B. California spends 50B a year on education, which can be cut back somewhat as the basic income extends to children as well (or provides vouchers) and I’ll just assume the other states have enough slack in their budgets to cut a total of 220B from so now we’re at 500B. That’s the equivalent of taking the UBI away from the richest 15% of the country.
If we introduce a gradual phaseout to deal with that part, the average american will lose about $1500 of their $10k. Done. That’s it. No new taxes, other than the phaseout and some shifting from state taxes to federal taxes. A lot of utterly impossible fiscal magic, but it’s ~*~theoretically doable~*~.
So, assuming you are right about the uselessness of those programs, cutting that many jobs/programs at once would probably cause a giant employment crisis and an economic recession(at least).
And freeing that many people to productive activities and giving that many people that much free money to pay other people in exchange for productive activities would cause a giant economic boom. It would be a huge shock to people who have gotten comfortable on tax money, and it would also hurt people whose uncomfortableness is partially alleviated by tax money in harmful ways and whose situation wouldn’t immediately improve even with the free money, that’s true and I won’t sugarcoat it. (Also a reason why I think it could be eg. phased in over a period of 10 years so that every year only 10% of those changes is applied and thus the shock would be lesser.)
I don’t have an exhaustive calculation and am instead working on my mathematical intuition (the power of which I have some proof about but I’m not willing to expose that proof for privacy reasons), but considering that we’d be dismantling harmful and distortionary stuff, in other words, ways of destroying value (I haven’t touched things like the EPA, NASA, ADA, basic research, OSHA, etc. because those are very legitimate in comparison to agricultural subsidies and the other harmful shit), the economy would be expected to re-equilibriate in a more valueful equilibrium.
Keynesian concerns wouldn’t apply as it wouldn’t cause a contraction in demand, only a reallocation. Monetarist concerns wouldn’t apply as we aren’t fucking around with the money supply any more than it already is being fucked around with. Remember, the annual amount of “free” money to people would be roughly 4 times as large as the 2009 stimulus package, and it would be allocated to things people value the most, greatly revitalizing economies all around the country, especially in the poorest places (rural and urban alike) (Washington DC is an outlier adn should not be counted).
All the economic concerns that favor giving money to poor people (because they increase demand and recirculate the money and it trickles massively sideways) would be expected to happen, while simultaneously a lot of social problems (those caused and worsened by not having money) would be alleviated far better than the harmful programs currently do (in aggregate; there would be losers as well and not all losers would be well-off people and that’s sad). Poor people with shitty credit ratings would nonetheless be better able to invest as they would know they can pay with their UBI and any work pays. Uber drivers would be a bit more prime for their car loans and their cars would be less expensive. Deaths from poverty NOS would plummet as $5,000 would no longer be a debt a person can’t foresee ever paying off.
At the same time it would cause a great increase in the supply of available labor as bureaucrats would lose their jobs and poor people would no longer have to choose between working and benefits. Yet it would not be catastrophic to the working poor because the free money would more than offset any wage decreases, while the massively boosted demand for value-creation would increase the amount of jobs available. Minimum wages could be abolished as people could be trusted to reach a sufficiently consensual agreement when they have the UBI to fall back on if employers ask unreasonable things. This would mean that all the work worth doing gets done. (in theory, market failures aside)
Obviously I’d combine this with massive deregulation to fix the problem of “Scott’s paranoid rant” where complex bureaucracy renders people unable to work (partially inevitably built-in because many of the bureaucracies would’ve been abolished, but those that would need to remain would to be adjusted to be less harmful and as I said, we’re neck deep in fantasy land and thus can do it), and thus people would be more free to just do it when they have a business idea in their neighborhood. Poor people may be lacking in many things, but ingenuity is not one of them, and opening the doors for applying that ingenuity entrepreneurially, not criminally or in navigating welfare, would be a huge boon to them.
TL;DR: I think most of what the government does is broken window fallacy compared to UBI.
I see this all the time, people saying “transwomen are risking their lives just by existing!” and bemoaning the high murder rate of trans women, things like that.
But when I actually look at the data, it paints a very different story.
There were 22 trans women murdered in the USA in 2015. There aren’t quality numbers about how many trans women there are in the USA total, but estimates put the total at around 700,000. Assuming half of those are trans women, that’s 350,000 (it’s probably more, but that would help my case). That’s a murder rate of about 6.2 per 100,000 people.
Cis women are murdered at a rate of about 1.95 per 100,000 people. So it looks like trans women are in much more danger than their cis counterparts, right?
Well, yes, if all we’re going to compare them to is women. But if we look at male victims of violence (which folks so rarely do, for some reason), we see that men are murdered at a rate of 6.56 per 100,000 people [ibid].
Which is to say, slightly more often than trans women.
Transitioning from being a man to a woman makes you safer.
So where did this idea of trans women as constant victims of violence come from? Is there something I’m missing in the data? Is it just an issue of nobody caring about violence against men, so they only compare trans women to cis women? What’s going on?
All of those 22 seemed to be black or hispanic, a population making around 30% of the US and thus an estimated 100,000 trans women for convenience. This gives a murder rate of 22/100,000.
Furthermore, that article was in late October, suggesting that if murders happen at a steady pace, they were missing approximately 20% of the year’s murders that would put the total at 26/100,000 instead.
And considering that 19 of the murdered women were black, while those estimates give roughly 40,000 black trans women, the murder rate is something like 50/100,000 when accounting for the couple of expected missing murders.
Then there’s the way male victims of homicide tend to be substantially more likely to…have engaged in activities universally agreed to constitute a lifestyle in which getting murdered is not such an unexpected thing. What I’m saying is that, just like we track combatant deaths and civilian deaths in wars separately, trans women are probably more likely to fall in the category which is the murder equivalent of “noncombatant”. When black men are killed, they relatively often are the same kind of people as the killers while trans women are not. (I won’t try to put numbers on it, but I’m pretty sure everyone knows that eg. gangs tend to shoot members of rival gangs more (per capita) than they shoot random outsiders; not saying it isn’t a tragedy, but it’s a different kind of tragedy and “violent men kill non-violent men and women” tickles people’s justice nerves more than “violent men kill other violent men”.) And when one counts that the homicide rate among black people is something like 17/100,000 and a rough estimate would imply a rate of ~25-30/100,000 for black men, black trans women are being killed at almost twice the rate of black men, and even more if one focuses on “non-combatant” murders of people who weren’t involved in doing violence to others (eg. assuming that 1 in 6 murdered black men were “combatants”, it gives trans women a ratio of approximately or over double that of “civilian” men).
Now, what possible factors could be causing one to overestimate the rate? That estimate on the number of trans women is on the low side and the real numbers are probably twice that. This would mean that black trans women would “only” be killed at the same rate as black men. On the other hand we don’t know how many trans women are murdered but labeled as men and not found out about. Thus the real numbers are probably somewhere vaguely between 25-50/100,000, and I’d guess probably a bit closer to the low side than the high.
In fact, this is something the non-shitty SJ people try to draw attention to: it’s not about white trans people; thus saying that “trans people” are having an extremely high risk of being murdered, when it’s specifically TWoC who actually get killed, is at best disingenuous and at worst completely detracting from the actual issues by glossing over that specificity. And this also suggests that black men are also suffering from massive amounts of violence that society should do something about (instead of doing something that lets it look like it’s doing something), as it’s almost as dangerous to be a black man as it is to be a black trans woman (and when we add class to this it gets even more extreme).
It seems a bit disingenuous to keep slicing and dicing the demographics until you come up with an obscure enough one where their rate is higher than average. Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it does make me look a bit askance.
How does the murder rate of TWoC compare to, say, illegal immigrant east Asian sex workers in the US? Or just US based sex workers in general? For a variety of reasons, trans women are more likely to be sex workers than cis women are. What happens if we control for that?
The point of intersectionality is to find out the factors that make people suffer. In this case slicing and dicing the demographics has shown that black people tend to suffer extremely high rates of violence, and I don’t think “black people” is a massively obscure demographic (unlike, say, the way the most vulnerable minority is always the individual; the demographic $murdered_trans_woman_X suffered a murder rate of 100,000/100,000 and that’s terrible), nor “black trans women” either. And I don’t think including class in it is a bad thing either, because “what do we do to the murder rate” is a vague question, but “what do we do to the murder rate of poor black people” is a more specific question that is easier to answer.
And such slicing and dicing also reveals new information; in this case I updated as I was expecting the murder rate of TWoC to be higher than it was compared to the murder rate of black men, and thus it seems that being black AMAB is the actual massive risk factor for violence. Intersectional analysis improves epistemic fidelity!
Also, sex workers suffer massive amounts of violence too and that’s not okay and the things that cause it need to be destroyed.
I just read a text exchange in which a guy tried to flirt with a stranger on Facebook by sending her a picture of his penis. The woman responded by ridiculing him, sending him lots of pictures of other men’s penises to demonstrate how horrible it is to receive dick pics, and suggesting that his dick was small and diseased. He got angry, and asked to end the conversation, which she didn’t do. Then he asked her not to share the conversation, and she posted the whole thing publicly, along with his name. Now it’s on my news feed because lots of people are reading it and finding it hilarious.
I hope I’m not the only one who thinks this is tragic.
The perception of dick pics as disgusting, low status, and worthy of ridicule is part of the larger perception of sexuality as shameful. I would much, much rather live in a culture where I sometimes received unwanted images of strangers’ genitals as part of clumsy flirting than to live in a culture where being open about sexuality is about as safe as making violent threats.
I would love to live in the nearby world where “you’re cute, wanna see my dick/vulva?” is a polite way of finding out whether an attractive stranger feels like sharing a casual online sexual interaction. The man’s actions in this exchange make me feel a lot more like I live in that world than do the woman’s.
I recognize that, given we *don’t* live in that world, *and* that the world we do live in includes a lot of people who feel women should be grateful for male attention and never allowed to protect themselves let alone retaliate, dick pics are often (usually?) more of a harmful spam tactic than a kind of benign if inept way of flirting.
I think it’s a good idea to discourage spamming people, and also to discourage treating women as if they have no right to refuse sexual advances.
But please, please, do not confuse strategic choice of social norms with the rush of a cheap status-boost. Do not play along with the game where we all punish each other for having bodies in the context of Christian purity and original sin.
So I gave my take on it:
The boy in question may not, himself, have realized he was performing an aggressive move. He may have just been emulating a move that he saw as successful, because when aggressive men make that move they often *are* successful.
It’s generally the less aggressive males, attempting to emulate aggressive strategies without even realizing that the underlying structure of the strategy is aggression, that get piled on for being aggressive.
The actual aggressive males get away with it, because no one wants to fight them.
If you’re winning the fight against a particular person, I guarantee you they aren’t the kind of person you think you’re fighting against.
If you’re making some fedora-wearing neckbeard cry delicious man-tears, if you’re viciously shaming some size 0 fetish model for promoting unhealthy body standards, if you’re screaming at some transgirl for “invading your safe space” and “not being a real woman”, if you’re savaging some internet pundit for using “transgirl” because they haven’t kept up with the lingo-of-the-week… you’re almost certainly attacking someone who’s probably been hurt worse by the Patriarchy than you have.
Because if you’re successfully attacking, and they aren’t successfully defending, then that almost certainly means you have more structural and institutional power than they do.
Feels nice, doesn’t it?
This is a pretty important heuristic.
no, actually…
This is a VERY IMPORTANT HEURISTIC.
However, anyone who sends me unsolicited dick pics will be at my mercy nonetheless. There Will Be Consequences, regardless of one’s position in the hierarchies, because I mostly* don’t want to receive unsolicited dick pics and anyone disregarding my explicit preference on the topic deserves the Consequences, and I believe that it’s more fair if I make these things explicit so a) benign but inept people would know it isn’t okay and b) malign people could not pose as benign but inept people.
(* It has been hypothesized that there might exist a category of people for whom the Consequences and “being at my mercy” would be net positive things, but I will not say explicitly which that category is, because I can’t give people foolproof definitions of when unsolicited dick pics could be okay and thus even ridiculously cute trans girls might end up misunderstanding the boundary and thus causing a net loss of utility when I would have to reject a ridiculously cute trans girl and that would be sad. So anyway even ridiculously cute trans girls please be careful about sending me dick pics and should probably ask first because asking first is a very good side to err on.)
(sometimes the parked cars / bikes are reversed on the few streets with Copenhagen-style bike lanes, but this is rare).
Needing separate lanes for trams, cars, and bikes makes the streets hella wide. But not having separate lanes is even worse, like Sydney Rd in Brunswick where trams can take half an hour to travel a couple of kilometres and cyclists are killed on a monthly basis by people opening car doors and knocking them into traffic.
Every time a tram stops it stops in the middle of the road: all the cars around it also need to stop (and most of the time they do, but not always) and then the people need to get from the centre of the road to the footpath safely.
To fix this the city has been installing large train-style super tram stops, but this takes up even more space and makes it even harder to fit in bike lanes on narrow streets. On Swanston St the bike path actually runs along the tram stop:
so people waiting for trams have to stand behind the yellow line or get taken out by a bike, and bikes have to stop when a tram is taking on passengers. You would think that would be a total clusterfuck but actually it more or less works, although at least once a week a car gets confused and drives down the platform and then falls off and gets wedged, blocking the tram line until it gets towed:
Plus the overhead wires the trams use are super ugly.
On the upside, tracks are more energy efficient and there are ways to do trams without overhead wires (such as in some European old towns) but it’s tricky.
When tracks are built separately from other traffic trams can achieve really high speeds, and the aesthetic footprint is lesser because instead of a fuck-ass wide stretch of asphalt the tram only needs two narrow strips of metal, and the thing between them can even be grass (as it sometimes is in European cities). And trams are more predictable in traffic, enabling the safety margins between them and others to be smaller; you can put a fence in exactly the position where a tram will not hit it, and the other side will be safe for pedestrians or cyclists, but you can’t have buses with only 50cm between them and fragile people, and you most certainly can’t drive a bus 80km/h if it has fences on both sides only 30cm away.
Furthermore, trams are more suitable for underground operation, such as in the Antwerp Premetro or SF Muni, allowing the tracks to be hidden away in the densest places at some cost in the ease-of-access department.
Trams have a significantly greater capacity, and it’s impossible to service important core lines with buses in any kind of a decent mass transportation system (eg. there’s one in Helsinki where they sometimes drive four buses behind each other to have room for all the passengers, and that’s pricey as fuck; little surprise they’re trying to turn it into a tram as fast as they can).
Electric buses are making the air quality part of the equation a bit more equal, so diesel pollution will not be a massive factor for long, but rubber transportation generates significant quantities of toxic dust from the tires and asphalt, whereas trams (metal emissions from the tracks and wheels) might possibly be less polluting.
Game idea that sprung from a conversation with @brazenautomaton about nonviolent gameplay. Ideally, it’d be Fallout branded, but that’s not necessary
Most RPGs get nonviolent solutions mostly wrong. You click some dialog options, and if you choose the right sequence, people change their minds. This is sort of like how real conversations work, except all the perception and creativity are the author’s. If they have a third solution that you didn’t see, you can take it; if you have a third solution that they didn’t see, or wanted to exclude for some reason, you can’t suggest it.
And it takes real courage for them to actually replace a boss fight with a dialog option. Being able to talk down Legate Lanius is such an example; in Mass Effect, you can, by convincing your opponent they’ve made a colossal mistake, get them to commit suicide–but that means you skip the first stage of a two-stage boss fight.
But there exist games where nonviolent solutions are the primary gameplay mechanism, rather than a shortcut past it. What would it look like to do a similar thing in a Fallout-like setting?
The purpose of this paper is to examine the legal and political institutions of Iceland from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. They are of interest for two reasons. First, they are relatively well documented; the sagas were written by people who had lived under that set of institutions[3] and provide a detailed inside view of their workings. Legal conflicts were of great interest to the medieval Icelanders: Njal, the eponymous hero of the most famous of the sagas,[4] is not a warrior but a lawyer–“so skilled in law that no one was considered his equal.” In the action of the sagas, law cases play as central a role as battles.
Fallout is divided into ‘civilization’ and ‘raiders,’ where you can shoot any raider without penalty (and, indeed, are actively rewarded for killing them). But the player is, in some deep sense, the ultimate raider, roving, killing, and stealing more than anyone else. Almost every quest involves making a bunch more corpses, and almost all of those corpses are people that no one will miss.
Imagine a world where everyone has concentric loyalties, and thus are all ‘morally grey’ in a universalist sense. Very few people are secure enough that they won’t steal from a stranger if presented with a good opportunity, and no one will choose to let their brother die instead of a stranger. In order to neutralize bad elements without earning the enmity of everyone else, you need to put them on trial, basically. In order to end feuds without mutual extermination, you collect wergild. Incidentally, that’s how the players gets paid–victimization creates property rights, which NPCs can sell to the PC, as well as rewarding them for doing natural things for a rover like delivering mail. (Imagine that, a courier who actually delivers the mail!)
A ‘quest’ doesn’t look like “there’s a bunch of mirelurks in the watering hole, kill them all,” it looks like “tribe A and tribe B are about to come to blows over their disagreement over the watering hole; can you convince them of a peaceful resolution?” And if you can’t come to a successful peaceful resolution, they’ll fight, and a fight may develop into a feud, and a feud may result in a tribe getting wiped out.
What’s neat about this is that you can procedurally generate these
disputes, not just by drawing cards from a “dispute” deck or having them always be the same when the player visits a particular town, but by
simulating the game world. People consume food and water and various
services; other people provide those services or obtain that food and
water. And if you can’t trade, you steal, and if you can’t get along,
you fight. Combine with a personality and relationship model, and you
have a world where conflicts to settle will arrive as a natural
consequence of time moving forward. If there’s not enough water to go
around, someone is going to get dehydrated, and they (and their friends
and family) are not going to be happy about it.
So anyway, in order for this to work well the conversation model needs to be very well done. My thought is allow the player to basically string together ‘concepts’ according to some rules, trying to make various arguments to sway the opinion of other people around them. (They collect those concepts from people they meet along the way / stories they learn / etc., and can also teach them to others.) Much of the challenge, I suspect, is figuring out what will convince who, especially if there’s a lot of things similar to a jury trial where one’s arguing a case before a council.
Reblogged so I can find this when I remember what this reminds me of. I swear there was some game where you went around learning phrases or something you could use later.
You might be thinking of The Secret Of Monkey Island, where you learn insults and rejoinders to use while swordfighting. (That mechanic is fairly common, though–I mean, in Skyrim you learn phrases you can use later!)
This also has a very nice opportunity for a ‘leveling’ mechanic I haven’t seen anywhere else. You start as a wandering arbiter, and each conflict you resolve increases your legitimacy, which would be tracked numerically, separately for each person. It goes up a lot for the winner of the dispute, regardless. The loser may either gain or lose legitimacy points, depending on the nature of the resolution and your solution to the dispute. ‘Just’ solutions in the eyes of the loser will gain a small amount of legitimacy (smaller than the winner), but strongarm tactics or deception will weaken your position. Then, everyone connected to the aggrieved parties on the social network will also gain or lose a portion of that legitimacy number. If the solution is mutually satisfactory, you gain legitimacy with everybody, but less than you would with a clear winner.
Aside from gatekeeping more difficult quests, legitimacy has the important role of allowing you to propose elements of a treaty/ system of laws- these are the rough equivalent of player perks. Each law requires a given amount of legitimacy with you to be active, and each is ranked- the more influence you have with a person, the more laws they will follow, in the priority order you set. They can do all sorts of things- regulate commerce, (dis)incentivize militarization, grant the player access to locked safes and terminals (alternative to a lock pick skill), even require people to be more polite.
So basically, the player is gradually building a social contract.
This has a few immediate consequences that I think are neat. First, the player has to decide whether to go ‘deep’ or ‘wide’ in legitimacy. That is, do you prioritize the interests of a small group of people, and be able to exert a lot of influence over the behavior of that tribe? Or do you keep a more even approach, working for a small number of more universal laws?
Second, it incentivizes corruption by the player. If an important person (a mayor, a merchant prince, or just someone with a lot of friends) calls for your services, an influence gain with that person could be incredibly important. You can get this bump by throwing the trial their way regardless of circumstances, but at the expense of a)perpetrating an injustice and b)lots of influence lost with others, especially if you’re obvious about it.
Yep!
I think something like the Icelandic system of law–where you have the godi / alderman / elder / whatever as a contractural representative of a congregation / group, and the country’s laws determined by all of them voting–makes sense, and is a thing the player should have access to and potentially participate in. If you want to settle down, you can be elected head of some group. Being the Lawspeaker, charged with memorizing all the laws as acting as, essentially, Supreme Court Justice, seems like a great brass ring to reach for.
How much of that should already exist when the player shows up seems uncertain. Probably any group of two or more people has a senior member, or it’s not really a “group.” But all of, say, post-apocalyptic California regularly meeting to decide on laws seems much too civilized for the start. More likely you have some existing leagues–maybe the NCR equivalent is make up of ~eight ‘congregations,’ each of which has a representative, and the league has a president (which is probably a rotating post among the representatives). But getting the NCR and the adjacent ghoul trading post to agree on laws and fines (which will dramatically cut down on the border skirmishes between them / increase trade) requires work on the part of the player, and until that happens the player will have to keep straight two different legal systems.
It’s unclear to me if it’s better to start the player off as a wandering arbiter, or have them have actual parents / a backstory / pre-existing relationships, which they have some ability to modify. Both approaches have their benefits.
It also seems like giving the player full access to the economic system opens up gameplay in a big way. If, say, there’s equipment necessary to purify water or a skill to doing right, the player can buy / craft that equipment or learn the skill. An easy way to be very popular is to be a doctor–which requires an immense amount of training to do well.
(This may open up gameplay too much, depending on how things are set up–if the main source of legal trouble is water conflicts, and the player invests all they money they can get their hands on into drilling more wells, then the water conflicts dry up. Presumably, population can expand until something else becomes the next pressure point, but that may be a bit too slow of a scale.)
