Annoying Questions I'd Like Answered...

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Sun Dec 27, 2015 3:35 pm

So all that's needed is for ISIS to hire first someone from Saudi Arabia to hire the Rolling Stones, and then tell them to go perform where ISIS wants.

I would say for all pratical purposes, it's the exact same thing, just that there's a middle dude that gets a cut of the deal. But then I remember that the dudes in power made those laws precisely so that they can get extra profits on the side, so yeah, pretty much anything is legal as long you remember to pay the proper people.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sun Dec 27, 2015 3:40 pm

maglag wrote:So all that's needed is for ISIS to hire first someone from Saudi Arabia to hire the Rolling Stones, and then tell them to go perform where ISIS wants.

I would say for all pratical purposes, it's the exact same thing, just that there's a middle dude that gets a cut of the deal. But then I remember that the dudes in power made those laws precisely so that they can get extra profits on the side, so yeah, pretty much anything is legal as long you remember to pay the proper people.

Except for how that wouldn't work at all. If you sell a car to someone who sells that car to ISIS, you can just say "I didn't know they were going to sell the car to ISIS." If you personally go and perform for ISIS, you can't say "I didn't know that the guy in SA was going to ask me to perform for ISIS, until he did, and then I did know, and went to ISIS territory and did it anyway, even though it's illegal, because fuck laws."

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Sun Dec 27, 2015 5:38 pm

I'm also pretty confident it's illegal to sell things to people you know are planning to give them to someone who it's illegal to sell them to directly. That is how it works for drugs and guns for sure.

Also, the US does periodically impose restrictions on trading with identified associates of terrorists. There are a lot of economic and diplomatic considerations that go into deciding who to do that to, but it happens.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sun Dec 27, 2015 7:12 pm

name_here wrote:I'm also pretty confident it's illegal to sell things to people you know are planning to give them to someone who it's illegal to sell them to directly. That is how it works for drugs and guns for sure.

It's illegal to do that sure, but my point is that they would have to prove you knew some guy was going to sell his truck to ISIS, which is hard, but it is super easy to prove that while you were singing for ISIS you knew you were singing for ISIS.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sun Dec 27, 2015 10:08 pm

They might have just told you that you were invited to sing for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and some of his wealthy friends in the middle east. 99% of people wouldn't know who that is and may not care which specific country it is. Now, going into a war zone is likely to raise some questions, but if they're not getting shot at then the performer may not know that either, I suppose.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Mon Dec 28, 2015 2:44 am

Rock stars are definitely not a protected class from the law, plenty of them end up in prison for all sorts of stupid shit. There was a period when many of them did hard drugs, but that was the same period when everyone was trying LSD and such, not just rock stars.

Military contractors can pretty much do whatever they want, because the US gets the puppets they set up after an invasion to grant them all legal immunity to the local law on promise of keeping them under US law, which conveniently defers to local laws in almost all cases, including said immunity.

The military themselves are generally only vulnerable to military law, which is mostly used to support the image of the military and punish anyone who makes them look bad. So it's not bad to torture people, but it is very bad to let congress see.

Bankers and the security agencies all just pretend the law says one thing when it obviously doesn't, and as long as they all agree about that the government just nods and hopes for the best. When it goes badly, the laws get "clarified".

The extended house of Saud is above the law in all ways, because they sell oil to US oil companies below market rates and have done so forever, which gives the US a modest energy price advantage against the rest of the world.

Lots of people, really, probably hundreds of thousands of them. But not rock stars.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Jan 08, 2016 10:49 am

I generally have pretty good google skills, but they aren't the greatest when it comes to images.

I find myself needing tokens for gun demons for my session on Saturday, I'm thinking some kind of demon marines, but Google keeps giving me Space Marines or just straight up actual USMC marines. Not guys who look like Platoon got crossed over with a B movie hellscape.

Any help?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Jan 08, 2016 11:32 am

When you say "gun demons" do you mean like the Demons in Doom? If so, couldn't you just use the Demons in Doom?

-Username17

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Jan 08, 2016 5:26 pm

Nah, much lower level. Demonic Jarheads.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Fri Jan 08, 2016 5:33 pm

This guy?

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Fri Jan 08, 2016 5:50 pm

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Fri Jan 08, 2016 6:28 pm

Longes wrote:

That's like the most uselessly pretentious pose, ever. Shoulder your weapon, idiot.

Count Arioch the 28th · Fri Jan 08, 2016 6:34 pm

It looks like a male version of the impractical female poses on novels.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Jan 08, 2016 6:50 pm

-Username17

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Fri Jan 08, 2016 8:23 pm

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:It looks like a male version of the impractical female poses on novels.

That was my first thought. So, Hawkeye meets demon?

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Jan 09, 2016 12:39 am

Much better, thanks guys.

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Sat Jan 16, 2016 9:42 pm

If we lived in an ideal world, how would we handle drug development and production?

Same question, but for democracy (general structure, campaigning, districts...).

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sun Jan 17, 2016 10:46 am

CGP Grey has an excellent series of videos on the latter subject. Skip the first one if you're already familiar enough with the specific problems of first past the post voting that the jargon for those problems won't confuse you in the later videos.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Jan 17, 2016 10:01 pm

As far as drug production goes, having profit making corporations make the drugs and faceless government bureaucracies regulate them is actually a pretty reasonable way to do it. The people who regulate the production and the people who make it pretty much need to be adversaries. Corporations are of course completely incapable and unwilling to police themselves (see: patent medicines), and government accounting to itself has a pretty horrific history as well (see: Henan Province Disaster). One could put together a system where the drugs were produced by a government agency and the whole thing was overseen by another government agency, and both agencies were accountable to the public via elections - but the unfortunate reality is that reports of failures would increase public dissatisfaction and thus encourage voting incumbents out which would in turn encourage a lack of public outreach and a culture of silence.

Really, I can't think of a better solution than to vote for the government that runs the watchdogs and have the production handled by corporations that are motivated by dollars. It sucks in a lot of ways, but it beats having the watchdogs be more likely to keep their jobs by not barking. You'd still need price supports for medications of a bunch of different classes (treatments for rare diseases, for example).

As far as development, you need a multi-pronged approach. Any rubric you use is going to fail to pursue lines of inquiry that from a humane standpoint must be pursued. For-profit producers will not spend money researching unprofitable medicines (such as cures). Democratically accountable regimes will not "waste" public money researching treatment for rare diseases. And so on. To get all the research done that needs to be done you're going to need a lot of different systems that justify research funding streams by different criteria.

-Username17

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Fri Jan 22, 2016 5:08 pm

Suppose there's a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure sort of game. You walk around the map by turning to sections and check against keyword conditions offering more section references when True. For simplicity, assume there are no deaths or dead ends and one ending.

Is there an established programmatic way to find the solution requiring the fewest actions (section references)?

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Fri Jan 22, 2016 5:18 pm

Starmaker wrote:Suppose there's a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure sort of game. You walk around the map by turning to sections and check against keyword conditions offering more section references when True. For simplicity, assume there are no deaths or dead ends and one ending.

Is there an established programmatic way to find the solution requiring the fewest actions (section references)?

Well, if you map out the decision chains as an unweighted graph (or a weighted graph with the same value between all connections), then you can apply Dijkstra's Algorithm and get your shortest path answer. Once you have the graph, it wouldn't even take that long for the program to churn out the solution either since it's O(N^2), where N is the number of nodes.

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Fri Jan 22, 2016 7:09 pm

The problem is each action can potentially change the map. I can determine the shortest path to each current objective and, thus, the easiest ojective, but there's no guarantee completing it won't fuck up the completion of everything else. E.g. objective A may be fastest, but completing B unlocks C at A's location, so it's more efficient to do B first, then A and C together.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Fri Jan 22, 2016 7:51 pm

Starmaker wrote:The problem is each action can potentially change the map. I can determine the shortest path to each current objective and, thus, the easiest ojective, but there's no guarantee completing it won't fuck up the completion of everything else. E.g. objective A may be fastest, but completing B unlocks C at A's location, so it's more efficient to do B first, then A and C together.

First off, my Computer Science knowledge is a bit rusty. I strongly suspect there is a single, rigorously proven algorithm out there that'll handle a map traversal of the sort you're looking for. But I don't know it off the top of my head, so you'll either need to do more research or find a non-lapsed computer scientist to help you out.

Secondly, you could still solve the problem with Dijkstra assuming you had a more complete map. By more complete I mean one that included the possible branches, including those that are variable (A -> B -> C, B -> A -> C). Creating something so exhaustive would be exhausting, but you could do it, and then Djikstra could solve it.

Thirdly, you could take it a step further and do an iterative state-space traversal. Basically, you have your graph with the starting node and all the options available from that point. It then does a depth-first or breadth-first traversal of the graph, with the "game" dynamically adding new nodes and/or connections as they are unlocked. Dijkstra's Algorithm is fine "discovering" new routes along the way, you're just changing the graph from being a static representation to being dynamic. You'd be doing a LOT more crunching with this method, and to be honest it's pretty brute-force as these sorts of things go, but it'd work.

Still, I'm sure something more elegant exists out there.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Fri Jan 22, 2016 8:31 pm

A* star search
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm

Alpha Beta Pruning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha%E2% ... ta_pruning

Iterative Deepening A*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterative_deepening_A*

I took a course in AI last semester so a lot of it is still somewhat fresh.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 6:22 am

In general, whenever some conspiracy theorist starts talking about "government cover-ups" I basically laugh in their (proverbial) face about the secret-keeping ability of the government.

But it occurs to me- I have no actual basis for my belief that the government is terrible at cover-ups.

So, given that we cannot actually know how well the government is doing at actively covering things up, what is the government's track record on keeping things secret that were later released to public knowledge? Is the (American) government generally successful at keeping things secret until they decide to tell the public, or are secrets generally uncovered while the government wants them to still be secret?

Or is there really no practical metric by which we can know how well the government manages to cover shit up or otherwise keep big things secret?