Quoting: wvstolzingSorry about the wildly off-topic post, though. Slightly more on topic: 'cyber cafe's were huge in Turkey in the early 00s; I had Starcraft-addicted cousins who practically lived in those places. They're all but extinct nowadays though.

Your cousins are all but extinct? Condolences, my dear chap!

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Quoting: elmapulthings will never end at this rate, its a "cat-and-mouse game"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_and_mouse [External Link]
just like wine will never be perfect for the same reason.

Welll . . . Wine will never be perfect for current Windows. But over time the proportion of software that was written for Windows-before-the-present gradually increases, and current Windows seems to be getting worse at backwards compatibility, probably deliberately for certain tactical reasons which I think may be mistaken.
So in theory Wine could become approximately perfect for pre-current Windows, and that becomes a more and more important role.

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So, since everyone here seems to agree (and that's also what I've heard) that cyber-cafes are very big in Asia, would that mean the recent surge in Asian Steam usage has been overstated?

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Purple Library GuyWhat about 'em? In case you hadn't noticed, we have powerful warrior classes now. And yet I'm not trying to claim capitalism isn't a real thing.

Neither am I. And I'm not claiming that feudalism was basically capitalism. All I'm saying is that capitalism is more or less an adaptation and evolution of what was before. As you said, we define capitalism by its differences to other paradigms. This definition serves a purpose, but isn't very objective or scientific. Of course it's by evolution and adaptation that all economic and political systems form.

I'm not quite sure what that means. Before capitalism nearly all people didn't do wage labour. Under capitalism, most people do. It would be wrong to say absolutely everything is different, but it would also be wrong to claim that structures of how people work and live didn't change in pretty fundamental ways. When water freezes, there's continuity--it's still water--but you can make some pretty broad statements about what's different.

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Purple Library GuyIn the old days merchants existed and made money, but they didn't rule, and if aristocrats got fed up with them they took their stuff. What constituted dog and what constituted tail was different, and what was considered the important social virtue was different. Compound interest was often illegal. And who dominates song and legend is far from beside the point. Vikings had song and legend about great warriors, we have news shows dominated by talk of the stock exchange and media that talks incessantly about lifestyles of the rich and famous--many of them famous solely for being rich.

And why do you think people didn't gossip about the lavish lifestyles of rich merchants and traders back then? Again, you might point out that their surviving legends are violent, but so is most modern entertainment.

I have no proof they didn't, no. But you can't really build an argument on "I can't prove otherwise". There are a lot of ridiculous things I can't prove to be false.
I mean, I'm sure people talked about rich merchants some. Just, not as much as they talked about rich clergy, or powerful warlords. Medieval merchants simply were not ancient counterparts to modern capitalists; they had a much tinier slice of the economic action. Commerce was much smaller compared to the economy as a whole, and merchants engaged in commerce didn't control production. Medieval merchants were kind of like just the modern shipping and trucking and freight rail businesses--IF those businesses were about a tenth their actual size. Well, no, because they did own the cargos, but like, say you had people who bought Hondas from Japan, shipped them to North America and sold them to dealerships at a markup--except hardly anyone ever bought foreign cars. It would be a noticeable group that made some money, sure, but it wouldn't be central.

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe vikings were actually a little odd in that their merchants, raiders, conquerors, and even peasants, were pretty much all the same people. But a lot of what they traded was precisely things they had stolen while viking--and people, actually; the viking slave trade was huge for a while. But these multi-role people, if you look at their own accounts, cared the most about the raiding and conquest and fighting--that was what made a man respected and followed. The merchant stuff was fine, but it wasn't as important, it wasn't what society was about.

What do you base all this on? Sure, vikings traded on all kinds of valuables and commodities, even slaves, just like their foreign peers. But they were also world class craftsmen. And their merchants, jewelers, blacksmiths and whatnot were just that, not raiders who also dabbled in a bit of trade.

You have a point. The vikings were excellent craftsmen and had plenty of their own stuff to trade. I exaggerated there. As to all the same people--all I was getting at was that the vikings unusually didn't really have a separate warrior vs. peasant class or warrior vs. merchant class. Kings had dedicated warbands and such, but in general they had a lot of reasonably independent farmers, fishermen and whatnot, who were armed and could fight, and who sometimes went viking, sometimes went trading, and sometimes went to do whichever looked like the best bet when they got wherever they got to. I wouldn't be surprised if increasing social stratification was part of what ended the "viking age".

Quoting: tuubiIn any case, trying to reduce any society to a single value or ideal is counterproductive. That forces you to ignore the human factor. Life might have been simpler, but not to such an extreme degree.

I respect you, but really, have you been reading what I'm writing or some funhouse mirror version of it? I feel this is a serious misrepresentation of my thesis and my extensive "human factor" qualifications of it. It's quite annoying.
Yes, yes, the world is messy, whatever. That does not mean there are no patterns to be observed. Human society is dominated by human ideas, human ideologies. And human ideas tend to be simple at the core. There are all kinds of reasons why any given dominant ideology doesn't control the whole show, why complexity comes in will we or nill we, but that doesn't mean those dominant ideas are not dominant or that they themselves are not fundamentally simple.

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI really think we tend to overestimate that aspect because it's what we care about and it reassures us to think people back then were just like us, that what we care about is inevitably what everyone has to care about.

I'll ignore the slightly patronizing tone, but you're right, I do assume our basic needs are the same as those of people a thousand years ago. I actually think it's the other way around: We tend to romanticize and mythologize people we have no direct experience of. Even famous historians and archaeologists have commonly fallen into this seductive trap. We have this strange need to make history seem exciting when most of it is decidedly not.

But maybe we're getting slightly off topic here? :P

I really don't quite see which bit of what I've been saying constitutes romanticized yearning for excitement. If anything I've been quite negative and brutal about the ethos both of the medieval and dark ages past and the 18th c. to modern era. I have been drawing a picture of two different elites running things for their own benefit largely to the detriment of everyone else--just in very different ways, with different basic organizing concepts and productive systems.
Our fundamental needs are to some extent beside the point. Our fundamental needs are the same as those of stone age hunter-gatherers, but one cannot claim that stone age hunter-gatherers were motivated by anything we could productively call profit; they were (and the few remaining ones are) as human as anyone else, but clearly had no merchant class at all or anything like one. So why would our fundamental needs somehow make it necessary that such a class be terribly important in medieval times? (Incidentally I'm not claiming a linear progression or anything--profits and mercantile endeavours and even investment were very important in the late Roman empire, but they kind of stopped being when it fell)

Ah, well, yeah. Very very off topic.

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Quoting: Patola

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI had a good deal of fun with this game. One thing that bugged me back when I played it though was that you were given a certain percentage chance to hit, and I noticed (became particularly obvious with powerful units with high chance to hit and lots of attacks) that the actual results seemed to average way below the given stats. So like, someone with 60% chance to hit seemed to hit around 40% of the time. Got frustrating.

But this is an open source game. You can promptly check the code to see whether the statistics are done wrong, or you're just experiencing selection bias.

This is one of those stupid smug comments that one sees a lot of in open source circles. Sure, I'll learn to code so I can check one thing on one game I've spent a bit of time playing. It'll only take 50 times as much time as I'll ever put in playing the game, what's the big deal?

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I had a good deal of fun with this game. One thing that bugged me back when I played it though was that you were given a certain percentage chance to hit, and I noticed (became particularly obvious with powerful units with high chance to hit and lots of attacks) that the actual results seemed to average way below the given stats. So like, someone with 60% chance to hit seemed to hit around 40% of the time. Got frustrating.

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Quoting: tuubi@Purple Library Guy
What about all the evidence we have of powerful, rich merchant classes in most feudal societies throughout history? Even vikings, known for their bloody conquests and raids as you point out, had a proper trade empire reaching all the way to the middle east and central Asia, as far as their boats would take them. There's not much romance in gathering wealth and it's the warriors and kings who dominate song and legend, but that's beside the point.

What about 'em? In case you hadn't noticed, we have powerful warrior classes now. And yet I'm not trying to claim capitalism isn't a real thing.

In the old days merchants existed and made money, but they didn't rule, and if aristocrats got fed up with them they took their stuff. What constituted dog and what constituted tail was different, and what was considered the important social virtue was different. Compound interest was often illegal. And who dominates song and legend is far from beside the point. Vikings had song and legend about great warriors, we have news shows dominated by talk of the stock exchange and media that talks incessantly about lifestyles of the rich and famous--many of them famous solely for being rich.

The vikings were actually a little odd in that their merchants, raiders, conquerors, and even peasants, were pretty much all the same people. But a lot of what they traded was precisely things they had stolen while viking--and people, actually; the viking slave trade was huge for a while. But these multi-role people, if you look at their own accounts, cared the most about the raiding and conquest and fighting--that was what made a man respected and followed. The merchant stuff was fine, but it wasn't as important, it wasn't what society was about. I really think we tend to overestimate that aspect because it's what we care about and it reassures us to think people back then were just like us, that what we care about is inevitably what everyone has to care about.

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Quoting: 14

Quoting: Purple Library GuyCapitalism is just the only system to actually base itself on greed as the main virtue (although most actual humans aren't really very virtuous by our society's standards).

I can't agree with this. I could be brain washed, but I don't think greed is a necessary component of capitalism. It was supposed to be more effort equals more reward, however that relationship doesn't scale linearly.

I think of greed as "I want more than you have" whereas "I want more than I have" is not always evil.

I don't think you're brainwashed. But I also think that most people don't actually know what capitalism is in much the same way fish don't know what water is. This also comes up in the way people tend to think of non-capitalist societies as being "really" capitalist except with funny costumes and titles.
The classical economists, whether Adam Smith or Marx, were writing at a time when it was a new thing and were much more interested in distinguishing it from other things that it was not. And as far as I can tell, they pretty much agreed on what it basically is. Capitalism is a system in which some people ("capitalists" or "the bourgeoisie" or whatever) employ other people for wages, investing money in those wages and in some sort of facilities or equipment (whether steel factories or software) for the employees to use to create some kind of valuable commodity. The capitalist owns what is produced, sells it for a profit, and invests the profit in more facilities or equipment or wages, so as to make a bigger profit. The facilities and equipment and stuff, or money earmarked for acquiring them, are "capital". That's why it is "capital"ism. Oddly, it has relatively little to do with markets.

This seems inevitable--how could people not have jobs? How could someone not be the boss employing them? But in the middle ages most production was done by peasants for their own use or to pay taxes. And most production in cities was done by self-employed craftsmen who gathered together in guilds to control prices and enforce quality and shut out competition. Almost anyone else worked mainly in return for food and shelter and even clothing--they might have a small supplemental wage to buy some minor luxuries at the market, but that was secondary. And merchants didn't employ people or produce things, they just bought stuff one place and sold it somewhere else for a higher price. Very few people worked for a wage, or using equipment belonging to other people. Early attempts to get people to work for wages actually met a lot of resistance.

So, where the greed comes in is that the essential nature of capitalist investment is continual expansion--you never stop re-investing profits to make more and more and more. And capitalist economic theories normally define people as maximizers--people who will do anything to increase the amount of money they make and/or wealth they have, who have no other motivations. Of course most people are not themselves capitalist investors employing wage labour, and even most small businesspeople are never really in a position, may not even really want, to reinvest profits and expand continually. But they're supposed to. That's what the right thing to do is, that's what success is. That's "entrepreneurialism"--becoming endlessly richer, through other people's work. It's an elite virtue--people who work for a living can't really participate in it, just as peasants couldn't participate in elite cultures of violence back in the day. But just as peasants were looked down on for not being properly violent (ie not having honour, seeking glory etc), the working class today is looked down on for not being effectively greedy enough. So yes, I'd say greed is capitalism's key virtue, even if real people have never fully bought into it or really had the opportunity.

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Quoting: Kels

Quoting: Purple Library GuyGreed existed before capitalism and will doubtless continue to exist after. Capitalism is just the only system to actually base itself on greed as the main virtue (although most actual humans aren't really very virtuous by our society's standards). Feudal societies based themselves on warrior virtues, and tended to disdain merchants as much because they weren't bloodthirsty enough as because they were too greedy.

How interesting that you mention that last part right after I read an article about how Bushido, the supposed way of the Samurai, was essentially bullshit made up by one man at the turn of the 20th century. And related closely to the similarly mythological idea of middle ages chivalry in Europe, itself made up well after the fact. In either case, personal gain was a bigger motivator than honour, and both Samurai and Knights revelled in their status as elites, and the upper ranks of both did pretty well for themselves financially.

You're looking through our lenses. And I don't think saying feudalism relied on bloodthirstiness is romanticizing. Sure, knights and counts and kings wanted "gain", and they liked plunder. But they defined gain differently. Nobody would go around trying to enlarge their fiefdom by buying the next baron out. Half the point of the conquest and plunder was to be, and be seen as, a conqueror and plunderer. It's not even just high medieval--the main viking thing was to try to make a big name for yourself which would be told in tales down the ages. Lasting fame was what the game was about. But how do you get lasting fame? By doing what society valued most. What did society value most? Violence, hands down. Nobody even imagined that you could possibly get the fame men craved by doing anything that wasn't violent.
Anglo-Saxons, who were basically a lot like vikings with fewer boats, believed very strongly in the "man-lord relationship". What was the man-lord relationship about? It was about the lord giving nice things, like gold armbands or snazzy swords or whatnot, to the men in return for their personal loyalty unto death. How was he supposed to get the nice things? By leading them on raids and seizing stuff from enemies, which he would then display his generosity by distributing, with extra to the bravest. These nice things were occasionally used as currency, but mostly these men, these "thanes", lived off farming either directly or knight-style by having subordinates who farmed and were sorta taxed. The nice things were mainly just nice things--analogous in a way to conspicuous consumption, but with totally different symbolism: Having a nice thing didn't mean "I am rich and successful in commerce or at a 'job'", it meant "I am a brave and powerful warrior relied on by my king". The base ethic was all about violence.
Similarly, there was certainly such a thing as "gain" for a feudal lord. But most wealth was "in kind"--your taxes from the peasants were in food and textiles and beeswax and stuff. So what do you do with all that? You maintain a big household and armed force. "Winning" for a feudal lord meant being able to maintain a bigger better army than the next feudal lord, and being able to get glory (and, yes, wealth) by using it violently. Being able to maintain a bigger better army required as much land as possible, ideally fertile prosperous land. So you seize more land so you can support more troops so you can seize more land. As times edged into the Renaissance currency got involved more and more--but that's deeply intertwined with a general shift to a different kind of society with different ideas.

Now in the real feudal/dark ages world, often people did do commerce instead of (or as well as) violence, often did make peace instead of war and so on. People were no more all virtuously violent then than people are all virtuously greedy now. Violence after all has a lot of drawbacks, it kills and destroys; if people all did things the "virtuous" way society would break down. The glory and violence oriented warrior societies always depended on the quiet work of people who were not being glorious or violent, much as our greed oriented capitalist society depends on people who are not themselves capitalists or acting on greed. But the quiet foundation of pre-capitalist society was mostly about agriculture and peasants. Commerce was relatively a frill until pretty late.

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Quoting: 14Haven't read the entire KS page, but I like everything I've seen about this game so far. I really like the idea of greed being the curse. Greed is not inherent with capitalism but it's certainly a potential side effect.

Greed existed before capitalism and will doubtless continue to exist after. Capitalism is just the only system to actually base itself on greed as the main virtue (although most actual humans aren't really very virtuous by our society's standards). Feudal societies based themselves on warrior virtues, and tended to disdain merchants as much because they weren't bloodthirsty enough as because they were too greedy.

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