Competition naturally degrades over time as companies go out of business and consolidate.
And it naturally improves over time as companies challenge established players and “distupt” the market. As long as the barrier to entry remains sufficiently low, there’s no reason for a net degradation in competition.
Large companies tend to become less efficient. Yes, they have economies of scale, but they tend to scare away innovators, so they switch to lobbying to maintain their edge.
The correct approach IMO is to counter the lobbying efforts of large orgs, and that means stripping governments of a lot of their power. Regulations tend to result in more monopolies, requiring antitrust to fix, and as you noted, that’s extremely rare.
Do you think a more direct “medical patient union” would work? Skipping a government intermediary?
Yeah, that can work. I’m thinking of having your primary care orovider offer your “insurance” policy, and they’d be on the hook to fund any procedures you need. So they have an incentive to keep you healthy, and that agreement could be a legal obligation that the doctor is doing their best to keep you healthy.
I do think we should socialize emergency services though. If a paramedic determines you need an ambulance ride, that should be free.
I’d prefer socialized healthcare over single payer
I prefer privatized care with transparency in pricing across the board, shortened patent durations, and some government assistance for the poor. But failing that, socialized care is probably the next best. Anything in the middle just breeds corruption.
Creation costs like the cost of an advanced degree?
No, copyright has little to do with advanced degrees. The creation costs are the time and resources needed to produce the book, movie, software project, or other work, which can be substantial.
There’s a better argument for patents, but still weak.
That was a rhetorical question
Right, and rhetorical questions by definition don’t have good answers. There needs to be a reasonable limit here, and what’s reasonable depends on what specifically we’re talking about.
For example, I benefitted a lot from my public education, but I can’t really quantify the impact to a a dollar amount, so I don’t think it’s reasonable to say my career success is due to public funding.
For me to accept that an innovation came from the public sector, I’d need to see a direct link between public funding and the innovation. Just saying a company got a tax incentive to put an office somewhere doesn’t mean all innovations from that office is government funded.
Is it unreasonable to say that the state is paying you to drive?
Yes, that’s unreasonable.
Driving is heavily subsidized by the state. For example, a lot of the funding for roads comes from income taxes instead of direct use taxes like registration and gas taxes. Even so, I don’t consider that to be paying me to drive, but it is an incentive to drive.
The government does pay me to have babies since I get a tax credit if I have kids. The difference is I have to do something proactive to get the benefit, whereas the roads will be funded whether I drive or not.
If a company gets a tax incentive to put an office somewhere, that doesn’t mean all inventions made there are publicly funded unless that’s specifically called out in the incentive deal.
If the market is sufficiently competitive, yes, I trust corporations more than governments. I firmly believe giving more power to governments results in more monopolies, generally speaking, because it creates an opportunity for the larger players to lobby for ways to create barriers to competition.
That’s a pretty broad statement though, and there are certainly cases where I would prefer the government to step in.
monopsony/single-payer system where all the buyers effectively are unionized
I don’t think that’s true. I think you’re making an assumption that the payer has an incentive to reduce costs, but I really don’t think that’s the case. What they do have is a lot of power over pricing, and while that could be used to force producers to reduce costs, it can also be used to shift costs onto taxpayers in exchange for favors from the companies providing the services.
That’s quite similar to the current military industrial complex, the military is the only purchaser of these goods, so the suppliers can largely set their prices. A monopsony means the value of making a deal is massive for a company because they get access to a massive market, which also means the value of lobbying to get that deal is also high.
So I really don’t trust that a single payer system would actually work in the US to reduce total healthcare costs, it’ll just hide it. If we want to actually cut healthcare costs, we need to fix a number of things, such as:
malpractice suits - providers need expensive insurance plans and hesitate to provide certain types of care (i.e. need more tests even though they’re very confident in their diagnosis)
pharmaceutical and medical device patent system, and subsequent lobbying to set regulations to hedge against competition
backroom deals between insurance companies and care providers where both sides get a “win” (provider inflates prices so insurance rep can report that they’re getting a deal by getting a discount)
whatever is causing ambulances to be super expensive
The problems are vast and I think single payer would likely just sweep them under the rug. We either need socialized healthcare or maximum transparency, single payer would just be a disappointment.
Yeah, Zelda was originally what I thought of when I heard “ARPG” because I grew up on the NES games. If I started w/ something later, I might consider the series “action-adventure” instead, because the definition of what an ARPG has changed somewhat. And yeah, I’d consider BotW “action-adventure” as well using today’s definition, but it would’ve been an ARPG using the earlier definition.
There are plenty of other somewhat similar games that do qualify as ARPG today that are very different from Diablo games, like the Ys series, Gurumin, and Cross Code. The Ys series is fairly diverse, but generally speaking, gear upgrades are plot-based (find in a chest in the dungeon you’re exploring) and there’s not a ton of diversity, and leveling your character is very important (1-2 level difference can be the difference between a nearly impossible boss fight and a manageable one). In Gurumin, there is a fixed set of upgrades, and you combine these to get effects. CrossCode has stats, unlockable abilities, and action-oriented combat. Loot isn’t really a major part of any of those games, they’re too action-oriented to be an RPG, and they have too much emphasis on progression to really be action-adventure.
Those are the sorts of ARPGs I absolutely love, yet everyone seems to focus on the Diablo-like dungeon crawlers where loot is a defining factor.
You can also legislate mandatory R&D in budgets for large corporations
Yeah, that’s not going to be abused/scare away companies.
You’d need to elaborate I’m not clear what you mean by this.
A few ways:
the term “R&D” can be pretty broad, so it’s unlikely to have the effect you’re thinking about - pretty much everything in a tech company is “R&D” whereas almost nothing in a factory is; making this somewhat fair is going to be very hard and will likely end in abuse
companies are more likely to set up shop where such restrictions don’t exist
enforcement could be selective to target companies that don’t “bend the knee” - esp true if the required amount is high enough that it’s not practical
force
Not a word I like to hear when it comes to government. The more power you give it, the more likely some idiot will come along and abuse it. Look at Trump, the only reason he can absolutely wreck the economy w/ tariffs is because Congress gave him that power and refuses to curtail it.
It sounds like the military is still getting what they paid for
Sure, but they’re getting a lot less of it than they could if it was a more competitive market.
They pay obscene amounts to get decent results. I think they could get the same (or better!) results with a lot less spending if the system wasn’t rigged to be anti-competitive.
Single payer also applies to healthcare proposals and is generally seen as a fantastic solution to keeping healthcare prices down.
I think that only works in countries w/o a large medical devices/pharmaceutical industry, otherwise you end up with ton of lobbying and whatnot. I don’t think the total cost of healthcare would go down, it would just shift to net tax payers and healthy people. Look at the ACA, it didn’t reduce healthcare spending at all, it just shifted who pays for it, and it seems healthy people ended up spending more (to subsidize less healthy people).
To actually reduce costs, you need to make pricing as transparent as possible, and I don’t think single payer achieves that. It can be a good option in certain countries, but I don’t think it’s universally a good option.
If that’s people’s main motivator then why does copyright exist in the first place?
Copyright exists to create a temporary monopoly so the creator can recoup their creation costs and some profit on top, since creating a work takes a lot more resources than duplicating it. Likewise for patents, though that’s more focused on sharing ideas.
large enough institution
We probably are. A quick search shows 100-200 patents, many of which have long since expired. Most of them are incredibly mundane, and I highly doubt a government would’ve been involved in funding it, and I don’t really know how to find out if they were.
How many transition steps are needed
That depends on a variety of things, but in general, very few? Like 2-3?
Let’s say my company gets funding to disseminate OSHA information to employees so they know their rights and what the company is obligated to provide. That has absolutely nothing to do w/ funding the actual production process at plants, even if those plants are subjected to OSHA safety requirements. In fact, it likely runs counter to increasing production because employees in a seminar by definition aren’t producing product at the plant.
So yeah, I would say government funding has to be pretty directly related to R&D to count as “funding” R&D. Maybe there’s an award for the first group to come up with something or a general subsidy to fund research in a given area.
I think Zelda is right at the boundary of Action-Adventure and ARPG, and some games fall on the RPG side (TLoZ, Zelda 2) and many on the action-adventure side. But many are right at that limit, using equipment and heart containers as progression.
Dark Souls is absolutely an ARPG. You have leveling mechanics, different builds with impactful player choice, and other forms of progression. Likewise for Witcher 3.
And yeah, what frustrates me a lot is that many people seem to mean “Diablo-like” when they say “ARPG,” which it is, but the genre is much larger than that.
Diablo’s effect on the market was significant, inspiring many imitators. Its impact was such that the term “action RPG” has come to be more commonly used for Diablo-style games, with The Legend of Zelda itself slowly recategorized as an action-adventure.
To me, ARPG means any game with strong RPG mechanics and a focus on the action instead of stats for determining player success.
They kinda did. They pushed out a sizable update that fixed a bunch of issues, but also upped the difficulty. People liked the improvements, but not the difficulty change, and my understanding is that they fixed that issue quickly but not before a bunch of people complained about it.
I get where they’re coming from, but I also don’t like them sking for positive reviews.
My understanding is they had a big update that fixed a bunch of issues people complained about, but also made the game more difficult, and people didn’t like that.
And what’s the big selling point behind why you would want to get a degree?
To work on interesting problems, that’s why most people get advanced degrees, no? I highly doubt most people who get a Ph.D are in it for the money…
Indirect funding is the much harder one to suss out
It’s also rarely directly related to R&D. For example, the company I work for produces chemical products, and innovations in that formulation is critical to our competitive advantage, but not particularly interesting from a national perspective. Our innovations merely help our products stand out from competitors, but competitor products are pretty similar.
If we get subsidies (haven’t checked), it would be for producing these chemicals with less pollution, using locally produced ingredients, or to improve safety of transporting them.
If you try hard enough, yeah, you could probably find some form of government funding. But that doesn’t mean the patents were produced as a direct result of public funding.