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The author was specifically referring to the original 3 book rules, which pre-dated Forgotten Realms by 13 years.

I'm not sure what you mean here. I had the original books, the supplements, then "Basic D&D" and "Advanced D&D". The rules were the same, just repackaged. The original rules didn't "recommend" using Chainmail, they assumed you had a copy and knew the rules, which was a source of confusion for newbies.

I remember being disappointed with AD&D as it was just the same old shit rules, with Dave Arneson's name cynically removed from the copyright. The next year I discovered Runequest, and later in College, Champions, and never looked back.

I think by the 80s D&D was well known, and not just because of the TV show. This was before 2nd edition, which came out in 1989.

I vaguely remember looking over 2nd edition, they tweaked a few things, but the core mechanics were the same.

3rd edition did shake things up a bit, and were the first version I considered worth playing.


I was talking about the original version of D&D that came in a box with three booklets and required Chainmail for combat.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_(1974)


Scala 3 has had union types for 4 years now. Scala can be used to do Haskell style pure FP, but with much better tooling. And it has the power of the JVM, you can fall back to Java libraries if you want.

I don't know exactly what you are trying model with this hypothetical circular dependency.

However, circular dependencies can be represented with lazy (aka non-strict) references and deferred function calls (aka thunks / call-by-name), and are IMO easier to reason about than mutable imperative techniques for representing such relationships. They also have the advantage of being totally thread-safe.

The OP (Lihaoyi) is the author of an important set of Scala libraries, and Scala is an example of what you are describing. Scala is a hybrid OO / FP language that is not dogmatic about purity. You can be totally imperative if you want.

It is common in the Scala ecosystem to implement performance-critical library code using local mutability and null references. Internally the function is imperative; to the caller, it is functionally pure.


The billionaires are trying that in California, and us peasants are quite suspicious of the deal...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Forever


Texas actually has higher taxes than California, despite the lack of income tax. They make up for it in property tax AFAIK. California actually has low property taxes for many property owners, thanks to the controversial proposition 13.

Desirable urban areas of California are expensive because we don't have enough housing.


As a Texan, who has considered moving to California many times, this is laughable. I pay maybe $10k-$11k in property taxes (https://tax-office.traviscountytx.gov/properties/taxes/estim...). I work for myself at the moment, but if I took my previous salary of $200k and earned that in CA instead, I would owe CA closer to $15k, and I'm not grandfathered into prop 13. Never once in my career has the math made any sense for living in CA over TX from a tax perspective. And you if you don't own your property, you don't owe TX anything.


Back in 2018 I did the math and ended up buying a house in Texas. Table stakes for a 2- or 3-bed shack on the SFBA peninsula was ~$1.5M at the time. At 1%, that's $15k / year in perpetuity to CA. In TX I found an amazing house in the town I was looking at for about $450k, and the property tax on this particular one (every house is in a locality, county, school district, maybe some other domains, and each has their own tax) added up to about 3%, or $13.5k / year.

In addition to being fewer dollarbucks out of my pocket, I had confidence that that money was going to be used closer to my own community.

(All of this is to say nothing of TX having no capital gains tax, which pushed the move from being kind of a wash to being a slam dunk.)

I didn't end up actually moving there for personal reasons, and having done all this analysis makes the California taxes all the harder to stomach.


In Washington, the property tax rate is 1% with no income tax.


Housing is presumably more expensive here. I know my uncle has a house twice as large as mine at similar cost, although that was 20 years ago. But then of course you have to pay much higher AC bills.

The tax thing is just something I hear in the California reddit groups when people discuss the never ending claims of a "California exodus". Allegedly, people have moved to Texas and discovered that they aren't actually saving money compared to California, and the weather is way worse.


> And you if you don't own your property, you don't owe TX anything.

If you're renting, it's not like your landlord isn't baking that I to your rent.


But the rent is way lower on the average because cost per sq ft is way lower.


Wages are lower as well.

> Desirable urban areas of California are expensive because we don't have enough housing.

I hear this a lot about California and other places. But I also know lots of people look to buy a 2nd, 3rd, etc property for rental income. For those homeowners, buying more property is rational because it's an investment they already understand. They can reap economy of scale benefits, even at a low multiple like 2-3 properties: water heaters, dishwashers etc become easier to maintain. The incentives are strong for homeowners to buy rental property. And they're in a stronger position to buy than renters.

My gut tells me that 7-8 of every 10 new houses built are bought with the intention to rent it out. It seems like "build more homes" will result in current property owners owning more property to rent out, and most renters will still be renters.


Then that would result in lower cost rental units. While not what everyone wants, it would be a great improvement over the current situation. There are also ways to create tax incentives that could discourage your scenario from happening.


Houses are not built with any particular intent. Developers and property owners are not the same people, and don't even have the same interests. Single family homes for rental are actually quite rare and most businesses that try to enter the market fail and leave again.


This is a large reason why many of our larger municipalities now forbid to buy a home in their zone if it isn’t (going to be) your primary residence. It seems to be working quite well.


The only thing that matters is how many homes there are; stuff like this and vacancy taxes has barely any effect. The main reason to do it is if you want to appear to solve the problem without actually trying to solve it.

The main reason anyone would own two SFHs is that you need to do this in order to move. If you sell your first home before moving you're homeless. And after that it can take a long time to find a buyer.

They're a bad rental investment though because it's way too risky to own one; one bad renter or one roof replacement means you've lost money.


>The only thing that matters is how many homes there are

Cost of construction also matters - it reduces the renter's BATNA which reduces bargaining power.


That sounds like a policy I can get behind. Can you share a name of such a policy or a link to one?


That’s an idiotic law. It discourages home building.


Maybe you are talking about Ultima Online, because the original Ultima games predate Time Bandits. Also, Marvel multiverse would have been mostly influenced by DC Comics alternate Earths, with Earth-2 introduced in 1961.


Richard G was HEAVY into time bandits (1981) and Ultima 2 (1982) on were heavily influenced and easter eggs for the movie are spread all over. The airplane in New San Antonio for example...


And it was probably heavily influenced by DC Comics alternate earths. Earth-2 was introduced in 1961.


I've lived in the Bay Area for 60 years, and never witnessed or been near a shooting. They do happen more often here, but violence is far lower than you would think from the media and online anecdotes.


I don't plan to work in an office ever again, and it is not because I am an introvert. I am saving 2-3 hours of my life by not commuting.


See my point about American having stupid commute because they refuse/can’t live close to their job.

Every discussion about WFH seems to me as a discussion about how US office culture is garbage and not about WFH.


This is not specific to Americans, in Germany a lot of people have the same problem.


I question the life choice of anyone that chose to have a 3h commute and apparently they do to because they would like to WFH. I think a lot of people are blaming their companies for situation they put themselves in but that’s on trend with the spirit of the time.


If I can live and work in a comfortable spacious house with a garden and no traffic nearby, why would I subject myself to renting a 1 square meter flat in an overly busy overly pricey city, just so I can slave my hours in an office?

We now have the ability to get big bucks and pay little rent for good housing, and not be stuck like sardines in traffic, and not having to listen to extroverts' incessant yapping.

Why does it make you mad? We nerds don't have the rights to happiness?


It doesn’t make me mad.

You are choosing to live far. That’s your own choice. No one has a duty to adapt the work environment to suit it.


> That’s your own choice. No one has a duty to adapt the work environment to suit it.

Nope, wrong. It's not my own choice only. It's the choice of many many people, increasingly more, enough that employers have to reckon with us. Hopefully you don't feel threatened or upset about it, cause it's happening, it's gonna happen more, and no amount of corporate shoe-licking can stop it.

There are plenty of people who are okay to be stuck 3 hours in traffic, or pay an exorbitant rent just for the privilege to be working in a cubicle. Increasingly so, however, many are rethinking this arrangement and refusing to work in an environment that doesn't suit them.

So, I don't know about duty, but employers can go f*ck themselves if they can't provide what I am looking for, and I won't settle for less, both in terms of flexibility, remote options, and salary. And since there's many of us starting to think like that, some employers will start seeing reason, and provide an accommodating work environment. To stay competitive, others will have to follow or settle for sub-par workers and potentially (hopefully soon) go into oblivion.

Employers who can't or won't adapt the work environment to the demands of the workers, will perish, and those who can, will flourish. It's as simple as that.


> enough that employers have to reckon with us

No really, they don’t.

You are confusing what you want with what’s happening.


> No really, they don’t.

Oh, really, they do. And no amount of corporate boot-licking can change that. It's, and always will be, worker power.

> You are confusing what you want with what’s happening.

It's possible that you are confusing a potentially bad situation you are in, with what's happening to the rest of the worker force, many of who are empowered and hold a considerable bargaining power in the market. More and more of us have been getting a 4 day work week without the loss of pay, and the right to work remotely.

I, for example, am happily on a 4 day work week, and haven't been to the office in 3 years, and so are many of my colleagues and many other people in the industry. No amount of corp simping or RTO mandate will bring this back.

Remote work:

- https://remoteok.com/

- https://business.gov.nl/running-your-business/staff/health-a...

4 day work week:

- https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/07/81percent-of-young-people-sa...

- https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/03/opinions/32-hour-work-wee...

- https://www.npr.org/2024/02/27/1234271434/4-day-workweek-suc...

- https://fortune.com/europe/2023/09/04/scotland-4-day-work-we... - https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/feb/21/four-day-week-...

- https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/business/four-day-work-we...


No jobs near my home and can't afford a decent housing near my office with my salary. But yeah, right, it's my fault. Luckily my employer is more clever than your post and will happily let us work from home for 3 days since he values our work.


Since Germany was mentioned, I will say that there is a policy debate in Germany right now about taking away unemployment benefits [1] from anyone who refuses a job with up to 3h commuting time. So a 3h commute is not necessarily something that people choose, unless the other choice is to not have any household income.

[1] This denomination is slightly oversimplified to avoid giving a lecture on how social welfare works in Germany.


Typically real estate is extremely expensive near the places where company offices are. So it's a little unfair to call this a "choice".


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