When dealing with electronic goods, where do we draw the line with theft. Even in video games, electronic goods do have an effective market value (even if real money trading is banned), and there have been a few court cases surrounding items of great value. Often times the items stolen has a market value too small to be worth investigating, but what of the cases where there is a significant investment. Eve Online has some interesting cases where the market value being above a few thousand US dollars. Diablo 3 use to have a real money auction house with items worth up to $300, and with a gold market that allowed for items to be sold for even more than that.

Now, Diablo 3 bans scams and would take action against players engaging in them. But in Eve Online, it looks like some of the tactics used are allowed. In another game, Path of Exile, scamming people is allowed (and there even seems to be some protections for scammers). While Path of Exile bans real money trading, there is still a black market and certain items do have a market value, some worth noticeable amounts.

And while I can't think of any case yet, it would be possible for a video game to be created where the in game currency is a crypto currency that is usable outside the game as a crypto currency as well.

I'm not saying we should legalize all scamming, but I do think it is worth discussing further where we draw a life, if we draw a line, and what that line looks like.

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Chance you are actually able to say that vs. chance you made a mistake in reasoning that conclusion? Still not a bet worth taking.

How many people would be willing to let someone else do their job for them when the cost is adding a little extra bias, something that isn't even a big deal in a single case (but which adds up over time)? It feels like ethics will quickly take a back seat for some small boon.

Then again, if the intrinsic value is worth less than the effort to use it, is there a difference from having no intrinsic value at all?

Couldn't the same be said of a brick and mortar store? They either accept the offers they are given or they don't. That for some item they only accept offers of exactly 9.99 (plus tax), rejecting not only lower offers but higher offers, doesn't change that the interaction can be described in the same fashion.

All the rest also applies to normal supply and demand. When you do a production run of some item, the cost tends to be fixed per item. Doing another run at a different time may cost different, and it is possible for something extreme to happen (factory accident), but in general the cost of production of a single run is the same.

I see nothing about this that would void basic economic reasoning, where things like 'reducing fees' happens in certain conditions.

Few systems are direct democracies. Isn't it more likely the people decided the rule maker should be who the rule maker is (or makers are) and the rule maker(s) then decided what the law should be. And that is just some of the political systems you can model.

Think of like how congress like a <25% approval rating but most of them keep getting voted back in.

I've developer a few simplistic economic simulations in the past for fun, some of which included land ownership, but I never considered adding each agent having the ability to modify the law of land ownership as part of the simulation. The comment made me think of what would the impact of adding it be, and if there is less validity of models which don't include it.

So a miner will never reduce the cost to include a transaction into their block, even when they aren't getting enough to fill up the block?

>They might stop mining altogether

Maybe, but any market can experience short term irrationality. Maybe it takes them a few hours to stop mining in which they lose money. Or maybe stopping operations costs enough money that the miner won't stop even at a small loss, at least for some amount of time.

Say the cost to mine falls by x (cheaper energy or some others amount), and x < f(t). x - f(t) < 0. The decrease in cost is less than 0, meaning the cost effectively increased since it didn't decrease by the amount needed due to the built in difficulty increase.

Normal economics works this same way due to scarcity, though the default change in cost into the future is far less sure of a thing. Take mining gold. Given that gold is mined from the cheapest to mine spots first, the more gold you mined, the more the cost of mining the same amount of gold. Maybe a new mine filled with easier to mine gold is found, maybe a current mine runs out of gold much sooner than expected, but it works in a similar manner.

Supply and demand drives prices, but it does so through individual actors setting prices they are willing to pay/accept (or by algorithms that have been setup by some human who set up the rules by which it will set prices).

>What masses of historical evidence?

This is a question in response to the GPs post that:

>>masses of historical evidence

>The ones that show that being a male has long been a major disadvantage in a legal system?

This is a purposed answer to the previous question, making the claim that there is plenty of historical evidence that males have been strongly discriminated against by the legal system, even if we went back in time. Need I source a claim showing that men were more likely than women to be charged, convicted, and receive longer sentences? This has been the case for at as far back as I've looked.

The reason for this is because GP acted as if I was ignoring some evidence that would justify the argument that the legal system is biased against women because it goes easier on them and make it somehow compatible with the second argument that the legal system is biased against racial minorities because it treats them harsher. It shouldn't be hard to see that these things still appear to be in contradiction.

>Yes, going back into the past being a minority was even worse than it is today, to a point where there was absolutely no justice at all

This is to preempt a response that if you went back in time, the legal system was even more biased against minorities than it is today. Instead of waiting for that response to be potentially made, I made it myself. I preempt this based on past experiences of seeing the point made in counter to my point.

> but that doesn't have an impact on the line of reasoning used to try to say the legal system discriminates against women.

I then follow up saying that I don't see this as a counter, because it doesn't impact the half of the two statements I have a problem with. One can try to explain why racial minorities being treated worse in the past by the legal system supports the statement that the legal system going easier on women is discriminating against women, only that the claim that I made in the first half of this sentence is not enough.

>This type of response only further reinforces the notion that the underlying reasoning and terminology is created ad-hoc to justify existing notions.

I then finish by saying the type of response from GP, which does not explain their argument to any degree other than a claim of forgetting to take historical evidence into account, makes people more dismissive of the original line of reasoning and the terminology associated with it, that of systematic discrimination, because the historical evidence appears to support my claim, not theirs. In short, an unsatisfactory defense strengthens the opposition's argument.

Would you like me to further clarify any point?

I feel like bringing up the notion of choice and free will is opening a can of black holes, but when dealing with mental illness you have to.

>When people try to explain why you're coming to broken conclusions due to broken reasoning, they get attacked as radical leftists for using the straightforward terminology we have for describing the phenomenon we're discussing.

How much of this is caused by people have past experience with selective application of different lines of reasoning.

For example, use the legal's systems racial and sex based discrimination. If we look at racial discrimination, it should be pretty clear that minorities have it much worse than whites. And there is a lot of research on this. If you then look at it based on gender, it appears there is even stronger discrimination based on gender than on race, with males much worse off than females (and a minority male receiving the worst of each). But the treatment of this online seems quite different. While it is a personal anecdote, on multiple occasions I've been told the racial discrimination is caused by structural racism against minorities that treats them worse than whites at every step on the system (from being more likely to be stopped and searched, to being more likely to be convicted given equal evidence, to receiving harsher sentences), and then being told that the gender discrimination is caused by sexism against women, resulting from the legal system treating women as children every step of the way (meaning they are less likely to be stopped and searched, less likely to be convicted, and receive less time). These seem like polar opposite lines of reasoning, yet I've seen both used as the same time.

I think it is at this point you get people who become opposed to the underlying reasoning because it appears that the group using the reasoning is starting with an assumption and then picking the logic that best fits their assumption. And I think many of the people you encounter online who use this reasoning are doing just that. People of every political and other leaning like to manipulate data to fit their world view. Combined with a lack of exposure to the actual scientists who work on this it can paint people's view of the language. To say nothing of scientist being humans and thus there being examples of scientist being very non-scientific about some issue (while I don't know of any examples on this particular issue, I did read through case of correspondences published in a scientific journal dealing with classification of certain behaviors as mental illnesses where some scientist were making some very indefensible arguments concerning evolution of which numerous counter examples were available that basically boiled down to "there is no way trait X evolved because it isn't reproductively advantageous in our environment").

And to be clear on my own stance, I do think that systematic racism exists in our current system, including in sub-systems where there are no racist members. There are agent models that show with even a small in-group bias, completely devoid of any out-group bias, you can have a system where out-group bias is apparent. For example, a system of entities of type A and B where A's has a certain preference for grouping with other A's, but no preference for not grouping with B's, ends up behaving similar to a system where A's have a preference for not grouping with B's.

I feel like the problem is worse with children due to them having a developing brain, where the impacts of medication can have impacts into changing the very person taking them. I am especially concerned with medication for mental illnesses that are prescribed to children, often times off label, but the risk exists for most any medication.