Decent black option:
Twisted Abomination
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STORY TIME!!!
Today I had the misfortune of stumbling into a Facebook discussion with two Wizards employees. As is often the case with
Magic-related people, the discourse suffered when the topic had to do with other things, which was unfortunate because that was the entire conversation.
Jesse Mason shared a link.
3 hours ago via mobile
Unpaid Internships Must Be Destroyed
LS
Yeah, if people want to make a mutually beneficial transaction, fuck them, right?
3 hours ago · Like · 1
LS
The real scumbags in this story are the people who *signed* *up* to work for free, and then sued to try to get money.
3 hours ago · Like
Chris 'cml' Morris-Lent
right lee because capitalism is 100% choice and the market has no failures ever
2 hours ago · Like · 2
LS
I'm very confident these people are better judges of what is good for their lives than the guy who wrote this article.
2 hours ago · Like
Chris 'cml' Morris-Lent
it's also cool when there's a tacit requirement to work for free to get a job, must get rid of some of the poorer applicants which has gotta be great from a libertarian's perspective (less competition, you know)
2 hours ago · Edited · Like · 1
LS
The irony of your statement is that minimum wage laws do the most harm to unskilled workers, which tend to be poorer. It's like cutting the bottom rungs off the economic ladder. If you only provide $5 of value to a business, and the minimum wage is $7.25, they aren't going to hire you. But if they can hire you at $5, you have a much better shot of gaining experience and skills and working your way up.
2 hours ago · Edited · Like
Chris 'cml' Morris-Lent
is that an explanation for the economic model of a "professional" magic player?
2 hours ago · Edited · Like
LS
Also, you know, because it raises the costs of goods and services, which in turn raises prices, which in turn hits poor people disprporpriately hard.
2 hours ago · Like
Chris 'cml' Morris-Lent
you know, i used to think cutting the 12th pack from a 4-3-2-2 payout wasn't a win for everybody, but who am i to argue with a modo business analyst
2 hours ago · Unlike · 3
Mike Sacco
I love it when I look through someone else's status comments and they have just as many friends that are total embarrassing dinguses as I do
2 hours ago · Like · 3
LS
I don't discuss stuff related to my job on Facebook. If that's the way this is going to go, then I'm out of this discussion.
2 hours ago · Like
MM
fairly natural progression from unpaid internships into lee having a hard time falling asleep on top of piles of magic online money
2 hours ago · Like · 3
Chris 'cml' Morris-Lent
Huh, a compartmentalizing libertarian? I thought it was an all-encompassing philosophy. Render unto Wizards, I guess.
To steer it somewhere less personal, I'd say the USA is past the sweatshop childhood of capitalism to the point where, who knows, maybe government regulations can help promote the middle class and equality of opportunity
2 hours ago · Like · 1
LS
Clearly you missed my previous comments where I explained how setting wage floors has a dispropriately negative effect on the poor, *reducing* their opportunities (both relatively and absolutely).
about an hour ago · Like
Chris 'cml' Morris-Lent
Unfortunately, I didn't miss them
about an hour ago · Like
Zac Ohnemus
I think when people turn to free market arguments they forget that a lot of those models work best when both parties have near perfect information. But in cases like these high power and information parties pray on low power low information individuals. So in fact I doubt the individuals in this story do have a better idea is best for them because they have little to no information on typical outcomes.
about an hour ago via mobile · Unlike · 1
Chris 'cml' Morris-Lent
But Zac, Objectivists are by definition omniscient
about an hour ago · Like
Chris 'cml' Morris-Lent Not to harp on Magic too much, but it's astonishing to me that a game of incomplete information, and therefore luck and psychology and subjectivity and trades and speculation and so on, could engender a mindset where perfect play is possible and there's a single answer to everything.
about an hour ago · Like
MM
i'm astonished by cml's inability to respond to lee's points directly, although i'm less astonished that someone is firing potshots on the internet
about an hour ago · Like
Chris 'cml' Morris-Lent
Alright, "minimum wage increases will allow the growth of a poor person's income to outpace that of the increasing cost of services, and unpaid internships presuppose that a person can afford to work without pay for a certain amount of time, which compromises equality of opportunity"
about an hour ago · Like
MM
what does equality of opportunity even mean
about an hour ago · Like
Mike Sacco
*says "dingus" but disguises it as a cough*
about an hour ago via mobile · Like · 1
Chris 'cml' Morris-Lent
An individual for having equal shot at making a good life for himself or herself? There's no strict definition necessary for the above example, but it's a theoretical thing that can only be approached in real life and is therefore as meaningful (or meaningless) as rationality or perfect information or Pareto efficiency or meritocracy.
Max, you're brilliant, you don't need me to explain how it's better (or "more efficient") to have a smart poor dude land a job and make your entity a lot of money than it would be to have a less smart rich dude land a job instead because of internship etc. and make less (or enough less to the point where a paid internship is a good investment for the company).
about an hour ago · Like
MM
oh, i thought it was that everyone had equal opportunity to accept or reject unpaid internships as they saw fit
about an hour ago · Like
Chris 'cml' Morris-Lent
If your actions have no consequences and the world has infinite possibilities, then I can see believing that
about an hour ago · Like
Caylen Burroughs
just to illuminate how ethically bankrupt the idea of unpaid internships are: would the "educated" libertarians in this thread explicitly lay out the differences between unpaid internships and Sharecropping?
about an hour ago via mobile · Like
Chris 'cml' Morris-Lent
Courtesy more lucid friend of mine: "You'd think gamers of all people would understand the difference between 'wanting to do something' and 'being forced into choosing the least bad out of several bad choices,' especially people in game design."
about an hour ago · Like · 2
Chris 'cml' Morris-Lent
Think of it this way: if everyone had equal opportunity to accept or reject unpaid internships, then wouldn't everyone be close to equal? This is far more radical, and requires far more regulation and inefficiency, than my proposal
about an hour ago · Like · 1
Jesse Mason
when someone sets a price for something (in this case, labor at $0) that ends up... affecting other people!! holy shit
37 minutes ago · Like
Chris 'cml' Morris-Lent
What is a Magic "pro player" but an unpaid intern? (See fig. 1)
Christina LaFon
lmao Jesse i love your commentary
2 minutes ago · Like
Chris 'cml' Morris-Lent
This thread perfectly explains how MTG culture encourages the very same biases MTG itself should eradicate. I can't speak for the overall commercial viability of this model, but I know it's discouraged me from recommending this game to a great deal of my friends.
a few seconds ago · Like
Chris 'cml' Morris-Lent
"Sharecroppers had a mutually beneficial transaction, better they do that than starve like NCAA athletes"
about a minute ago · Like
Chris 'cml' Morris-Lent
Free labor drives down prices? You mean ... correlation and causation are sometimes muddled? WELL I'VE READ SOME AYN RAND BOOKS AND THEY SAY OTHERWISE
about a minute ago · Like
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(MM is a designer who is good, when he wants to be; LS is part of the large Wizards crowd that I am told by an inside source is "bad at their jobs"; this crowd, he went on to say, constitutes almost everyone there except R&D, the people who make the cards themselves.)
Anyway! Good god, rereading this I am surprised the LS fellow can even breathe. Trying to argue these things with him was like talking morals with a Baptist or going to couples therapy over Skype with a three-year-old. I think I'd like him more if he didn't think he were telling the truth. (In literature we have a thing called the 'aptronym,' a perfect name -- Ms. Judge the Latin teacher, Aleksey Vayner the investment-banking applicant, and anyone in Dickens come to mind -- for the main libertarian fellow, what's the opposite of that?)
In any event this all explains a great deal of the corporate euphemism and falsehood that contaminate the game's culture. Finishing
A Handful of Dust for the fourth time this evening it occurred to me that Tony's situation in the beginning, where he's chucked and interchangeable, and at the end, where he's detained and indispensable, are roughly the same thing, as are Objectivism and fatalism, or thinking you have all the control or none of the control. Again, you'd think that a game of variance, incomplete information, psychology, etc. would disabuse people of those kinds of idiocies, but the fact of the matter is that it doesn't, because the only way to make money from
Magic is to be a Wizards employee, and once you're a Wizards employee, you'll never need to risk losing again.
Discuss amongst yourselves
