> Howdy, I'm the Sheriff of Chartcrimes

Oh no

* Angel Summoner can also summon Stealth Angels and Lockpicker Angels and Poison Angels. But it costs them a slot that they'll have to rest to get back. Sure, resting is unlimited but we expect players to adhere to the honour system.

> really pushed the boat out.

Well, except for maintaining the Boomer RPG tradition of "magic is so ridiculously overpowered" - but at least it's not implemented as "What would you like to be - sneaky BMX Bandit who strikes from the shadows or Angel Summoner* who must make do with angelic might?"

I love them all (and the 2-hour video essay as the new 'radio') ... but Tyranny was best because it really pushed the boat out.

It's so, so good. Real sneaky way to force people who come in the door thinking they're going to play a Fight The Aliens Strategy game to end up focussed on African state development and the maintenance of democracy.

Sorry Cambodia, some must be sacrificed if all are too survive!

Quite upsetting to find out that the shit writing that felt unrealistic is, in fact, quite realistic - whereas it's the good writing with the compelling bad guys that is utterly unrealistic / inserted clumsily for the reader.

Sharp reevaluation of how much realism matters to me in fiction.

> to Musk and Bezos

They're not just ... credible.

Like, literally, for years when someone dropped a shallow, incoherent, unsypathetic character like that in as the bad guy and groan at the lazy, unrealistic shit writing.

Particularly the "capitalism bad/I'm polluting for no reason" genre.

I have a whole universe of sympathy for Hobbes' ability to look at any problem and come up with a position that makes everyone hate him.

It's hopepunk - both the Soviets *and* American presidents/political system in general end up considerably less insane in this timeline (saying more would mean spoilers).

People who lack self-awareness often lack the self-awareness to realise they lack self-awareness.

It's good think out loud, but this is one of those cases where when assumptions conflict with reality it's the assumptions that need to be rethought.

As a material fact, it hasn't been problematic (not even in the marginal sense of "the fringe of the fringe obsess about it").

Performative Reasonableness.

It's not *nothing* - take a moment to think about politicians who *don't even do this* - but it's not *everything*/the sort of thing that stands up under even minor scrutiny.

That is pretty inoffensive when it's a thermostat/The Good has been defined by a democratic process and now you're asking as welfare economist to implement it.

But trying to export those models outside that context tends to lead to collapse as the premises no longer hold.

It's also normative - unlike political science - and proceeds from the premise that there *just is* a measure of The Good for each individual that you can straightforwardly capture and then you proceed to figure out how to optimise for that with policy.

Part of that is that social choice theory starts from the assumption of individual preferences developed with respect to specific policies not parties/values - "where you should we set the thermostat?" not "who should be CEO?".

So *one* of the issues is that median voter theorem really comes from Social Choice Theory more than political science and gets cross-applied by economists more than political scientists.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_...

In the context where you have only two established elite parties located close enough together on the 'political party ring' / post-WWII where the Nazi part of the ring is verboten, you can say "Centre" and have it unambiguously understood to mean a specific zone on the ring somewhere bottom right.

There's a very basic Tripping Over Your Own Shoelaces error here.

Voters are distributed pretty evenly over 2 attitudinal dimensions.

Political parties are distributed (with a notable gap post-WWII) across 1 dimension *around* those 2 dimensions.

The other issue is that a median in two dimensional space is a line - even in the simplest of times when you could ish ignore all but Con and Lab, the median voter ran from Auth-Left-BNP to Lib-Right-LibDem.

A lot of older people haven't adjusted to the - good news! - that this niche no longer exists since the educational tap water stopped being actively poisonous and that the 'public' school system is now an explicitly export-oriented *luxury* luxury good.

It has a weird age profile because England&Welsh schooling used to be like tap water in a developing country - not instantly poisonous but bad enough that even the *not dramatically prosperous* would drink only bottled water.

Yeah, I meant that to be caveated in the same hypothetical.

But with 5 close parties that means 5x4 unique pairs => 20 median lines across the political compass

> And makes unambiguous sense only in a single dimension.

That's the thing - in a two party system (even one spinning like a top like the US) you can make a reasonable case that the single dimension is the axis on the political from one party to the other => one median (line)

No rush! I plan to refactor the text[1] - there's somehow both *too much* **and** *too little* - as well as the code.

[1] (I'm informed parentheses (inside parantheses) can limit legibility)

Not obv what use that would be, but it would make more sense than simply declaring the Median Voter to be a fully signed up member of the Acquiescence Bias Party.

Also ... what is the meaning of "median" voter when you have *5 parties* just in England all within a few % of each other?

You can have 20 different medians between each unique pair - or you could form loose blocs and have a diagonal running Auth-Left to Lib-Right.

Yes, it's a bit "terrible food" & "such small portions" but "this is lazy bullshit/acq bias" & "how is this 'different'?".

In an - albeit highly mobile - strong two party system like the US you can reasonably argue that at any moment you orient voters on the line between the two parties and def a median that way.

But England alone has 20 different 'median' voters for each party pair.

Also, completely inane to talk about a "median" voter on a 2-dimensional space with 5 competitive parties.