True equality!

The key point you’re missing, I think, is that the tax would increase exponentially for each additional house owned. The first one could be, say, a 0.5% tax increase, and it could go up from there.

If you’re in a position where paying 0.5% extra tax on your hunting cabin split 5 ways will bankrupt you, then I’d argue that it isn’t how you’re supposed to spend your money. That’s “Skip eating out once a year” territory.

I’ve said this before (and caught flak for it) but I think the solution to this is to apply a heavy additional tax to vacant homes (as defined as any home that isn’t occupied by a permanent resident for more than 6 months a year), and increase the tax exponentially for each residence beyond the first owned by the same company or individual.

At some point, you make it so expensive to keep unoccupied properties that they’re better off letting people live there for free than continuing to let them go unoccupied. Use all of the proceeds from this tax to assist homeless people or build new dense housing developments.

“But Kobold, what about soandso with their summer home?” If you can afford a second home, you can afford to pay a bit more tax on it to benefit the public good.

“But Kobold, a lot of those homes that are vacant are run-down, or are in places nobody actually wants to live!” Doesn’t matter. If they’re vacant, tax them. Use the money to build dense housing in the places where people do want to live. If the place is too run-down to be occupied, the owner can tear it down and do something else with it.

The city should just put forth a new plan that involves taking those specific homeowners’ land via eminent domain, and using it to install new parking lots or roadways or whatever will fit to accommodate the new requirements.

Terraria

No, but a multiplayer game which starts with, for example, 4 players could be reduced to 2 players before it ends, so they have to specify ‘begins with’ to keep that multiplayer game from also being a two-player game at that point.

And this really sums up the level of semantics and minutia that requires a 299 page comprehensive rule PDF for a card game.

Or any interaction that requires understanding layers.

In all fairness, the instructions you actually need to know to play the game could be summarized in a single page (with the caveat that there will be a lot of edge cases that won’t be adequately explained there); tournament judges and, to a lesser extent, tournament players are the only folks who need to know the majority of what’s in that PDF.

That said, the game is super archaic and hard to learn, and any player who thinks otherwise is probably either playing only at a super basic level, or just isn’t considering how long they’ve been playing and how much nuance they’ve accumulated. Sorry you had a shitty experience; your friends absolutely should not have tried to throw you into the deep end like that. You sound like you already know, but to reiterate it, this was absolutely not a failing on your part and was 100% your friends’ fault.

If you actually want to try the game (and I completely understand if you don’t), you can go to a game store that sells MtG products and ask for a (free) intro deck. They’re small decks with simpler cards and a booklet explaining the basic game rules that can be helpful to learn the game.

There’s also Magic Arena, the computer game version, which really does a pretty good job of teaching the game. If you don’t mind that format, I’d absolutely start there.

Wow. If you told me this was satire, I’d 100% believe you.

“Here, just use this easy quick-reference PDF.”

Come in with some bolt cutters. Free the milk.

I remember when I was in middle school, I saw my older brother working on a Unix system and it looked like he was some elite hacker. Now, it’s the same look I get from my kid any time he sees me doing anything in the terminal.

Maybe I needed to add a \s to that. :D

Swordfish was always one of my favorites. Writing a worm using a custom compiler he wrote many years prior (to 2001) and had stored on a tape drive in some dusty basement.

Hacking scenes in old movies are ridiculous to look back on. Always some crazy GUI-heavy pseudo-video game with people clattering away madly on keyboards and tense music playing. So unlike hacking scenes of today, which are obviously much more realistic to appeal to a refined modern audience. We’ve truly come a long way.

I believe their meaning was, ‘Do you have to see boots on the ground before you call it a war?’, not accusing you personally of wanting war.

In short, vibe coding kick-started an era in which humans could make computers do new things, rather than the stuff they’d been hard-wired to do at the factory or through installed “software” (another word for “apps”).

Yeah, it sure is a good thing we have AI. Now real people can make computers do the things they want! It’s a novel idea that previously was just unthinkable.

Pretty sure they were going for the former, but I also wouldn’t put it past anyone who would actually wear this shirt in public to do the latter.

Is that a ring of holes near the bottom of it? That seems unsanitary as fuck.

Don’t listen to them, you can be as enthusiastic about chocobos as you like! ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)