Automatic Success and Failure on a natural 20 and 1

[tussock]

Tussock, medieval knights were vulnerable to both crossbow and longbow fire. They were effectively armor piercing.

That's a myth. At the battle of Crecy in 1346, a good many French knights in mail were felled by longbow fire. But at Agincourt in 1415, French knights and men-at-arms all in plate walked for several minutes under constant longbow barrage described as darkening the sky, which didn't seem to kill anyone of note. The weight of their armour in the soft ground and poor sight from closed helms left the formation disorganised and fatigued. They were struck at point blank by longbow fire untill the archers ran out of arrows to little effect, until said archers charged them in the flanks with their hatchets and mallets used to build a stake wall, which decided the day because the French could not move or strike any more so thick was the crush. Very few of them died until after they were disarmed and had their armour removed.

Horses were very vulnerable, as were any light troops like crossbowmen or longbowmen. Not the point (cavalry charges still regularly slaughtered longbowmen without their prepared fences). Longbows and Crossbows could pierce certain armour plates at certain angles, like the thigh plates with a rare strait hit, but the evidence of real battles is that high end armour was not vulnerable to the missile weapons it normally faced. That was the point. The arrival of the longbow created plate armour for all, and the development of firearms made it harder.

Steel plate chest armour saw continuous use from about 1350 to 1918, was out of favour for a few decades, and is now back in composite chest armour. It's great stuff, and it totally stops arrows.

[Omegonthesane]

Steel plate chest armour saw continuous use from about 1350 to 1918, was out of favour for a few decades, and is now back in composite chest armour. It's great stuff, and it totally stops arrows.

Continuous use? I thought there was a period in the middle where armour technology simply wasn't capable of stopping rank and file guns, to the point where the First World War began without helmets.

[fectin]

But plate armor does fine against shrapnel, ricochets, long enough range, bayonets, and swords, which remained threats throughout WWI.

[Hicks]

The reason armor fell out of favor was cost, not stopping power. It was cheaper to outfit vast formations with inexpensive and quickly made guns and bayonets than tie up skilled artisans for weeks making a single suit of plate.

Also weight. Heavy armor is heavy, expensive, and slow to manufacture, while cover weighs nothing, Is just as if not more capable of stopping a bullet, and at worst costs as much as an entrenching tool.

[fectin]

The US Government produces a lot of standards.
My absolute favorite so far is the grading ruberic for evaluating how well an Army officer supervises enlisted men digging a foxhole.

[zugschef]

The life of a soldier is worth shit. Do a research on WWII and which tactics the Allies used. When the Nazis only had anti-tank weapons left you know what they did? They sent in tanks and let their soldiers be slaughtered by the thousands.

Armor is way too expensive for modern warfare. Weapons may be expensive too, but at least they destroy something which can be rebuilt afterwards boosting economy.

And please leave out real warfare when discussing fantasy ttrpgs. It's ridiculous. Next thing is someone starts ranting that katanas suck and are so overrated because steel in Japan was of bad quality. *sigh*

[hyzmarca]

Steel plate chest armour saw continuous use from about 1350 to 1918, was out of favour for a few decades, and is now back in composite chest armour. It's great stuff, and it totally stops arrows.

Continuous use? I thought there was a period in the middle where armour technology simply wasn't capable of stopping rank and file guns, to the point where the First World War began without helmets.

Actually, the French fielded mounted Cuirassiers during World War I, though not many. Their armor was fairly useless against contemporary rifles, but they still wore it.

[infected slut princess]

Weapons may be expensive too, but at least they destroy something which can be rebuilt afterwards boosting economy.

So if I blow up your house and you now have to rebuild it, we are "boosting" the economy. That is absurd.

[Koumei]

Against the earliest firearms, which were shit, and could only hit air with any reliability*, plate armour was totally boss. Typically they would actually shoot it before selling it, and part of the armour would warp or dent without being punctured. That was the proof that no bullet could penetrate it. There was some term that evolved from that, but it eludes me at the moment.

*Indeed, the smoke clouds created gave enough cover that you could call their primary use defence.

[zugschef]

Weapons may be expensive too, but at least they destroy something which can be rebuilt afterwards boosting economy.

So if I blow up your house and you now have to rebuild it, we are "boosting" the economy. That is absurd.

well you do force people to spend money and not to save it. you might say people would just spend money for something else, but the truth is that people tend to save their money when inflation is high and there is a natural limit to economic growth. it's no coincidence that it's prefered to build new than to renovate.

but the real reason is that modern economies try to destabilize weaker economies and get resources under their control. what do you think the iraq wars were for? to free the iraqis from hussein?

first you destroy shit in another country, then you rebuild it so it's under your control.

[wotmaniac]

Weapons may be expensive too, but at least they destroy something which can be rebuilt afterwards boosting economy.

well, that's Broken Window Economics, and it's actually kinda counter-productive.

first you destroy shit in another country, then you rebuild it so it's under your control.

that's just good strategy.

[infected slut princess]

well you do force people to spend money and not to save it. you might say people would just spend money for something else, but the truth is that people tend to save their money when inflation is high and there is a natural limit to economic growth. it's no coincidence that it's prefered to build new than to renovate.

So if I am an Identity Thief and I hack your bank account, withdrawing all your savings, and go spend it at the mall, this is boosting the economy. That is absurd.

[RadiantPhoenix]

So if I am an Identity Thief and I hack your bank account, withdrawing all your savings, and go spend it at the mall, this is boosting the economy. That is absurd.

I'm pretty sure it is, and that this is one of the reasons why, "boosting the economy," doesn't automagically make your actions justified.

[zugschef]

Weapons may be expensive too, but at least they destroy something which can be rebuilt afterwards boosting economy.

well, that's Broken Window Economics, and it's actually kinda counter-productive.

yeah, i know that argument. i personally think that's simplified capitalist bullshit, but nevermind. these types of discussions lead to nowhere.

So if I am an Identity Thief and I hack your bank account, withdrawing all your savings, and go spend it at the mall, this is boosting the economy. That is absurd.

I'm pretty sure it is, and that this is one of the reasons why, "boosting the economy," doesn't automagically make your actions justified.

co-signed.

[wotmaniac]

well, that's Broken Window Economics, and it's actually kinda counter-productive.

yeah, i know that argument. i personally think that's simplified capitalist bullshit, but nevermind. these types of discussions lead to nowhere.

No, goddammit -- I want to completely derail this thread with a 10 page argument over economics!!!

oh, wait .... on second thought, never mind.

[Stubbazubba]

Don't let Frank see this...

[zugschef]

Don't let Frank see this...

FWAAAAAAANK!!!

[Username17]

well, that's Broken Window Economics, and it's actually kinda counter-productive.

Actually no. Broken Window Economics works fine, if your current problem happens to be that labor is going unused rather than a shortage of glass.

When the windows get broken, people get hired to make and install new windows. Then there are more employed people and thus more potential consumers, so other people get hired (or have their hours extended) to provide shoes and meals and handjobs and whatever to the newly employed. The total wealth of society is increased, because the fact that the window repairing people transform from unemployed people to consumers puts more resources to work than the mere resources required to fix the windows themselves.

The Broken Window Fallacy is only a fallacy in a planned economy. If the government is willing and able to put all the unemployed people to productive labor and continually ensure that every man and woman in the economy is a consumer who is working to their limits, then breaking windows pulls construction workers off of building new things to fix old things. As long as you have a free market and unemployed people, there will always be a place for Broken Window Economics.

So if I am an Identity Thief and I hack your bank account, withdrawing all your savings, and go spend it at the mall, this is boosting the economy. That is absurd.

Of course that would boost the economy. If I take money out of my bank account and spend it at the mall, the economy is boosted. If you take the money out of my account and spend it at the mall, the economy would be boosted by exactly the same amount. There's nothing absurd about that at all.

You seem to be conflating morality with wealth. The two are not particularly related. GDP goes up whenever there is productive labor or commerce. It doesn't only go up in the cases that said productive labor or commerce happens to be ethical or legal. If I came over to your house and killed your dog and sold the meat on the open market for twenty dollars, then GDP would have increased by twenty dollars.

When we talk about "the economy" we are talking about GDP. When we "boost the economy" we are talking about increasing GDP. That means that the total incomes of every single person have increased. If I steal a dollar from you, then my income has gone up by one dollar and your income has gone down by one dollar - that's zero sum. But if I spend that dollar to buy a cup of coffee at the mall, then the income of that coffee shack has gone up for that year by one dollar. The total is now +1 dollar over you getting to keep your dollar (assuming you weren't planning on spending it during this period). If the guy at the CoffeeShack spends the dollar on something else, the total would be +2 dollars for the year. And so on. The fast money moves, the more the "economy is boosted".

But whether boosting the economy is a good thing or not is entirely dependent on what it's being boosted with. The assumption of a market society is that people will normally be making Pareto-Efficient exchanges and thus everything people choose to buy or sell makes everyone happier. But this is not in fact the case. There are externalities. If I buy some Moldovan sex slaves, both people carrying out the transaction are happier (me and the Romanian human trafficker), but there are other people who didn't exchange any money in that transaction who are made less happy (the slaves themselves and also the family members who never see their daughters and sisters again). It is in fact trivially easy to imagine scenarios that increase GDP and nevertheless are a net loss for society. Many of these things are considered immoral or illegal or both.

But not all of them are. Right now, it's still considered basically OK to sell people harmful and addictive drugs like tobacco that destroy their internal organs and make them die young. This taxes the healthcare system, but of course that boosts the economy too!

Note: the vast majority of things included in GDP are not especially morally reprobate. It's actually a pretty good figure for the overall health of the economy. The fringe weirdness is nonetheless there.

-Username17

[infected slut princess]

Of course that would boost the economy. If I take money out of my bank account and spend it at the mall, the economy is boosted. If you take the money out of my account and spend it at the mall, the economy would be boosted by exactly the same amount. There's nothing absurd about that at all.

That is not really correct. To see why, we must address what is meant by “boosting the economy.” You and I mean different things by this, but you have helpfully explained that you mean “boosting economy = making GDP go up.” Ok, fair enough.

GDP is just a tool, a flawed tool as you recognize. As you rightly point out, it is not necessarily “good” just because the GDP went up. It can rise even when wealth does not increase.

Now, when I talk about “boosting the economy”, I was not referring to making the GDP rise. Instead, I mean increasing the marginal productivity of labor, which increases future income. This is done by increasing the capital invested per capita. This is what makes it possible to produce more stuff in the future. And because this is the process by which society’s wealth actually grows, this is a lot more meaningful than a flawed national accounting statistic like GDP which misleadingly goes up for all kinds of bad reasons.

Now let us return to the original example of the identity thief. Here, no new wealth is being created. Existing wealth is merely being shuffled around by a thief’s stealing activity.

While you may not personally be spending the money in your savings account at the moment on consumer goods at the mall, that money is still being used. The bank is lending it to others to acquire consumer goods (as with a mortgage or a credit card or car loan or whatever), or they are lending to others for production of capital goods (like factories and machines) so that future consumer goods can be made.

This means the money stolen by the identity thief was already being used for consumption or investment -- so the thief has done nothing to make human civilization wealthier. He is merely reallocating wealth that was already created. He is not boosting anything, even in terms of the GDP. Either way, the money is spent.

[fectin]

It doesn't boost the economy at all, in any way. At best it's only slightly worse than neutral, because spending is merely redirected, but capital is reduced by one window.

More generally the "broken window fallacy" is ignoring the opportunity costs of something, while counting the benefits.

[Stubbazubba]

GDP goes up whenever there is productive labor or commerce.

I thought GDP was largely a measure of consumption? Wages paid to a laborer aren't counted until they're in turn spent on a product or service.

[Username17]

GDP goes up whenever there is productive labor or commerce.

I thought GDP was largely a measure of consumption? Wages paid to a laborer aren't counted until they're in turn spent on a product or service.

Incomes equal consumption. My spending is your income, your spending is my income. Counting incomes and spending together would be double counting, but more spending does mean higher incomes by definition.

It doesn't boost the economy at all, in any way. At best it's only slightly worse than neutral, because spending is merely redirected, but capital is reduced by one window.

More generally the "broken window fallacy" is ignoring the opportunity costs of something, while counting the benefits.

I think you'd be hard pressed to define windows as capital. But in any case you seem to have forgotten that we live in a market economy rather than a planned economy. Because when we "redirect" spending, we are often redirecting from "nothing" to "something". The money that pays to replace the window doesn't have to come out of the money that was going to pay for blow jobs (redirecting spending from the hookers industry to the window repair industry), it could have been destined to sit under a mattress for the foreseeable future (thus "redirecting" spending from zero to a positive number). Indeed, in a depressed economy that is extremely likely to be what happens. Because depressed economies usually have a higher saving rate, that's why they are depressed.

This isn't just idle theory or anything, consider the actual pile of cash under the mattress of current corporations:


If you were to run around throwing rocks at the windows of GE and Exxon, then the money they spent to have them fixed would not come out of money allocated to productive projects, it would come out of a pile of money that is currently sitting under a proverbial mattress. Five trillion dollars are currently sitting under the proverbial mattresses of corporations, meaning that we could in fact very easily smash windows until we returned to prosperity.

Now, when I talk about “boosting the economy”, I was not referring to making the GDP rise. Instead, I mean increasing the marginal productivity of labor, which increases future income. This is done by increasing the capital invested per capita. This is what makes it possible to produce more stuff in the future. And because this is the process by which society’s wealth actually grows, this is a lot more meaningful than a flawed national accounting statistic like GDP which misleadingly goes up for all kinds of bad reasons.

Investment per capita is even worse as a measure than GDP. First of all, there are as many or more ways to tweak the capital per person number without creating real wealth. And secondly, the amount of capital that people have is a measure of how much money society owes them in the future, not how much society is actually going to produce. We hope that the two even out, but they don't always. Capital ownership is not a measure of future productivity, it's a measurement of debt.

Example1: During the Soviet Union's Fifth Ruble period, the government spurred people to work and produce more by printing and paying them more money. The flow of currency into society was actually faster than the creation of real goods and services, and people ended up with large bank accounts. The capital per person was very large, but ultimately the government had to wipe everyone's savings out by creating a new Ruble and giving people ten kopeks to the ruble on all bank accounts above a modest ceiling.

Example2: During the housing bubble, people invested tremendous amounts of wealth into building ownership: Residential Capital. This in turn caused a temporary boom in the production of new buildings. But at the end of the day, that huge investment into capital didn't increase anyone's productivity. In fact, it left households massively debt constrained, which in turn reduced their consumer spending which caused layoffs and slowdowns in manufacturing that reduced marginal output.

These are not obscure, technical examples. They are a pretty big deal. Capital investment is necessary but not sufficient to increase productivity. an increased saving rate does not correspond to periods of increased growth nor does it correspond to periods of technological advancement.



-Username17

[Korgan0]

Of course that would boost the economy. If I take money out of my bank account and spend it at the mall, the economy is boosted. If you take the money out of my account and spend it at the mall, the economy would be boosted by exactly the same amount. There's nothing absurd about that at all.

That is not really correct. To see why, we must address what is meant by “boosting the economy.” You and I mean different things by this, but you have helpfully explained that you mean “boosting economy = making GDP go up.” Ok, fair enough.

GDP is just a tool, a flawed tool as you recognize. As you rightly point out, it is not necessarily “good” just because the GDP went up. It can rise even when wealth does not increase.

Now, when I talk about “boosting the economy”, I was not referring to making the GDP rise. Instead, I mean increasing the marginal productivity of labor, which increases future income. This is done by increasing the capital invested per capita. This is what makes it possible to produce more stuff in the future. And because this is the process by which society’s wealth actually grows, this is a lot more meaningful than a flawed national accounting statistic like GDP which misleadingly goes up for all kinds of bad reasons.

Now let us return to the original example of the identity thief. Here, no new wealth is being created. Existing wealth is merely being shuffled around by a thief’s stealing activity.

While you may not personally be spending the money in your savings account at the moment on consumer goods at the mall, that money is still being used. The bank is lending it to others to acquire consumer goods (as with a mortgage or a credit card or car loan or whatever), or they are lending to others for production of capital goods (like factories and machines) so that future consumer goods can be made.

This means the money stolen by the identity thief was already being used for consumption or investment -- so the thief has done nothing to make human civilization wealthier. He is merely reallocating wealth that was already created. He is not boosting anything, even in terms of the GDP. Either way, the money is spent.

I highly recommend you read an introductory macroeconomics textbook. Michl's Macroeconomic Theory: A Short Course is excellent.

Firstly, one of Keynes' most brilliant and perceptive insights, and one that remains valid to this day, was that it's investment that determines saving, not the other way round, and investment doesn't just magically appear. The money that you put in the bank is money that isn't being spent on creating effective demand, which is in turn what allows for investment, since workers have to have wages to buy the cars or whatever. If there's demand, then managers will necessarily invest in factories or whatever, but if you put that money in the bank then it's not being spent on handjobs and sandwiches, which means that overall demand declines, which means that managers will invest less, and you end up depressing the economy and saving less, since you have less money to save. This is called the paradox of thrift, and while Keynes popularized it, people have known about it since the eighteenth century.

[Stubbazubba]

Incomes equal consumption. My spending is your income, your spending is my income. Counting incomes and spending together would be double counting, but more spending does mean higher incomes by definition.

Are savings just a negligible amount, then? I thought people saving or otherwise not spending had a non-insignificant effect on GDP, thus the entire need to induce consumption during recessions in the first place?

[zugschef]

the one thing you need to understand is that banks produce money themselves by giving credit. you don't need to give them money so they can lend it to someone else. they just virtually pull it out of their ass.

then, everything else falls into place.