Lemmy.zip instance admin

  • 4 Posts
  • 43 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Government spending/revenue as percentage of GDP is the common proxy for government size. That said actual empirical evidence doesn’t lead to clear cut conclusions about the relationship between economic growth/outcomes and government spending. It’s very much dependent on the country, quality of government institutions and components of the expenditure.

    Intuitively, you can clearly see that if you had 2 identical countries where 50% of gov spending went to building schools, hospitals and roads in one and paying interest on national debt in the other then you would expect very different outcomes with the same government “size”.

    For the US, that metric has been close to 30% for the last several decades with spikes during crises like 2008 and 2020 (changes to money supply or “minting” is a component of government size but usually a temporary one). It’s been relatively stable outside of that since the 1970s. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-spending-to-gdp

    Relative to the rest of the world’s rich countries it’s on the lower end:

    In my view, it’s highly dependent on the quality of the government institutions and components of spending. People immediately think of inefficiency and bureaucracy when governments are brought up but there is empirical evidence to show that gov spending on things like education and infrastructure are usually “productive” in additional to contributing to factors that may not be properly captured by measures like GDP growth.

    In short, people reducing government spending/regulations as inherently bad/controlling are at least not being completely honest because it’s a very complicated discussion.



















  • I mostly picked it back up to have access to the PoGo exclusive shinies (Mew, Jirachi, Meltan/Melmetal, Genesect and Deoxys) but I just spoof instead (trying to play in negative temps outside of a city is no fun) and just trade cool stuff to friends (who live in different places so I can’t even trade with them legitimately if I wanted to).

    Another example of bullshit is the PAID shiny Mew ticket. Even after you pay for it you still need to complete a potentially ridiculous requirement of completing the kanto dex. Which would be fine if they didn’t geolock Kangaskhan to Australia (outside of events in the past?) so you would be shit out of luck if you didn’t either already have one or knew someone you can meet up with in real life that did.

    As for your 2016 mons, the first 9 or so you trade will be guaranteed to be lucky meaning an IV floor of 12/12/12 or 80% (and half stardust cost) so you would ideally trade them for something strong and/or shiny like a shiny legendary or strong mega/dragon/top within its type pokemon. All 2016 pokemon have like a 75% of making a trade lucky so they’re all valuable. Another trick to get people to nag their friends and family to start playing again.


  • I played in 2016 and started playing again in 2023 and I was surprised at how little had changed but its par for the course for the pokemon franchise.

    Almost all your other grievances are partly due to how mobile games are monetized and how much of it relies on fear of missing out (applies to regular pokemon events too). Pokemon Go is a constant stream of FOMO to try and get you to spend money when there’s barely any payoff. A pokemon you can catch in the wild can already be 87% of the way to a perfect pokemon you spend months (years?) getting stardust, candy and XL candy to max out.