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> Surely you choose Minecraft because it was unusual, unusual in delivering so much wealth to one person. Notch shared a lot of the money, hence my focus on th
by gwern 9y ago
> Surely you choose Minecraft because it was unusual, unusual in delivering so much wealth to one person.
Notch shared a lot of the money, hence my focus on the total sales price. Lots of people have gotten extremely rich on an individual level from video games, if you want to nitpick about that: Gabe Newell or Palmer Luckey. There are other Asian examples, and a number of billionaires benefit heavily from video games, like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. None of this affects my point: no matter how you slice it, the quoted aristocrat is not particularly wealthy.
> You also said the House of Lords is "largely inactive" which doesn't really seem connected with reality either.
That's literally from the article.
> Do you mind sharing why you're so keen to minimise this?
Because I am incensed by lying with statistics. There is no excuse for lines like "Nearly half the land is in the hands of 432 private individuals and companies". That is lying to the reader and trying to trick them. Unforgivable.
- ZeroGravitas 9y agoThe word inactive is not in the article. The article says the hereditery peers seldom turned up, not that the house of lords stopped having a say in how the country was run. The point the author is trying to make is the opposite of yours, that they rule without bothering to even give the appearance of interest in the affairs of those they rule over. Can you explain why you think the quote about 432 landowners is a lie and what it's trying to trick people into thinking? Can I also note that taking a noble stand against misinformation and misleading uses of numbers seems inconsistent with the points I've already taken issue with.
- gwern 9y agoIf they are rarely showing up, then they are not shaping the debate or likely doing anything but voting, assuming they are not merely having minimal quorums and slacking on that as well; this inherently cedes all initiative and the public debate, and is a huge loss of power. Imagine a president who didn't bother to give speeches, travel, propose new legislation, or do much beyond veto occasional legislation. How much power would he have? Darn little. And they then lost most of that. > Can you explain why you think the quote about 432 landowners is a lie and what it's trying to trick people into thinking? It is a lie because it is implying that most or all of them are aristocrats and implying 'private individuals' is a synonym for them and trying to get the reader to not notice that technically 'individuals and corporations' != aristocrats and in fact many or most of them likely are not because of the massive decimation in aristocratic wealth, while not even trying to make the case for that; it is pure begging the question, it cannot add any evidence to the claim the aristocracy still controls as large a fraction of national wealth as it ever did (at best, you could reason backwards - 'assuming they are still wealthy, then a large fraction of those 432 must be aristocrats').