ObjectivityIncarnate

It’s unfortunate the Viagra and Cialis didn’t do the trick, but we do have an alternate treatment we can try.

Going off? Yeah, you asked a question, and I answered it. What are you talking about?

“Antes” are what Balatro calls its levels. Each level consists of 3 stages, which the game calls “blinds” (small/big/boss).

In poker, you don’t “beat” an ante, it’s part of what you bet. You also don’t “reach” blinds, nor is there such a thing as a “boss blind” in poker. And the word “bet” or any synonym should be pretty conspicuous by its absence in Balatro’s description. There is no gambling without betting/wagering, after all.

So yes, if you’re familiar with poker, that description should make it obvious that the words have different meanings in the game than they do in poker.

The only actual ‘mechanic’ that’s actually the same in Balatro as in poker is what comprises the different hands, and their relative value. And even then, there are also hands in Balatro that don’t exist in poker at all (five of a kind, flush house, etc.).

You literally do not make antes in Balatro, in any way.

You should know that you’re talking about before drawing conclusions.

You are suggesting that $X in profit = $X of having “overcharged” the customer.

This is completely ridiculous on its face. No private entity will or should ever go to all the effort and time and resources to start a new business if there will never be any profit. Obviously.

And ironically, even if the government gets involved in providing X instead, without profit in mind, the bureaucracy is such that its ‘no profit’ price for X is invariably higher than a price a private entity can charge while profiting.

the reason you are a billionaire or your company makes billions in profit is because you overcharge your clients

This is an assumption.

Costco’s founder, who was also the CEO up until a few years ago, is a billionaire. And that’s a company that is famous both for its very competitive prices on the customer side (insert infamous story about ‘threatening’ to kill someone if they raised the price of that hot dog), AND for how well it treats its workforce.

You can become a billionaire just by creating something that a large number of people find valuable, and continuing to own it as its value in others’ eyes increases over time. Because that’s what net worth fundamentally is–it’s the price tag of how valuable everyone else thinks shares of that company are worth.

The implication that you HAVE to be ripping people off to acquire wealth (and when it comes to increasing one’s wealth, ‘billionaire’ is just a distinction of scale) is just plain wrong, an ignorant talking point.

Yeah, they’re referring to the old idiom ‘actions speak louder than words’.

What actions? This is done most commonly toward strangers they don’t know at all.

If someone were to say, for example, “I’m okay with the government picking up the slack to keep a kid from starving, but it shouldn’t be treated like a solution. Instead, it should be seen as a temporary necessary measure while resources are put into solving the real problem, by preventing children from being in a position where their own parents aren’t capable of feeding them to begin with, since they’re the ones who should be doing it”, the people I’m talking about would happily contort it into “they want kids to starve”, because that requires no thought/effort, and you get to look morally superior to boot, since now that guy’s just evil, because what a horrible thing it is to want children to starve!

Fact is, almost nobody is willing to even take the majority of people at their word, much less actually steelman an argument, which is how you really end up with rock solid positions and arguments, instead of having to rely on stupid rhetorical and semantic maneuvers.

The typical issue with people making these statements is that they tend to wildly exaggerate and straw man the positions of anyone who disagrees with them on anything.

Who out there is actually saying “children shouldn’t be fed”, for example? Fucking nobody, lol.