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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 7679632" data-attributes="member: 8461">I agree that your point is pretty much the same either way, but only because it lacks validity no matter how you slice it. Clicking "refresh" is indeed a high enough bar, since the people who do that are putting in more effort, and thus more merit, than those who don't; moreover, it's a bar that's relevant to the interest at hand, unlike the ridiculous idea of judging who gets to go to a game convention by who spends more hours at a soup kitchen.The person who thinks that measuring charity work is a valid system of distributing hotel rooms at a convention has no right to speak of practicality.Except that it is functional, and has been functional every single year. It's not perfect, but any gateway, be it physical or electronic, can only admit so much traffic at once. Those who manage to get to the front of the line are the ones who get to go first, which is how it should be, instead of randomly handing out spaces with no regard for those who have worked very hard to try and earn a space versus those who haven't.Yes, it is. Moreover, it's a relevant barrier, because it measures how much work those people are putting in to succeed. You may think that it's too little work - mostly because you overlooked everything else I wrote about how to try and deal with the system, such as calling to get on the wait lists, coordinating with other people who are going, etc. (which goes to show that you're not really reading what I'm writing) - but at least it's a system where what you put into it has some bearing on what you get back.No, not a lottery. While it may not be entirely based around how hard you try to get through the digital portal, trying repeatedly does have some effect on how soon you'll get in, which is far and away better than being one of the first people in and being handed a ticket that says to wait for three hours, while someone who comes along forty-five minutes later only has to wait one hour due to chance.Why? Because it doesn't satisfy your sense of morality that those who put in the effort should get commensurate rewards unless there are more barriers to overcome? The system wasn't a lottery before they deliberately made it one - I know because I experienced that every year. Not even slightly. Irrelevant good deeds remain irrelevant.I strongly suggest that you take responsibility for your failure of comprehension, rather than giving me grief over it.You forgot the part where the work is actually relevant to the task at hand, which should go without saying, but apparently needs to be explicitly spelled out. How you think that somebody doing a sit-in for Greenpeace would be any kind of filter I have no idea, since you don't seem to want to think through the practical aspects of how such a system would work, or the fact that having this be a requirement would actually keep people away from signing up in the first place, but all of these are secondary concerns behind the fact that suggesting irrelevant effort be put in is not merit.Except that it is a fair approach. Equity of opportunity is fair, even though it doesn't guarantee equality of outcome.Except that the evidence of what that system actually accomplished put the lie to that. "Opening the floodgates" was, in fact, better than the lottery system they put in.</blockquote>

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