netnerd85 wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 15:46:

Cutter wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 11:02:

Mr. Tact wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 09:14:
My gift to the Earth -- I cut the lawn yesterday..

Too bad your lawn wasn't emo, that way it would cut itself.

2002 called, it wants it's joke back...

Mean while, I'm playing Homefront. That game is FUCKING HORRIBLE. Why does it have any fans, why did it get 70/100 metacritic. This game is truly the most lazy, horrible thing I have played :|, to celebrate Earth day, let's remove this thing (Homefront) from the Planet.

[Edit]
The Internet: A warning from 50 years in the future
LMAO, that is awesome... and I'm a web developer

what have we done.

RollinThundr wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 15:47:

m00t wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 14:55:
Certainly the debt is a concern, but it's not an immediate one. As in, it won't kill us tomorrow, or the next day, or even the next year. After WWII, we had a debt ratio of over 110% and paid it down over the course of 30 years, so the current level of ~75% is clearly not "life threatening", as it were. Now if we use the debt as an excuse to cut services and enact austerity measures, then yes, that's a problem as it will contract the economy significantly. The real issue that will cause significant long term damage is the vast inequality in the economy. People with significant sums of money simply spend less of it as a total percentage than people with more "middle" amounts. They tend to hoard it in various ways. The poor (but not utterly broke who obviously have *no* money) and middle classes have to spend a large % of their income or holdings to survive and spending goes up as their net worth and income go up (to a point) keeping money in the system and increasing fluidity, causing the economy to grow (and in the long run, reducing our debt / gdp ratio). Everyone benefits. Even the rich, it's just not as immediate or direct as they'd like. Think of it as a trickle-up economy... The current distribution will ultimately harm them, too.

We won't last another 30 years going the way we're going. We'll be lucky to last another 10 without it all collapsing on itself. The smarter move would be to start addressing the problem now before we pass the point of no return.

This isn't about rich vs poor like the democrats want you to believe. What we're doing is not sustainable and a total collapse is coming whether anyone likes it or not if we keep spending the way we are. Taxes isn't going to help as much as you think either. Tax the 1% 100% and you're still not even making a dent.

Verno wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 12:08:
Hamilton is like Dan Simmons, great author but cannot write an ending to save his life. Also never google authors you read, I had no idea Simmons was such a nutcase before and would have been happier not knowing

I just finished The Terror by Dan Simmons and have to say its one of his best.

Julio wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 11:36:

LittleMe wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 11:22:
The Chinese and many other countries own a huge amount of our debt.

Beamer wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 11:24:
8%. China has 8% of our debt.

And other countries besides China own another 38% or so of the US debt. Not that I'm agreeing with LittleMe on why our manufacturing base is moving to China. To me, it's a matter of corporations offshoring to increase profits, and consumers not caring where they buy from. There's a large amount of people buying non-US cars, they don't care if they buy goods from China either.

Whenever this much money vanishes, I still think it's worth an investigation to see if any of it stuck to Curt or the politicians' hands.

Creston wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 11:35:

Beamer wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 11:26:
If only the cost for a family of four to see a game was a standard benchmark of baseball franchises.

Are you even capable of comprehending what I'm saying? The metric you provided is an AVERAGE cost, which means they literally take every single seat in the stadium, and average out the price. I've never said you CAN'T spend that.

I said if you don't feel like spending that, then don't spend it, and buy a fucking family pack. (which has admittedly gone up in price since last I was at the Rangers' ballpark, but it now also includes mandatory kids' zone tickets, which, for the Rangers at least, it never used to.)

Creston

Creston wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 11:20:

Beamer wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 11:09:
So, don't like it - don't buy it?

More like: Don't want to pay 200 - 450 dollars? How about you spend 50? Seriously, 450 bucks? Do you get lapdances while watching the game? I've been to 8 different ballparks, have never spent more than 25-35 bucks on a ticket, and have always had great seats. Yes, you can spend that much if you want to, but don't act like a family has no other choice BUT to pay that much if it wants to see a ballgame. (admittedly this is MLB only. I don't think the NBA has any such deals, nor does the NFL.)

Can't we turn that around to why we're saddled with tons of shitty microtransaction based games? Because the market supports it?

I think EA and its ilk are at least smart enough to realize that microtransactions are a source of income. You are perfectly free to buy the games without MTs in them.

Of course, sometimes it doesn't work out quite right. See: the Yankees 2012 playoff home games and all the empty seats.

Which is actually a perfect example of what I said. Ballparks charge what the market will bear. The Yankees believed their market would bear $2500 seats. The market proved them (largely) wrong, leading to them lowering their prices for most of their season tickets and single-seats this year.

Creston

LittleMe wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 11:22:

Beamer wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 11:09:
Yes, the market supports prices being through the roof and athletes being paid extreme salaries.
Much like the market supports the goods you buy being manufactured in China and the US-based CEOs being paid extreme salaries.

Well a big contributor to our manufacturing base moving to China is, imo, due to Fed (reserve) policy and our Federal debt. The Chinese and many other countries own a huge amount of our debt. Yes, it's a market force, but it's centrally planned and managed. So this isn't free-market economics at work in this case. It's anti free-market economics at work.

Mr. Tact wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 11:11:
Amazingly, I'm guessing the Yankees still made plenty of money last year.

Cutter wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 11:05:

Beamer wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 11:04:

Cutter wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 10:59:

Mr. Tact wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 10:33:
While I agree it is a silly commercial it did what it was supposed to, put the product into your head.

No, it puts the product into your head in a negative way so you're less inclined to want one. Wtf do a bunch of breakdancing 20 somthings with bad clothes and hair have to do with a device that applies to me and my life? Zero. Less than zero actually. I'd be fucking embarrassed to be associated with said product after that. I can just see people seeing it and then asking you if youu have to breakdance in order to use it. There is bad publicity.

Come off it. I'm sure people said the same thing about the commercials that made the iPod a hit.


What's that? That was 10 years ago? For a product with less productivity? Don't tell anyone in Redmond!

And do I own an iPod or any other Apple related shite? No. Do I hate Apple for myriad reasons? Yes.

Creston wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 10:59:

Beamer wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 10:53:

Mr. Tact wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 10:36:
Actually, the sports athletes and Hollywood stars making millions makes more sense. Many (most?) go to sporting events and movies because of those people. There isn't a single product I've bought because of a CEO.

Does a game for a family of four need to be a $200-$450 event?

You realize that you're perfectly welcome to NOT pay said prices, right? Most ballparks offer family deals where you get 4 tickets, 4 drinks and 4 hot dogs for typically right around 50 bucks. Ballparks (and other venues) charge what they think the market will bear. If the market pays said prices, whose fault is that?

Creston

Cutter wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 10:59:

Mr. Tact wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 10:33:
While I agree it is a silly commercial it did what it was supposed to, put the product into your head.

No, it puts the product into your head in a negative way so you're less inclined to want one. Wtf do a bunch of breakdancing 20 somthings with bad clothes and hair have to do with a device that applies to me and my life? Zero. Less than zero actually. I'd be fucking embarrassed to be associated with said product after that. I can just see people seeing it and then asking you if youu have to breakdance in order to use it. There is bad publicity.

nin wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 10:32:

McSterls wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 10:28:
I saw the video of this last week, and it looks exhausting. I get wanting the VR experience that the Occulus Rift brings, but why would I want to run around on a treadmill?

I'm going to KS a game called "Rabid Snow Wolves" that requires this and a rift. It involves a lot of looking over your shoulder.

Mr. Tact wrote on Apr 22, 2013, 10:36:
Actually, the sports athletes and Hollywood stars making millions makes more sense. Many (most?) go to sporting events and movies because of those people. There isn't a single product I've bought because of a CEO.

Parallax Abstraction wrote on Apr 21, 2013, 23:35:
I "played" this "game" on my girlfriend's iPad for about 5 minutes and never touched it again. It's everything that's gross about the exploitive non-game garbage that Zynga produces, except now he's added the ability to pay to make it go in reverse. If my gut is right, this feels like Molyneux has realised his Populous remake isn't going to be possible with the money he raised on Kickstarter and this is a way to help fill out the coffers to try and get that to market. Could be completely wrong but given his penchant for going way over time and budget, this might be what he has to do since he has no publisher to get more money from this time around.

Mr. Tact wrote on Apr 17, 2013, 12:33:

RollinThundr wrote on Apr 17, 2013, 12:25:
Eh really tossing stuff like that in there only to get your panties all bunched up. If you really want to call that trolling sure.

Pretty sure that's the definition of trolling...

RollinThundr wrote on Apr 17, 2013, 11:48:

Beamer wrote on Apr 17, 2013, 11:41:

RollinThundr wrote on Apr 17, 2013, 11:40:

jdreyer wrote on Apr 16, 2013, 15:58:
In order to prevent this kind of senseless violence, we'd have to live in a very restrictive society, like that of East Germany 30 years ago. We have freedom in the US. A very few people abuse it with tragic results. But I'm always reminded of Ben Franklin's quote:

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

It doesn't make what happened right, nor does it mean we should not take action to bring perpetrator(s) to justice or implement reasonable precautions. But freedom comes with a cost, and we must take care not to overreact to this event.

One of the great joys of marathons is that you can be within a few feet of some of the greatest athletes in the world and you can participate in the same events that they do. There are almost no other sports where that is the case. It would be a shame if we radically changed marathons as a result of this event.

Obama would be more than happy to radically change things. He's been pushing for it since day one and tragedy's like this are all the fuel he needs.

TROOOOOOLLLING

You and nin really need to learn the difference between trolling and stating an opinion. IE anyone who doesn't share your political views is not automatically a troll.