If you slash the price of the game in half in a few months and re-advertise it (like Steam has been doing with their weekly sales), then you will see another jump in sales. If you cut it down to 1/4, you will get even more sales. Some people think $4 is a good price, but others won't pay more than $2, and still some will wait for the $1 or $0.50 sale.
Each step allows you to reel in more buyers, because everybody has their own price threshold.
Games depreciate in value quickly--that's just how it is. Eventually the game won't be worth anything to anyone. Then you should give it out for free, along with a big fat advertisement for your next game. You ARE working on the next game, right?
Some people wouldn't pay a cent for the game in the first place, and they are the real pirates. You can't negotiate with them, so don't even bother. It's wasted development time to fight them. Even if you somehow make your game unpirate-able, they will just ignore your game and find something else to occupy their time.
What you CAN do is try to net the would-be pirates who simply have a lower price threshold. Also you might net a few guilt-ridden pirates who think they are "redeeming their sins" by eventually buying the game they pirated, even though it's been a few months since release and the price has dropped significantly in the meantime. You might also pick up a few people who just like thinking they're getting a good deal.
have they ruled out the reason why they haven't sold any to those pirates is because...they aren't really pirates but people who despise the App Store and it's restrictions?
Are you suggesting that these so-called pirates are actually peaceful protesters performing civil disobedience? MLK Jr. would be so proud!
One interesting note is that the most pirate scores are submitted for Story level, then Rounds, then survival. This is the same order that the game types show up in our menus. This may point out that Pirates generally have a lower attention span – they quickly move on to the next game.
There's a really good reason why pirated scores are submitted in that order, and I would tell you, but there's a shiny red ball outside and I gotta catch it.
Truthfully, I've not made my mind up about abortion, because I can't objectively nail down when a child should be considered a human life.
Well, there's your problem.
The question has a false premise. "When does human life begin?" That assumes there's a clear, objective marker that exists before and after life "begins."
Does life begin at conception? No, because the body often gobbles up fertilized eggs, or the body accidentally splits the early zygotes to create identical twins, or a million other wacky things can happen to the embryo. If each time, a human life is destroyed or cleaved asunder with the body's natural processes--well, if you're a sexually active woman, I hope you can hire a good defense attorney for those genocide charges.
Does life begin when the fetus can survive outside of the womb by itself? No, because medical technology is making it possible to survive outside of the womb earlier and earlier, and pretty soon we won't need a woman to carry the child at all.
Does life begin when a child is finally born? Our legal system certainly doesn't think so. Killing a late-term pregnant woman is worth 2 points, after all.
Whatever point someone chooses is arbitrary and probably based on vague notions of "souls" or "consciousness" or whatever. Trying to find the "truth" of when a life begins is like trying to find the precise moment that your milk-drenched Frosted Flakes change from crunchy to soggy.
The dealer does NOT have the ability to decide to shuffle early. The dealers are not allowed to make any decisions at all.
If they're doing this, they're cheating, and can lose their gaming license over it.
This is true. But the dealer can inform their floorperson about suspected cheaters, and that floorperson can then tell the dealer to cut the next shoe differently, shuffle differently, or a million other (sometimes superstitious!) techniques to throw a suspected card-counter off the trail.
I work as a dealer, and often they won't even ask suspected card-counters to leave. The floorperson can simply instruct the dealer to put the cut-card a quarter or halfway through the shoe, rather than two decks from the end. Since that means far more manual shuffles, I figure we try to bore the player into leaving on their own volition.
I'm not seeing very many productive comments. Yeah, we get that the Internet is the Wild Wild West. Now what can be done to ensure that parents know what they're getting their kids into? You can't use the TEEN / MATURE / etc. labels for player-to-player communication, because that can vary so much. So why doesn't the ESRB include labels for the method of P2P communication? That way parents at least know what degrees of separation exist between their child and the greater population.
Voice Chat (Unmoderated) - Players cannot turn off voice chat, or voice chat can be turned on even when a parental lock is in place.
Voice Chat (Parental Lock) - Players cannot hear or transmit voice if the parental lock is turned on.
Text Chat (Heavily Moderated) - A dedicated moderator exists in every chat location to ban people who don't comply with the rules.
Text Chat (Profanity Filter) - No moderators exist, but the game includes a profanity filter for unregulated communication.
Text Chat (Unmoderated) - Anything goes.
Home Page - Players can create a home page where strangers can read information about the player or leave messages.
Friends List - Players can pick friends in the game and see when their friends are online or what their friends are playing.
No Communication - Players can play together, but cannot exchange any information (except maybe a name and dev-written text strings, like "Your turn!").
These categories could be mixed and matched, and of course there could be more than just these categories. Obviously they should be written simply so that one or two sentences can convey what each category means to a parent unfamiliar with online gaming.
Regardless, the ESRB needs to evolve or it will cease to matter.
And that quote is one of the reasons why DS9 is one of the most beloved--and hated--series in the Star Trek franchise.
It's great because it turned some of the long-held Trek conventions on their heads. For instance, the Federation and most of the protagonists resort to morally gray actions during times of crisis. Sisko himself lies to bring the Romulans in on his side in the war, and he has to deal with the repercussions.
Suddenly the Federation is not so different from us, and I can imagine that would have upset the fanbois.
This is pretty much how Champions Online operates, and I am quite happy with it. You avoid overcrowded game-spaces while avoiding ghost town game-spaces too. If your initial population of 1000 players dwindles down to 200, and your instance-size is 100, then your original 5 instances is simply reduced to 2 without impacting the players' perceptions.
Champions Online has the best strategy, in my opinion. As far as I've been playing, they've never had an issue with lag, because they can cap each zone-instance's population to whatever they deem the best. They don't have serious overpopulation problems (like where you can't do a quest because you're waiting for 50 other people to finish it), because of the same reason. You can jump back and forth between instances by clicking one button, and zones with your friends are clearly marked (though it'd be nice if it told you WHICH friends).
What they are unfortunately lacking is a world-wide group searching interface, like a global LFG channel. Currently you are force to instance-hop when you're looking for party members.
I don't buy the "immersion-breaking" factor. What's far more immersion-breaking is finding a new friend in real life who plays the game but plays on a different server, then having to cough up some money to switch servers (in WoW's case).
Evolution really only changes how we understand the world. It would give you no units, abilities or anything I can think of in the game world...
Obviously you never considered mutant chimpanzee assassin squads with jetpacks.
Mutant, because Darwin's theory of evolution required descent with modification. Though he didn't understand modern genetics, he did know that change had to be introduced into the equation somewhere.
Chimpanzee, because he knew that we shared a common ancestor with Old World apes and monkeys.
To some people, the color of shirt you put on in the morning is political. The toothpaste you use is political. Everything is political because somewhere, somehow, sometime during the creation of that thing or state of being some person or entity involved had some political leaning that in some subtle way influenced the way they contributed to the process.
The original color of Band-Aids was white-person. Crayola originally had "flesh" as one of their crayon colors, but this was changed to "peach" as a result of the civil rights movement.
These seemingly innocuous household items--bandages, crayons--were already infused with cultural biases. No one sat down and said, "Ha ha! I'll get those rascally blacks and make their injuries stand out more prominently on their dark skin with these sticky, tan bandages!", but that's what ended up happening. These silly oversights (culturally insensitive problem areas) were caught and corrected (by establishing more inclusive and diverse solutions) in an effort to promote better business: why should only white people get skin-colored band-aids? There's money to be made by opening up new markets!
There's nothing insidious about pointing out biases that exist or have existed. Nobody is pointing fingers and screaming, "Racist!" We study our culture's problems, learn from our mistakes, and move on.
People who think like this believe the way I take a dump is political. (Seriously - find somebody who's gone off-grid and uses a composting toilet. Ask them about it. They'd have you believe that the way you urinate and defecate is a political statement.)
The way you take a dump is quite political. Squatting is how most cultures do their business, but for some reason the West looks at squatting as uncivilized or crude, despite numerous health benefits over the sitting position. This leads to a further question: why does the West seem to have a preoccupation with appearing civilized? What does that say about our culture?
While we're on waste elimination, I'm sure you could ask a feminist about what they think when a guy stands up to urinate. I'm also sure you could ask Sigmund Freud what he thinks when you ask him why a woman would want to pee standing up. It's really mind-boggling to see how many people have written about these seemingly pedestrian practices, but it's all out there.
While an individual may not know why they're doing what they're doing, they still learned it from somewhere (parents, friends, tribe, TV, Slashdot, etc.), so understanding these little daily routines can make for a fascinating cultural study.
"Politics is a component of everything" may be true but it's also meaningless. Any statement so broad is meaningless because it has no real, practical impact on anything.
Most of us are utterly clueless about how the world works and don't realize how much we take for granted. Just watch an old cartoon and count the number of political statements you didn't notice as a child.
For instance, Fred Flintstone is a white working-class caveman who lives in the suburbs and uses all sorts of dino-powered gadgets to power his "modern stone-age family." Of course, he gets into zany hijinks and sometimes makes a fool of himself, but all problems are resolved by the end and things return to the status quo--the happy, healthy two-parent household. In that respect, he is the ideal 1950s American living out the ideal American dream. That's a pretty bold political statement in a frikkin' cartoon.
These politics do have a real, practical impact, because millions of Americans grew up with Fred Flintstone's ideals floating around in the back of their collective minds. I hesitate
A book by itself is an incomprehensible array of words, symbols, and ideas. It takes a reader to make any sense of the labyrinth. Unlike a secret decoder ring, where you punch in one value and get one (and only one) result, reading a book unravels a whole mess of different results depending on the individual reader.
Now, of course there are some things that an author tries to push upon the reader, but once that manuscript leaves his hands and hits the printers, it's completely out of his control. For literary purposes, the author is "dead" (in the Nietzschean sense). His work is at the mercy of the publisher, critics, the media, English teachers, PTA moms, and twelve year old kids.
So we're left with the individual reader to determine what significance a work of literature has. That may not seem very interesting, but each reader brings a new set of ideologies and experiences to the table. We disseminate these experiences through classroom discussions and formal papers. The "fun" part about being over-analytical with literature is discussing, debating, arguing, bringing in outside sources to help clarify a paradoxical passage, etc.
I think you're mistaking his point. It's not that he's more attracted to the polygonal body than the real body. It's that his girlfriend is fetishizing his hobby with a lovely/dance. He loves that she enjoys his hobby, much like the satisfaction you get when you recommend a book or movie to a friend and hear how great it is later on.
Pornography is rift with females fetishizing male hobbies. If you don't believe me, search girls with guns on Google.
In short, other people are the reason why playing online sucks.
This is why I'm eagerly looking into playing Dungeons & Dragons Online again. Besides moving to a free-to-play-but-pay-for-more subscription model, you can also hire NPC henchmen to accompany you through the dungeons.
With a henchman, you can probably solo most dungeons on Normal mode. With two other friends, you can hire 3 henchmen (6 total characters), which lets you take on the entire dungeon by yourself (possibly on Hard mode, too). I think you'd still need people for Elite mode, but once you get Elite, you are no longer wowed by the "new-ness" factor anyway, so you're probably doing it for the challenge and rewards.
For me, the funniest parts of the books are the excerpts from the Guide (especially the part about how the Babel Fish has been used for the non-existence of God). If they had added just a couple of minutes to put those into the movie, I think I would've liked it much, much more.
While I agree with you, the producers believed the Guide segments were slowing down the narrative pace, especially in the beginning where lots of Guide segments were used. There's only so much you can put in 1.5 to 2 hours of film and expect a brisk, action-packed story (in contrast to the whimsical, sometimes meandering pace of the book). Two different mediums, two different beasts, and two different presentation philosophies of the same story.
Long-term use of the nicotine patch isn't known to cause serious side effects. The most common short-term side effects from the nicotine patch include mild itching, tingling or burning on the skin at the patch site.
As a personal anecdote, my mom has been chewing Nicorette gum for at least 5 years. The only side effect I've noticed has been that she spends a ton of money on $40 boxes of chewing gum.
Slashdot Mirror
If you slash the price of the game in half in a few months and re-advertise it (like Steam has been doing with their weekly sales), then you will see another jump in sales. If you cut it down to 1/4, you will get even more sales. Some people think $4 is a good price, but others won't pay more than $2, and still some will wait for the $1 or $0.50 sale.
Each step allows you to reel in more buyers, because everybody has their own price threshold.
Games depreciate in value quickly--that's just how it is. Eventually the game won't be worth anything to anyone. Then you should give it out for free, along with a big fat advertisement for your next game. You ARE working on the next game, right?
Some people wouldn't pay a cent for the game in the first place, and they are the real pirates. You can't negotiate with them, so don't even bother. It's wasted development time to fight them. Even if you somehow make your game unpirate-able, they will just ignore your game and find something else to occupy their time.
What you CAN do is try to net the would-be pirates who simply have a lower price threshold. Also you might net a few guilt-ridden pirates who think they are "redeeming their sins" by eventually buying the game they pirated, even though it's been a few months since release and the price has dropped significantly in the meantime. You might also pick up a few people who just like thinking they're getting a good deal.
have they ruled out the reason why they haven't sold any to those pirates is because...they aren't really pirates but people who despise the App Store and it's restrictions?
Are you suggesting that these so-called pirates are actually peaceful protesters performing civil disobedience? MLK Jr. would be so proud!
One interesting note is that the most pirate scores are submitted for Story level, then Rounds, then survival. This is the same order that the game types show up in our menus. This may point out that Pirates generally have a lower attention span – they quickly move on to the next game.
There's a really good reason why pirated scores are submitted in that order, and I would tell you, but there's a shiny red ball outside and I gotta catch it.
BRB
Truthfully, I've not made my mind up about abortion, because I can't objectively nail down when a child should be considered a human life.
Well, there's your problem.
The question has a false premise. "When does human life begin?" That assumes there's a clear, objective marker that exists before and after life "begins."
Does life begin at conception? No, because the body often gobbles up fertilized eggs, or the body accidentally splits the early zygotes to create identical twins, or a million other wacky things can happen to the embryo. If each time, a human life is destroyed or cleaved asunder with the body's natural processes--well, if you're a sexually active woman, I hope you can hire a good defense attorney for those genocide charges.
Does life begin when the fetus can survive outside of the womb by itself? No, because medical technology is making it possible to survive outside of the womb earlier and earlier, and pretty soon we won't need a woman to carry the child at all.
Does life begin when a child is finally born? Our legal system certainly doesn't think so. Killing a late-term pregnant woman is worth 2 points, after all.
Whatever point someone chooses is arbitrary and probably based on vague notions of "souls" or "consciousness" or whatever. Trying to find the "truth" of when a life begins is like trying to find the precise moment that your milk-drenched Frosted Flakes change from crunchy to soggy.
You're not supposed to put a disclaimer on a link to a shock site! That defeats the whole point*!
*disclaimer: This is not a shock site.**
**disclaimer: Or is it?
The dealer does NOT have the ability to decide to shuffle early. The dealers are not allowed to make any decisions at all.
If they're doing this, they're cheating, and can lose their gaming license over it.
This is true. But the dealer can inform their floorperson about suspected cheaters, and that floorperson can then tell the dealer to cut the next shoe differently, shuffle differently, or a million other (sometimes superstitious!) techniques to throw a suspected card-counter off the trail.
I work as a dealer, and often they won't even ask suspected card-counters to leave. The floorperson can simply instruct the dealer to put the cut-card a quarter or halfway through the shoe, rather than two decks from the end. Since that means far more manual shuffles, I figure we try to bore the player into leaving on their own volition.
I'm not seeing very many productive comments. Yeah, we get that the Internet is the Wild Wild West. Now what can be done to ensure that parents know what they're getting their kids into? You can't use the TEEN / MATURE / etc. labels for player-to-player communication, because that can vary so much. So why doesn't the ESRB include labels for the method of P2P communication? That way parents at least know what degrees of separation exist between their child and the greater population.
Voice Chat (Unmoderated) - Players cannot turn off voice chat, or voice chat can be turned on even when a parental lock is in place.
Voice Chat (Parental Lock) - Players cannot hear or transmit voice if the parental lock is turned on.
Text Chat (Heavily Moderated) - A dedicated moderator exists in every chat location to ban people who don't comply with the rules.
Text Chat (Profanity Filter) - No moderators exist, but the game includes a profanity filter for unregulated communication.
Text Chat (Unmoderated) - Anything goes.
Home Page - Players can create a home page where strangers can read information about the player or leave messages.
Friends List - Players can pick friends in the game and see when their friends are online or what their friends are playing.
No Communication - Players can play together, but cannot exchange any information (except maybe a name and dev-written text strings, like "Your turn!").
These categories could be mixed and matched, and of course there could be more than just these categories. Obviously they should be written simply so that one or two sentences can convey what each category means to a parent unfamiliar with online gaming.
Regardless, the ESRB needs to evolve or it will cease to matter.
And that quote is one of the reasons why DS9 is one of the most beloved--and hated--series in the Star Trek franchise.
It's great because it turned some of the long-held Trek conventions on their heads. For instance, the Federation and most of the protagonists resort to morally gray actions during times of crisis. Sisko himself lies to bring the Romulans in on his side in the war, and he has to deal with the repercussions.
Suddenly the Federation is not so different from us, and I can imagine that would have upset the fanbois.
This is pretty much how Champions Online operates, and I am quite happy with it. You avoid overcrowded game-spaces while avoiding ghost town game-spaces too. If your initial population of 1000 players dwindles down to 200, and your instance-size is 100, then your original 5 instances is simply reduced to 2 without impacting the players' perceptions.
Champions Online has the best strategy, in my opinion. As far as I've been playing, they've never had an issue with lag, because they can cap each zone-instance's population to whatever they deem the best. They don't have serious overpopulation problems (like where you can't do a quest because you're waiting for 50 other people to finish it), because of the same reason. You can jump back and forth between instances by clicking one button, and zones with your friends are clearly marked (though it'd be nice if it told you WHICH friends).
What they are unfortunately lacking is a world-wide group searching interface, like a global LFG channel. Currently you are force to instance-hop when you're looking for party members.
I don't buy the "immersion-breaking" factor. What's far more immersion-breaking is finding a new friend in real life who plays the game but plays on a different server, then having to cough up some money to switch servers (in WoW's case).
"In fact, according to Massive's research, gamers like ads."
Emphatically, absolutely, unequivocally
WRONG.
I'd be glad if someone can come up with a fashion that looks decently "business like", is practical and doesn't involve ties and zillions of buttons.
http://www.st-spike.org/pages/uniforms/uniforms.htm
Evolution really only changes how we understand the world. It would give you no units, abilities or anything I can think of in the game world...
Obviously you never considered mutant chimpanzee assassin squads with jetpacks.
Mutant, because Darwin's theory of evolution required descent with modification. Though he didn't understand modern genetics, he did know that change had to be introduced into the equation somewhere.
Chimpanzee, because he knew that we shared a common ancestor with Old World apes and monkeys.
And jetpacks, because those are frikkin' cool.
To some people, the color of shirt you put on in the morning is political. The toothpaste you use is political. Everything is political because somewhere, somehow, sometime during the creation of that thing or state of being some person or entity involved had some political leaning that in some subtle way influenced the way they contributed to the process.
The original color of Band-Aids was white-person. Crayola originally had "flesh" as one of their crayon colors, but this was changed to "peach" as a result of the civil rights movement.
These seemingly innocuous household items--bandages, crayons--were already infused with cultural biases. No one sat down and said, "Ha ha! I'll get those rascally blacks and make their injuries stand out more prominently on their dark skin with these sticky, tan bandages!", but that's what ended up happening. These silly oversights (culturally insensitive problem areas) were caught and corrected (by establishing more inclusive and diverse solutions) in an effort to promote better business: why should only white people get skin-colored band-aids? There's money to be made by opening up new markets!
There's nothing insidious about pointing out biases that exist or have existed. Nobody is pointing fingers and screaming, "Racist!" We study our culture's problems, learn from our mistakes, and move on.
People who think like this believe the way I take a dump is political. (Seriously - find somebody who's gone off-grid and uses a composting toilet. Ask them about it. They'd have you believe that the way you urinate and defecate is a political statement.)
The way you take a dump is quite political. Squatting is how most cultures do their business, but for some reason the West looks at squatting as uncivilized or crude, despite numerous health benefits over the sitting position. This leads to a further question: why does the West seem to have a preoccupation with appearing civilized? What does that say about our culture?
While we're on waste elimination, I'm sure you could ask a feminist about what they think when a guy stands up to urinate. I'm also sure you could ask Sigmund Freud what he thinks when you ask him why a woman would want to pee standing up. It's really mind-boggling to see how many people have written about these seemingly pedestrian practices, but it's all out there.
While an individual may not know why they're doing what they're doing, they still learned it from somewhere (parents, friends, tribe, TV, Slashdot, etc.), so understanding these little daily routines can make for a fascinating cultural study.
"Politics is a component of everything" may be true but it's also meaningless. Any statement so broad is meaningless because it has no real, practical impact on anything.
Most of us are utterly clueless about how the world works and don't realize how much we take for granted. Just watch an old cartoon and count the number of political statements you didn't notice as a child.
For instance, Fred Flintstone is a white working-class caveman who lives in the suburbs and uses all sorts of dino-powered gadgets to power his "modern stone-age family." Of course, he gets into zany hijinks and sometimes makes a fool of himself, but all problems are resolved by the end and things return to the status quo--the happy, healthy two-parent household. In that respect, he is the ideal 1950s American living out the ideal American dream. That's a pretty bold political statement in a frikkin' cartoon.
These politics do have a real, practical impact, because millions of Americans grew up with Fred Flintstone's ideals floating around in the back of their collective minds. I hesitate
Some of us LIKE to be over-analytical.
A book by itself is an incomprehensible array of words, symbols, and ideas. It takes a reader to make any sense of the labyrinth. Unlike a secret decoder ring, where you punch in one value and get one (and only one) result, reading a book unravels a whole mess of different results depending on the individual reader.
Now, of course there are some things that an author tries to push upon the reader, but once that manuscript leaves his hands and hits the printers, it's completely out of his control. For literary purposes, the author is "dead" (in the Nietzschean sense). His work is at the mercy of the publisher, critics, the media, English teachers, PTA moms, and twelve year old kids.
So we're left with the individual reader to determine what significance a work of literature has. That may not seem very interesting, but each reader brings a new set of ideologies and experiences to the table. We disseminate these experiences through classroom discussions and formal papers. The "fun" part about being over-analytical with literature is discussing, debating, arguing, bringing in outside sources to help clarify a paradoxical passage, etc.
Kind of like the comments section on Slashdot.
I wonder if Iranian politicians refer to people in rural areas as "folks."
Well, saying "nothing was ever more X than Y" is a figure of speech, so it's supposed to be a bit exaggerated. But whatever, I guess.
What part of "no fatties" didn't you understand?
I think you're mistaking his point. It's not that he's more attracted to the polygonal body than the real body. It's that his girlfriend is fetishizing his hobby with a lovely /dance. He loves that she enjoys his hobby, much like the satisfaction you get when you recommend a book or movie to a friend and hear how great it is later on.
Pornography is rift with females fetishizing male hobbies. If you don't believe me, search girls with guns on Google.
Buy a Roomba, play more WoW.
I stopped reading past that point and successfully argued my point in class that a book based on bullshit arguments wasn't worth wasting my time over.
Huh. How come that argument never works in church?
In short, other people are the reason why playing online sucks.
This is why I'm eagerly looking into playing Dungeons & Dragons Online again. Besides moving to a free-to-play-but-pay-for-more subscription model, you can also hire NPC henchmen to accompany you through the dungeons.
With a henchman, you can probably solo most dungeons on Normal mode. With two other friends, you can hire 3 henchmen (6 total characters), which lets you take on the entire dungeon by yourself (possibly on Hard mode, too). I think you'd still need people for Elite mode, but once you get Elite, you are no longer wowed by the "new-ness" factor anyway, so you're probably doing it for the challenge and rewards.
For me, the funniest parts of the books are the excerpts from the Guide (especially the part about how the Babel Fish has been used for the non-existence of God). If they had added just a couple of minutes to put those into the movie, I think I would've liked it much, much more.
While I agree with you, the producers believed the Guide segments were slowing down the narrative pace, especially in the beginning where lots of Guide segments were used. There's only so much you can put in 1.5 to 2 hours of film and expect a brisk, action-packed story (in contrast to the whimsical, sometimes meandering pace of the book). Two different mediums, two different beasts, and two different presentation philosophies of the same story.
Anyway, they actually produced (most of) the Babel fish segment for the DVD release, seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1ctoT7ezTE
Long-term use of the nicotine patch isn't known to cause serious side effects. The most common short-term side effects from the nicotine patch include mild itching, tingling or burning on the skin at the patch site.
Source: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/nicotine-patch/AN01257
As a personal anecdote, my mom has been chewing Nicorette gum for at least 5 years. The only side effect I've noticed has been that she spends a ton of money on $40 boxes of chewing gum.