I don't know, I have painful memories of playing it in college. If I remember correctly, it was a basic platform side scroller, but it took me forever to acquire the Vertical and Horizontal Positions and get to the Trigger Level.
*I wouldn't have said slumping, since that is mostly past. The economy today is stagnant, rather than the fall that a slump suggests.
In the past 18 months unemployment is down 15% relative to what it was (from 9.1 to 7.8) the S&P is up 25%, GDP is up almost 2%, and home prices have made a huge rebound. It's not perfect, but it is most certainly not STAGNANT. Certainly MUCH better than the 2009 trough.
And it's not just ULI policies that would be affected, that was just an extreme example. How is it any better for the government to pay out massive amounts to FDIC, SIPC, etc claims vs. what it did, which is keep the banks solvent long enough to recover with no significant net loss to the taxpayers?
Anyway, your argument makes no sense. It's like the argument for a debtor's prison. If you punish someone so severely for not being able to pay you back that they can't make any money, what good is that going to do you besides spite? Assisting recovery in a way that preserves the life savings of a large percentage of the population while not bankrupting the government was a good idea. It's orthogonal from creating better banking regulations to prevent it from happening again, unless your definition of regulation is destroying the banking industry.
Can you cite a case where a business went under and their competitors did as well... Unless the competitors were also doing poorly.
This isn't about competitors, it's about customers. When a bank fails and the goverment doesn't step in, customers are fucked almost as badly as the bank. FDIC can ensure that certain customers will at least have a bit left to survive on, but FDIC doesn't cover investments/brokers/retirement, larger corporate accounts, loans with demand call (which are more common than you'd think even now), etc.
But actually, another poster already clearly explained it can be bad for competitors as well. It's just a disaster in many ways.
Plus, what no one seems to be pointing out is that the government has actually MADE IT'S INVESTMENT BACK. Is it annoying that the banks are (to some extent) back to the same shit? Absolutely, but it would have been worse if the government had just decided to take on another humongous debt to cover all of the losses with no hope of repayment rather than inject enough capital to get the banks back in business again.
Your solution reminds me of a debter's prison. If you punish someone for not being able to pay debts, how in hell do you expect them to fix it?
No, considering the government has pretty much made back all of the money it put in (plus a profit in some cases) I think that was exactly the right choice.
Would it really have been better to take on another trillion dollars in debt covering all of the losses with no way to make it back? And in situations that weren't insured by the government (like universal life insurance) just tell millions of people they are fucked? At least this way the banks PAID their loans back - and then of course went back to making money hand over fist as usual, but that's really an entirely different argument that definitely needs to be addressed.
And of course, this claim that the economy is continuing to slump along today really seems to be as much a fabrication of the media as anything else. Or at least it's highly dependent on the industry. The market is on fire, tech is going great, and as you said finance/banking is back in the black. Yes, there are a lot of people who were in manufacturing who are out of work, but honestly that is not recession, that is a fundamental shift and those jobs are not coming back any time soon. But certainly letting all of the largest banks and insurance companies fail and potentially doubling the unemployment rate wouldn't have helped that no matter what you think of the economy...
I didn't cherry pick anything or even mention MSFT's Xbox profits or losses (it's common knowledge they they lost billions to break into the industry, and I assume also common knowledge that they had been making a healthy profit up until their recent losses). But as long as *you* are cherry picking, some more random stats: Nintendo lost almost $400M in the first half of 2012 (so basically about equivalent to the XBox division losses you mention). And the XBox division had a $700M *profit* in 2011 (which was a horrible year for Nintendo), largely due to something totally unrelated to hardware costs but completely enabled by hardware sales: XBox Live.
Anyway, I really have no horse in this race and am not arguing one company's strategy over any others here (as you seem to be?) I was just pointing out that hardware profitability is really not that important if they make the money back in licensing and online subscriptions. Both Nintendo and MS have had good and bad periods in their console businesses, and it's kind of interesting to see how different their approaches are.
Nintendo lost over $500M in 2011, the fist half of 2012 was even worse, and has stated the WiiU is being sold at a loss. So much "for profit relative to their effort"...
No, it's better to return an error or thrown an exception rather than assert when the input to a function is perfectly reasonable but not what you expect.
And, in the end, who knows. Maybe it was the caller aborting by not handling the error/exception. In which case it's STILL bad coding by someone, as this is not an exceptional case...
It's not all about clock speed, it depends on the architecture. The WiiU CPU has 3 PPC RISC cores, each capable of executing 2 instructions per cycle.
And of course the games are going to be multithreaded... it can effectively run 6 threads at once, 2 on each core. And given the GPU's capabilities and decent pixel/vertex/geometry shaders, on a game console the CPU isn't everything, anyway.
Yep - the majority of revenue comes from software licensing, and the Wii has been far below Xbox 360 and PS3 as far as games sold per console (let alone Xbox Live and PSN subscription fees).
I never said anything about 100 years, and the whole point of the thread (which you clearly didn't follow) is tax rates with social services (ie. SS in the 30's, Medicare in the 60's, etc). Thus 1913-1915 is totally irrelevant (well, as is the rest of your post, but for different reasons). I just picked 60 years, sure (sort of as an average to the biggest social programs) but as you point out, 80 years would have made an even *stronger* point, thanks.
And you also missed my statement "not in terms of effective tax paid" - even in the 80's the effective tax rate paid in the upper brackets was higher, because there are so many more people in the upper brackets taking advantage of loopholes and the current *15%* capital gains rate (vs the previous lowest rate os 20% in the 80's). In fact for many wealthy people cap gains and dividends are their major source of income.
Also, the top tax rate for last year was 35%, not 37.5%. But I'll give you a pass on that since I doubt you were anywhere near it.
And if this weren't enough to make your post look bad, the effective top *corporate* tax rate is also at a modern low (here's a simple chart so you don't have to try to do math)
So my point is the same - originally taxes were at a level to pay for social services. Unrealistic tax cuts are as much responsible for the current debt as excessive spending.
Anyway, if you want to keep ranting have some balls and don't be an anonymous troll, at least. But you have to try harder than that either way.
Bullshit. Go demand every citizen to pay their share of the national debt today (which is about $52,000 per person, or over $200k for a family of 4) and see if that doesn't affect a lot of people's standard of living. For a significant number of families, that's more than their life savings.
All of those houses, cars, and consumer electronics cost money, and $200k can pay for a lot of them.
Tax rates have been WAY too low for decades. If you think this deficit spending can continue indefinitely *you* are ignorant of economics.
In fact, that would be about 1929, so yes, it kind of was! Thanks for proving my point...
The other time that was close in terms of top rate, but not in terms of effective tax paid, was the lat 80's. Hmm. 1929, 1987, 2003. Seems like whenever taxes hit a low, the market soon collapses. I suppose it's probably a combination of people investing stupidly to take profits from low taxes, and the taxes being lowered when there is more income from higher profits.
Though, of course, if the morons in Congress had any backbone or economical sense they'd understand that the market is cyclical, so they should be taking more income during good times like everyone else to get through the lean years. Instead it's too tempting to gain points with equally shortsighted voters by lowering taxes to give back any surpluses, while refusing to raise them back to previous levels once the inevitable shortfall comes.
I don't know, I think a propped up American standard of living had a lot to do with the Russian people pushing for a more Western/capitalist government & economy as did all of the money wasted on the arms race.
Of course, that notwithstanding I'd also argue idiotic tax breaks have done more to kill the US than social services. Many of those services have been around for decades, but tax rates are a 60 year low.
One of the most basic rules of warfare is this: a strategy if a winner if it costs them more than it costs you.
Or if you have more available resources to spend than they do. That's how the Cold War was won. Or "won", I suppose, as the US may just take longer to die from crippling debt...
It doesn't have to be a current implementation like Iron Dome...
Maybe it could measure radiation. While I'd imagine nuclear warheads are somewhat shielded they must give off some radiation. If scientists/engineers can build a comprehensive missile defense system and experiments to detect single cosmic rays, neutrinos, etc it's not too far fetched to imagine a detector that can figure out the biggest threats this way.
Actually, I'm wondering if a system could be designed to detect the mass of ballistic objects based on minute changes in velocity from bouncing particles off of them? Or how about a gravitational wave detector? (hey, we are talking "Star Wars Defense" here...;)
Set a missile to appear that it will land someplace harmless, and once it's over land, alter it's course. Costal cities are probably safe, but anything too far inland is will make a nice target, save the costal shots for the end of the barrage.
I'd argue the reverse there. Any missile with enough range to hit inland cities is not going to be that cheap.
Aw, come on, troll, really? It was a JOKE. Personally, I think it would be cool if more people just ran everywhere they wanted to go in real life. Don't know if I'd want to sit next to them in a meeting, though.
Seems to me "time dilation" is basically just trying to put a silly sci fi spin on "the servers just slowed down to 1/10 of real time to keep up". Not sure how that's such an amazing feat (in fact, some players on reddit said it was taking a minute for the server to respond to their commands, though that wasn't a big deal because it taking 3-4 minutes between firing weapons...)
And once again almost EVERYTHING you just ranted about was true 100 years ago in the US. Do you disagree with the child labor laws established since then in the US, too?
And we are talking specifically about CHINA here, RTFA. Have you been to China recently? Or ever? It's now the world's 2nd largest economy, has had a sustained GDP growth over over 10% for years, and is creating thousands of new Chinese millionaires every year. China's "undernourished" population has fallen under 10% (in the US it's still about 5%).
The China you seem to be picturing ("eat your vegetables, there are kids starving in China!") is long gone, and they are poised to be the biggest economy in the world in 20 years. They are long overdue for some changes to their human rights policies, and attitudes like yours (and many American businesses and consumers) is what has been propagating the current lagging of social vs. economic progress far longer than it needed to be.
Besides, China has already enacted child labor laws - it's been illegal to employ minors under 16 for years. The problem is people (including govt officials taking bribes) ignoring/breaking those laws. I don't see what's wrong with Apple dropping a supplier who is breaking the law. Last year the Chinese govt fined and/or closed down a bunch of Walmart stores in China because one of their suppliers broke the law (labeled non-organic meat as organic). If Apple has knowledge of *illegal* underage labor use by their supplier, dropping them (or demanding they fix it) is not only the right thing to do, it's the right business decision.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know, I have painful memories of playing it in college. If I remember correctly, it was a basic platform side scroller, but it took me forever to acquire the Vertical and Horizontal Positions and get to the Trigger Level.
Their console design looks a little retro to me.
http://www.ouya.tv/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/photo-1-e1359051832288.jpg
I've been waiting for years for someone to release truly innovative titles like "2D Cube Zombie Platformer" and "Bowling Pro"...
*I wouldn't have said slumping, since that is mostly past. The economy today is stagnant, rather than the fall that a slump suggests.
In the past 18 months unemployment is down 15% relative to what it was (from 9.1 to 7.8) the S&P is up 25%, GDP is up almost 2%, and home prices have made a huge rebound. It's not perfect, but it is most certainly not STAGNANT. Certainly MUCH better than the 2009 trough.
And it's not just ULI policies that would be affected, that was just an extreme example. How is it any better for the government to pay out massive amounts to FDIC, SIPC, etc claims vs. what it did, which is keep the banks solvent long enough to recover with no significant net loss to the taxpayers?
Anyway, your argument makes no sense. It's like the argument for a debtor's prison. If you punish someone so severely for not being able to pay you back that they can't make any money, what good is that going to do you besides spite? Assisting recovery in a way that preserves the life savings of a large percentage of the population while not bankrupting the government was a good idea. It's orthogonal from creating better banking regulations to prevent it from happening again, unless your definition of regulation is destroying the banking industry.
Can you cite a case where a business went under and their competitors did as well... Unless the competitors were also doing poorly.
This isn't about competitors, it's about customers. When a bank fails and the goverment doesn't step in, customers are fucked almost as badly as the bank. FDIC can ensure that certain customers will at least have a bit left to survive on, but FDIC doesn't cover investments/brokers/retirement, larger corporate accounts, loans with demand call (which are more common than you'd think even now), etc.
But actually, another poster already clearly explained it can be bad for competitors as well. It's just a disaster in many ways.
Plus, what no one seems to be pointing out is that the government has actually MADE IT'S INVESTMENT BACK. Is it annoying that the banks are (to some extent) back to the same shit? Absolutely, but it would have been worse if the government had just decided to take on another humongous debt to cover all of the losses with no hope of repayment rather than inject enough capital to get the banks back in business again.
Your solution reminds me of a debter's prison. If you punish someone for not being able to pay debts, how in hell do you expect them to fix it?
No, considering the government has pretty much made back all of the money it put in (plus a profit in some cases) I think that was exactly the right choice.
Would it really have been better to take on another trillion dollars in debt covering all of the losses with no way to make it back? And in situations that weren't insured by the government (like universal life insurance) just tell millions of people they are fucked? At least this way the banks PAID their loans back - and then of course went back to making money hand over fist as usual, but that's really an entirely different argument that definitely needs to be addressed.
And of course, this claim that the economy is continuing to slump along today really seems to be as much a fabrication of the media as anything else. Or at least it's highly dependent on the industry. The market is on fire, tech is going great, and as you said finance/banking is back in the black. Yes, there are a lot of people who were in manufacturing who are out of work, but honestly that is not recession, that is a fundamental shift and those jobs are not coming back any time soon. But certainly letting all of the largest banks and insurance companies fail and potentially doubling the unemployment rate wouldn't have helped that no matter what you think of the economy...
Nintendo makes money hand over fist in their gaming division.
Really... I guess that would explain the $700M loss last year...
I didn't cherry pick anything or even mention MSFT's Xbox profits or losses (it's common knowledge they they lost billions to break into the industry, and I assume also common knowledge that they had been making a healthy profit up until their recent losses). But as long as *you* are cherry picking, some more random stats: Nintendo lost almost $400M in the first half of 2012 (so basically about equivalent to the XBox division losses you mention). And the XBox division had a $700M *profit* in 2011 (which was a horrible year for Nintendo), largely due to something totally unrelated to hardware costs but completely enabled by hardware sales: XBox Live.
Anyway, I really have no horse in this race and am not arguing one company's strategy over any others here (as you seem to be?) I was just pointing out that hardware profitability is really not that important if they make the money back in licensing and online subscriptions. Both Nintendo and MS have had good and bad periods in their console businesses, and it's kind of interesting to see how different their approaches are.
Nintendo lost over $500M in 2011, the fist half of 2012 was even worse, and has stated the WiiU is being sold at a loss. So much "for profit relative to their effort"...
No, it's better to return an error or thrown an exception rather than assert when the input to a function is perfectly reasonable but not what you expect.
And, in the end, who knows. Maybe it was the caller aborting by not handling the error/exception. In which case it's STILL bad coding by someone, as this is not an exceptional case...
It's not all about clock speed, it depends on the architecture. The WiiU CPU has 3 PPC RISC cores, each capable of executing 2 instructions per cycle.
And of course the games are going to be multithreaded... it can effectively run 6 threads at once, 2 on each core. And given the GPU's capabilities and decent pixel/vertex/geometry shaders, on a game console the CPU isn't everything, anyway.
Yep - the majority of revenue comes from software licensing, and the Wii has been far below Xbox 360 and PS3 as far as games sold per console (let alone Xbox Live and PSN subscription fees).
How is that relevant to repetitive Nintendo games? COD is from Activision and is on every platform, INCLUDING the Wii.
I never said anything about 100 years, and the whole point of the thread (which you clearly didn't follow) is tax rates with social services (ie. SS in the 30's, Medicare in the 60's, etc). Thus 1913-1915 is totally irrelevant (well, as is the rest of your post, but for different reasons). I just picked 60 years, sure (sort of as an average to the biggest social programs) but as you point out, 80 years would have made an even *stronger* point, thanks.
And you also missed my statement "not in terms of effective tax paid" - even in the 80's the effective tax rate paid in the upper brackets was higher, because there are so many more people in the upper brackets taking advantage of loopholes and the current *15%* capital gains rate (vs the previous lowest rate os 20% in the 80's). In fact for many wealthy people cap gains and dividends are their major source of income.
Also, the top tax rate for last year was 35%, not 37.5%. But I'll give you a pass on that since I doubt you were anywhere near it.
And if this weren't enough to make your post look bad, the effective top *corporate* tax rate is also at a modern low (here's a simple chart so you don't have to try to do math)
So my point is the same - originally taxes were at a level to pay for social services. Unrealistic tax cuts are as much responsible for the current debt as excessive spending.
Anyway, if you want to keep ranting have some balls and don't be an anonymous troll, at least. But you have to try harder than that either way.
Bullshit. Go demand every citizen to pay their share of the national debt today (which is about $52,000 per person, or over $200k for a family of 4) and see if that doesn't affect a lot of people's standard of living. For a significant number of families, that's more than their life savings.
All of those houses, cars, and consumer electronics cost money, and $200k can pay for a lot of them.
Tax rates have been WAY too low for decades. If you think this deficit spending can continue indefinitely *you* are ignorant of economics.
In fact, that would be about 1929, so yes, it kind of was! Thanks for proving my point...
The other time that was close in terms of top rate, but not in terms of effective tax paid, was the lat 80's. Hmm. 1929, 1987, 2003. Seems like whenever taxes hit a low, the market soon collapses. I suppose it's probably a combination of people investing stupidly to take profits from low taxes, and the taxes being lowered when there is more income from higher profits.
Though, of course, if the morons in Congress had any backbone or economical sense they'd understand that the market is cyclical, so they should be taking more income during good times like everyone else to get through the lean years. Instead it's too tempting to gain points with equally shortsighted voters by lowering taxes to give back any surpluses, while refusing to raise them back to previous levels once the inevitable shortfall comes.
I don't know, I think a propped up American standard of living had a lot to do with the Russian people pushing for a more Western/capitalist government & economy as did all of the money wasted on the arms race.
Of course, that notwithstanding I'd also argue idiotic tax breaks have done more to kill the US than social services. Many of those services have been around for decades, but tax rates are a 60 year low.
One of the most basic rules of warfare is this: a strategy if a winner if it costs them more than it costs you.
Or if you have more available resources to spend than they do. That's how the Cold War was won. Or "won", I suppose, as the US may just take longer to die from crippling debt...
It doesn't have to be a current implementation like Iron Dome...
Maybe it could measure radiation. While I'd imagine nuclear warheads are somewhat shielded they must give off some radiation. If scientists/engineers can build a comprehensive missile defense system and experiments to detect single cosmic rays, neutrinos, etc it's not too far fetched to imagine a detector that can figure out the biggest threats this way.
Actually, I'm wondering if a system could be designed to detect the mass of ballistic objects based on minute changes in velocity from bouncing particles off of them? Or how about a gravitational wave detector? (hey, we are talking "Star Wars Defense" here... ;)
Set a missile to appear that it will land someplace harmless, and once it's over land, alter it's course. Costal cities are probably safe, but anything too far inland is will make a nice target, save the costal shots for the end of the barrage.
I'd argue the reverse there. Any missile with enough range to hit inland cities is not going to be that cheap.
This isn't s freaking law of physics, it's an Internet meme. It's meaning is what people say it is, and everyone except you seems to say otherwise.
Aw, come on, troll, really? It was a JOKE. Personally, I think it would be cool if more people just ran everywhere they wanted to go in real life. Don't know if I'd want to sit next to them in a meeting, though.
Run, Forrest, run!
Yeah, but R that in TFA in a good or bad way?
Seems to me "time dilation" is basically just trying to put a silly sci fi spin on "the servers just slowed down to 1/10 of real time to keep up". Not sure how that's such an amazing feat (in fact, some players on reddit said it was taking a minute for the server to respond to their commands, though that wasn't a big deal because it taking 3-4 minutes between firing weapons...)
And once again almost EVERYTHING you just ranted about was true 100 years ago in the US. Do you disagree with the child labor laws established since then in the US, too?
And we are talking specifically about CHINA here, RTFA. Have you been to China recently? Or ever? It's now the world's 2nd largest economy, has had a sustained GDP growth over over 10% for years, and is creating thousands of new Chinese millionaires every year. China's "undernourished" population has fallen under 10% (in the US it's still about 5%).
The China you seem to be picturing ("eat your vegetables, there are kids starving in China!") is long gone, and they are poised to be the biggest economy in the world in 20 years. They are long overdue for some changes to their human rights policies, and attitudes like yours (and many American businesses and consumers) is what has been propagating the current lagging of social vs. economic progress far longer than it needed to be.
Besides, China has already enacted child labor laws - it's been illegal to employ minors under 16 for years. The problem is people (including govt officials taking bribes) ignoring/breaking those laws. I don't see what's wrong with Apple dropping a supplier who is breaking the law. Last year the Chinese govt fined and/or closed down a bunch of Walmart stores in China because one of their suppliers broke the law (labeled non-organic meat as organic). If Apple has knowledge of *illegal* underage labor use by their supplier, dropping them (or demanding they fix it) is not only the right thing to do, it's the right business decision.