MMOs with a monthly fee still expect you to pay for expansions to get that content though. How many full games would you be able to buy off Steam with the subscriptions WoW players paid during ICC?
Once you're at max level, assuming three months per raid tier, you're paying $45 for a handful of bosses. Is that really equivalent in content to a normal game?
How much infrastructure is required to sit through a cut-scene in TOR, or go through the single-player campaign against a couple of enemies with minimal AI? You could probably host 99% of the game on the player's computer. You're paying for nothing.
Other MMOs have gone free to play, only WoW seems to be able to keep people subscribing in the long run. Is this game really $15 a month better than Lord of the Rings Online?
And from what I understand, most of this game is single-player RPG content with lots of cut-scenes off the DVD, you're not actually getting much from the server anyway.
It's not geography, it's urban planning. Just because you have a big country doesn't mean you have to commute across three state lines. Germans don't live in Munich and work in Berlin. The population distribution is more important than the density. Public transport would be viable in America if Americans didn't all hate each other and build their suburbs so they're as far away from other people as possible.
Once the oil runs dry you'd better hope they've come up with a viable electric car, otherwise you'll have to knock down and rebuild your entire country.
In countries where universities are fully funded and controlled by the government, tuition fees are next to nothing. In countries where government funding has been slashed, and universities are allowed to set their own fees, and students are forced to get loans to pay the fees themselves, the costs go through the roof.
The evidence here is that mroe government means lower costs, and more capitalism means higher costs.
I'm wondering why it costs three times as much money to run New Hampshire, I thought it was some libertarian utopia whilst California was the socialist monstrocity. Looks like it's the other way around.
Why does proximity to California matter? You're trying to get away from them and their business-unfriendly environment, remember. Better to get as far away from them as possible.
Interesting. The race to the bottom between countries, whereby they compete to slash taxes and regulations in order to attract businesses, everybody losing except the businesses, has been pretty ridiculous in itself, but America is the only country I've known to have a race to the bottom... with itself! Other countries degrade themselves to compete with foreign rivals, America eats itself from within!
In a nation of fifty states, there can only be one with the lowest taxes and loosest regulations, so this system can only benefit a few states at a time, to the detriment of the rest. The logical conclusion of this is that everyone has to keep slashing taxes and abandoning regulations until there's nothing left to cut.
The problem is, once every state has reduced taxes to zero, destroying essential public services and impoverishing hundreds of millions, and every state has abolished all regulations, letting corporations do what they want, to who they want, what happens next? Not only is there nowhere lower to go, but the resulting collapse of tax revenues means a collapse in government spending, meaning consumers have less money to spend, therefore economic decline, and all the businessmen rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of all the money they'll make in the new tax/regulation haven will suddenly realise that they don't have any customers.
Boeing moving to China? Considering how much money the US government spends on aerospace, and how much the aerospace industry is dependent on government spending, a government that cared about its people would never let that happen.
Bankers don't pay for anything, they just give back some of what they've taken. The world does not need this parasitic financial overclass. They make money because they control its creation and distribution, not because they add value.
The world could live without big finance, it couldn't live without construction. Why shouldn't people talk about class warfare, when one class has been fucking the rest for decades?
There are countries with narrower wealth distribution than the US, that have less debt, less poverty, less ill-health, less crime and less of a myriad of other terrible things, thanks in part to bankers not making multiples of the incomes of construction workers.
They actually have a few modern ships, that might be capable of challenging our own ships, one on one - although there is little evidence that they understand strategy, tactics, and fleet operations as well as we do
On the other hand, when was the last time the US was involved in a naval war with an equivalent power?
The whole idea of HFT is that when you mail in your sell order on OJ, the Gordon Gecko characters use their special ultra-fast connections to notice that other people are selling, then get their sell orders in first so they make all the money whilst the ordinary traders lose out.
This fast pipeline is not there to help informed, retail traders making trading decisions based on changes in reality, it's to help the institutional sharks exploit everyone else.
On the contrary, government defence spending props up a country's manufacturing sector. If they cut defence, a lot of engineers would find themselves out of work.
Obviously domestic manufacturing means unaffordable goods. Which is why Germany doesn't have any exports: all that domestic manufacturing labour at Western wages has made them uncompetitive.
The trick is to base your economy around making things that require skilled engineers rather than sweatshop coolies.
Those things are the result of white flight from the suburbs, not the cause. Obviously the suburban education system isn't that great after all, it hasn't taught you anything about cause and effect, or demographic history.
People forget most things they learnt at school. I doubt I could even do long division today. Kids are usually a lot more curious too and will seek out information, whilst adults blitz their brains with booze and watch TV.
Yes, instead of having a sensibly sized, well-made house they can afford on a single income, now they have a big house made out of cardboard where they don't even use half the rooms and can barely afford to heat, in the middle of nowhere because the huge footprint has forced the creation of 'exurbs', meaning even more money spent on fuel and more time sat in traffic.
Oh and this house also needs two professionals to pay the mortgage rather than a single ordinary worker, so your kids come home to an empty house and eat processed food loaded with salt and sugar out of a plastic tray rather than a proper meal.
What the fuck does an iphone matter when you're struggling to the pay the mortgage on a house with two incomes that you used to pay with one? And when you're graduating college with a debt that used to buy a house?
The funniest thing about your post, is that you've unwittingly shown how Westerners have been distracted by shiny things as their livelihoods have been pulled from underneath them.
Those junk food items you listed are only cheap because the government subsidises them with borrowed money so people don't realise the drop in income.
Yeah, when a few buildings are burnt down and shops looted in the UK it's global news and parliament is recalled to deal with it. In America it would be lucky to made the state news.
One of the reason the looting was so successful in the UK was that no-one was expecting it. In the US the shop-keepers would be armed with shot-guns or sat behind bullet-proof glass, and there'd be iron bars on the windows and armed security guards. In the UK shops are protected by a thin sheet of glass, and the shop-keepers expect nothing worse than someone stealing a bar of chocolate.
This is the difference between a hyper-violent culture and everywhere else. The main difference between the two is shown by the fact that in the UK most police aren't even armed, because they're expecting to deal at most with a few unarmed drunken hooligans, rather than a shootout with the Crips.
That is why things that matter a great deal of money to certain businesses such as the formula for coca-cola or the colonel's 11 special spices are still secure despite their wide-spread availability.
The things worth a great deal of money in those cases are the brand names. Food companies have to publish their ingredients, it'd be trivial to backward engineer them, but people won't pay the same money for supermarket own-brand cola that's chemically identical to the one with its logo plastered all over the world.
It's not like there's a special secret process to throwing chemicals in a vat, or putting salt and pepper in batter.
Doubt he'd bother coming, Slashdot barely has a games section anymore. Unless you want to read about Apple and Google over and over again, every day, there's not much point in visiting.
How could you give them back? We never had them in the first place, we never had America's cowboy culture. I don't see how adding guns to the equation would help anything. Do we really want these feral looters armed with guns?
And do we really want angry shop-owners going Rambo, shooting at everyone, killing countless innocent by-standers? Even trained, professional police marksmen miss all the time, killing the wrong people even with rubber bullets.
Keep your cigar-chomping gun-nut culture to your three-person redneck village where it belongs. There's nothing going on in London that can't be solved by a copper with a truncheon who's willing to use it. However most of the time they just stand around waiting until they have a hundred co-workers in riot gear before doing anything, by which time the looters have dispersed.
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TOR has all those things, although they may be reskinned as something else.
MMOs with a monthly fee still expect you to pay for expansions to get that content though. How many full games would you be able to buy off Steam with the subscriptions WoW players paid during ICC?
Once you're at max level, assuming three months per raid tier, you're paying $45 for a handful of bosses. Is that really equivalent in content to a normal game?
How much infrastructure is required to sit through a cut-scene in TOR, or go through the single-player campaign against a couple of enemies with minimal AI? You could probably host 99% of the game on the player's computer. You're paying for nothing.
Other MMOs have gone free to play, only WoW seems to be able to keep people subscribing in the long run. Is this game really $15 a month better than Lord of the Rings Online?
And from what I understand, most of this game is single-player RPG content with lots of cut-scenes off the DVD, you're not actually getting much from the server anyway.
It's not geography, it's urban planning. Just because you have a big country doesn't mean you have to commute across three state lines. Germans don't live in Munich and work in Berlin. The population distribution is more important than the density. Public transport would be viable in America if Americans didn't all hate each other and build their suburbs so they're as far away from other people as possible.
Once the oil runs dry you'd better hope they've come up with a viable electric car, otherwise you'll have to knock down and rebuild your entire country.
In countries where universities are fully funded and controlled by the government, tuition fees are next to nothing. In countries where government funding has been slashed, and universities are allowed to set their own fees, and students are forced to get loans to pay the fees themselves, the costs go through the roof.
The evidence here is that mroe government means lower costs, and more capitalism means higher costs.
Why's that? Even if the worst disaster happened to the Earth, it'd still be more habitable than anywhere in the known universe.
I'm wondering why it costs three times as much money to run New Hampshire, I thought it was some libertarian utopia whilst California was the socialist monstrocity. Looks like it's the other way around.
Why does proximity to California matter? You're trying to get away from them and their business-unfriendly environment, remember. Better to get as far away from them as possible.
Interesting. The race to the bottom between countries, whereby they compete to slash taxes and regulations in order to attract businesses, everybody losing except the businesses, has been pretty ridiculous in itself, but America is the only country I've known to have a race to the bottom... with itself! Other countries degrade themselves to compete with foreign rivals, America eats itself from within!
In a nation of fifty states, there can only be one with the lowest taxes and loosest regulations, so this system can only benefit a few states at a time, to the detriment of the rest. The logical conclusion of this is that everyone has to keep slashing taxes and abandoning regulations until there's nothing left to cut.
The problem is, once every state has reduced taxes to zero, destroying essential public services and impoverishing hundreds of millions, and every state has abolished all regulations, letting corporations do what they want, to who they want, what happens next? Not only is there nowhere lower to go, but the resulting collapse of tax revenues means a collapse in government spending, meaning consumers have less money to spend, therefore economic decline, and all the businessmen rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of all the money they'll make in the new tax/regulation haven will suddenly realise that they don't have any customers.
Boeing moving to China? Considering how much money the US government spends on aerospace, and how much the aerospace industry is dependent on government spending, a government that cared about its people would never let that happen.
Bankers don't pay for anything, they just give back some of what they've taken. The world does not need this parasitic financial overclass. They make money because they control its creation and distribution, not because they add value.
The world could live without big finance, it couldn't live without construction. Why shouldn't people talk about class warfare, when one class has been fucking the rest for decades?
There are countries with narrower wealth distribution than the US, that have less debt, less poverty, less ill-health, less crime and less of a myriad of other terrible things, thanks in part to bankers not making multiples of the incomes of construction workers.
On the other hand, when was the last time the US was involved in a naval war with an equivalent power?
The whole idea of HFT is that when you mail in your sell order on OJ, the Gordon Gecko characters use their special ultra-fast connections to notice that other people are selling, then get their sell orders in first so they make all the money whilst the ordinary traders lose out.
This fast pipeline is not there to help informed, retail traders making trading decisions based on changes in reality, it's to help the institutional sharks exploit everyone else.
On the contrary, government defence spending props up a country's manufacturing sector. If they cut defence, a lot of engineers would find themselves out of work.
An engineer is someone with an accredited engineering qualification. This does not include computer programmers, boiler mechanics, and so on.
Obviously domestic manufacturing means unaffordable goods. Which is why Germany doesn't have any exports: all that domestic manufacturing labour at Western wages has made them uncompetitive.
The trick is to base your economy around making things that require skilled engineers rather than sweatshop coolies.
Those things are the result of white flight from the suburbs, not the cause. Obviously the suburban education system isn't that great after all, it hasn't taught you anything about cause and effect, or demographic history.
People forget most things they learnt at school. I doubt I could even do long division today. Kids are usually a lot more curious too and will seek out information, whilst adults blitz their brains with booze and watch TV.
Yes, instead of having a sensibly sized, well-made house they can afford on a single income, now they have a big house made out of cardboard where they don't even use half the rooms and can barely afford to heat, in the middle of nowhere because the huge footprint has forced the creation of 'exurbs', meaning even more money spent on fuel and more time sat in traffic.
Oh and this house also needs two professionals to pay the mortgage rather than a single ordinary worker, so your kids come home to an empty house and eat processed food loaded with salt and sugar out of a plastic tray rather than a proper meal.
What the fuck does an iphone matter when you're struggling to the pay the mortgage on a house with two incomes that you used to pay with one? And when you're graduating college with a debt that used to buy a house?
The funniest thing about your post, is that you've unwittingly shown how Westerners have been distracted by shiny things as their livelihoods have been pulled from underneath them.
Those junk food items you listed are only cheap because the government subsidises them with borrowed money so people don't realise the drop in income.
Yeah, when a few buildings are burnt down and shops looted in the UK it's global news and parliament is recalled to deal with it. In America it would be lucky to made the state news.
One of the reason the looting was so successful in the UK was that no-one was expecting it. In the US the shop-keepers would be armed with shot-guns or sat behind bullet-proof glass, and there'd be iron bars on the windows and armed security guards. In the UK shops are protected by a thin sheet of glass, and the shop-keepers expect nothing worse than someone stealing a bar of chocolate.
This is the difference between a hyper-violent culture and everywhere else. The main difference between the two is shown by the fact that in the UK most police aren't even armed, because they're expecting to deal at most with a few unarmed drunken hooligans, rather than a shootout with the Crips.
The things worth a great deal of money in those cases are the brand names. Food companies have to publish their ingredients, it'd be trivial to backward engineer them, but people won't pay the same money for supermarket own-brand cola that's chemically identical to the one with its logo plastered all over the world.
It's not like there's a special secret process to throwing chemicals in a vat, or putting salt and pepper in batter.
Doubt he'd bother coming, Slashdot barely has a games section anymore. Unless you want to read about Apple and Google over and over again, every day, there's not much point in visiting.
Really? I've read a lot about the riots and seen pictures and videos, haven't seen looters with guns, just bats. Perhaps you could enlighten us.
How could you give them back? We never had them in the first place, we never had America's cowboy culture. I don't see how adding guns to the equation would help anything. Do we really want these feral looters armed with guns?
And do we really want angry shop-owners going Rambo, shooting at everyone, killing countless innocent by-standers? Even trained, professional police marksmen miss all the time, killing the wrong people even with rubber bullets.
Keep your cigar-chomping gun-nut culture to your three-person redneck village where it belongs. There's nothing going on in London that can't be solved by a copper with a truncheon who's willing to use it. However most of the time they just stand around waiting until they have a hundred co-workers in riot gear before doing anything, by which time the looters have dispersed.