The nature of the United States is that there are primarily two opposing political forces vying for control.
Yeah, on the one hand you have the Democrats and Republicans, and on the other...
Or are you seriously saying that the balance should occasionally swing to people who believe in politicising the education syllabus and infusing it with religion?
Since when were living standards defined by how much cheap crap you can consume? I'm not sure Walmart makes poor people better off. They steamroller local businesses, leaving them as a captive audience with fewer shopping options. They pay low wages, provide poor working conditions, and sell very low quality goods.
Actually for most of history, colleges were only attended by people who would never think about working, they went there to study the Classics for a few years before inheriting the estate.
I don't think that is necessarily a problem. How much capital do you really need to start a business? It doesn't have to be a lot. It also doesn't have to be yours.
Businesses cost a lot of money. Premises, equipment, materials, bills, staff etc. The main cause of new businesses going bust is a lack of funding.
Um, really? How about someone who's running a company that makes a hundred billion dollars? If they can increase revenue a tenth of a percent more than the next guy, it's worth it for the company to pay them $100 million more, because the gain will be more than the cost.
This assumes the companies profitability is down to the CEO. Of course, when the company loses money it's the fault of the market. Considering that the vast majority of people never get to be a CEO (it's not like these jobs are advertised to us commoners, they're headhunted from the existing executive class), how do you know that if it wasn't for that CEO, profits would have gone up even more?
If two CEOs, one of company A that makes a million dollars a year, and another of company B that makes a billion dollars, both increase their companies profitability by the same proportion, both paid a proportion of the profits, CEO A will make a thousand times less money than B, for the same results. Running a company with twice the revenues isn't twice as difficult. If anything, it's easier because you have larger economies of scale, more influence over the market, more ability to buy governments etc.
Objections to enormous salaries are usually grounded in some wishy-washy analysis that's crippled by the human mind's inability to intuitively grasp huge numbers.
And defence of enormous salaries is usually grounded in either worship of the mega-rich (common in the US), or refusal to believe that trickle-down economics doesn't actually work. Someone who voted for Reagan, twice, on the promise of allowing the rich to hoover up all the cash, won't admit that they're actually being screwed over by their own decision.
I can think of a lot of fields that I wouldn't want a DIY or on-the-job trained person to be working in - structural engineer, dentist, surgeon, even lawyer.
Once upon a time, none of those of jobs required degrees. In fact, the degrees didn't exist at all, universities were just for studying the classics. Didn't stop buildings, aqueducts, railways, bridges and ships being built by engineers with no degrees.
Right, so we replace demand for oil with demand for battery acids, and coal, and the limited places to put hydrodams.
Yeah we can extract tar sands, at great cost and environmental destruction, and that's just to keep up with existing demand. Where do we get the oil to support the other 80% of the world's population?
Btw hydrogen isn't an energy source, it's just a very volatile, hard to handle energy storage medium.
Food? We already produce more food than we need. It breaks down because of economics and distribution.
Yes, economics means most of it is consumed by the first world, who are obese and incredibly wasteful. The world cannot live at first-world eating standards without the first world dropping down. Who in the West will give up their cheeseburgers, pizzas, and the right to outright waste huge quantities of their food, just so some African can eat like them? They're cutting down rainforests to increase agricultural land whilst Westerners throw half their food in the garbage.
There aren't enough minerals, or oil, for the whole world to live at first world standards. Consider what happens if the Chinese and Indians emulate Americans in commuting fifty miles from McMansions. When they all expect a steady supply of disposable electronics full of rare-earth metals, thrown away when the next version comes out. When they all expect to fly on holiday every year at a minimum.
Maybe someone will invent nuclear fusion, so effective it can viably synthesise oil. Or some viable way of getting uranium out of the sea. And then someone will magic up a devise to trawl landfills to get the metals back. But like the end of civilisation, these things are always fifty years away.
So you punish the small fry that got screwed so the rich guys who made the decision for the government and their friends gain all the benefit?
Small guys are not making millisecond trades on the stock market. They might have a pension fund, they might invest long-term in a few companies. They're not sitting 16 hours a day at a super computer hooked right into the exchange, looking for things like this as a vulture watches for a wounded animal.
There's no 'punish' about it, if professional gamblers get their fingers burnt it's simply tough shit.
In this case, someone wanted to make an instant 300,000% profit by doing and creating nothing, just taking advantage of someone else's mistake.
Who decides that? And what happens to a smart invester that buys stock at $0.01 that usually trades at $40, to quickly later sell it at $30? Will the $0.01 buys be cancelled, but the $30 sells not be cancelled? But that would leave you with a short position, having to buy them back at $40. May be very expensive.
My heart bleeds, maybe he could just get a job instead of trying to make money out of nothing.
Personally, I believe that if we took anybody who didn't know how an engine, transmission, brakes and exhaust system work off the roads, the world would be a far better place.
But then the roads would be full of petrol-heads who think they have a divine right to drive everywhere at 120mph.
It's nothing to do with being 'boring', it's that after several decades of game development, they've settled on a set of genres that most people enjoy playing. People still eat bread after thousands of years, is that unoriginal and boring? Four-wheeled cars enjoy popularity over more innovative exciting designs etc.
Most of these new original gaming ideas aren't actually fun to play, so players and developers will fall back on proven formulae such as the FPS, sports games, MMOs etc.
Just because something's new, it doesn't mean it's better.
Being so fungible, it also means that if everyone switches to other suppliers, the prices goes up in general, as demand is the same but the number of suppliers fewer.
It's safe because the planes are that good. Just because they needed 5 pilots out of a thousand applicants doesn't mean the rest of those couldn't have flown a plane over the middle-east and pressed a button to drop a bomb on a hospital.
You have planes that can shoot down a previous generation plane before it's even seen you, where's the challenge in that?
Nuclear doesn't produce that much waste. Especially if we could reprocess the fuel. In the end you get a few tons of waste that's hot for a couple hundred years, but that can be dealt with better than the tons of crap coal spews out a day. It's just that we've had 30+ years of people scaremongering about Nuclear energy.
There's more waste than spent fuel, you also have the decommissioned plants.
Most MMO's aspire to higher subscription ratings with 1 million being considered the line between success and an "also ran".
There are not half a dozen MMOs out of hundreds with that number of paying subscribers. Lineage, Warcraft, and I can't think of any others other than those free web ones. Most have maybe six figures if they're lucky.
I always find it amusing to see PK and PvP and twitch fans scream that their genre's are OH SO POPULAR and yet not a single game that gives them what they want is a success. Odd that. Why are PK and PvP and Twitch fans not playing the games aimed at them?
What games are those then? Practically all MMOs are RPG-style PVE. There'd have to be a professionally-made, twitch, PK game to exist in the first place to see how successful it'd be.
Honestly, for Activision the lawsuit is worrying. However, what would be far more worrying is the fact that they're apparently lost 26 people from the MW dev team and they're losing more frequently.
Not really, MW is a franchise at the stage where it just needs a skeleton team to keep churning out sequels that will sell on name alone.
Tell that to the people who've made millions off Halo, Call of Duty, Final Fantasy etc. Face it, no-one cares if some 'hardcore gamer' can't spin 180 degrees with a flick of the mouse.
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Yeah, on the one hand you have the Democrats and Republicans, and on the other...
Or are you seriously saying that the balance should occasionally swing to people who believe in politicising the education syllabus and infusing it with religion?
Since when were living standards defined by how much cheap crap you can consume? I'm not sure Walmart makes poor people better off. They steamroller local businesses, leaving them as a captive audience with fewer shopping options. They pay low wages, provide poor working conditions, and sell very low quality goods.
Actually for most of history, colleges were only attended by people who would never think about working, they went there to study the Classics for a few years before inheriting the estate.
Businesses cost a lot of money. Premises, equipment, materials, bills, staff etc. The main cause of new businesses going bust is a lack of funding.
This assumes the companies profitability is down to the CEO. Of course, when the company loses money it's the fault of the market. Considering that the vast majority of people never get to be a CEO (it's not like these jobs are advertised to us commoners, they're headhunted from the existing executive class), how do you know that if it wasn't for that CEO, profits would have gone up even more?
If two CEOs, one of company A that makes a million dollars a year, and another of company B that makes a billion dollars, both increase their companies profitability by the same proportion, both paid a proportion of the profits, CEO A will make a thousand times less money than B, for the same results. Running a company with twice the revenues isn't twice as difficult. If anything, it's easier because you have larger economies of scale, more influence over the market, more ability to buy governments etc.
And defence of enormous salaries is usually grounded in either worship of the mega-rich (common in the US), or refusal to believe that trickle-down economics doesn't actually work. Someone who voted for Reagan, twice, on the promise of allowing the rich to hoover up all the cash, won't admit that they're actually being screwed over by their own decision.
Of course, because there are no other living costs than Happy Meals.
Once upon a time, none of those of jobs required degrees. In fact, the degrees didn't exist at all, universities were just for studying the classics. Didn't stop buildings, aqueducts, railways, bridges and ships being built by engineers with no degrees.
Right, so we replace demand for oil with demand for battery acids, and coal, and the limited places to put hydrodams.
Yeah we can extract tar sands, at great cost and environmental destruction, and that's just to keep up with existing demand. Where do we get the oil to support the other 80% of the world's population?
Btw hydrogen isn't an energy source, it's just a very volatile, hard to handle energy storage medium.
Yes, economics means most of it is consumed by the first world, who are obese and incredibly wasteful. The world cannot live at first-world eating standards without the first world dropping down. Who in the West will give up their cheeseburgers, pizzas, and the right to outright waste huge quantities of their food, just so some African can eat like them? They're cutting down rainforests to increase agricultural land whilst Westerners throw half their food in the garbage.
There aren't enough minerals, or oil, for the whole world to live at first world standards. Consider what happens if the Chinese and Indians emulate Americans in commuting fifty miles from McMansions. When they all expect a steady supply of disposable electronics full of rare-earth metals, thrown away when the next version comes out. When they all expect to fly on holiday every year at a minimum.
Maybe someone will invent nuclear fusion, so effective it can viably synthesise oil. Or some viable way of getting uranium out of the sea. And then someone will magic up a devise to trawl landfills to get the metals back. But like the end of civilisation, these things are always fifty years away.
Small guys are not making millisecond trades on the stock market. They might have a pension fund, they might invest long-term in a few companies. They're not sitting 16 hours a day at a super computer hooked right into the exchange, looking for things like this as a vulture watches for a wounded animal.
There's no 'punish' about it, if professional gamblers get their fingers burnt it's simply tough shit.
In this case, someone wanted to make an instant 300,000% profit by doing and creating nothing, just taking advantage of someone else's mistake.
My heart bleeds, maybe he could just get a job instead of trying to make money out of nothing.
But then the roads would be full of petrol-heads who think they have a divine right to drive everywhere at 120mph.
So, DRM is introduced in response to piracy, and you respond by more piracy. You just don't get it, do you?
Yes, the 'liberal elite' (can't believe people actually use that term unironically) caused the Dark Ages...
You'll find that the modern equivalent of the Christian establishment are presidents with voices in their head 'from God'.
Call me when you can run a 747 off a solar panel, or make plastic from the sun.
It's nothing to do with being 'boring', it's that after several decades of game development, they've settled on a set of genres that most people enjoy playing. People still eat bread after thousands of years, is that unoriginal and boring? Four-wheeled cars enjoy popularity over more innovative exciting designs etc.
Most of these new original gaming ideas aren't actually fun to play, so players and developers will fall back on proven formulae such as the FPS, sports games, MMOs etc.
Just because something's new, it doesn't mean it's better.
Being so fungible, it also means that if everyone switches to other suppliers, the prices goes up in general, as demand is the same but the number of suppliers fewer.
It's safe because the planes are that good. Just because they needed 5 pilots out of a thousand applicants doesn't mean the rest of those couldn't have flown a plane over the middle-east and pressed a button to drop a bomb on a hospital.
You have planes that can shoot down a previous generation plane before it's even seen you, where's the challenge in that?
How good do you have to be to shoot down rusty Soviet cast-offs and bomb weddings? The US air-force is probably the safest job in military history.
How do you explain the global financial crisis then? All those bankers were being paid megabucks to ensure they were the best.
There's more waste than spent fuel, you also have the decommissioned plants.
There are not half a dozen MMOs out of hundreds with that number of paying subscribers. Lineage, Warcraft, and I can't think of any others other than those free web ones. Most have maybe six figures if they're lucky.
What games are those then? Practically all MMOs are RPG-style PVE. There'd have to be a professionally-made, twitch, PK game to exist in the first place to see how successful it'd be.
Not really, MW is a franchise at the stage where it just needs a skeleton team to keep churning out sequels that will sell on name alone.
Tell that to the people who've made millions off Halo, Call of Duty, Final Fantasy etc. Face it, no-one cares if some 'hardcore gamer' can't spin 180 degrees with a flick of the mouse.
Actually it's the fat that makes prime beef sought after. Kobe is basically fat marbled with beef.