it's also when all the social programs got defunded. Reagan turned back the clock on what FDR had started. Bush Sr & Clinton continued that ( he never really cared about anything except being prez) and Bush Jr ramped it up into full gear so he could give the money to his cronies.
Why would it be any different for the refugees? It's kinda like when they relocated all those dirt poor black share croppers to the projects in the 70s and then Reagan pulled the funding sending them into a perpetual spiral of poverty. Did I say 'kinda'?
which is terrible, abject poverty. China double planted and starved half their population, albeit because everyone was too scared to tell Mao he was wrong. But the point is it's not hard to get people to do stupid things that aren't in their best interests.
You're right about one thing: their entire way of life is going to die. Privately owned farms are few and far between. All you have to do is wait for a dry spell, economic downturn or for junior to get tired of living in the middle of nowhere watching crops grow and you can buy the land out for cheap. And let's face it, we don't need that many people to grow food. Hell, we've got berry picking robots now and they only reason we don't use them is migrants are still cheaper. It's not necessarily a bad thing if we shift the wealth around and have few kids with better upbringings.
was RAM. You just didn't have enough RAM to do complex games. So you got a lot of games that were just like their cartridge ports but with some FMV and CD audio thrown in. The only exceptions were RPGs, but those hadn't really caught on yet. There were some indications of success with games like Mortal Kombat on the Sega CD, but the load times were terrible and the game wasn't enough better than MK on the SNES/Genesis to justify the $200 price tag for the CD. Not when MKII for SNES was on it's way. If you want to see a starker contrast look at the two launch titles for the Turbografx-CD: Street Fighter and Monster's Lair. The former was a good port of a mediocre game and the latter was bested by the Cartridge Genesis Version. That experience would have set you back $750+ tax in 1990 dollars.
What CDs did well in the 90s was anime style graphics, but it would be at least 5-10 years before that stuff had enough of an audience to support expensive peripherals. It makes me wonder what would have happened in NEC had poured the money they wasted on the US CD launch into advertising and a bigger launch.
Did a pretty cool serious of videos on their site interviewing as many folks involved in the Japanese gaming industry from the 80s and 90s they could. They'll selling a dvd of the entire thing but a lot of it's on their site/youtube for free.
the point isn't that the risk is high, the point is there is a risk in exchange for very, very little benefit to the US. It's just plain not in our interest and if it wasn't for the silly 'Drill baby drill' clap trap that's been floating around this wouldn't even be discussed. We'd drop it and call it a day.
That Nintendo didn't manage to kill Sony as a competitor with legal wrangling. They were always really good at that sorta thing (ask Namco about their Sega Genesis games:P ). Apart from that this is one of those pivotal moments in the game industry I always love to hear about. Like when EA bluffed Sega into giving them a sweetheart deal on Sega Genesis licensing in exchange for not sharing their tech to get around the Genesis lockout chip (turned out the chip didn't work, though to be fair EA didn't know that, but Nintendo woulda told EA to go pound sand).
Seriously, I'm asking. I've generally heard much, much lower numbers (in the hundreds best case). There'd be a flurry of jobs while the pipeline was build, but after that nothing. Now, if we made them _lease_ the land for a hefty sum of the profits plus make them buy lots and lots of insurance for the spills...
There's no issue here. Keystone was just a way for Canada to get it's oil to China cheaply. There's no benefit besides a few hundred jobs. OTOH there's a strong likelihood that sooner or later the pipeline will burst and spew oil everywhere for days. We here in America don't have the best track record of making oil companies clean up their messes....
I can move to the suburbs of a nice city and avoid the smog and fracking problems. I'll be dead before the CO2 causes enough problems outside of my immediate environment (vis-a-vis global warming) to care. Yeah, I know. I a prefect world we'd all go nuclear and be done with it. Specifically in a world where we don't treat 99% of the population poorly and 60% of it like shit...
I understand very well how business works. 20 years into the 80 year operation of the factory it'll be time for major repairs and maintenance. Meanwhile inflation will have bit into the profitability of the plant. Best case scenario is the maintenance is done half assed. Worst case it isn't done. With Fukushima I remember the prez of TEP saying it was a once in a hundred year storm. No one pointed out to the bastard that it'd been 100 years since the last record of such a storm. I guess that wouldn't be polite...
is that the results linger. They'll be cancer victims out of Fukushima for decades. Or maybe not. It's hard to say. Too many people have a vested interest in both camps to be sure how many will get cancer from the disaster.
The other problem nuclear has is that it while safety is cheap per MW it's expensive as hell on the balance sheet. At least in America we've got a long history of privatizing things to hand off the profits to somebody's brother in law. But sooner or later inflation bites into their profits and they start cutting corners....
The trouble is you're not buying a car and another house. Old cars break down a lot. For most people they start getting little nuisances at the 3-5 mark and getting stranded at the 7-10 mark. So for most folks not buying a car every 3-7 years is a sign of something not right. As for houses, you're not building any equity. Property is too good an investment opportunity to pass up for people who aren't millionaires. If you're having trouble with credit you're probably not a millionaire:P.
because you're not buying a Car and a House, which are both debt. These are things every person wants. Used cars break down a lot (I'm stuck driving a clunker, so I speak from bitter experience). With few exceptions nobody who can afford it doesn't buy a new car every 3-5 years because of this. As for a house if your an American you don't rent because you want the equity on the home. Also, that equity is a large part of what improves your credit score
Now, you might still be low risk. You might live next door to your job and not like travel (or travel without a car). You might have a job in San Fransisco and not be able to buy a house For the car they can't tell and for the house they know you're pissing away equity. They don't care why in either case.
they can't just leave their class. The days of easy peasy teaching jobs are long gone. At least for grade school teachers. If their kids don't pass the standardized tests their quickly fired. There's only so much the unions can do when a multi-billion dollar industry is out to get you. Subs don't cut it. They don't have the resources or experience (teaching is harder than you think). We're sabotaging them on purpose so we can privatize the whole she-bang and let a lucky few assclowns skim 10-30% off the top.
So no, the teacher is going to do the same thing: Get out of jury duty. Mission accomplished.
that their low unemployment is artificial? Their economy is full of make work jobs that can be eliminated anytime someone decides their tired of paying for it. As for animation, it's a much more respected industry / art form in Japan than it is here. Osama Tezuka, Leji Matsumura and Hayao Mizaki are practically national heroes. You generally don't outsource something like that. It'd be like hiring a cheap Mexican version of Steven Spielberg. Good for a laugh on the Simpsons but you'd never really do it...
who finds the constant buyouts and mergers disturbing? It seems like everytime I turn around there's another mega merger. Hell, the only thing that's stopping the Cable companies from merging is the FCC. Where are companies getting all this money to go on buying sprees like this? What happened to internal R&D? Remember Bell Labs? Why bother innovating when you can just buy the survivors? Thing is, R&D is expensive. So instead of great new games we get cheap, highly addictive and manipulative stuff like Candy Crush...
We all like to looks back on some mythical glory days when everything was fine. It wasn't. Life was nasty, brutish and short. We tortured people all the time. Shit, the stuff we did in South America is the stuff of nightmares. Don't spend too much time thinking about it, you won't be able to sleep at nights.
I really wish people would stop pining for some idealized past that never existed. If we'd acknowledge just how fucked up things were, have been, and still are we could start attacking the problem. As it is the sentiment you express just gives more ammo to the Radical Regressives who pass themselves off as 'Conservative' these days. It's counterproductive and plays into the hands of the same people you'd like to see stopped...
whatever's good for our corporate masters is what stands. See, you're making the mistake of having principles, ideas, and believing in the law. Our ruling class does none of that. They have one and only one agenda: expanding their wealth and power. So while you're bound by all these rules and ideas and you try your best to fit your beliefs and worldview into the US Constitution they're just doing whatever makes them the most $$$...
Yeah, I'm kinda bitter. My kid is a senior in high school and went to school sick because she was afraid of missing a day. With the way they do class all she'd have missed was a bunch of indoctrination about the wonders of supply side economics in her Econ 101 class and a bunch of crap about how wonderful our two party system is (that conveniently glosses over how the entire system was thought up to keep wealthy landowners from losing their land to the people who actually worked it)...
now, the Chinese factories that make all their stuff are doing pretty good, and a few guys at the top do well. But the rest of Japan has been in recession (depression? we're not allowed to talk about that) for 20 or 30 years since their bubble burst in the 90s. I knew it was bad when they started outsourcing animation to South Korea to save money...
it just depends on what part of society you're from. If you're in the upper class drug laws are great. They keep the poors out of your neighborhood, schools and parks.
Let me explain. Almost every poor person at least knows someone who takes drugs. In the absence of access to medical care you're going to self medicate. Now, remember that all our drug laws make you guilty by association. If they find your buddy's pot in your car you still lose your car. That means if you're poor you learn to avoid the police. You especially learn to avoid giving them "probably cause" to search you and your friends. And what better way to give the cops probably cause than by showing up in a neighborhood you obviously can't afford?
For years I lived paycheck to paycheck (I had 3 major family illnesses hit me all at once, yay). I got called but was working for a company with a jury duty benefit. It only paid 2 weeks, but the trial was only 2 weeks. If I got called for a murder trial I'd have to beg the judge and hope he wasn't an asshole.
The trouble with juries is they are inherently conservative and right wing because only successful people who've never experienced any hardship can really afford to be on them. Everyone else just googles for how to get out of 'em (or asks around pre-google). That's not by accident. Every major facet of our legal system was built to protect property owners from the unwashed masses...
It's just really, really hard to plan. It takes several years to develop a game. Meanwhile computer hardware is advancing. You're trying hard to hit that moving target. You don't write your game for the computer your users have today, you write it for the computer they're going to have when your game launches. Monolith got hit hard by this. They developed Shogo Mobile Armor division thinking by then everyone would have PII 300s while lots of us were stuck on 200 MMXs. Their games got bad reviews until hardware caught up with their engine. Even John Romero and the Duke Forever guys suffered from this problem. If you're not writing games for a console you're job is 100 times harder.
Slashdot Mirror
it's also when all the social programs got defunded. Reagan turned back the clock on what FDR had started. Bush Sr & Clinton continued that ( he never really cared about anything except being prez) and Bush Jr ramped it up into full gear so he could give the money to his cronies.
Why would it be any different for the refugees? It's kinda like when they relocated all those dirt poor black share croppers to the projects in the 70s and then Reagan pulled the funding sending them into a perpetual spiral of poverty. Did I say 'kinda'?
which is terrible, abject poverty. China double planted and starved half their population, albeit because everyone was too scared to tell Mao he was wrong. But the point is it's not hard to get people to do stupid things that aren't in their best interests.
You're right about one thing: their entire way of life is going to die. Privately owned farms are few and far between. All you have to do is wait for a dry spell, economic downturn or for junior to get tired of living in the middle of nowhere watching crops grow and you can buy the land out for cheap. And let's face it, we don't need that many people to grow food. Hell, we've got berry picking robots now and they only reason we don't use them is migrants are still cheaper. It's not necessarily a bad thing if we shift the wealth around and have few kids with better upbringings.
and Juries are really, really unpredictable. Even if the outcome is legally obvious it doesn't mean the jury won't get dazzled into blaming AMD.
was RAM. You just didn't have enough RAM to do complex games. So you got a lot of games that were just like their cartridge ports but with some FMV and CD audio thrown in. The only exceptions were RPGs, but those hadn't really caught on yet. There were some indications of success with games like Mortal Kombat on the Sega CD, but the load times were terrible and the game wasn't enough better than MK on the SNES/Genesis to justify the $200 price tag for the CD. Not when MKII for SNES was on it's way. If you want to see a starker contrast look at the two launch titles for the Turbografx-CD: Street Fighter and Monster's Lair. The former was a good port of a mediocre game and the latter was bested by the Cartridge Genesis Version. That experience would have set you back $750+ tax in 1990 dollars.
What CDs did well in the 90s was anime style graphics, but it would be at least 5-10 years before that stuff had enough of an audience to support expensive peripherals. It makes me wonder what would have happened in NEC had poured the money they wasted on the US CD launch into advertising and a bigger launch.
Did a pretty cool serious of videos on their site interviewing as many folks involved in the Japanese gaming industry from the 80s and 90s they could. They'll selling a dvd of the entire thing but a lot of it's on their site/youtube for free.
the point isn't that the risk is high, the point is there is a risk in exchange for very, very little benefit to the US. It's just plain not in our interest and if it wasn't for the silly 'Drill baby drill' clap trap that's been floating around this wouldn't even be discussed. We'd drop it and call it a day.
That Nintendo didn't manage to kill Sony as a competitor with legal wrangling. They were always really good at that sorta thing (ask Namco about their Sega Genesis games :P ). Apart from that this is one of those pivotal moments in the game industry I always love to hear about. Like when EA bluffed Sega into giving them a sweetheart deal on Sega Genesis licensing in exchange for not sharing their tech to get around the Genesis lockout chip (turned out the chip didn't work, though to be fair EA didn't know that, but Nintendo woulda told EA to go pound sand).
Seriously, I'm asking. I've generally heard much, much lower numbers (in the hundreds best case). There'd be a flurry of jobs while the pipeline was build, but after that nothing. Now, if we made them _lease_ the land for a hefty sum of the profits plus make them buy lots and lots of insurance for the spills...
There's no issue here. Keystone was just a way for Canada to get it's oil to China cheaply. There's no benefit besides a few hundred jobs. OTOH there's a strong likelihood that sooner or later the pipeline will burst and spew oil everywhere for days. We here in America don't have the best track record of making oil companies clean up their messes....
I can move to the suburbs of a nice city and avoid the smog and fracking problems. I'll be dead before the CO2 causes enough problems outside of my immediate environment (vis-a-vis global warming) to care. Yeah, I know. I a prefect world we'd all go nuclear and be done with it. Specifically in a world where we don't treat 99% of the population poorly and 60% of it like shit...
I understand very well how business works. 20 years into the 80 year operation of the factory it'll be time for major repairs and maintenance. Meanwhile inflation will have bit into the profitability of the plant. Best case scenario is the maintenance is done half assed. Worst case it isn't done. With Fukushima I remember the prez of TEP saying it was a once in a hundred year storm. No one pointed out to the bastard that it'd been 100 years since the last record of such a storm. I guess that wouldn't be polite...
is that the results linger. They'll be cancer victims out of Fukushima for decades. Or maybe not. It's hard to say. Too many people have a vested interest in both camps to be sure how many will get cancer from the disaster.
The other problem nuclear has is that it while safety is cheap per MW it's expensive as hell on the balance sheet. At least in America we've got a long history of privatizing things to hand off the profits to somebody's brother in law. But sooner or later inflation bites into their profits and they start cutting corners....
The trouble is you're not buying a car and another house. Old cars break down a lot. For most people they start getting little nuisances at the 3-5 mark and getting stranded at the 7-10 mark. So for most folks not buying a car every 3-7 years is a sign of something not right. As for houses, you're not building any equity. Property is too good an investment opportunity to pass up for people who aren't millionaires. If you're having trouble with credit you're probably not a millionaire :P.
because you're not buying a Car and a House, which are both debt. These are things every person wants. Used cars break down a lot (I'm stuck driving a clunker, so I speak from bitter experience). With few exceptions nobody who can afford it doesn't buy a new car every 3-5 years because of this. As for a house if your an American you don't rent because you want the equity on the home. Also, that equity is a large part of what improves your credit score
Now, you might still be low risk. You might live next door to your job and not like travel (or travel without a car). You might have a job in San Fransisco and not be able to buy a house For the car they can't tell and for the house they know you're pissing away equity. They don't care why in either case.
Wow. Googling Plutonomy is disturbing. I'd like to say it's bullshit but there's too many take down notices from Citigroup floating around...
they can't just leave their class. The days of easy peasy teaching jobs are long gone. At least for grade school teachers. If their kids don't pass the standardized tests their quickly fired. There's only so much the unions can do when a multi-billion dollar industry is out to get you. Subs don't cut it. They don't have the resources or experience (teaching is harder than you think). We're sabotaging them on purpose so we can privatize the whole she-bang and let a lucky few assclowns skim 10-30% off the top.
So no, the teacher is going to do the same thing: Get out of jury duty. Mission accomplished.
that their low unemployment is artificial? Their economy is full of make work jobs that can be eliminated anytime someone decides their tired of paying for it. As for animation, it's a much more respected industry / art form in Japan than it is here. Osama Tezuka, Leji Matsumura and Hayao Mizaki are practically national heroes. You generally don't outsource something like that. It'd be like hiring a cheap Mexican version of Steven Spielberg. Good for a laugh on the Simpsons but you'd never really do it...
who finds the constant buyouts and mergers disturbing? It seems like everytime I turn around there's another mega merger. Hell, the only thing that's stopping the Cable companies from merging is the FCC. Where are companies getting all this money to go on buying sprees like this? What happened to internal R&D? Remember Bell Labs? Why bother innovating when you can just buy the survivors? Thing is, R&D is expensive. So instead of great new games we get cheap, highly addictive and manipulative stuff like Candy Crush...
We all like to looks back on some mythical glory days when everything was fine. It wasn't. Life was nasty, brutish and short. We tortured people all the time. Shit, the stuff we did in South America is the stuff of nightmares. Don't spend too much time thinking about it, you won't be able to sleep at nights.
I really wish people would stop pining for some idealized past that never existed. If we'd acknowledge just how fucked up things were, have been, and still are we could start attacking the problem. As it is the sentiment you express just gives more ammo to the Radical Regressives who pass themselves off as 'Conservative' these days. It's counterproductive and plays into the hands of the same people you'd like to see stopped...
whatever's good for our corporate masters is what stands. See, you're making the mistake of having principles, ideas, and believing in the law. Our ruling class does none of that. They have one and only one agenda: expanding their wealth and power. So while you're bound by all these rules and ideas and you try your best to fit your beliefs and worldview into the US Constitution they're just doing whatever makes them the most $$$...
Yeah, I'm kinda bitter. My kid is a senior in high school and went to school sick because she was afraid of missing a day. With the way they do class all she'd have missed was a bunch of indoctrination about the wonders of supply side economics in her Econ 101 class and a bunch of crap about how wonderful our two party system is (that conveniently glosses over how the entire system was thought up to keep wealthy landowners from losing their land to the people who actually worked it)...
now, the Chinese factories that make all their stuff are doing pretty good, and a few guys at the top do well. But the rest of Japan has been in recession (depression? we're not allowed to talk about that) for 20 or 30 years since their bubble burst in the 90s. I knew it was bad when they started outsourcing animation to South Korea to save money...
it just depends on what part of society you're from. If you're in the upper class drug laws are great. They keep the poors out of your neighborhood, schools and parks.
Let me explain. Almost every poor person at least knows someone who takes drugs. In the absence of access to medical care you're going to self medicate. Now, remember that all our drug laws make you guilty by association. If they find your buddy's pot in your car you still lose your car. That means if you're poor you learn to avoid the police. You especially learn to avoid giving them "probably cause" to search you and your friends. And what better way to give the cops probably cause than by showing up in a neighborhood you obviously can't afford?
For years I lived paycheck to paycheck (I had 3 major family illnesses hit me all at once, yay). I got called but was working for a company with a jury duty benefit. It only paid 2 weeks, but the trial was only 2 weeks. If I got called for a murder trial I'd have to beg the judge and hope he wasn't an asshole.
The trouble with juries is they are inherently conservative and right wing because only successful people who've never experienced any hardship can really afford to be on them. Everyone else just googles for how to get out of 'em (or asks around pre-google). That's not by accident. Every major facet of our legal system was built to protect property owners from the unwashed masses...
It's just really, really hard to plan. It takes several years to develop a game. Meanwhile computer hardware is advancing. You're trying hard to hit that moving target. You don't write your game for the computer your users have today, you write it for the computer they're going to have when your game launches. Monolith got hit hard by this. They developed Shogo Mobile Armor division thinking by then everyone would have PII 300s while lots of us were stuck on 200 MMXs. Their games got bad reviews until hardware caught up with their engine. Even John Romero and the Duke Forever guys suffered from this problem. If you're not writing games for a console you're job is 100 times harder.