Recent posts by philnotfil on Kongregate

Topic: Kongregate / Who is the oldest person on Kong?

We might not show up in chat, but that’s because most chatrooms I have seen are like the local school yard where kids are still calling each other mean names or have just learnt some brilliant, new Bad Words… You SO grow out of that, but you never grow out of gaming…

QFT

Topic: Games / Zilch Awards

Give it an easy badge for getting all achievements, then only people who love the game will get them all :)

This is genius.

Topic: Kongregate / Poll:What do you want quickest?

I would like a heavily modded chat room.

Topic: Kongregate / So many nerds!!!

A little higher than I had hoped, but at least I don’t have the high score

45.56213%

Topic: Serious Discussion / Are pharmaceutical companies just corporate drugdealers?

Yes, prescription drugs are expensive, but that shows how valuable they are. Besides, our research and development costs are enormous, and we need to cover them somehow.

Their R&D costs are dwarfed by their marketing costs.

Topic: Serious Discussion / Book 2 of the "Inheritance" trilogy or "Eldest" by Christopher Paolini

I really enjoyed the first book, but the second had a few too many preachy monologues. The third one is on my list of books to read, but I’m not in any hurry to get to it.

Oh, as to the actual discussion, the standard Christian response is that God loves us enough to give us the freedom to choose, even when we make bad choices that cause problems for others.

Topic: Serious Discussion / Why is a game like "Blizzard's World of Warcraft" so popular?

drop rates and intermittent schedules of reinforcement :)

Topic: Serious Discussion / Ayn Rand Quote

I forgot how much I hate textile, I knew there was a reason I wasn't posting as much.

"The entirety of the labour is worth the entirety of the produce produced or the services rendered. We'll say it takes 100 hours to make a bicycle- to get it from natural resources to an item in the hands of the consumer- with those hours spread between various proletarians (the miners, the factory hands, the managers, the delivery guy, the shopkeep etc.) Without any of those people, the bicycle would not be produced and would not get to the consumer. Because it took 100 hours to make it, you can divide the value of the bicycle by 100. A person who works one hour towards producing the bicycle has contributed 1% towards the production of the bicycle, and so deserves for that work 1%. The Capitalist, as opposed to the essential Proletarian, deals with the money- they do not produce anything or perform a service. Whether the Bicycle ends up costing £50 or £100, the fact is that still only one bicycle has been produced. In their role as Capitalist the person hasn't added to society's value, yet they demand a slice of it.
The bicycle produced by 100 hours labour, say, costs £50. Each of those hours that saw the bicycle come from natural resources to an item in the hands of the consumer therefore is worth 50p. The Capitalist, who hasn't added to the mass of produce or services given, gets a cut, however. The bicycle, produced by 100 hours labour, gets sold for £50- the capitalist takes £25. Labour that produced £50 worth of produce is paid the remaining £25.
Whatever the Capitalist does- the same amount of items and services are produced."

The capitalist is why the bike was able to be made in the first place. As you so clearly pointed out, "Without any of those people, the bicycle would not be produced and would not get to the consumer". What you left out is that the capitalist was the one who got all of those people working together. Without the capitalist the miners would have only produced enough metal to make the plows they needed, and the factory workers would have been out on a farm somewhere, and the delivery guy would be delivering vegetables instead of bikes. Additionally, the capitalist was motivated by profit to find a way to get more than an hours worth of work out of an hour of pay, maybe by streamlining the process, maybe by finding someone who needed the job more and was willing to work faster, maybe just by paying the workers less.

Topic: Games / Florida-LSU

Wow, Florida’s offense is scary good, too bad they didn’t play like that against Ole Miss, they would be #1 in the country.

Carry on.

Topic: Kongregate / Badges v actually playing the games

Badges. I must have them all.

Topic: Serious Discussion / Suriving the Coming Economic Collapse

How have Schiff’s investments performed over the last twenty years?

Topic: Serious Discussion / Sex at an early age?

If both parties are willing and mature enough to understand it and its consequences then why not.

Who gets to decide if both parties are willing and mature enough?

Topic: Serious Discussion / Biden vs. Palin

Palin sounds like a cheerleader for McCain and not a VP candidate.

Umm, that is what VP candidates do, they cheerlead for their presidential candidate and attack the other guy.

Topic: Serious Discussion / Off Topic

I thought that Off Topic was for exactly that kind of stuff.

Topic: Serious Discussion / Gas Prices

3) Taxes. Their is a massive federal tax on gas. Something like 46 cents. Then you have state taxes. Then local taxes.

When people do their yearly freak out about how much the gas companies make they always leave out one interesting fact. The federal government makes more off of gas sales than the gas companies make off of gas sales.

Topic: Serious Discussion / Lowering the Drinking Age

http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/UnderageDrinking.html

He goes through a bunch of stats on drinking and provides citations for further reading if you so choose.

Depending on the study and how they measure drinking, 30-66 of college students don’t drink. (an interesting note, the self reported studies showed higher levels of drinking, when they actually went out and observed they found lower levels of drinking, that whole perception thing at work)

Topic: Serious Discussion / US Govt. Bail-out of Insurance Companies

Brian Wesbury has an interesting idea on how to fix things without the taxpayers spending 700+ billion dollars.

This is from Dave Ramsey, you can find it here

However, it’s part of what’s caused this in the news now. Merrill Lynch was sitting with $30 billion are tied up in sub-prime loans with houses. Stupid! They get what they deserve for doing that, and I’m with you on that. Those houses didn’t become worthless all of a sudden because those people couldn’t sell their bonds. Since they couldn’t sell them, they basically gave them away for 22 cents on the dollar. Now do you think all those houses lost 80% of their value underneath that deal? No, they didn’t, so they gave them away for 22 cents on the dollar (about $6 billion total) because there was no market for them. Nobody wants to buy sub-prime bonds because they suck. They’re junk bonds. But at 22 cents on the dollar, it’s a bargain because even if you foreclosed on every one of the houses in there, you’d probably get $20 billion back out of $30 billion, and so the company that bought those for $6 billion got a deal! But there’s no market for them. That’s where these companies are stuck. They can’t sell this stuff, but accounting-wise, they’ve had to mark it down to market and it’s frozen the marketplace.


Economist Wesbury is saying that if we change that one rule and don’t force them to market down to market and just let them hold on to all the stuff, and say just on sub-primes for this period of time you can change that rule — a temporary change — that’ll free the market up. It’s seized right now; it’s frozen. This will thaw it out and get it going again. He says that’ll solve 60% of the problem … and I think he’s right.

I don’t like giving them any money or any help with my tax dollars. But I’d rather see that than see the whole thing turn completely upside down in a fruit basket turnover rather than have a whole meltdown or something and freak out here in the middle of the election season. Why don’t we just take the FHA insurance program and extend it across these sub-primes? What that means is that you and I are guaranteeing the lender that they’re not going to lose as much or any money on those mortgages. Now I don’t like guaranteeing them, but I like it better than buying them. In other words, instead of $700 billion in tax-payer debt going out there to bail out these companies, just extend the insurance out. You could probably do that for less than $40 billion. It’s like a 95% savings!


If the government insured those mortgages, they would then be marketable. And could sell them. And the companies would stay afloat. And we, the people, don’t have to get into the mortgage business. Now we’re going to get in there a little bit because of the insurance on those getting foreclosed on. But foreclosures aren’t causing this. This is being caused because these companies are frozen and seized up. We’ve got to let some of the steam come off and put some oil in there to get this thing moving again. We can do that without going into debt $700 billion.

My understanding of all of this is that perception is reality. Financial people view these things as being worthless and so they are, no one is willing to buy them. The feds plan is for us , the taxpayers, to buy them so that they will then have value. Wesbury’s plan is two-fold, first allow the companies holding these “worthless” securities to list them at a higher price than buyers are currently paying (giving them value on paper) and then having us, the taxpayers, insure those securities, if the financial people can’t eventually find buyers for the “worthless” securities, we will then buy them. This plan would restore perceived value to these securities, and then they would be once again traded, although more cautiously and at lower prices. It seems like they both work the same way, just one of them costs us, the taxpayers, about 700 billion dollars less.

The confusing thing to me is that these securities made up of thousands of mortgages are not in reality worthless. In fact they are incredibly undervalued (the article says 22 percent of their real value). You would think that someone would be buying them up as fast as they can and then making a ton of money. If I can buy a million dollars worth of real estate for only 222,000 dollars, wouldn’t that be a good deal? Sure, right now, that million is only worth about 600,000 dollars, but hey, I’m tripling my money right away, and when the economy straightens out I’m going to be filthy rich.

Are the financial people just too lazy to go through the process of dealing with the individual properties? I don’t get it.

Topic: Serious Discussion / Lowering the Drinking Age

raises his hand with head down we college kids drink like its our job. If you can you will and that’s that.

I didn’t drink in college, I know many, many people who didn’t. I know even more people who tried it their first semester and then didn’t bother with it again.

I’ll have some stats for you later today, but college students don’t actually drink as much as people think they do. But the perception is there, which interestingly leads to more people drinking than would otherwise.

Topic: Serious Discussion / US Govt. Bail-out of Insurance Companies

The good in letting the economy crash is that everything will go back to its real value. Right now we have a house of cards where everything is overvalued, except for the pieces of paper at the bottom holding everything else up, those are way undervalued.

Lenders made huge amounts of shaky loans, realized that they weren’t good loans and that the housing market was not as strong as it was when they made those loans. At the time the shaky loans weren’t a big deal, housing prices were going through the roof and the lenders figured that they could just foreclose and resell the property for enough to cover the value of the loan and still make money. Once everybody starts doing that it stops working, hence the housing bubble and crash. The clever lenders seeing what was happening realized that they could package thousands and thousands of these loans into fancy things (investment vehicles?) that they could then sell to other people trying to get rich quick, who then sold them to other people (and got rich quick) and so on and so forth. When the bubble popped these buncles of loans were not backed by enough assets to match the price people had paid for them. In many cases they had used these bundles of loans as collateral for more loans, now their collateral was not worth enough to cover the loan and they couldn’t pay back the people who they had borrowed money from. Those people had listed that loan as an asset and used it as collateral for a loan from someone else to invest in something else and those people used those loans as collateral for other loans to buy other things and on down the line. These next numbers are entirely made up, just to put this in concrete terms, eventually you end up with a trillion dollars worth of loans backed up by a billion dollars worth of real estate, and then the real estate loses its value and is only worth 500 million, and some of the people want their money now, and the people who owe money are scrambling to come up with the cash, and no one wants to buy their worthless real estate paper, or give them loans based on that worthless real estate, so they go the the people who they loaned money to and try and get their money, and then those people go to the people they loaned money to and try to get their money, on back down the line. (this would be why credit is bad, stay out of debt)

So now you have all of these people trying to collect on their trillion dollars worth of money, when there is really only a billion dollars out there.

Out of time, I’ll give you the next chapter in a couple of hours, have fun.

Topic: Games / Diablo II

You still have a floppy drive? :)

Armor and weapons you will want a runeword, but depending on your character the shield also, but for helms the unique, and depending on your character, the magic items will be more effective.

With the keys and the Ubers people are playing a very limited number of builds, mostly paladins with smite. Which is really a shame because every class has at least two builds that can solo hell, and pretty much any build can be viable in a party.

There are really two major play styles, caster and melee (pretty much like every other game in the genre), you have a couple of oddities, bow amazons play like casters, but do physical damage, enchantresses are melee sorceresses, and you even have singing barbarians that are in a special place all by themselves.

Skill and equipment are kind of like time and money. Up to a certain point one can make up for a lack of the other. If you have ridiculous gear you don’t need any playskill until the very end of the game, and by then you have probably picked up enough skill to finish the game. If you have enough playskill you don’t need the godly gear until the very end, and by then you have probably picked up enough good equipment to finish the game.

It really is an incredibly well balanced game. Like I said earlier, the whole Ubers thing skews things towards paladins with smite, but most builds can do the ubersx if you are willing to take the time (thirty minutes instead of three).

My favorite builds are Strafing Bowazon, Summoning Necromancer, and Werebear Druid. The Bowazon is crazy powerful, the Necromancer is easy (and a great first character, you don’t really need any equipment, so you can pack on the Magic Find and get good stuff for your next characters, and you are not very often exposed to the enemy), and the Werebear is a big bear, how cool is that.

Topic: Serious Discussion / Without an AX: Video games cause crime?

What seems clear? Remember, correlation is not the same as causation.

That seeing violence increases the rates of violent behavior in the viewers.

Correlation is not the same as causation, but the studies I cited were experiments randomly assigning participants to groups and using control groups. For showing causation it doesn’t get any better than that.

Topic: Serious Discussion / AX: Video Games cause crime.

You can’t have violence in video games and not have it influence the behavior of the people who play it. Changing the violence to cute stars or something would be a good solution, but it would remove the violence. What azaral had to say is good, but it still only diminishes the influence, it doesn’t negate it completely. I like the psychiatry approach, but that would get expensive fast.

Harry Harrison has a great short story about a near future where they enforce population controls by allowing the general public to have a chance to kill the father of the incoming child. It doesn’t matter if the father kills the enforcer or the enforcer kills the father, either way the population is reduced by one, creating a place for the incoming baby. He points out that some people would be signing up for this opportunity out of the desire to kill, or just plain craziness, rather than civic duty and the police and psychiatrists get to use this sign up to flush out those people and deal with them. A little random, but that’s what I was thinking about while I read the thread.

To try and get back on topic, the psychiatry approach could use the games to identify people who do have issues and get them the help that they need.

Topic: Serious Discussion / Without an AX: Video games cause crime?

Just because it is interesting to see the misinformation that people come up with to defend their pastimes :)

Do video games affect behavior?

If they don’t the whole marketing industry needs to give back their paychecks.

Albert Bandura has a bit to say about this as well. “Influence of models’ reinforcement contingencies on the acquisition of imitative responses.” Children who see violence are more likely to commit violence

Walters and Parke, “Influence of response consequences to a social model on resistance to deviation.” Children who see deviance rewarded are more likely to be deviant. Children who see deviance ignored are just as likely to be deviant as those who saw it rewarded. Children who saw no deviance are less likely to be deviant than children who saw deviance punished.

It seems pretty clear, but I’m sure that many people will chime in with “well I play <their> and I haven’t killed anyone.” True, but as a group, those who see violence (real or computer generated) are more likely to commit violence.

To be fair, violence in movies and on television also affects behavior.

Topic: Games / What are the chances of getting ...

Multi-player Necronomicon to the same level as Kongai? Personally I liked the gameplay of Necro better than Kongai, why not get the Kong resources behind Necro and build it to the level that Kongai is at?

Topic: Games / Starfighter: Disputed Galaxy - More Badges?

What Darkruler said.

It isn’t that the game is hard, it is that the game is boring. The first 200 kills were pretty awesome, the next 200 were pretty cool, the next 200 were more like work, and I haven’t been able to convince myself that it is really worth it to get the last 200 kills that I need to get the badge.