Lurker > red sox 777

In order to believe this, you have to ignore all logic. People will see the characters they like and vote for them. Same as any other contest we've had in the past. The people on the fence, your "independents" if you like, won't go in depth about what rivalry is better. They'll find their favorite character of the bunch and vote for them (or anti-vote their most hated character). The same as any other contest. Throwing a sidekick/villain from the same game won't make a difference in this contest.

Voters have proven time and time again in the past that they don't vote blindly, and they do take the situation into account. They'll vote for their favorite rivalry- of course in many cases that will be the same as the team with their favorite character. It's a subjective decision, but that doesn't mean that good rivalries won't get a boost. It really takes no effort at all. You don't have to justify your vote to anyone.

--
90s games > 00s games

1. Globalization- There are fewer and fewer "working class" jobs in the United States. They've all been sent overseas. So, college is becoming more and more of a necessity. There is still a long way to go on this perhaps, because still, only 25% of adults over age 25 have 4-year college degrees.

2. Financial Aid- A lot of the tuition increase is artificial. The true tuition is lower, but the colleges take money from richer students and give it to poorer students. Suppose the actual tuition is $20,000- so, from 2 students, the school needs to collect $40,000. The school does this by setting nominal tuition at $40,000 and collecting that from a rich student, and then giving the poor student "$40,000 in aid." In fact the school is not being nearly as generous to the poor student as it sounds like it is.

3. Population Demographics- There's a mini baby boom that is around its peak now. So, more students of college age = more demand = higher prices.

4. Federal Government aid- The Federal government has been very loose with handing out loans and grants to students recently. Easy credit = higher tuition, because the schools know students are able to borrow more.

--
90s games > 00s games

Taking inflation from 1980 to 2010, it's actually less than 3 times as much. $.36, to be more exact. (thank you, inflation calculator)

It's not just inflation, it's also real economic growth, which has been going at approximately 3% a year. Your degree is worth more than theirs in real dollars, because the US economy is worth more now than in 1980, because of all the technology that's been invented since then. I believe when you multiple the factor from inflation and real economic growth, 6 should be a pretty good ballpark estimate.

--
90s games > 00s games

Most of the increase from 200k to 1M would be inflation. In today's dollars it'd probably be more like 300k.

--
90s games > 00s games

Well, to be completely fair, assuming your parents are about 30 years older than you, you should multiply their costs by 6. That reflects the growth in the US economy and inflation in the past 30 years. Though of course, their generation's college costs will end up still being a lot lower. I think the next generation's college costs will be even higher though. You can probably expect to pay around $1 million to put a child through a good private college another 30 years down the line, if you don't get financial aid.

--
90s games > 00s games

Who has a loan at only 3%? My loans are at like 15% from undergrad. I'm being robbed blind.

15%?!? This isn't the late 70s/early 80s when we had double digit inflation, you ARE being robbed blind. Why didn't you borrow from the Federal Government? They have much lower rates than that.

--
90s games > 00s games

They can be as upset about it as they like. The country (or at least the majority) dislikes them and their ideas, and isn't going to change its mind. I am really glad that is the case. It is a culture war, and leftists believe they are on the right side of history, but we do not. The only societies they'll win are ones that are degenerate or degenerating.

Speaking of history, marxism is really outdated. There are no more proletariats in the United States. That kind of work has been shipped overseas.

--
90s games > 00s games

To be honest Smuffin, it's not just Obama. The US economy hasn't really been growing properly since 2000, in my opinion. The tech boom was the last great engine of real economic growth (real as in actually makes people better off). Since 2000 we've had the housing bubble, which is essentially people having the exact same houses but feeling good about it because they're worth more, and a boom in derivatives, which is once again, people having the exact same underlying securities but feeling good about it because they're worth more. Oil companies have had a lot of growth, which is similarly having the exact same oil as before, but at a higher price.

Speaking of the tech bubble, I wonder how much CJayC could have sold Gamefaqs for in March of 2000. He ended up selling at basically the very bottom for tech companies in 2003. Looking at other tech, especially internet, companies it wouldn't be too shocking if he could have gotten 50-100 million for the site in 2000, given that he sold for 2 million in 2003.

--
90s games > 00s games

Jill beat Kirby the last time votals were as low as they are now, right? Or was it 2003, I don't remember.

--
90s games > 00s games

Unless the regulations say that you have to make super risky loans, so that anyone who doesn't want to gets shut down by the government and the remaining banks can make more money.

--
90s games > 00s games

And that match was on TP release day. Do we think Link overperformed there and Cloud actually should've been closer?

It's not just possible, it's almost certain. Unless you think Link has actually lost ground to Cloud since 2006, anyway.

--
90s games > 00s games

Liberals have been in hiding since Reagan, and really since Nixon. It's because they're unpopular and they know it. Liberals always have to sugarcoat themselves as moderate or reasonable. Conservatives can openly trumpet themselves as far right extreme. A large number of the Democrats in power are moderates- the party really depends on them for its survival. If the Democratic Party treated moderates like the Republican Party does in primaries, Republicans would have complete control of the Federal Government, because the far left would fail horribly at winning general elections.

--
90s games > 00s games

I'm taking Cecil/Golbez over Luigi/Waluigi after some thought. I think Waluigi is really going to drag that team down. It's going to completely kill Luigi's votes from rivalry voters, and will take away a good portion of his tag team voters too.

--
90s games > 00s games

People sure love their EV over variance on this board.....I guess that happens when you're not actually risking anything. It looks like you already tried differing odds (maybe it was in 2003 that every match paid 1:1?), and that wasn't enough to get people to stop betting everything on a lot of matches. But hopefully the trend betting option will keep people away from making max bets, because then they won't be able to bet if more favorable odds come up during the match. Or maybe it's better to just institute a rule that you can only bet 90% of your stake.

--
90s games > 00s games

I think the main problem with the old betting contest (that existed before spread betting) was that it was too easy to predict straight up winners, and that if I remember right, every match had 1:1 odds. Then when we had a surprise match, almost everyone busted at the same time, because people tended to bet all their money on every match.

I think that by having different odds on each match, people likely will not go all in every match. If betting on Magus against Knuckles only gives you 1:10 odds, I think a lot of people would resist going all in on Magus, even if everyone would pick him in the Oracle.

I really like the idea of betting during the match. Would let people win through their knowledge of trends, which no other board contest does. It would be a lot of work for me or any host though, to be updating the odds several times a day, especially when there will probably be days that I am not on Gamefaqs when it is time to update odds. Maybe if we update the odds only 4 times a day: at the freeze, 1 AM, noon, and 8 PM, it could work.

--
90s games > 00s games

Hmm, actually, do we get this ability for life? I think the word "tax" in the topic made me think it was for one year for some reason. In that case......$X*60/2*(1.07)^60 = 5000 yields x around $8700 assuming that the one-year value was $5. But when I was thinking about this question in the first place, I wasn't really thinking about investing the $5,000, so I guess my answer will still be no.

--
90s games > 00s games

$5,000 really easily. $500 would be an easy pick here. Or $50. Not sure about $5.

--
90s games > 00s games

Would people be interested in a board betting contest with differing odds on the characters instead of spreads? So, for example, Snake/Liquid might get 1:10 odds while Crono/Lavos gets 10:1 odds.

--
90s games > 00s games

Also, booms and busts aren't necessarily bad things. Having a cycle of booms and busts is probably positive for expected value of the economy in the long run. It's +Variance a lot, +EV a little. I'd be very surprised if having major booms and busts was negative for EV in the long run, because then you could decrease variance and raise EV by having a more steady economy, which is getting the best of both worlds and too good to be true.

--
90s games > 00s games

Sure thing.

--
90s games > 00s games

I dunno that they're not making a positive impact. They're bringing the issues to the forefront, and successfully turning public opinion against themselves. Which may count as a positive impact. Wall Street is very unpopular on Main Street, USA, but nothing's going to change that faster than seeing a bunch of liberal socialist/communist hippies protesting at Wall Street.

--
90s games > 00s games

That's nothing new. Liberal activism has made the left look bad in America for 40 years. That might be why liberals usually don't do it anymore.

--
90s games > 00s games

Sure... until a list of OWS approved candidates starts circulating.

These candidates would be so far to the left that they wouldn't win anywhere that isn't already staunchly blue. All it could accomplish is to replace some moderate dems with radical communists/socialists.

OWS does not represent the 99%. It represents maybe people from the 70th to 98th percentiles. That is, college educated people who didn't make it or college students who don't expect to make it (top 1% = making it). I'd almost guarantee you that if you went to OWS and polled people, the majority of them have graduated from college or are in college. Nationally, only 25% of people end up graduating from college. By contrast, the Tea Party has support across a more broad economic spectrum. True, the TP has much more support among poor people than the upper middle class or the rich, but they have plenty of allies in the top 10% who are libertarian or otherwise conservative but aren't willing to go as far out as the TP.

--
90s games > 00s games

The Tea Party got stuff done because they can get politicians thrown out of office. Politicians listen when their positions are on the line.

--
90s games > 00s games

A mass movement with no leaders has no responsibility to have a specific platform. Unlike the Tea Party, this is a truly grassroots movements that more or less spontaneously happened.

The Tea Party is a grassroots movement. Republican politicians have jumped on board, but they didn't start it.

They all are spouting similar rhetoric ,but they arent solutions based. How can they be?They believe that no matter what they do they are incapable of influencing an inherently corrupt system.

Their cause is doomed not because the system is corrupt but because they are in the minority. Long live the silent majority.

--
90s games > 00s games

I'd be happy with a law mandating that no one at a Wall Street firm is allowed to work more than 40 hours a week. Then the big banks would have to hire twice as many people to work half as much- the result will probably be much more level-headed decisionmaking. People working 80-100+ hours a week are likely getting a low enough amount of sleep and a high enough amount of stress to make them fuctionally drunk. Putting very smart, very ambitious, functionally drunk people in charge of billions of dollars is a bad idea.

And we can't just ask people working such obscene hours to make less risky decisions- If I'm going to be working 100 hours a week, you bet I'll be taking big risks to maximize my bonus. You would do the same. The bonus would have to be very large for me to work that much for it.

Now, what do the banks' shareholders lose by hiring twice as many people to work half as much? The second half won't be quite as smart and ambitious as the first half, so the bank's expected value of investments probably goes down. But it probably won't go down very much, while the variance will probably drop a lot. And that's good enough for the country that it may be justifiable. It may even be good for the shareholders. People employed in the banks now stand to lose a lot more of course, so they'll naturally oppose it.

We can justify this law under the Commerce Clause.

--
90s games > 00s games

They are both very related to how power structures affect those below them. Culture and economy and society are very linked together.

That is extremely vague and makes no suggestions about what we should do.

But, you know what the trend for male/female equality has actually been? As obnoxious as Ulti and co.'s alpha male talk was for a while, there's a lot of truth in that. The median male has no economic advantage over the median female in this country today, a disadvantage probably. More women go to college, by a 56/44 margin. Even with graduate degrees, the numbers are evening up. Meanwhile, men continue to be expected to provide for their families (this explains part of the salary gap- men choose higher paying fields because they are expected to contribute more money to the family).

Where do men have an economic advantage over women? At the top 1%. CEOs, Wall Street traders, tech company founders, politicians......these are dominated by men. All those affirmative actions society has implemented to try to equalize men and women in the past decades do almost nothing to the top 1%. These men do not see women as competition, only other men, and they see the current situation correctly. Further action by society to favor women over men to correct a perceived imbalance will only place the bottom 90% of men further behind the bottom 90% of women. It won't do a thing to the economic power of the top 1% of men.

--
90s games > 00s games

Precisely. And for those people who are mocking Smuffin for calling everything Communist when it's actually to the right of Communism, you only have to look at the French Revolution to see how a liberal movement can radicalize itself very very fast. The people on the far left in 1789 were being guillotined by 1793 for being too far right. The country went from absolute monarchy to mobocracy (literally) in 4 years.

--
90s games > 00s games

Raising awareness on sexual assaults on women and letting workers form unions are completely unrelated. And the former has nothing to do with Wall Street unless they're saying that Wall Street is prejudiced against women or something. Though that is probably true, but no more than Board 8 is prejudiced towards women.

--
90s games > 00s games

The occupy movement seems to clearly be interested in a more equitable society as their primary goal.

That is extremely vague.

Although, if you're going to argue next that the Tea Party's goal is a more free society, and that's just as vague as equitable, you might have a point. I'd say that even if we do accept that as the Tea Party's goal, a more free society is a good deal more clear than a more equitable society, though.

--
90s games > 00s games

http://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/index.html?poll=3482

And indeed, looks like DKC was beat down well over 60/40 by Super Mario Kart, and more than quadrupled by LTTP.

--
90s games > 00s games

I don't think DK gets much strength from DKC at all....the vast majority of it probably comes from his presence in the Mario side-games and Smash.

--
90s games > 00s games

I guess they put that button there to help you lose money faster.

--
90s games > 00s games

Ad hominem and guilt by association are terrible arguments, so yes, it is.

--
90s games > 00s games

I think if we instituted the tax with a bottom rate of 80% there, salaries would actually rise a huge amount. Nobody would work for minimum wage anymore; McDonald's wouldn't be able to hire anyone for less than $15 an hour. The effect would continue all the way up the chain through at least the upper middle class, and possibly would trickle up to the rich.

The flip side is that corporate profits would plummet. Any place that can't turn a profit paying employees in the $15-$20 range or higher would have to close down. Not sure what would end up happening, but it's a good bet there will be at least temporary chaos.

--
90s games > 00s games

I'm not in favor of a progressive or regressive taxation system. It is blatantly obvious that under the terms of the fourteenth amendment, a flat tax is the only morally acceptable and constitutional system.

My tax system there is actually MORE progressive than a true flat tax. Here's an example of a true flat tax, where everyone pays the same amount: $40,000:

$0: Infinite%
$10,000: 400%
$20,000: 200%
$40,000: 100%
$80,000: 50%
$160,000: 25%
$320,000: 12.5%
$1M: 4%
$4M: 1%
$20M: 0.2%
$200M: 0.02%
Marginal: 0%

--
90s games > 00s games

Hint hint: The question was more directed at Smuffin than the rest of you.

--
90s games > 00s games

How about this taxation system?

0-$10k: 80%
$10k-$20k: 70%
$20-$40k: 60%
$40-$80k: 50%
$80-$160k: 40%
$160-$320k: 30%
$320-$1M: 20%
$1M-$4M: 15%
$4M-$20M: 10%
$20M-$200M: 5%
Marginal: 0%

This system will reward success!

--
90s games > 00s games

Well, Tifa and Aeris have always been bad at getting nominations. I'm also surprised that they didn't make, and they'd crush Yuna/Seymour, but them's the breaks.

--
90s games > 00s games

Small business loans come from banks. They don't come from artists or college professors or politicians or whatever other handful of professions these communists think aren't evil.

They come from the American people, of course. That's where all the wealth of this country actually comes from. A bank doesn't get capital simply by virtue of being a bank, it's got to get it somewhere.

Banks are basically giant risk tanks. People don't like risk, they're happy to pay someone high high premiums to take their risk for them. People are willing to pay shockingly high amounts to get rid of risk. And banks are happy to take their risk.

In the past, business got their capital from a wider range of sources than recently. Business has become more and more dependent on financing, and on financing from a small number of sources recently.

--
90s games > 00s games

Virtually none of the modern conveniences we enjoy would be possible without large investment institutions. This is an indisputable fact.

I'd dispute this. Even 10 years ago, Wall Street was less important to the economy than it is now. Go back 20-30 years and it is a marked difference.

And I agree that Wall Street is evil. But I mostly think this because the people there work ridiculous hours in an extremely toxic environment. And these people are choosing to do this, so they don't have the excuse that they are being exploited. They willingly choose to exploit themselves in exchange for money and for the ability to lord it over other people. This may not seem like a rational reason for thinking Wall Street is evil, but it's mine.

--
90s games > 00s games

I thought about more day voters leaving helping out CT. But I did some calculations that show the effect purely from the 26.3% vs. 28.6% losses would be minimal. Say hypothetically that Mario/Crono is a 50/50 match, and Mario wins the day 52/48 while Crono wins the night 53/47. Even if we assume the same losses happened again in the period since the GOTD contest, so that day matches are now at 51% of their 2010 Character Contest votals, and night matches are at 54.3% of their 2010 Character Contest totals, if we just remove votes evenly, Crono only moves up to........50.08%.

Unless, of course, it's the "casual" voters who are leaving in both day and night, and "hardcore" voters are staying in both periods. Then the day/night difference would just be the result of casual voters leaving, and that could have a much bigger impact on matches.

--
90s games > 00s games

So a 28.6% decline for day matches and 26.3% decline for night matches in a 9-month period. Wow. If we get another similar drop in the 12 months since the GOTD contest, we're looking at votals around 1/2 of what they were in the last character battle. If we lose half our voters, we can expect some major shakeups......so go ahead and don't cut cookies!

--
90s games > 00s games

Out of those you listed, of the ones I've been to:

California
Nevada
Oregon
Arizona
Alaska
Florida

'Twas close between Oregon and Arizona.

--
90s games > 00s games

Hi Luster, if you have the numbers could you post the average votals for the 2010 character contest and games contest? I seem to remember votals falling about 20% between those contests in the span of like 6 months. And the 2010 character contest is the relevant one here, since that's the last time we saw characters in action.

I'm thinking we may have as much as a 33% decline in votals from that contest to this one, which could create some really big shifts. The shifts wouldn't be very predictable, of course. But it would be likely that we'll have a big shift of some kind, a la 2003, 2005, or 2008.

--
90s games > 00s games

That's definitely true for the board. CT has always been a top tier game on this board (since winning NGamer's original board games contest in 2003), while Crono has never been more than a midcarder. On Gamefaqs though, they're pretty similar with CT being a bit stronger (relative to other games of course).

So we've lost 20% of our voters since last year right? Or is it more than that? Say Snake/Crono is 55/45, as per last year's stats. If the 20% of voters who left split 75/25 in favor of Snake, Crono can do this. Alright everyone, it's time for HOPE AND CHANGE.

--
90s games > 00s games

Poor Phillies. Well then....let's go Tigers?

--
90s games > 00s games

Friendly reminder: Crono hasn't won a match since 2008.

I hate you too. Although, I guess Crono made the final in 2008 and we didn't have a 2009 character battle so it's not so bad. I guess it's like in baseball where you should be satisfied with 1 world series every 8 years......here you have to be satisfied with 1 finals appearance every 8 years.

--
90s games > 00s games

After setting up Sephiroth/Crono in round 3 last year and now THIS, I'm convinced Bacon has it out for Crono.

Haven't read the topic yet, but I'm guessing most people are going to end up taking Link/Ganon because of Skyward Sword? If it's like 80/20 or more for Link, I'm going to keep Cloud/Sephiroth as my pick. I think they've got a very real shot there even with SS coming out, and without it they're the favorite in my book.

I have Red/Blue losing to Mario/Bowser right now: pretty sure that going by pure character strength, they'd lose before that, but that's about as good of a "rivalry factor" as you're ever going to get.

My first instinct was to take Kirby/Meta-Knight over Sonic/Robotnik because Sonic and Kirby are pretty close and MK easily beats Robotnik. Plus it feels like a better rivalry by a bit (though I could be wrong on that).

--
90s games > 00s games

Crono has to face Solid/Liquid in round 1? So unfair!

Good thing Frog/Magus got a good seed, so they could go pretty far. Alucard/Magus suggests that picking Frog/Magus over Alucard/Dracula is a bad idea, but when there's any doubt, I'm going to go with CT.

--
90s games > 00s games