Lurker > red sox 777

Let's go Ron Paul.

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90s games > 00s games

Yeah, I know we all want to see Link/Ganondorf vs. Link/Dark Link in the finals. It's not fair.

This would actually be a really interesting matchup. And the more I think about it, the more I think Cloud/Sephiroth beats Link/Ganon, and it's probably not too close.

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90s games > 00s games

Tyson seems like exactly what that would be targeted at.

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So, the Phillies have lost 6 straight......resting players for the postseason already?

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Whoops, wrong topic.

I don't remember the last time I've done that. I think I may have never done that before.

I'd be disappointed if I were in BT's shoes, yeah. This contest feels......gimmicky.

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90s games > 00s games

Well, in the US, universities get most of their money from high tuition and alumni donations rather than the government, so the same thing probably couldn't happen here. It's not like pure math needs a lot of funding; you don't have to build giant particle accelerators to support math research.

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90s games > 00s games

If I had remembered to vote in time, I would also have put Melee in 2nd like lefty. So RE4 getting unanimous 2nd place would have required both of us to not vote for some reason.

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90s games > 00s games

Crono/Serge?

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Crono/Magus. I suppose Frog/Magus is a better fit, but we need a good partner for Crono. Crono/Lavos is pretty lame.

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90s games > 00s games

I'll be saddened if Link/Ganon wins. Cloud got 46.5% on Link last year. Link/Ganon would probably be below 52% in a Link/Cloud/Seph/Ganon 4-way or even lower. Add to that that the Cloud/Sephiroth relationship is possibly the greatest thing about FFVII's story, and I think I'm going to take Cloud/Seph here.

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90s games > 00s games

Sounds like a pretty bad contest. Although, Link/Ganondorf is such a bad rivalry that we could see something else win. Cloud/Sephiroth upset train let's do this!

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90s games > 00s games

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2011/09/new-hampshire-poll-romney-huntsman-ron-paul-rick-perry.html

Glad to see New Hampshire knows what's up. Poll results if you don't want to open the link:

Romney 41%
Paul 14%
Huntsman 10%
Perry 8%
Palin 6%
Bachmann 5%
Gingrich 4%
Santorum 1%
Roemer 1%

I've also been impressed by Jon Huntsman- he seems like a smart, reasonable, person in the debates. Has the right vision for America and would know how to actually implement it. And as a bonus, he's from Utah- I've only ever met good people from that state, and it's a model for what America should be economically.

IMO New Hampshire is a great state to hold the first primary. So much more reasonable than most of the country. Perry, Palin, and Bachmann shouldn't be in the running for this.

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90s games > 00s games

Alright, time to end this slide with games against the only team we could beat back in April when we had our other bad stretch. 14-4 here we come.

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90s games > 00s games

Anyway, the question was idiotic because it was a blatant "gotcha" question based on virtually nothing. President Obama didn't repeal DADT, CONGRESS did. Obama getting kicked out and replaced with a Republican, no matter how conservative, would not be relevant to this issue.

A Republican president could veto a repeal. The president is just as important in the legislative process as Congress, unless Congress can ever muster up 2/3 in both houses.

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90s games > 00s games

Wow, Putnum......I'm impressed. Good luck!

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90s games > 00s games

Also Wharton sucks. Other Ivy League schools are too elitist for undergrad business schools, and they are on the right side of this one.

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90s games > 00s games

I agree that it's all about the program for grad school, but not for undergrad. For undergrad, the differences between the programs aren't very big and/or aren't very well known. Plus, you take the majority of your classes outside your major anyway, so the most important thing is the quality of the school in general.

Brown is a really great school to its students. They have a 3.65 median GPA, and it's literally impossible to get a D or F. The grading system is A/B/C/no record. Students have an enormous amount of choice in curriculum. Which may be good to make fun of, but at the end of the day is a really good deal for its students.

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90s games > 00s games

Cornell is becoming elite too - one of my best friends, who goes to Yale, didn't get in there.

Maybe they knew he wouldn't go there so they just turned him down first!

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Other countries have treaty rights to access the UN. To get to the UN, he has to go into New York City.

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If it was about being elite, you should throw out Cornell and add Stanford. Though it obviously wouldn't work as an athletic conference.

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90s games > 00s games

FFVIII would beat Brawl in a real contest, you say?

Hmm.....this is.....tempting.

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90s games > 00s games

Dark energy is actually an entirely appropriate name for it. It's called "dark" because we don't understand it.

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90s games > 00s games

However, maybe for the right game it could work.......consider this poll:

http://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/index.html?poll=2412

Would you buy a PlayStation 3 remake of Final Fantasy VII?
Buy it? I'd invest in Square Enix to make it happen! 29.9% 26081
Yes, I'd love to see it on a modern system 24% 20936
Probably, if it was re-done well 21.91% 19118
Probably not, I wasn't a big fan FF7 11.32% 9877
No, I can't stand it 12.87% 11227
TOTAL VOTES 87239

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90s games > 00s games

This boils down to whether I would pay $8820 for Chrono 3, as it is definitely the only game I would remotely consider buying at that price. I normally buy very few games, so even one game would put me well over 0.68% of my normal purchases.

And the answer is.......no. That's just too much. I could countenance $1000 if the game was reputed to be outstanding, but $8820 is far too much.

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90s games > 00s games

No. The hours spent playing it are a bigger deterrent to buying than the money.

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90s games > 00s games

Interesting. Perhaps the $120 price point would work for those games that get most of their sales the first weekend, like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest in Japan. I have to imagine the elasticity on those is pretty low. If you're going to skip work/school and camp out/stand in line for hours for it, an extra $60 isn't going to deter you.

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90s games > 00s games

I mean, Ivy League schools aren't the only good schools.

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90s games > 00s games

Ivy League =/= good university

The Northeast does have the highest concentration of good schools though.

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90s games > 00s games

Interesting. I wonder if the elasticity for casual gamers would be different. If you're only buying one or two games a year, you might still buy the same amount even paying double.

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90s games > 00s games

I got carded for an R-rated movie for the first time when I was 21.

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90s games > 00s games

Also, I'm making some assumptions here. The increase in price to $120 would HAVE to be justified in some way. Either the dollar falls in value (in which case you're paying the same amount in real dollars), or the quality of video games doubles, or the demand for video games somehow rises in which case the price increase seems justified by market forces.

I suppose that if tomorrow, the exact same video games we have now doubled in price and no other conditions changed, then yeah, sales would plummet, at least in the short term. But that's a ridiculous assumption and a completely unrealistic scenario and I guess I just assumed red sox wouldn't bother asking such a pointless question.

It is justified though- $120 now would be the same price as video games had in the mid-1990s after adjusting for inflation. Video game prices have fallen in real dollars since then, and prices are set so rigidly now that I think companies haven't really tested the elasticity above $60. The relevant question for companies is: would sales fall in half? If they would fall by less than that, then they would make more money charging $120.

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90s games > 00s games

For those of you saying you wouldn't buy games at $120: would your answer change if it was only big or high quality games priced at $120 (stuff like Skyrim, Skyward Sword, etc.) while more middling games were priced around $60-90 and shovelware was priced at, say, $40?

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90s games > 00s games

Personally, it probably wouldn't impact how many games I buy, because I don't buy games nowadays anyways, except for the very occasional game from 2002 and earlier. And I'd pay $200, $300, $400, I dunno how much my limit is, for Chrono 3 (so you may as well try to find out, Square!), if it ever comes out.

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90s games > 00s games

I'm not really surprised at all the "less" answers, but I don't really believe it. I think people are bluffing, and once the reality of $120 and up games sets in, people would buy at that price. More than half what they buy now at $60 anyway.

And by the way, in this scenario, games would drop to $40 instead of $20 once they become cheap.

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90s games > 00s games

Sorry, the question isn't clear. More clear version: If games cost $120, would you buy more or less than half the games you buy now?

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90s games > 00s games

I've thought high production value games were underpriced for a few years. Adjusted for inflation, prices are half what they were back in the days of the SNES/N64 when games like CT and SM64 could run to $90.....in 1996 dollars.

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90s games > 00s games

Yeah, but the idea behind this is that the evidence used to declare him guilty in the first place wasn't truly up to snuff, with most of the witnesses recanting. But they stuck with the decision even knowing this, and that's what got people up in arms. You ideally shouldn't continue to stick with "Guilty until proven innocent" if there's heavy doubt the initial guilty may not have been fairly received.

You don't have to prove you're innocent to win an appeal to get a new trial, just that there was evidence that impacted the jury's verdict that should have not been admitted. Dunno what happened in this case though. Wish Georgia had a governor who could stay an execution.

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90s games > 00s games

Guess I was wrong then. What do they do if everybody did suddenly want their money?

1929-1933 version: Go bankrupt. About 5000 banks in the US shut their doors.

2008 version: Ask the government for a bailout.

Though IIRC I read somewhere that 0 or very few Canadian banks went bankrupt in the Great Depression, so they must have been doing something right.

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90s games > 00s games

Yeah, I'm thinking the DOJ is just making its accusations are grandiose as possible to make FTP look bad in the court of public opinion.

The thing is, I'm thinking it's probable that the only reason FTP can't pay people back is that they were shut down. If you just shut down all a bank's operations, they wouldn't be able to pay out their deposits either.

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90s games > 00s games

Not sure how this is different from a bank, assuming they were going to be able to pay everyone when they wanted to withdraw in perpetuity.

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90s games > 00s games

I should hope that preventing someone from eating a poisoned tomato to begin with is more important than ensuring the company pays a proper settlement afterwards.

The company isn't going to produce a poisoned tomato if they know they're going to be sued straight to bankruptcy afterwards. I used not to think this, but after learning more about it I do think it's impotant for us to maintain a strong tort system. There are many lawsuits that are not frivolous but necessary to protect the public. For example, the McDonald's hot coffee case- millions of dollars for one person who was burned by their hot coffee seems excessive, but there were actually hundreds of people who were burned by McDonald's coffee and didn't sue, or settled for a few hundred dollars.

I think the new Supreme Court decision allowing companies to put clauses in their contracts barring customers from suing in class action lawsuits is a bad idea.

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90s games > 00s games

Well then, just get rid of the rule saying you have to be sponsored by a brokerage to take the test. And I would assume that most poor people can't afford accountants or other financial assistants to manage their assets in the way that a rich person would.

We should get rid of that rule, as well as loads of other rules that don't actually protect the consumer and do protect large corporations.
And you usually pay a percentage of the assets under management, so a poor person could afford it.

But if they're in bed with the regulators, then they are not being regulated.

But smaller business are being regulated, by people who are in bed with the big companies. That's the problem.

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90s games > 00s games

I have a counter example

Ultra conservative comes into office, we cut back on regulating corporate America. Say perhaps, the food industry. They send out tomatoes that kill everyone that eats them. No one holds them accountable since they didn't break any regulations. We no longer have a FDA so we can't investigate and figure out where the tomatoes that are killing everyone are coming from. People keep dying until the bad set of tomatoes are gone. No one knows enough to stop eating tomatoes altogether because there's just scattered reports here and there and no governing body to piece it altogether and alert the media.

During this whole ordeal, the tomato company was paying it's workers 35 cents an hour, and forcing them to work 12 hour days.

I suggest that situations like this would be common in a deregulated economy. They were before, after all. Which is why we have regulatory bodies in the first place and why people unionized for better pay and hours. These things are a direct result of bad situations in our history which conservatives are calling to go back to.

Indeed, we have the tort system for that. Also, people aren't going to keep eating tomatoes- as soon as it gets on the news that this company's tomatoes are poisonous, no one will buy them anymore, and the families of anyone who has gotten sick from them will sue for millions of dollars each. And they'll win. This company will go bankrupt really fast.

Now, as for paying its workers 35 cents an hour- if the workers want to work for that much, why not? They'd only agree to do that if they couldn't find work at higher pay somewhere else. They may not be able to get work anywhere for what is now the minimum wage, so they'd just be unemployed. Is that better than working for 35 cents an hour? If it is, they can still choose unemployment!

I think in reality companies aren't going to be able to hire people to do farm work in America for 35 cents an hour. Georgia passed a law this year making it very difficult to employ illegal immigrants, and as a result the pay for farm laborers skyrocketed.....to double the minimum wage I think, and they still couldn't get enough people to meet their labor needs.

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90s games > 00s games

Well, the DOJ has to compete for the best legal talent with private firms. They can't pay nearly as much, so I guess they compensate through a combination of prestige and expensive snacks.

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90s games > 00s games

SM64 isn't going to fall out of the top 10 over this. Zelda > Mario forever, good result.

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90s games > 00s games

Indeed, the country did pretty well during the Gilded Age. We had economic and population growth that turned us into a first rate world power. Standard of living went up a lot.

It is rather difficult to show that small businesses/entrepreneurs are deterred by regulations without resorting to anecdotes, yeah. But you can look at what it takes to start a business in a highly regulated industry.

For example, take brokerages. To start a brokerage, you need to hire brokers. But to become a broker, you need to pass an exam. To take the exam, you need to be sponsored by a brokerage that is already a member of a quasi-governmental private "self-regulatory organization" that works under the SEC, an actual government regulatory agency. But your new firm obviously is not that, so you're out of luck.

You're forced to hire people who are already brokers, meaning that they currently work for other firms. See how this perpetuates the cycle? And there are still a huge number of other regulatory hurdles you have to get through before you can ever do business with a customer. And when you do get to that point, it's much easier for you to work with rich customers than poor customers, because of government regulations "protecting" poor customers from supposedly unsuitable investments. These are also often the most popular investments with rich people, because they are risky and therefore profitable on average. But you can't encourage poor people to get into these, because they're too risky- why not let them decide what they want instead of bureaucrats? Because the government thinks non-rich people are stupid and need to be protected from themselves.

The rich lost a lot more than anyone else from the Great Depression. The percentage of income held by the top 1% fell from 24% to under 10%, IIRC. That was because the rich had the most invested, and the most to lose when stocks came crashing down. That was the price they paid for the risks that brought them such huge profits in the 1920s. This time, the share of income held by the rich hasn't really budged at all- because the government has been propping them up. They still took the risks that led to profit, but the fallout has been muted.

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90s games > 00s games

I think they're panicking a bit over their stock price, which has plummeted by 50% in 2 months (after going up about 1000% over the past 3 years, mind you).

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Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (Patriot Time Portals Conference)
#7 The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (Zelda Overload Conference)
Brave Fencer Musashi (Cult RPG Galaxy Conference)
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (Fanservice Conference)
Mother 3 (Sonic Overload Conference)
Suikoden V (Patriot Time Portals Conference)
Mario Kart DS (Tanooki Blitzball Conference)
#9 Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Cult RPG Galaxy Conference)
Gunstar Heroes (Cult RPG Galaxy Conference)
#5 Super Mario World (Thousand-Year World of Sunshine Conference)
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (Thousand-Year World of Sunshine Conference)
#3 Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow (Nintendo Objections Conference)
Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (Smackdown Hotel Conference)
Super Metroid (Nintendo Objections Conference)

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90s games > 00s games

At least we lasted longer than any of the French Republics. The gall of DeTocqueville to make a statement like that when his country has gone through 17 government systems in the time that we've had 1.

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90s games > 00s games

Is it really a gift if I go to jail if I don't give it to them?

The gift isn't from you the taxpayer. It's from the government. The government just takes it from you; there's no giving involved on that end. The people vicariously give to those on welfare because they elect the representatives who dole out the money, NOT because they pay the taxes that fund it. Which may be an immoral system.

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90s games > 00s games