Lurker > adjl

ItIsSoOver posted...

Its not that we cant recognize when a guy is good looking, its just that even when they are good looking they aren't THAT good looking.

Also worth noting: A lot of the standards men try to live up for looks to are perpetuated by other straight men. If you want to make yourself look more attractive, make a point of listening to women and (to a lesser extent) gay men's opinions on how you look and what would constitute an improvement. That will generally serve you better than listening to a straight dude tell you what he thinks makes himself count as good-looking (at least romantically, since there's value in listening to dudes' opinions if you want to like dress up for a job interview or something).

rjsilverthorn posted...

I haven't watched it, but just from what I have read I can tell you it is not like the comics. I don't know if
'scary' is the right term for it but it is definitely not like the comics.

From catching bits and pieces of it while my girlfriend watched some of it before giving up because it went too off the rails, this sounds about right. "Scary" doesn't quite fit, but it does try waaaaay too hard to be dark and edgy and violent.

Eh, we'll see. So far, Xenoblade has mostly been a matter of using the ideas of Xenogears Perfect Works, taking a fresh approach to building the story Takahashi wanted to tell with Xenosaga but couldn't because the series flopped, so while it's turned into something pretty expansive and convoluted, it's all been with the aim of tying it all to pre-existing ideas. I expect we're going to see a Xenosaga tie-in sooner rather than later (*major FR endgame spoilers*)(if the blue dot at the end of FR's credits was indeed KOS-MOS and that confirms that the Earth that Klaus borked was Lost Jerusalem and his shenanigans were why it was lost, I expect Xenoblade 4 will also be Xenosaga 4), then past that it's just a matter of deciding how it should build from there. Who knows what that uncharted territory will yield?

Mystic_Myotis posted...

I also wish the consuls weren't so shallow

I do enjoy that you can make some inferences about the sort of person they were pre-Moebius by looking at what their Moebius powers are. Triton wanted to explore the world forever and regretted that his mortal life was too short to see everything, so as a Moebius he gained the ability to claim trophies of the strong enemies he defeated as a record of his journeys. Joran was constantly being bullied by others and convinced himself that even the people who were nice to him were just lying about how much they hated him, so as a Moebius he gained the ability to dominate whoever he wanted and make them reveal whatever they were thinking with no filters. Irma's ability was to create elaborate disguises, so we can infer that in life she had trouble fitting in by being herself and made a habit of pretending to be somebody she wasn't to manipulate others into doing what she wanted without actually making a connection with them (making her story particularly tragic because she did find a group she was comfortable with in Colony Mu and was genuinely welcomed there, but she'd backed herself into a corner with her lies and her inability to open up and ended up effectively forcing herself to betray them). Mio's biggest concern was making sure she passed on a legacy, even at the expense of her own life, so M gained the ability to literally pass her will onto others in lieu of actually being able to die and leave something behind.

Some of the powers are too non-specific to figure out anything detailed, like W's reanimation/mind control (they were obviously leaning toward evoking a child playing with dolls, but there isn't much of a character there), and some we don't even really see any powers (R, O, P) or identify anything about the character at all (L could have been a generic wild animal and nothing would have changed), but where possible it's an interesting speculative exercise.

Mystic_Myotis posted...

One pet peeve I have is that opening the menu = menu music. Blegh.

I didn't mind the menu music, but I did mind that the Chain Attack theme overwrote almost all battle themes. The Chain Attack theme is great and all, but so are many of the boss themes that you hear much less often. I also didn't like that fast travelling defaulted to making it daytime and it was therefore pretty uncommon to hear night themes for areas, despite the fact that many of the night themes are fantastic.

For that matter, I ended up picking up Minecraft again in 2019 for the first time in a few years with absolutely zero influence from PewDiePie, just because it had been long enough since I last played it and I wanted to check out a couple of mods that had grown in popularity since I last played (mostly Botania, iirc). While I'm not about to suggest that my experience is universal, given the age of the game, when updates were released, and the evolution of the modding scene, it wouldn't surprise me if a significant number of people also went through that, particularly if the surge linked to PewDiePie also made Youtube's algorithm show people more Minecraft content than usual to remind them that it exists.

PewDiePie played a role, certainly, but suggesting that the game only entered mainstream popularity because he played it in 2019 is hilariously out of touch.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

On X:
I'd rather they not try to tie it in, and hopefully they don't. X1-3 just does a fine job having all the overarching storyline bridge together, whereas X is wildly different. Hell, unless Alrest and Bionis merging together becomes "Earth 2.0", and thousands of years later it gets destroyed, a la the story that kicks off X, they basically can't exist together.

Unless they retcon Earth's destruction at the beginning of X to be less a matter of a literal Earth-shattering kaboom and more a matter of a blinding flash that causes it to disappear (which is actually how it's described at one or more points in X, I believe). Then they exist just fine, and the White Whale escaped Earth just before Klaus did a genesis.

There are a few more points of speculation floating around, but they hinge on content from FR, so I'll hold off on digging deeper until you've gotten through that.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Speaking of, there's kinda throw away lines about the Keves side needing to use Power Frames (the glowing blue circled they all have) in order to match the strength of Agnes/properly weird their Blades. It's brought up out of the blue by Riku once, and then.power frames are mentioned, like, twice ever again. So why is it Agnians are naturally stronger?

They allude to their core crystals as being the reason. Agnians all have one somewhere (some of them aren't readily visible), so it seems that all Agnian soldiers are descended from Blades.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

As for the photo, assuming Rex knocked up Pyra, who knocked up Mythra and Nia?

"And all you guys!"

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

As for thr Keycard, you find it alongside clothing of a soldier (the clothing looks odd to everyone) on a quest outside of Colony 9 IIRC. It's a Key Item that sits in your inventory all game, and no one online seems to have an answer as to what it does, ir where it came from.

I don't remember that myself, but I've seen a couple comments suggesting that it opens a door in the City barracks. Maybe that's it?

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Also also, pretty sure it's implied Melia and Nia must be thousands of years old, since e Aionis history dates back a couple thousand years through various conversations.

Yep. Time doesn't pass the same for everyone in Aionios, depending on how Origin brought them in (coming in as an outside administrative figure vs. being generated from stored data vs. being born naturally). FR will go into that a little more, then the aforementioned art book has more explicit answers.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Went to the Hall of Heroes Past or w/e and saw that the Sword Cabity is now an area, not sure if any new.spaces opened up

That's the area that got annihilator'd when Shania tried to summon her persona. There are some high-level enemies there (85-95, iirc), plus something that only shows up after you beat the four superbosses.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...
Then I'll do FR, which I assume has different characters to play as?

Yep, the party's a whole different cast there, including a sentient pile of beans.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...
And I forget how old Rex was supposed to be, but dude grew.like 2 feet taller.

He was supposed to be 15. He had quite the glow-up.

Factorio Space Age. I've just about beaten it, though I expect I'll keep puttering around for a while after doing so because that's just the nature of Factorio.

slacker03150 posted...

If they find an abandoned car they will look for the owner. If the car is in your name they will know who to look for. If the car is not in your name they will contact the one whose name it is under and they will need to provide a reason why their car is abandoned in Canadian territory. And now all of a sudden you have a stolen car on your record.

So if you actually plan on ditching your car, legally sell it so it's no longer tied to you and won't be treated as abandoned. Getting to the border after doing that will require quite a bit more work, but at least you won't be dragging two tons of "Hello my name is ___" with you.

Indeed. Driving would be significantly more enjoyable if other people did not also drive.

Salrite posted...

I can't deny this

Also, wtf movie is this!?

The Spirit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceauKejv0Jo

If you're trying to sneak into a country, it's not a great idea to bring a large asset with you that carries several pieces of identifying information and will need to be registered using those pieces of identifying information if you want to use it on a long-term basis.

It did take me longer than I'd like to admit to realize they were machina-adjacent. In my defense, though, I have no idea how the biology of that would work and it actually doesn't mesh particularly well with the functional race-blindness everyone in Aionios seems to have (they're aware that some people have wings and some people have cat ears and some people have face spikes, but nobody seems to care any more than they'd care about a hair style). Overlooking aesthetic features is one thing, but overlooking that some people are literally robots is a bit of a stretch.

Salrite posted...

Real answer, probably techniques like color theory, shading, linework for drawing and painting would be the basics. Others for other mediums of course. I'd guess there'd be some art history in there as well to promote inspiration.

Pretty much. The aim isn't so much to teach you how to make art as it is to teach you how to refine the talent you've already developed, guiding your practice and teaching new techniques to help you translate what's in your mind into something on paper (or canvas or clay or macaroni). It's similar to music school: You don't go to music school to learn how to make the piano make noise. Anyone can hit the keys, and anyone can try hitting the keys in different ways until they figure out what seems to work best. You go to music school to refine your technique and learn theory that makes it easier to wrap your head around more complex pieces, both of which will guide you in making your own music.

There is also the value of the degree. Having a piece of paper saying you've learned a bunch of stuff and demonstrated enough skill that a bunch of relatively respected artists are willing to certify your abilities does help guide potential employers in picking who's going to be the best fit for the job they need done. A portfolio arguably does more in that regard, and specifically a portfolio will tell prospective clients/employers what kind of style they can expect, but a degree tells them what you've learned and are capable of beyond what you've decided to show off.

SomeUsername529 posted...

Games get announced too early these days is why. Apparently its for hiring purposes (hey people! We're making Kingdom Hearts 4! You could too!) but on the consumer end its pointless.

I do really like that Nintendo's been trending in the other direction. Metroid Prime 4 and TotK being notable exceptions (the reactions to whose delays may be the motivating factor behind this strategy), most of their recent games have been announced within less than a year of the anticipated release date, which I'm a fan of.

Yeah, I'm not sure what that means for lifespans outside of Aionios. Obviously cross-breeding between humans and blades is now totally possible on the Alrest side of things, as The Picture was kind enough to let us know, and humans and high entia have always been compatible, but I kind of doubt that everyone ages at the same rate and has similar lifespans when Origin isn't imposing that on them. I'm also really not sure how humans cross-bred with machina, because there are a couple of logistical issues there. I guess we'll see what things look like in 4.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

The explanation over what Z was was a little confusing (kinda thought he was gonna be Zanza in a way/another aspect of Klaus, but just Origin's AI?), but I think I got it sorted.

FR helps make a little bit more sense of it by revealing how Origin was structured in the first place, but it's still pretty vague. I kinda like the vagueness, though. It's led to a lot of really interesting speculation about how everything fits together that I've enjoyed wading through, which wouldn't have been possible if it were more explicit. The fact that Z's more of an idea than an actual character has definitely rubbed some people the wrong way, but I also kind of liked that, especially because it means all the sidequesting ties back into the main story (the collective unconsciousness' fear of an uncertain future is what gave Z control of Origin, most of the sidequests you do serve to help everyone in Aionios come to terms with the uncertain future that awaits them post-flame clock and therefore assuaged that fear and eroded that control).

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

And yes, I know that's despite the worlds moving apart now, lol (won't they just try and come back together anyways?).

While not explicitly stated, my impression is that when they're recreated by Origin, they're stabilized in a way that resolves the whole implied matter/antimatter problem, giving everyone time to work out how to merge them more safely. It's kind of deliberately left open, though, to align with the core message of being hopeful about an uncertain future.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Also, any clue what the Mysterious Keycard you find mid0game ish goes to?

I don't remember that off-hand. Maybe one of those big Agnian bases in Erythia? You can break into them a couple of different ways, one of which involves stealth and finding keys and such and the other of which involves not stealth and just hitting anyone in your way.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Also, really wish they would release a big book tying X1-3 together

There was an art book released for 3 a little while back that includes some interviews with Takahashi that clarify some of the more ambiguous (or outright missing) plot points, including some significant ties between the games. Definitely hold off on looking for that stuff until you've finished FR, though, because it spoils a ton of stuff.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

(and X? I kinda need to re-read about X, since it doesn't seem quite related?).

As it stands right now, X is not apparently related to 1-3. There are a couple of throwaway lines in FR that some people think might be allusions to X, and the parallels between Origin and the Lifehold are hard to miss, but otherwise there's nothing outside of Lin's Monado barrettes, Tatsu referencing a legendary heropon, and Adam Howden and Carina Reeves being options for the MC's voice, which are more easter eggs than real story connections.

However, there's a very strong chance the upcoming Definitive Edition will be doing more to tie them together, much like 1's DE retconned Alvis' key pendant into a core crystal that matched Pneuma's and Logos'. In addition to the fact that they're adding new story content (maybe even an actual ending!) which is expected to solidify where X stands, people have noticed some considerable aesthetic similarities to 3 in the updated visuals, including what look like Annihilation Effects and Ouroboros/Moebius symbolism. 3 already reused a few aesthetics from X, but they were vague enough that they could be written off as just reusing ideas and not any sort of deliberate nods (especially where, when X came out, they hadn't really committed to making an overarching Xenoblade story), but when X is being specifically updated to bear resemblance to the numbered games and we now 100% have an overarching story being told, it probably means something this time.

I joked back when X came out (and again when 2 was announced) that it was secretly titled with a Roman numeral and it was actually Xenoblade 10, but at this point I honestly wouldn't be surprised if that's genuinely the case and Takahasi's telling some kind of ludicrous uber-narrative from both ends.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Also, some of the islands in the sea are Titans from X2?

Yep, Erythia is a mix of Eryth Sea and Leftheria. All of the zones mix up bits and pieces of old zones; that one's just one of the more obvious examples.

It makes some amount of sense. You get rid of mostly-useless money without having to go out of your way to do so, and in exchange you ensure that you get only useful money as change instead of getting even more useless money. I'd much rather get rid of a dime and seven pennies than hang onto them while also getting another three dimes and seven pennies to have to deal with later. Sure, it's not terribly hard to just chuck them in a jar and roll them every few years to take to the bank and make $10, but I can see the appeal in kicking that can further down the road.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Even beyond that, you have all the people who treat them like they're worthless and just toss them on the ground or in the trash. I've seen people do that and I just shake my head.

They are pretty worthless, at least for people that aren't in a position where they need to obsessively hoard every cent they can. On the rare occasion that I use cash for anything, I rarely use anything smaller than a loonie, and virtually never use anything smaller than a quarter unless I just happen to be carrying exact change. I'll let change accumulate in my wallet until I've got more than like 10 coins total, then take out all the small change and stick it in a pile or bag that accumulates. Every few years, I'll actually deposit it, and I don't think I've ever seen it add up to more than $20-30, which is barely worth the effort unless I'm already heading to the bank. Even then, the vast majority of that is loonies and toonies, with a lesser portion being quarters. It's rare for dimes and nickels to add up to more than a dollar, and pennies would amount to even less if they were still in the mix.

Now, if I used cash more often, I'd accumulate change faster and there might be something more worthwhile there, but even so we're not exactly talking about a significant amount of money. The majority of it would still come from larger change and pennies would be a negligible portion of it. For pennies alone to add up to enough that the trip to the bank would actually be worth the time would take decades.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Presumably they'd be melted down and repurposed. Copper and zinc are both valuable, and there are ways to separate metals (or potentially just mix them together into brass).

Presumably, but that's not a trivial ask either. It's proving surprisingly difficult to find data on this, but from what I can dig up, the US exports about 200-250 million pounds of brass per year, or about 100 million kg. Throwing an extra 60 million kg of pennies into the mix to be melted (which, remember, is just a tenth of what's out there) would be a non-trivial strain on that industry, and it wouldn't be worthwhile to build additional capacity to handle that strain because it'll be over relatively quickly.

beefcake71090 posted...

Fair. Looks like we're also losing money on nickels. We should prob do away with them, too.

Honestly, I'm in favour of ditching anything smaller than a quarter. Even quarters are arguably unnecessary, but you do lose a lot of granularity at lower price scales if you don't have them (like the difference between paying $3 for a croissant and $3.50 is actually significant for both the customer and the bakery), so I think they should probably stick around. I don't have any exact figures on how much it costs to keep nickels, dimes, and quarters in circulation, so I can't state with as much certainty how much financial sense it makes to kill them, but in terms of usefulness, I draw the line at quarters.

MICHALECOLE posted...

There are so many pennies why are we making more

Pennies have a bad habit of kind of removing themselves from circulation. Retailers need to stock them to be able to give change, but when people get them, they tend to end up just accumulating in change jars and other such places because they aren't worth enough to carry them around and it takes a very long time to amass enough to justify a trip to a bank to deposit them. They're still officially in circulation, but more need to be produced to ensure they can be given out as change. It's been estimated that there's somewhere on the order of 240 billion pennies floating around out there, the vast majority of which aren't going to be used any time soon. Because they aren't going to be used any time soon, more need to be produced to be handed out to customers and continue to not be used. It's a really silly problem, which can really only be solved by stopping production.

Though this does actually bring up one of the potential problems with killing the penny: Even if pennies continue to be legal tender after production stops, the act of killing them would prompt a significant number of people to roll up those pennies they've been sitting on for years and deposit them, which would end up being a substantial logistical problem. If even a tenth of those pennies got turned into banks, you're looking at 60 million kilograms of coins occupying over 13 million litres of space, abruptly introducing a collective $240 million into people's bank accounts. That's not a trivial issue to sort out, even if the plan is to destroy the pennies instead of trying to store them long-term in some manner of vault.

beefcake71090 posted...

Pennies are just cool, is all. Who cares if it's efficient, profitable, or whatever. Pennies are nice and they should stick around.

Nobody's stopping you from keeping some around if you want, but when tens of millions of dollars are being wasted every year producing currency that really isn't actually useful, that's kind of a problem.

Salrite posted...

Also, I don't know what the intention of giving 1.17 is for when you only need to pay 25 dollars.

I assumed the total was like $24.17, so he gave a $20, a $5, and the change so he'd just get two $1 bills back instead of more change.

https://imgur.com/ACrCnAR

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Hard to say. There have been forms of currency that have been declared invalid in the past that are no longer accepted (like, if I find a cache of Civil War era Gold Certificates I'm kind of SoL), but the fact that most other forms of currency issued in the US since the Civil War are all still technically legal tender it should be fine.

At least, even if the penny were abolished tomorrow, I feel pretty comfortable predicting that you'd have 10+ years before you actually had to panic and dig up those rolls you've got sitting around.

Salrite posted...

When did Canada eliminate pennies, because I absolutely still see Canadian pennies in US circulation

Production stopped in May 2012, distribution stopped in February 2013. I'm guessing that they pretty often get mixed up with US pennies because they're visually so similar and because accidentally exchanging them at par amounts to little more than a rounding error on the scales pennies typically get used.

ReturnOfFa posted...

Well, that isn't the standard for anywhere that has eliminated pennies, but the USA is pretty stupid so who knows.

I'd thought Australia rounded down in every case, but just looking it up I see that's mistaken, so I'm not sure who I was thinking of. Either way, it's a valid approach that can assuage consumer concerns about getting ripped off of their precious 1-2 cents half the time, while still actually working for businesses better than one might think at first glance, but regular rounding is probably the simpler option.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

About the only thing that has always held it back is that people never wanted to have all of their purchases rounded up to the nearest 5 cents, and businesses never wanted to have to round prices down, so there was always hesitation on the part of Congress to push it as an initiative because it might cost them reelection votes (which is literally the only thing anyone in Congress actually cares about).

In practice, rounding normally means it'll all roughly even out on both ends (favouring businesses slightly because of the ubiquity of $X.99 prices that would get rounded up by a cent), and while rounding down looks like businesses get a raw deal, the fact that it provides an incentive for customers to use cash stands to make them more in the long run unless they already mostly deal in cash or have particularly low-cost products. Businesses also have the option to just round the prices up themselves, if they're worried that missing out on those 4 cents per item will offset the extra sales that $x.99 prices get them. I don't believe anyone's ever gone the "round up all the time" route.

Of course, politics is more about perception than reality, and most people haven't done the math to figure out how much they'd actually be impacted by killing the penny and are therefore likely to overestimate the cost to them. The optics around it can be hard to overcome, as much as pretty much everyone is objectively paying more in taxes than they're gaining from having pennies.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

This is the main paranoia for me, because I'm dead certain I've got rolls of change tucked away in my house and I don't feel like having to scramble to dig them out and cash them in before they "expire". But as you say, you'd still be able to cash pennies in later even if they stop making them. This is "stop making pennies", not "pennies are no longer valid currency".

While I can't guarantee that the US' implementation will mirror Canada's, up here we can still cash in pennies, and they stopped being distributed in 2013. I doubt they'll ever stop being considered valid currency, though at some point you can expect that most vendors will stop taking them because they don't want to be bothered.

ReturnOfFa posted...

getting rid of pennies won't eliminate 9 cent ramen.

Depends how it's implemented. With regular rounding, probably not. If rounding down becomes standard, though, selling it for 5 cents instead of 9 cents is actually a pretty huge loss, so I'd expect it to become 10 cents instead, in which case consumers relying on that as a major staple of their diet would see their food budget balloon by 11%. On higher prices, having to round from $X.99 to $X.95 isn't a big deal and I'd expect retailers to absorb that in exchange for what they save when people pay cash (credit cards usually charge 3-4% per transaction), but below a dollar, that would incentivize retailers to make sure everything was priced to a multiple of 5 cents, most likely increasing prices to achieve that.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I don't disagree, but there's still a world of difference between "Medicine is more subjective than most people think", and "This person is literally being paid to sell a product to you, and thus have all the motivation in the world to overpraise the positives and gloss over the negatives. And will use charisma and rhetoric to push product that may not necessarily be the best solution for a given problem."

Yes, that is true.

pedro45 posted...

A local grocery chain had ramen for like 9 cents.

In which case, you've got several options if you're concerned about losing money on that:

• Buy those in a quantity that allows you to round down (3, 4, 5, 8, 9, and 10 all work)
• Buy those in a quantity where losing up to 2 cents is more negligible (e.g. ~$20 worth, though this is more of a challenge for those living paycheque to paycheque)
• Buy those using a non-cash method (credit, debit, gift cards, food stamps)
• Implement a rounding-down system instead of regular rounding

Yes, gaining or losing a penny or two becomes a much bigger deal when you're dealing with really low prices, but under regular rounding, there are roughly as many opportunities to gain a penny as there are to lose one.

pedro45 posted...

2 dollars may not sound like much

Two things:

• Losing $2 was under a hypothetical system where every price gets rounded up. In practice, nobody (to my knowledge) has ever taken this approach to ditching the penny. Every other example has been either rounding normally (in which case I lost 50 cents in a year) or rounding every price down (in which case I gained $2)
• That $2 difference was on $50,000 in expenditures over the year

While my experience won't generalize perfectly (spending less means a variation of a penny is more significant, and having fewer transactions creates a greater risk of random drift leaning one way or the other), I was looking at 0.001% of my annual expenditures. For somebody living off of $300 a week, that's $0.15 a year. That could mean one extra meal in that year, but even that's a stretch, it could just as easily go the other way, and the difference can be mitigated by not using cash.

Also worth noting: The penny cost the government $85 million last year. There are roughly 40-45 million people receiving food stamps. While it's profoundly unlikely that the current government would ever make this decision, if the savings from killing the penny were just reallocated to SNAP benefits, that would offset any potential rounding losses by more than an order of magnitude.

waterdeepchu posted...

While I do agree we don't need them anymore, I'm pretty sure Trump doesn't have the authority to do this. It'll get tied up in court for years if he tries through an executive order even if its ultimately determined that he does. What he should be doing is pushing Congress to do it.

Indeed. This isn't a proper, well-conceived plan to phase out the penny, it's Musk dangling something shiny in front of Trump and Trump chasing excitedly after it by trying to achieve it in what he thinks is the easiest way possible. The idea is excellent and long-overdue, and I appreciate that Trump is going to provide pressure that voters wouldn't necessarily provide (as much as the potential losses from killing the penny are trivial, Americans have a tendency to fixate on the idea of being cheated at all and not on how much impact that potential cheat actually has), but the US is not (supposed to be) a dictatorship. This is the sort of thing Congress actually needs to agree on.

pedro45 posted...

Must be nice to live a life where every penny doesn't count.
Those things add up for some of us

I once went through my financial records for 2019 to simulate exactly what the difference would have been if I'd paid everything in cash and they'd been rounded according to various options. Using Canada's actual rounding system (just rounding it normally to the nearest nickel), on approximately $50,000 in expenditures, I would have lost about 50 cents if I'd paid everything in cash. Using Australia's (rounding everything down to the next nickel), I would have saved about $2. Rounding everything up to the next nickel (which no country does, to my knowledge), I would have lost about $2.

That's the absolute worst case scenario of paying absolutely everything in cash. In reality, literally none of those transactions were cash because the records were pulled directly from my bank/credit statements, so even if I significantly increased the amount of cash I use, the difference would still be quite a bit smaller than that. That worst case scenario works out to spending 0.001% more under a regular rounding system, 0.004% less under a rounding-down system (which sounds like a raw deal for businesses, but in practice they save quite a bit of money when people use cash over incurring credit/debit fees, plus they can just stop pricing things at $X.99 and most of the issue goes away).

It does not, in fact, add up. Those pennies that you store in a jar until they turn into a few bucks would be almost entirely replaced by what you save through automatic rounding. With a rounding-down system, you'd actually just save money across the board by paying cash, and if you're really concerned about losing money in a regular rounding system, you can just use a card for anything that would be rounded up and cash for anything that would be rounded down to ensure you're always coming out on top.

It's long overdue. Enacting it as a unilateral order from Trump is perhaps not the way to go about it (that's not really the way to go about anything in a non-dictatorship, outside of emergency situations where there just isn't time for bureaucracy), but pennies are a waste on several levels. They cost more than their face value to make, and because people very rarely use them they effectively get removed from circulation as soon as people get them (but also still count toward the total amount of money in circulation because they can still be spent at any time). There's plenty of precedent for ditching the penny worldwide that can be drawn on to avoid having to study the various options for doing it, so really, this one's a no-brainer. Good job, orange man.

That may be a matter of corporate policy to counteract the "I'll give you six dimes and you can give me three quarters back" sort of scam. While your particular example might not have been as deliberately obfuscated as those tend to be (which may be why other employees have just gone with it), it wouldn't surprise me if the official policy is to not accept more change than is necessary.

It could also have just been somebody that's bad at math.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

In an ideal world, we'd probably be better off having some sort of independent organization devoted solely to doing the research on what medications are best for what conditions, what the side effects are, etc - and then publishing that information for doctors in an easy-to-digest way that keeps them up to date without requiring too much time for them to do their own research. And making it very, very illegal for any drug manufacturer to attempt to sell their product to this group or influence it in any way, meaning its findings will always represent the best data available at the moment and not simply act as further marketing for whichever major drug manufacturer manages to field the best sales team.

Sadly, we definitely don't live in an ideal world.

The problem with that isn't even just not living in an ideal world (recognizing that, very obviously, there are very powerful competing interests that would want to compromise the objectivity of such an organization), it's just the nature of medicine in general. The human body is an unfathomably complex machine. Medical education explains in broad strokes how things work and how to fix them when they don't, but medical practice still consists of a whole lot of trial and error to see what actually works for a given patient's personal medical idiosyncrasies (which can be a product of their genetics, their home environment, their work, their medical history, their personality...). Just look at the whole concept of side effects: many of those effects are vanishingly rare, and in those cases, it's rare that anyone even knows why they happened except to be able to say that they happen very rarely.

Medicine isn't nearly as objective as people would like to think it is, so an independent body objectively laying out the pros and cons of a given drug isn't really possible even before getting into the human/corporate interest side of things.

faramir77 posted...

Prescription drug commercials shouldn't be a thing. I'm not a medical professional, it's not my job to suggest medication to my doctor for them to prescribe back to me, nor would it even be a good idea for anyone to do that.

The alternative is for drug companies to spend that marketing budget schmoozing doctors to convince them to try out their new drug. They already do that, but it would get quite a bit worse if they couldn't rely on commercials to get patients to ask doctors about the drugs.

In an ideal world, the paradigm of "patient learns about new drug --> patient asks doctor about new drug --> doctor says 'I don't know, I'll look into it' --> doctor researches new drug --> doctor makes recommendation to patient at next appointment based on findings and will consider new drug in future patient interactions where they feel it's appropriate" does actually work pretty well. Something has to be done to get the word out about new drugs (expecting doctors to proactively stay on top of the literature for every one that comes out isn't particularly feasible), and this approach means doctors are made aware of each new drug when it becomes relevant to a given patient's care.

In practice, though, patients have a tendency to not want to take no for an answer when they've already convinced themselves that this new drug they saw an ad for will help them, and doctors often don't have the time to book them in for multiple appointments to discuss the drug and assess its effects on them over time in a sort of miniature clinical trial. That can result in pressure to just give out the prescription, which can either result in prescribing it inappropriately or categorically refusing to consider new drugs, neither of which is ideal for patient care.

dragon504 posted...

As for the topic at hand, I can't even see why they'd just not have the option for the original audio.

I'd guess licensing issues. Different dubs often have separate distribution licenses, so a distributor will only pay for the ones they expect to be worthwhile. Where most people prefer dubs over subs outside of vocal anime communities on the Internet, it doesn't surprise me that they'd stick with just the English version and only shell out for the Japanese if the show turns out to draw enough attention to make it worth maximizing the audience.

dragon504 posted...

Looking at you Xenoblade Chronicles.

Xenoblade's voices are fine, for the most part. 2 gets a bit rocky in places because of the iffy direction and inexperience of the actors (Pyra's first scene was literally Skye Bennett's first time recording voice for a game, and it shows even compared to her performance in later parts of the game), but series-wide I don't really have any complaints aside from the rather unpleasant filter they put on the Ma-non in X.

They fill different niches. Store-bought ice cream cake tends to be better than store-bought cheesecake, but the ice cream cake is only going to satisfy a desire for junky, store-bought dessert. If you're looking for something of better quality and either buying an artisan product or making it at home, that cheesecake is going to be quite a bit better than store-bought ice cream cake. While homemade ice cream cake can certainly be comparable, making ice cream cake at home is orders of magnitude more of a pain than making cheesecake (especially if you go with a simple no-bake option, many of which are a lot better than their simplicity might suggest) and often isn't notably better than just serving the ice cream in a bowl with the other parts of the cake added as toppings, so I'd say homemade cheesecake wins out there by simple virtue of actually being viable to make for anything short of a truly exceptional occasion.

PikachuMaxwell posted...

Well, looking at the formulae, Tau appears in all of them

Well, yes. That's how algebraic substitution works. If you define "monkeypants" as being equal to 4*pi, you could make monkeypants appear in all of the formulas just as easily.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

it just keeps sounding faker and faker as this goes

Are you at least vaguely familiar with the piezoelectric effect? And the fact that it works both ways (applying voltage changes the shape of the object, changing the shape of the object generates voltage)?

ConfusedTorchic posted...

brothers rocking the amd r9 280? 270?

it's from 2013

280x, which I bought in 2015. It's starting to shows its age a little, though it also says a lot about the sorts of games I usually play that I haven't felt much pressure to upgrade.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

"Animation" is considered a genre in the West though.

While true, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense and mostly just reflects that animation in the West has been relegated to certain genres and styles. A genre label should tell you something about the content of the piece in question. "Animation" just tells you what it will look like. Any further information you get from the label is just making assumptions based on trends in Western animation, which don't necessarily apply to anime (by virtue of the medium being treated differently in different cultures) and can therefore be pushed back against when the two are conflated.

https://imgur.com/CUQ8IQ0

I see your 6.66 FPS and raise you this "Unsupported graphics card":
https://imgur.com/cu8eU2d

Damn_Underscore posted...

Presumably one day it will be able give you information and if you say give me sources it will give them

The problem with that is that LLM-based AI doesn't have discrete sources. It has a data set, consisting of enormous numbers of data points whose content and context it interprets to find correlations that it uses to provide answers to questions that resemble those contexts. If it provides every source that contributed to a given answer, that could easily end up being millions of data points, which is just too many to verify unless it's actually your job to debug the AI. If doing research using AI turns into debugging it by searching through all relevant sources yourself, you might as well just cut out the middleman and do your own research by searching through relevant sources yourself, eliminating the AI's power cost, ethical concerns, and the ability for the AI's owner to skim a bit of value off of the top of the research you're doing to refine it.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

those vibrations are making the gears move

Those vibrations are turning an electrical signal on and off. They're not moving the gears directly, just like the pendulum doesn't move gears directly in a grandfather clock. Instead, that signal turning on and off dictates whether or not power is allowed to flow from the battery to the motor. The motor - powered by the battery - is what makes the gears move. That same electrical signal can also be used to tell a digital display when to update, including the clock you can see right now on your phone or computer screen.

All clocks consist of separate timing and power components. In a clock that you have to wind, the weight or spring that you're winding up provides the power that drives the clock mechanism, while a pendulum keeps the timing steady and ensures that the mechanism can only be driven at the appropriate times. In an electric, quartz-based clock, the quartz acts as the pendulum, while the voltage source acts as the weight/spring.

captpackrat posted...

It is possible to make an electric clock that doesn't use a quartz crystal, using an AC synchronous motor instead. A motor supplied with AC operating at 60Hz will rotate 60 times per second. This is a much simpler design than quartz, but it requires that your power supply remain steady. The US used to require nearly perfect 60Hz, but those regulations were dropped a few years back as it's rather expensive. If the AC frequency varies, so will the speed of the motor, and thus the clock will not be accurate.

I'd argue that that's just deconstructing the clock, not actually making a clock with no timing component. In that case, the clock is effectively outsourcing the timing component, relying on whatever is being used to regulate the frequency of the power source instead of on its own internal timer.

rjsilverthorn posted...

Apparently we can add math to the list of things AI is bad at.

Which is baffling, because math is supposed to be the thing that computers are good at.

Damn_Underscore posted...

Some of the AI responses are good, some are bad. This is what teachers were fearmongering to us about Wikipedia, you really have to look at another source or you can't be sure if it's true or not

It differs from Wikipedia, though, in that it doesn't provide citations or otherwise reference further material that can be used to evaluate what it's saying. Toss in that nobody's overseeing it, and you've got a situation where the only reasonable (or even safe, in some cases) course of action is to assume that it's wrong and ignore it. Given that, why does it exist?

Dikitain posted...

Lets be perfectly honest, most of us could probably buy GameFAQs with what we have in our checking accounts right now. We don't need a Billionaire to do it.

Not quite. The site's valued at about $60-65k, which isn't exactly a ton of money and it certainly wouldn't take a billionaire to afford it, but it's still more disposable income than I expect most of us actually have to hand.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

feel like it would be much simpler to power a small piezoelectric motor with a planetary gear system instead of needing a rock that vibrates and somehow makes gears move instead of the battery in it

Quartz *is* a small piezoelectric motor. The piezoelectric effect is what causes the deformation when voltage is applied and generates the voltage when it rebounds.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

then why have all those f***in gears and cogs in the watch

So that you only need one motor to turn everything instead of a series of electronic steps that convert the timing signal from the quartz into the movement of other hands. Turning 1 Hz into 1/60 Hz and 1/3600 Hz digitally isn't the easiest thing to do, since 60 isn't a power of 2. Turning 1 Hz into 1/60 Hz and 1/3600 Hz using gears, however, is relatively simple.

For digital watches, though, they often don't have all the gears and such because the signal can just be digitally translated into time.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

there's already mechanisms where you just turn a little dial and the watch functions for days, requiring no battery or quartz

there's even a variety of that that you don't even wind, it just works by wearing it

Yep, they function similarly: Winding the spring (whether manually or by a self-winding mechanism) provides the energy to turn the hands, and another component provides oscillating motion at a frequency that the rest of the watch translates into keeping time. Quartz is not the only way to do this, it's just a particularly reliable option that runs for much longer than non-self-winding watches can.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

so why is the rock necessary if you want a battery

It's not strictly necessary, but it is the simplest and most reliable option. As I mentioned, a fully-electronic LC circuit could do the trick, but would be much more sensitive to temperature fluctuations and harder to translate the higher-frequency oscillation into something useful for timekeeping. Quartz is used because it works well.

shadowsword87 posted...

Oh, it's not physically vibrating, it's electrically vibrating. Then other electronic stuff can read that vibrating voltage.

Actually, it is physically vibrating. That's the nature of the piezoelectric effect: it's translating electricity into physical movement and vice versa. It's a very small physical vibration, by virtue of being a very small piece of quartz and the relatively small amounts of energy involved in the vibration, but it's a vibration nonetheless.

faramir77 posted...

BotW is a master class when it comes to exploring a large open world. The series desperately needed exactly this kind of change. The trouble is that I've played through this a few times before, so exploring the world doesn't really feel as exciting as it used to. I'm trying to not hold that as a critique against the game, but I also don't think it can be ignored, as other major Zelda games haven't suffered from replayability issues like this one has.

I think you're approaching that opinion correctly (at least, as much as one can judge an opinion objectively). It doesn't necessarily make it a worse game overall or for a first playthrough, but it does mean it doesn't hold up as well on replays because it's more reliant on the sense of wonder you get exploring cool new areas for the first time. That ended up being a point against TotK for a lot of people, because having explored BotW's Hyrule relatively recently, exploring the same world again didn't really have the same lustre (I didn't mind, but I also haven't played BotW since I beat it shortly after launch, so the world wasn't exactly fresh in my mind going into TotK).

ConfusedTorchic posted...

this doesn't make sense

if you already have voltage, a power source, then what's the point of needing a rock

The voltage alone can cause the second hand to spin. The voltage alone cannot cause the hand to turn 6 degrees every second. That requires some kind of timing element, usually an oscillator of some sort.

In a similar vein, in a grandfather clock, you already have the energy needed to run the clock in the form of the weights or springs (depending on what it uses). You need the pendulum and an escapement mechanism, however, to ensure that energy is only released at the appropriate times to run the clock at the correct rate. The pendulum provides the timing element. Without it, you'd have to do something like carefully calibrate the friction the gears/axles experienced to ensure that they spun at the correct rate when under constant force from the weight/spring, and that would be extremely difficult and not remotely reliable (it'd stop working that precisely as soon as the temperature changed).

Similarly, the quartz and its oscillations function as the pendulum for a watch. You can, in fact, do the same thing with just electricity if you use what's called an LC circuit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LC_circuit), which consists of a capacitor and an inductor that effectively bounce a current back and forth around the circuit. The problem with that is that the period of that oscillation depends on the resistance of the system (so it's prone to fluctuations if the temperature changes and as the system ages), and is often much faster than is really useful for a timepiece. Quartz is stable and the resonant frequency for a given piece depends mostly on how it's cut, so you can be very consistent in the oscillation frequency you get. That's something you can build a timepiece around, in this case by cutting the quartz to have a resonant frequency of 2^15 Hz and using a series of flip-flops to slow that down to 1 Hz.

TL;DR: Quartz doesn't power watches. It acts as a timing element that tells the battery when to power them.

shadowsword87 posted...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2By2ane2I4

TL;DW: When you apply voltage to a bit of quartz, it deforms slightly. When it un-deforms, it produces voltage. If you use a battery (or other voltage source) to amplify the voltage coming off of it as it deforms, that voltage can be used to cause it to deform again, creating a perpetual (at least as long as the voltage source lasts) oscillation. By cutting the quartz in very specific ways, you can control the frequency of that oscillation, then translate that into mechanical motion or drive a digital display.