Calax

The Last Stand and Octavian.

True, but at the same time, it's not guaranteed, and those numbers are based off the previous two generations where college was not as widespread as it is in todays world (where everything you do in highschool is geared towards sending you to college, rather than getting you ready for life). Anecdotal I know but right now one of my friends has a comp sci degree and is a checker for Target and that's it because of the choice he made that prioritized college over work. The average value of a 4-year degree is increased earnings income of $900,000, almost a million dollars, compared to a high school education. I think that's worth the investment. Admittedly educational costs are far outstripping inflation so it makes it tougher. Last time I checked ed costs were one of the fastest risers. The flip side is ed loans are low interest. (Correction: I double checked and they aren't as low as I remember. Fed student loans run 3.86 to 6+% now. My loan rates were considerably lower. So things are tougher) Usually you don't have to start repayment until after you graduate and you have a 6 month window to start, assuming that you do not interrupt your schooling. I think it still works that way. I know the squeeze though. I had fed and state loans to pay off and the state loans required repayment immediately on graduation. Which meant I was paying them off while I was in grad school. OUCH! So yeah I understand the pain. Yeah compound interest is a bitch. Sometimes the solution is to go without until you can really afford something. yeah that's harsh. I'll be blunt - I have absolutely no sympathy for someone complaining about how paying interest on something is stretching their budget. If you can't really afford it, don't buy it. After all, you did mention items over 7 grand and I hardly would classify things in that range as essentials. Okay, income disparity is fair game. I totally agree with two issues. (1) Increased worker productivity has not found it's way into regular incomes - that profit has increasingly been retained at the corporate level without proportionate increases in hiring or income. (2) The % share of wealth held by various income groups has become decidedly skewed towards the 1%. I have to admit that part of me says so effing what? Isn't that part of what is so great about the US? Being able up with a fantastic freaking idea and making a bloody fortune? Like Facebook? On the flip side, I do wonder why there is a cap on income for paying social security and medicare taxes. Oh I understand why it's there - I just don't think it should be. There are just two things that should be added to your analysis: Outsourcing has eliminated a lot of low level entry jobs as well as moved entire fields to other countries and now people are just working harder to be able to keep their jobs rather than make progress. Students take the worst of it since they are trying to enter industries which requires them to have experience which they are unable to gain as the jobs are simply not there. Markets have been consolidating for some time, with just a few emergent global markets remaining and an industry that's monopolized by mega-corporations. I doubt that a small business can break into a market that's dominated by a corporate entity, that would be a remarkable feat of the likes of David defeating Goliath. Mark Zuckerberg is likely to be one of the few people who can take an idea and create a market out of it because he created something new. I would say that in order to break into an established market you'd have to be either extremely wealthy, extremely smart or extremely lucky. With the level of education that we see in the US I guess that just leaves the wealthy. I think that's part of it, also the fact that there is such an income disparity means that for the most part you won't see somebody finding something akin to McDonalds and making it worth a gajillion dollars. Because they don't have the inital money to even try to start up and then if they start to become big they get run over by their competitors corporations. Although to be fair I'm considering starting a business in denver after school to fill a need between Boulder and the Denver international.

Well part of the reason that you're taxed so much is that you have a much larger social services industry. In america the tax burden is lower, but the wages are also lower in general. And there are entire industries built upon you not being able to pay for things (payday advance etc). Add to that the fact that in order to make money, everyone is told that you need an education (which in many european countries is partly nationalized, here it's mostly private/student funded) so kids are outright bankrupting themselves trying to get ahead. And when you start with no money it's really hard to have any money come in because you're always paying off last weeks debt. It was kinda funny, had a friend who was complaining that "I pay 150 a month on my loans for 2 years, and i've only payed off about 100 dollars!?" which led to me explaining that Compound interest is magically removing most of her paying power. IMO (again, OPINION!) one of the reasons the amount of disposible income has dropped is because we're paying almost 150% extra on anything we purchase with a price tag over about 7 grand due to compound interest. And the average income, adjusted for inflation, over the past 10ish years it's risen 11% (according to the NYtimes article I've linked previously). For the 90th percentile, it's risen 20%... and when you hit 99 it becomes 100%+ numbers (increasing exponentially the smaller you make the percentile).

I think it's more corporate greed mixed with overengineering of products. So the costs of goods keeps rising relative to the purchasing power of the conumer, but at the same time, the companies who want to sell those goods don't want to raise wages in favor of increased profitability. Hell, at my job the new boss had to make a friggin presentation about the cost of living to get us a raise, as some of the employees who'd been there for 2-3 years hadn't had more than one 10 cent raise since they started working (Owners rationale? We get many tips!). And currently at Lockheed Martin, they're creating a situation where younger people don't want to work there because there is no room for growth for about 10-20 years. My brother currently is looking for another job because rather than promote him, the company is trying to shuffle him sideways in the company, partly because they have so many 50 and 60 year olds who are filling the upper echelons of their workforce.

Eh, it's more the fact that they're saying "yeah, we messed up!" and openly acknowledging an issue. Other devs will either say "it's the way you play!" or don't even acknowledge or fix the issue. It's the fact that they recognize the issues and work with them and explain it to the players that makes it "ok" in my book.

For the record, reverse inflation is them going back and saying that what cost 100 bucks in 1982-1984, cost X in 1919

I would post the graphs from the Times but they format stuff stupidly. The third one is the one I'm looking at the most, it tracks the 50th, 90th, 95th, 99th, 99.9th and 99.99th percentiles of income and how it's changed since 1980. The changes are 11%, 21% 32% 63% 115% and 199% respectively (over their income at 1980). And the note on the BLS data, I don't post that directly because their website gives you dynamic generation. ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt That's the Consumer Price index for urban consumers, with reverse inflation included.

Funny because I don't think that is entirely true or at least not the inference that purchasing power is down. Ok the cost of living part is true; the dollar is worth about half of what it was in 1984. But I don't think it's true about income at all, and definitely not true about purchasing power. Calax, you must have been looking at inflation adjusted data. In terms of actual dollars, the trends are decidedly up. (If you have links that suggest the following data are in error please share) Household income (nominal - unadjusted for inflation) http://econintersect.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Income-Growth-4.png individual income.- (nominal - unadjusted for inflation) http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dHK3tHSCFoE/TuP-C5l1x9I/AAAAAAAADlE/5dSk3OPWdRk/s1600/Screen+shot+2011-12-10+at+7.47.55+PM.png income by income quintile (nominal - unadjusted for inflation) is up across all income groups. The real disparity in the curves is apparent after adjusting for inflation, although the lowest income groups at least stayed level with inflation, it was the upper income levels that actually showed gains. The bottom line is that no income group has lost ground to inflation (except perhaps very recently due to the recession) Hourly compensation rates (or their salaried equivalents) have stagnant (or relatively so) in the lower income groups. Cost of living adjustments have been sufficient to maintain purchasing power for lower income groups. The effects of increased worker productivity have been realized only at the corporate and upper income tiers and not at the median income levels or lower. That has resulted in an increasing wedge between the wealth held the two tiers. Edit: I removed a couple of images simply to reduce the size of the wall of text. You can click on the links to open the images in another window. This is from the GM chief economists presentation to dealers to basically "prepare to not have many new car sales" And here's a bit from the New York Times about income stagnation http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/10/24/us/politics/income-stagnation-and-inequality.html?_r=0 Where your median family income has barely moved since 1980, while according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics since 1984 inflation has reduced the purchasing power of the dollar. What you could buy for 100 bucks in 84, now costs upwards of 200 (according to the consumer price index).

Fun Fact, in the USA the cost of living has gone up about 100% since 1984, but the average income has stayed the same over that same period.

Trying new meds (Abilify and methylphenidate). Took em later (the Meth-whatever is short term add) and right now all I wanna do is sit around and talk about life with somebody.

As much as I want to hate CA for their constant "release mildly broken game>Patch" cycles... I can't. They're dealing with it exactly how they should in their "totally our fault, sorry guys" and quick patching while obviously listening to their customers. Maybe because there isn't six layers of BS marketing to go through.

My academic "dismissal" has officially been rescinded. It took four levels of BS to get that but it happened finally.

Having not played it, but previous Total War games...can't you manually enable most/all factions anyways? Though I'm sure they probably created at least some minor new content to make it work better, (e.g. the difference between playing the Papal States in default Medieval 2 and playing a mod that actually builds them as a real faction). Yes and no. One of the things for most of the minor factions is that they don't have enough money or unit diversity to be a faction worth playing. At the same time they wouldn't have many of the "objectives" that are available (which provide injections of money for completing tasks)

Selucids are now playable in todays free update! (along with various bug fixes)

Going to be signing up for a trip to Italia tonight. It's school related >.> It'd be may 11-31 in Rome/Pompeii. I figure I'll have a pretty good chance of getting in given that I'm hoping to have several of the school leads giving me notes of reccomendation but *meh*

I am amazed at how something simple like misplacing my glasses is driving me into an existential quandary while eyeing add meds.

He's got no sense of "I shouldn't be up here"

I swear to god you need to get something going with the Des Moines Airport... Their only internet is "Boingo hotspots" and I have umpteen passengers asking for my internet every day while at work. new meds, Cat is firmly attached to me, to the point where he doesn't want to go outside anymore (if he does it's only while standing quite firmly on my shoulders).

Warcraft, Rome 2, GTA V, and am probably gonna start a new AC:3 play through to remember the game and re-familiarize myself with the mechanics to prep for AC: Black Flag.

Completely agree. Calax is a good guy, he's just hasn't caught too many good breaks in life. He'll weather the downs and enjoy the ups just like he always has And if not we'll buy him a ticket o South Africa so he can hang out with Bruce, that guy could cheer any one up! that'd probably be the first time anyone outside my family bought me something bigger than a meal of two.

Aren't you getting a little old for this Emo crap? Just remember that you aren't living in India or Africa and count your blessings, ya privileged **** At least if I was in Africa or India I'd have somebody who could help me out with this **** instead of just saying "I've got my own problems, have fun with yours, you privileged ****!"

I am hitting that point today where if I were slowly bleeding out and could only be saved by calling somebody nearby.... I wouldn't because it's obvious the world hates my existence

I hope he recorded the obligatory shootout with his smartphone! He was about as successful as a bank robber as he was with everything else in his life Trio of bank robbers didn't get very far *singing badly* One of these things is not like the other!

pssssh imposter You're not a pixie until you've got Cosmo as an avatar.

Did you read why he was forced into such actions? I mean these guys were attempting to shut down a new york street by using the fact that they existed to try to force people off the road. My cat is learning how to work my phone.