Agustus

Let me give you my user experience and see if you can help us play your game more: About seven of us played a game of Blight of the Immortals in turn-based mode, namely because we all have jobs and would be unable to get to the devices appropriately. The turn-based functionality is an add-on that causes immense game issues where characters can be held for long periods of time in stun spells, sometimes because of recharge rates and other items indefinitely. That being said, we love the game, just the quirks of having the turn base sit on top of the real-time throws some wrenches in.

The items for you to take this up a notch are the following: 1. Update things from time to time to make it newer-ish. The game does not feel like it has changed any of the times that we have played it over the four years (has it been that long)

2. Turn based for the die-hard workers.

3. Figure out the Iron Key for paying to play for a period of time. That really worked out for getting us to have one person pay for a key and then we could all play. If a person wants to get new friends to start a separate game, then you have an in for a new key purchase.

4. Ask your users, send an e-mail out to everybody and ask them what their issues are. Ask those that love it to post on their facebook / twitter / etc.

Because I love that scene, and youtube hasn't DCMA'ed it yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgv7U3GYlDY

Part of the retooling process of the brand that occurred to make it. Leading up to this, Lego was coming out of a slump and trying to identify how to streamline the number of bricks, product offerings, and generate solid revenue streams.

Also, a person on brickset suggested it may be sorting costs from manual labor. [1]

[1] http://brickset.com/article/1705

"A false wall rested on dusty display cases and was supported by sandbags. “This is not architecture,” he said, because the building’s historic status prevented any changes to the interior. And besides, according to the rules of the arrangement, Newcastle’s artisans could use vacant properties like this for free as long as they promised not to alter their interiors (and thus their tax statuses)."

The cities create burdensome regulations, in the form of historic building status or adhere to ADA compliance, driving up the cost of any remodel and thus driving away any business opportunities at these locations, then turn around after realizing the loss in taxes, allow for utilization of a building with a look-the-other-way mentality fraught with legal craziness.

If one of those buildings catch fire, will the insurer pay out for a non-stated use of the building. If the insurer does pay-out, it is a one-off option as they will most definitely increase premiums to handle the new risk of these "artisans."

It is a great concept, however, it just points to how regulatory burden price out competitive up-starts and defends entrenched players.

The issue with books like this, when you start to question validity, is who was the writer and what was their goal. In this case the writer of "The Emigrants' guide to Oregon and California" is trying to entice individuals to move to the West, but also using their book. Doing this could be done by pointing to larger than life situations, beautiful landscapes and plentiful fish, surely this entices and could drive people to leave the less than 10 lb salmon on the Atlantic for the easier and more plentiful "10 lbs to 60 lbs."

If I did not have a vehicle I would be forced to live along a route dictated by the likes of yourself. Whereupon I would be forced to choose jobs that would be only along the transit route; whereupon rents / prices for residential and commercial ownership increases as more people compete for a route oriented locations.

Your last line of enslavement is quite amusing when logic is applied: Telling the rat that it is in a clear jar that it is not free is demeaning, but who is telling the rat this; a fellow rat who is also enslaved in a clear jar.

Because the transit systems do not have that as a tool. Look at other countries and see that where the system is used by more hostages, the number of times a ransom is demanded anecdotally appears higher.

In the last 15 years for U.S. transit:

* 2005 New York City transit strike

* 2007 Orange County transit strike

* 2010 Spirit Airlines Pilot Strike (U.S.)

What does private enterprise need to improve as it currently stands? The government subsidizes transit to such an extent that private players stay out and any hint of a profitable line is look unfavorably upon by government players that they ban it or try to robustly oppose it; examples include Google Bus', and Jitney's in New York.

What are these safe spaces? Houses, then what is a dorm, police stations, then what is campus police offices, or a car, which is available to most students on campus.

What is intimidation in your example? You are projecting a generalized concept that does not have a defined impact on a person. Is it intimidation if someone posts a comment on a website that they are for male/female marriage only, a person yells out a slur on the street, a person walks up to another and says: "We do not like your kind here?" The last item on this list should be the one that a state agency involves itself in as it is the only where physical harm can occur. The others are simply words.

As an aside, in future discussions, try not to resort to simplistic arguments like "right-wing jargon terms" to dismiss an alternative view point. I was worried for a moment you may have a point until I read that.

Stories like these are great to look for what the author is omitting and what propaganda is being pushed.

  "Residents in suburbs, who tend to be over 30 with children, said they live 
  there because of the cost, size and type of their housing, to be close to 
  good schools,and because of the safety and security of the neighbourhood."

The city infrastructure, the very things it is supposed to do, is inadequate for its citizens needs: it cannot provide good schools, safety, or security.

I would like to note that this article is not the usual puff piece from Citylab and this documents with further evidence a common theme that we all know:

a. young: live the hipster lifestyle in the city

b. mid-age: live the family lifestyle in the suburbs

c. old-age: live the retirement lifestyle in the country.

CityLab is a mission driven organization that is obviously for city living based on their recent articles. Fortunately when they manipulate the presentation of data the way they do it becomes obvious to those in the know what they are up to.

However, the data contained in this article provides evidence of what the planning community is constantly trying to overcome: How do we keep the mid-age and retirement individuals from leaving the city?

How long of an event horizon are you looking for? As long as we do not have another Cash for Clunkers boondoggle [1] the propagation of used vehicles down through the system will start occurring by 2030. [2] Are you willing to have the government force a solution on the populace which will essentially disappear in ten years?

Additionally, the low-income individuals will have access to Uber for self-driving cars. [iUber] Better advocacy would be spent finding out how Uber will get low-income individuals without a smartphone access to it.

1. Cash for Clunkers destroyed vehicles that would have gone to lower-income individuals and upset the used vehicle market driving prices up to new vehicle prices.

2. Assuming a 2020 release date, and following a similar curve of ABS brake adoption of ten years, then by 2030 low-income individuals will start to have access to self-driving vehicles. Maybe earlier as the software rolls out or at-home implementations of the technology can be adapted.

That cars enable upward mobility and easy access to jobs devoid of the ever reaching control from the central planning agencies?

More power to them.

I will give up my car when the people driving the subways, lightrail, buses, and trams promise not to strike.

The day the subways, lightrail, buses, and trams are run by private enterprises and are not subject to the political whims of the unions and elected officials, then I might consider giving the concept a test run.

What of those who are not in college, do we provide them who have experienced these acts a safe space?

Are college students, the supposed vanguard of curious minds, closing their minds and reducing their ability to deal with the world they live in?

Why do they have no morals? If you have worked hard to build up a business and then you find out that some of your workforce is engaging in efforts that will destroy your business, would you not want to be kept abreast of it? If you do not feel that the union efforts would destroy business, witness the revenue issue Wal-Mart is experiencing now with a $10/hr wage floor; something the unions would like to start at and move to $15/hr.

Unions have on a consistent basis driven the operating costs of low cost companies through litigation, union negotiations, and other minutiae to bankruptcy. Witness the default process of the Haggen Grocery Store, where union rules drove a business into the red through non-negotiable states.

Here is a great contrarian point to the CityLab discovery about induced demand. An individual is unwilling to walk 2 miles to the nearest grocery store, the solution would be to take a bus, however a route does not exist the ideal solution would be a car. However, entrepreneurs stepped in and identified what the non-car community would pay for things and still turn a profit: $5 for milk from readily available stores. As an aside, how is this any different from Walgreens/CVS' model of having multiple convenient locations, but charge a larger premium.

The idea of a food desert is non-sense as people have access to food, they just want cheaper prices.

You do not. We all pay for our roads through gas taxes. The real question becomes then: Why should I pay for you to ride the bus?

No, travel demand modeling includes transit shares and modeling.

More roads are a fantastic solution for encouraging mobility of individuals. Yes, it is difficult from a group planning point of view, but think about it from the users point of view. There is a single dad who is restricted by her availability of time to a thirty minute commute window. If he has no available car, he is forced to a bus route based job, or bicycle / walking distance job. Locations for bus routes are chosen by top-down planning based on productions and attractions, with a preference for utilization based on larger employers, think hospital and hospitality. The buses drive the single dad to a certain area and precludes him from looking for jobs in non-bus route areas. You are forcing an individual to choose a non-ideal job based on a push for modal share and the "Planners" basis of what is best, not the individual.

Road diets are dangerous for the populace. Look at Los Angeles current push for road diets that will decrease the levels of service across the city from 18% failure to 30% failure and the warnings that the emergency services say about the corresponding decrease in response times.

The school run in the mornings is a good thing to focus on, here in the United States, we force the kids onto a crazy schedule of arriving in class before 8:00am.

The letter does not help the situation:

* The letter says: "In your various demand letters you noted the scientific study in question was of some consequence, and could potentially have an effect on policy decisions. However it should be emphasized that the issue in question is a scientific research study, not a policy decision by a Federal agency. As such, this is not an area of delegated legislative authority by Congress to the Executive (unless you are proposing that Congress should somehow legislatively overrule peer-reviewed scientific findings.)*

First, Mr. Johnson, cutely tries to defer that science is not going to be used in a policy manner. Right now, the President of the United States is engaged with making policy decisions from scientific studies, so his premise is flawed to begin with. Also, all of the pushes for climate change agendas feed from scientific studies.

Second, pointing to the delegation of authority and making a cute reference to legislating peer-reviewed scientific findings is a nod to The Daily Show crowd's jokester attitude.

Third, the last line from the paragraph says that "you have not articulated a legitimate need for anything beyond what NOAA has already provided" plays into my argument from before about a government agency obfuscating.

One could argue that the obfuscation is to hold a checks and balance, but then why is a legislature member worried about what the executive branch is doing? The executive branch should be defining what it will fulfill in FOIA requests and why.

Also, the entire letter points to my earlier discussion that while one can have the data, the models, and the methodologies, the reasoning behind the change appears to be left off and NOAA is not helping the concern with the agency when it does not come out with this. Even if they came right out and said, look, we used an incorrect number of significant digits, that is why our models appeared misleading before, it would be a quick story, make the rounds on skeptic sites, and then could move forward. So, why obfuscate?

But what would we do, how are we going to tell China or India, sovereign nations whose people are emerging from abject poverty, to knock it off? These nations are on a year over year increase path that by 2030 will see them doubling their CO2 emissions.

Are you willing to give them money and how much, what if they do not use it for appropriate actions?

Are you willing to force them to change, how do you propose forcing them? Are you willing to wage American lives now for a future probability?

The United States of America has done a great job reducing its environmental impact. Back in the day it was a rare event to see stars in Los Angeles because of the fog (the gaseous burning orb ones not the celebrities), but thanks to the EPA, it is a common occurrence now.

It is not blindingly clear to those nations that are developing.

China has brought their coal plants online and they use 4,361,427 thousand short tons of unfiltered or carbon captured coal to the United States carbon capturing EPA mandated 924,442 thousand short tons. Compare areas that have coal plants with those which do not in China versus America [3] and you can see that our nation has it under control and China does not. [1]

Are we honestly going to another country and tell them to quit developing?

Do we have the will to force them to give up their coal fired plants for nuclear energy (which from internal announcements is set to make up only 5% of their power structure), or natural gas? What does that will look like, money, political manipulation, force?

How can you say that computer projections are more reliable now than they were before? Hurricane projections, using state of the art modeling for a shortened horizon cannot say whether a hurricane in three days will bear west or east of Florida. The validation of the computer projections of today will not be evaluated for another fifteen years, all the while, every day you can continue on with that statement, essentially: "All of the previous models had errors, but today's model is perfect."

[1] http://www.eia.gov/beta/international/

[2] I do not have a picture that correctly does this justice, there are ones that are doctored by greenpeace and others where the plant is not running at capacity. So this is not a fair comparison.

[3] http://www.ecorevolution.it/img/pho/me6.jpg

You have an agency that releases an update to its modeling capabilities, from which based on the update, a change is made to the forecast that eliminates a political hat upon which an argument is being made. If you release the model, the data, the before and after results, and all of the information, you do not know why and what prompted the change. Internal machinations what they are, the previous Michael Mann situation where we have people admitting: "I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Nothing externally hinted at any issue, but when an internal machination occurs, the public facing data may not be enough.

As an aside, please stop downvoting me for these posts, I am not trying to defend for or against climate change, just pointing out that a reason for suspicion could exist. If you disagree with my internal machination comment, please witness EPA and Pebble Mine, Lois Lerner and her IRS hijinks, and the former Secretary of State on the origins of the Benghazi attack, all of which were forward facing items that looked fine, but internal machinations showed suspicious activity.

Ridiculous, a government agency with individuals paid for by the American tax payer is not willing to release to the American public internal communications.

I am not blaming the politician, just noting the chasm in the NASA projections and what the politicians are pivoting on.

Mr. Smith does not deny climate change science, he is a skeptic, not the same. As a congressman, he is afforded the roles of his position to investigate corruption or suspicions of corruption, which in this case includes an agency using taxpayer dollars avoiding the release of information to a committee. The NOAA situation is one where the agency should openly share data with the committee and Mr. Smith would go away, by stonewalling, the agency does not help the cause of science or dissipate suspicion of obfuscating results.

In Apollo 13 the movie, there is a scene where the NASA representative is walking politicos on a tour:

JIM LOVELL - I'm slated to be the commander of Apollo 14 sometime late next year.

CONGRESSMAN - If there is an Apollo 14... Now, Jim, people in my state have been asking why we're continuing to fund this program - now that we've beaten the Russians to the Moon. [1]

The chasm between what NASA wanted, pilots down, was to keep on its trajectory, but the politicians saw monies to tender.

[1] https://sfy.ru/?script=apollo13

That article is stilted to say the least. Representative Smith has a number of initiatives for science Leahy-Smith America Invents Act and the STEM Education Act of 2014.

The goal with any Congress is to think what if the parties were reversed. Would the conversation be the same if Hank "[Guam] the island will tip over" Johnson asked for information on the collusion between an agency and outside agencies.

We have a government agency turning down a request by a voted in member representing the populace of the United States of America that elected him. There is no reason for a government agency to be doing this. They should be accorded the respect of the position, no matter how much someone disagrees with it.

We have a situation where the Republicans postulated that the IRS was coordinating against a group of individuals to prevent their recognition during an election, and were proven correct despite agency stonewalling. The agency head had a secret e-mail to avoid FOIA, so searching for a slip-up required going through thousands of e-mails.

Another agency had its Secretary running a private server as an end run around the FOIA. Where upon closer inspection reveals that the agency publicly deceived the populace on originations of a terrorist attack.

Additionally, the federal government has been on a bender with coordinating against individuals in the name of political purposes. Witness former Senator Stevens railroading, IRS' Lois Lerner, and EPA's Phillip North coordinating with EPA on Pebble Mine.

There is no opportunity for innovation in SF, there is so much anti-owner pushes, that owners are holding on until the ROI makes it.

The benefits were not cut, they were frozen. Those benefits currently earned are guaranteed through the aforementioned Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. The article does not mention it, but there are a variety of freezes that could occur:

* Plan freeze: All currently earned benefits are given to the employee without any future opportunity to earn further benefit. In this case, the earned benefits are still there, just now one needs to find another retirement system.

* New freeze / Grandfather Freeze: All current employees are allowed to fill out the vesting period, but new employees are not allowed onto the pension.

Aside: nice handle.

Yes. The change in pension to defined contribution should be something that is phased in as those making decisions in the system were making them under existing conditions. However, once the change has been made, those not grandfathered in should expect the new infrastructure.

That is why the social security system needs to start being changed for longer lifespans, not for those who operated under the current system, but so it can remain solvent for those entering the program now.