> I'm pretty objective since I've beaten every Zelda and I can't agree. Their games just aren't at the same level as anything modern.
A lot of "modern" games come with rough edges. I'm not saying that they're not good games, but you can tell it was a bunch of people working to crank out features, exercising every new capability their engine provides.
There's a level of polish that a lot of Nintendo games have. They don't necessarily try to push technical boundaries. They'll take a simple concept or gameplay paradigm and then attempt to be fully immersive within the scope of they've defined.
Modern AAA games feel like summer blockbusters. Marvel superhero films.
Nintendo games feel like Miyazaki. Breath of the Wild legitimately felt like playing through one of his films.
Animal Crossing has huge problems? Like what? It's a simple game about managing friendship and an island. It does that perfectly. There was some issues with multiplayer, but even those where minor and are being fixed.
BOTW is empty????? Have you never played a large map game ever? It's absolutely amazing and one of the top rated games of all time.
You're just being an iconoclast for no reason but to get downvotes?
Botw is empty. Yes, large maps are common in 2020. Elder scrolls, assassin's Creed, and GTA come to mind as full but large worlds. Instead of walking to a destination, you'd often run into side quests.
I'm wondering if you've only Nintendo gamed and are just unaware.
>I'm wondering if you've only Nintendo gamed and are just unaware.
That is unnecessarily patronizing. Just because someone does not agree with your opinions does not mean they are ignorant.
And just to take the example I'm most familiar with from your list, sure you occasionally run across a side-quest in Skyrim, but most of the time the world is just populated with the same small set of spawning NPCs who exist to add the 12 or so big quests to your journal.
The sheer seriousness with which that series takes itself and how ridiculously cringey it ends up being, due to broken AI and a host of other problems, is something of a hilarious meme:
7 of the top 25 highest rated games are Nintendo. Of course whether or not you like a game is personal and subjective but only pointing out lots of people disagree with your assessment
For me BotW is my favorite game ever. Not saying it's a perfect game or that you should like it but for me personally I got 120 hours of pure joy from that game. Where as I didn't get into Witcher or Skyrim etc.. (not saying those are bad games, just didn't do it for me).
If you open your network tab in your browser's devtools, there may be JSON payloads to give you what you need (rather than farting around with OCR or reverse image searching your album art).
But I did make that python program to take photos. 64 images to scrape one day. I'm not too concerned of the difficulty of OCR, there's gotta be some libraries for it, especially on black and white text from a web page.
Debt is. Indentured servitude is widely understood as being a variation of slavery.
Essentially you've got a large debt. You're only allowed to work for the person who you owe that debt to. That person gets to choose your interest rates and your pay rate. For many it is made impossible to ever repay that debt, even if they pay it many times over.
Note they can't go somewhere else to get a higher paying job, because to do that they have to pay off their debt.
Marketing is all powerful evil. Even if ads don't work.
Some companies are better than others. Instead of "buy my product" they teach consumers they look cool if they buy. We wouldn't be dealing with Apple's BS if people only cared about quality.
How out of touch and uneducated are these people? Pandemics can't be stopped outside a vaccine. We are all going to catch it or be quarentined for 18 months.
Want to flatten the curve? I could go to Walmart and interface with 50 people to get ibuprofen, or I can interface with 1 worker?
We need to stop electing marketers and start electing people that understand math.
The plague was stopped before vaccines existed... Same with many other pandemics. A pandemic is an epidemic that affects a larger area, not an unstoppable monster
I'll be glad if we get a vaccine. If we don't, we must fight it nonetheless. In 2003, we stopped the SRAS epidemic, another coronavirus. We stopped it. There's no vaccine yet. The 2015 MERS isn't completely extinct but it's under control.
Also I think Korea and a few other Asian countries will be virus free soon (those who thought the 2003/2015 epidemics)
> They are raising their wage to $17 per hour. That's around $3,000 per month in stead of their usual $2,500 per month.
According to Google, that beats Walmart pay[0]. Less clear for Target[1]. Of course, if reports are even remotely accurate, Amazon warehouse working conditions are considerably worse.
I don't know what other retailers pay, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're comparable.
Politicians right now are in, "it doesn't matter if we do the right thing, it matters that we look like we're taking authoritative action" mode. This happened after 9/11 too.
Right now, 0.1% of the US has had Covid-19. For heard immunity we need that number to be at least 500 times larger.
So, what's the plan here? Wait for a miracle that isn't coming? Stay in quarantine for a year and risk societal ruin?
And how will our lives look if we continue this quarantine for a decade -- which at our current level of infection (which has leveled off) is the minimum time it would take to gain heard immunity?
> And how will our lives look if we continue this quarantine for a decade
Probably look at Iraq and Afghanistan has dealt with post 9/11.
Speaking strictly in terms of the US, we'd be able to weather a 10-year lockdown.
America is rich in natural resources, and has a large agricultural base.
Our government can handle the basics:
Drinking water
Food
Shelter
The rest would be economic shifts, such as reduction in costs of living to account for a new economy that has shifted away from the ability to get together.
I would speculate we're better off with the entirety of the economy being in shambles, than we would be by having rather high mortality rates, and overwhelming our health services.
Let me post another question:
What if you did not need to work to have your any of needs met?
I'm not sure that society can in fact adapt to such strict restrictions. People in Afghanistan didn't take the decade off from socializing, even though there was a significant risk of getting killed.
By any reasonable estimate, it's over 1%. Highly infected areas like NYC likely exceed 10%
> So, what's the plan here?
It's not feasable to get herd immunity in a world as open as 3 months ago. The hospitalization rate (and duration) is too high -> it would take longer than the optimistic time for vaccine development.
Electronic contact tracing, heavy testing, traveler quarantines, mass gathering restrictions. It's not going to get contained, but you can have a world where isolated bursts effectively get squashed.
The whole structure of the debates and 24/7 news coverage is more about reality TV than any kind of substance. It's geared for soundbites and drama. So someone like Yang doesn't fit into that, but shines in long form formats like podcasts.
Andrew Yang is a nice guy but his "math" isn't actually all that good.
His plan to use a VAT to pay for UBI is a regressive tax. People with lower incomes spend a higher percentage of their income on consumable goods. Putting a higher VAT or sales tax on everything to UBI puts a lot of the burden on the lower class to pay for this program. Someone with a much higher income has a number of ways to avoid this tax - they can invest in companies instead, they can buy real estate, they can take a jet to a different country and buy expensive stuff there instead of buying it in the country with a high VAT, like how people in Massachusetts buy their computers in New Hampshire.
So, he "did the math," but that doesn't automatically make it good policy.
His plan was to exempt such goods from VAT, so it wouldn't be regressive.
That said, I wasn't entirely convinced by the Freedom Dividend and wish it hadn't been the centerpiece. What I was more interested in and really appreciated was his overall approach and focus on problems and solutions. An actual problem solver and uniter, not someone perpetuating the WWE reality TV show that is our politics.
Actually that's true, I wish I could take back my original comment at this point or modify it (too late).
"Assuming all goods are subject to a VAT and the entire VAT is passed on to consumers, an individual would have to buy $120,000 worth of items before the extra costs associated with a VAT “use up” their UBI."
That is...true, yes. Everyone's still getting the extra $1,000 a month.
Using all of that up by spending on a 10% VAT puts you at spending $120,000 a year.
So, while a VAT is not progressive, funneling it into UBI turns it into being progressive. That makes sense. You don't even need a goods exemption for that to work as intended.
I am also not convinced on the idea of UBI. There needs to be more studies including large scale studies if possible. I am not convinced that the largest rent-seekers with limited competition and supply alternatives wouldn't just suck those income gains away - jobs with labor supply surplus might pay closer to the minimum wage, landlords might simply all agree to raise rent, Comcast will raise bills across the country, colleges raise tuition, etc. UBI sometimes feels like an oversimplification, one of those "easy solutions" that doesn't take a long time to write down and fits in a campaign slogan.
a regressive tax used to fund a progressive policy can be either net regressive or net progressive. if rich people buy enough stuff that they pay more VAT than they receive in UBI, the whole system is still progressive.
For a good example of this, see Social Security (OASDI) in the US. The funding method is very regressive, taking a flat percentage of income only under a threshold (12.4% of income under $137,700 with half paid by employer and half paid by employee). People who make more than that pay less tax.
But then we use the tax to directly fund one of the most progressive programs in the US, which directly pays people who need it most.
I think most people would think of Social Security as a net progressive policy, even though it has a very regressive funding model.
And really, a VAT might be slightly regressive in practice because poor people tend to spend a larger fraction of their income but it's still pretty close to being a flat tax. If you were to try to fund a UBI with a head tax that would indeed be pointless. As long as rich people tend to spend large amount of money, in absolute terms, than poor people a VAT+UBI combo is going to be progressive.
It's probably more available in the US than in Ethiopia but it's still a part of the cuisine. Interestingly, according to the guy who runs my local place, mushrooms are also found in Ethiopian cooking but are often left off the menus because (his words not mine) "white people don't think mushrooms are authentic".
I live in Ethiopia. This country has the highest number of livestock in all of Africa. So it's available in quantities. The price for a kilo can range between 7$ to 20$ (if you go to specialized places). The price hikes was driven by high inflation driven by some economic growth. So meat is moderately expensive but it's a regular menu item at least in the section of society i interact most with. As a comparison, It was 3$ a kilo, markedly cheaper.
Plus, people follow strict fasting (up to 210 mandatory fasting days in a year) ... at least the Oriental Orthodox church followers which make up 40-50% of the population.
