Yantelope V2

It's only a choice if you allow those people who earn more money to keep a proportional amount. What I am saying is that if you increase taxes exponentially then you're making it exponentially harder to get a bigger house or a nicer car as the costs of those things are not linear. Your mortgage is not the only thing that gets more expensive with a larger house. Besides, what are you suggesting people who are richer should be doing with their money if they are richer besides get nicer things? You think everyone should live in a 2000 square foot house and drive the same cars regardless of their lifestyle? The idea of a free market is that people who want bigger houses and nicer things should be able to work hard and earn them and if you're stifling that then you're going to end up with a less productive society.

That's simply not true, as your standard of living increases your cost of living increases substantially as well. Electricity, property taxes, and just the upkeep of a larger home or a nicer car can be quite a bit more expensive. Cost of living increases proportionally just like everything else but you're proposing increasing taxation exponentially which simply is excessive. Giving people necessary medical treatment is not "rewarding" them for anything, it's being a decent human being. Anyway, we're just going to have to agree to disagree about this. I'm not going to convince you and you're not going to convince me. Depends on how you define necessary. Besides, as Darwinists would think you guys could grasp easily how society paying money to sustain individuals who are not productive is a drag and not a boon. I think you do agree with me that all of these programs hurts the economy but you're simply arguing "it's the right thing to do". That's totally different. You can live in a small apartment and have a roof over your head. Providing someone a house is different. Ethan was talking about people losing their houses. As far as medical treatment goes everyone gets life sustaining medical care. Beyond that, if you want medicine you should have to pay for it. Disclaimer: I'm not against life sustaining medical care or some levels of government intervention for the very poor. I just think we're way beyond that now. I do not wish to go back to having people living in hoovervilles.

Having a house is not a "minimal" standard by any stretch of the imagination. No society has ever come close to providing a house for every one of its residents. You have to step back to the meta view of the economy if you're going to discuss healthcare or housing or those things. If you want more people to have houses you need to have more people building houses and providing housing. If you want more people to have medical care then you need to be encouraging people to become doctors or nurses or to work for pharmaceutical companies etc. How is rewarding people for not learning skills and encouraging people to not get jobs going to result in there being more doctors, more hospitals more houses and more food?

The problem is we're already more than providing a minimal standard of living. If you check census data we have the richest poor people in the world. The problem is that by propping up and making poor people comfortable your enabling them to be less productive. The more you reward people who are unproductive the less productivity you get. Additionally you're paying people money to take money from rich people and give it to poor people so you're wasting money to waste money. It's all about encouraging people to be productive. Ironically what most very rich people do is give their money to the poor. They're also much better at it than the government is. Edit: going back to your quote: "It's better for the economy to give a million poor people $1 than it is to give one rich person $1M." Well, not if half of that gets wasted by employing a few hundred people to distribute that money. If only $500,000 or even $800,000 goes to poor people then you've just taken $200,000 out of the economy that could have been used for something productive and wasted it on overhead. Any good company would tell you that keeping your overhead low is crucial to being profitable and yet we insist on creating as much overhead as possible when running our government.

I agree that taxation should be a percentage based system with a poverty level at which people do not have to pay (much lower than it is now). I think tierd % rates or people paying higher % of their total earnings than other people is completely unfair.

There are already tiered income brackets in america. You're taxed at a certain rate for the first x amount of dollars and anything more than that get taxed at a higher rate and so on. In response to people making tons of money and what they do or don't contribute to society. Someone asked a football kicker one time if he thought it was fair to get paid millions of dollars to kick a football. The player looked back at the reporter and simply said "I can do something you can't do". I thought that was a pretty good response. CEOs are people upon whom rest the jobs of tens of thousands of people many times. There are very few people who can be a CEO and those people are often compensated handily. Bad CEOs result in the destruction of companies, the loss of thounsands of jobs, wasted money and can have a negative impact on the economy. So yes Ethan, it's very easy to see how the impact of one person's decisions can be 1000x greater than the impact of another persons decisions. I know we all think we can be CEOs of companies or great football players or whatever you want to say but the fact is that the best and the brightest, the people who contribute or provide unique services get rewarded handsomely by society and that's a good thing because it increases wealth to everyone who benefits from their contributions. To say that somehow that person should automatically begin to forfeit large portions of their earnings simply because "they can afford to" is simply jealousy in my opionion. Furthermore it's simply stupid to assume that rich people having lots of money is a bad thing. You want rich people to have money so they can spend it on whatever goods or services you supply, so they can expand their own companies and hire more people and so that the economy can grown and flourish. The worst thing you can possibly do is take money from productive people, and give it unporductive waste. Wealth is not static. Wealth can be created and it can be destroyed. With the same amount of materials you can either create 4 factories or you could build one factory, tear it down, build another one, tear it down and build another one and tear it down. You can expend time, money, resources and manpower and have it be all worth nothing or you can spend time resources and manpower to make the world a better place. In my experience the government is great at wasting all of the above while corporations provide goods and services and make the world a better place. You need a government to hold it all together but trying to replace corporations with governement like the afformentioned health care bill is a bad idea.

I don't believe that 45% of americans cannot afford to pay any taxes. How do the rich financially benefit more from society than any other person who lives in society? What benefits do they accrue? If you're talking about money then what should be fairly obvious is that as people provide goods and services to society. The only idiotic thing would be to punish people for providing goods and services to society. How is that not obvious?

As you're talking about federal taxes. Clearly you didn't factor in all the other taxes he paid? Clearly that is not his total tax burden. Update: Found a good rebuttal online http://www.tnr.com/b...ouble-price-fox Makes me wonder exactly how the number work out. I really don't want to bother actually reading the CBO's report. Update 2: Hmmm, This is directly from the report "Offset in part by about $0.4 trillion in receipts from penalty payments, the new excise tax on high-premium insurance plans, and other budgetary effects (mostly increases in tax revenues)." So they've added $400 billion in extra taxes. Yikes. Didn't remember them touting that loudly. I'm sure that wont have any kind of negative impact on the economy. Update 3: more talk about other revenues are coming from elimination of tax credits. That's an effective tax increase too, so basically there's a ton of new taxes in here to pay for the $2 trillion dollars of additionally spending. Update 4: I think it's also worth noting that we're spending 2 trillion dollars to bring the % of insured people up 10% to 90%

As it pertains to balancing the federal budget it is entirely accurate to state that almost half of people pay nothing especially as it pertains to raising taxes on the rich.

Yeah, nobody bleeds to death dying the streets here. The other great thing in america, not having to wait 19 weeks for a simple referral like say Canada. http://www.washingto...th-care-reform/ "Because doctors would receive a flat annual fee for each patient, they’d have a direct financial incentive to keep their patients healthy - or more cynically - to limit the care they provide. That’s exactly what has happened in Canada, which implemented such budgets in the 1970s. Last year, Canadians were waiting to receive more than 941,000 procedures. The average total wait time between referral from a primary care physician and treatment by a specialist reached 19 weeks in 2011. That’s more than double the wait time in 1993." I seriously think that you UK residents and Canadians love your healthcare because you don't realize how bad you have it. @Ethan: Property taxes, sales taxes, state incometaxes and all of the other things you mentioned are not going to go to pay for this Obamacare. Federal projects are funded by federal income tax.

Yes, tax the rich, nobody cares that 45% of americans pay nothing. Apparently that's "their fair share". At any rate, there's currently no way to pay for Obamacare and it is going to result in higher taxes unless repealed. It's already resulting in higher health care costs across the board and as a result it's grand total achievement is lower standard of living for every american from worse healthcare and higher tax burden. Great policy making at its finest.

I think this goes back a bit to separating the two aspects of reviewing the game. Like you said, it's a product, and you review it on functionality just like you would review some new consumer electronic or even an appliance. At the same time it's a form of entertainment so you review it on artistic merit and fun factor and things of that nature. I think the fact that we have to mash together those things and put a number on it is a little rough.

http://nightmaremode.net/2012/03/do-we-need-metacritic-17251/ Seriously, why do people hate metacritic so much? Shouldn't you hate the people who put too much emphasis on the metacritic score rather than the site itself? The site itself serves a pretty useful funciton I think which is to give you a quick at a glance look at what the general critical opinion of a game is.

It wasn't exactly framed that way. It was more like this: Republicans: There is no way to pay for this bill Democrats: It's only going to be $900B and we are replacing $900B through cuts in medicare. Republicans: No, it's going to cost 2 trillion dollars we can't pay for this. 2 years later, CBO: The actual cost is really 2 trillion. Republicans: There is no way to pay for this bill

I love how every thread devlovles into a Burnout Paradise hate session at least once. I also love how "take any route to your goal" became, "if you take one wrong turn you're screwed and there's no restart button!".

Donations thread goes up, suddenly dean is posting on the games you've bought thread. Coincidence?

Yeah, it seems to me that anonmyity of the internet will be gone soon if only because all you have to do is make the ISPs be the police. The problem is the ISPs have a vested interest in not being police since their customers don't want to be policed. It's not perfect but really, would a little accountability for people on the internet be a bad thing? I know we're going to do down the net neutrality route but unless people here are legitimate anarchists you should be able to agree that some level of policing on the internet is a good thing. Oh I guess ISPs do have a dog in the fight as they'd like to have an excuse to kick BW hogging pirates off their network.

So what does it take for people to care? Does he personally have to punch a hadicapped person while urinating on the American flag? It just seems like nothing he does bothers his supporters.

I guess only time will tell how these schemes work out in the long run but I don't think they're to the point of inspiring long term brand degredation. DLC oversaturation is pretty much an annoyance right now and it usually doesn't keep me from buying a game (Mass Effect 2 excluded). I don't think there's going to be longterm fallout with the gaming community over it especially since it's being done industry wide. Perhaps if it were only EA you'd see people fleeing to Capcom but Capcom is just as guilty as is Activision and THQ. Everyone is on board with this with a few minor holdouts so unless there's simple backlash against gaming as a whole I don't see it impacting a single publisher more than another.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57397452-261/riaa-chief-isps-to-start-policing-copyright-by-july-12/

Well, not everyone lies about everything although politicians lying is not news. I will say that I find that everytime I talk about Obama and all the lousy things he does to people who voted for him they respond with "everyone does that" as if it somehow absolves Obama.

would it help if everyone clicked on the ads repeatedly?

At the same time, I know a lot of gamers who aren't even informed enough to know what "day 1 DLC" would mean or the implications of it. These are people who play a decent amount of games they just don't follow game blogs very much and they don't really keep up with game news every day. If you explain to them about day 1 DLC and things like that they generally do understand why people are upset and agree that day 1 DLC seems pretty lame but they just don't know about it or care about it unless someone tells them. I feel like I know a lot of people like that. People who didn't know about the Deus Ex HR codes being taken from the Gamestop boxes. Those sorts of stories never make it out unless you're the kind of guy who checks game blogs every day and lets face it, I don't think even 50% of the gaming population reads kotaku or joystiq or destructoid regularly.

Except that this wasn't hard to predict. Everyone knew he was fudging the $900 billion factor using a number of tricks so that's why I said the 2 Trillion total cost was no surprise. It's been no surprise that this thing was going to add another Trillion dollars to the national debt but Obama and the democratic congress should be held accountable for being completely dishonest about the costs of the legislation. Edit: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/09/09/obama-health-care-reform-will-not-increase-deficit/ All the conservative commentators then were saying that the $900 billion figure was a joke.

nevermind, I should learn to read.