Yantelope V2

Concert tickets and the like. Hmmm, that's interesting. Well, in response to your last post. I don't think it's either 50% taxes or no healthcare. I think you can have low taxes and affordable health care. I just don't think you can accomplish it with universal healthcare and big government.

Well, first off, cost of public transportation isn't all that great. We have light rail in dallas and it's still almost the exact same cost to ride as it is to drive. You only come out ahead if you include "mileage" on your car. Additionally, we're talking about how the standard of living numbers are skewed. Take some of the northern states where there is a lot of land and a small population. If you say that we should have busses running to every single rural house, that's just not practical but it would skew your "standard of living" metrics if you're doing the calculation based on square footage. I don't know how they control for all that. TL:DR, the point is that the public transportation and other similar metrics can skew your average numbers.

What is considered a "culture" good?

We're not arguing over whether or not public transportation is a good or a bad thing. We're discussing the fact that directly equating access to public transportation to standard of living is not a good metric because like you said, not everyone is a rich white guy and not everyone is poor. So really you're making the same point we are that assigning a value to public transportation and saying that provides better standard of living isn't necessarily true. Where is India getting all the meat for their Big Macs to be so cheap? I thought it was illegal to be killing all those cows over there. Also, I'm going to have to do some digging but just based on these early numbers and stuff I'm pulling up it just seems that people in Sweden have less spending money and are okay with that. I suppose we could do what they do and double everyone's taxes here in America but I'd personally prefer to spend my own money.

Well this is the most ignorant thing I've read all day. Not really, which do you prefer, to ride on a bus or to drive your own car? There's tons of areas in Texas with no public transportation. That doesn't mean everyone is broke. Most of those rural areas people have lots of land and nice trucks.

I grabbed minecraft for that brief glorious moment. I need to play it now that they've updated it a bit.

Well, isn't a bit stupid of them to advertise how smart Siri is when according to the article it's just pulling a ton of answers from Wolfram Alpha anyway?

How you actually measure,compare and add a numerical value all of those things gets a bit messy. Edit: What I mean is who decides "affordable or free (misnomer) access to healthcare" and how do they balance that with the other factors. If you think socialized medicine is great you can crank the value of that way up and skew the "standard of living". Another interesting thing I've just been reading about is Purchasing Power Parity. Interesting. http://en.wikipedia....PPP)_per_capita Johnny, didn't you say videogames are crazy expensive in Sweden in the piracy thread? I'm learning so much now. Clearly Sweden is inferior because they are way behind on the big mac index. http://upload.wikime...SD_2columns.png I wonder how the size of the GDP affects the cost of the programs in terms of administration and such. Sweden's GDP(PPP) is 2.5% of the US.

Standard of living is kind of a subjective measure depending upon who's defining it.

I mean, isn't this chart pretty telling? Their government consumes roughly 2x of their GDP compared to the US. Now that's big government.

Well, perhaps I need to expand my vocabulary a bit. I'll use the terms as guys defined them here though. Progressive/liberal/leftist policies like redistribution, universal healthcare, etc. are leading to economic collapse and are unsustainable without direct impact on the standard of living. @Dean and TME, I think I've already agreed that there is a ton of waste in the military that we could probably cut. As far as Sweden goes I honestly don't know much about the country. I'll try to do a little digging and find out a bit more on their policies and such. Maybe Johnny has some of that info. I wonder what the median take home income in Sweden is. I'd also like to know what their highest tax bracket is.

I know we all complain about what the Wii became but I do remember the introduction of the Wii was the first time I was really excited about a new console in a while. It seemed at the first reveal of the Wii that it might actually bring about new experiences in gaming. It's a shame that it only really amounted to waggle really. I'm not sure if it's being chained to a traditional display or what the problem is but as Ethan has already pointed out, the diminishing returns of graphics coupled with the internet tools to wring cash from gamers it seems like the industry is not very exciting right now. I honestly don't know what it would take to make a game that is truly exciting but I'm hoping someone out there is still looking for the next level of immersion.

Don't they let you just keep playing indefinitely after the game is "over" and it gives you a score?

@Dean, Well, this is a global economy so bad economic news in America affects the rest of the world. The housing bubble and the general banking crisis that resulted clearly affected the rest of the world but I do believe the EU crisis is more related to the poor bailouts and the refusal of EU creditors to realize that Greece is unwilling and unable to repay their debts. They keep trying new "bailout" packages with more debt but there's not really any way for Greece to repay it so sooner or later the loans will stop coming in, Greece will run out of money and it's not going to be pretty.

I don't think that's true though. I think that's a fundamental difference between left and right wing politicis. I think even if world hunger were a think of the past and we all had shelter and medical care there would still be war for numerous reasons. We covet what others have, women, friends, power. Power itself is something people will fight over.

Greece's current financial woes are unrelated to the housing crisis or are you saying they're the same thing?

Greece's problem is that it has racked up huge debts based on their socialistic entitlement programs that it can't pay for and it can't service the debt. The citizens of Greece refuse to cut the entitlements and they can't service their debt to Germany and the EU so they're pretty much pissed off and about to face some hard reality. It's nothing to do with bad money. It's all about piss poor leftist ideals. For reference: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122290574391296381.html

Can I just say for the 800th time that I'm not against regulation? The aforementioned housing bubble was an example where the government should have stepped in and shut down the selling of bad mortgage backed securities and there are plenty of records showing that they knew it was a problem way ahead of time.

Well, the recession was a direct result of the housing bubble and bad financial decisions and "creative accounting". That bubble bursting was something you can blame both Republicans and Democrats for as there are many of them on record saying they didn't want to be the ones to pop the bubble. I think Barney Frank even said he wanted to "roll the dice" on fannie may and freddie mac. That was a failure of regulation for sure brought about only by initial government intervention during the Clinton era. That aside it didn't really have anything to do with the growing federal debt or budget defects. I think that problem will be far worse because you can't just work the bad money out of the system. You have to either eliminate many entitlements which will make a lot of people very upset (like the protests in Greece) or you have to crank up taxes and still cut a ton of entitlements and everyone makes less money while financing the debt. So really we're talking about a completely different animal than a typical economic market bubble.

No. I mean, you can see the economy imploding in Greece right now and you can see democrat states imploding financially but we really haven't gotten there yet on the federal level.

after 63 pages and a few hundred before that it's all by this point right?

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/05/15/ubisoft-expects-next-gen-consoles-to-integrate-item-based-model/ Here's one more of those stories that just makes me go

I'm sorry, let me rephrase, the type of over taxing the rich to give to the poor type of redistribution that Obama advocates is socialistic in nature. The idea of the individual right to health care is socialistic. You might not think that all socialism is bad but it's pretty clear that Obama is socialistic in nature. He'd love to have the government control the means of production. It's just the methods he uses to gain control are different. Rather than the traditional military state he does it through "regulations" and "taxes". It's a slow and steady change over to socialism and it doesn't mean America will be instantly turned into a rotting cess pool. It means that the standard of living will continue to decrease for every American much like the trend we are seeing in the EU right now. They sky isn't falling with Obama and socialism. It's just making life a little less comfortable one day at a time until eventually our economy implodes. Edit: I mean, crap, you don't even have to look overseas. Just look at the failure of liberalism at the state level. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-state-budget-20120515,0,1532582.story

Yeah, I do wish they'd go back and make some of their games deeper. The seams of the games do start to show by the time you're at the end of them and they're overpriced at $5 but while you're figuring out the mechanics of them they can be very addicting. Pocket League Story was great too, I just wish they had a baseball version of it.