Struensee posted:

Maybe they should lower prices.

Xaris posted:

somethingawful stays winning but jeff is really blowing a big opportunity to revitalize it and bring in new people as the rest of the internet enshittifies itself. like the front page (which is absolutely embarrasing and dead now) should have been taken down and just redirect to the forums years ago. oh well.

Xaris posted:

somethingawful stays winning but jeff is really blowing a big opportunity to revitalize it and bring in new people as the rest of the internet enshittifies itself. like the front page (which is absolutely embarrasing and dead now) should have been taken down and just redirect to the forums years ago. oh well.

Ammanas posted:

costco and walmart/sams club are the principle drivers for keeping prices down in america. they loving hate things costing more, because then their customers buy less, or just don't come. no one else has their purchasing power.

Vox Nihili posted:

Amazon has something like five times their combined retail market share

Ammanas posted:

does amazon give a single poo poo about keeping prices down?

Vox Nihili posted:

I finally got an opportunity to watch the movie The Menu tonight. As the friend of many Bay Area foodies it really hit home for me.

I am giving it the Doomsday Economics Thread Seal of Approval.

It's streaming on "the Max" by HBO, at least until they cut it for tax write-offs.

webcams for christ posted:

nice

webcams for christ posted:

nice

double nine posted:

that movie was hilarious, I just don't know how much of it was intentional

e: for those who haven't seen it: it's not a comedy, it's a thriller-esque social commentary
it's not a light romp

quote:

CITY LEADERS are trying to figure out what the future looks like for their downtowns full of half-empty office buildings. Here in the middle of 2023, the speed of the return-to-office movement is somewhere between a trickle and a stall.

But office isn’t a dead asset class — the question is what kind of office product will thrive in the future, and what to do with the buildings that don’t make the cut. I’ve got a vision of how this will play out, inspired by the shift in the movie theater business over the past few decades.

Movie theaters are a type of real estate that has been forced to evolve and improve its offerings as technology has made it easier and better to watch movies at home. Sound familiar? Nowadays, many consumers have 70-inch high-definition televisions with surround sound, comfortable couches, and the ability to watch thousands of films on multiple streaming services. It’s remarkable that anyone bothers to pay the ever-escalating price to watch a film at a movie theater. But they do. In the first quarter of 2023, the US box office tally is tracking just 25% below 2019 levels, an improvement over last year, which would work out to $8.5 billion in ticket revenue this year should the pace be sustained.

Because the viewing options at home for consumers continue to improve, theaters have changed to offer an experience that can’t be had in the typical family room. IMAX Corp. — operators of theaters with super-sized screens and super-sized ticket prices — saw its revenues in this year’s first quarter exceed the same period in 2019, for instance. Nobody has a house big enough for a screen that measures 59 by 79 feet. IMAX is growing while older theaters that can’t keep pace on the amenities front are in decline.

Based on the evidence we have, that’s a reasonable way of thinking about the state of offices now and what’s likely to work in the future. The Related Companies, developers of projects like Hudson Yards in New York City, recently put out a presentation on the future of the office where they coined the phrase “lifestyle office” to describe the model that’s currently thriving and has the brightest future.

Lifestyle office, as they see it, is essentially the IMAX version of an office building, packed with amenities including beautiful design, unique experiences, world-class shopping and culture, and plenty of greenspace. Related Companies says its lifestyle office vision represents less than 5% of the market and has significant rent premiums and lower vacancy rates compared with the rest of the market.

For the somewhat hollowed-out office centers in high-cost cities like New York and San Francisco, this strikes me as where we’re headed. These are the neighborhoods with the wealth that can afford the construction and operating costs needed to build a lifestyle office, and with the high-powered employers in tech and finance that will pay the stratospheric rents needed to make the projects viable. The $1 billion renovation of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco is a sign that developers are putting money behind this bet.

Everywhere else, where budgets are more of a factor and office rents north of $100 a square foot aren’t feasible, it’s a bit more complicated. In some cases, improving amenities enough to become a discount version of a lifestyle office might be enough to stabilize an office district, similar to non-IMAX theaters that offer plush, reclining chairs and upgraded food options.

But when that isn’t enough, the question becomes how to repurpose a building. Residential conversions are great, but they’re often difficult because of the difference in floor-plate layouts between modern office and apartment buildings. Public money and streamlined permitting to assist in the redevelopment of antiquated buildings is going to be essential in some places, which is what city officials in Calgary, Canada, determined after an oil bust-related office market downturn in 2014.

Since cities and office building owners will be reluctant to admit defeat, what they should do for now is watch this lifestyle office trend and think about how they can tweak it to suit their needs based on the wealth and employer base of their market. Just like we’ve seen with movie theaters, we’ll still have a thriving office market in the future, but it’s going to be smaller and more expensive to operate — though ultimately a better experience for customers.

Vox Nihili posted:

I finally got an opportunity to watch the movie The Menu tonight. As the friend of many Bay Area foodies it really hit home for me.

I am giving it the Doomsday Economics Thread Seal of Approval.

It's streaming on "the Max" by HBO, at least until they cut it for tax write-offs.

gradenko_2000 posted:

anime was right posted:

It's a fun movie that's very hamfisted and could easily have been greater than the sum of its parts if there was more intentionality behind the ensemble cast. Still worth watching once tho imo.

webcams for christ posted:

nice

Goa Tse-tung posted:

all that money goes to AI startups instead

Monkey Fracas posted:

We should all thank Doughboy Bebop for compromising crypto to a permanent end before it snaked its tendrils into a place where we would be forced to bail it out when it it inevitably crashed because the whole thing is made-up bullshit (more than any other finance horseshit anyway)

Still had to endure years of crypto and then NFT morons tho so he's still getting thrown down the 300 Pit

Xaris posted:

Cory Doctorow's piece about enshittification is applicable to reddit (and internet) as well: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/bworldph/status/1665652184061710336

Not a Children posted:

Ah yes the office stock, typically built to the minimum legal requirements of bathrooms, fire egress, and water sources and covered in the cheapest carpet and paint money can buy for the purpose of housing information workers to stare at their computers, will be converted to cultural centers

FlapYoJacks posted:

Have the people making $250,000/year tried not buying luxury cars and big houses?

shrike82 posted:

https://twitter.com/MarketWatch/status/1665108634596962316?s=20

Monkey Fracas posted:

We should all thank Doughboy Bebop for compromising crypto to a permanent end before it snaked its tendrils into a place where we would be forced to bail it out when it it inevitably crashed because the whole thing is made-up bullshit (more than any other finance horseshit anyway)

Still had to endure years of crypto and then NFT morons tho so he's still getting thrown down the 300 Pit

Nothus posted:

the basic premise of crypto and Web3 is such a powerful one to tech-brained morons that they will always keep trying to gently caress that chicken

gradenko_2000 posted:

when reading a GURPS statblock,

the first entry is the stat / skill
the second entry is the level of that stat / skill
the third entry, in square brackets, is the point cost

so, let's look at this, from the first image you posted:


Hatchling/Man-Sized Dragon

code:

ST +3 [30]

That means the Hatchling has a Strength of +3, and it costs 30 points to set Strength to +3; where a Strength of +0 (or rather, a Strength of 10, because nothing is added to the base) costs nothing

code:

DX -1 [-10]

That means the Hatchling has a Dexterity of -1 (or 9, one less than the default of 10), which costs -10 points. The benefit of deliberately reducing your stats in this manner for negative points is that it gives you back more points that you can then spend elsewhere, if you're working within a specific points budget. An average human, for example, is supposed to be about 100 points, with 250 points for someone in the milieu of very-competent-but-still-mortal action hero archetype.

code:

HT +3 [30]

That means the Hatchling has a Health of +3 (or 13), which costs 30 points

code:

Common Advantages [111]

That means that the GM can spend 111 points on whatever Advantages they like, provided it's not tagged with the Exotic or Supernatural descriptors

code:

Breathe Fire (1d-1 and 2 yards range only -30%, 1-hex Cone +60%, Costs 2 Fatigue -10%) [25]

That means that the Hatchling can... breathe fire.
The fire deals 1d-1 damage; roll a single six-sided die, and subtract one from the result
The fire breath has a range of 2 yards...
... but it is also a Cone attack within 1 hex, which means that everyone within one hex of the fire breath cannot use their Active Defenses to avoid getting hit; they can only do a Dodge-and-Drop move
It costs the Hatchling 2 Fatigue to use this fire breath
And all of this, taken together, costs 25 points

code:

DR 1 [3]

That means that the Hatchling has a Damage Resistance of 1.

Having established some basics, let's skip ahead to this table of Dual-Purpose Guns:



Looking at the 3rd line for the "105mm Medium DP Gun", we can see that:

it rolls a 5dx8 for damage

the "SS" number stands for SnapShot - if your unmodified attack roll is as high as the SS number or higher, then you can fire without needing to aim; taking a snapshot. If your attack roll is lower than the SS number, then you take a -4 penalty when trying to do a snapshot. The SS number for this DP gun, at 30, is quite high, though for some perspective, an AK-47 has an SS number of 12, and a 9mm Luger has an SS number of 9.

the "Acc" number stands for Accuracy, or the bonus you get to your attack roll, if you spend at least one round to aim.

the "1/2D" number stands for the range, in yards, at which the weapon's damage is halved (roll normally, then divide by 2, rounding down). Also, shooting beyond this range means that you no longer gain the benefit of the weapon's Acc stat.

the "Max" number stands for the maximum range, in yards, at which you can shoot this weapon (in direct fire).

the "Ind." number stands for the maximum range, in yards, at which you can shoot this weapon in indirect fire.

the "RoF" number stands for the weapons Rate of Fire. In this weapon's case, "1/5" means it takes five rounds to reload after a single shot. Other weapons, such as automatic rifles, might have a positive integer to their RoF, which means that they can fire multiple times within a single round, but then they also have a "Recoil" stat, which adds a cumulative penalty to every shot taken after the first, until there is a minimum one-round pause in firing.

the "Ldrs" number stands for the number of Loaders that needs to be serving the weapon, besides the operator, just for the weapon to be able to shoot and reload at all.

___

I don't see why you couldn't kill a Dragon with a DP gun, given the correct characters with which to do so.

A GM could stack a number of Advantages in their stat block to help them, and you'd take a penalty to the attack roll from trying to attack a fast-moving one, but you'd also gain a bonus from trying to hit one given their large size. Even a large Dragon only has a Health of 15, and a single hit from a 105mm is about 140 damage, cut to 70 for firing at beyond 1/2D range and you're still killing one as long as you can actually land the hit.

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/bworldph/status/1665652184061710336

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/bworldph/status/1665652184061710336

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/bworldph/status/1665652184061710336

Pittsburgh Fentanyl Cloud posted:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/zombie-mortgages-could-force-some-homeowners-into-foreclosure-e615ab2a

Homeowners are getting foreclosure notices from second mortgages on their houses that they didn’t know existed

History doesn’t necessarily repeat but it certainly rhymes

PoundSand posted:

article is paywalled so I googled Zombie mortgage and from descriptions it sounds like a mortgage someone did take out but for a variety of reasons just sat out of sight for long enough it became out of mind? I feel like you wouldn’t just kind of forget about still owing money on a mortgage or assume it disappeared simply because you hadn’t heard about it in a while so I’m assuming there’s a more insidious explanation here.