Zeusthecat

That's very informative. Thanks for posting that Gormongous. So it's clear that there is a sizeable percentage of people making less than minimum wage, the vast majority of which have their wages supplemented by tips. What isn't clear though is what the relative turnover rate is for those industries that pay less than minimum wage. In my experience, turnover is very high in the restaurant industry, indicating that the vast majority of that subset of workers are leaving these jobs to find other jobs on a regular basis. I would be curious to see if there is some kind of data to that effect that could quantitatively show roughly how many people are truly stuck in these jobs making less than minimum wage with no way out.

Oh I saw plenty of condescending and snarky responses to Syntheticgerbil's earlier posts in this thread before it all reached fever pitch. And even though Ninety Three could be a little abrasive at times, he was always dog piled on too. I'm fucking tired of everyone coming into these arguments with their minds already made up. I remain unconvinced by the majority opinion here and was hoping to broaden my perspective.

Damn, going against the group think on these forums can be rough. I wish we welcomed more diverse opinions without shouting down anybody who dares go against the majority consensus.

I'm dubious of the claim that there is a significant number of citizens in the US who are completely stuck in a less than minimum wage job and are completely unable to find another job. I grew up in poverty, got my first job at 14, and landed various other jobs throughout my teenage years and early 20's until I started making much more decent money as a server at Applebee's. I have honestly yet to meet this hypothetical person that is working a job where they make less than minimum wage and are completely unable to leave that job and search for another one. Even some of my least fortunate friends growing up had no problem getting hired at McDonald's or a call center or working at a stand in the mall selling cell phones. I recognize these people do exist out there and it really sucks if you have somehow managed to get hired at the only job that will ever employ you and you are completely stuck. But I think it is false to assume that the number of people in that situation is so large that we just have to suck it up and participate in this system and make up the difference so they are making a living wage. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of people in a shitty job are perfectly capable of leaving that job to find a better one. If there were data to suggest that this isn't the case and that there is this huge percentage of people that can't leave to find a better job, then I would definitely re-think my opinion on this and probably land where most of you are. As it stands now though, I've just never seen any indication that that is the case other than claims made by people here.

Eh, I don't know. If you are saying that the situation is hopeless and therefore it is the customer's duty to tip appropriately to ensure fair wages are being paid I completely disagree. That is just perpetuating a broken system. It's shitty to think that some people are theoretically stuck in a job where they bring home less than minimum wage and have absolutely no ability to change that situation, but extending that to say it is the customer's job to fix that problem is just wrong. The cycle has to be broken somehow and I think the single most valid way to do that is for everyone to stop tipping entirely, forcing companies to address these shitty business practices. Continuing with the narrative that we all need to be tipping well to make sure these people are making living wages just continues to put the onus on the customer and continues to breed a situation where companies see this as a viable business practice, creating an even larger market of employees that are underpaid and rely on the generosity customers to pay them a living wage. It is a vicious broken system. Tipping is the worst and everyone would be better off without it. I'm with Synth on this one.

I try to avoid paying attention to dumb celebrity stuff but inevitably, some of it still bleeds into my brain thanks to the prevalence of Twitter and social media. One thing that is amazing to me is how a person as terrible as Kanye West is still able to land gigs and maintain a following despite his constant awfulness. It is kind of fascinating. There have been very few people I've witnessed that have had such a wide combination of terrible traits and have managed to maintain so much support despite all of that. As much as I can't stand the guy, everything I ever hear or read involving him is entertaining as hell.

This has become a new staple and might be the only breakfast I ever eat from now on.

One of my co-workers has been trying to get me to play these games for ages but I kept putting it off so I could keep making progress on all my backlog games. With that out of the way, I finally purchased the Nathan Drake Collection and have been playing it for the last couple weeks. Prior to this, the only experience I've had with a Naughty Dog game has been with The Last of Us, which I absolutely loved. At this point, I've finished Drake's Fortune and liked it so much that I went back through to mop up all the trophies aside from the ones you get for beating the game on Hard and Crushing. Starting the game, I was immediately taken aback by just how good it looked. Considering this game was an early PS3 game, I wasn't expecting much in the visual department. But it's immediately apparent that they put a lot of effort into sprucing up the visuals and upgrading the textures. There is just no way it looked nearly this good on PS3. The color pallet was especially nice and all of those vivid green leaves in the jungle areas really made the scenery pop and feel alive. Having a nice crisp framerate on top of that made for a very smooth, consistent experience. After starting the game, it quickly became apparent that the gameplay itself was fairly standard, middle of the road stuff. The gunplay and traversal was just as good as it needed to be to propel the story forward and that is all it needed to be for me. I hear it was originally way worse on PS3 with some bullshit Sixaxis control mechanics but the way they implemented it here, I never had any problem shooting the dudes I needed to shoot and platforming the platforms I needed to platform. Although, there were maybe a couple spots where the platforming could have been a tad better. I did have a few frustrating deaths that resulted from me being unclear on where I was supposed to jump. Despite the middle of the road gameplay, this game really kept me engrossed with the general premise of the story, the stellar writing, and the beautiful environments. It was an Indiana Jones ass game and I loved every minute of it, cliches and all. The banter and character dynamics between Nate, Elena, and Sully was top notch and of a much higher quality than what I'm used to seeing in a video game. I kind of expected some cheesy romantic angle to come up between Nate and Elena but to my surprise, they almost entirely avoided it. The little bits where you do get a sense that they are maybe becoming drawn to each other through this crazy adventure were done really well, especially when you get to the end of the game and just see it kind of fizzle out after a near kiss. I'm so glad they didn't shoehorn some unnecessary love story into this game but still touched on the possibility that maybe they started to develop some feelings for each other. Considering how unrealistic a lot of this game is, the relationships felt surprisingly grounded in reality. Elena was probably my favorite character but all three of them were very likeable and interesting. Again, the writing in this game is a big step above what I'm typically used to seeing in a game. The story itself wasn't necessarily anything great but nonetheless, it came together really well for me. It was clear that they were going for a very Indiana Jones-esque story and I think they nailed it. It had the grand adventure to recover a mystical artifact, the cheesy villain characters, wisecracking charismatic protagonists, and some great action scenes. They even appropriated the Grail diary, which I thought was a great touch. The one part of the game that didn't work for me was the zombie stuff in the later chapters. That whole section just felt way out of place and was frustrating to play. Especially those couple rooms that were just littered with ammo and had zombies pouring out of vents. I hope to see less of that in 2 and 3. After finishing the game I went back through and got all the collectibles and weapon related trophies. It was nice and wasn't a whole lot of effort to get a couple of sweet gold trophies. I may eventually go back through and beat it on Crushing to snag the platinum trophy but for now I've moved on to Uncharted 2. I'm about halfway through that one now and it is quite a step up from Drake's Fortune. Once I finish I'll probably post some thoughts on that but so far it has been quite incredible.

Minecraft version 1.9 (Combat Update) hits next week! There are some fairly significant changes coming that I am super excited for: Addition of shields, dual wielding, multiple types of arrows, and other combat changes including an attack strength mechanic. Up to 128 strongholds per world instead of 3. Introduction of End cities, structures, and ships on infinitely generated End islands, End specific plants (chorus trees/fruit), End rods (new type of light source), several new End blocks, and a new End mob. Ability to respawn the Ender dragon. New item, Elytra that the user can equip in the chestplate slot to allow flight. My friend and I have continued to play this on an almost daily basis and have made some significant progress in our world. We've purposely avoided trying to get to The End though until 1.9 hit so we could experience it for the first time with all the cool new shit they are adding. In the meantime, we've continued building and preparing ourselves for some of this tougher content (not to mention the insanely difficult water temples that were added in 1.8). Last weekend, we finally got around to building a basic mob grinder using a canal system to funnel the mobs into a central point and a lava blade to kill them. By just AFK'ing near the collection point whenever we're busy doing other things, we've managed to collect dozens of stacks of arrows, bones, gunpowder, and other materials that we need to beef up our armory. I'm not entirely sure what we'll need to take down the Ender Dragon so we're just making sure we have all the TNT, arrows, and enchanted weapons and armor that we would need to take on a small army. We've also advanced our nether operations and have constructed a cobblestone tunnel from our portal area down to one of the two nether fortresses we found. Then we enclosed all the nether fortress walkways with cobblestone to give us some fairly safe corridors to run around and farm Wither Skeletons without having Ghasts and Blazes raining hell on us the whole time. And luckily, that fortress happened to have two Blaze spawners in close proximity to each other so we walled those off and now have an easy, endless supply of Blaze rods we can farm which are usually difficult to come by. Our villager breeding operation has continued to expand and we've been relying on the trading economy a great deal to get some fantastic items. By trading massive amounts of wheat, pumpkin, carrots, and potatoes to one of our farmer villagers, we've been able to keep a steady balance of emeralds that we've been using to get enchanted tools, armor and weapons from the tool smith and armor smith villagers. And we finally bred a leatherworker, giving us a way to finally obtain saddles to use with our horses. Once we were finally able to trade emeralds for saddles, we built a couple of maps and decided to go out exploring on our horses, which we've never done before since they were introduced after we had stopped playing way back when. It turns out, horses are the fucking best. They can go faster than a minecart at full speed and automatically walk up single block inclines. So we quickly found that we were able to get from one side of a fully zoomed out map to the other in a single day where it used to take us several days travelling by foot. We brought a couple of leashes with us as well so we could ferry our horses across rivers whenever they blocked our path and so we could tie them up to a fence post in whatever makeshift shelter we made each evening. In just a few Minecraft days we managed to cover every inch of our maps and made note of several interesting places, including another village, that we will eventually go back to. And through further research, we found that each horse has unique equine stats and as you breed them, you can breed better running and jumping stats to eventually get a horse that can clear up to 5 blocks in a single jump and run way faster than the apparently shitty horses we have now. I also started doing some fishing and was surprised to see just how much better that has gotten since its initial implementation. There are now several types of fish that you can catch as well as random rare treasures that you can only otherwise find in dungeon chests. And when you cast your rod, you see little splashes in the water and a little stream of bubbles that approaches your lure right before a fish bites. I somehow got lucky on one of my casts and fished out a nametag which I used on my horse to name it Skittles. So now, it's clear which horse is mine and which is his (which was already obvious because he appropriated the one set of horse armor we managed to find in a chest). I'll eventually need to do a bunch more fishing so I can catch a bunch of puffer fish to use in water breathing potions, which we'll need to eventually tackle a water temple. Up next, I'm thinking of making an automatic lava moat that is hooked up to a daylight sensor and appears out of the ground each night. Not that we necessarily need the extra protection at this point, it just seems like it would be cool.

We've been stressing out for awhile about our son's speech delay and within the last month or so he has finally had an explosion of new words. He's a little over 2.5 years old and had just refused to talk up until recently. We've had a number of behavioral tests done and had been taking him to speech therapy every week but it just didn't seem to be going anywhere. But now he is rapidly learning new words and seeing all that fast mapping finally happening has relieved so many worries. I guess he just didn't give a fuck and wanted to talk on his own terms. Work is the one constant positive thing and I'm super grateful for the position I'm in and the group of people I work with. I'll hit my 7 year anniversary in June and I've suddenly found myself going from standard software testing and software deployments to leading development efforts and managing projects over the last year or two. At this rate I think it's likely that I'll spend the remainder of my career at this company and it feels great to have that level of stability. On the video game side, I completed my backlogs for Steam and all of my major consoles. I was worried for a bit that the goals I set for myself were too unrealistic but I totally pulled it off and it felt great!

Honestly, I think grown-ass people need to watch more cartoons because cartoons are awesome. I think my problem is more that the grown-ass people making some of these movies need to stop injecting Looney Toon antics into every animated work in a lame attempt to appeal to kids. They spend all this time building these incredible worlds and go to painstaking lengths to build a good level of internal consistency and then throw it out the window so they can have a clumsy Tom and Jerry-esque chase sequence. Why is this necessary? Do they throw that kind of stuff into these movies intentionally or have they internalized it so deeply that they can't fathom making an animated feature without it? It's infuriating.

Jesus Ben, why do you keep thinking things I think but like several months to years before I do? First it was Jurassic Star Wars, now this? Not to mention the LucasArts playthrough being partially (mostly?) your idea. And honestly, I'm not sure that anyone else aside from me is bothered by those things. The problem I have with these things is that a magic toy horse still has to follow the laws of physics that clearly still apply in the toy universe. He's not a flying unicorn and he doesn't even have batteries. He's just a regular ass toy horse and has to use his magical toy muscles just like all the other non-battery powered toys. There is no reason why he should be able to catch up to a plane when it has been clearly established elsewhere in the toy universe that their little toy legs physically limit their running abilities to basically make them scaled down versions of us. A full grown horse could maybe catch up to a car driving on an average surface street so it would stand to reason that a toy horse 1/1000 the size of a full horse could, at best, maybe catch up to the RC car driving at full speed in Toy Story 1 (and even that would be a stretch). And the flea being able to put enough pressure on that lighter fluid bottle to shoot out a stream of fire is utterly ludicrous! It completely breaks the movie and makes it even more pointless because that flea would have been capable of taking out the entire group of grasshoppers with a few matches and some well placed shots of lighter fluid. Screw the bird. Flick is an idiot for wasting his time on that stupid bird instead of capitalizing on the destructive capabilities of that lighter fluid and that flea.

Yeah, it definitely works a lot better when it's framed that way. But if I were a toy, I would totally prefer to be in a museum with all of my matching accessories and a sweet little display to live in. It would obviously be of much higher quality than some cardboard box fort that I'd be forced to live in if I were owned by a kid.

I really enjoyed Toy Story 2 and agree with Patrick. The second Buzz really was great and kind of retroactively made Buzz's situation in Toy Story 1 work a bit better. The gags and the lessons learned all made sense and worked quite well throughout the whole movie. I find the scene with the old toy repairman fixing Woody especially cathartic to watch. I think generally, this movie explores what it means to be a "child's plaything" much more effectively than the first movie My only real complaints: The end sequence where a toy riding a toy horse catches up to a plane on the runway. I guess I'm not too fond of clumsy chase sequences where there is the constant back and forth where you think they are rescued, but then the prospector jumps out and pulls Woody back and then he does get rescued, but they need to save Jessie. It seems to be a staple of these types of movies to have these frustrating to watch, drawn out chase sequences. The overarching message that toys don't belong in a museum and should instead be played with. Yeah, the bad guy was an asshole for stealing Woody but they never really sold me on the idea that it was somehow worse for a toy to end up in a museum than to be played with and eventually forgotten by a kid. I guess I could make this same complaint about The Lego Movie too although I think it was handled much better there.

I'm just saying, we do this all the time for all kinds of other things people believe in. Whether its someone who's an MRA and believes feminists are ruining the world. Or people who believe in gamergator ideology. Or people that don't believe racism exists any more. Or any number of any other things. If we can have frank discussions about how stupid we think those people are for their illogical beliefs that are harmful to others and aren't rooted in reality then why should religion be off limits?

And I think that's kind of bullshit. There are so many ridiculous things that people believe in. Why isn't it fair game to state my opinion that it is silly for people to ignore logic and believe a lot of this stuff purely on the basis of faith. Some people still believe the Earth is flat too. Do we have to tiptoe on eggshells around those people so we don't hurt their feelings for ignoring reality? It's just ridiculous to me that we can't talk frankly about how we feel about this kind of stuff.

Oh hey, this thread! So I have some new respect for what you were trying to do here Austin. My daughter and I have hit the 220 hour mark on Super Mario 3D world by maxing out save files and then erasing them and starting all over. I've lost track of how many times we've played through now but it is actually quite enjoyable starting from a fresh slate over and over. We've both gotten super good at the game now and its pretty fun trying to blast through these levels as fast as we can while trying to get all stars, stamps, and top of the poles.

That's different though. While kids do tell each other dumb stuff all the time the religious stuff is incredibly pervasive and she will be bombarded by that messaging all throughout her life. She will hear it from other kids, their parents, teachers, and all kinds of other people in positions of authority. That puts additional, unnecessary pressure on me to consistently put forward a convincing enough argument that she doesn't need to worry about that kind of stuff. Being told that you will burn for all of eternity and be in intense pain if you don't follow along with some stupid book that a huge percentage of the population follows can be very damaging to a developing mind. Much more damaging than kids just being dumb kids and making up stories about monsters.

It turns out that hypothesizing about how to make a cool game based on the Bible is pretty damn fun. In the interest of not further de-railing the Feminism thread, I figured it might be a good idea to move this topic to a new thread. To start off, here is the horribly fucked up series of posts from the Feminism thread that started this. https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/7428-feminism/?p=268850 (I have no idea how to quote posts from other topics/pages so if someone cares to drop some knowledge on me I'll update this to show the posts from the Feminism thread properly) Apparently what I'm trying to do exceeds the maximum allowable number of quotes in a post so I'm leaving it like this. Thanks for dropping some multiquote knowledge SecretAsianMan. Edit: And here is the link to the Wisdom Tree thread mentioned below - https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/9097-breaking-news-wisdom-tree-still-exists/

New idea. You play as a Christian and instead of a health meter you have a persecution complex meter. The goal of the game is to use psychological warfare through branching dialog trees to get NPCs to join your cause. Those who don't join you add to your persecution complex, which makes it slightly more difficult to get future people to join. Once you feel fully persecuted, you and all of your fellow followers try to enact legislation to force Christian laws onto the entire population. If you've managed to get over 50% of the NPCs to join your cause, the legislation goes through and you (and God) win. If you haven't managed to get over 50% of the NPCs, you still win because Everything Happened According to God's Plan.

Totally agree. As much as I despise religion it is absolutely wrong to be shitty and disrespectful to other people on that basis. And that's what's so fucking gross about this stuff. A core part of so many religions involves trying to sucker other people into seeing the light and accepting Jesus or whatever other deity is in charge. And that usually involves saying some pretty shitty things to non-believers to scare them into signing up. I think we can all agree, whether we are atheist or religious, that an atheist is being an asshole when they mock and belittle someone for their beliefs. But when a Christian (or other religious person) does it, they are doing the lord's work in the eyes of religious people.

Didn't you know? God turned the Sadducees into vampires before sending them to Christian hell.

As I expected would happen at some point, my daughter came home from school the other day saying that her friend told her she was going to go to hell because she didn't believe in God. She then proceeded to tell her all about how there is a bunch of vampires and fire and scary shit in hell and that she needed to believe in God if she wanted to go to heaven when she died. So naturally, my daughter is saying she believes in God now because she is scared of going to hell. So I have to now try to work on explaining to her how some people let fear run their lives and end up believing in some really silly made up stuff because they think they are going to be tortured for all of eternity if they don't. I know this is a very unpopular opinion but having been raised very religious, I think it is a form of abuse to raise your kids believing this shit. Teaching children to let fear run their lives makes for a pretty agonizing childhood.

Actually yeah, the first Sahelanthropus (I never know if I'm spelling that right) mission wasn't all that bad. A little annoying that even when you sneak away he still magnetizes to you and seems to know where you are but otherwise it didn't bother me too much. That last fight though? Ugh. Maybe it's because I never unlocked the legendary gunsmith and hadn't really spent a bunch of time upgrading my heavy weaponry but it just took way too many rockets to take him down. It would be a massive understatement to say he was a bullet sponge. The extreme version of that mission is what really got my blood boiling though. With those spikes often killing you in one hit it got incredibly frustrating and it took a lot of patience and determination to finally get through the whole thing without accidentally getting caught by those. I did rejoice out loud when I finally did beat it though so at least I got a great sense of accomplishment from it when it was all said and done. I also ran DD over with a tank repeatedly while retrying that mission and that made me sad.

6 degrees of Jonathan Taylor Thomas.