The Gaming Den

So I've been watching a bunch of Some More News on youtube lately.

Darcy has observed that without seeing the screen, Cody Johnston's voice and speech mannerisms are eerily close to that of another youtuber I follow.

My question is whether they share a regional dialect or if it's just coincidence? My google-fu has so far been too weak to find an "early life" blurb for Cody Johnston -- did he also have a childhood in or near the Long Beach, NY area? Are there any Denners who have heard him mention relevant details on one of his podcasts or somesuch?

I have no idea about those two particular people, but I have noticed that there's a YouTube voice that a lot of people have in their videos. It follows the same speech patterns and rhythms, and comes off to me with the same auditory uncanny valley effect as the standard recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.

My current Kickstarter is losing its initial momentum and I'm looking for other places around the internet I can post it to keep it going through the mid-campaign doldrums. Anyone have any ideas?

I see a lot of ads for things in various facebook rpg groups I'm in. The 'Spheres of X' people floated their stuff on giantitp before publishing it for a long time. Having a growing personal discord community probably helps. If you can get anyone even a little well known in rpg communities to do a YouTube review, a twitch or YouTube playthrough, or any such thing would probably help a lot. I've only heard of certain very extremely niche material through Facebook or Reddit at random in particular, not counting the martial I only encountered from visiting these boards.

Ad-space on gaming podcasts?

Chamomile wrote:My current Kickstarter is losing its initial momentum and I'm looking for other places around the internet I can post it to keep it going through the mid-campaign doldrums. Anyone have any ideas?

In my own admittedly limited experience with game-related kickstarters -- online is already over-saturated, to really get the buzz out there you need to do meatspace demos.

The current Kickstarter is the second part of an adventure path, and it's a big chunk of content. I have no idea how I'd run any part of it in a single meatspace session, especially when a major theme of this one is how chaotic and unpredictable the long term game is. Presenting players with a list of quests, many of which will rapidly expire in a bad way, is really just offering them a list of modules for play that may as well not even be related if it's a single session game.

Are there gaming podcasts with a reasonably wide audience who also sell adspace for like $50? My understanding is that usually people don't bother pestering their audience with ads until it's worth much more than that.

Is there any data on what global warming is going to do to Antarctica decade by decade? I'm writing a story set 20 years in the future in a growing megacity, and want to know if putting it in western Antarctica would be premature. Research indicates that (barring a solution being implemented) Antarctica's coast will be suitable for dense inhabitation supported by a rural farmland further inland by 2100, but seem pretty mum on exactly at what point Antarctica could plausibly be home to its first major city. 2039 is probably too early, just on account of being considerably closer to 2019 than to 2100, but I can't seem to find any exact predictions. "Effects of global warming by decade" infographs are always focused exclusively on currently inhabited continents.

Isn't that ozone layer hole country?
Or am i getting my arcticas mixed up again?

Chamomile wrote:Is there any data on what global warming is going to do to Antarctica decade by decade?

One of the reasons that Global Warming isn't getting as much attention as it deserves is that it's a 'run away effect'. If you drop a penny from the Empire State building, it starts falling faster and faster until it can potentially kill. Most of the warming 'compounds' so it really hits in the later part of this century. The US Climate Office is reducing the projections from 100 years to 20 years to minimize the apparent impact. When your graph is a hockey stick, dropping the last 20 years makes it look much less drastic.

In any case, I don't think you'd have much reason to have a city by 2039 unless you're positing a social change. There are lots of places in the United States where a city would be possible - maybe even ideal - but they just don't exist there. You need a reason for a lot of people to gather densely. I could see a 'boom town' or a series of them. Throw in a gold discovery and no one government able to claim the territory and things will get interesting, fast.

Stahlseele wrote:Isn't that ozone layer hole country?
Or am i getting my arcticas mixed up again?

The ozone hole is basically gone. Turns out that when people accept that they're contributing to an environmental problem, we can solve them.

The Penny from empire state building thing is bullshit.
The Penny simply does not have enough mass to reach anywhere near dangerous velocity, much less terminal verlocity.
It is much more likely to be blown back up by the immensely powerfull updrafts around there.


It is?
Good to know, thank you!

Stahlseele wrote:The Penny from empire state building thing is bullshit.
The Penny simply does not have enough mass to reach anywhere near dangerous velocity, much less terminal verlocity.
It is much more likely to be blown back up by the immensely powerfull updrafts around there.


It is?
Good to know, thank you!

..... The penny does reach terminal velocity quite quickly. It's terminal velocity isn't dangerous.

Terminal velocity is the velocity at which it no longer accelerates, not the velocity at which things kill.

Why are people attacking La Croix?

Last year, a lawsuit was filed against the company alleging that the claim of natural flavors was a lie. The suit brought no proof of this but apparently has been allowed to proceed. Another was brought in a different state alleging the same thing but based on a different kind of chemical analysis.

And today it was announced that another lawsuit is accusing La Croix of planning on telling people that its cans were BPA-free when they're not. (And they never actually did.)

To me, it seems like these lawsuits are mostly full of hot air and are just attacks on the company. So what have I gotten wrong? Why are they happening?

Because there is money to be made from that.

Because you can't sue them for making a bad product?

Coconut La Croix is a good mixer for rum.

It just seems like the same things could be applied to other sparkling water companies. The case of San Pellegrino Essenza right next me not only claims natural flavors in the ingredients, but natural CO2 added to mineral water (bottled at the source!). It tastes like fruit-flavored plastic. [I don't recommend this. Nor do I recommend Kroger's organic Simple Truth sparkling waters.]

Throw a cat out of an airplane and see the results

https://www.straightdope.com/columns/re ... they-fall/

OK. So AOC is in the news for her questioning of Fed Chair Powell, and the article I read ( https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... ge-deficit ) talks, in part, about the natural rate of unemployment. So I turned to Wikipedia for an overview on what that was because I don't get it.

From what I read, it seems to be saying that when unemployment is low, wages go up (I get this; this make sense). But then, inflation mystically goes up... Because we're paying people more? I don't get that; that doesn't make any sense.

What am I getting wrong here?

The "Natural Rate of Unemployment" was made up in basically the 70s as a justification for never trying to get unemployment too low, no one has ever seen any evidence of it's predictions taking place ever in the US economic history before or since, we've seen tons of evidence that it won't happen, and the result is that people have made policy based on what amounts to a really bad guess for half a century.

In practice, no one actually knows what causes inflation because it's an intersection of too many factors for us to ever figure it out so some economists said it was caused by low unemployment because that fit their political goals of keeping a seething underclass of desperate workers to keep wages low.

In general, all economics works out to a supply and demand curve. If you want something (like a lobster) you're essentially bidding against everyone else that wants one (and we're at $20/lb. or so).

Assuming that people see significant wage gains, they might want to reward themselves with something nice (like a lobster). Supply of lobsters is relatively limited - they can't double the catch overnight and they want to keep it sustainable. Since more people want lobsters, but there aren't more to go around, the price rises.

What that ignores is that a lot of goods aren't particularly limited. Whatever product you're talking about it's pretty easy to get a little more but progressively harder to get a lot more - for example once you're growing wheat everywhere it grows well, you have to start planting it in places it doesn't grow well... In any case, while there may be limits on each individual good, most people are okay with substitutes. Instead of beef, you can eat pork. Instead of pork you can eat chicken. Instead of chicken you can eat black-bean burgers.

A general rise in wages can raise the cost of specific goods, but the effect across the entire economy isn't always for general inflation.

As a nation, we have a policy to promote inflation, but to keep it low. We want goods to become more expensive over time and we want wages to rise at least in lock-step. Currently, the Federal Minimum Wage is lower (relatively speaking) than it has been since it was created.

For you as a consumer, the cost of the things you buy should go up a little if the cost of producing them goes up due to increased wages. Some jobs that were once common will disappear to limit the increased cost in those services. What does it mean when there are no cashiers and every grocery store is sel serve?

There are three kinds of unemployment; cyclical, structural, and frictional. Cyclical unemployment is when everyone is too poor to buy your boss's stuff so he fires you because he doesn't need your labor. Structural unemployment is when the workforce's aggregate skillset doesn't align with employer's aggregate needs. Frictional unemployment is the unemployment caused by people transitioning from one job to the next. Frictional and structural unemployment are not really economically correctable. This isn't to say you can't craft policies that reduce or increase them (job search assistance programs and retraining programs, for example), but that you can't solve them with the kinds of policies that are considered the domain of economic policy wonkery (fiscal stimulus, interest rate manipulation). They're caused by social and institutional change, not economic transactions.

So the generous reading of the "natural rate of unemployment" is that it's just structural unemployment + frictional unemployment for society as it exists right now. The economy changes just enough over time that, along with routine employee turnover, a certain percentage are just going to be unemployed at any given moment.

The historical reading of the "natural rate of unemployment" is that the government definitely shouldn't ever try and do anything about unemployment because fuck the poors here's a bullshit theory I just made up that explains why poor people suffering is the natural state I call it the "natural rate of unemployment" look I said natural don't you get what natural means stop trying to help poor people. Essentially, conservative economicists spend a lot of time trying to convince everyone all unemployment is structural and then invoke the natural rate of unemployment to argue for inaction about unemployment. This played out during the Great Recession, which was blatantly a case of cyclical unemployment for which the correct policy response was fiscal stimulus, but conservatives worked backwards from "I hate fiscal stimulus because it helps poor people" to "this is actually structural unemployment so it definitely won't help them and we shouldn't do it."

Note that this is deception is largely for wonks, not the general public. This is how the argument for kicking the poors while they're down looks in academia. The general public doesn't know what the natural rate of unemployment is and doesn't care, and when they turn on Fox News they get "b-b-but the deficit!" (or, if it's a taxcut for billionaires, they get chirping crickets) instead.

EDIT: The 'inflation' aspect of this discussion comes about because when you try and push unemployment below the 'natural rate of unemployment,' it's supposed to lead to runaway inflation - and in theory there probably are circumstances where that would happen, but in practice, hahaha no. Right now we have low unemployment with low wage growth because we don't actually have low unemployment - unemployment is defined as people looking for work but unable to find it. We have a bunch of people who have been so unable to find a job (that pays what they consider a reasonable wage) that they've stopped looking entirely. Labor force participation rate suggests a true unemployment rate closer to ~8%.

I love Den conversations. I learn so much (thank you).

How does low unemployment lead to high inflation? That's the mystical step I don't get here. It seems like an underpants gnome's phase two.

Low unemployment means employers have to compete for workers... by offering higher wages. With higher wages it becomes more expensive to produce goods and those prices go up too. Thus inflation.

[edit: that said, fuckers still should be paying employees more. for a lot of businesses the cost of paying employees a decent wage wouldn't massively impact their bottom line.]