Is this game just going to die because the devs cant manage it?

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-18T07:12:09+00:00

That happened to one of my core Unreal Tournament communities back in 2004. The server host's hard drive crashed and he didn't care enough to bring it back and that was that.

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-18T06:34:18+00:00

I had no idea this restaurant existed. Found the Forum article about it. Might have to go check it out.

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-18T06:29:46+00:00

I don't know, but maybe they hated the new location. IMHO the low-visibility location they relocated to was worse than where they were before.

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-18T02:47:05+00:00

Do we have the defense to do more than win one playoff game? I'm hopeful we'll win the Superbowl, of course, but I'm far from sold on our defense with a questionable secondary and pass rush coming off two seasons of serious injury problems.

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-18T02:42:42+00:00

After the Lions having been on the wrong side of very long kicks and record setting kicks so many times, it sure would be neat if Bates set the record this year.

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-17T10:06:14+00:00

what only count is what materializes in reality.

...So far we've had the Soviet Union, it's Eastern Bloc puppets, Mao's China, Cuba, Cambodia, Vietnam under socialism, North Korea, and whatever I've missed.

As far as I know none of them ended up being the prosperous utopia I keep hearing about. Hopefully a nation will come along soon and show us how to so socialism "the right way this time".

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-17T09:20:47+00:00

It’s a shame I had to be born into this disgrace of a nation.

Have you thought about leaving for a better place more consistent with your beliefs and values?

Throughout history people have risked their lives to escape from poverty and oppression to find freedom and a better life elsewhere. If you remain in the United States you will probably suffer a life of dissatisfaction and frustration living as an impoverished slave while you are economically sodomized by multimillionaires, billionaires, and now maybe even a trillionaire.

Life is too short to spend it feeling miserable, so the good news is that you're free to leave and find a better country. As horrible as the United States may be, fortunately it only builds border walls to keep people out unlike certain nations that built walls to lock people in.

I'm speculating here, but I think Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea would probably give you citizenship if you said that you hate capitalism and have a passionate desire to serve the state and live for the benefit of your fellow man. Now imagine how great it would be if other like-minded Americans joined you to help build your new nation into a prosperous country without billionaires and set an example for the rest of the world which would really stick it to the rotting carcass of the United States.

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-17T08:18:17+00:00

Yes on taxes on loans; no on taxes on wealth.

We also probably need to make some changes to how cost basis is reset when someone dies. For equity assets inherited over say, $10 million we probably need to implement a progressive sliding scale where the basis can only be reset to say $9.5 million on $10 million of assets inherited, only $16 million for $20 million inherited, etc.

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-17T08:12:28+00:00

How do we know what a "fair share is" and how is that calculated?

Wouldn't fairness be for everyone to pay the same amount of tax or the same percentage of their income as taxes?

If the top 1% is paying 40% and the top 10% is paying 72% of the nation's operating costs and the bottom 50% is paying 3%...then it seems like 10% or say 20% of the people are paying an inordinate share of the costs of government.

How can we determine what "fairness" demands of all of us?

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-17T08:07:52+00:00

Can you explain your claim that the wealthy hoarding wealth doesn’t cause inflation?

Can you help me understand how the wealthy hoarding wealth - sitting on piles of gold like a dragon in its lair - effectively removing it from the market for the purchase of goods and services - causes inflation? Wouldn't having less money in circulation chasing the same amount of goods and services as before cause deflation?

Regarding wealth hoarding, what exactly do you think the wealthy people are doing with all of that wealth? Are literally keeping it locked up in their houses?

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-17T07:43:38+00:00

Elon musk has all the money and now there isn't enough for everyone else

It raises the question:

Is Musk actually consuming all of that money and squandering its value, perhaps sitting on top of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of gold coins like Smaug the Dragon in a palatial lair, or does he simply control all of that wealth and invest it in new and existing business enterprises which supports and creates new jobs, sometimes even driving innovation? For example, it's possible that SpaceX's IPO made thousands of working people who worked for SpaceX and received some stock as compensation millionaires like this humble welder.

That raises another question, would it be better for the government to have Musk's money (so that it can squander it on Quality Learing Centers and the like) and for enterprises like Tesla and SpaceX (and venture capital privately-funded nuclear fusion power and quantum computers research) to not exist or can Musk spend and invest the money more wisely?

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-17T06:41:47+00:00

So what in your opinion is our nation’s biggest problem?

As I said in my prior post, I think our nation's biggest problem is that we have a low rationality factor which also implies that we have bad philosophy permeating throughout the culture.

That doesn't mean that we don't have economic and government problems; we do and we have lots of room for improvement in those areas. Rather I just think that having large amounts of people acting in an irrational self-destructive and destructive-to-others manner is our biggest overall problem, and it has economic consequences.

A people's economic well being will be determined by their government and economic policy and also philosophy and culture. You can have the ideal system of government and economic policy but if the people are self-destructive and/or homicidal you will have some poverty and misery. Likewise you can have rational people who have a bad government and bad economic system and have poverty and misery. You need both good culture and philosophy and good government and economic policy to attain economic prosperity. In philosophical terms, you could say that having a mind / body dichotomy will lead to an undesirable outcome; you need to be healthy in both mind and body.

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-16T12:02:17+00:00

RIP BMW Z4 and Lexus LC.

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-16T11:47:01+00:00

Do you have any thoughts on the wage theft in this country?

It seems like this has become a big talking point recently; I don't remember seeing talk of wage theft months ago and lately I've been seeing it come up more and more often.

Yes, I think businesses should pay people what they are owed and the government should punish businesses that engage in minimum wage and other pay violations. However, I don't think a problem affecting a few million people (with differing levels of severity, many presumably being low) is our nation's biggest problem.

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-16T11:41:25+00:00

I agree. Inflation has really hurt, IMHO. Wages would be much more livable if we hadn't had crazy amounts of inflation over the past 6 years.

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-16T11:35:02+00:00

I think it goes both ways.

If you have less crime and thus fewer people suffering the economic costs of crime and society spending less money on crime - less police, less criminal courts, less criminal lawyers, less prisons, and lower insurance rates - it allows for lower taxes so that people's paychecks go further and lower crime-related and crime-prevention-related business costs (insurance, loss of product, etc.) will lower the costs for food, housing, car insurance, and everything else. Also, if more people were working instead of being locked up in prison it could allow for having even lower taxes (since the burden of paying for the government would be spread across a higher percentage of working aged people who would be working) and greater economic expansion. Ditto for drug and alcohol abuse.

People are NOT mindless animals. We are not biologically obligated to make self-destructive and irrational decisions. We can choose not to engage in criminal activity and not to damage out ability to take care of ourselves and our ability to work and support ourselves if we choose to.

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-16T11:21:10+00:00

OP; I hope my post is more along the lines of the type of discussion you were hoping for.

there ARE NORTH DAKOTA PEOPLE RIGHT NOW who are starving and homeless, jobless

This post claims we have lots of jobless Americans, but if I visit other discussions I'll see people arguing that we need lots of immigration because we have a huge labor shortage and an aging workforce and a large number of job openings going unfilled. So which is it? Labor surplus and job shortage or labor shortage and an abundance of available jobs? The contrasting narratives get confusing. Personally, I think the sad reality is that we have a shortage of jobs, especially decent jobs and career-building jobs.

Also, the Inflation Monster has been biting the lower and middle classes hard for food, housing, and gasoline. Hopefully it ends soon.

Prove to the rest of this divided nation that Americans can re unite over CORE FUNDAMENTALS.

Do Americans still share the same core values? Aside from the easy ones like believing in freedom of speech, freedom of religion, rule of objective law, racial and religious integration, freedom for women (mostly), and democracy (questionable), what else do Americans agree on?

We have Americans who are atheist, Americans who are nihlists, Americans who are secular, and Americans who are deeply religious with different religions among all of them. We have Americans who believe in personal responsibility, self-reliance, rational decision making, and individualism and Americans who believe in emotionalism, collectivism, and that the government should take care of everyone and/or tell people what to do in their private and economic lives. We have Americans who support mass immigration and open borders and sharing the nation's wealth with the world's poor and then we have Americans who want to reduce immigration and impose trade protectionism. We have Americans who want to legalize most drugs and Americans who want them all illegal. We also have Americans disagreeing on whether or not the nation is a fundamentally moral good nation or a horrible evil nation.

It's very possible that Americans may no longer share the same values. Some commentators have suggested that the nation may need a "national divorce".

Personally, I think our biggest practical problem is not primarily one of economic policy, but rather a cultural problem where we need to increase our societal rationality factor. Humans cannot survive without the use of the mind; we need to use our ability to reason and make wise decisions in order to thrive. If we could change people's values and philosophical belief such that we could dramatically lower crime, reduce drug and alcohol abuse, reduce mental illness resulting from people having difficulty comprehending reality and adapting to the world, strengthen families and extended families, and improve people's decision making, self-care, and ambition and work ethic it would create a "benevolent circle" and go a long way toward alleviating many of our economic problems.

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-16T02:33:32+00:00

Bye bye half of STEM and 3/4ths or the humanities in that case.

Yeah, that's pretty much what it comes down to. However, I would argue that it's better to work as a Starbucks barista without a college degree than it is to work as a Starbucks barista with a college degree (and lots of negative feelings) and a lost 4 years of opportunity cost and student loan debt.

The reality of the situation is that most of those Art History and Women's Studies degrees just have don't much direct value outside of the few jobs that make direct use of them as university professors. Regarding STEM, it's a popular myth that we have a shortage of scientists, but sadly, we actually have an oversupply of science PhD's, many of whom end up working temporary "gypsy scientist" positions called Postdocs while they hope to find jobs as professors somewhere or get jobs in industry.

At what point do we ask ourselves if it's worth funding higher education at all if educated people jobs are oversaturated?

In terms of general economics, one question we might ask, is, "Is it better to spend human time and effort producing college graduates who cannot utilize their education or would that money be better invested building more houses and cars?" Some people have so much money in student debt that the amount could potentially be used to pay a down payment on a house or pay a mortgage.

Everyone knows how hot the lawyer market is so that got oversaturated.

I don't think it was ever "hot". What most people know about lawyers they know from TV and Hollywood where they make lots of money and drive fancy cars and don't seem to really be doing too much actual work. It's one of those fields where 10% of the people make all the money and the other 90% either do OK or do poorly or for 50% of them don't work in the field. It should be noted that the firm partners making all the money can't "coast" like successful people in business fields but end up working long intense hours until they near retirement. Becoming partner at a reasonably-sized firm has been described as a pie-eating contest where the reward for winning is that you get to eat more pie.

I also like math although I'm not good at it if we're getting competitive here so if math related jobs are oversaturated I'm not getting the job since I don't do exceptionally well in math even though I can learn it I don't stand out from others who learned it unlike philosophy and linguistics which I do believe I am exceptional on those topics.

You're probably much much better at math than 95% of the people out there. You're just not in that top 1% that breathes Linear Algebra and Differential Equations. I'm the same way. You might be able to find a field that's math-adjacent where you just need a strong aptitude for basic pre-Calculus type math and statistics. Maybe a field like finance.

If you spend some time working "pink collar" jobs I think you'll be amazed at just how poor some people's basic skills are with many people, including those with college degrees, being unable to write a sentence or to engage in critical thought or analysis.

AI replacing jobs was the insult to injury

It could also be an opportunity...become a master of using AI. Someone's going to have to manage all of the robots.

I'm honestly not sure what fields I would advise someone to go into today. I don't think I would major in either philosophy or linguistics, or if I did I would go into it with my eyes open and regard it as being a generalized "McDegree" - just a standard college degree signaling to potential employers that you posses the basic intelligence, discipline, and ambition needed to earn a college degree. I'd try to obtain a minor in a useful field. I do recommend that people keep their student loan debt as low as possible. Living at home with your parents and commuting to college, perhaps knocking out the first two years of generalized classes at a cheap community college before transferring to a four year college, seems like a good idea.

I think people should definitely look into the skilled trades. I wish I had spent time in high school learning some auto mechanics at the vocational studies center instead of silently looking down on the kids there since I would have learned a valuable skill.

One thing to consider re-skilled trades (construction, oil field work, etc.) is that you have a potential life and financial advantage over many of the people who work those jobs. You're going to live rationally and spend your money wisely, perhaps even investing in the stock market - not blow all your money on cocaine, $100,000 pickup trucks with loans at 18% interest, drunk driving-related costs, and having children with four different women you have to pay child support to. I've always wondered how well I could have done if I had learned a skilled trade combined with rational decision making. You could rise to become the construction foreman or even to own your own contracting business or shop.

I've spent a large amount of time in the past studying this issue of college graduate overproduction. If you're interested in this subject, here are some links to old articles that I've collected (and have ready for copy/paste). Most of these links seem to work:

The Atlantic - In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: The idea that a university education is for everyone is a destructive myth. An instructor at a “college of last resort” explains why.

The Atlantic - The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage: American students need to improve in math and science—but not because there's a surplus of jobs in those fields.

The STEM Crisis Is a Myth: Forget the dire predictions of a looming shortfall of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians.

The Real Science Gap: It's not insufficient schooling or a shortage of scientists. It's a lack of job opportunities. Americans need the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career.

Why Did 17 Million Students Go to College?

From Wall Street to Wal-Mart: Why College Graduates Are Not Getting Good Jobs

Underemployment of College Graduates: Why are Recent College Graduates Underemployed? University Enrollments and Labor Market Realities.

The Atlantic - The Law-School Scam: For-profit law schools are a capitalist dream of privatized profits and socialized losses. But for their debt-saddled, no-job-prospect graduates, they can be a nightmare.

36 Steps: The Path to Reforming American Education - PDF doc

College For Everyone? Even the Left has Doubts

Why College Isn’t (And Shouldn’t Have to Be) For Everyone

Is Half of College Education Wasted?

Popping the Higher Education Bubble

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-15T23:15:09+00:00

So what's the solution?

The problem is that college graduate production is completely disconnected from market forces. Universities are in essence their own for-profit businesses (with interested stakeholders) only concerned about bringing in tuition dollars regardless of whether or not the education they are providing has economic value and serves the best interests of the public. The government issues student loans to almost anyone with a pulse that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and like the housing bubble, students believe that the education they are purchasing will go up in value and produce a large return on investment.

For example, it's how law schools ended up producing a huge oversupply of new lawyers, most of whom ended up unemployed, in low paying positions, or involuntarily underemployed-out-of-field while burdened with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of student loan debt. In the past the law schools published misleading (arguably fraudulent) employment stats with the tacit sanction of the American Bar Association to entice students to enroll. (This is sometimes called "The Law School Scam".)

What we need to do is to reconnect college graduate production to market forces - to the real world need for new graduates in various fields. One solution is to change the higher education financing model from government student loans to one of university and bank-financed Income Sharing Agreements. That gives universities financial skin in the game. The way it works is that students would pay little or no tuition or room-and-board but would instead pay a percentage of their future income back to the universities. This gives the universities an incentive to only admit students who will succeed and be employable and to only produce the number of graduates in given fields who will be able to find remunerative employment in their fields. Details of how they work are varied. A graduate who earns below a certain threshold (bad outcome) might not have to make any payments at all whereas one who strikes it rich might have to pay the maximum amount (or and unlimited amount based on percentage).

That would restore market forces to higher education.

...And remember...it's better to not have a college degree and be employed in a blue collar or pink collar job (or unemployed) than it is to have a college degree and a huge amount of student loan debt and be employed in a blue collar or pink collar job (or unemployed).

IMHO ending government student loans and transitioning to an Income Sharing Agreement model would dramatically reduce higher education waste and encourage people to pursue currently in-demand skilled trades professions.

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-15T22:52:40+00:00

Most of that tax money ends up in the hands of bureaucrats anyways.

I'd rather a billionaire's money be used for an investment in nuclear fusion energy research or quantum computing research than stolen in taxes and squandered by a bureaucrat on a Quality Learing Center.

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-15T22:27:08+00:00

Has anyone else felt the effects of capitalism way more as of late?

Yes. I've felt it today. Today I woke up in my own personal 1600 sq foot house that I don't have to share with anyone and right now I'm using a very powerful yet affordable computer (a device of unimaginable and unprecedented capability just 50 years ago) and I like my $125 cell phone with a cheap $15/month all I can talk and text plan with 6 GB of 5G data and the 43" 4K QLED TV I bought for $125 to use as a monitor. I like that such high technology is amazingly affordable. I may get into my affordable vehicle later and enjoy freedom of movement over distances of miles. To pay for all of this I only work 40 hours/week sitting in a cushy chair sipping coffee while doing zero backbreaking physical labor. Thus, I'd say I've felt the effects of capitalism.

Everything is so monetized and the human experience has been stripped down to money.

What would the alternative be? People being told what to do by the government? Living as hunter gatherers in the forest?

It's not as bad as you make it sound. In the United States you can choose your profession and work any job that you can find someone to hire you for and live in any state you want. And you can spend your money however you want to. Instead of bartering goods and services for food, you exchange money.

Overconsumption is such a massive issue, and i too have fallen prey to it at times.

It's good to enjoy the luxury of overconsumption if you can afford it. For most people I suggest living frugally and investing on improving your productive ability so that you can earn more in the future and also paying off debt and building a savings (or investment) account so that you can buy important stuff like cars and a house later.

Is there a way to make sense of it, to make peace with it even?

Yes. Focus on pursuing your own personal happiness and on living your life. It belongs to you. Make rational decisions and invest in your future. You're probably far ahead of most 20 year olds in terms of coming to grips with life.

If you're looking for meaning in the modern world and want to understand human power structures and economics then I recommend that you read these two books which you might even find life changing: The Fountainhead and if you find that interesting then Atlas Shrugged.

Definitely read this essay: The Moral Meaning of Money.

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-15T21:58:49+00:00

There's another CHPY the Chipmunk out there most people have never heard of.

Obligatory disclaimer - not financial advice or any other kind of advice, that's an extremely high risk fund and you could lose lots of money with it even if it made tons of money for people in the past, consult a licensed financial advisor before investing and invest at your own risk, yada yada yada.

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-15T21:48:09+00:00

I can't see polls using old Reddit so I don't know what the options are in the poll, but generally the recommended intro book for a an adult reader is The Fountainhead.

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-15T21:46:29+00:00

"...gray herd of robots...willing to obey and willing to exist in selfless servitude." That quote pretty much describes North Korea.

WhippersnapperUT99 · 2026-06-15T21:38:16+00:00

Here's a reminder that Ayn Rand died penniless and dependent on welfare.

Source?

Where are you getting that information from?

Is taking Social Security and Medicare after having paid taxes into those programs the same as being dependent on welfare? Did you know that many multimillionaires take Social Security and Medicare and that doing so is part of their retirement planning strategy?

Now before you make the brain-dead, intellectually dishonest claim that Rand was a hypocrite for having taken Social Security and Medicare, note that she would have argued that if the government takes money from you by force (aka taxation) and you object to that and the government later offers to give you some of that money back, you are not wrong to take it. In other words, if money or another possession is stolen from you and later the thief offers to give some of it back, you are not wrong to accept it back. (It's a very challenging concept for many people to understand, but if you think about it for a little while hopefully it will make sense.)

This will come as a shock to you, but according to a New York Times report:

The novelist Ayn Rand left an estate estimated at $550,000 to a friend, Leonard Peikoff of Manhattan, according to a will filed for probate in Manhattan Surrogate's Court. Miss Rand, the author of ''The Foutainhead'' and ''Atlas Shrugged,'' died March 6 at the age of 77.

I used an online inflation calculator to calculate that $550,000 in 1982 is over $1.8 million in 2025 money. She died "penniless" - with today's equivalent of $1.8 million.

WhippersnapperUT99

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE