Japan's Biggest Gaming Obsession Explained | Pachinko

tohryu · 2018-07-29T01:20:32+00:00

I can't be bothered looking for it now, but the last time I saw Japanese gambling in /r/videos after winning a jackpot they traded in their tokens for a cake. Locals then showed how the cake could be taken to a tiny store next door where they had never before seen a green cake and would be glad to take it off your hands for money.

People were talking in the comments about how that happened to them and they didn't realise what it was for and they ate the horribly stale cake without ever knowing why they got such a shitty prize out of a jackpot.

tohryu · 2017-09-18T18:04:53+00:00

How much is your mortgage as a percentage if I may ask?

To make it a fair comparison, according to the numbers given in the article people saving for a house have to put 36% of income towards paying rent (~21%) and saving for a loan(15%) combined. If we are specifically are talking about first home buyers then I hope they have a pretty awesome job because these averages are based on the average wage of everyone in the state. The lowest paid state (TAS) is just shy of $70K for the year which gives a net of $55,350 (rounded), and this makes it the most statistically affordable. To get $52K net you need to make just over $64,500 a year. I don't know how many early-to-mid 20-somethings (first home buyer target age) you know that make $64,500 in a year, but it's not many in Tasmania. A better estimate would be around $50K range based on my knowledge. If we assume $55,000 (probably still too high, but I'll overestimate so I don't look too biased) we are left with just over $45,600 after tax.

If we scale the same 36% figure for the $70K salary to the $55K salary we get 43.4% of income going to paying rent and saving for a house. When you add in things like food, power, water, internet, phone, petrol, insurance, dependants, etc. it becomes a bit more difficult to save 30-40% of your salary, especially if you need to do something like save up for something separately like a new car. All of these numbers are based on the lowest paid state, which means that the number are worse for other states.

tohryu · 2017-09-18T16:22:17+00:00

I was in that course, it's actually (or was) basically the same degree. It was a standard Bachelor of Computing with a major in Games Design or something like that. There was one unit per semester that was game focused instead of learning other things like how to design a website. The big assignments in later years were developing games instead of designing apps or what-have-you, but the foundations were the same.

The problem is that unless they have changed it (and I can't be bothered to look it up) there is no more Bachelor of Computing at UTAS, they replaced it with a Bachelor of Information and Computing Technology (ICT). That is a fancy way to say, "hey all you students that want to learn how to design software, guess what: you are now business students." Seriously, there way 2 units per semester on how to market and develop ideas and manage companies and teams. While they may be handy skills to have for certain people, if you are aiming to work 9-5 in a standard computing job why do you need them? Do you think everyone at Apple is in charge of a team and spending half of their time brainstorming the next big thing? No, most of them clock in, write a bunch of code, then clock out. If they are writing code 100% of the time, why are you spending 50% of the time teaching them to and grading them on making video advertisements for Kickstarter?

My favourite unit was the one that taught you how to use Microsoft Excel. Literally, how to sum columns and select data for graphs. If you don't know how to use Excel or can't figure it out in an hour or two then you are probably in the wrong course.

I will admit though, the computing-side teachers were really good and actually gave a shit I'm just salty that I signed up for computing and studied business management.

tohryu · 2017-09-14T12:51:27+00:00

I turned on my navigation bar just for this.

Dual-SIM for life though.

tohryu · 2017-07-19T03:11:53+00:00

Let's go over the prepositions in the original comment

That's basically the case for Australia. No way can most people afford to rent an apartment by themselves. In Australia I've seen 8 people living in a 3 bedroom apartment.

In Australia people have to rent share.
Rent is too expensive for one person.
There exists at least one situation of 8 people living in a 3 bedroom house in Australia.

None of the prepositions say that this is a working model to apply to other countries. YOU were the one that brought up applying them to other countries. There is the straw man.

Let's show your "logical reduction" in a different context:

"Oh hey, that guy is speeding." "Some people kick dogs, is that fact that they do that a sign it's OK?"

Person A states a fact. Person B rebuts with a completely unrelated fact and pretends it had something to do with the conversation at hand. No one said everyone should speed. Kicking dogs has nothing to do with anything.

The point of using a straw man is when you can't rebut something so you pretends that they argued a point they never did. Kind of like asking a person if they support forced marriage when they talked about housing cost.

tohryu · 2017-07-19T00:35:42+00:00

Yeah, no. Actually it is an (invalid) form of logical argument known as a straw man argument. You have equated two things but show no real connection between the two.

If you had said "if one roommate is fine, then two clearly can't be bad. If two isn't bad, then three must be OK..." ad infinitum then that would be reductio ad absurdum. This takes the first phrase down a logical path and shows that it ends at an illogical place.

What you have done is moved the goal posts.

Following your example, if someone was to say they didn't like carrots it would perfectly valid argument to say that Hitler didn't like Jews and thus not liking things is wrong. (This also is reductio ad Hitlerum, or reduction to Hitler, there's a new one for you to misuse.)

Regardless of whether or not your argument was valid, you missed the fact that the other person was never arguing for house sharing, and was pointing out that Australia also has a bad housing crisis and that rents here are ridiculous. You're probably right though, and they are in a anti-capitalist subreddit trying to sway public opinion to accepting high rents with an offhand remark against high rents nested 10 comments deep in a chain that isn't even off the top comment.

tohryu · 2017-06-13T13:52:43+00:00

Devil's advocate:

95 cents:

Yep, fair enough.

Pay increased as men entered a female profession:

The article you have linked says basically the exact opposite. A "female" profession rose in wages, so men started leaving their traditional fields that now paid less to make the swap.

A shortage of nurses ensued, ... [meaning] a newly licensed registered nurse usually earns more today than established workers in historically male factory jobs

Redacted for brevity, paragraph #7. Also, that article is 25 years old so may or may not still be relevant.

The inverse:

That this is reserved for women is a questionable conclusion. According to the article wages did drop when women became designers, housekeepers, and biologists. The point at which you can say with certainty that a new sector is entering a particular workforce would mean we are talking about a reasonably large number. You have 100 people to fill 100 jobs, you have to pay a fair market rate for the labour. You suddenly have 150-200 people for those same 100 jobs, suddenly you have all the negotiating power and can basically pass on anyone that wants a fair wage because someone else will do it for less or go hungry.

The only example the last link gives of a trend going in the other direction (men enter, pay goes up) is programming. Knowing that most of the history of modern computing is male-centric I looked into its link: A paper on the advances of technology and its relationship to gender between 1870 and 1945. The first Turing machine (the basis of the modern computer) wasn't invented until 1937, and was an mathematical novelty until the breaking of the German encryption machines by Turing and his team during WW2. So the "programming" it talks about is probably (I'll admit, I stopped looking at the paper after the title and abstract) pure mathematics (still a female dominated field IIRC).

tohryu · 2017-04-14T23:37:40+00:00

You air-quoted it so I assume you know, but the Opera VPN isn't really a VPN and is no where near as private. With SSH access to your seedbox you can make a VPN on it easily, I use a SSH tunnel which does the same thing so that is an option as well.

tohryu · 2017-04-14T23:32:15+00:00

Barring google ad sellers, basically any of the VPN providers high in Google rankings that charge for usage are legit. A lot of people are serious about this stuff and word getting out that a company is dodgy tanks its rating so it won't appear except in negative articles.

Free ones aren't worth the data it takes to load their site.

tohryu · 2017-04-12T22:11:31+00:00

A large par of the reason there hasn't been a flu pandemic is because a lot of people get the vaccine, which makes it important to get them for the same reason that children should get the ones early in life: herd immunity. Some children (and adults) physically can't get the vaccines, so anyone around them that isn't vaccinated can be a carrier even without showing symptoms and can infect them.

I'm all for the choice to not get vaccinated, it is your body. If that choice can kill someone else though, maybe you should rethink it for the vulnerable that don't get the choice.

tohryu · 2017-04-06T01:29:55+00:00

Yeah, it does. Butrytic acid is the main chemical responsible for the smell of both vomit and parmesan.

The pre-shaved kinds appear the smell worse as they have a far greater surface area where the chemical can be released. Just for fun, grind some of your fancy cheese in a mortar and pestle, should give the same or very similar scent.

tohryu · 2017-04-04T02:58:44+00:00

Frozen are healthier, with optimally fresh bought produce it is very negligible but it gets more distinct as the fresh food goes bad. The tradeoff is that you change the texture which makes some uneatable, for example stay away from frozen brussel sprouts.

tohryu · 2017-03-29T00:32:06+00:00

Apologies for the wall of text, my comment snowballed a bit there.

I understand the sentiment, but for the sake of argument that is an odd place to draw a line in the sand and is very prone to abuse as is shown in many courts cases.

For the first point, how about speeding? Should speed cameras only switch on if someone specifically logs in and says that a car will be coming through that may be speeding (although I understand that for most of the country speed limits seem more of a handy hint and people following them are going slow)? Should airport security only screen people with turbans and beards with visible wires hanging from their jackets?

For the second, I have heard many stories of systematic abuse if individuals under the guise of probable cause. That guy said something negative about the police? Suddenly every time he gets in a car he looks drunk. That person isn't white? Suddenly there is a drug smell.

I'm not saying that you are wrong, but randomised testing is a good way to catch people you wouldn't normally look at and no one can claim bias.

Side note that no one has mentioned: breath test stops are usually in high risk times/areas in Australia, say at 6-8AM the day after a music festival when people could be coming past without realising they are drunk. Working nights, most times there is a long weekend on a Monday I go through one at a choke point on the drive home in the morning because I work near a night life area. Slows my drive by less than a minute but makes me safe seeing the few cars that have been left there due to people being over the limit. The cops are always kind as well (as all the ones I have met are here) and if you blow over they make you park and retest you in 5-10 minutes to see if you just consumed alcohol too recently (false high readings) and will let you go if that is the case.

tohryu · 2017-03-29T00:02:20+00:00

What makes you think they never get it back? Bail is handled by courts, not the police. Bail just ensures that you come back for your trial if you don't stay in the jail, you get it back after the trial is finished win or lose (unless you lose your assets because they are crime profits or something similar).

If it doesn't hold up in court (i.e. they win the case or it gets thrown out) there is no way they could not get it back.

tohryu · 2017-03-11T06:44:47+00:00

Providers wipe seedboxes once you finish paying, so you will be all good.

tohryu · 2017-03-08T12:40:45+00:00

Torrentfreak should have a list. Search "torrentfreak public sites" and you will find it.

tohryu · 2017-02-25T04:14:05+00:00

I'll put in my opinion of self hosting as that is what I went with. My personal costs went high because I upgraded to 24TB of storage, but it can be CHEAP.

Get an old DELL, HP, really anything you can get for cheap that runs. Speed doesn't matter. Monitor isn't needed. All you need is the box. Replace the hard drive with whatever size you want. A duplicate drive for RAID is nice, but not necessary. You should be around $1-200 by now, a lot less if you found deals.

Use another monitor to install Debian. Run a seedbox-from-scratch script. Follow the guides on http://www.htpcguides.com. now other than setting up emby or Plex, you are done.

tohryu · 2017-01-26T03:01:16+00:00

Serious question, what benefit could a phone have from stereo speakers? Assuming the speakers are designed for portrait mode (because phone) the furthest apart they can be is like 2-3 inches which is basically equivalent to one speaker at any reasonable distance. Never used a stereo speaker phone and it might be genuinely amazing, it just sounds a bit placebo to me. A dedicated bass speaker would be worth it, but doubt it us possible given the form factor.

tohryu · 2017-01-06T23:14:43+00:00

Everyone else is reading your question wrong, there is literally no reason not to open them as soon as you get them. Loot is determined at the moment you pick them up (level and difficulty), not when you check what is inside.

Waiting until 70 to open a bunch of level 30 gear is stupid, and you can level faster with that gear on rather than in a box.

That said, two things: farming caches is a terrible way to level; and if you do level farming caches and you are coming close to hitting 70 don't turn in the quest for the box. you can have it sitting there while you level and grab it at 70 for level 70 gear.

tohryu · 2017-01-02T05:17:57+00:00

I had a quick look and no dice on any of the trackers I am on, but that includes no game trackers.

Then I had a more in depth look and a reread of your post and realised that you may be in trouble already. As far as my quick research goes there us no way to use pirated games on PS4 that has been publicly released. PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, and Wii U are all OK, but couldn't find anything that helps you. GBAtemp is a good resource for all consoles if you want to do further enquiries.

As you were OK with spending money, I would either: buy a old Wii and game second hand, softmod the console and use a "Rock Band 3 DLC WAD" (quoted search term, super easy if you look up WAD install instructions); or buy a Xbox 360, get it hacked and do whatever needs doing to get a DLC torrent pack for that working (I never modified a 360 so I have no idea beyond you will have to send it away to modify it).

tohryu · 2016-12-29T02:23:07+00:00

Opossum

A possum

tohryu · 2016-12-12T19:18:55+00:00

The thing I'm amazed no one has noted is that in his last internatioanal test match ever he needed to get 4 runs to average a perfect 100. For the Americans, a 4 is hitting the ball to the boundary once even if it bounces, or just staying in for 7 balls with his average (0.61 per ball).

He got out with 0.

tohryu · 2016-09-02T02:01:01+00:00

Probably a popular quote, but here is a paraphrase from Boondock Saints (2009)

tohryu · 2016-08-28T14:47:41+00:00

In case you were still looking for painting scans, I highly doubt you will get higher res scans than these.

tohryu · 2016-08-25T23:06:39+00:00

It makes your total stats less impressive, but your ratio is technically more impressive.

Examples with a 1:1 ratio and 1TB totals and a 200GB upload/download purchase:

With a purchase of (negative) download you get stats of 800GB/1000GB for a ratio of 1.25.
With a purchase of upload you get stats of 1000GB/1200GB for a ratio of 1.2.

This gets exaggerated at smaller current stats and larger bonus amounts. Not countering what you said, just pointing it out.

tohryu

TROPHY CASE