Bay 12 Games Forum

> The catholic church was coming to execute all the masons in Europe

Where is this stuff coming from?

So the ... masons headed west from Europe in the middle ages, that's the conspiracy theory. Presumably this is a Mormon-type thing where they landed in the USA. But here's a sanity check on that claim. The claim is that boatloads of masons escaped to the Americas. Why, then, didn't they build any masonry when they got there? If you tell me to look at the Aztecs or Incas you should bitch-slap whoever told you that. The whole point about native American architecture is how wacky it is, since it developed in isolation from Eurasian architecture. They had some novel building techniques that the Old World doesn't have, but they also lacked basic things like wheeled vehicles to transport materials, or basic architecture like arches.

> Aside from these people, and say, the Vikings who mysteriously disappeared, is there any other indigenous or non-indigenous groups who are rumored to, or have officially, had to make mass migrations in the past? Also what is the actual likely story behind the Vikings disappearing?

This is at the level where all I can say is you should read the whole wikipedia entry on the vikings before we can even discuss that.

Expert sailors and navigators aboard their characteristic longships, Vikings voyaged as far as the Mediterranean littoral, North Africa, and the Middle East. After decades of exploration around the coasts and rivers of Europe, Vikings established Norse communities and governments scattered across north-western Europe, Belarus,[9] Ukraine[10] and European Russia, the North Atlantic islands all the way to the north-eastern coast of North America. The Vikings and their descendants established themselves as rulers and nobility in many areas of Europe. The Normans, descendants of Vikings who conquered and gave their name to what is now Normandy, also formed the aristocracy of England after the Norman conquest of England. While spreading Norse culture to foreign lands, they simultaneously brought home strong foreign cultural influences to Scandinavia, profoundly influencing the historical development of both. During the Viking Age the Norse homelands were gradually consolidated from smaller kingdoms into three larger kingdoms; Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

Nobody disappeared, the vikings are the ancestors of the Danes, Swedes, Norwegians. Iceland is one of the remaining Viking outposts, and it's kind of obvious they're related to modern people in Scandinavia. What happened was that at the start there weren't big centralized kingdoms in Scandinavia so local lords would send raiding parties out, but as they conquered territory and Scandinavia consolidated into a few larger kingdoms, this behavior died out.

Looking up "The Free State of George Floyd" took me to a FOX News article, in which the police claim the autonomous zone doesn't exist:

https://www.foxnews.com/us/minneapolis-autonomous-zone-emergency-response

Police spokesman John Elder told Fox News there is no autonomous zone but that crowds do interrupt police and medical responders.

"This autonomous zone talk is ridiculous. We literally are patrolling every inch of this city that is public property bar non, period," Elder said, while acknowledging emergency response is difficult in some parts of the city.

I guess the police could be lying here, but the idea of dismissing what the police actually say because that gets in the way of the narrative seems a bit like circular logic. So, if, you know, the cops are saying it doesn't exist then i can see why the 'lamestream media' aren't exactly reporting on it.

> if the most common transaction is one item, set your prices at $x.x6 and you will gain $0.04

It's rounded to the nearest 5 cents if you remove pennies. anything ending in a 6 gets rounded down. You're right that that rounding would work if they also got rid of nickels. Although, 5 gets rounded up too, so they could set prices ending in 95 cents. However ... there's actually no incentive for businesses to do that.

First, if the old price was 99 cents but you changed it to 95 cents to exploit 'rounding up' for people who pay by cash haven't you just lost 4 cents on every sale that uses a card? Plus if the person buys two of them, now that's 190, so you lost 5 cents on each unit. So, if you remove both pennies and nickels, prices will still stick at 99 cents. That's because if every item is 99 cents then you need to buy a lot of them to get to the point where they're rounding down.

As for the disproportinately hurting the poor thing: how many transactions does the average poor person make per week where they end in a 99? Logically: not that many. Say they buy one thing worth 99 cents with cash every single say (highly unlikely), so they're hard hit by the rounding up. In a whole year, they're out of pocket exactly $3.65. But note that it's actually a highly unrealistic scenario that they'd have a transaction of this type every single day. if prices end in 99 and they round to the nearest 10 cents you only need to put things through in transactions of 6 items and you've almost doubled the amount of changed you'd normally get, so if they merely bought their stuff weekly then they'd get twice the change they're getting anyway.

Plenty of nations have already abandoned pennies, and the net effect was no fucking difference at all, apparently: other than saving money on the government not throwing money away producing crap nobody wants. For example most people wouldn't stoop to pick up a penny: even on minimum wage if you spend all day bending over to pick up pennies, you'd make less money than your wage per hour. You'd have to pick up a penny every 5 seconds to equal federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. So even if there were pennies littered everywhere on the ground it wouldn't be worth the time of even the poorest American to collect them.

At this point they're not facilitating anything, their mere existence is actually a hindrance to commerce.

EDIT: and the key point about the rounding thing is that you could, if you wanted to, go through a self-serve checkout and you can group the items however you want. So if you're buying 20 things at the supermarket, you can do the self-serve and strategically make the rounding work for you, and the business can't say a fucking thing. Nobody bothers with this however, because fucking around for 10 minutes to save 2 cents isn't actually worth anybody's time, even for the poorest people.

Quote from: Reelya on September 19, 2020, 12:51:41 am

Since when is it cheaper to recycle things? That just costs more, not less.

It is when you have to make a new one anyway, the object is made out of metal, and you just recast it?

Have you missed the thing where they more or less can't pay people to take materials away for recycling, let alone giving it away. Recycling it is basically the cost of reprocessing all over again.

If it was cheaper to recycle coins then they'd exclusively use recycled materials in coins already, but they don't.

The Fed presumably makes 1 penny per penny replaced, minus costs.

It costs 2 pennies worth of metal to make however. There's no conceptual way that's making a profit. It's a shell game that's clearly losing money.

You'd be in disagreement with just about every economist then.

Defunding planned parenthood can't be helping on that front, so i'd expect you to support providing those sorts of services.

Face it, nobody likes to rent. Not one. The only time you might not mind it is if you're renting privately from some nice old lady and she's charging you rent that's more appropriate for the 1980s that 2020. Anyone paying market realistic rent resents it.