Lurker > Kuuko

SgtBash posted...

Air bases of a country based on foreign soil are treated as if they were still on their own soil, right?

So despite Jacobs being born on a military base in Spain because it's run by the US, the base itself is considered American soil, right?

It doesn't matter even then. The rule is that you have to be a "natural-born citizen". Republicans used to argue that that means you need to be born on American soil to run, so that they could do racist Obama birther conspiracies (of which Trump was the biggest proponent btw). But they changed their interpretation when Ted Cruz ran for president, because Ted Cruz was plainly just born in Canada. So now most people accept that you're "natural-born" as long as you were a citizen at birth (either because you were born on US soil or because one of your parents is a US citizen).

It is inevitably going to be wrong about things. The larger problem, which OpenAI has often discussed that they're working on with GPT4 already, is that its answers tend to sound excessively confident and authoritative to users even when the AI isn't really all that sure. A simple arithmetic problem should sound confident and authoritative, but some other esoteric answers should have the AI respond with some degree of ambivalence and hesitancy. It's a problem that's being worked on though.

Fun fact is it is possible to get Heracross and the other tree pokemon before you beat Bugsy. Rather than getting Headbutt from the dude in Ilex Forest, you can get Headbutt a bit earlier if you level-up a Slowpoke to level 34. It's very stupid and pointless but it is possible

remandramdoll posted...

Time for a new generation of players to find out how broken the game was. Straight up cheating AI.

Well at least Stadium 1 is nicer than Stadium 2

In both games they kind of try to balance the rentals so that good pokemon have bad movesets and bad pokemon have good movesets. But in Stadium 1 the balance isn't as good and there are a bunch of good pokemon with pretty decent movesets. Which still doesn't compare to all the opponents with great pokemon and great movesets but it's something.

FES first playthrough for the fully modeled world and The Answer
P3P second playthrough for the feMC route and to see the little differences

Not even just a covid anti-vaxxer. He's like a super anti-vaxxer.

Giant's Knife
Razor Sword
Deku sticks I guess?

Cuticrusader09 posted...

Not if you make too much. Then its a reduced amount or zero.

Backdoor Roth IRA.

TendoDRM posted...

In which case you can still contribute the remainder of the $6500 to a Traditional IRA.

Technically true but realistically not true for a lot of people (most people?). The IRS guideline is that if you are covered by a retirement plan at work, then there is an income limit on the amount you can deduct from your Traditional IRA contributions when you file your taxes. You can still contribute to the Traditional IRA but you can not deduct your contributions. So there's no tax-advantage to contributing to a Traditional IRA in that case. The income thresholds that you can deduct Traditional IRA contributions when covered by a retirement plan at work are actually even lower than the income thresholds for Roth IRA contributions
https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/ira-deduction-limits

With that being said, this is the exact mechanism through which the Backdoor Roth IRA is possible:

1. IRS allows a person who makes a lot to make a nondeductible contribution to a Traditional IRA
2. The IRS has no limitations on anyone converting a Traditional IRA to a Roth IRA (except that if they were deductible contributions before, you'll need to pay taxes now)

So you can legally contribute to a Roth IRA if you just split it up into those two steps. It's so stupid and easy and makes the Roth IRA income limit so simple to get around that it puts into question why the Roth IRA income limit still exists. But the loophole is left open and Congress and the IRS know it'd be unpopular to close it now.

It's also silly because it makes contributing to a Traditional IRA useful for only a very limited number of people. People who don't make very much should probably contribute to a Roth IRA over a Traditional IRA, because it locks in their lower tax brackets. People who make a lot can only contribute to a Roth IRA (but may need the backdoor to do it).

VeggetaX posted...

This life insurance lady told me to buy life insurance that includes an investment portfolio and she told me the interest returns are so much better than Roth IRA or anything else really. She's saying the national average return on these kind of portfolios are 12% which is better than any 401K or Roth IRA.

Please run away from that person. Life Insurance is absolutely teeming with shady salespeople. If you think your local shady car dealer is shady, they pale in comparison to how shady life insurance people get. That's not to say life insurance isn't a useful product for people (not everyone) but based on what you say, she's obviously the shady kind.

You can immediately tell because her statement doesn't make any sense. To be clear, 401ks and IRAs can invest in (almost) anything. They're not investments on their own, they're just buckets that you invest within - and then those investments get tax advantages. Well technically in 401k's you're limited by the fund selection your employer gives you but these days most 401's have a variety of stock and bond choices. And in an IRA you can invest absolutely anything you want. If your life insurance salesman was investing in something that gets 12% returns then you could invest in whatever that same thing is in your IRA too. With that being said, the 12% number is obviously made-up too. Keep in mind Bernie Madoff promised his ponzi scheme buyers "only" a modest 10% return. Consistent 12% returns don't exist.

The life insurance salespeople have other weasely magic words they say about their products too. Like how they're "tax-free" because you can borrow against your own cash value and death benefit, and let you make your money work in multiple places at the same time, or allow you to do "infinite banking" and other buzzwords. Or worst case, they guilt you about how much happier your family would be with life insurance money if you died suddenly right now. It's all scammy.

DKBananaSlamma posted...

He legally cant contribute if he makes over 150k

You can. It's called a Backdoor Roth IRA and it's very easy to do. I did it last year and this year. It's a stupid loophole but it's IRS-approved.

ArkhamOrigins posted...

I make well over 150k a year, but that has nothing to do with it.

You should be contributing to a Roth IRA. You make too much to deduct contributions to a Traditional IRA. And contributing to neither a Roth IRA or a Traditional IRA is just paying taxes for no reason.

"When You're Hot, You're Hot." - Blaine

aarrgus posted...

Pretty sure every game has already been dumped and available.

Yeah all of them definitely have. 3DS piracy is like the most popular piracy of all the last couple generations of consoles.

Without your restrictions, in my opinion the strongest party members "should" be like:
Vincent > Cloud > Aeris > Red > Tifa / Yuffie > Cait Sith > Barrett > Cid

Well, I feel weird about Aeris there because she dies early on so presumably by end game everyone else got stronger than she was, but as a half-Cetra she has more of a reason to be superhuman than some of the people below her do. At least, that's my opinion based on what we know about the characters and why they would actually be unique in the FF7 world. Vincent should be even higher in his own tier if you count what Dirge of Cerberus adds about him. And Cid for example is probably one of the best party members in gameplay, but within the world we're not really given any reason at all why he's stronger than any random Shinra soldier. His entire background in the game is in piloting stuff. I don't really think limit breaks are canon but you can interpret it all how you like.

With your restrictions, I don't know but just guessing I feel like I'd put it like:
Tifa - obviously the best martial artist and probably has a lot of raw strength too

Red - his race of animal things seems really strong and he shouldn't lose much by not having his comb's or whatever in this restriction

Vincent - seems like he loses most of what makes him strong here but his powerlevel's still fucked enough that I think he should be up there

Barrett - probably about as strong as the team gets in raw strength but I don't get the feeling he's a martial artist as much

Cloud - feels weird putting him this low because his main character status makes him do the most but yeah I don't get the feeling he'd beat up the dudes ahead of him here without any weapon. His mako infusion jenova cells whatever probably gives him some level of advantage above the people below him still

Cait Sith - is a robot, so strength can honestly be wherever it wants to be. But cait's also the most excluded from plot things all of the time so never gets any showings to make his strength clear. Feel like it makes sense to put him above the people below who seem more human in strength though

Yuffie - probably a martial artist to some extent but in general seems the most reliant on weapons I think

Cid - like I said, the game doesn't give us really any reason to think that he's a particularly impressive fighter in the plot

Aeris - should be extremely magically-powerful, but never seems to be as strong physically

I dunno I don't feel strongly about that list though. Could rearrange anyone.

Supersex420 posted...

I will probably let Persona users get a physical boost in my RPG so they can compete with summoners and shit in the real world

BUT I don't think they can cast spells and shit outside of the cognitive realm

Persona-users in P3-P5 probably can summon their Personas in the real world. In P4A the way the P3 team talks is as if the Midnight Hour didn't help them summon their Personas at all, and it was simply the Evokers which let them summon a Persona. It's emphasized a couple times that it is possible to summon one without an Evoker but it's much more difficult, and it's only when they enter the TV world where they can easily summon a Persona without an Evoker at all because of the TV world's connection to the sea of unconsciousness.

In P1-P2 there's no trouble at all summoning a Persona anywhere. People can summon them any time without much difficulty and without any special alternate dimensions or whatever. The rules on that and other things like only Fool arcana's being able to use multiple Persona's changed in P3. There's an interesting scene in P2 where a Devil Summoner (Tamaki) fights a fairly powerful Persona-user (King Leo) and is significantly beaten, so at least by P1-P2 rules summoners and Persona-users are probably on the same level-ish.

I've thought about this too. It does feel kind of deliberately sidestepped. P3MC should be killing it in track/swimming/kendo too, but Mamoru is still probably better than you. And P4MC isn't carrying his team in basketball/soccer. Akihiko and Yukari are in sports clubs with the same weapons they use in battle, so you'd think at level 99 they'd be world champion level athletes. Well, Akihiko is at least a badass by the time of Persona 4 Arena and Ultimax. But then at the same time Junpei is implied to still be a mediocre-at-best baseball player in Ultimax.

Probably the explanation is that their Persona needs to be summoned to some extent to get the superhuman abilities that let them punch gods in the face. Even though the Personas aren't being very visibly summoned a lot of times in battle.

Collecting is fine but scalping is really annoying. If it were just collectors perusing yard sales looking for games they like it's one thing, but the dudes buying them all up with the intention to flip them at a higher price to other nerds who actually want them just makes everything worse for everyone. And for some reason videogames have become completely overrun with those scalpers.

epik_fail1 posted...

I am a bit confused. Aside from Calculus(which is college only) and US world history(since I don't like in the US) I was able to take most of those as options when I was 15/16. I wonder if I had to pressure put on me too young

If it isn't clear - the system is very, very location-dependent. Different states have very different standards. There's also often a lot of choice in how you arrange your classes in American high school. Many classes that some students take senior year might also have been available to take junior or sophomore year. And AP classes are quirky because they're effectively college-level material so a student could even be in an AP class for a subject that they had already taken earlier but at highscool-level expectations. AP classes could be available even earlier than senior year but more likely senior year is where more students would be ready to take them.

Generally I'd say you can guess a senior-year student would have a schedule including:

• A foreign language, likely at an intermediate level by this point because it's likely the student had studied the language for at least one or more years earlier (maybe even all 4 years of highschool)
• A math course - but the specific math course is heavily dependent on the students' math ability to this point. Generally Calculus or Statistics at best.
• Very high chance of still taking an English course, which usually encompass both literature and essay-writing

And then the rest I think can kind of be all over the place and probably depends on the student.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

Nah he says that because those were his final dying words in Mark and in Mark's gospel Jesus is overall way less divine and much more prophet. He has completely different dying words in Luke and John, where the books want to make his death seem more admirable and where Jesus is way more literal-son-of-god.

The nuances in the different gospels is actually one of the most interesting things about the NT. But christians for the most part don't like to really think about the differences and rather just combine them into one sort of super story. Which is sad because you miss the individual author's intention and what sort of story he was trying to tell. But if you don't try to combine them into one super story then you have contradicting stories where Jesus has a bunch of different dying words, and that implies that one of them didn't really happen, which is a problem if you take the gospels literally.

bigblu89 posted...

Depends.

Do you plan on retiring anytime this year?

If not, not it doesn't matter.

I'm 45 years old. I don't care what the stock market is doing right now. I care about what it'll be doing in 15 years when I retire.

Not only does it not matter, but in theory you should actually prefer stocks to have lows while you're far away from retirement. It is literally buy low, sell high.

FortuneCookie posted...

There is no "modern Christianity." We're not hive-minded. Just because there are a number of people who would like to see Trump replace Jesus as the Messiah, that doesn't mean that they speak for all of us.

What is the denomination of the church you attend?

HudGard posted...

Churches do a lot of good for a lot of people. I just want them to become more accepting and not push people away like this.

Yeah, it's just too bad that the good stuff kinda gets overshadowed by all the pedophilia and anti-LGBT and anti-birth control and anti-abortion and tax evasion and political lobbying and PPP loan abusing and that sorta stuff. If only the youth would just look past that and accept christ into their hearts.

Kamil posted...

There was a fan translation of SMT for the PSX last year. I have it but I never bothered to try it much for some reason.

Yeah, and it's cool we got it but we also had the GBA version of SMT1 already so it's the one that was least on my wishlist. I'm kind of putting off playing SMT2 in favor of other games specifically hoping we get the PSX port some day. And SMT If... to a lesser extent.

The PSX versions of the SNES games would be ideal. We don't even have fan-translations of most of those versions.

what did they mean by thishttps://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/5/3/7/AAZQKKAAER0B.png

The entire scene is weird. You meet Red XIII and he's like "I have a normal name and I know what it is but it's okay if you just refer to me by the weird test subject name that the mad scientist guy who was about to make me breed with Aeris called me. In fact, let's just make that the default name choice"

But he did. He went Super Saiyan in the Lord Slug movie :)

Slightly related but Budokai Tenkaichi 2 had a really cool "what-if" storyline where Raditz gets amnesia after coming to Earth. He befriends Goku and everyone - and in the end decides to sacrifice himself by getting back in his spaceship pod and crashing it directly into Vegeta's and Nappa's ships in space.

Cool story for coming up with a way Vegeta and Nappa could reasonably be defeated and also cool since Raditz, as Goku's brother, always felt like he should've had a little more characterization.

Yeah you do need to spend a lot for most of the premium travel cards to actually be worth it. They have all the credits and perks that in theory help them pay for themselves. But in practice, Chase and Amex make tons of money on cards like the Sapphire Reserve or Amex Platinum because people think they're status symbols and try to flex on Applebee's waiters with them.

It's a little funny in the gen 2 pokemon games' case because those cartridges are actually unplayable in their state now unless you buy a replacement battery for them too.

VP is an almost entirely meaningless position so it's weird Kamala even gets as much hate directed at her as she does (I wonder why). Can you imagine a dude in 2009 being like "Idk I don't have strong feelings about Obama but that BIDEN guy is the worst" which is a comment I actually sometimes see regarding Kamala. In 2009 you could probably poll half the country and they wouldn't know who the VP was.

First understand what the time horizon you're looking for with this money is. If it's for a short or mid-term goal like a car or a house downpayment within the next 5 years or so then it's probably best to just leave it in a high-yield savings account or look into bonds if you want to be a little fancier than a savings account. This is because in general the stock market goes up over time but if it were to have bad years when you wanted to withdraw then it would put your goals on hold.

If it is for a longer term goal, what's often suggested is after hitting your company match in your 401k (which you've done), invest the rest into a Roth IRA. The annual maximum you can contribute in 2023 is $6,500. IRAs are tax-advantaged so it's better than investing in a regular old brokerage account. The downside is that IRAs are meant for retirement, and so you're not supposed to withdraw from them until you're 60 years old (same for 401k). But Roth IRAs have some flexibility in that if you really have to, you are always allowed to withdraw the contribution (not earnings) you've invested into the IRA tax-free and penalty-free if you need to.

After contributing to a Roth IRA and getting your 401k employer match, you could turn toward putting more money into your 401k (up to $22,500 per year in 2023), or contribute to an HSA if one is available because it's another tax-advantaged account. Or if you really don't want the money to have any restrictions like retirement age and stuff at all, invest it with a taxable brokerage. You mention that you already have some kind of an account so as long as it's not with some weird company that charges weird fees then that's probably fine.

In regards to specific investments to pick - unless you know you are a very, very smart person who sees the future of company stock prices better than people with much more education and hours in the day (and perhaps a little bit of insider trading) do, you should probably just invest in broad index funds like VTI / VTSAX. They'll track the total stock market fluctuations so that you're exposed to everything and automatically diversified and also tend to have very low fees since they're not actively managed. VTI and VTSAX are identical - one is just the ETF version and one is a regular mutual fund. Depending on where your taxable brokerage is, they might have their own version of those funds that are just as good and track the same exact index.

no it's the giant Jigglypuff from that one episode with the giant Gengar and giant Alakazam

If you didn't like KH2 I'm not sure what you'll think of BBS. I like BBS but its gameplay is pretty jank, and I think KH2's gameplay is probably as polished as the series gets

I can't believe she stooped so low

Illuminoius posted...

on gamecube you had to go out of your way to attack the chao by standing still and pressing the button prompt, it's not ilke the dreamcast original where you could easily spin dash into them by accident (a move disabled entirely in the ports)

It's still pretty easy to throw them on accident too. If you're holding them and want to put them down, but you have a little momentum still with SA2's kinda slippery movement, and end up tossing your chao across the map into a rock wall.

I like to do completionist stuff in games but pretty often the achievements don't line up with it so I never really look at them. I've played games where there's a completion percentage counter and I got it to 100% but I don't have all achievements because there's a bunch of shit like "open 4000 doors (584/4000 complete)" or like " On Very Hard Difficulty and while at 1 HP go to level 4 and kick a dog into a trashcan" or some random thing I'm not going to go out of my way to do.

VeggetaX posted...

Japan loves D&D?

Japan loves Dragon Quest, which was heavily inspired by PC RPGs like Wizardry, which are basically just D&D campaigns.

Well it's certainly not hard to achieve the enlightenment needed to see how awful libertarianism is

Rharyx211 posted...

They're somehow more important than the games that actually have numbers lol

Like, Birth by Sleep, Dream Drop Distance, and Union Cross are the games which introduce characters and lore and advance the mythos. In contrast, Kingdom Hearts 3 just had characters goofing off in Disney worlds for 20 hours before trying to figure out what actually happened in those other games for the final act.

Except re:Coded, where it does have a plot but the entire plot, from beginning to end, is just like "what is the point of any of this"

I read the NYT article that mostly exposes the story about it. There are a lot of parts to the story but the TLDR is that the dude who masterminded the "posture photos", Herbert Sheldon, was really into eugenics - specifically how body types correlate with intelligence / success. And probably to some degree held a related opinion that, because your body type is genetic, different races probably had different ceilings of intelligence too.

He's also the dude who invented the made-up somatotype mesomorph endomorph stuff that people still repeat. The article notes "By the time Hillary Rodham arrived on the Wellesley campus, women were allowed to have their pictures taken only partly nude". It was written in 1995 and the wikipedia page mostly pulls from it, so not really clear what newer updates there are in this story other than that definitely not all of the photos are burned since the wikipedia page references a bunch of them coming up recently on auction sites.

Lovelace was amazing in many ways but I always feel like it needs to be clarified a little bit that Charles Babbage was the mind behind the Analytical Engine and the programs written for it. Lovelace was a very close friend of Babbage's and helped him primarily as his translator. But Babbage, his machinist, and at least one or more of his sons knew how to and would've written "programs" for the Engines before Lovelace did. Her part is that she was the first to "publish" a program for the engine while adding an appendix and translating notes about the Engines. Babbage himself never really published anything about his work with the Engines even though he worked on them for decades. The whole story is a little complicated with a lot more details.

I don't want to sound like Lovelace isn't still an important part of the story but these days her contribution seems to overshadow Babbage himself, which is a little silly.

TaylorHeinicke posted...

It opens up risk of forgetting or overspending. Small price to pay for 30 seconds a day.

It takes 30 seconds to go to the bank websight, open my credit history, and pay the balance. Additionally, if not more importantly, it's a great way to stay on top of fraud. It's a lot easier to remember what that weirdly-listed vendor actually was when I was just there yesterday vs. 27 days ago.

Most of us just set it to autopay so there is no forgetting. I review my statements and don't have trouble noticing unexpected charges. I have 10 or 11 cards and never paid an annual fee or interest on any of them. But personal finance is personal so you do you.

To the original point - another factor that confuses people is that there are different FICO models. In theory some FICO models are more accurate than others for different things, like for auto loans or for mortgage loans. So the score given might be unexpected because it's a different FICO model. And if you saw your score through Experian directly then this part doesn't apply, but in general a lot of people are also confused because sites like CreditKarma and stuff use VantageScore, which is altogether not the same algorithm as FICO but is kinda close to it. But that's another reason the scores would be unexpectedly different.

CE learns how stocks work

ViewtifulJoe posted...

The roaming beast in FRLG feels like it gets the least fanfare of any legendary I can think of.
Do they even announce that it's been running around like RSE have Latias/Latios on TV? I can't recall any NPCs caring and it's a Kanto game so the legendary themes barely register.

I swear you're just walking around and an Entei shows up and you casually go "Oh.", master ball him, nickname him Aloysius or Egbert or something then dump him in the PC forever. I mean you're not gonna train it up for the league rematches when you probably have a Mewtwo to carry you.
Entei fell a long way from that "Oh shit." moment in Colosseum very quickly.

Yeah it's a huge moment when you see Entei for the first time in Colosseum.

- First legendary you see (and can catch)
- For that point in the game, it being level 40 is pretty strong, and a lot more meaningful than Suicune and Raikou being level 40 when you later see them is
- There's a pretty likely chance most people ran through the gauntlet of battles beforehand without healing before the fight, so you're already kinda beaten up heading into it. Even if you know you can backtrack and heal, it's really annoying to do
- If you wanted to catch Entei in this battle instead of waiting for later, you need to deal with Dakim's stupid friendly fire earthquaking it while you're trying to catch it at low HP. So you probably reloaded to get Entei here quite a few times

Actually weirdly may be one of the most iconic moments in Colosseum

Smashingpmkns posted...

It seems like he's moreso saying that they're not a zombie show because it's more about the humans/survivors and their story in the world. Which is like what 99% of zombie media has been about since the inception of zombie media lol so he's just ignorant of the genre.

It's hilarious how often zombie things are like "this one's different. it's not about the zombies - but rather about how people would interact with each other in the face of the zombies" when that's literally Night of the Living Dead from the very beginning.