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Financial fuckery thread

Started by Cain, March 12, 2009, 09:14:45 AM

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Junkenstein

Back on gaming again:
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals

Pushing $50 Million. "First AAA title with your cash".

From what I can see so far it's either going to be genre-breaking or the biggest kickstarter clusterfuck since such things began.

Consider their current stretch goal:
QuoteAlien Languages – Do you speak Banu? We will work with real-world linguists to create distinctive and realistic alien languages for Star Citizen's three biggest alien races, the Vanduul, the Xi'An and the Banu. No universal translators, no garbled animal noises: Star Citizen's aliens will be speaking their own authentic languages!

What could possibly go wrong?
Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

xXRon_Paul_42016Xxx(weed)

Meh, Klingon was made up by just one langauge nerd. So was the Dothraki language on GOT. Fuck, just look at the shit Tolkien did for fun. Its apparently not hard for a dedicated language nerd to cook up a decent sounding fake language for movies and stuff.

Junkenstein

I'm not familiar with the field to be fair, I think I was more looking at the level of cash thrown at it and how stretch goals can fuck you.

Fun fact - About 50% of all kickstarter funded video games that should be released by now, aren't. Of those not yet out, more than a couple have hit problems of various levels and are likely to never be finished.

Thinking on this, I'll do a "business of games" thread at some point. EA alone does enough shady shit to justify it.


In other news:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-28948518

QuoteRoyal Bank of Scotland has been fined £14.5m by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for "serious failings" in its mortgage sales business.

The City watchdog said RBS did not ensure that it gave suitable mortgage advice to customers.

Quote"Only two of the 164 sales reviewed were considered to meet the standard required overall in a sales process," the FCA added.

And they were so close to the 100%. Shame. That must have been one guy actually doing his job. Twice.
Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

minuspace

The future is kickstarters for REAL initiated encounters of the 5th kind.  PM.
Quote from: xXRon_Paul_42016Xxx(weed) on August 24, 2014, 12:47:09 AM
Meh, Klingon was made up by just one langauge nerd. So was the Dothraki language on GOT. Fuck, just look at the shit Tolkien did for fun. Its apparently not hard for a dedicated language nerd to cook up a decent sounding fake language for movies and stuff.

Cain

For those naysaying EA's microtransaction system...Dragon Age Inquisition's multiplayer has been officially announced.  Everything is available without paying...but they're relying on the same random number generator system that ME3MP used.  Meaning it will probably take 900+ hours of gameplay to unlock everything to maximum level, if a similar number of classes, upgrades and weapons are made available (probably not).

They're also reducing the grind in some ways (break down useless items to create useful ones), which suggests at the very least either Bioware has more control over its MP than people originally thought, or else EA is reconsidering some of the worse aspects of their online gameplay. 

ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞

Carmen Segarra recorded Goldman Sachs doing God's work with the Fed.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-09-26/the-secret-goldman-sachs-tapes
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/sites/default/files/TAL_536_transcript.pdf

QuoteIn meetings, Fed employees would defer to the Goldman people; if one of the Goldman people said something revealing or even alarming, the other Fed employees in the meeting would either ignore or downplay it. For instance, in one meeting a Goldman employee expressed the view that "once clients are wealthy enough certain consumer laws don't apply to them." After that meeting, Segarra turned to a fellow Fed regulator and said how surprised she was by that statement -- to which the regulator replied, "You didn't hear that."
P E R   A S P E R A   A D   A S T R A

Junkenstein

This one's sneaking by nicely:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-29572475

QuoteThere are rising concerns in Europe over negotiations to liberalise trade with the United States.

The project, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP, aims to remove a wide range of barriers to bilateral commerce.

QuoteIn the EU, campaigners say that consumers could be faced with more genetically modified food, hormone treated beef and chicken meat that has been rinsed with chlorine.

Another major concern is the provisions under discussion to enable foreign investors - for example American firms investing in the EU - to sue a host government in some circumstances if they are hit by a change in policy.

The bold is nicely worded. A "hit" from a change in policy could be literally anything. From new minimum wage requirements to regulation changes to taxation to roadworks near the office to whatever. Governments change policies more often that I can count. Any time a new body occupies a post there's policy changes.

Take Education in the UK for example. A large sector that suffers policy changes literally annually if not more frequently. Now consider the potential range of suppliers to the sector. It's extensive. Now consider how many lawsuits you could be looking at from even basic changes. Menu change? Caters sue. Textbook change? Publishers sue. Uniform change? Suppliers sue. Basically everyone will sue everyone sooner or later and they won't have to demonstrate a lot to be able to win.

Yet I'll bet big money on all political parties being for this. I wonder why?
Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

P3nT4gR4m

Quote from: Junkenstein on October 14, 2014, 08:41:15 AM
This one's sneaking by nicely:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-29572475

QuoteThere are rising concerns in Europe over negotiations to liberalise trade with the United States.

The project, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP, aims to remove a wide range of barriers to bilateral commerce.

QuoteIn the EU, campaigners say that consumers could be faced with more genetically modified food, hormone treated beef and chicken meat that has been rinsed with chlorine.

Another major concern is the provisions under discussion to enable foreign investors - for example American firms investing in the EU - to sue a host government in some circumstances if they are hit by a change in policy.

The bold is nicely worded. A "hit" from a change in policy could be literally anything. From new minimum wage requirements to regulation changes to taxation to roadworks near the office to whatever. Governments change policies more often that I can count. Any time a new body occupies a post there's policy changes.

Take Education in the UK for example. A large sector that suffers policy changes literally annually if not more frequently. Now consider the potential range of suppliers to the sector. It's extensive. Now consider how many lawsuits you could be looking at from even basic changes. Menu change? Caters sue. Textbook change? Publishers sue. Uniform change? Suppliers sue. Basically everyone will sue everyone sooner or later and they won't have to demonstrate a lot to be able to win.

Yet I'll bet big money on all political parties being for this. I wonder why?

Answer your own questions much? Best democracy money can buy.  :lulz:

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
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Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
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walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

Junkenstein

Absolutely.

Best case situation with that shit is governments only get sued every 4-5 years. Worst case is a lawsuit every time a politician opens their mouth.

If it goes ahead you can pretty much write off any possible positive reform indefinitely. Wages stop dead, no new regulations regarding H+S or environmental impacts. No increase in standards in any industry for fear of being sued forever.

I'm starting to suspect we may even see a slip in standards before a great rush for every nation to treat its citizens as horribly as possible to avoid financial penalties.
Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

Junkenstein

UK government, doing what it does best. I can only assume Osbourne and co spend most of their day in slack jawed amazement at Velcro. I'm reasonably confident of this. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-30125780

Quoten a surprise move, the UK government has withdrawn its legal challenge to EU legislation that caps the level of bankers' bonuses.

Chancellor George Osborne said he had recognised the challenge was "now unlikely to succeed".

The move comes after an adviser to the European Court of Justice rejected the UK's legal arguments against the plan.

The cap restricts bonuses to 100% of banker's pay or 200% with shareholder approval.

QuoteThe government put forward six legal arguments to support its case; the advocate general decided none of them held water.

However, he did make one rather interesting point. He said that because the level of bonus is linked to annual salary, and there is no cap on salaries, there is not really a bonus cap at all.

Which is all relatively fucking moot anyway because we're apparently still pretending not to live in a world of tax havens, loopholes and various other ways for those earning these sums to effectively reduce their liability to nothing.

Apparently there's some shit about this driving away "talent". Fucking GREAT. If we can drive all the "talented bankers" out of the banks then they might not turn to shit and do grossly horrific evil shit all the fucking time.

That's actually serious. This thread started in '09, is now 106 pages and isn't even anywhere near all of the shady shit you could lay at the feet of various financial institutions. No-one's clean and you can't even play "who's the least dirty" with any kind of straight face.

Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

Demolition Squid

So in his Autumn statement, Osbourne has laid out a vision of a future where the UK government is spending less as a percentage of GDP than we have since 1930. Before we had things like 'the national health service', for instance.

He's also had to admit that, although he promised he'd bring the deficit down to £35 billion, it has in fact risen to £100 billion.

Despite this, he - and the press in general - are going to claim that his policies are still working great because the UK's growth is the fastest in Europe and our unemployment figures have fallen faster than expected. Never mind that Europe is still mired in catastrophe, so this is like saying we're faster than a sprinter who has just been shot in the leg, and the reason unemployment has fallen is a combination of part-time jobs, self-employment and government schemes which literally bribe companies to take on staff who are then not paid the minimum wage. Oh, and encouraging the jobcentre to sanction people and remove them from unemployment benefit for - say - attending an interview when they should be signing on. Even if this kills them.

Note that we literally have benefits claimants starving to death and Osbourne plans to slash from those dirty scrounging benefits claimants even harder to claw back money for, say, dig up and destroy ancient burial sites in order to build a cheaper and bigger road.

The worst thing is, he's probably going to get in and he's probably going to do it because the public seem to believe that, whilst Labour and the Lib Dems are full of incompetent idiots, the Conservatives are just evil - which is better than incompetent or stupid. But he hasn't met a single economic challenge he has set himself! He's living in a fantasy world, and he's planning to just do the same thing, but harder if he gets in next time. Even though the deficit is almost three fucking times the size his godawful cuts were supposed to get it to, and the areas he wants to cut for most of this are already literally killing people.

And they'll vote him in anyway because who else is there?

Goddamnit.
Vast and Roaring Nipplebeast from the Dawn of Soho

Cain

Yeah, this country is pretty much fucked.  Our political class are good for nothing except scrounging bribes off Saudis for arms deals, and buggering kids then covering it up.


Demolition Squid

Those were great reads, Cain. Thanks for that!
Vast and Roaring Nipplebeast from the Dawn of Soho

Cain

Russia's economy looks likely to crash.

Well, sorry.  You played a good game, Putin, but you made the same fatal mistake the Soviet Union did: you had a raw resource, export driven economy and didn't diversify.  And when the Saudis came and wrecked your shit by flooding the global oil markets and bringing prices down massively, you had nothing to counter with.