Posts by Minos

  • The random model thread!

    zomg i maed a character!


    Made this for a small challenge with some friends, where everyone had to pick a theme and they were randomly assigned between us. The person I got chose Pokemon/Zelda, but due to lack of time I had to scrap the arena which was going to be a Zelda dungeon.


    The base was completely rushed and looks like shit, I'll redo that.


    Anyways, I'll still polish this a bit more so any feedback is welcome!


    [Blocked Image: http://thiagoklafke.com/misc/temp/tklafke_charmeleon.jpg]


    If you are wondering what my theme was, the keywords were "Feijoada (brazilian food dish), fascist mages, industrial machinery, alternative dimensions, zergs and space battle on a Jupiter moon". This was the result: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/sh/ymr7k1obkzq…-pra-Klafke.gif


    Other entries: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ymr7k1obkzqowfv/r_JtiWaGPY#/

  • Diablo 3

    Damn... playing on torment 2 now and getting 650% bonus XP


    Tried that route earlier today and got a legendary bracer after 3 runs. Have you guys tried any "elemental" builds yet btw? Got a few items with extra fire damage, might try going that route with my DH.


    Btw, I merged my old account with my blizzard one and lost my friends list in the process, if you want to add me: Minos#1840

  • Investment Bankers...

    Quote from Pericolos0


    At frist glance that graph looks less scary than the other ones and might suggest that's just the way things were in the past and everything is going to be fine again. But let's cross it with more data and context:


    I looked up what the US GDP was in 1945 and it was a "mere" 2.22 trillion dollars. A lot of money at the time, but remember that the dollar was backed by gold back then so it was much harder to expand the money supply. At the end of that year, the total US debt was equal to 120% of the GDP, or roughly 2.66 trillions.


    Fast forward to 2012. The GDP at that year was roughly 15 trillion, so 104% or so of that equals 17 trillion. In between 2000 and 2014, the Debt to GDP ratio went up more than 40%!


    Now it's true that the debt to GDP ratio also skyrocketed during the 40s, but because the economy was much smaller back then high fluctuations like that were much easier to happen than nowadays I presume. Considering that we have a much larger volume of money circulating today, a 10% or so increase is several times more drastic than it was in 1945, since it requires a much larger volume of money to happen. That's where the second graph I posted comes into play: Notice the volume of money needed to increase that 40% in the graph you posted.


    This is the same reason why bitcoin will probably never see any other 1000% increase in value in the future (if it ever goes up again). It's one thing to increase 1000% in value when a unit is worth 1 cent, but it's a completely different thing to increase 1000% when its valued at 400 or whatever it is nowadays. Infinite growth isn't sustainable and the main reason why our economic paradigm is completely broken.


    Some more interesting facts: The US GDP in 2000 was 10.3 trillion and grew to 16.9 trillion in 2013 (sauce). At the same time, the total debt went from 5.6 trillion to 16.7 trillion. That's more than 10 trillion dollars of debt added in just 10 years, while the economy "only" grew 6 trillion dollars. Can we really expect the economy to grow 10 trillion in the next decade just to catch up with the debt acquired during the past decade? I'd love to believe so, but I haven't seen a single indication towards that possibility. That's the definition of "debt spending steals prosperity from the future" in my opinion.


    The guy in that video may be trying to sell you gold and might get some information wrong, but the general message is: the economy is FUBAR and the crazy money that can be made buying debt right now might be worth shit in a few years, while gold is very likely to still have some value in the future


    I think the concept of debt is very confusing for a lot of people, and it makes big numbers sound like the end of the world is near. The truth is you dont need 16 trillion dollar to fix 16 trillion dollar worth of debt.


    Imagine you, me, seldoon and sentura are a small country of 4 people. I owe you 2$, you own seldoon 2$, and seldoon owes me 2$. together we own 6$ of debt and the debt is not getting fixed because we are all broke. now, sentura buys an apple from me that i've grown for 2$. All of a sudden, i have 2$ to pay off my debt to you, which in turn gives you 2$ to pay off seldoon. Holy shit, our 6$ of debt just evaporated using only 2$!!!!

    The economy is a very complex web of lots of different entities owing each other debt in various ways. Adding up all the different debts is gonna amount to a scary large number, but that doesn't mean we're so deep in the hole we might as well just give up


    Not sure if that's the best example because since it fails to consider the fractional reserve system, which basically requires banks to keep only a very small percentage of deposits in their vaults (3% in the US) at all times and the rest can be used for new loans and so on. Banks can basically make shitloads of "commercial money" out of a single deposit, since they can lend more money on the assumption that depositors won't withdraw all their money at the same time. Example.


    Add to that: derivatives market and money being created out of thin air in those QEs and you got something so complex that it's virtually impossible to predict what the fuck will happen. We live in a completely different economic paradigm than in 1945, so we can't really compare our current situation with the past, so yeah, this 16 trillion debt might magically disappear tomorrow, who knows? I certainly don't lol


    By the way, can you post some examples of real economic growth in the last few years? I'd love to see those, because the only indicators I saw going up recently were the stock markets and those don't necessarily reflect the "real economy".


    I'm going to have to confess that I'm completely biased in this case, since I tend to read more "economic collapse" blogs than keynesian economists' ones, so I might have completely missed positive news.

  • Investment Bankers...

    Quote from Pericolos0

    of course everyone has a bias but there's a huge difference between an economist with a keynesian bias and a guy who's using scary sounding words to sell you gold lol.


    and those graphs sure look scary, can you tell me what they mean?

    thank god there are less scary graphs to look at


    At frist glance that graph looks less scary than the other ones and might suggest that's just the way things were in the past and everything is going to be fine again. But let's cross it with more data and context:


    I looked up what the US GDP was in 1945 and it was a "mere" 2.22 trillion dollars. A lot of money at the time, but remember that the dollar was backed by gold back then so it was much harder to expand the money supply. At the end of that year, the total US debt was equal to 120% of the GDP, or roughly 2.66 trillions.


    Fast forward to 2012. The GDP at that year was roughly 15 trillion, so 104% or so of that equals 17 trillion. In between 2000 and 2014, the Debt to GDP ratio went up more than 40%!


    Now it's true that the debt to GDP ratio also skyrocketed during the 40s, but because the economy was much smaller back then high fluctuations like that were much easier to happen than nowadays I presume. Considering that we have a much larger volume of money circulating today, a 10% or so increase is several times more drastic than it was in 1945, since it requires a much larger volume of money to happen. That's where the second graph I posted comes into play: Notice the volume of money needed to increase that 40% in the graph you posted.


    This is the same reason why bitcoin will probably never see any other 1000% increase in value in the future (if it ever goes up again). It's one thing to increase 1000% in value when a unit is worth 1 cent, but it's a completely different thing to increase 1000% when its valued at 400 or whatever it is nowadays. Infinite growth isn't sustainable and the main reason why our economic paradigm is completely broken.


    Some more interesting facts: The US GDP in 2000 was 10.3 trillion and grew to 16.9 trillion in 2013 (sauce). At the same time, the total debt went from 5.6 trillion to 16.7 trillion. That's more than 10 trillion dollars of debt added in just 10 years, while the economy "only" grew 6 trillion dollars. Can we really expect the economy to grow 10 trillion in the next decade just to catch up with the debt acquired during the past decade? I'd love to believe so, but I haven't seen a single indication towards that possibility. That's the definition of "debt spending steals prosperity from the future" in my opinion.


    The guy in that video may be trying to sell you gold and might get some information wrong, but the general message is: the economy is FUBAR and the crazy money that can be made buying debt right now might be worth shit in a few years, while gold is very likely to still have some value in the future

  • Investment Bankers...

    Quote from Pericolos0

    http://pragcap.com/debunking-the-…tory-of-mankind


    I didn't take me long watching that video that it's made by someone with an obvious political agenda, and in the end is just a sales pitch for X or Y...


    This is true for pretty much every economics analysis out there though Most "experts" will subtly twist the meaning of words to make them fit their agenda, just like the guy in your blog. He is hanging onto semantics and oversimplifications in the original video to dismiss its message.


    Example:


    Quote

    The US government has run budget deficits for the majority of its history. Just to put this in perspective, can you imagine what someone like this narrator would have said back in 1945 when the deficit was over 25% of GDP? Do you remember how the government “stole” all of our prosperity back in the 1940′s? Or did the USA undergo a massive economic boom over the 70 year period since then during which it became, by far, the most prosperous and wealthy nation mankind has EVER seen? A little common sense should make you question the claim that government spending (which has happened for hundreds of years during an extraordinary American wealth boom) necessarily steals future prosperity. Yes, government spending can have negative ramifications and isn’t necessarily always good, but there’s a bit too much hyperbole in the claim that deficit spending “steals” future prosperity. That’s just not true in all cases. The extremely high deficit from 1945 should make that abundantly clear.

    “[deficit spending] Steals prosperity out of the future so it can spend it today”


    I'm no economics expert and don't claim to be one, but a bit of "common sense" might be enough to dismiss that article as a source of good information. The amount of debt currently being generated is far greater and unparalleled to anything else in history. A single year (1945) can't be used as an argument against that. How can you argue with these graphs?


    [Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/ZukHL30.png]

    [Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/B5tp19e.png]


    That guy is just as reliable as any other "conspiracy" bloggers out there, he just has a different agenda

  • Dahell is happening in Kiev

    Quote from Sentura

    I got Ukraine work colleagues here, they're telling me that Ukraine is pretty much surrounded from 3 sides by Russia, and that an invasion is imminent. Adding to that, the border to Poland has been rigged with landmines. So much for Putin just declaring it an exercise...

    ...And once Ukraine falls, eastern Europe is next. Watch them try.


    I don't mean to sound rude, but do you have any proof for this, maybe a blog post, pictures or something

  • Dahell is happening in Kiev

    That's funny, most of those channels are usually included in basic cable TV packages here


    Also, sorry for the wrong words, I meant "state funded" not "state owned" (even though it can be interpreted as pretty much the same thing, if you fund something you basically control it ).