Saturday, March 31, 2018

Top 100 JRPGs

NumberGame
100Rogue Galaxy
99Pillars of Eternity
98Fallout 3
97Ar Tonelico II
96Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
95Disgaea: Hour of Darkness
94Suikoden
93Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth
92Tales of Xillia
91Shining Force II
90Star Ocean: Till the End of Time
89Path of Exile
88Digital Devil Saga
87Child of Light
86The Last Remnant
85Nier
84Legend of Legaia
83Dragon's Dogma
82Terranigma
81Final Fantasy VIII
80Baten Kaitos
79Demon's Souls
78Illusion of Gaia
77Mother 3
76Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga
75Lost Odyssey
74Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel
73Radiata Stories
72Shadow Hearts: Covenant
71Odin Sphere
70Dark Souls III
69Parasite Eve
68Final Fantasy IV
67Dragon Quest V
66Wild Arms
65Suikoden V
64Planescape: Torment
63Devil Survivor: Overclocked
62Fallout 2
61Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together
60Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance
59Seiken Densetsu 3
58Legend of Dragoon
57Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
56Tales of Symphonia
55Grandia
54Xenosaga Series
53World of Warcraft
52Tales of Vesperia
51Skies of Arcadia
50Bravely Default
49Elder Scrolls: Morrowind
48Borderlands 2
47Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete
46Radiant Historia
45Final Fantasy XII
44Valkyria Chronicles
43Baldur's Gate II
42Ni no Kuni
41Secret of Mana
40Bloodborne
39Grandia 2
38Tales of the Abyss
37Fire Emblem: Awakening
36The World Ends With You
35Star Ocean: The Second Story
34Mass Effect 2
33Dark Cloud 2
32Golden Sun
31Nier: Automata
30Pokemon Gold/Silver
29Chrono Cross
28Fallout: New Vegas
27Lufia 2
26Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door
25Mother 2 (Earthbound)
24Undertale
23Dragon Age: Origins
22Dragon Quest VIII
21Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky: SC
20Super Mario RPG
19Shin Megami Tensei III (Nocturne)
18Kingdom Hearts II
17Final Fantasy X
16Witcher 3
15Diablo II
14Dark Souls
13Elder Scrolls: Skyrim
12Xenogears
11Final Fantasy IX
10Xenoblade Chronicles
9Persona 4
8Suikoden II
7Persona 3: FES
6Breath of Fire III
5Persona 5
4Final Fantasy VI
3Final Fantasy VII
2Final Fantasy Tactics
1Chrono Trigger

I hear synthwave music (Dance of the Dead) over the speaker at work., because I work with 21 year olds. I feels like videogame music with EDM in it. Its a tad odd, because the nearest dance club is Minneapolis 30 miles away. You hear this music in a dance club. 

Thursday, March 29, 2018

My Cherokee is for sale

It's been a sweet Cherokee, I drove it for 13 years, but I've replaced it yesterday with a 2008 santa fe.


Saturday, March 24, 2018

Millennials that are thriving in this economy are those with links to rich parents:

Most young Americans are still living in an economy that feels like it is in a recession.  Yet there are Millennials that are doing well and are thriving in this economy.  How are they escaping mountains of student debt?  How are they gaining access to down payments to purchase more expensive homes?  The short answer is that they have rich parents.  This isn’t some Trumpism.  This is merely facts that are coming out of research from the Fed, Census, and Zillow.  For the vast majority of young Americans the last decade has been one of low wage labor and a market mired with very expensive colleges.  Despite the disappearing middle class many of those Millennials that are thriving are doing so thanks to familial wealth transfers.  We tend to romanticize the “self-made” person in the United States but it is increasingly becoming more difficult.  More wealth is accumulated in fewer hands and it is staying there.
The Millennials who are thriving
Millennials have taken it on the chin during this recovery.  They are saddled in debt and are a large part of the $1.3 trillion in outstanding student loans.  Many are finding jobs in the lower paying service sector of our economy even with college degrees.  Many are delaying buying homes and in many cases, are stuck living at home with parents even after college.
But a portion of Millennials are doing well:
“(The Atlantic) And then there are those who are doing just great—owning a house, buying a car, and consistently putting money away for retirement.
These, however, are not your run-of-the-mill Millennials. Nope. These Millennials have something very special: rich parents.
These Millennials have help paying their tuition, meaning they graduate in much better financial shape than their peers who have to self-finance college through a mix of jobs, scholarships, and loans. And then, for the very luckiest, they’ll also get some help with a down payment, making homeownership possible, while it remains mostly unattainable for the vast majority of young adults.”
The two biggest benefits here are paying for college and a down payment for a home.  Paying for college allows these Millennials to enter the workforce with a minimal debt load.  Add in the down payment for a home and you accelerate the wealth building years for this group immediately.  Take for example saving 10 percent for a typical US home down payment:
down payment
Source:  Trulia
Your typical American household will take 8 years just to save for that down payment.  Compare that to getting immediate assistance from your family and you suddenly own a home 8 years quicker.  That is a big deal and since most Millennials don’t have this privilege, the home ownership rate has been plummeting in a group that usually leads household formation:
Trulia_NoDegreeDownpayment_Infographic
In some parts of the country, going to college may delay your ability to build wealth:
millennials
In Las Vegas, households without a college degree can save for a down payment 1.5 years faster than those with a college degree.  This isn’t advocating for avoiding college altogether but as Greece is showing us, having way too much debt can be a really bad thing.  Education is vital but you have to question the underlying cost of what you are getting.  The Millennials that are doing well have access to capital and that is important:
“The study calls this a “funnel of privilege”: Young adults with rich parents soon become rich themselves.
“Haves are turning their riches or their wealth into bigger wealth because they are investing in the housing market by simply living in a house,” says Gudell. This advantage is one that these Millennials will carry forward as they earn more than their degree-less peers, and save more than those who were forced to throw away tens of thousands of dollars on rent due to their inability to buy. In the future, they’ll have wealth to pass down to their own kids, continuing the cycle.”
Homeownership is the main path for Americans to build wealth.  As the market has been pillaged by big Wall Street investors, the homeownership rate has collapsed all the while prices have gone up.  Those building their wealth (those who control stocks and real estate) can then pass that wealth down quickly to their children.  In the past, buying a home was a big part for the young emerging middle class.  Now, it is becoming more of a privilege to own a home especially in a more expensive metro area.  The study merely reveals something we probably already know: more wealth is being filtered into fewer hands.

Monday, March 12, 2018

Dr. Alan Beaulieu: US Economy to Skirt Recession Until 2019, Hit a Brick Wall in 2030

In a recent interview with Financial Sense Newshour, Dr. Alan Beaulieu, President of ITR Economics and author of the must-read book Prosperity in an Age of Decline, explained to listeners how the world's largest economy, the US, is likely to enter a Great Depression by 2030 given three very important trends: growing interest payments on debt, healthcare costs, and a return to higher levels of inflation.
As President of the "oldest, privately-held, continuously operating economic research and consulting firm in the US," Beaulieu noted the focus of their analysis is not to scare investors, but to face the objective reality of these forces and help business leaders respond appropriately to changing economic conditions.
Addressing the issue of indebtedness, Beaulieu noted how all western industrialized nations struggle with high debt to GDP ratios and this will only increase in the years ahead. In the US, according to projections by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, interest payments alone will consume substantial amounts of the federal budget in the decades ahead, he noted.
But the real trigger for a future crisis will likely start with Japan: “their numbers are worse than ours’ in terms of debt and demographics. They don’t have enough children and they don’t like immigration.” Eventually Beaulieu sees the Japanese government having to sell US Treasuries in such large quantities that it puts downward pressure on the US dollar and leads to higher interest rates. Japan “begins a trend that starts to snowball,” he said.
In this scenario, the US will not be well equipped to handle higher interest rates or a declining dollar in large part because of health care costs. Beaulieu predicts that the US—with the most expensive health care system in the world—will eventually suffer the consequences of out of control spending: “we can’t afford this system now… when you consider that 10,000 people a day are retiring you balloon the cost of the system as we move into the 2030 timeframe [and] it becomes unsustainable.” Beaulieu cited the high cost of end of life care as a particularly acute problem for the United States.
Inflation is also a major concern of Beaulieu in Prosperity in an Age of Decline. Looking back through history, he noted that deflationary trends last at most thirty years and believes in the coming decades we will be dealing with the negative effects of high inflation, even as few expect it now. “We have the trigger in place for everything we need for higher inflation,” Beaulieu asserts, including rising wages both in the US and around the world.
Beaulieu noted how in its initial stages everyone from bankers to wage earners welcome some inflation since it hides or "forgives a lot of sins," he said. But as happens all too often, policy makers are slow to respond to what eventually becomes a dramatic loss of purchasing power and central banks aggressively tighten. Beaulieu believes that by 2030 or so most major governments will be so pressured by demographic headwinds and debt that any additional borrowing or stimulus won’t work, sending the US and global economy into a severe contraction.

Though Beaulieu sees major trouble past the next decade, when asked about his outlook over the next year or two, he said they don't expect to see a US recession until 2019 and that we are likely to see a major transition from deflation/disinflation to rising inflation starting next year, which will be reflected in commodity prices and other asset classes that he outlined during the interview.

Scientists Find Ancient Seafloor on Mars Which Could Have Sustained Life

When popular culture examines what life might be like on Mars, one consistent theme comes up: big-headed, bug-eyed grey aliens sheltering from a constant red dust storm in the middle of the desert.
Why nobody’s set a Western on Mars yet is anyone’s guess, but in the meantime, it might be worth revisiting our stereotypes surrounding life on Mars, and what an ecosystem on the Red Planet might actually look like. As much fun as it is to think of Mars as basically a chalky red wasteland, this wasn’t always the case – millennia ago, the planet looked very different, with oceans and hot springs that weren’t unlike the watery covering that our planet currently sports.
Scientists examining craters on the surface of Mars that were once expansive seas now think that they might have discovered the most interesting spot yet; a so-called “cradle of life” that may have once been capable of supporting living creatures.
A new paper published in Nature Communications explains how a team of international scientists, examining the Eridania basin on the surface of Mars, have noted that coloration in the bedrock of the crater hints at a past time in the planet’s lifespan that would have been a pretty nice place to live – at least for some Earth creatures.
According to NASA’s Paul Niles:
Opening quote
“This site gives us a compelling story for a deep, long-lived sea and a deep-sea hydrothermal environment. It is evocative of the deep-sea hydrothermal environments on Earth, similar to environments where life might be found on other worlds – life that doesn’t need a nice atmosphere or temperate surface, but just rocks, heat, and water.”
Closing quote
From the sound of it, Mars was never exactly a perfect vacation destination (the temperature fluctuation alone should probably have tipped us off about that). That said, it’s interesting to think of how some particularly hardy micro-organisms could have got on just fine at the bottom of a Martian ocean.
This is particularly significant considering NASA’s recent attempts to study the atmosphere of Mars to make sure that, in sending rovers, we’re not accidentally contaminating Martian environments with our own scummy Earth bacteria. If we end up accidentally killing off alien life, or even drastically affecting their habitat, then we should be considering ourselves a big failure when it comes to the Prime Directive.

On the other hand, it’s nice to think that even a planet as inhospitable as Mars may have once played host to some form of living creature – or at the very least, been capable of supporting such organisms. If this is the case, we might not be all that alone even in this solar system.

Evidences of Nuclear Explosion in Mohenjo Daro

Mohenjo Daro (lit. Mound of the Dead, Sindhi: موئن جو دڙو, pronounced), situated in the province of Sindh, Pakistan, was one of the largest settlements of the ancient Indus Valley Civilization. Mohenjo Daro was built around 2600 BC and and continued to exist till about 1800 BC. The ruins of the city were discovered in 1922 by Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay, an officer of the Archaeological Survey of India. He was led to the mound by a Buddhist monk, who believed it to be a stupa. In the 1930s, massive excavations were conducted under the leadership of John Marshall, K. N. Dikshit, Ernest Mackay, and others.

When excavations of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro reached the street level, they discovered skeletons scattered about the cities, many holding hands and sprawling in the streets as if some instant, horrible doom had taken place. People were just lying, unburied, in the streets of what once happened to be a sprawling metropolis.  And these skeletons are thousands of years old, even by traditional archaeological standards. What could cause such a thing? Why did the bodies not decay or get eaten by wild animals? Furthermore, there is no apparent cause of a physically violent death. These skeletons are among the most radioactive ever found, on par with those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. An ancient, heavily populated city in Pakistan seemed to have been instantly destroyed 2,000 years before Christ by an incredible explosion that could only been caused by an atomic bomb.

At one site, Soviet scholars found a skeleton which had a radioactive level 50 times greater than normal. Other cities have been found in northern India that show indications of explosions of great magnitude. One such city, found between the Ganges and the mountains of Rajmahal, seems to have been subjected to intense heat. Huge masses of walls and foundations of the ancient city are fused together, literally vitrified! And since there is no indication of a volcanic eruption at Mohenjo-Daro or at the other cities, the intense heat to melt clay vessels can only be explained by an atomic blast or some other unknown weapon. The cities were wiped out entirely.
The David Davenport Angle to Mohenjo Daro Extinction [Quotes adapted directly from his works]
An ancient, heavily populated city in Pakistan was instantly destroyed 2,000 years before Christ by an incredible explosion that could only been caused by an atomic bomb. That’s the mind bogging conclusion of a British researcher, David Davenport, who spent 12 years studying ancient Hindu scripts and evidence at the site where the great city – Mohenjo Daro once stood. What was found at the site of Mohenjo Daro corresponds exactly to Nagasaki, declared Davenport, who published his startling findings in an amazing book, “Atomic Destruction in 2000 B.C.”, Milan, Italy, 1979.
There was an epicenter about 50 yards wide where everything was crystallized, fused or melted, he said. Sixty yards from the center the bricks are melted on one side indicating a blast. the horrible, mysterious event of 4,000 years ago that leveled Mohenjo Daro was recorded in an old Hindu manuscript called the Mahabharata, “White hot smoke that was a thousand times brighter than the sun rose in infinite brilliance and reduced the city to ashes, the account reads. Water boiled…horses and war chariots were burned by the thousands.. . the corpses of the fallen were mutilated by the terrible heat so that they no longer looked like human beings…”. The description concludes, “it was a terrible sight to see … never before have we seen such a ghastly weapon”.
Based on his study of many ancient manuscripts, Davenport believes that the end of Mohenjo Daro was tied to a state of war between the Aryans and the Dravidian. Aryans controlled regions where space aliens were mining minerals and exploiting other natural resources, he believes. Because it was a Dravidian city, the aliens had agreed to destroy Mohenjo Daro on behalf of the Aryans. The aliens needed the friendship of the Aryan kings so that they could continue their prospecting and research, explained Davenport. The texts tell us that 30,000 inhabitants of the city were given seven days to get out – a clear warning that everything was about to be destroyed. Obviously, some people didn’t heed the warning, because 44 human skeletons were found there in 1927, just a few years after the city was discovered.
All the skeletons were flattened to the ground. For example, a father, mother and child were found flattened in the street, face down and still holding hands. Interestingly, the ancient texts refer repeatedly to the Vimanas, or the flying cars, which fly under their own power, he added. Davenport’s intriguing theory has met with intense interest in the scientific community. Nationally known expert William Sturm said, “the melting of bricks at Mohenjo Daro could not have been caused by a normal fire”. Added professor Antonio Castellani, a space engineer in Rome, “it’s possible that what happened at Mohenjo Daro was not a natural phenomenon”.
David Davenport, who spent 12 years studying ancient Hindu scripts and evidence at the ancient site of Mohenjo-Daro, declared in 1996 that the city was instantly destroyed around 2,000 BC. The city ruins reveal the explosion’s epicenter which measures 50 yards wide. At that location everything was crystallized, fused or melted. Sixty yards from the center the bricks were melted on one side indicating a blast… the horrible mysterious event of 4000 years ago was recorded in the Mahabharata.

How did man 2000 tears before Christ have the the knowledge of not only producing such high degree of heat, but also harness the power of such high temperatures? If Mohanjo Daro was destroyed by a nuclear catastrophe, who designed and manufactured them? If not then what was used to produce such heat that vitrified rock and bricks? What could be attributed to the high degree of  radioactive traces in the skeletons? How did all of them die, in one instant? Its up to us whether we need answers to these questions or continue to live in a sanitized view of the world, as provided to us by mainstream scholarship.