For the example I provided, I worked at a sandwich shop. My boss had an average of 7 employees on the payroll throughout the years for that store. I started at $8.15/hr when I was in high school, and when I left a couple years later I was at $11/hr. As I mentioned, the average for the business was right at $10/hr.

As far as the $15/hr thing, I was drawing off the topic of the thread. If you never said that specifically, I apologize for the straw man. Several others in this thread have argued such however.

Wow, that ended up being quite an essay. For those with an aversion to reading something totally opposite their views for half an hour, here is what I think is the key paragraph:



The fact is that raising the minimum wage would lead to many businesses cutting their employees' hours, and others that would be forced to close their doors entirely. We're talking about a trade-off which would lead to some employees gaining a 'living wage,' and others losing a significant portion of their wage, possibly in its' entirety.

I worked for 5 years below the poverty line, very recently in fact. Yes, it is an excellent way to begin. Sure, I 'struggled,' but I still had a car, repairs to said car, a large screen television, cable, internet, water, electricity, a place where I paid rent to live, health insurance, car insurance, food, a gaming system, drinking money, spare cash to go out some nights, etc. I had plenty of coworkers who also had children and they made their way as well.

When a prospective employer sees that you've been with the same company for years, that is very good to have on a resume regardless of what the job was. In addition, you will pick up some skills whether that's just customer service or something else, however small. I learned how to talk with customers, how to take inventory, how to prepare and safely store food, how to accurately count money, as well as how to wash and dry dishes just to name a few. You can easily discount these things, but really these are excellent entry level skills to learn, and a solid base from which to move up from.

Further, if you are in the customer service business, you can end up chatting with people who upon seeing excellent service, and maybe even hearing about some of your other skills, could offer you a job. I got many offers over the years, from odd jobs, to job offers elsewhere in the customer service industry, even to programming jobs which is actually how I got my current job where I now get much higher pay and benefits.



I think plenty of businesses care about their employees. The majority of all jobs are in small businesses where the boss often has to interact with most if not all of their employees face to face, meaning they are forced, even if they don't want to, to see these people as humans just like them who have to support themselves. Further, having an employee who thinks you give a fluff about them and has a high morale leads to them being more productive for you. It's really in their best interest to treat you like a human being and pay you what they can afford , which is one of the reasons why these businesses run on such thin margins as it is.



Fortunately, every single employee in the USA is completely free to leave that job for another one if they think they are not getting a fair wage. Let me say that again: If an employee thinks they are not getting a fair wage, they can get another job where they will. If they can't, frankly they are probably overvaluing themselves.

Further, I think you are underestimating their generosity. The vast majority of businesses run on extremely small margins. Walmart for example, runs on ~3% margins. At one of the companys where I worked, the margins were around 10% and about $80k in profit for a business that cost $700k to purchase.

So this was a business making $80k in profits with 42 man hours needed a day. Going to $15/hr, would have been an average of a $5/hr wage increase. The store was closed Thanksgiving and Christmas, so that's 363 days a year. Rounding down, this would mean a $76k/year increase on a business that only was making a profit of $80k a year! You will say he should raise his prices, but this would be just as likely to just scare off customers to the bigger businesses which could absorb at least part of the losses. In fact, he played with the prices at one point and that is exactly what happened. He ended up making less money.

Raising the minimum wage would force small businesses to fire a lot of people, or go bankrupt. This would only give the big Corporashunzz even more wage pricing power, and would raise the barriers to entry for people who wanted to start a business. Frankly, I agree that handing these huge corporations even more employees, who can sometimes treat their employees like fluff, would be a bad thing. At the same time, what you're advocating for would lead to the precise conditions which would allow that to happen.

I think your hearts are truly in the right places, but the unintended consequences of these actions would be monumental.

I have yet to see anybody refute the math that SAM_DANGER presented earlier. While his numbers are a bit high, going from $8/hr rather than a probably more reasonable $10/hr, that would still mean the business is dramatically in the red.

Are you guys just going to continue to ignore this, or would you care to explain why he's wrong?

Linux FTW.

I was #9 and certainly did not get FA'd into the top 10.

Personally, I think it's a cheap tactic so I choose not to utilize it. However, I'm not going to go crying about it either. It's just that for me personally, I would not feel nearly as good about my finish if it wasn't something that I accomplished through my own skill and time invested into my country.

Literally half the servers are dedicated to this. This is the Alliance server. Meaning you have allies, meaning implicitly that they help you either directly or indirectly.



I honestly just wanted to thank you for using the correct phrase here. People saying 'I could care less' is probably my biggest pet peeve, and seems to be the way a majority of people now use this.



There is already a level playing field! The rules are the same for everybody. It's not as if the admins give extra turns or bonus effects to chosen players. That would indeed be an uneven playing field.

Your assertion that it's "the easiest thing in the world" to get a top 10, or even "realistically" the #1 spot is ridiculous. Ignoring the hyperbole, there are by my count at least 50 countries that land traded this past set. Obviously not all 50 can get into the top 10. So virtually by definition, only the best can get in. This means at least several sets of getting your ass kicked and sucking at life, because it's actually not that easy.

Yes, the land grabbing formulas are involved, but this is true for hostile grabbing as well. You seem to imply that this is the only thing involved, other factors still must be taken into account. There are land traders who will purposefully manipulate the situation according to the rules to fluff you over, and there are people who will grab you and try to outrun the retal by buying up a bunch of defense or otherwise manipulating their NW in order to try and prevent you from getting even returns. People can lie to you and fluff you over if you don't or can't spy op them. So you still need figure out who you can trade with, and who you should not trade with, just as you must with hostile landgrabbing where you need to make an assessment on whether it's a good idea to be hitting that country or not, and what to do after the hit.

What's with the FA allegations? #1 was sitting on 80k acres since land trading ended, surely he was set for a 300M set already. Then he pulled that land trading trick, which got him an extra few million in NW. Does anybody have any proof of FA or is this all essentially just baseless accusations?

You should probable put this in the Bugs and Suggestions forum.

I was having this problem a few hours ago, but it's now fixed for me.

LOL! Holy fluff, I'm dying over here! You guys are simply the best.

你們都黑鬼是瘋了

I must admit that I generally find iScode's posts antagonistic and in bad taste, but he hit the nail on the head with this one. Not only did you not really give him an answer, but he was deleted as if you had said he shouldn't do it, and then reinstated as if you had said he could, consequently losing him at least a day's worth of turns.

So I take this to mean if a country is langrabbing countries 2+ times willy nilly across several teams, whoever has been hit has the right to retal, whether that means SS/PS or killruns?

Dude, it's a fluffing dollar. This could happen literally 10 million times and at BEST, $200/NW, that would be 50k NW off a finish.

I'm pretty sure qz's got enough on his plate that fixing a bug that costs a dollar, and sounds like it would take quite a bit of work to change, is, and *should* be the last thing on his list.

Yes, all pilots of large commercial planes, meaning basically any 7*7 knows English. It is the international standard for international flight communications.

Hmm, why are the dollar values truncated, and *before* adding them up? Since these are dollar amounts, it might make sense to include the decimals (cents) in the addition before truncating/rounding.

I believe this is his gripe, and to be honest I've always wondered why there aren't cents included in your on hand cash in the first place.

Always? All you have to do is grab people once, and stop there. If you hit someone more than once, expect to have your set go straight down the fluffter.

I'll be on XBL playing ghosts later. My gamertag is EddieTheBearJew if anyone wants to add me.

Almost 600.

I actually had not gotten this in a few days, but it just popped up once in FFA.

I understand perfectly. I'm saying that they are equivalent.

Further, it would be absolutely trivial to add this into eestats or earthgraphs. It really couldn't be more than ten lines of code at the absolute most for a basic version of it.

Just subtract current time by time of hit, and plug it into the equations for min (H=19.8) and max (H=24) DR. Calculating the multiplier would be only slightly more. Hell, if someone tells me how to get ahold of this guy, I'll do it for him.

Xinhuan, I honestly never thought I'd see the day when one of your posts was even the slightest bit incorrect and I would get to correct you. To be perfectly honest, it gives me a bit of a thrill.

The parentheses doesn't matter in this case. Go ahead and test it either way, the result is the same.

Here is the formula for calculating DR ripped straight from the Announcement:

For each hit within the past 72 hours, add 1/2^(T/H) where T is how many hours have passed since the hit, and H is the halflife, for which I substitute 22 for an average oversend of about 130%, or 30% past exact break. For each outgoing hit, subtract 1/2^(T/H). The maximum a halflife can be is 24 hours, which is a 150% oversend or higher, so you can use this number to get the most conservative estimate. If a hit is a DH, use H=19.8 as a conservative estimate.

Then to get the multiplier, take DR and plug it into the following formula: 0.1+(((DR-13)^2)/135). Obviously if this number is above 1, that means 100% returns since returns do not go above 100%. If you solve for DR, you find that this will equal 1 if DR is less than or equal to 1.98.

To get the ghost acres multiplier, follow the above process but don't subtract anything for offensive attacks, since offensive attacks don't negate ghost DR.

I'm not sure if set-long man to man DR is applicable on this server, but if it is make the halflife 168 (7 days) for targets where you have hit them at any point during the set, and of course fill in T hours since your hit on them.

Again, this is all taken directly from the announcement regarding the change.