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#Monopoly money amount
wintav · 2 years
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Monopoly money amount
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#MONOPOLY MONEY AMOUNT DOWNLOAD#
Although it is possible for this to happen, it is not really necessary. The bank actually has a privilege, it can release more money by printing or simply writing additional customized monopoly money as much as the players need. What happens if the bank runs out of money in Monopoly? The money will be used to buy houses and hotels and also pay taxes, fines, and bills. Those also help to run the game, such as paying fines and taxes. When sharing the money evenly to all players, the bank has their own savings. The amount of those money are divided into some various denominations, two sheets of $500, four sheets of $100, one sheet of $50, one sheet of $20, two sheets of $10, one sheet of $5, and five sheets of $1. When the game begins, each player will receive the monopoly money as much as $1,500 dollars. How much money do you get at the start of Monopoly? For instance, picking a wrong color for a certain denomination. This will be helpful for us in reducing mistakes.
#MONOPOLY MONEY AMOUNT DOWNLOAD#
If we want to create DIY monopoly money, download monopoly money templates. Each denomination has a specific distinguishing color. Currency denominations that usually appear in the form $1, $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100. It is useful for operating activities that exist in monopoly games, including buying hotels, houses, paying water and electricity bills, and paying fines and taxes. This monopoly money only applies to monopoly games. Monopoly money refers to a transaction instrument in the form of banknotes.
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visualwint · 2 years
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Monopoly money amount
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#Monopoly money amount how to#
"Making someone go bankrupt isn't quite as complicated as world domination," Myers said.
#Monopoly money amount how to#
So, what's next for Myers and his son? They'll try to figure out how to play the shortest game of Risk, which he predicts will be more difficult. Because currency denominations rapidly lose value, printed bills will. In an interview that will air on All Things Considered today, Myers said he is confident they've figured it out. Refers to currencies that have suffered or continue to suffer from hyperinflation. Statistically speaking, it would happen "once every 253,899,891,671,040 games," Josh Whitford, an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University, says.įor a long time, Myers and his son have tried to figure out how to shorten length of time it takes to play Monopoly, to refute critics who complain the Hasbro (nee Parker Brothers) board game is a waste of time. So, what is the statistical probability of that particular game happening? "And the other one ends up drawing a Chance card that sends them to Boardwalk, and they don't have enough money to pay the rent with three houses, and the game is over." "One player moves around the board very quickly, to buy Boardwalk and Park Place, and places houses on them," Myers explained. (You can read the entire play-by-play after the jump, originally posted on Scatterplot.) Myers, a professor of sociology at Notre Dame University, told NPR's Robert Siegel. The shortest possible game of Monopoly requires only four turns, nine rolls of the dice, and twenty-one seconds, Daniel J.
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hotpiner · 2 years
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Monopoly money amount
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MONOPOLY MONEY AMOUNT FREE
2008, the money was divided as follows in the U.S. Also, new bills were added, all the bills including the new ones are as it follows:Įach player begins the game with $1500 (or 1500 of a localized currency) in play money. 2022) edition has a total of $118,660, with 45 of each bill denomination. In addition, the colors of some of the bills have been changed $10 notes are now blue instead of yellow, $20 notes are a brighter color green than before, $50 notes are now purple instead of blue, and $500 note are more are a darker orange the before. 2008) editions have a total of $20,580, with 30 of each bill denomination. Whenever a Chance or Community Chest card requires a fee, it is paid to Free.
MONOPOLY MONEY AMOUNT FREE
Older versions had a total of $15,140 in the following amounts/colors: The simplest house rule places a 50 or 100 bill under the Free Parking spot and replenishes it whenever it is 'won.' Some players prefer a graduated payout beginning at 1 and moving up one bill increment each time it is claimed to 5, 10 and subsequent amounts. version has changed with the newer release versions. Therefore, to answer the question: how much money is in a monopoly game, as mentioned above, each player gets the same amount of 1500 which is their. Properties can be Mortgaged in order to borrow money from The Bank. Monopoly Money (or Munny) is what players use to buy properties, construct buildings, trading, and pay rents, fines, or taxes. For information on the actual medium of exchange, see: Monopoly Dollar This article is about the concept and use of money in the game rules.
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hussyknee · 7 months
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loverboyromanroy · 1 year
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also this secondary succession pr package…pure insanity
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zvaigzdelasas · 2 months
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[BBC is UK State Media]
Truong My Lan is charged with taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. Prosecutors say $27bn may never be recovered.[...]
The evidence is in 104 boxes weighing a total of six tonnes [!!!]. Eighty-five defendants are on trial with Truong My Lan, who denies the charges. She and 13 others face a possible death sentence.
"There has never been a show trial [sic] like this, I think, in the communist era," says David Brown, a retired US state department official with long experience in Vietnam. "There has certainly been nothing on this scale."
The trial is the most dramatic chapter so far in the "Blazing Furnaces" anti-corruption campaign led by the Communist Party Secretary-General, Nguyen Phu Trong.
A conservative [sic] ideologue [sic] steeped in Marxist theory, Nguyen Phu Trong believes that popular anger over untamed corruption poses an existential threat to the Communist Party's monopoly on power. He began the campaign in earnest in 2016 after out-manoeuvring the then pro-business prime minister to retain the top job in the party.
The campaign has seen two presidents and two deputy prime ministers forced to resign, and hundreds of officials disciplined or jailed. Now one of the country's richest women could join their ranks.[...]
Although Vietnam is best known outside the country for its fast-growing manufacturing sector, as an alternative supply chain to China, most wealthy Vietnamese made their money developing and speculating in property.
All land is officially state-owned. Getting access to it often relies on personal relationships with state officials. Corruption escalated as the economy grew, and became endemic.
By 2011, Truong My Lan was a well-known business figure in Ho Chi Minh City, and she was allowed to arrange the merger of three smaller, cash-strapped banks into a larger entity: Saigon Commercial Bank.
Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan actually owned more than 90% [!!!] of Saigon Commercial.
They accuse her of using that power to appoint her own people as managers, and then ordering them to approve hundreds of loans to the network of shell companies she controlled.
The amounts taken out are staggering. Her loans made up 93% [!!!] of all the bank's lending.
According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement.
That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam's largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes.[!!!!!][...]
David Brown believes she was protected by powerful figures who have dominated business and politics in Ho Chi Minh City for decades. And he sees a bigger factor in play in the way this trial is being run: a bid to reassert the authority of the Communist Party over the free-wheeling business culture of the south.
"What Nguyen Phu Trong and his allies in the party are trying to do is to regain control of Saigon, or at least stop it from slipping away.[...]
faster growth in Vietnam almost inevitably means more corruption [sic]. Fight corruption too much [sic], and you risk extinguishing a lot of economic activity.
10 Apr 24
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bibiundtinaundzombies · 3 months
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au in which robert, the starks and the lannisters play monopoly instead of going hunting and pushing each other‘s kids from towers.
tyrion implements a tax system to make things more interesting and fights cersei over the cat for a solid ten minutes.
around thirty minutes into the game, catelyn realizes that she has free will and stops paying taxes.
arya and sansa haggle over new york avenue, which ends up being bought by theon. this causes the two to completely cast aside their differences, ally and subsequently start doing everything in their power to make theon‘s life hell.
theon himself is quite severely stoned the entire time throughout.
ned enters horrendous debt pretty much immediately and, after two hours of being financially sucked dry by both cersei and his tax evader of a wife, decides to just place his figurine in jail and never leave.
jon, playing the dog, controls the railroads and makes jaime, playing the ship, go completely broke within minutes. being beaten by a bastard and officially the first to lose the game makes jaime so mad he spends the rest of the evening perched on the family‘s ancestral armchair eating flaming hot cheetos and stifling sobs.
cersei is holding onto her last two dollars and her one house in atlantic avenue like a maniac and evades taxes like it‘s an olympic sport. she claims ownership of kentucky avenue on the grounds that red is her house‘s color at least twice. after three hours, she‘s consumed enough vintage red to kill a large mammal and keeps quoting the art of war. fascinatingly enough, she never goes completely broke.
robert, just as broke and drunk as his wife but not nearly as ferocious, proposes marriage for tax advantages to bran, who is in possession of the boardwalk and lets him dangle on his proposition for two rounds before accepting and feeling like a benevolent god.
sansa sees this and immediately proposes to arya, who accepts, only for them to be sued by their mother for public indecency („you‘re siblings, jesus christ!“). arya argues that this is just a game and that one could argue that robert‘s and bran‘s marital alliance is just as if not even more inappropriate, considering that bran is seven and robert thirtyseven. sansa countersues her mother for tax evasion, who promises she‘ll drop her lawsuit if her daughters let her keep hoarding perverse amounts of wealth. „love wins!“ arya says, which causes jaime, still perched on the armchair but now eating old nan‘s home made whiskey truffles, to hysterically sob. cersei stares him down.
robb, in a rare moment of almost prophetic foresight, excuses himself one hour in and goes on a very, VERY long walk with grey wind.
tyrion, whose tax system has spectacularly backfired in his face, proposes marriage to catelyn, jon and cersei in rapid succession, who all turn him down. „i wish i was the monster you think i am. i wish i had enough poison for the whole pack of you. i would gladly give my life to watch you all swallow it.“ he screams before he leaves the table.
at that, joffrey, who has refused to participate and instead sits on the couch playing doom on his nintendo ds, starts hysterically laughing. tyrion turns on his heel and awards his nephew with the bitchslap of the century. this causes cersei to completely abandon the game and chase after him with a broom. catelyn makes sure that everyone is distracted by the lannister antics and then reaches across the table and bags cersei‘s money and properties.
with a heavy heart, myrcella trades arya and sansa one of her limited edition bayala schleich unicorns for park place.
at this point, the game is between the tycoons that are catelyn and jon, the bran-robert alliance, the arya-sansa-alliance, and ned, who is still in jail and watching ice hockey on his phone under the table. that is when catelyn hears rickon gagging and discovers that he, in the absence of tyrion, the self declared bank manager, has managed to eat all bank notes from the box.
rickon gets his stomach pumped, cersei and tyrion have both been arrested, theon is still stoned, arya, sansa and myrcella have wandered off to go play schleich horses, and jon remains at the table, alone, content, and quietly considering himself the winner.
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Ticketmaster jacks us for billions so it can pocket millions
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NEXT WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.
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Corruption is a system of concentrated gains and diffused costs: cheaters make a lot of money, and their victims each lose a little. The cheater has a much larger pool of money to spend on keeping the scam going, and the victims need to pay again to fight the cheater.
Actually, it's worse. The victim pays once when they are cheated, then, they pay a second time (in time and/or money) when they fight back against the cheater.
But in order to fight back effectively, the victims need to band together – it doesn't make sense for one victim to pony up to counter the cheater, because the cheater stole from a lot of people and can therefore spend far more than the victim lost and still come out ahead.
This is the third time the victim pays: they pay the "collective action" tax of locating other victims, agreeing to a common strategy for fighting back, and then coordinating with all those co-victims to keep the campaign up.
But actually, it's even worse. Because most corruption isn't just dishonest, it's incredibly wasteful. Corruption involves stealing ten dollars from you to make a dime for the cheater. The polluter who gives you cancer rather than cleaning up their industrial process costs you millions in medical bills – and maybe costs your family the lifelong trauma and expense of living with your death. They pocket an infinitesimal fraction of those costs. The rest is just wasted. They're setting your house on fire to spare themselves the cost of a match to light their cigar.
This is yet another way in which the deck is stacked in favor of corruption. A victim of corruption is placed in a condition of precarity and misery from which is it difficult to marshal a counteroffensive. The cheater, meanwhile, is made stronger and more comfortable by their corrupt activities. Immiserated victims must undertake the hard, ongoing work of acting together to be effective against the cheater. The cheater answers only to themself, avoiding the collective action costs that the victims pay every time they seek to act.
All of this is why we have governments. A government is (said to be) a democratically accountable way to meet the concentrated power of the corrupt with the concentrated power of the victims of corruption. Governments are many things, but they are especially a way of solving the collective action problem of enforcing the rules against cheaters. This is partially in service to justice – no one likes to be cheated, and a society of rampant and routine cheating is unstable and prone to collapse.
But it's also a matter of efficiency. While it makes a certain kind of selfish sense for the cheater to liquidate our dollar to make their penny, from a societal perspective, it's a catastrophe. Letting Wall Street slumlords corner regional markets in single family dwellings makes large amounts of money for their investors, but it costs those cities unimaginable amounts in public services as their housing stock decays, homelessness spikes, and schools and public services crumble for want of local taxes.
The paltry sums that Flint's creditors extracted by insisting on switching to a chlorinated water-supply that leeched lead out of the city's water infrastructure are crumbs compared to the vast, lifelong costs of giving an all the children in a city lead poisoning, to say nothing of the costs to the city as a city nor forever tainted by this unspeakably evil crime.
This is why inequality – and its handmaiden, monopoly – is so dangerous. The more concentrated private wealth becomes, the harder it is for the state to police, and the more likely it is that this private wealth will corrupt our officials. We see this all around us – for example, when Supreme Court justices receive lavish gifts from billionaires whom they later rule in favor of:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/06/clarence-thomas/#harlan-crow
Through the neoliberal era – the past forty years of billionaire-friendly Reaganomics – we've seen increasing concentration in wealth, coupled to increasing collusion between the wealthy and the government to protect the corrupt against the public. Think of the IRS's long decay, in which it turned a blind eye to increasingly blatant tax evasion by the ultra-wealthy, while training its fire on working people who fudge a few bucks on their returns:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/13/taxes-are-for-the-little-people/#leona-helmsley-2022
Likewise, think of the governmental obsession with "welfare cheats," no matter what the cost to families who are kicked off food stamps and Medicaid:
https://armandalegshow.com/episode/medicaid-enrollment/
All this in the midst of a corporate crime-wave that is not only unpunished, it's utterly unremarked-upon:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/07/solar-panel-for-a-sex-machine/#a-single-proposition
This emphasis on benefits cheating and indifference to corporate crime really highlights the drag that corruption places on a society's efficiency. Even if you believe that there's a lot of welfare fraud (there isn't!), the dollar in "undeserved" food stamps spent by a cheater costs society…a dollar. Meanwhile the dollar that a corporate criminal makes by skimping on workplace safety costs society thousands of dollars to care for the worker who is then maimed on the job.
This is very easy to see in the world of corporate environmental crime. The "social cost of carbon" measures the total cost of pollution: the injuries caused by marinating in fossil fuel extraction, processing and combustion byproducts; as well as the loss of life and property from climate events. These costs are blistering, so high that every MWh of renewable power we bring online saves us $100 in social carbon costs:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon
Governments that sleep on corporate crime are objectively governing badly. That's why the antitrust failures of every US presidential administration from Carter to Trump are so damning: they set the stage for later corruption that would not only be carried out on a larger scale than smaller firms could accomplish, but also for those large firms to corrupt the political process.
This is the Ticketmaster story. The superpredator that is today's Ticketmaster is the end-point of a series of ever-more corrupt mergers, waved through by every-more pliable presidential administrations. It was bad enough when Bush I allowed Ticketmaster to gobble up Ticketron in 1990. After all, the company had already proven itself to be a cesspit of corrupt, bullying activity.
The Ticketron acquisition kicked off a two-decade-long corporate crime-spree that produced a mountain of evidence proving Ticketmaster's nature as an inherently corrupt enterprise that acquired power for the purpose of abusing that power, at the expense of creative workers, the public, and the owners of venues:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taking-on-ticketmaster-67440/
Despite this, the Obama administration waved through an acquisition that was obviously far more dangerous that the Ticketron caper: the 2010 merger between Ticketmaster and the concert promoter Live Nation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Nation_Entertainment#History
After a decade and a half of vertical monopoly power – Ticketmaster/Live Nation controlling ticketing, promotion and venues – the company has grown from a dangerous octopus with its tentacles twined around the industry into a kraken that is strangling every kind of live event and everyone who earns a living from them. This has produced an ever-more obvious string of scandals, most notably the company's assault on Swifties:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/20/anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-will-eventually-stop/
A combination of mounting public outrage (with Swifties at the vanguard) and the Biden administration's generational enthusiasm for smashing corporate power has led, at last, to a reckoning with the Ticketmaster kraken:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/30/nix-fix-the-tix/#something-must-be-done-there-we-did-something
Ticketmaster is a famously opaque organization. When Rebecca Giblin and I were working on Chokepoint Capitalism, our book on monopoly and creative labor markets, we were able to speak on the record to insiders from every part of the industry, except live performance:
https://chokepointcapitalism.com/
As soon as we raised Ticketmaster/Live Nation with club owners and other events industry insiders, they'd go pale and quiet and tell us that they didn't feel comfortable staying on the record. TM/LN has a well-deserved mafia-style reputation for savage retaliation against snitches.
With the DOJ Antitrust Division chasing Ticketmaster through the courts, we're starting to get a rare, on-the-record glimpse of TM/LN's operations, as its internal documents find their pay into court records. In response Ticketmaster's spokesliars have embarked on an epic spin campaign, to "contextualize" these damning numbers and paint the company as a weak, low-margin business that has been unfairly set-upon by the bullies at the DOJ.
In his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller offers a spectacular, must-read breakdown of these documents and the ensuing spin:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/is-ticketmaster-telling-the-truth
Stoller starts with Ticketmaster's insistence that it is barely profitable. Though this is true on paper, the numbers just don't add up. For one thing, anyone who's bought a ticket can see, printed on its face, TM's junk fees: "a 'service fee' without any obvious service [and] a 'convenience fee' that is anything but convenient."
Far more damning is a comparison between the price of a Ticketmaster ticket in the US vs the EU. The EU has legally mandated competitive ticketing, and the tickets there are far cheaper. A US ticket to see Taylor Swift will run you $2,600 – the same ticket costs $340 in the EU. As Stoller writes:
An American could fly to Paris, spend a few nights at a nice hotel, see a Taylor Swift concert, and fly back, for less than it costs to see that same show in the U.S.
How to make sense of this contradiction? How can Ticketmaster show such a low profit margin on its books but somehow end up costing event-goers such an absurd premium?
Start with the fact that Ticketmaster has three businesses, not just one. They sell tickets, but they also promote concerts (that is, front the money for personnel, travel and marketing), and they also own a bunch of the largest and most profitable venues in the country.
This allows them to play a shell-game that's very similar to (and possibly not actually different from) money-laundering, where money is shuffled between entities in order to shield it from creditors, suppliers or tax agents:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/explosive-new-documents-unearthed
But this presents a problem for Ticketmaster. They're a publicly traded company and their investors demand high returns. And unlike performers or venue owners, investors have power over Ticketmaster management. Keeping "margin per ticket" number as low as possible lets Ticketmaster minimize the revenue it has to share with the people who actually do the work and invest the capital in live performances. But for investors, they need to show another number, one that's as high as possible, to keep the investors happy.
That number is "Adjusted Operating Income" or AOI. While gross margins are the difference between the face value of a ticket and the sum remitted to the venue and the performer, AOI factors in all the other revenue TM/LN books from that ticket, like kickbacks. TM/LN's AOI is very healthy: it's 37% on tickets and 61% on promotions.
Those sums delight TM/LN's investors, and they express their joy through lavish executive compensation packages. CEO Michael Rapino is America's fifth-highest paid CEO, at $139m/year (that's eight times the Fortune 500 average). His sidekick Joe Berchtold is America's highest paid CFO, at $54m. The total AOI for TM/LN is $732m/year – and 19% of that is being paid to two of its execs.
But LN/TM has a third line of business: operating venues. The AOI for these venues is just 1.7%. If this were a normal, cutthroat business, you'd expect those same return-focused investors to insist on their handsomely compensated execs selling off that low-margin turkey. But nevertheless, TM/LN keeps those venues on its books.
When those execs talk to the public, they use the poor profit margins of ticketing and the poor AOI on venues to plead poverty: "how can we be a monopoly when we're barely scraping by?"
But when they talk to the investors who decide whether to pay them 800% of the S&P500 average, they are more forthcoming.
Keeping the margins low on tickets – and making up the money with kickbacks and other corrupt payments – means that potential rival ticketing firms can't afford to get into the business. Without the venue and promotion business, those rivals wouldn't be able to command kickbacks. They'd have to subsist on the rock-bottom margins that are competitive with Ticketmaster.
Likewise those venues: ownership of key venues lets Ticketmaster/Live Nation force out credible rivals in important markets, and keep new ones from emerging, because again, they'd have to make a living on that paltry 1.7% AOI (or the even lower profit margins!).
As Joe Berchtold, the highest-paid CFO in America, told an analyst:
I don't think Concerts AOI per fan is a logical way to look at it. I think if you look at how we've talked about our business, we've talked about our business across the multiple pieces. So you have to look at it, what's the concerts plus sponsorship plus ticketing AOI per fan.
Berchtold is paid roughly $26,000/hour. Those words take roughly 25 seconds to utter, so that's a $7.20 explanation, but it contains a wealth of information – it's basically the DoJ's case in a nutshell.
But Stoller points out a curious fact that isn't captured here. Remember when I told you that TM/LN's NOI is $732m/year? What I didn't mention is the company's gross revenue: $16.7 billion.
When TM/LN talks about how shitty their business is, and therefore they can't be a monopoly, this is the trump card. How could a company creaming off a mere $732 million off $16.7 billion in gross revenue be a monopolist with "pricing power"?
This is where understanding corruption helps clarify our understanding and cut through the bullshit. Corruption is vastly wasteful. In order to extract $732m from $16.7b, TM/LN has to engage in a lot of wasteful and corrupt activities. They have to bribe other key players in the system, spend vast fortunes on lobbying, and generally do a lot of unproductive things with their money.
This is concentrated gains and diffuse losses. In order to command the highest salary of any American CFO, Berchtold has to cook up and maintain this process. In order to earn his $139m/year, Rapino has to play mafia don and keep everyone is his supply chain sufficiently terrorized or sufficiently greased to maintain omerta.
These two men take home a fifth of Ticketmaster's net income because they possess a rare and valuable skill. They are able to obfuscate a corrupt arrangement, enrobing it in layers of performative complexity, until the average musician, concertgoer, or lawmaker, can't understand it. Any attempt to unravel it will induce a deadly, soporific confusion. The investment industry term for his is MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over), the weaponization of complexity. A skilled MEGO artist can convince you that the pile of shit they're peddling is so large that there must be a pony under it somewhere.
Here's Stoller, de-MEGOfying the TM/LN story:
Live Nation has a giant capital intensive unprofitable division of putting on concerts, from which it skims for its real cash flow. But this leverage among different subsidiaries means that it has an incentive to push up the cost of concerts overall, not just for its own profit. This incentive operates in two different ways. One, since ticket fees are based on the price of a ticket, Live Nation seeks higher prices for tickets so it can move more cash to its Ticketmaster subsidiary. And two, since Live Nation itself gets rebates by overpaying for venues, it has the incentive to push up the cost of shows. No one can undercut Live Nation, as it’s a monopoly.
You might think that this is a lot of mental energy to expend on understanding live performances. If you're not trying to see Taylor Swift, does any of this matter?
It assuredly does. Understanding how Ticketmaster's shell-game works is critical to understanding the similar shell-games played by many other kinds of monopolists, who have wrapped their tentacles around all the other parts of our lives. As David Dayen and Lindsay Owens write for The American Prospect, the companies that avoided monopoly prosecution by ripping off suppliers have bled those suppliers dry, and now they're coming for their customers:
https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-03-age-of-recoupment/
From groceries to plane tickets, rent to cab rides, Amazon to Ticketmaster, we are living through the "Age of Recoupment," when the long con of lowering prices to secure monopolies flips enters it final stage: greedflating the shit out of customers, and using the monopolist's power over regulators to avoid consequences.
Today, everywhere consumers turn, whether they are shopping for groceries at the local Kroger or for plane tickets online, they are being gouged. Landlords are quietly utilizing new software to band together and raise rents. Uber has been accused of raising the price of rides when a customer’s phone battery is drained. Ticketmaster layers on additional fees as you move through the process of securing seats to your favorite artist’s upcoming show. Amazon’s secret pricing algorithm, code-named “Project Nessie,” was designed to identify products where it could raise prices, on the expectation that competitors would follow suit. Companies are forcing you into monthly subscriptions for a tube of toothpaste. Banks have crept up the price of credit, so customers who cannot afford price-gouging in their everyday transactions get a second round of price-gouging when they put purchases on credit. Expedia is using demographic and purchase history data to set hotel pricing for an audience of one: you.
When these companies end up in front of angry attorneys general, DOJ lawyers, or an FTC investigation, they'll use the Ticketmaster/Live Nation playbook to try and wriggle off the hook. They'll point to some barely-profitable (or money-losing) part of their business and say, "How could a monopolist possibly be running a business this shitty?"
If the DOJ makes its case against Ticketmaster, it will set a precedent, both in court and in policy circles, for understanding how a monopolist's corruption works. Monopolists aren't always businesses with gigantic margins. Like other criminals, their corruption can produce spectacular wealth and spectacular waste at the same time.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/03/aoi-aoi-oh/#concentrated-gains-vast-diffused-losses
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ms-demeanor · 10 months
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Since some people might want a Mac, I'll offer a Mac equivalent of your laptop guide from the perspective of a Mac/Linux person.
Even the cheapest Macs cost more than Windows laptops, but part of that is Apple not making anything for the low end of the tech spectrum. There is no equivalent Mac to an Intel i3 with 4 gigabytes of RAM. This makes it a lot easier to find the laptop you need.
That said, it is possible to buy the wrong Mac for you, and the wrong Mac for you is the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar. Get literally anything else. If it has an M2 chip in it, it's the most recent model and will serve you well for several years. Any new MacBook Air is a good pick.
(You could wait for new Macs with M3, but I wouldn't bother. If you are reading these guides the M3 isn't going to do anything you need done that a M2 couldn't.)
Macs now have integrated storage and memory, so you should be aware that whatever internal storage and RAM you get, you'll be stuck with. But if you would be willing to get a 256 gig SSD in a Windows laptop, the Mac laptop with 256 gigs of storage will be just as good, and if you'd be willing to get 8 gigs of RAM in a Windows laptop the Mac will perform slightly better with the same amount of memory.
Buy a small external hard drive and hook it up so Time Machine can make daily backups of your laptop. Turn on iCloud Drive so your documents are available anywhere you can use a web browser. And get AppleCare because it will almost certainly be a waste of money but wooooooow will you be glad it's there if you need it.
I get that you are trying to help and I am not trying to be mean to you specifically, but people shouldn't buy apple computers. That's why I didn't provide specs for them. Apple is a company that is absolutely terrible to its customers and its customers deserve better than what apple is willing to offer.
Apple charges $800 to upgrade the onboard storage from a 256GB SSD to a 2TB SSD.
A 2TB SSD costs between $75-100.
I maintain that any company that would charge you more than half the cost of a new device to install a $100 part on day one is a company making the wrong computer for you.
The point of being willing to tolerate a 256GB SSD or 8GB RAM in a Windows laptop is that you're deferring some of the cost to save money at the time of purchase so that you can spend a little bit in three years instead of having to replace the entire computer. Because, you see, many people cannot afford to pay $1000 for a computer and need to buy a computer that costs $650 and will add $200 worth of hardware at a later date.
My minimum specs recommendations for a mac would be to configure one with the max possible RAM and SSD, look at the cost, and choose to go buy three i7 windows laptops with the same storage and RAM for less than the sticker price of the macs.
So let's say you want to get a 14" Macbook pro with the lowest-level processor. That's $2000. Now let's bump that from 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD to 32GB and 2TB. That gets you to $3000. (The SSD is $200 less than on the lower model, and they'll let you put in an 8TB SSD for $1800 on this model; that's not available on the 13" because apple's product development team is entirely staffed by assholes who think you deserve a shitty computer if you can't afford to pay the cost of two 1991 Jeep Cherokee Laredos for a single laptop).
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For $3000 you can get 3 Lenovo Workstation laptops with i7 processors, 32GB RAM, and a 2TB SSD.
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And look, for just $200 more I could go up to 48GB RAM and get a 4TB SSD - it costs $600 to upgrade the 14" mac from a 2TB SSD to a 4TB SSD so you could still get three laptops with more ram and the same amount of storage for the cost of one macbook.
I get that some people need to use Final Cut and Logic Pro, but hoo boy they sure are charging you through the nose to use products that have become industry standard. The words "capture" and "monopoly" come to mind even though they don't quite apply here.
"Hostile" does, though, especially since Mac users end up locked into the ecosystem through software and cloud services and become uncertain how to leave it behind if they ever decide that a computer should cost less than a month's rent on a shitty studio apartment in LA.
There's a very good reason I didn't give mac advice and that's because my mac advice is "DON'T."
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chaoticace2005 · 4 months
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Reasons why Niffty might be so small:
(Related: list of why she has one eye.)
1. To represent the fact that her whole life she felt looked down on by people living in the world as a mixed-race woman in the 50s
2. So she can crawl through the vents easily.
3. Budget cuts. All the money for height was used on Angel, Sir Pentious and Valentino. So there was very little left for Niffty.
4. She was one of Santa’s elves until she fled to become a dentist.
5. Why aren’t YOU that short? God, some people!
6. Everyone else is abnormally tall.
7. To stab people’s ankles when they least expect it.
8. So she can be closer to the floor and closer to the bugs.
9. So she can fit in the oven to take naps.
10. It’s a good size to sneak up behind someone while they’re talking and stab them :)
11. Angel stole it from her.
12. She’s half Egg Boi.
13. With deals with Alastor when you trade away your soul you also trade away part of your height. This happened to Husk too to a lesser extent and is why Alastor can grow to be so tall.
14. She’s a bug puppeting a doll of a demon. This was the biggest size they had.
15. She was actually really tall in life and this is her eternal punishment.
16. Unlike the other characters she never got out through a taffy puller.
17. She’d be too powerful if she was any larger.
18. You need to sleep to grow. Niffty never does.
19. She’s Alastor’s ventriquist dummy
20. So her eye to body size ration is REALLY out of wack
21. She lost the bottom half of her body in the Great Pirate War
22. To consolidate her power. Short people contain energy in a smaller amount of space, making it more pressurized, the more pressure the more powerful.
23. The ears Alastor has actually used to be her feet, but she didn’t want them so she gave them away.
24. Rosie and Alastor got hungry once
25. Every kill she has takes a mm from her height (you don’t want to know how tall she was originally.)
26. So she can be closer in size to her greatest love, a roomba with knives.
27. She knife monopolied too hard once. Got in debt, you can fill in the blanks.
28. So her enemies underestimate her
29. So she can hide under your bed and you will NEVER know :)
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if Lokius becomes canon there needs to be a scene where everyone in the TVA is playing Monopoly (no one knows about Lokius yet) and Mobius is the banker rather than an actual player so when Loki lands on a space where he has to pay a lot of money Mobius will go “okay you gotta give up x amount of dollars” and Loki just gives him a seductive look and go “do I have to?” And Sylvie slams her hands down on the table and yells “THIS BITCH IS FUCKING THE BANKER!”
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that-house · 1 month
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can you tell us more about dronestrike & the campaign theyre from?
just read thhe post about it & immediately became obsessed
(context: Dronestrike is my warrior cats OC, an american imperialist robot cat the size of a horse and equipped with enough firepower to wipe out the clans if it seems like they're at risk of falling to communism. in the oneshot he accidentally fired a nuke at the city of LA and blamed "every other country" in a phone call with Bidenstar to avoid getting in trouble)
it wasn't a campaign, just an 11-person oneshot in the single most chaotic discord voice call I have ever been in. so i haven't played him since then, nor will i ever play him again
i can provide you a variety of facts about him i came up with after the fact though because he's a funny enough character that i can't stop thinking about him:
his brain is composed of three parts with an equal amount of control over his actions: the soul of a vietnam veteran, an AI replica of a cat, and every single super bowl halftime commercial
he comes armed with combat knives for claws, a machine gun in his mouth, a high caliber sniper rifle built into his spine, a pistol that he somehow uses with cat paws, and a douglas air-2 genie air-to-air unguided nuclear missile
transition could not save him because all trans people are godless communists who bully him on twitter
Dronestrike acknowledges every independence movement if only so that America has more countries to eventually colonize
he has read Marx so he can misuse quotes and flex on any marxists who haven't read theory
his greatest wish is for america to have won 'nam
doesn’t really have any physical possessions because he’s a cat who doesn’t have pockets or a permanent residence. he does however have $8.6 million in Shell oil stock
Dronestrike if he played League of Legends: only plays champs who have america-themed skins, but doesn’t actually own the skins because that would be giving money to a chinese company. plays all of them jungle to poor results. iron 4 two thousand games this season
has no mouth but wishes he did so he could taste the burgers that honest Americans have died to defend
Dronestrike's dream world is world war 3, with the stipulation that there is an american flag superimposed over EVERYONE'S vision instead of just his
if he had 24 hours to live he would start a “second american revolution” by attacking England
he isn't a good kisser: no lips, he's a cat, and also george washington famously said that romantic connections weaken your spiritual link with The State
response to being trapped in a maze of mirrors: breaks through the mirrors without noticing, but also can’t recognize his reflection. Thinks he has to fight these teleporting commie clones of himself to save the United States of America
he's on Santa's naughty list
on Halloween he dresses up as George Washington and “trick or disappears” journalists
Dronestrike hates the reds, the brits, women, and most importantly, himself
prefers fundamentals over schmovement
favorite board game is Monopoly because watching people go bankrupt or be imprisoned is one of his hobbies
his happiest memory is his first glimpse of an amazon packaging facility and the horrible conditions of the workers
favorite season is summer: 4th of July babey!!! the holiday where you're allowed to blow shit upppp!!! he also frequently sets off fireworks in the off season to scare dogs and people with anxiety
doesn’t date but he sends tech billionaires unethically farmed flowers sometimes
doesn’t play video games but he has a simulated CoD lobby’s chat going at all times in his head. they call him slurs whenever he misses a shot
relates strongly to Patrick Bateman
he was in ShadowClan. they picked which clan he would be deployed into by having him take the official "which clan are you" quiz
sometimes he doubts that he has the heart of a true warrior
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wonbriiize · 8 months
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pairing; wonbin x reader
genre; fluff
warnings; none (? i think,, a kiss at the end tho)
note; it‘s my first time writing something like this but i tried my best,, let me know if there’s anything that i can do better next time !! + it‘s a bit long oops
one condition
in which you’re playing monopoly with your friends and everything is going well until wonbin, your best friend (who has a crush on you but you don’t know that) steals your money and runs away with it…
“i‘m buying this street!” sungchan announces while he takes out the street card from the box, not letting sohee do his job since he‘s supposed to be the bank and the person who gives out all the cards.
“hey, you need to pay for it first!”
“chill, here‘s your money,” sungchan throws it to sohee who starts counting it once he has it in his hands. “okay, it’s the right amount. *y/n* it’s your turn.”
you roll the dices and see that you have to take 10 steps. once you land on the final street, you decide to buy it since no one has done it. the second you want to grab your money, you notice that it’s not on the table. where did it go? you could have sworn that you’ve put it on the left side, right next to wonbin‘s bought streets.
wonbin is enjoying this whole situation because he knows exactly where your money is. he can’t hold himself back from snickering silently. sadly, his silent wasn’t quiet enough because your eyes wander over to wonbin. ”give me back my money!” he throws his arms up. ”who says that i have it?” ”oh, stop lying wonbin!”
you grab after his hands and search them. it’s not there.. but where is it then?
your eyes move towards the pocket of his sweatshirt and before you can grab into them, wonbin stands up and runs away.
he‘s not serious right now, is he? you think.
sungchan and sohee seem to be enjoying it since they’re laughing their asses off. you glare at them before you stand up and run after wonbin. knowing wonbin, he probably ran into his room. it’s his safe place.
“wonbin stop being so annoying and give it back!” you yell, running towards his room. once you arrive, you notice that his door is widely open. he should have closed it.
you walk into the room, looking around to find wonbin. thump! the door behind you closes. you turn around and see wonbin leaning against it with the biggest grin on his face, holding up the money in his hands. your money.
“this is so childish wonbin! just give it back.”
”come and get it yourself,” he grins.
glaring at him doesn’t help because his grin just keeps getting wider and wider while he’s stretching his arm up super high. launching yourself at him, you start holding down his upper body (which is very defined as you can feel) with one hand and with the other you’re trying to bring down the arm but it’s not working.
“guess you’re too short to reach it,” wonbin smirks.
“guess you can’t play a game without cheating,” you say and look at his face.
in this moment, you notice how close you both are standing to each other. his face is only a few inches apart and you stare at him, noticing not one single imperfection.
wonbin notices you staring which just makes him smile even more. that’s what he wants, he wants you this close to him, always. he has been wanting this since the day he saw you tripping over your own shoelaces and helped you up. this was the start of your friendship.
that was three years ago.
“okay, i‘m going to give it back to you,” he gives in. for him, it’s now or never. this is the perfect moment.
”as you should,” those words just come out of you like a whisper because you’re still so mesmerized by him. this is the first time you’ve ever been this close to wonbin and honestly, you don’t mind. you’re actually enjoying this.
”under one condition. we go on a date.”
”what?” this throws you offguard.
”i want to take you out on a date.”
”wait, why? so suddenly?”
wonbin takes his arm down so now you’re holding both of his shoulders. after realizing this, you let go.
”not suddenly. i have been wanting to ask you this since forever, i just never had the guts to do it.. until now,” wonbin scratches the back of his head, avoiding your gaze. this is the first time in the three years of friendship that you’ve seen him act like this.. so shy. it’s cute.
”basically all it took for you to ask me this was stealing my monopoly money, running away and luring me into your room. why not just.. ask?” now you’re finding this situation hilarious, but in a very good way.
“it’s funnier like that,” wonbin steps closer to you, the big smile being back on his face.
”so, *y/n*, will you go on a date with me?”
he looks directly into your eyes and it’s like he’s staring right into your soul, that’s how intense this feels. but you’re loving it. you’re feeling something weird in your stomach. maybe it’s those butterflies that everyone talks about when they have a crush on someone. you’re getting the urge to get more of this feeling.. more of wonbin.
“okay, i will,” you can’t hold back a little smile when you see how happy wonbin is after hearing this. ”under one condition,” you add and take a step closer to wonbin.
“i want you to kiss me,” you say, taking another step towards him.
wonbin starts smiling so brightly but once he notices that he’s losing his cool persona like that, he tries to hold it back a little.
“as you wish,” he says, closing the distance between the two of you.
when your lips touch, you feel chills all over your body. in the best way possible.
the feeling in your stomach only grows and grows the longer the two of you kiss.
yeah, you think. it’s definitely butterflies.
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a-tear-in-space · 3 months
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Milgram characters playing Monopoly (some random HCs I made)
Haruka - Does not want to be the dog piece. Doesn't know how to play, so one of the other players typically have to tell him what to do as he goes along. Pretty much just happy to be there since he's getting attention. Has the least amount of properties bought.
Yuno - Doesn't care for the game too much, but plays it anyway. At some point another player (probably Mahiru) buys a space she wanted and she silently holds a grudge against them for the rest of the game. Has a fair amount of properties.
Fuuta - Oh boy. When he's unhappy with a roll, everyone knows it. Probably the type of player to just get progressively more pissed off as things go on. He keeps landing on properties that others have bought and it's slowly draining his money. He ends up landing on one of Shidou's properties with a hotel and gives up trying. Has maybe one or two properties. Kotoko calls him a bad player and he tries to start a fight.
Muu - Actually kind of good at the game. Has somehow remained stocked up on money for most of the game because she keeps asking Haruka for his, and he doesn't mind giving it to her. She keeps trying to get out of paying tax to other players by guilt tripping them. Has a few properties, some with one or two houses.
Shidou - Relatively good at the game (he probably played it with his family.) Definitely has the smartest method when it comes to property management - investing everything into one property and fully upgrading it before founding another. Has been calm the entire game and nobody can tell what he's thinking about. Has one or two fully upgraded properties.
Mahiru - Mostly just goes for the properties she likes, more than anything. Not the greatest player, but not the worst either. She's pretty much just happy to be here. Has a fair amount of properties across the board.
Kazui - The banker. Actually kind of good at the game, though he does end up in jail a few times. Has to stop Kotoko and Fuuta from fighting. Usually the one who has to give pointers on how to play to Haruka and Amane. Has a few of the more expensive properties on the board.
Amane - Keeps trying to take money from the bank. Has been silently staring at the board with a blank stare the entire game as she plays, and nobody knows if that's a good thing or not. Probably the type of player to try and flip the board at some point if she gets annoyed. Has a few properties to her name, but nothing major.
Mikoto - Has spent like 75% of the game in jail. Nobody knows how he keeps getting sent there, especially him, but he insists he finds it funny. Spends most of his time talking to the other players. Has a couple of properties that he's managed to buy (when not in jail.)
Kotoko - By far the most complex player, rivalling Shidou in terms of prowess at the game. Switches sporadically between pointing out mistakes/flaws in the other players' decisions (especially Fuuta's) to being completely silent and observing what's going on the entire game. Nobody knows which is worse. Has somehow avoided going to jail the entire game. Has a few well stocked properties. Ready and willing to fight.
Es - Does not want to be here, probably only forced to. Refuses to play, claiming that it's not something a warden should do.
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meshaamem-li · 29 days
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imagine how much more vibrant and varied our animation industry could have been if large monopolies like Disney would have spent $20m on 10 films instead of $200m on 1 soulless cashgrab.
seriously. Wish had a budget of 200 MILLION dollars, and for what? a sorry excuse of a story that feels like it's been written by AI? if Disney divided the money across multiple creators and let them pour actual passion into their art, we could have so many more animated films of different genres and for different audiences.
the average movies I can find that aren't a large disney production are usually made on like a $30-60m budget, but Song of the Sea was made with a $7.5m budget, wolfwalkers was made on an $11m budget, and the nightmare before Christmas was $24m. Your Name was only $5.5m!!!! so it's not impossible to make good films on lower budgets.
I'm not saying "don't pay your artists" or limit creativity, but there's no reasons to waste 200 fucking million on a movie that has no soul when there are millions of artists and storytellers who are just itching for their story to be told. not every movie has to have groundbreaking hyperrealistic animation, you can actually make really good and unique animation without it being this fucking expensive! (while still paying your fucking animators because they're fucking amazing and deserve a much higher wage than the Industry standard)
it's like.... why they putting all their money on like 1-2 films a year when they can make at least double that amount and they'll still look good??? why are they not giving any room for experimentation with lower budget films and instead relying on soulless cashgrabs that appease the general audience of parents and doesn't treat their young viewers as people with taste? take more risks!!! bring some variety to the medium!!! this 200 million film could have been 4 50 million films!!! you are a multi BILLION dollar corporation, you have the resources to make multiple films at a time, and not all of them need to be the most amazing and visually appealing movie of all time!
yes, movie production is complicated and requires a LOT of people and a LOT of time, and costs a LOT of money, but animation evolved a lot over the years, and we're at a point where indie animators can make a solid short film basically by themselves at home and it would look much better than anything that was made 30 years ago because the tools we have now are much more powerful and accessible.
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d10nsaint · 1 year
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hey -twirls hair while holding monopoly money- don't know if you're taking requests rn but if it is can i request platonic hc's of orv characters(preferably your favorite) reacting to a Constellation!reader that has blatant favoritisim towards them? does that even make sense
Thanks beloved(づ ◕‿◕ )づ // novel spoilers below (//▽//) !!
୨୧parings;platonic!Dokja, Sangah, junghyuk,Oldest dream, secretive plotter x afab! Reader
PUPPY PRINCESS NO.2
ʚɞ Kim dokja;
I'd see people like Jung Heewon constantly nagging him about the fact that he has a female constellation giving him coins at every turn of his had.
Han sooyoung would beg him to share his coins, and say that 'he has too many to spend', while the kids batter their eyes and ask for money. Yoo Junghyuk would constantly think he does something to bribe you in private because the amount of coins you give him is ridiculous.
He didnt know much about you; besides the fact that you adored him. When he finally got the chance to see you in a (preferably odd circumstance) he didnt expect someone who looked like a human. He thought it'd be a middle aged man who had a thing for men weaker than them— but it was a pretty woman. A very pretty woman.
ʚɞ Yoo sangah;
She was so flustered when she first realized that she was your favorite! she always thought that she wouldnt have been good enough in a situation like the apocalypse; and now she has you, a constellation— a significantly higher being— cheering for her and supply her with goods.
Kim Dokja would be very happy for her; seeing as he doesn’t have to give her coins so she could survive, and because you always give her quality weapons.
ʚɞ Yoo junghyuk/joonghyuk;
He’s constantly annoyed by the sound of you giving him coins for breathing. He thinks that you’re weird but knows he wouldn’t survive without your constant sponsorship.
The only reason that he hasnt killed you (besides the reason listed above) Is because in every round, you happily support him (probably) with a big smile on your face.
ʚɞ Oldest dream;
He was unnecessarily happy when you first started helping him, like giving items or guidance when he first met you and Secretive Plotter.
He would always try to repay your kindness in some way; you’d been with him for hundreds of years, and remained his closest friend without avail.
ʚɞ Secretive Plotter;
He isnt happy or mad about it.all he knows is that if you stop, all hell will break loose.
With that said, he loves you near him. It just puts him at ease. He’s always trying to stop you from giving him stuff, saying that he has too many things from you and things in general.
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