TheDankNikolai

To be honest the huge gap in time between the previous follow up episode made this one all the more welcome. Plus with the mysterious Shaun Puckett story, the straight from hollywood Leland Yee story, and the lesson on how to illegally trick arcade quarter cabinets into taking smashed up nickels, I'd say it was just as interesting as the regular Game Dungeons. ...also you're still keeping alive the soundtrack end of each GD, for which me and my people are eternally grateful. I will never let that go because our SOULS go into some soundtracks, even if its for a shitty flash game.

Mohawk & Headphone Jack, a 2d rotational game that game out for the Snes in 1996. Check it out if you haven't and tell me it doesn't make you at least a little nauseous.

There's a lot of disagreeable things in this video, but I'll just stick to one particular point. Ross makes a point to mention that wages have been decreasing as a percentage of GDP, and uses this as evidence that the globalist corporations are draining wealth to the top. If I recall correctly, I debunked this exact same myth several months ago when he brought it up in another form (saying wages haven't kept pace with overall productivity increases) by pointing out, among other things, the deliberate exclusion of non-wage benefits in the chart he was using, which have risen massively in the past 40 years. Ross simply responded that he didn't study such things and that what I was saying sounded like gibberish; which is fine. However, I do have to get a bit annoyed when he proceeds to make another video mentioning this subject and repeats the same myth using the same fallacious logic (excluding non-wage compensation). In case the argument I made earlier was really that poorly put/difficult to understand/whatever, here's a video that I think quickly sums up the whole issue in plain and simple terms: fHm7P4TA97U tl;dr: actual compensation has risen more or less proportionally with productivity increases. Now, on using percentages of GDP to see what people 'should' be paid: this is also fallacious. Corporate profits and worker compensation should be measured as a percent of corporate income, not the economy as a whole, because the GDP is not increasing solely on the back of corporate profits. Federal government spending in general as a percentage of the GDP has increased quite a lot, for example. To relate to another one of Ross's points, defense spending as a percentage of GDP has been generally decreasing since the Cold War started, so you can't say that all that GDP is going to the "military-industrial complex" either. In the 21st century in general, defense spending is lower than it has been at any time since WW2 ended, except for the brief period between then and the start of the Cold War where the Americans genuinely thought that Uncle Joe would be their bust bud. Anyway, when we measure employee compensation (not wages) as a percentage corporate profits (not the whole country's GDP), we get this result: Employee compensation as a percentage of corporate income has consistently stayed at 10-13%. Currently it is much higher than it was in 1970, and just about the highest it has ever been- the exact opposite of what Ross claimed (I put a thin black line on the picture to make that more noticeable). And overall standard of living, of course, has increased massively, just as productivity has. So yeah, there's no dystopia here. To relate this back to Deus Ex, I don't think there's another level to Deus Ex either. It's a hackneyed, stock, sci-fi plot that cherrypicks a handful of statistics out of context to lend its story some credibility. Really no deeper than any cyberpunk dystopia story with an evil corporate or government villain. It's still a fun game, though. EDIT: As a bonus, Ross also tries to use the progressively lowering corporate tax rate as evidence that the rich are gaining more power at the expense of the common man. Someone better go tell that to the anarcho-capitalist hellholes of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Pages 173-175 the World Bank and International Finance Commission's report puts the effective corporate tax rate of the USA at 27.9%. By contrast: Denmark: 20.3% Sweden: 16.1% Norway: 24.8% I like my "compensation" to be money though, I don't know about anyone else.