The Syndicate

I'm pretty sure it was locked in lead box, welded shut, encased in concrete, dropped into the deepest part of the Marianas Trench, and is currently protected by a rotating shift of irascible kraken.

I don't know who, if anyone, has access to it.

Long Con wrote: ↑Wed Nov 22, 2017 11:50 am Net Neutrality was discussed, like, last year somewhere in here. Anyone remember where? A search for "net neutrality" comes up empty. Maybe you can @mention me if you find it.

[mention]Long Con[/mention] You can find it in The Thread That Must Not Be Named.

I know religion is a touchy subject in general and for some around here but I have to sing my daughter's praises a little bit.

Today our church did a meal-packing event with Rise Against Hunger. Every 3,000 meals we packed, they banged a gong and had someone pray. Unbeknownst to my wife and I, our Director of Outreach Ministries asked Chloe to pray after one of the gongs. She's got a gift for praying for someone her age (6 years old). The fact that she wasn't even nervous speaking in front of over 150 people made her former-Toastmaster papa even prouder.

The Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine has been awarded. The research nabbing the award is pretty cool.

unfurl wrote: ↑Wed Sep 06, 2017 5:05 pm I have not been around for a while, but I just wanted to say Hello/Hi

I just put my oldest little girl on the school bus a few minutes ago. She's going to do just fine in Kindergarten.

The little boy she shares the bus stop with might be another story. As soon as the bus pulled up, he took off running the other direction!

Knowing his mother and father, I bet he'll get quite the earful while they drive him into school on the first day.

Sorry for your family's loss. I was fortunate to grow up knowing five of my great-grandparents. It's only in hindsight that I realize how special that was. Your children are extremely blessed to have known a great-great-grandparent.

Spacedaisy wrote:Weirdness in the Sockface household. We received a package yesterday addressed to Alex and Annie Browne. It contained a board game. But... we didn't order any board games. And as of yet I have not had anyone confess to sending it to us. We're going to try it out this afternoon. It would be nice to know who sent it and why so that we can at least say thanks. Talk about random...

If you hear African drums emanating from the board game, DON'T PLAY IT!

Elon Musk has a company who's goal is to create an interface between computers and the human brain.

Epignosis wrote:Turns out a nearby neighbor decided to burn a tree stump with cooking oil...

I'm taking my daughter to her first minor league fight tomorrow night. Hopefully a hockey game will break out.

Interestingly enough, I almost registered on this forum as ThunderSnow because the name is cool. But alas, I stuck with G-Man because it's what the folks remember me as.

Hey Stella!!!!

Thanks for the snow day.

juliets wrote:I just read on FB that Lostpedia is gone. I don't have a link to it anymore so I don't know for sure but if it is, RIP.

Lostpedia still exists as a wiki but the forums have indeed been shut down. Very sad to lose those mafia exploits of long ago.

The STV forums live on still (if you can find them).

As the day goes on, the fact that I am attending a Kindergarten registration meeting tonight for my oldest daughter sinks in deeper. My mind is slowly being blown.

So I switched from the dark background to the light background today because my wife caught me on the site during family time last night. It reminds me so much of The Piano that it makes me sad. Perhaps that will fade in time.

I thought the original intent was for Heists to NOT have banners, as there would be more of them and banners for Heists would clutter up people's sigs. Same reason why winning a Heist doesn't count for qualifying you for Game of Champions.

Golden wrote:

G-Man wrote:Astronomers confirmed the existence of seven exoplanets orbiting a nearby* star that are similar in size to Earth. Three of them are believed to be within the star's habitable zone. I read the full article for the gory details. It's a small star but the planets are in a tight orbit. Given some of the technical details, I doubt intelligent life akin to dolphins or primates exist there but lower levels of life seem plausible.



*40 light-years

Wrong. It's where dolphins came from before they moved here to take over the world.

Given how small the star is, you may well be correct.

Astronomers confirmed the existence of seven exoplanets orbiting a nearby* star that are similar in size to Earth. Three of them are believed to be within the star's habitable zone. I read the full article for the gory details. It's a small star but the planets are in a tight orbit. Given some of the technical details, I doubt intelligent life akin to dolphins or primates exist there but lower levels of life seem plausible.



*40 light-years

Here is an article that I found interesting. It deals with both taxes and personal financial responsibility. The former is at the forefront of my mind lately because I'm prepping tax documents. The latter is always on my mind because I don't shy away from preaching the gospel of saving. Apparently, tax season is when many people face costly emergencies. Coincidence?

MovingPictures07 wrote:I have never watched the Super Bowl ever before, and I have no intention of changing that today. Not because I'm contrarian, mind you, just because I have pretty much no interest in doing so. Who else is in my boat?

I'll instead most likely be working on something.

The first Super Bowl I remember watching was Super Bowl 25 between the Giants and the Bills in 1991. I have watched part or all of every Super Bowl since. I grew up in a football-watching family, so I can't imagine NOT watching the game.

I will, however, be working through a trial balance for work or some church finance documents during the game. I'll look up for commercials and when the announcers sound excited.

thellama73 wrote:

G-Man wrote:

Long Con wrote:I am going crazy I need a Mafia game to start.

LOL, I still need another week to get my silly pre-game posts out of my system. Someone really needs to stop me from getting so out of hand with my games one of these days.

Will it disqualify me from your game if I admit to not reading any of your pre-game posts?

Nope. They just fill in the gap between games. Nothing consequential about them really. I just like to write.

Long Con wrote:I am going crazy I need a Mafia game to start.

LOL, I still need another week to get my silly pre-game posts out of my system. Someone really needs to stop me from getting so out of hand with my games one of these days.

My body + gravity + Youtube + my daughters = Dance party cardio

juliets wrote:G-Man what is the alternative to government backed loans (besides expanding grants) that you are hoping to see in the student loan industry? If it's private student loans, won't the same practices in collection be a problem?

I have nothing against government-backed loans, so long as the industry cleans up its act. Private student loans typically carry higher interest rates but I know nothing of their collection practices or customer service standards. I'm open to the Income-Based Repayment options to make payments lower and more manageable but I disagree with eliminating any remaining loan balances after the set payment periods (20 years for undergrad, 25 years for graduate loans). If you borrow, you should pay. Otherwise, it's just another way for the federal government to throw our tax dollars away.

What the federal government really took over was guaranteeing the loans. In other words, PHEAA takes financial responsibility for the student loans it generated for the government. If a loan defaults, PHEAA lost the money when it was sent to collections. If a loan is forgiven (via death, permanent disability, or forgiveness programs), PHEAA once again lost the money. If a borrower refinanced their loan and it got sent to another guarantor/servicer, PHEAA would lose the money to that other company. Nowadays, PHEAA doesn't take financial responsibility for the loans. They just generate and babysit the loans. If a loan defaults, the government loses the money.

Since PHEAA has no skin in the game save for their cut of the next batch of loans to babysit, it seems to me that there is less incentive to care about the end customer. When they were at risk of losing money on a default, I'd like to think that they cared a little more. Maybe not, but the lack of caring was one of the things that ate at me the most and I fear that it made me a less sympathetic/empathetic person. There's no such thing as a bad job but there are jobs that aren't right for people. This job was not right for me.

If the government doesn't want all of its money back, then yes, expand the grant programs and reduce the student loan programs. If they want their money back, don't forgive loans, do a better job of informing borrowers of the details so they can make better decisions, and try to cultivate and/or incentivize a better corporate culture for the servicing companies they contract with.

I also think that too many people who aren't college material are being encouraged to take out loans for college but that's another rant for another day.

Posting this here because the Politics Thread is just so... well, you know.

So the federal government is suing Sallie Mae for inappropriate procedures regarding student loan debt collection/repayment. The article says that Sallie Mae cheated borrowers out of repayment options. When I collected student loan debt for PHEAA / American Education Services and FedLoan Servicing, I never heard a positive thing about Sallie Mae. Obviously, as a competitor, PHEAA and FedLoan brass would never sa a good thing about them, but borrowers who refinanced their loans and landed at PHEAA or FedLoan were always elated to be rid of that company.

While I applaud the government for suing Sallie Mae, I must also spit in the government's face on this one and say 'you reap what you sow.' Servicing federal student loans is a lucrative business. Since taking over the public student loan industry with the stimulus package, the government generates every federal student loan created. Private loans still exist, but the vast majority of student loans are created by Uncle Sam.

Since the federal government had no way to service the millions of loans generated by the industry they took over, they hired (sub-contracted really) a variety of companies to service the loans for the government. When I worked in the industry, there were just four servicing companies. I've been out for five years and there are now nine such companies. Servicing really just means monitoring and managing accounts- collect payments, call the delinquent borrowers, and pass the defaulted ones off to subrogation. I called delinquent borrowers.

The government contracts with servicing companies for blocks of time. Eventually, those contracts come under review. Quarterly and annual reports come out comparing the government's ratings for each servicing company. These ratings cover a number of areas (though they may have changed in the last five years)- customer service satisfaction, the servicer's website, the proportion of borrowers making full or reduced payments, delinquency rates, and default rates. It's bad to be in last place in any category, particularly the last two.

The government is generating millions of student loans each year. Since servicing companies are contracted for certain blocks of time, they can't just stop giving these companies new loans to service, as it would overload the other companies. They can, however, assign a higher volume of loans to the companies performing better in their metrics. In this way, the government incentivizes these companies to keep their default and delinquency rates as low as possible. There's also an incentive in keeping as many borrowers as possible in full repayment mode.

These companies, in turn, incentivize their employees to keep borrowers current. This involves (what I consider) the rampant abuse of something called a forbearance. The tow main tools available to me when I worked in the industry were deferments and forbearances. It looks like they've changed the names and added a few since my time but it breaks down like this- deferments on subsidized loans don't accrue interest. Naturally, the government tries to push more people toward the unsubsidized loans now. Unsubsidized loans still accrue interest while on deferment and that interest is capitalized when you enter repayment (AKA- the interest is added to the loan principle, causing you to pay even more overall).

All loans accrue interest while on forebearance and that interest is capitalized when you get back into repayment. While they are useful in wiping out a delinquency, forbearances are doled out like crack and servicing companies all but don't give you a choice in the matter when you apply for a deferment. Deferments take up to two weeks to process and apply, so we were told to strongly encourage the forbearance to bring them current while the paperwork processes. If anything goes wrong with the paperwork, at least they won't be reported as delinquent (or as delinquent) when the next round of reports and ratings comes out.

At the companies I worked at, the environment was extremely production oriented. We had almost 100 people working in Default Prevention when I quit, and we'd each talk to dozens of people a day. That's how many loans are delinquent. We did outgoing and incoming calls. Because the government prefers borrowers to stay in full repayment mode, servicing loans is less about actually helping people and more about meeting benchmarks and 'sales' goals. Individual reps could earn quarterly bonuses for keeping their scores up. Our score was determined by some phantom calculation that awarded more points for coaxing a payment out of a borrower, fewer points for deferments and forebearances, and no points for referring someone for a lower payment plan. This is the kind of practice that Sallie Mae is being sued for.

I've got news for the federal government- I'm willing to bet that EVERY servicing company does the exact same thing that Sallie Mae did. FedLoan certainly did. Apparently we just didn't piss of as many people as Sallie Mae. To be fair, the government isn't paying these companies to care about customers; they're paying them to service the loans. The government cares about loan status more than customer service because loan status gets Uncle Sam paid. When you have a student loan, you cease to be a person in the eyes of the government and servicing companies. You are a customer who is legally obligated to pay up at some point. That's more or less what debt collectors are trained to believe about you. Ignore the sob stories, stick to the script, collect a few bonuses, and keep applying for supervisor and QA positions while hoping that somebody higher up the ladder likes you.

It's a soul-sucking environment that I knew I had to escape from. I rebelled in my own little way because I was nice to people. I cared. I took more than the 'encouraged' 6.5 minutes maximum per call. I was as honest as I was legally allowed to be on most of my calls. Anyone with a GED and a pulse can collect student loan debt and they make sure you know that. Turnover is horrendous but it's not a specialized job. A week or two of training and the computer more or less guides you through the process.

Now I am all for personal responsibility. I'm not anti-student loans. I do think the government sucks at running this program. Several of the elected officials who complain about federal student loan interest rates also voted in favor of the government taking over the industry. The government complaining about interest rates that the government sets? The government suing a servicing company for doing what the government incentivized it to do?

When I worked in the industry, lower repayment options were just starting to gain steam. I don't even think our supervisors understood them right because we were told they were last-ditch-effort hail Mary's that almost nobody would qualify for. We were told to do anything to avoid going that route. I can understand why- from an investment standpoint, it's stupid to loan someone money and not expect to get it all back in time. People take out the loans and they ought to pay the money back. If you don't want your money back in full, then expand the grant programs. The government took it all over because of abuse and predatory lending and yet the government continues to tout how much you can borrow through unsubsidized loans and now they're suing a contracted servicing company for abuse.

I feel like I had more to say but I'm losing focus and this is already too long for most people to read. Good night.

G-Man wrote:Random post just to see how long any other Speakeasy topic can last on the homepage before the Politics Discussion thread yanks it back down into obscurity.

Just over eight minutes. That was more than I expected.

Random post just to see how long any other Speakeasy topic can last on the homepage before the Politics Discussion thread yanks it back down into obscurity.

R.I.P. Ringling Bros. Circus.

We almost took Chloe last year but held off. Now she'll never get to see the circus.

I saw a headline yesterday that read: "Does Nutella Cause Cancer?"

No lie- my first thought was "Why don't you ask her?"

Rather than creating another pre-game hype post for BLUE vs. RED, I spent my lunch break changing security settings for my Google and LinkedIn accounts.

Thanks a lot, hackers.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!


And happy Monday to you Aussies and Kiwis. Looks like I missed you by a hair.

Sloonei wrote:

Dom wrote:Favorite game I hosted? Probably my first on LP (pixar)... both horrifically bad and wonderful experience.

playeD?
IDK JFC

This is how I'd sum up the first game I ever hosted as well. It was on RYM so it is now lost in internet purgatory, but it was infamously known simply as "Game 8" when the community was still up and running.
We were all still new to the game so the community as a whole was in that experimental stage where we were just trying to figure out what worked for us. Long story short, I ended up having to set an unbreakable RYM record for modkills in a game, we had two scum partners bus each other hardcore out of the gate (harhol & MrMungbean, if my memory is correct), and the game concluded with a botched lynch tally and an inconclusive resolution. It remains the only draw I've ever seen in mafia. Train wreck that it was, everyone told me it was a fantastic game to play in.

Some of us have never left that experimental stage.

I think my favorite game that I played is still Economics. A lot of good stuff came out of that game: my new zany reputation for shenanigans, my Joker meme, Coward, dog pee, and a healthy distrust of Golden.

That game literally went down to the wire. A Lylo standoff until the last three minutes? Nuts. It sucked to lose but it was a fun ride.

Golden wrote:I'm hard pressed to think of the best game I've ever hosted. I don't think I've ever had one go to lylo up to this point. Mostly what I enjoy is wreaking mechanical havoc upon everyone and watch them try and resolve it all. And basically all of my games do that, so...

Both games I've hosted so far broke posting records, featured mechanics/powers that caught people off guard, went to Lylo, and featured one living player at the end. True to form, I doubt I would have enjoyed playing either of them, so I can't pick a favorite.

Oh man, those days seem so long ago now for me. Lilah just hit 13 months. You're in for a treat though, because he's coming up on the span where they start figuring things out. It's an amazing process.

Ricochet wrote:You are making me quite thirsty.

Metalmarsh89 wrote:

thellama73 wrote:

Metalmarsh89 wrote:After years of trying, I've finally been able to enjoy the taste of whiskey, the past couple weeks.

I dabbled with scotch for years, always kind of liking it but never loving it. Then I discovered bourbon and now I am a full-on whiskey drinker. It's great.

And G-Man, of course you're supposed to sip whiskey. It tastes too good and is too expensive to shoot.

One can also swig whiskey.

Agreed. The speed at which whiskey should be consumed is inversely proportional to the price paid for the whiskey.

While my dad gave me a few inquiring sips of beer when I was a kid (back then I liked the smell but not the taste), just about all of my firsts with alcohol came in college.

The first full alcoholic drink I ever consumed was a bottle of Smirnoff Triple Black.

My first experience with whiskey was at a cast party. Someone gave me a scotch glass half full of Jack Daniels. Not knowing any better, I sipped it slowly over the course of an hour. I liked the slow burn down the throat and the warm feeling in my stomach. One of my friends, who didn't know I hadn't drank much of anything before, questioned me about it. Apparently the only people he had ever known to sip whiskey slowly were alcoholics.

I haven't had any in years, but I used to love Gentleman Jack. Nice and smooth all the way down.

MovingPictures07 wrote:

G-Man wrote:Red means least suspicious, right?

You wish; that's my color. Confirmed town teal.

I guess I'll never live down my antics in Economics Mafia. Perma-suspicious it is then.

Red means least suspicious, right?

Epignosis wrote:

thellama73 wrote:It's one of my life's ambitions to one day be a creepy old man with a secret heart of gold, like in Home Alone.

You just want to hit burglars with snow shovels.

Don't we all?

I'm guilty of not looking people in the eye much when talking to them. I am also guilty of being a people watcher. I guess that makes me a little creepy.

But seriously, how is being older a creepy factor? That's not something you can control. I think old people who try to look and dress younger than their age are a little creepy but not old people in general. Maybe they just mean being older in relation to the person being engaged?

Here's something to discuss. Who among us is creepy? Here's the article.

If you're not into reading the full article, here are the bullet points:

-Men are more likely to be labeled as “creepy” than women.
-Women are more likely to think sexual threats are creepy (duh).
-Acting unusually was associated with creepiness.
-Some hobbies and jobs make people creepy.

Creepy Qualities:

-Being extremely thin
-Not looking you in the eye
-Asking to take a picture of you
-Watching people before interacting with them
-Asking about details of your personal life when you don’t know them
-Displaying too much or too little emotion
-Being older
-Steering the conversation toward sex

Creepiest Jobs:

-Clown
-Taxidermist
-Sex shop owner
-Funeral director

Golden the Survivor! Glad you and your family are safe and sound.

Epignosis wrote:We just got the call. The owners accepted all the terms of our proposal except that they met us in the middle regarding their asking price and offer.

That's awesome! Any idea when you might hear back on the offer?

About 1/3 of the problem is old kids clothes and toys from our oldest. Once Kid 2 goes through it all then we can yard sale most of it. Another 1/3 of it is my wife's fault. She started out teaching 1st grade but got moved to 3rd grade after seven years. This summer she switched districts and moved from 3rd grade to kindergarten. So now we have all her 1st and 3rd grade stuff downstairs because she could always get bumped back to either grade now that she's low woman on the totem pole. Another 1/6 of it is my wife's scrapbooking stuff that is often thought of by her but never worked on. The other 1/6 is just random odds and ends.

As much as I like to think that I live a relatively simple life, HOLY CRAP DO I HAVE A LOT OF STUFF IN THE BASEMENT!

We're having out A/C / heat pump system replaced tomorrow and I've spent three nights shifting piles and boxes of our stuff across the basement to clear out around the internal unit and the tubing to the external unit. My back is all