Incursions drop good stuff. That’s why everyone’s exploiting them.

Most of the game is PvE, so it doesn’t really BREAK anything if you stay out of the DZ (or exercise some extreme caution). The real problem is that the loot tables for grinding kinda suck right now, which makes the grind more painful than it should be (think “early D3"), and gives exploiters an additional leg up.

I think the interest rate was < 2%, too, and we borrowed considerably less than $20k (we went about half out of pocket on both). As you said, interest rates are stupidly low, it makes sense to take advantage of that. (I am happy to say that our bank account has more than recovered from that ordeal.)

Your housing market is really not that bad. I was there a year or two shopping around in the Seward Park area, and while it was expensive, it was no worse than any semi-nice portion of the DC area (which is where I am right now). You also have no state income tax, which is friggin’ huge - here in MD, I get nailed by a…

Because when financing is this stupidly cheap, there is a risk-reduction factor in keeping the money in the bank in case some other emergency comes up. My wife and I had to both get replacement cars within six months of each other after having paid to replace our HVAC three months earlier. We could have paid for all…

I think it’s like $27k after taxes. IMHO, it would come down to rent... if you could find a place for $700-$800 (perhaps by sharing an apartment or renting a room), that’s a livable wage. Wouldn’t be much fun, but you could make it work. Obamacare subsidies will help with the healthcare, and then it’s just about food,…

One of the few things I thought the Obama admin got right was tightening the rules for salaried positions - but they didn’t go far enough. The only people who should be salaried are genuine corporate middle managers and upwards. Everyone else should be hourly. By all means, give hourly workers proper benefits if they…

I made $52k a year at my first job when I graduated from college with a CS degree... more than a decade ago. And that was with decent benefits and a normal work schedule. I now make more than double that, and still rather like my job (albeit the work schedule has gotten a little rougher... that’s life in management).

Worth noting is that The Division does give a nod to some of these issues (which the author couldn’t have known, this article was written a year ago):
1. The game notes that the virus was specifically engineered to not be affected by the vaccine, and there is some intel indicating that everyone was taken by surprise…

“My formative years involved a lot of time in heavy metal parking lots. Just great memories of beer, boobs and buds. Thirty years later I’ve made new memories in these same parking lots with my own kids.”

My wife had a MS and made more money than me for a long time. Finally caught up to her on both (MBA and money). Neither of us cared that much, and it had no impact on our marriage. It was perhaps a bit motivational for me to get my own life in gear, at most. I can’t even imagine getting into an argument about it.

Maybe that was open? I guess I was wrong.

AW 13's height is 17.5mm - 18.3mm, which is essentially the same as the RB’s 17.8mm.

I’ll be interested to see how the OLED Alienware 13 compares. Admittedly, this laptop has a much better CPU.

The likelihood that NK has equipment, training, and operational flexibility to take advantage of real-time drone feeds in a panic situation like an amphibious landing seems... unlikely. Never mind that the US/SK would be swatting the drones out of the sky ASAP.

Wow, first Fable Legends, now Everquest Next. That’s a lot of money to dump down the drain on these projects.

Europeans appear to get to cherry-pick American examples of racism as being normative, why shouldn’t Americans get to do the same to Europeans?

There is absolutely a good military argument to be made that the South Koreans would be much better off kicking off the war rather than waiting for the North Koreans to do it. The North Korean trump cards are 1) nukes and 2) the artillery over Seoul... the South Koreans could minimize the damage from the latter by…

The memory card thing is just the worst part of the Vita existence. I have to do memory management on it with every new major purchase, and to make matters worse, the Vita is not exactly speedy when doing those operations. When I consider how much I spent on that memory card... ugh.

I found it to be perfectly enjoyable to play solo, at least in the closed beta. There is a very strong Diablo-like aspect to the loot system - you’re always looking for better guns, better mods, better armor, etc. There’s also base-building, the story, exploration, etc.