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No Room for Randomness – Removing the RNG from RPGs
When I started getting into tactical RPGs and reading up on them online, there was a term I'd never heard before that I started to get familiar with: RNG. RNG is short for random number generator, the tool in a game's mechanisms that is used to create random outcomes. While RNG refers to a specific mechanism, it is also used as a catch-all to refer generally to anytime the random aspects of the game influence its outcome. One example of this usage is in Fire Emblem, where a character who is "RNG-screwed" has had such bad level-up bonuses that they become effectively unusable. Conversely, an "RNG-blessed" character performs above and beyond what you would expect from them simply because of how lucky they've been when they level up.
Randomness was a key mechanism in many of the tactical RPGs where I cut my teeth, games like Final Fantasy Tactics or Fire Emblem. The likelihood of whether or not your attack will hit is based on RNG; your damage is randomly pulled from a range of minimum and maximum power; the likelihood of a critical hit is determined randomly; certain abilities had a random chance of activating during an attack or defense phase; and as we discussed in the paragraph above, the improvements made by a character when he or she levels up are dependent on RNG. Now these trends in tactical RPG design are not good or bad, they simply are – it's one possible approach to how these games could work.
Lately, I've been noticing a different trend in the strategy games I've been playing. I noticed it first in a couple of Fire Emblem titles and then to an even greater extent in other tactical RPGs I played. There seems to be a movement towards eliminating some of the randomness from the mechanisms of the genre, finding ways to put control of specific outcomes into the player's hands. Everything I mentioned above – accuracy, damage, criticals, skills, character improvement – has seen a game in the last three years that experimented with how it could work without randomness. I find this design trend quite interesting, so I want to take some time today to talk about each of the gameplay elements above and how they differ when they are random versus when they are not. I'll be focusing on five games with (US) release dates from 2016 to 2019: Fire Emblem Fates, Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle, Fire Emblem Echoes, Into the Breach, and Wargroove.
Accuracy refers to the likelihood that a given attack will hit its intended target, and it is a mechanism that is handled on a gradient of sorts. Fire Emblem is on one end of that gradient, Into the Breach and Wargroove are on the other, and Mario + Rabbids sits balanced between them. Accuracy is an interesting concept to attach randomness to because for those playing action games, accuracy being random doesn't necessarily make a whole lot of sense. If you miss, you just need to…aim better, you know? For those who cut their teeth on the RPG genre, though, we've been accepting random misses during combat since the Warriors of Light first whiffed an attack with their rapier.
In Fire Emblem Fates and in Echoes, accuracy sits on the random end of the gradient. Each weapon in the game has a base accuracy rating generally between 60-100, with these numbers representing a percentage chance of a successful hit. The accuracy is modified by the Skill stat of the attacker to create Hit. When you attack an enemy, the target's Avoid value (a combination of their Speed, terrain bonuses, and class traits) is subtracted from Hit to determine a final likelihood of attacking. This number is affected even further by the weapon triangle (in Fates), which gives an advantage to Hit or Avoid based on the relationship between the weapons the characters are wielding. The likelihood is a percentage from 0-100, with 0% being a guaranteed miss and 100% being a guaranteed hit. When the attack goes calculates, a number between those values is randomly generated. If the number is less than the percentage chance of the attack connecting, you execute your attack successfully.
On the other end of the spectrum you have Into the Breach and Wargroove. These games do not have an accuracy calculation at all – if a target is in the attack range of your unit, they will get hit by your attack. Plain and simple. So how does that impact gameplay? Well in Fire Emblem, the significance of unit placement can be softened by their stats. Say I accidentally leave my already badly-damaged commander in the attack range of a group of enemies – this could spell doom for me, but if she has excellent Avoid and an advantage on the weapon triangle, then I probably don't have that much to worry about. This means that when playing Fire Emblem, I may not think as hard about where to position my soldiers. Conversely, positioning is everything in Wargroove – leaving a wounded soldier in the enemy attack range is almost a guarantee of death, unless you luck out and the enemy prioritizes different targets. When there is no statistic for accuracy or evasion, moving your units on the battlefield takes on greater significance. Into the Breach even takes this a step farther by having the enemies telegraph exactly what they are going to do on their turn. You know when you are choosing your position what the outcome will be if you don't defeat a particular enemy or move them to a different tile on the grid, so an important aspect of the tactics in that game is choosing which consequences to accept if it isn't possible to avoid them all.
Mario + Rabbids is an interesting middle ground in that there are really only three possible accuracy values: 100%, 50%, and 0%. These are based on whether your character has no cover, partial cover, or full cover. When moving your units around the battlefield in Mario + Rabbids, you want to try to place them behind cover so that they can avoid attacks from the enemies while still being able to fire at the opponent safely. If enemies are behind cover, you want to try to hit them with weapons that circumvent it, such as rocket launchers that explode and hit the area all around the cover or sentry bots which navigate around the cover to attack. It is only with partial cover that you get the Fire Emblem effect of possibly missing a target that is in your attack range, and this isn't a desirable situation to be in.
Damage represents the impact of an attack on its target, the natural follow-up to accuracy. Naturally you want to do as much of this as possible while taking as little as possible from your opponent. The two trends with this value are to either have a damage range (Mario + Rabbids and Wargroove) or to have a set damage value that will always be the amount of damage dealt in that particular situation (Fire Emblem and Into the Breach). I'll also talk a bit about how Into the Breach handles damage against a specific type of target, because this is an interesting element of randomness in a game that otherwise sits the farthest towards "not random" on our scale.
So what is the operational difference between having a damage range and not having one? Since damage is all about impact, having a random element with damage gives you less certainty about your final impact. This is most likely to happen to happen in Wargroove, which includes a damage range but doesn't show you the minimum and maximum values. I've found this to be frustrating when an attack that was supposed to do 101% damage actually turned out to do 99% and the enemy survived my attack. Mario + Rabbids at least does you the courtesy of showing you that you may or may not defeat the opponent, displaying the lowest possible damage you will do alongside the highest possible. Unlike accuracy, where you generally have a pretty good idea of whether you will hit or miss, in these games with a damage range there's really no way to control whether you end up at the low or high end of the range.
Now let's compare this to Fire Emblem and Into the Breach. In both of these games damage values are set in a given situation. You deal damage based on the weapon you are using and the defense value of your target (in Fire Emblem factors like the attacker's strength, terrain bonuses, and the weapon triangle also get factored in). Because you'll always deal that same amount of damage to that particular target on the particular tile they happen to be on, you can be confident in the impact of your attack, whether small or large. If it looks like you're going to kill the enemy then you can be confident that you truly will do the amount of damage necessary to do the job. In Fire Emblem, your impact can even be greater than anticipated because of special skills or critical hits. In general, though, these games give you greater confidence that when you make an attack, you're going to have a specific outcome that you can then adjust your tactics for.
Now there's a particular circumstance in Into the Breach where a random element is factored into damage. In this game, you have buildings on the battlefield which contribute to the power grid, which serves as the collective power source of your entire mech squadron. Power grid is shared from mission to mission and if it is ever fully depleted, you get a game over (which in Into the Breach means starting over from the beginning rather than restarting a particular mission or chapter). When a building takes damage, there is a chance that the damage will be ignored as a result of a stat called grid defense. Grid defense is a percentage that ranges from 15% to 35%, and when an attack hits a building a random number is generated to see if your grid defenses activate. If they do, the full impact of the attack on your building is canceled, regardless of how powerful the attack would have been. Including this possibility is an interesting choice in Into the Breach, a game which removes randomness from most of the other mechanisms present. It's a useful feature when it kicks in but just as we outlined above, the lack of reliability makes it difficult to count on this impacting your success.
A critical hit is a blow which deals extra damage, striking the enemy where it hurts most. A critical hit can be the difference between whittling an opponent down or outright defeating them, and their impact varies from game to game. If we were to put critical hits on a scale, I think Mario + Rabbids sits at the most random end while Wargroove sits on the most predictable, with Into the Breach standing out in that there are no critical hits in that game at all. We'll talk a little about how an absence of crits can be an interesting design choice as well.
Let's start with Fire Emblem, the middle of our scale. Like the other elements we have discussed so far, critical hit rate is dependent on your weapon but modified by bonuses from character stats, skills, and unit type. These add together to create your Crit stat, which is then modified by the opponent's Dodge to determine a percentage chance of landing a critical hit. If a critical hit makes an impact, you'll do three times the damage. One thing of note with Fire Emblem criticals: your accuracy calculates before the critical chance, meaning an attack with 100% crit but 0% accuracy will not be a guaranteed crit – it will miss instead.
Now we move towards Mario + Rabbids, the most random end of the scale. Critical hit likelihood is determined by your weapon, but critical hits don't just do higher damage. Crits in this game are called super effects, and each type has a different impact beyond increased damage. Some super effects cancel out particular abilities such as being able to move, fire a weapon, or use a special ability. Other super effects dislodge the opponent from their current position, while still others inflict a status problem that you can then use to your advantage. It can be tempting to factor super effects into your strategy, angling for pinning an opponent to a particular position or pushing them out of the boundaries of the stage for some extra damage. However, because critical hits are random in these games, critical hits are an unpredictable bonus that can be hoped for but never strategized around.
Now we come to Wargroove, a game which handles critical hits in a way that I find quite compelling. Critical hits are not random in any way. Instead, critical hits have activation conditions that vary based on unit type. Swordsmen get a crit when they attack while adjacent to their commander while pikemen should be adjacent to another unit of the same type. Rangers get a critical hit by not moving on their turn; knights get a critical hit by moving the farthest distance they can move on their turn. These various activation conditions firmly put control of critical damage in the hands of the player, making them a key part of your unit placement and attack patterns. Where Wargroove adds a random factor that is not present in Fire Emblem or Mario + Rabbids is in the damage calculation; while the latter games indicate to you exactly how much damage you'll do with a crit, Wargroove's crit damage varies and is also subject to an undisplayed damage range.
Finally, let's touch on Into the Breach, a game which lacks critical hits in any form. Not including a form of increased damage is an intentional choice, and it is one that I think makes a lot of sense for the strategy in Into the Breach. This is a tactical RPG where killing the enemy isn't always a key part of your strategy; there are times when you want to push an opponent into a position where they will block an attack from another enemy, or kill one of their own units with their attack. If you try to set that up and inflict a critical hit, killing your target, now you've burned one mech's movement and action on what may now feel like a fruitless move. This accentuates that while critical hits can be helpful, doing more damage than you planned can sometimes be detrimental rather than beneficial. This can be seen in other tactical RPGs too – I've had times in Fire Emblem where a unit in a defensive position actually made things worse by getting critical hits, allowing a new, fresh enemy to come in and deal a lot more damage when a weakened enemy would have bottlenecked the battlefield and stopped the opponent from pushing forward. Wargroove avoids this problem by giving you control of your criticals – Into the Breach avoids it by taking them away altogether.
If every character or unit type in a tactics game operated in the same way, it would remove some of the mechanical depth from the experience. Unique movement patterns, special attacks, or passive bonuses do a lot to help different units stand out from one another and make them feel special. Special abilities work differently in each game and the shift in philosophy from random to controlled has the most significant impact on the Fire Emblem titles. So we'll address the other three games first and then spend some time talking about how FE has shifted over the course of its recent games.
Wargroove and Mario + Rabbids each feature special moves that are tied to specific characters. In Wargroove, only commanders get these unique abilities called grooves. A groove charges up over time and then can be activated on command. Example grooves are the ability to heal yourself and nearby allies by 50%, the ability to give a second turn to spent units, and the ability to deal a set amount of damage and take an additional turn if the damage kills. Mario + Rabbids gives each character two special abilities which can be activated immediately but then require a cooldown. The most common types of specials are reactionary attacks that activate during enemy movement or shields that reduce certain damage types more than others. In both games, special abilities are activated at a time chosen by the player and they cannot be used all of the time. This emphasizes their role as powerful but limited advantages where the tactic is deciding when to use the special ability.
Into the Breach doesn't have special moves in this way – instead, each of the time-traveling pilots in the game has a unique skill that makes that pilot's mech play differently than others. These vary in how much they alter the core gameplay, as some characters just influence the stats of their mech rather than how it operates (such as granting armor or gaining XP faster) while others grant their mech a whole new behavior (such as pushing adjacent tiles when repairing the mech). What is significant in Into the Breach is that the unique move attached to each pilot changes how you use their mech. For example, if I have Camilla on the battlefield, I will always try to place her in a spot to lure enemies with the ability to web her. Their intent will be to pin her to a single spot, but since she cannot be webbed, they'll have wasted their turn and I have the freedom of movement to stop a different Vek.
Fire Emblem is an interesting case because it has a wider variety of special move types, and because over the course of their last few games they have changed how those moves are applied in significant ways. Let's start with Fire Emblem Awakening, the game which revitalized the series. In Awakening, characters can have skills that grant them passive bonuses or powerful special attacks. These special attacks are activated at random based on a stat like skill, speed, or luck. This means you can never plan for Chrom to activate Aether and heal some of the damage he's taken – you just kind of hope it happens. Awakening also introduced pairing up, the act of putting two units together on the same tile to get a stat bonus. More than the bonus, though, pairing up gave the chance of having the second character either make an additional attack or completely stop an enemy attack. These bonuses activated randomly based on the relationship between the characters and could be influenced by their skills. So in Awakening, a character with a special attack who is also paired with an ally could do devastating damage by activating a crazy-powerful move and then having their ally follow-up and negate all damage against them; or you could just do a regular attack and get attacked back, having nothing of note happen at all. Having these factors happen randomly means you could not strategize around them, and in some cases they could negatively impact the plan you were trying to act out.
Fates changed the formula by putting the pair up mechanism into the player's hands, limiting its effectiveness but making it much more predictable. If two units stood adjacent to each other but were not paired up with allies, they would attack together, the support unit guaranteed to deliver a second attack. If the two units were paired up on the same tile the second unit would block any secondary attacks as described above and also built up a meter overtime that, when full, would stop a primary attack from the main attacker. This made it so that you no longer had to hope for an ally to jump in to defend you or contribute an additional attack – you knew whether or not it would happen and thus could plan for it when positioning your units and choosing who to attack.
Echoes did not feature pair-ups, but it made a significant change to attack skills. No longer did special, powerful attacks activate randomly based on a percentage created by your stats. Instead, skill activation was placed in the hands of the players. In Echoes, specific weapons have skills attached to them with a variety of effects. Some exchanged accuracy for damage, some delivered a single powerful hit in exchange for not getting a second attack, others gave a ranged attack to a melee weapon, and still others granted powerful attacks but cost HP to activate. As with the changes to pairing up, making skills activated rather than random allows players to incorporate those skills into their strategy. While we don't know everything yet about Fire Emblem Three Houses, based on the early trailer it appears that Intelligent Systems is continuing to favor this approach.
CHARACTER IMPROVEMENT
As your units fight and gain experience, they gain better stats or add new abilities that make them more effective on the battlefield. Over the course of a lengthy roleplaying game, your opposition may grow in scale from a slapdash group of highwaymen to an organized military force commanded by an evil monarch – it is expected, then, that your own fighters will grow in kind and become able to deal with this greater opposition. On the random end of the character improvement scale we have Fire Emblem, while Mario + Rabbids sits on the controlled end. Off the scale entirely is Wargroove, and we'll address that topic too.
I discussed Fire Emblem and the terms "RNG-blessed" and "RNG-screwed" in the opening of this article, but let's dive deeper into how exactly that works. Each character in Fire Emblem has a number of statistics that each have a growth rate based on the character and their class. These growth rates can sit anywhere from 5% to over 100% but typically hover in the 40-75% range. When you level up, a random number is generated for each stat and if that number is below the percentage of growth, you'll get a +1 to that stat. Because the improvement of your stats is random and occurs slowly over the course of a long series of battles, it is possible that a string of bad luck can cause a particular character to fall too far behind the rest of the party to continue to be useful. Things can also swing the other way, where you end up with a character who always seems to get tons of pluses and becomes powerful enough to carry the rest of the team. Random character improvement means that no character will ever be the same in two playthroughs, which can be frustrating when the protagonist or a character that you are attached to becomes RNG-screwed and thus unusable.
Into the Breach also has random character improvement, but not quite to the degree of Fire Emblem. Into the Breach has two pieces to every unit: mechs and pilots. Mechs are improved by the skills of the pilots or by purchasing equipment, while pilots gain XP from killing Vek and level up when they reach a specific amount. When a pilot levels up, they gain a skill, and these skills vary from giving an additional mech reactor to increasing the movement or health of the mech to improving your grid defense rating. Because these improvements are random, you never quite know if a pilot will get the skills you want. However, a pilot with less useful skills can still be usable, making the negative impact less devastating than Fire Emblem.
Mario + Rabbids has no random elements in its character improvement mechanisms. At the end of battles, you gain a number of skill orbs which can be invested in each character's skill tree. Skill trees unlock new abilities as well as increasing the effectiveness of those abilities, and they can also improv stats like health, movement range, and the damage dealt in certain conditions. The most interesting aspect of this mechanism is that you can respec your investments for free. This allows you to custom tailor each character to the particular battle you are preparing for. Need to reach the end of the map as fast as possible? Focus on skills that increase your movement and team jump capabilities. Need to take a defensive approach? Invest in the shield skills of your various Rabbid allies or improve characters with healing abilities. Because you as the player control character improvement and can change your choices at any time, you can craft each member of the party to play the way you want them to for any given battle.
Wargroove is the outlier in this category because Wargroove characters do not improve. Your units are not unique characters but rather random squad members, and even those units who are unique (the commanders) do not have any sort of mechanism for leveling up or getting better over time. In Wargroove, your characters start out as powerful as they are ever going to get, and they become weaker as they take damage. Because you can't invest in a particular unit over time, individual units are only as valuable as what they can do for you in the present moment. The way Wargroove makes you feel as if you have improved is that it layers new mechanisms over time by slowly introducing new unit types. Because you are always gaining new units to bring into battle with you, you feel as if you are growing stronger even though individual units don't actually improve from their base stats.
While all of these games feature randomness to some degree within their mechanisms, there seems to be a clear trend in the tactical RPG genre of giving more control to the players. Personally I find that I am enjoying this shift, particularly in playing Into the Breach. The way that Into the Breach has removed randomness from nearly every aspect of the game makes it feel as though it is a true test of tactical ability – if you fail, it feels that you failed because you truly got outplayed rather than a stroke of luck benefitting the enemy. Seeing this trend has made me curious to see how Fire Emblem Three Houses might either continue it or go against it. In what ways will the newest title in the series embrace the randomness of its predecessors? In what ways will it move away from them? I'm excited to find out!
Now I turn the conversation to you, adventurers. Do you prefer random chance in your tactical RPGS or do you, like me, enjoy having more control placed in the hands of the player? Are there any strategy games you have played which have interesting mechanisms that are worth mentioning in this conversation? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
game mechanics, Gaming, Humor, RNG, rpg, strategy, video games
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4 thoughts on "No Room for Randomness – Removing the RNG from RPGs"
Jett says:
Randomness in game design as a whole is a touchy subject. Sort of continuing our conversation from Twitter yesterday…one of the big differences between Fire Emblem and Advance Wars is that Advance Wars (as far as I'm aware of) has never used any elements of randomness to it, dating all the way back to its Japan-only NES roots. Every action has a clearly-defined consequence, as the focus on the game is your ability to command your troops and manage your resources.
I generally prefer games with little-to-no randomness. My genre of choice is fighting games, where randomness is largely nonexistent. I want to be rewarded for knowing that I blocked your heavy attack, which is -7 frame advantage on block, so I'm going to counter you with my medium attack, which has a 5-frame startup, is guaranteed to land in this scenario, and I can combo it into a super move for massive damage.
That said, I think the conversation around it is more nuanced than that. Randomness makes sense in places where random things could happen. In Pokemon, it can be frustrating when a Pokemon breaks out of a ball, no matter how much you try and mitigate the escape factor with an Ultra Ball and berries. However, I get it. Random stuff happens when you're hunting wild animals because the behaviour of wild animals appears more random to us, especially when we're threatening them. I can't stand it in XCOM when my soldier misses a clear shot against an alien with no cover, but there's also the chance in that hypothetical scenario that the alien would dodge in time.
It gets weird when it doesn't make sense. The one that always bugged me the most were random character improvements in Fire Emblem. Leveling up a character and not getting any stat boosts will always grind my gears, because the "parent" level system said I got better but then I have nothing to show for it.
Mario Party is really hard for me to swallow due to how random its action is, but it's that randomness that also makes it a huge hit among certain players. There's always a feeling that you can win, and there's a sizable chunk of gamers who would rather that than having their experienced gamer friend crush them in every mini game as part of a death march to an inevitable loss. Mario Party with no randomness might be a better game in my eyes, but it would almost certainly sell worse and alienate the intended player base.
Randomness isn't inherently bad. It's a tool that can be used for good or evil. It gets a bad rap because its implementation in games digital or otherwise has been hit-and-miss. It's really a matter of finding the right spots where it makes sense and/or makes the game more fun.
I totally agree. I'm generally one to prefer skill over luck but there's definitely a place for games where there are random elements, I think it's particularly valuable when playing with folks of uneven skill levels – my sister is only seven, but she can play Mario Party with my brother and me with no issues because the random elements of the game kind of negate our advantage as more experienced gamers, and she gets the opportunity to perform well or even win as a result. So even though I don't enjoy it as much from a gameplay perspective, I enjoy that it gives her an opportunity to feel good and see her character in first place.
Now for tactics games, on the other hand, I'll take as little randomness as possible, thank you very much!
Ogreatgames.com says:
I think the randomness makes games more fun. Dark Souls 3 utilizes this element, making it really fun and challenging. I just don't like it implemented on some game events. For example in Fire Emblem Heroes, the 5★ Special Hero Summon Year 2 event randomly gives me the hero I find less desirable. I've suffered such fate two times and it sucks.
And yeah, another awesome post Robert!
Thank you! I think there are games where randomness has a place and those where it doesn't. For me, tactical games work better without it, but that may not be the case for everyone.


"The Sixth Section" opens a surprising window on immigration in the twenty-first century. Following a group of Mexican immigrants from the tiny desert town of Boqueron who now work in upstate New York, the film documents their struggle to support themselves – and their hometown 2000 miles to the south. To do this, the men form a 'union' that raises money in the form of weekly donations of or from each of its members in New York. In the past few years the group has brought electricity, an ambulance and, most dramatically, a 2,000-seat baseball stadium to Boqueron. "The Sixth Section" is an intimate portrait of how 'The American Dream' is being redefined by today's immigrants. A P.O.V. Co-Presentation.
Alex Rivera is a media artist and filmmaker who, for the past 10 years, has worked with digital video and on the Internet to tell unique stories of the Latino experience. He recently completed a series of short films for P.O.V.'s Borders web series, and produced for Hector Galan on the PBS series Visiones. He won the Sundance/NHK International Filmmaker award, and a Silver Hugo. His works have been screened at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), The Guggenheim Museum, Lincoln Center as well as on PBS and at numerous film festivals around the world. He lives in New York City.
Bernardo Ruiz is a writer and filmmaker whose credits include the shorts, "Night Magic" and "The Devil's Twilight" (with Eli Wallach). He recently produced a 10-week interactive web documentary, Leaving Elsa, for P.O.V.'s Borders web series. Ruiz's writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and The Miami Herald. He is a recipient of a film grant from the New York Foundation on the Arts and an Emerging Maker grant from Latino Public Broadcasting. He lives in New York City.
P.O.V. / American Documentary, Inc.
This program was produced by Second Generation Media which is solely responsible for its content.


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High Schools Are Allowing Sleep-deprived Students to Take Midday Naps
By: Shelley Danzy
Some high school students are getting the opportunity to take a midday snooze in comfy pods. STAN HONDA/AFP/Getty Images
Ah, high school memories: football games, yearbooks, proms ... and good old-fashioned nap time? Based on National Institutes of Health stats, 70 percent of U.S. high school students don't sleep enough on school nights. In fact, a 2014 NSF Sleep in America poll indicated that more than half of the 15- to 17-year-olds surveyed got seven hours or less of sleep every night. Now, high schools are experimenting with remedies for students' sleep deprivation, including midday naps.
Some schools have adopted later start times to help students get more sleep. Some offer students guided meditation and mindfulness sessions to combat stress and fatigue. And in 2016, Stanford University students trained high school students to be "sleep ambassadors" and teach their peers the importance of sufficient sleep.
Another option? Snoozing stations. Many companies and colleges already have nap pods. But now, these pods are in the fight to refresh sleep-deprived high school students.
Las Cruces High School in New Mexico was in the spotlight recently after a federal grant allowed the school to buy nap pods, reclining chairs with orb-shaped enclosures and relaxing music designed to shut out distractions. But it's not the only high school with these pods. According to local news station KVIA, students at Chaparral High School and Onate High School in southern New Mexico can also doze in one.
Christopher Lindholst, CEO of Restworks (which provided the pods at Las Cruces) and co-founder of MetroNaps, confirms an increase in demand for pods for high schools and universities via email. "We have seen significant upswing in these installations in the last 24 months in both the U.S. and international markets." This is due to an awareness of the importance of sleep, he says, and a combination of societal pressures and technologies that cause sleep deprivation.
Is this a wake-up call for students? According to the National Sleep Foundation (NSF), teenagers usually require eight to 10 hours of sleep per night, but more often than not, their actual sleep time is insufficient. And in the aforementioned Sleep in America poll, 81 percent of parents surveyed said inadequate sleep had an impact on their kid's performance in school.
But naps aren't all positive. Short naps or power naps (less than 30 minutes) could help teenagers who are sleep deprived, but Kumar says that shouldn't be the norm. Poor sleeping habits result in sleep debt, and naps don't really allow students to catch up when the debt is high. It's best to have a bedtime and a wake-up time, seven days a week, to maintain a healthy sleep schedule.
Kumar, who is also the medical director at the Sleep Disorders Center at Wake Forest Baptist Health, says one of the important things that her team tells teenagers who complain of insomnia is to ditch devices, like smartphones and computers, before heading to bed. "The LED blue light that emanates from the gadgets prevents a good night's sleep," she says.
So, there's good reason for teens to get some shut-eye during the school day, but creating good nighttime sleep habits is paramount. Lindholst, who takes a 14-minute nap every workday afternoon, reminds us, "Napping is not a replacement for night time sleep, but the natural circadian rhythm of humans (young people also) supports a brief rest during the day." Teenage pod nappers unite!
According to the National Sleep Foundation, more than 85 percent of mammalian species are polyphasic sleepers (sleeping short periods throughout the day). Humans are monophasic sleepers (two periods: asleep and awake).
Shelley Danzy "High Schools Are Allowing Sleep-deprived Students to Take Midday Naps" 22 February 2017.
HowStuffWorks.com. <https://people.howstuffworks.com/high-schools-are-allowing-sleepdeprived-students-take-midday-naps.htm> 1 February 2023
Does the full moon affect your sleep?
How Polyphasic Sleep Works

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Q: Can I create a multiple-column context menu in .NET Windows Forms? I want to create a context menu that has several columns. Basically it would go like this:
First item  | [common option] | All Options >
Second item | [common option] | All Options >
Third item  | [common option] | All Options >
Fourth item | [common option] | All Options >

So basically there are a bunch of items (generated at runtime), each item can be launched on its own; or with a commonly used option; or you can get a submenu with all possible options.
How can I do this? I'm trying to abuse both ContextMenuStrip and ContextMenu, yet they don't seem to have any such options. Still I seem to recall having seen multi-column menus somewhere...
I'd prefer a Windows Forms solution, because I don't have any WPF experience. Oh, and this context menu will open when clicking on an icon in the Notification Area (aka systray).

A: I don't know about ContextMenuStrip, which is a menu built entirely in .NET code, but you can definitely do this with ContextMenu, which is a wrapper over the native system menus.
The key is setting the MFT_MENUBREAK or MFT_MENUBARBREAK flags for the individual menu item(s), which are exposed as properties in the MenuItem class wrapper: MenuItem.Break and MenuItem.BarBreak, respectively.
The former just places the menu item in a new column, while the latter places the item into a new column and separates the column with an etched vertical line.
From the MSDN example:
public void CreateMyMenus()
{
    // Create three top-level menu items.
    MenuItem menuItem1 = new MenuItem("&File");
    MenuItem menuItem2 = new MenuItem("&New");
    MenuItem menuItem3 = new MenuItem("&Open");

    // Set the BarBreak property to display horizontally.
    menuItem2.BarBreak = true;
    menuItem3.BarBreak = true;

    // Add menuItem2 and menuItem3 to the menuItem1's list of menu items.
    menuItem1.MenuItems.Add(menuItem2);
    menuItem1.MenuItems.Add(menuItem3);
}

A: Menus in WinForms can only be built like trees: you can have a submenu under each item. So you can put the common option as the first item of the submenu.
It cannot look any different unless you design your own control (and then WPF is much more suitable for this task, but WPF takes a lot of time to learn).

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


No matter if you're shopping for back to school supplies, birthday presents, Christmas gifts, or just for you, Amazon can be an awesome place to find good deals and fast shipping! I'm a huge proponent of shopping on Amazon. I'm a Prime member and I don't mind showing my support. They make shopping online so much easier with their huge selection and quick shipping. Their customer service is really good as well (if you've ever had to use it).
Amazon has introduced same day shipping in our area. I did try it out and it was pretty cool. I ordered in the morning and the item was there that night. Most of the time they charge extra, but the item I bought was free that same day. This service is only available to Amazon Prime members. If you're not one, why not try out a free, 30-day trial?
Today, I'm going to share with you 10 ways, yes 10, to save more money when shopping at Amazon. Not all of these are revolutionary, but they will make you think before you click the checkout button. If you check all of these out, you can really save good money when shopping at Amazon. You can also ensure you're getting the best price possible. There are times when Amazon is not the cheapest game in town and I know that can be the case. Having said that, I also account quick shipping, ease of returns, and customer service in my reasoning to purchase something. Typically, there are few retailers who can compete with Amazon on all of those levels.
Without further ado, let's get started. Here are the money saving tips everyone should know before shopping on Amazon!
This is the place to shop! I have saved so much money here and the products are just as good. Amazon's Warehouse deals section is for the open-box and discounted used items Amazon has around. Since they are the largest retailer, they get items that have shipping damage, were opened and then returned, or a customer just didn't want them. It happens to every retailer. Instead of just calling it a loss, Amazon sells the items they deem are in good condition.
When on Amazon, head over to this page to start shopping their warehouse deals. Amazon grades the merchandise in their warehouse to help you make a better decision on what you want. They are New, Like New, Very Good, Good, and Acceptable. I would stick with the first three when buying anything. I was able to save $75 off a camera lens for my wife just because the shipping box was damaged. It was labeled new, but since there was box damage, they couldn't sell it at full price.
If the warehouse deals weren't enough, Amazon also has an outlet section. This is where they stick their overstocks, older models, overruns, closeouts, and markdowns. The items are all new, but they put a deep discount on them in order to sell. Right now, you can typically score a deal up to 60% off the regular price. It's a pretty good section to look at. Not every category has an outlet section, but they deal mostly with clothing, electronics, outdoor equipment, musical instruments, and a few more. You can typically find outlet deals for Amazon's most popular categories.
It's a good place to look for items you know are not in season. If you need something that you can use in the summer, but you're buying it in the winter, check Amazon's outlet section. You never know!
Want up to 15% off items you normally buy each and every week? Then you need to be a part of Amazon's subscribe and save program! Yes, this little gem allows you to subscribe to a bunch of products you normally buy (think everyday items), but save money on top of it. Subscribe and Save sends out products to you on a regular basis. You choose what products you want to be delivered and when each month. Amazon will do the rest.
The best part is if you have five or more items on subscribe and save, then you get 15% off. You also get free shipping on your items (doesn't matter how many you have). This is the perfect way to keep your house stocked up without having to drive to the store every month the replenish your supplies. They will be waiting for you at your door at the time you specify. It's not much easier than that!
Oh, and you can also include some coupons in the mix. Amazon does have some instant clip coupons just for subscribe and save items. Hot dang!!
Did you know that Amazon has coupons? Most people didn't know that, but they really do. Amazon has an entire coupon section just for those looking for some deals! Now, these coupons tend to be for the bigger manufacturers, but the best part is they are an instant clip. If you're looking to buy some diapers, you can head over to the Coupon section and see if they have any diaper coupons. One click and the savings are yours.
If you want to just navigate to the coupon section, you can just go to www.amazon.com/coupons/ and you will be there!
They break out the categories for their coupons into sections such as Most Popular, Beauty, Grocery & Gourmet, Household Supplies, Electronics, Baby & Child Care, Vitamins & Dietary Supplements, and much more. Depending on your need, there might be an instant clip coupon waiting for you!
If you're a student with a .edu email address, then you can save on an Amazon Prime membership. Amazon Student is basically a Prime account, but for 50% off. You can get it for $49 a year. There are some limitations to this program, which are still available for full Prime members. You can't share any of your shipping benefits with anyone else and you can't get Instant Video until your free trial expires after 6 months.
To sign up, you just head over here. You don't need to have your .edu email in your Amazon account, but they will use it to verify you're truly a student. The program will end after four years of your sign up or they can't verify your student status any longer, whichever comes first. This is just an easy way to save on Prime and get some discounts on books.
Do you like shopping and giving back at the same time? Good!
Amazon Smile can do just that for you. While it's not a way to save money on Amazon, it is a way to give back while you shop there. If you haven't heard of Amazon Smile, then here is a rough break down.
When you shop at smile.amazon.com instead of just amazon.com, you can give back to your favorite charity. Amazon Smile lists over one million charities where you can donate to. But, how do you donate?
Simple, instead of buying an item on Amazon, you just head over to smile.amazon.com and buy the item there. It's still Amazon's site, but now they will give 0.50% of your purchase to the charity of your choice. While it's not going to be a huge donation, it's still a donation none the less. It's basically a donation to your favorite charity just for shopping on Amazon. You don't get to write it off, since Amazon is the one doing the donation, but still. It doesn't take any extra time or effort on your part and you can help your favorite charity in the process.
The next time you are on Amazon looking at a product to buy, try replacing the "www" with "smile" in the URL. If the product page comes back up, then you're in luck. Most of them work this way, but if not, just head to smile.amazon.com and look for the same product.
Here is a sneaky little trick that does work from time to time. It's not guaranteed, but I have seen it work before. Basically, this is a way to get Amazon to push deals over to you without doing any work.
When you want to buy a product on Amazon, head over there and add it to your cart. The key to this pricing trick is to NOT check out after you add it to your cart. You want to wait for some time to see if Amazon will drop the price. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't.
This is what I like to call "forcing a promotion." You must be logged into your Amazon account before you add the items to your cart. This is the only way I've seen it work. Once you add the item(s) to your cart, you need to leave Amazon for a few days. Obviously, you want to use this trick when you don't need an item quickly. After some time, you might get an email from Amazon saying you have items in your shopping cart and they could provide a promotion to you. I've saved 20% by waiting before, but it is hit or miss. It's not 100% effective.
It's free to try and doesn't hurt you, so why not? There's a chance you can score a deal without doing anything but leaving an item or two in your shopping cart!. Winning!!
This is basically running a small price comparison right on Amazon from your computer. You are trying to see if you can score a better deal when shopping on Amazon without being logged in. This is not 100%, but I have seen it work and have received a few lower prices. It all depends on the product and where you live.
You just need to navigate to Amazon like you normally would. Find what you want to buy, but don't add it to your cart. Make sure you're logged into your Amazon account!
Next, open a new, fresh browsing window (try incognito in Chrome or private window in Firefox). Navigate to Amazon and go to the same product page. Sometimes Amazon will show lower prices to those not already an Amazon customer, but this trick really works if you can get a friend in a different city to check the pricing. Amazon does really well with their product distributions, so if they can pinpoint where you are and where the product is, they might be able to score a better deal if the distribution center is near.
This trick is not hard to try, but it's accuracy is not as good as anything else in this article. I think I've seen this work about 10% of the time. Either way, you can save by checking pricing on two different browsers.
I learned about a cool and free browser extension a few weeks ago. It has changed the way I shop online, even on Amazon. This free extension works on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, but not Internet Explorer.
Basically, this extension scours the web for coupons and discount codes. You don't even have to search for them anymore. When you're about to checkout on Amazon or any other store, it will go through it's database to try to find a valid coupon code to use. It's not always successful, but it does work from time to time.
I've had some success on Amazon, but since you don't have to do anything, it's certainly something I would advise you try out. It really doesn't hurt and all it can do is save you more money!
This money saving tip could be a little touchy for some because it involves emails. If you're anything like me, you have an inbox that is growing by the day. I can't handle too many emails beyond what I already have. That being said, Amazon does deliver deals right to your inbox depending on what categories you sign up for. As noted before, I get Amazon's daily deals in my inbox every morning. This allows me to quickly look to see if the deal is anything which pertains to me. If not, it gets deleted.
It only takes a minute to sign up for different lists Amazon provides. You can go here and see what they offer, but these emails will usually be promotions and deals. It's really just about saving money with this one and making it easy for you.
Now here is another giveaway for our reader. We are giving away $50 Amazon gift card to one lucky winner. Enter through the gleam widget and come back every day for more entries. To see the winner list visit this page after finishing the competition, we will announce here on gleam widget after 7 days of the deadline.
Due to some unknown reason, our gleam account got disabled and this is why we are going to finish all our giveaways and contests that started on/before December 13, 2017. We are going to choose a winner based on comments on our blog. We will contact and announce the winner's name here shortly. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Will be posted on/before December 22, 2017.
I knew this was legit once I saw honey mentioned! I love honey.
I didnt know about the warehouse and outlet sections! Thanks!
Great tips. Some of them I knew but I learned several new tips and since I'm on Amazon all the time they will help.


text:
using System;
using System.Reflection;
using System.IO;
using PublicApiGenerator;

static class Program
{
    static int Main(string[] args)
    {
        try
        {
            var assemblyPath = args[0];
            var asm = Assembly.LoadFile(assemblyPath);
            var options = new ApiGeneratorOptions();
            switch (args[1])
            {
                case "-": Console.WriteLine(asm.GeneratePublicApi(options)); break;
                case string apiFilePath: File.WriteAllText(apiFilePath, asm.GeneratePublicApi(options)); break;
            }
            return 0;
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            Console.Error.WriteLine(e);
            return 1;
        }
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Reach for the perfect way to pay. Any time, any amount.
No matter where you are or what you need, Bank of Tennessee's VISA Debit Card offers much more flexibility and security than cash and checks.
Before you hit the road, tell us where you're headed so you can use your debit card wherever you roam. We've made it easy with our online Travel Notification Form.
Receive real-time alerts when your card is used for purchases online, in foreign countries, or when the purchase is over a certain dollar amount.
Simply set up the criteria for the activity that happens with your debit card and you can receive text or email alerts.
Sign up for VISA Purchase alerts in just a few, quick steps.
Make sure your debit or credit card is a "Chip Card". Smart chips are microchips embedded in credit/debit cards that encrypt the information contained in the magnetic strip. The microchip cannot be changed or deleted. If a skimmer tries to scan your card through the device, they will obtain only encrypted information and thus be unable to clone your credit card. If someone steals your smart card and disables the chip, the new swipe terminals will alert staff to ask for an ID or decline the transaction.
When you enter your PIN to make a purchase, money is immediately taken out of your account and sent to the vendor.
When you choose credit, you are giving yourself full protection from VISA. Your payment is sent from the bank, through VISA and then to the vendor you are buying from. Also, since you aren't entering in your PIN you are protected by the zero-liability policy by Visa.
So what do you need to do in order to have the most protection on your Debit Card?
One simple thing: instead of selecting "debit" and entering your PIN, select "credit" and sign for the authorization.
Monitor your account activity using your bank's online and mobile banking technology. That way you can catch fraudulent activity quickly and report it. Not signed up for online banking?
Inspect card readers on outside devices (like ATMs or gas station terminals) to see if there is a suspicious piece of hardware on the card reader. Unfortunately this can be very hard to detect, especially if it is a terminal you don't use often.
See that VISA logo at the bottom right corner of your debit card? That logo is your protection.
VISA's Zero Liability Policy is our guarantee that you won't be held responsible for unauthorized charges made with your account or account information. You're protected if your Visa credit or debit card is lost, stolen or fraudulently used, online or offline.
Disclaimer: VISA's Zero Liability Policy covers US issued cards only. Does not apply to ATM transactions, PIN transactions not covered by VISA or any other transactions not processed by VISA. You must notify your financial institution immediately of any unauthorized use. For specific restrictions, limitations, and other details, please contact Bank of Tennessee. Standard messaging rates may apply.
If your debit card has been lost or stolen, contact us immediately so we can turn the card off. Our Customer Service Center is available Monday-Friday from 8:00am-6:00pm ET and Saturday from 9:00am-1:00pm ET at 866.378.9500. If your card is lost after business hours, please call 800.500.1044.
Replacement cards are available at any branch location via our InstaCard service, or you can also request one via mail. Please allow 7-10 business days for receipt.
What do I do if I suspect fraudulent use of my debit card?
If you suspect your debit card is being used fraudulently, or you notice an unauthorized transaction, please contact us immediately. Our Customer Service Center is available Monday-Friday from 8:00am-6:00pm ET and Saturday from 9:00am-1:00pm ET at 866.378.9500.
How much money can I withdraw from the ATM with my debit card?
Are there limits on how much I can spend on my debit card?
I have forgotten my PIN number. What do I do?
If you have forgotten your PIN number, please stop into any branch location with identification to change it. If you know your pin and just wish to change it, you can do so at any Bank of Tennessee ATM.
*VISA's Zero Liability Policy covers US issued cards only. Does not apply to ATM transactions, PIN transactions not covered by VISA or any other transactions not processed by VISA. You must notify your financial institution immediately of any unauthorized use. For specific restrictions, limitations, and other details, please contact Bank of Tennessee. This card is issued by Bank of Tennessee pursuant to a license from VISA USA Inc. VISA is a registered trademarkof Visa International Service Association. InstaCard available at all branch locations, fee may apply. Daily spending limit applies, $500 per day cash limit, $2,000 per day point of sale.


you've ever seen happen in person on Black Friday?
I know there are tons of olds posts that look like it might be similar, but would love to read the stories all in one place.
Me? Well, no grabbing or fighting or anything like that, but the very first Black Friday I went out shopping I had no clue what I was in for. I went into Best Buy and there were people EVERYWHERE. And they were just standing. I went in looking for one DVD (stupid me, and never found it) and people were just in EVERY single part of every aisle....just standing there. I remember one guy hugging his item to him. Hahaha!
I didn't realize till a year or two later when I learned more about Black Friday that.... ALL THOSE PEOPLE WERE IN LINE. Every single person just standing there was in line waiting to checkout. That's why they weren't going anywhere.
First of all, let me say welcome to the forums! Glad you can join us. We're here year-round so make this your Internet home. We have cookies!
I haven't seen anything crazy. Couple years back, I heard a commotion at Walmart while I was standing in line for something, but I don't think it was at that level of craziness you can see on YouTube. I elbowed someone a few years back too because she came flying into me trying to push me out of the way for some DVDs when I had been waiting patiently for a few hours.
Then again, my usual BF experiences is: Walmart & Menards. And online. If I get to anywhere else, it is always way after the rush.
A couple years back Walmart had the 3 crockpots thing for like $18. There was about 30 on the skid. Everyone is crowded around waiting for time to happen. Right at time people started jumping from behind trying to get these things. I was standing in front next to this lady probably in her 60s at that point. Someone jumped from behind knocked in her on top of the skid. People just kept pulling them from under her while her husband is on the otherside trying to get to her. I was so shocked. I forgot all about the crackpots and attempted to help her off the skid. Theyou had pulled them all so she was literally left on the empty skid. I was so disappointed I didn't get one but this lady wasn't harmed so I was ok with it. About 10 mins later a lady walked up to me and said I seen you try to help that lady so I got one of these for you and she hands me a 3 crockpot thing. It was awesome!
That is crazy. People are just insane. I don't understand why people act like that, or when they trample over people. There is no deal that good enough to treat another like that.
Every Best Buy store I've been to on BF has been like that. And sadly they always have EXTREMELY LIMITED stock; like only 2 of each of the big doorbusters, maybe 3 copies of each DVD/BD title... I remember one year(I think it was the first year I joined BFADs) I was going to hit up BBY for something(not a big doorbuster), even stood outside in line (place #30 of 600+) for about 30 min before deciding that the item I wanted wasn't worth being there - When I got back to my truck, I looked back at the line and about 200 people from the back of the line just DARTED for the doors. Trampled over those who have been, literally camping, there for days. I hung around to see if the store security team would do anything but they just yelled at the crowd to form a single file line otherwise they wouldn't open the doors. At that point the campers were packing up their stuff and leaving...To me, THAT was crazy - camp outside a store for days prior to a sale only to leave within minutes of opening? LOL!!
Yeah, that's nuts. Wait all that time and then ditch it? Heck no.
My son and I like to drive by the Best Buys and see how early people are out there waiting. I think Monday was the earliest, but then, we never thought to even check before then. It's all extreme.
clubing25 wrote: A couple years back Walmart had the 3 crockpots thing for like $18. There was about 30 on the skid. Everyone is crowded around waiting for time to happen. Right at time people started jumping from behind trying to get these things. I was standing in front next to this lady probably in her 60s at that point. Someone jumped from behind knocked in her on top of the skid. People just kept pulling them from under her while her husband is on the otherside trying to get to her. I was so shocked. I forgot all about the crackpots and attempted to help her off the skid. Theyou had pulled them all so she was literally left on the empty skid. I was so disappointed I didn't get one but this lady wasn't harmed so I was ok with it. About 10 mins later a lady walked up to me and said I seen you try to help that lady so I got one of these for you and she hands me a 3 crockpot thing. It was awesome!
OMG Tek I do remem that. Your all good now?
The crazy things for me, happen over housewares. No matter what store I have been to, there is ALWAYS a fight over crock pots, or the big boxes of storage containers. It blows my mind that peeps actually go to blows over that stuff.
The most annoying , tho most stores don't allow it anymore, is when you show up hours early: about 10th in line, and just before store opens, a bunch of peeps show up and flood the front of the line, so now I am 60th in line. Well they had family members hold their place at the front and 15 of them show up. That really pisses me off. First BF I got screwed. Now I make a big fuss with the store manager if that happens to me. Now I know better.
A woman berating other customers in junior because "I can say whatever the f#(« I want"
ALL IN THE FIRST HOUR!!!!
I really can't think of anything too crazy I have seen in person. The typical grab and shove of a few years ago at Walmart most of us have seen. And the families that bring all the kids out in their pajamas used to drive me nuts. The kids would be crying/cranky/trying to sit down in the aisles while parents are piling toys around them.
Yep I could even imagine bringing ny kids when they were younger. Of course now my 15 yrs old isn't let me leave without her.


One of the fundamental concepts of Economics over the past 50 years has been market equilibrium. Simply stated, if markets are left to their own, they will naturally balance supply and demand for all products and markets will efficiently determine the prices and amounts of all products. No need for government intervention or price controls; it will all be achieved by the "invisible elbow"* of market competition. In fact, Equilibriumists believe that the government is the force that prevents markets from achieving true equilibrium. If government were only kept from interfering with markets, market equilibrium would be restored to the throne of Shangri-La and riches and profits would stream out of the mountains of commerce to quench the thirst of everyone.
IF THIS IS TRUE, then why do all markets move in the direction of monopolies? Recent history demonstrates this point.
When Bell telephone was broken up into multiple phone companies, reducing the barrier to competition, the number of phone companies exploded. Now, 30 years later, we're down to 4 or 5 mega-phone companies.
When the US airlines were deregulated, the number of airline companies increased, providing increased competition. Now, 30 years later, the number of airline companies in the US is down to a handful, with a bunch of regional airlines handling the less-profitable scraps. How long until they're all consolidated into a handful or regional airlines?
When I was first old enough to buy beer, there were about a dozen nationwide beer makers. That number has been reduced to only a few – the latest merger of SAB Miller and AB InBev ensures that 1 in 3 beers purchased in the US will be bought from AB InBev. And when the trend for craft beers runs its course, AB InBev will probably sell 2 out of 3 beers.
It is irrelevant what equations or theories the Equilibriumists produce; the evidence of what actually has happened is quite different from their beliefs. For equilibrium to exist, the number of producers of any product must be large enough to develop a healthy competition. Without competition, markets lose their invisible kneecap* that regulates prices. That is why most economists are against monopolies and oligopolies – they reduce competition among sellers that produces the lowest prices that "the most benefits for society at large." (Lowest prices producing the most benefits for society is a different subject open for debate.) Instead of moving in the direction of increased competition, markets always move in the direction of consolidating competitors into fewer, larger competitors, despite the efforts of the government to limit the consolidations.
Equilibriumists and conservative economists in general agree that the government shouldn't be in the business of picking winners and losers in business and that competition should be the sole determinant of said winners and losers, underpinning their beliefs that markets work best when left alone. However, when competition is the sole determinant of winners and losers, the market will always move in the direction of monopolies.
The commonly accepted economic thought is that the winners (or luckiest or most efficient producers, etc) will do better and sell more product and thereby claim increased market share, driving out the less efficient or more obsolete producers. However, this fails to follow the thought to its logical conclusion, that the winners eventually out-produce the majority of their competition, driving out the competition, which leads to oligopolies or monopolies, thereby producing a market for that product that is out of equilibrium because the winners no longer are constrained by competition. They can charge whatever they want.
In other words, free markets always end up destroying free markets.
Consider this: the description of markets always moving in the direction of monopolies is similar to the description of the universe and how stars and planets formed. In this description, the early universe is filled with an almost uniform distribution of atoms and nothing else. The tiny differences in uniformity causes the atoms in slightly more densely populated areas to be pulled together into clumps. Those clumps attract more of the surrounding atoms until they start to form a large body. That large body draws in even more surrounding atoms and the body grows until it is so large that it's combined gravitation attraction forms the body into a planet or into a stars. Eventually all of the free atoms are absorbed by the planets and the stars.
Market equilibrium is a description of a perfect, ideal state which can never exist for very long, just like the early universe with its (almost perfectly) uniform distribution of atoms. Eventually, without any outside forces or influences, the markets (and atoms) begin to consolidate into larger units. Because the competitors in a market will never be exactly equal, true market equilibrium can exist for only moments because competition and innovation and efficiency and just plain good (or bad) luck will upset the equilibrium and send the market into consolidation and reduction of competition.
Market equilibrium is cloudy economic thinking; it focuses on only one part of the issue (of the cloud) and ignores its effect on other parts of the economy (on the rest of the cloud). For economics to become a useful tool, we have to move beyond wishful thinking and our dreams of ideal perfect worlds that can never exist. We have to accept that markets will twist and turn and change because of innovation and chaos, because of fashions and consumer whims, because of improvements and resistance to change. We have to abandon our (bordering on) religious belief that markets will always right themselves because of equilibrium or that bubbles can't really exist in a market, or ONLY government interference prevents the proper functioning of markets. W have to accept that markets can, by themselves, run off into a ditch and fail. It is the nature and the essence of the beast called free markets.
*If the "invisible hand" really is invisible, how do they know it's a hand? An elbow or a buttock are equally valid body parts UNTIL someone actually sees the invisible hand, at which point it is no longer invisible!!!
This entry was posted in Economics on November 13, 2015 by AvianWriter.
Bank entities will begin as savings and loaning organizations. The other aspect of banks will be covered in the Investment entities. Banks will make loans to Individuals, Consumers, Vendors, and Producers and collect installment payments (with interest). Initially, Consumers, Vendors, and Producers will all pay some amount for loans, which, on average, most Consumers, Vendors, and Producers all have.
Credit Cards are usually backed by Banks but because they have such a significant role in the lives of Individuals and Consumers, Credit Card entities will be split out separately. Credit cards also have a much broader distribution than bank loans; approx 40% of Americans households rent instead of having a home mortgage, but approximately 70% to 80% of households have at least 1 credit card, depending on the year selected. Credit cards will be another payment that Consumers will make based on some typical amount for a quintile. However, Individuals will have to make credit card payments based on their individual profiles that will try to estimate their tendency to buy on credit and their tendency to carry a balance on their credit cards. And based on income and other factors, their "credit score" will affect the interest that they pay but typically in the 15% to 30% range.
Investment entities play a significant role in the US economy but in many ways they behave like a separate, parallel economy that is only connected to the mainstream economy at a few points. Some of those intersections are the Bank entities, consumer confidence, and Individuals.
When dealing with Consumers at the quintile level, investments look like savings accounts and 2% interest earned and 7% stock market returns just look like savings with different interest rates. On average, throughout a quintile, some Consumers will save more and some will save less, some Consumers will receive higher interest payments and others will receive less. The investment entitiy doesn't really affect Consumers.
However, Banks are strongly associated with Investments and Prime Interest rates, etc, so their lending is affected by Investments in general. So changes in Fed policy will affect lending policies and interest payments and more.
Just as importantly, the stock market and bond markets affect (and reflect) consumer confidence. If consumers are feeling nervous, they will put more money into bonds. If consumers are feeling optimistic that everything is getting better, they will put more money into stocks, perhaps even taking out savings to invest heavily in wildly speculative stocks. When the stock market goes up consistently for a while, the "wealth effect" comes into play, making people feel more confident, reducing savings rates and increasing purchases, setting the "virtuous cycle" in motion.
Individuals are affected by their Investments more than Consumers in general. This is intentional as some people are lucky when they invest and others lose everything. Some individuals put their money is steady performers; others invest their money in stocks that might grow significantly or might fail completely. Based on the Individual's investment profile and how "lucky" the individual is, an Individual may be helped greatly or lose greatly. On average, however, it is expected that most Individuals will have their Investments pay approx 5% year over year.
OK, that's everything that I can think of for now. I'll add more as I come across it.
This entry was posted in Economics on November 9, 2015 by AvianWriter.
So far we've covered Individuals, Consumers, and the Government entities in the simulation. That leaves Vendors and Producers.
Vendors sell stuff or services to Individuals, Consumers, and to the Government entities. Right now the Vendors reflect the purchases that Individuals and Consumers typically make, based on the standard Basket of Goods and Services defined for the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Using this categorization makes some unrealistic combination of vendors, such as in the Other category, which includes cigarettes and bubblegum and other miscellaneous items. Transportation is another odd Vendor because it represents both Public Transportation and Auto Dealers. These odd combinations are not considered significant at this point in the development of the Economic Simulator, although it is expected that more detailed definitions of Vendors will become part of this project.
Vendors also buy all of their stuff from Producers. If the amount spent on clothing by Individuals and Consumers increases, then the amount of clothes that the Vendor buys from Producers should also go up. If the amount spent on food goes down, then the amount the Vendors buy from Producers should also go down.
Vendors also are employers, which means that as their sales increase, the number of employees will increase, increasing their expenses. The number of employees will be allowed to increase by fractional amounts (.13 employees) because this number represents the overall increase in their specific vendor category. If the demand goes down, the number of employees will also go down.
Producers include raw materials producers, such as miners, wheat growers, and blue jeans makers. They are both employers and sellers of stuff and services to Vendors. Employees are part of their expenses, as are buying or mining or refining materials needed to make their products. When their costs go up, their prices to Vendors go up. When Vendors order more, Producers respond by producing more. More employees are hired when they need to produce more (including fractional amounts); employees are laid off when demand goes down.
Vendors and Producers will also need to have an "Automation" factor that represents the increased productivity of workers due to automation and computerization. For example, the coal mining industry has seen significant reductions in the size of their workforce primarily due to improved coal mining equipment and techniques. For example, "hilltop removal" in West Virginia has applied open pit mining techniques to extract coal, allowing huge earth moving equipment to replace the manual efforts of thousands of coal miners. For another example, large corporations used to have entire floors of accountants tracking all of their income and expenses. These hundreds of accountants have been replaced by a dozen or so accountants working at their computers.
No attempt at this time will be made to try to track the off-shoring of work, sending manufacturing jobs oversees where employments costs are lower. At the current level of analysis, a streamlined job in the US is the same as an off-shored job; both are reductions in the costs to the Producer. Some Producers in one industry will have larger cost reductions than Producers in other industries. Some Producers will be more efficient and will drive out or absorb the less efficient Producers.
All of the churning caused by automation and computerization and mergers and acquisitions and off-shoring among Producers is not going to be captured at this point. In fact, the initial representation of ALL Producers will be a single Producer entity that all Vendors buy from. Since individual consumers account for 70% of GDP, it is more important to capture their activity with some fidelity than to capture every detail of Producers.
As with Government expenses, the reporting needs and curiosity of developers will drive the level of detail applied to the Producers. If the amount of cotton grown for clothing is important, then it will be necessary to estimate how much cotton clothing is sold by Vendors as well as what affects the amount sold (styles, product options, weather, etc). If the trade-offs between renewable energy and fossil-fuel energy need to be simulated, then those Producers and the resources they consume will need to be modeled.
Temporarily, the details of Vendors and Producers will be minimized. As their models are better understood, their models will be improved to produce finer levels of detail.
So far we have described 3 major pieces of the Economics Simulator; Individuals (who suffer the ups and downs of real life), Consumers (who as a quintile buy and work like people do in their quintile), and the Government (who collects taxes and makes expenditures).
As a side note, Consumers don't pay state taxes or sales taxes. Instead, Consumers just pay lump-sum rolled up taxes. This was required because the members of each quintile are spread across all of the states in the US, making it impossible to correctly apply State taxes because each state has it's own State taxes – some states have high Income Taxes, some states have no Income taxes. Individuals, however, resolve this issue because every Individual must reside in one State within the US. The Sales taxes and Income taxes applicable for the selected State will then be used whenever the Individual performs some economic activity, such as earn money or buy stuff.
As another side note, Consumers provide the economic framework within which Individuals operate. Consumers are built-in "Sanity Checks" for every economic run. If changes are made that affect both Individuals and Consumers at large, then the economic results should produce reasonable results for both Individuals and Consumers. For example, if a 1% increase were made to the minimum wage, a 100% increase in Consumer spending wouldn't be expected.
In this way, the Individuals and the Consumers provide off-setting perspectives on the impacts of any changes to economic policy. Policy changes to improve the economic life of a specific Individual might not provide benefits to Consumers in general, or might improve one quintile to the detriment of another quintile.
I just realized that I'm going to have to add "Propensity to Save" to Consumers. The national confidence index, that captures how optimistic people are in general about their economic situation, reflects how people spend and save their money. In recent history, consumer savings has been in the 3% to 5% range, at times dipping negative when consumers as a whole were spending more than the earned and spending every penny and then borrowing more to spend that as well.
At the time of this writing (late 2015), the savings rate is about 6%, indicating that we as a nation are uncertain about what's going to happen economically in the coming year(s). This increased savings has prevented the extra spending that was expected when the cost of gasoline dropped significantly in 2014-2015, and muting the expected GDP growth.
I just realized that this blog should have been titled "Sidenotes to the Economic Simulation". Oh well, at least I got these things covered.
So to summarize, Individuals will go to work and buy stuff based on their profile and rise and fall in relation to the background of Consumers. Individual Profiles include each Individual's propensity to spend, propensity to keep up with friends, propensity to buy name brand instead of store brand, propensity to save, propensity to buy on credit, etc. Consumers buy and sell and work as appropriate for their quintile, the 20% of the US households to which they belong.
In 1985, each quintile was approximately 25 million households or about 125 million households. The average number of people in each household varied by quintile from less than 2 to less than three, which puts us up around 270 million people in the US which is approximately correct for 1985.
Now to make the Economic Simulator in any way valid, the other major components of economic society must be simulated: the Government, Vendors, and Producers. All three of these categories are both consumers and employers. All three of these will grow or shrink according to the economic situation and their long term plans.
The Government is (initially) the easiest to model. They collect taxes from Individuals and Consumers and purchase from Vendors. They also provide employment in accordance with the actual numbers since 1985. For example, in 1985 there were "X" number of non-military government employees earning an average of "Y" dollars each. Ideally, these numbers will be further refined as research identifies more accurate accounting of employees, such as the number of GS-3 employees at a typical salary, for a particular year. A specific goal is to get the total number of non-military government employees for each year so the growth or shrinkage of employees is generally accurate over time.
Since Government employment specifically excluded military, there will also need to be an accounting of the soldiers and other direct hires of the Department of Defense. Expenditures for military support (food, housing, transportation, materiel, etc) will also need to be tracked so that increases or decreases in soldiers and operational readiness because of times of war are not invisibly included into Government expenditures and thereby invalidating any analysis of Government expenditures. For example, ramping up the military for a war would cause increased Government expenditures, but if this were not tracked separately, any wars (economically speaking) would be indistinguishable from increased welfare spending or increased infrastructure spending.
Since government budget and expenses are available for the recent past, these numbers will be used whenever possible. Just like the Consumer Price Index breaks down expenditures into 7 or 8 categories, Government expenditures will similarly be broken down into categories. Perhaps it makes sense to break them down into Discretionary and Mandatory spending, as the budget information is frequently broken out this way. Initially, the spending might be broken out into just Mandatory (Social Security, Medicare, etc) and Discretionary broken out into just Defense and non-Defense spending. And then increase the number of categories as reporting needs and curiosity requires.
While thinking about economic simulations, I couldn't help but notice their similarities to climate prediction simulations and weather forecasting. They are sensitive to the data used to define their initial situations and they can produce different outcomes even when using the identical initial setups. This variability of outcomes is required because the real world is NOT exactly deterministic. Sometimes the panther jumps on the baby antelope and the antelope escapes anyway, despite the odds being against that outcome. Sometimes someone is pulled out alive from the rubble two weeks after an earthquake. Sometimes it doesn't rain on the parade, even though it should have.
This variability is generally accomplished using random numbers that fit some range of expected values. But randomness isn't enough. The variability should also have a probability associated with the value selected for the range of expected values. Randomness assumes that if you dropped a marble on a plate, the atoms in the marble and in the plate could randomly line up at some point and the marble would fall right thru the plate. Probability says that you'd have to drop the marble a lot of times before their atoms would align well enough that the marble would fall thru the plate.
So any economics simulation should be able to meet these twin requirements of variability and probability. The starting numbers should affect but not determine the final outcome. The final outcomes should be different for the various runs but their outcomes should fit into some range of final outcomes that match a probability curve that makes sense.
For example, an individual might start off in poverty and (rarely) grow to great wealth, but if the simulation shows it happening most of the time, there's something inherently wrong with the simulation, something that produces an unrealistic outcome. It doesn't mean that there can't be circumstances and coincidences that allow for happy outcomes, just that they shouldn't happen most of the time.
Just like every time a cloud approaches it doesn't mean that a flood is going to wash out the inhabitants of a valley, valid and useful economic simulations have to be able to produce a range of possible outcomes approximately in proportion to their real world probabilities.
Once we have an economic simulation capable of producing a stable range of probable results, we will be able to change the operating parameters (raise minimum wage or reduce taxes) and study the range of results that are produced. If they produce unexpected results, either our software is wrong or our expectations are wrong.
My suspicion is that it wouldn't take too long to wring out the errors in the simulation software because of the many sets of eyes with great vested interests in the results. And once the simulation is cleaned up, economics will finally be able to move away from the Farmer's Almanac version of weather prediction and into a time where the effects of economic policy changes can be predicted with the same level of precision as weather is predicted now.
Consider how much weather prediction has improved in the past 50 years. Weather predictions used to be, "It will probably rain next week" to "we will probably see some light rain starting late next Tuesday and get heavier overnight into Wednesday and will probably be gone by Thursday morning." Sure, there's always some variability, such as when the rain starts Tuesday noon instead of late afternoon, or doesn't start until Wednesday morning, but for the most part they are much more accurate than they ever used to be.
I look forward to when we can expect the same improved accuracy in our predictions of the impacts of changes to economic policy.
This entry was posted in Economics on November 7, 2015 by AvianWriter.


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Tradeweb captivates Wall Street as investors buy into electronic bond trading
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Author Declan HartyStefen Joshua Rasay
Theme BankingFintech
A leading U.S. electronic trading company has bewitched Wall Street.
With one of the largest initial public offerings so far in 2019, Tradeweb Markets Inc. captivated investors in its April 4 public debut. The New York-based company's newly minted stock closed its first day of trading 32.6% above its initially projected price of $27. At $1.08 billion, Tradeweb's offering was the 16th-largest U.S. IPO since the beginning of 2015, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data.
Now, as the company ramps up operations as a public institution, Tradeweb's biggest growth opportunity may lie within the corporate bond market, where an increasing number of market participants are relying on electronic trading platforms such as those owned by Tradeweb, MarketAxess Holdings Inc. and Bloomberg LP.
"The growth in the fixed-income electronic trading space should not be underestimated," said Larry Tabb, founder and research chairman of TABB Group, a capital markets-focused research and consulting firm. "We are at the beginning of a pretty significant growth spurt."
Established more than two decades ago as an electronic marketplace for U.S. Treasurys, Tradeweb has since expanded its business to reach into a host of global asset classes including over-the-counter derivatives and currencies. Today, Tradeweb has more than 2,500 clients, and it recorded an average daily volume exceeding $600 billion in February, according to its website.
The company moved into the public markets after a long string of M&A and IPO rumors, which ultimately spawned from Blackstone Group LP's $17.30 billion deal to acquire more than half of Thomson Reuters Corp. The early 2018 tie-up made Blackstone and Thomson Reuters co-owners of Refinitiv, which still plans to retain control of Tradeweb.
But it is Tradeweb's business in the sprawling and illiquid corporate bond market that has raised expectations for the company across Wall Street.
"The market seems to like the growth story around fixed-income electronic trading and the data that comes with it," Kevin McPartland, head of market structure and technology research at Greenwich Associates, said in an interview. "That's where Tradeweb sits."
At the turn of the century, electronic-trading companies rushed to modernize the corporate bond market by developing platforms based on the best technology available at the time. But, unlike the equity and derivative markets' transformations, the space is still dominated by traders using phone calls, emails and chat messages.
Trading companies' debt issuances over electronic platforms continues to gain steam, though.
Between the first and third quarters of 2018, electronic trading in corporate bonds grew from 19% to 26%, according to a January report from Greenwich Associates. Within that growing share of electronic trading of corporate bonds, Tradeweb held the second-highest market share among U.S. institutional corporate bond investors in the third quarter of 2018, at 9.1%. It trails only MarketAxess, which controls most of the electronically traded corporate bonds with an 85% market share among those investors in the 2018 third quarter.
The projected growth for Tradeweb in an expanding universe of electronic trading has helped fuel investor demand for the company's shares, several industry experts said. The company's stock added 2.2% in its second day of trading on April 5 and was up about 5% more as of midday on April 8.
Tradeweb has also steadily turned a profit in recent years, something that not every company that has recently hit the public markets can say. The company posted net income of $29.3 million and net revenue of $178.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2018, according to its registration statement.
"It's great to see a profitable company tap the IPO market," Kathleen Smith, principal of pre-IPO research and IPO ETF provider Renaissance Capital, said in an interview.
Declan HartyStefen Joshua Rasay
BankingFintech
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