tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63785422024-03-06T21:51:43.446-08:00Vacuum EnergyCommentary on movies, politics, society and those pesky orbital mind control lasers.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.comBlogger702125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-73767025326456065592011-06-06T20:50:00.000-07:002011-06-06T21:00:46.161-07:00Was Michael Moore guest-blogging at The Dish today?<a href="http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/06/heightening-the-republican-contradictions-ctd.html">Andrew Sullivan decided to excommunicate the Religious Right from American politics on grounds that basically amount to heresy.</a>Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-60762040676161949992011-05-17T21:56:00.000-07:002011-05-17T22:04:30.751-07:00Political flameouts this week<a href="http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=27618">Newt Gingrich, of all people, decided to go Left</a> in order to earn "strange new respect" from the New York Times.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.nysun.com/national/selling-gold-at-fort-knox-emerges-as-next-big/87350/">Ron Paul, a.k.a. "Mr. Gold Standard", wants to sell off the national gold supply</a> to pay down the deficit. That makes a lot of sense if we want <I>China</i> to go onto the gold standard...<br /><br />Eight years of being the California governmor <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/05/17/report-schwarzenegger-fathered-child-household-employee/">seems to have morphed Arnold Schwarzenegger into John Edwards.</a>Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-77122382250788259392011-03-26T13:08:00.000-07:002011-03-26T13:12:26.849-07:00The Daily LoonAndrew Sullivan sees the Middle East revolutions reaching near-Obama levels of audacity: <blockquote>I remain stunned both by the courage of this immense younger generation - from Tehran to Tunis - trying to move past their sclerotic elders. But what really amazes is the speed and breadth of the change. Merely what has happened in Egypt would be historic enough - and Egypt, to my mind, remains the indispensable nation here. And yet, from Yemen to Morocco, the spirit of revolution has accelerated. Quite how this became the tipping point will be decided by historians. But one suspects the combination of a huge teen bulge with the communications revolution were central.<br /><br />I also see some parallels with America. Of course we already had a democracy. But the mass young support for Barack Obama, his vision of a less polarized country and world, his biracial identity, his restraint and inspiration occurred first of all.</blockquote>Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-60353486125803005262011-03-24T00:39:00.000-07:002011-03-24T00:43:07.601-07:00Post #700: The NY Times adopts the ObamaCare paradigm.You'll have to pay through the nose to get the NY Times, <a href="http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-technology/some-readers-will-get-around-paywall-ny-times-20110324-1c70j.html">unless you're slick enough to pick up on the wavers.</a>Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-91851522709555903682011-03-23T20:54:00.000-07:002011-03-23T21:09:04.148-07:00The world situation...Here's the world situation as we know it: <ul><li>American troops are still trying to aid Afghanistan and Pakistan in their struggle with the Taliban and Al Qaeda.</li><br /><li>Iran is still developing nuclear weapons.</li><br /><li>American troops are still on duty protecting Iraq for Al Qaeda and other insurgents.</li><br /><li>Turmoil, upheaval, and revolution has spread across the Middle East.</li><br /><li>We're launching air strikes on Libya now.</li><br /><li><a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/42233910">Out-of-control deficit spending</a> could cause the European economy to collapse any day now.</li><br /><li>Out-of-control deficit spending could cause the American economy to collapse any day now.</li><br /><li>The drug war in Mexico is expanding beyond restraint.</li><br /><li>We have political power struggles from Washington D.C. to Wisconsin.</li><br /><li>The American government is threatening to shut itself down on a week-by-week basis.</li><br /><li>There is the ungoing humanitarian apocalypse in Japan.</li></ul><br />Now we come to the worst disaster of all. A disaster that President Obama regrets more than all of the others put together, yet, as it turns out, was tragically self-inflicted. A disaster that future generations will point to as the 21st century's darkest hour.<br /><br />That's right: <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/03/23/obama-ending-americas-tour-cuts-mayan-visit/">Sascha and Malia won't be visiting Machu Picchu this year</a>. Weep, humanity. Weep.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-18489517650518458362011-03-02T19:44:00.000-08:002011-03-02T19:54:16.462-08:00The Girl Named Mary SueI just finished "The Girl Who Played With Fire." At this point, it would be helpful to review the attributes of the title character, a Swedish girl named Lisbeth Salander.<br /><ul><br /><li>She has a photographic memory;</li><br /><li>is an untraceable, unblockable, world-class computer hacker;</li><br /><li>and has talent with mathematical analysis at the level of Fermat's last theorem.</li><br /><li>She is mysteriously sexually attractive to both men and women;</li><br /><li>yet the Swedish police find her to be an untraceable, wraith-like ninja who can elude a nation-wide manhunt at will.</li><br /><li>She is fast enough, if not strong enough, to go into the boxing ring against male boxers.</li><br /><li>Through a combination of wits, speed, and ruthlessness, she has managed to overpower half-a-dozen adult men, including professional criminal members of a biker gang.</li><br /><li>She has managed to terrify, admittedly irrationally, a man the size of Andre the Giant who is immune to pain.</li><br /><li>She has survived hurricane-force winds.</li><br /><li>She has survived three gunshots wounds, including one that left a bullet lodged in her brain.</li><br /><li>She has survived being buried alive.</li><br /></ul><br />How do we explain all this? There really is only one explanation. She is not actually mild-mannered Lisbeth Salander at all. She is really Sal-El, daughter of Zal-El, last survivor of the planet Krypton!Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-82274816845886515172011-02-22T23:46:00.000-08:002011-02-23T00:19:16.341-08:00News Flash: Fantasy Fiction Still SucksLeo Grin decided that he could stand only so much crappy writing in the fantasy genre and <a href="http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/lgrin/2011/02/12/the-bankrupt-nihilism-of-our-fallen-fantasists/">wrote an essay about his disappointments</a>. Here's his breaking point: <blockquote>But it was only recently, after decades of ever-increasing reading disappointment, that I grudgingly began to admit the truth: I don’t particularly care for fantasy per se. What I actually cherish is something far more rare: the elevated prose poetry, mythopoeic subcreation, and thematic richness that only the best fantasy achieves, and that echoes in important particulars the myths and fables of old.<br /><br />This realization eliminates, at a stroke, virtually everything written under the banner of fantasy today.</blockquote>Congratulations, Leo. You've outgrown a literary genre. Pretty soon you'll be reading Dostoyevsky and loving it.<br /><br />The next question that Leo Grin takes up is why he outgrew the genre. In his analysis, his taste didn't get bigger; the genre got smaller: <blockquote>The other side thinks that their stuff is, at long last, turning the genre into something more original, thoughtful, and ultimately palatable to intelligent, mature audiences. They and their fans are welcome to that opinion. For my part — and I think Tolkien and Howard would have heartily agreed — I think they’ve done little more than become cheap purveyors of civilizational graffiti.<br /><br />Soiling the building blocks and well-known tropes of our treasured modern myths is no different than other artists taking a crucifix and dipping it in urine, covering it in ants, or smearing it with feces. In the end, it’s just another small, pathetic chapter in the decades-long slide of Western civilization into suicidal self-loathing. It’s a well-worn road: bored middle-class creatives (almost all of them college-educated liberals) living lives devoid of any greater purpose inevitably reach out for anything deemed sacred by the conservatives populating any artistic field. They co-opt the language, the plots, the characters, the cliches, the marketing, and proceed to deconstruct it all like a mad doctor performing an autopsy. Then, using cynicism, profanity, scatology, dark humor, and nihilism, they put it back together into a Frankenstein’s monster designed to shock, outrage, offend, and dishearten.</blockquote>All I can say is this: the third way between order and chaos is renaissance. The only way to move the genre forward is for people to explore and take risks and birth monsters. They might also birth the next masterpiece along the way. The problem is that we don't in advance what directions the genre needs to go in to produce that next literary titan. What we do know is that blanket condemnations of the literary opposition are not going to take the genre where it needs to go.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-45624358166875368652011-02-12T11:34:00.000-08:002011-02-12T11:41:41.784-08:00I know who *won't* win the 2012 presidential election:Mitt Romney. <a href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/02/11/mitt-romney-as-presidential-candidate/">John Podhoretz makes the case</a>: <blockquote>The one-term Massachusetts governor is speaking at CPAC right now. He’s offering lots of good applause lines. Sounding very right-wing. Mitt Romney cannot be the Republican nominee for president and he cannot be president. He is the author, in his Massachusetts health-care program, of the individual mandate that is the heart and soul of ObamaCare.<br /><br />If he runs, and he will, his origination of this policy will give his opponents in the primaries a stick so large to beat him with that no amount of clever one-liners purchased from high-paid freelance political speechwriters and joke writers will be able to mitigate the damage. And that’s to say nothing of Obama talking throughout 2012 about how he doesn’t understand what the Republicans are complaining about — one of their lead candidates agrees with him!</blockquote>Choosing Mitt Romney as the Republican presidential nominee makes a breathtakingly audacious strategy available to candidate Obama: running to the <i>Right</i> of his opponent on health care! Obama will tell the country that it wasn't his fault that he got "logrolled" by the most viciously partisan Congress in modern history while pointing out that Romneycare makes Romney a "true believer" for the individual mandate.<br /><br />That such a strategy virtually ensures that Obama will be reelected is without question.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-51500489087167418972011-01-20T00:02:00.000-08:002011-01-20T00:06:44.731-08:00A great reason for being an atheistThis comes from the english critic Edmund Gosse writing in 1907 (as quoted in the January/February 2010 issue of "The National Interest"): <blockquote>It [religion] divides heart from heart. It sets up a vain, chimerical ideal, in the barren pursuit of which all the tender, indulgent affections, all the genial play of life, all the exquisite pleasures and soft resignations of the body, all that enlarges and calms the soul, are exchanged for what is harsh and void and negative. It encourages a stern and ignorant spirit of condemnation. . . . There is something horrible, if we will bring ourselves to face it, in the fanatacism that can do nothing with this pathetic and fugitive existence of ours but treat it as if it were the uncomfortable antechamber to a palace which no one has explored and of the plan of which we know absolutely nothing.</blockquote>Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-57522974811786205122011-01-12T22:59:00.000-08:002011-01-12T23:08:23.959-08:00The mainstream media in America is a total joke.<a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/sarah-palins-crosshairs-ad-focus-gabrielle-giffords-debate/story?id=12576437">Here's the old coventional wisdom (circa last Sunday) from ABC News about the Giffords shooting</a>: <blockquote>In the stunned aftermath of the Tucson massacre, Sarah Palin has found herself in the crosshairs of the ensuing political debate with opponents suggesting she may have fueled the gunman's rage and her supporters saying it is "grotesque" to blame her and to politicize the tragedy. </blockquote>Apparently spontaneous mass hysteria broke out on Facebook: <blockquote>Facebook executive Randi Zuckerberg said many people on the social networking site are asking whether Sarah Palin is to blame.<br /><br />According to Zuckerberg that is the #1 question on the social network behemoth following the Tucson shooting.</blockquote>Today is Wednesday and the conventional wisdom has shifted. <a href="http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2011/01/the-note-obama-palin-and-arizona-a-tale-of-two-speeches.html">Now, the story is "That zany Sarah Palin has to make everything about her her her": </a><blockquote>BOTTOM LINE: Sarah Palin, once again, has found a way to become part of the story.</blockquote>The mainstream media in America is a total joke.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-72778687267886001182011-01-05T22:21:00.001-08:002011-01-05T22:22:05.298-08:00The Obama Presidency began today.<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/256475/boehner-and-obama-task-ahead-alvin-s-felzenberg">Here's a nice summary of where we go in the next two years.</a>Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-81044943503150634542011-01-03T19:59:00.000-08:002011-01-03T20:16:01.393-08:00Sore-Loser Democrats are plotting a Senate coup.<a href="http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2011/01/03/could-senate-dems-nuke-filibuster">The Democratic party is going to seize power in Washington D.C.</a> Happy New Year!<br /><br />N.B. <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/256230/why-republicans-will-get-lot-exchange-raising-debt-ceiling-daniel-foster">In case you were wondering why Senate Democrats are so god-damned desperate to eliminate the filibuster rule...</a>Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-43996569157825154302010-12-29T14:37:00.000-08:002011-01-02T11:54:53.803-08:00Vacuum Energy favorite posts of 2010January: <a href="http://vacuumenergy.blogspot.com/2010/01/2010-film-legion-or-welcome-to-irony.html">The 2010 film "Legion", or "Welcome to the Irony-verse"</a><br /><br />February: <a href="http://vacuumenergy.blogspot.com/2010/02/case-of-self-refuting-linguist.html">The case of the self-refuting linguist</a><br /><br />March: <a href="http://vacuumenergy.blogspot.com/2010/03/harold-ford-jr-sells-out.html">Harold Ford, Jr. sells out.</a><br /><br />April: <a href="http://vacuumenergy.blogspot.com/2010/04/dungeons-and-dragons-is-not-art.html">Dungeons and Dragons is not art.</a><br /><br />May: <a href="http://vacuumenergy.blogspot.com/2010/05/political-move-so-stupid-that-it-could.html">A political move so stupid that it could only be evidence of a brilliant strategic plan.</a><br /><br />June: <a href="http://vacuumenergy.blogspot.com/2010/06/absolutely-laughable-bias-at-time.html">Absolutely laughable bias at Time Magazine</a><br /><br />July: <a href="http://vacuumenergy.blogspot.com/2010/07/who-hell-do-you-think-you-are-prince.html">Who the hell do you think you are, Prince Charles? Al Gore?</a><br /><br />August: <a href="http://vacuumenergy.blogspot.com/2010/08/george-lucas-turned-out-to-be.html">George Lucas turned out to be the responsible one. Who knew?</a><br /><br />September: <a href="http://vacuumenergy.blogspot.com/2010/09/president-of-united-states-is-stuck-on.html">The President of the United States is stuck on stupid.</a><br /><br />October: <a href="http://vacuumenergy.blogspot.com/2010/10/great-reason-why-california-proposition.html">A great reason why California proposition 19 is a dumb idea.</a><br /><br />November: <a href="http://vacuumenergy.blogspot.com/2010/11/some-bad-history-from-daily-dish.html">Some bad history from "The Daily Dish"</a><br /><br />December: <a href="http://vacuumenergy.blogspot.com/2010/12/civilization-v-sucks.html">"Civilization V" sucks</a>Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-5546911131318664052010-12-29T13:47:00.000-08:002010-12-29T14:15:00.815-08:005 weird things about the 2010 film remake of "True Grit"<ol><li>Mattie Ross spends hours riding her horse through the snow, gets caught in pouring rain, and even immerses herself up to the eyeballs in a stream, yet she never ends up wet.</li><br /><br /><li>Everyone in this film seems to have been replaced by a cartoon character. Rooster Cogburn gets shot in the shoulder, but is still able to carry Mattie for miles. The Texas Ranger, like Daffy Duck, can get hit in the head with a boulder and just walk it off. One character gets shot in the leg, gets some of his fingers cut off, and then gets stabbed in the chest with a 6-inch knife without seeming to feel any pain or discomfort.</li><br /><br /><li>The film's dialogue sounds like it was written by George Lucas.</li><br /><br /><li>The characters anachronistically refer to "Indian Territory" as "Native American Territory". Similarly, even though the Texas Ranger fought for the Confederacy in the Army of Northern Virgina, he doesn't seem to notice that Mattie has non-white facial features (which mysteriously disappear when she gets older). </li><br /><br /><li>Mattie loses her left forearm to a rattlesnake bite just so the filmmakers can deploy the CGI "limb erasure" tool at the end of the film.</li></ol>Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-11164514942837301612010-12-19T00:53:00.000-08:002010-12-19T01:10:59.467-08:00Obama's plan for the lame duck sessionHow is it that President Obama, the liberal's liberal, managed to convince himself that he needed to fight his own base over preserving the Bush tax cuts? And why was it so damned important for President Obama to get a repeal of "Don't Ask. Don't Tell." in the lame duck session?<br /><br />Two words: Jerry Brown.<br /><br />As the governor of California, Jerry Brown will perfectly positioned to mount a primary challenge to Obama in 2012. Brown has the most powerful Democratic state in the Union as his own personal fiefdom. He has loyal armies of union goons to do his bidding (if they're sufficiently compensated). Brown has no obligation to run on Obamacare, the stimulus package, Obamanomics, or any of the other Obama blunders since 2008. Brown is dumb enough to make a go of it and smart enough for his campaign to be a credible threat.<br /><br />The key is whether Brown can turn the California economy around before Obama can turn the national economy around. If California is perceived as outperforming the national as a whole by 2012, Brown becomes a very dangerous man. If the national economy is doing well in 2012 and California is still mired in the doldrums, Brown has blown it and Obama wins.<br /><br />Thus, the next two years are a sort of chess game between Obama and Brown. Extending the Bush tax cuts was the opening move.<br /><br />Why the emphasis on "Don't Ask. Don't Tell." then? Think of that as a political gift for Nancy Pelosi. As a congressperson representing San Francisco and the outgoing Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi is obviously a major political power in Brown's backyard. Giving Pelosi this as a consolation prize from the 2010 midterms is Obama's way of making sure she stays on <i>his</i> side in this battle.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-62464684137751428282010-12-05T19:17:00.000-08:002010-12-06T00:53:12.595-08:00"Civilization V" sucksFor the sake of convenience, I'm going to refer to version # of the long-running "Civilization" series of video games as C#.<br /><br />I first got invested in the "Civilization" series back in the late 90s with the release of C3. C3 had its quirks. Modern battleships would occasionally get sneak attacked and destroyed by spear-wielding barbarians in dugout canoes, for example.<br /><br />C4 was the incremental improvement on C3, and it fixed some old quirks and added new ones. The most glaring lacuna is that, based on the amounts of CD-ROM space devoted to different aspects of the game, C4 is essentially an animation program for three-dimensional heads of world leaders with a few gameplay elements knocked on.<br /><br />The current version of the franchise is this year's C5. If C4 was a step forward from C3, C5 is the two steps backwards. Here's a list of what I believe the game does right and what it does wrong.<br /><br /><b>Graphics</b><br />Right: the hexagonal tileset<br />The most obvious change introduced into C5 is the new hexagonal tile shape which gives the terrain a more natural feel compared to the traditional square tile set. Unit movement is more natural as well since it feels harder to speed up movement by gaming the tile topology. C5 also handles the problem of what do to with the polar ice caps more gracefully than its predecessor.<br /><br />Wrong: the same old unit animation<br />A C4 warrior unit, for example, consisted of a trio of little animated warriors who walk around the map like real, little people when they follow your orders. A C5 warrior unit consists of... a few more, slightly smaller little people still walking around following orders. Maybe this is some kind of titanic, computer programming breakthrough. Maybe it's just the programmers being lazy. Either way, I'm definitely not impressed.<br /><br /><b>Diplomacy</b><br />Right: C5 eliminates the three-dimensional animated heads<br /><br />Wrong: stupid diplomacy<br />World leaders in C5 are constantly pestering you to join "pacts of cooperation" or "pacts of secrecy". What these pacts do, why they're important, and what happens when you violate their terms is apparently a complete mystery. The "pact of secrecy" is so secret that even the game programmers don't seem to know what it is.<br /><br /><b>Audio/visual</b><br />Right: better voice-overs<br />C5 replaces the celebrity voice-overs of Leonard Nimoy with voice-overs by actor W. Morgan Sheppard (cf. the film "Gettysburg"). It's hard to overstate what a smart move this was.<br /><br />Wrong: C4's video clips were replaced with static splash panels.<br />This is incredibly disappointing. C4's video clips were mind-bogglingly bad; completing, say, the Pyramids in C4 wins you a 20-second video clip showing the Pyramids being built in super-fast motion. Completing the Pyramids in C5 wins you a static splash image of the Pyramids and a 20 second audio clip. When you win the game in C4, you were treated to a 20-second video clip showcasing sweet, sweet late-90s computer graphics. In C5, you get an early-90s static image and another voice-over.<br /><br />In other words, CIVILIZATION V GIVES YOU VIRTUALLY NO REWARD WHATSOEVER FOR PLAYING THE GAME!!!!<br /><br /><b>Terrain and terrain improvements</b><br />Right: "on the fly" expansion of civilization borders.<br />This is a major leap forward. In C4, each city had a static, pre-defined zone of tiles that it could work. In C5, cities slowly expand their suite of workable tiles, but you can also purchase tiles to work for your city. This lets cities rapidly expand to encompass strategic tiles and critical resources and then slowly filling in the gaps as other priorities rise in importance later in the game.<br /><br />Wrong: workers have little to do<br />C5 workers can build farms, mines, trading posts, and lumber mills to improve tiles. You have one primitive improvement for each of the three primitive resources and one primitive improvement to stick on forests. And that's it. Your workers pretty much have nothing to do for a big chunk of the game. Roads also cost money for upkeep, which means you can't pass the time having your workers carve out "road spaghetti".<br /><br /><b>Game Mechanics</b><br />Right: cities have built-in garrisons<br />Cities can fight back against beseigers. This is more realistic and spares you from producing the large garrison armies of C4.<br /><br />Wrong: Cities can shoot volleys of arrows at opponents even if you haven't researched "archery" yet.<br /><br />Right: Ranged units can actually attack opponents "at range". Major conceptual breakthrough.<br /><br />Wrong: Unit upkeep is a mystery.<br />C5 tells you a total gold cost for maintaining units. There is no way to break this down on a per unit basis. The C5 documentation is totally silent on this point. Late in the game, you'll do things like delete your do-nothing worker unit and discover it, alone, was responsible for 50% of your unit upkeep costs over the last 200 turns.<br /><br />Right: You can buy "social policies" with culture points.<br />This seems to be a rational solution for turning culture (i.e. the stuff you do when you're not at war) into a viable game mechanic.<br /><br />Wrong: You can't switch social policies.<br />Once you buy a social policy, you're stuck with it forever, even if it becomes worthless.<br /><br /><b>Strategies</b><br />Right: city-states<br />C5 has the innovative feature of non-competitive city states that you can ally with or attack. The city states will give you resources, culture, science points, food, or even military units if you befriend them. They make an intriguing addition to the game-play if you can get on their good sides.<br /><br />Wrong: the game is designed to deter conquest victories<br />Cities have garrisons now, so good luck storming one with a handful of stone age warriors. Resource limits prevent you from mass producing key military units. Your civilization's global happiness degrades rapidly when you annex (or even "puppet") captured cities. And in a deliberate slap to the face of all of the hard-core conquest players, there are some cities that cannot be razed so a "one-city" conquest victory is impossible.<br /><br /><b>Summation</b>: Unless you're a hard-core "Civilization" masochist, I recommend that you not drop any money on this game.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-75474595302779692812010-12-04T12:24:00.000-08:002010-12-04T12:36:31.407-08:00Another bad day for Democrats<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/dec/4/senate-blocks-obamas-tax-plan/">President Obama's class warfare tactics are rejected in the Senate</a>: <blockquote>The Senate blocked President Obama's and Democratic leaders' tax cut plans Saturday in a foreordained symbolic vote that now sends both sides back to the negotiating table to work out a viable deal.<br /><br />A bipartisan filibuster, led by unified Republicans and joined by four Democrats and one independent, proved there isn't enough support to back Mr. Obama's preferred option to extend income tax cuts for couples making less than $250,000 and tax increases for those making more than that.</blockquote>Nancy Pelosi passed this bill in the House as a test of the resolve of the Senate Republican caucus. This time, the squishy moderate Republicans didn't defect as they did on the stimulus bill. I'd call this a win for the Tea Party movement.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20024551-503544.html?tag=contentMain;contentBody">In other news, the WikiLeaks revelations seemed to have claimed their first political victim</a>: <blockquote>"I think I will serve as secretary of state as my last public position," [Secretary of State Hillary Clinton] said. Clinton's career has included not only her current position as secretary of state, but also eight years in the Senate representing New York. </blockquote>Of course, the statement was made with the typical Clintonian rhetorical escape hatch. She isn't definitively leaving politics, she just thinks that she will someday in the future. On the other hand, people don't usualy go around saying that they're abandoning formal politics forever unless there is a reason.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-60548391364070988832010-11-30T22:02:00.000-08:002010-11-30T22:52:22.006-08:00A deceptively simple economics question<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/business/01scene.html?_r=2">This economics question popped up in the New York Times some years ago</a>: <blockquote>"You won a free ticket to see an Eric Clapton concert (which has no resale value). Bob Dylan is performing on the same night and is your next-best alternative activity. Tickets to see Dylan cost $40. On any given day, you would be willing to pay up to $50 to see Dylan. Assume there are no other costs of seeing either performer. Based on this information, what is the opportunity cost of seeing Eric Clapton? (a) $0, (b) $10, (c) $40, or (d) $50."<br /><br />The opportunity cost of seeing Clapton is the total value of everything you must sacrifice to attend his concert - namely, the value to you of attending the Dylan concert. That value is $10 - the difference between the $50 that seeing his concert would be worth to you and the $40 you would have to pay for a ticket. So the unambiguously correct answer to the question is $10. Yet only 21.6 percent of the professional economists surveyed chose that answer, a smaller percentage than if they had chosen randomly. </blockquote>Clearly the opportunity cost here is $10. Why? Because if you are willing to pay up to $50 for something and you are given an opportunity to buy that thing at $40, then that opportunity is equivalent to you possessing a $10 coupon. So what is the cost of letting your $10 coupon expire? $10.<br /><br />So this is the economics version of “What color is George Washington’s white horse?” <a href="http://voxday.blogspot.com/2010/11/incompetent-economist-at-nyt.html">Here's Vox Day's answer</a> (boldface in original): <blockquote>Since various people are tripping all over their various attempts to define "opportunity cost" instead of paying attention to how it was defined in the question, I will highlight the relevant portion of the question posed by Frank here.<br /><br /><b>"The opportunity cost of seeing Clapton" is the total value of everything you must sacrifice to attend his concert - namely, the value to you of attending the Dylan concert."</b><br /><br />The value of attending the Dylan concert to you is $50. This means the value of the discount on the ticket is $10. Now, it's vital to note that Frank assigns TWO distinctly different definitions to "the opportunity cost of seeing Clapton" in his question, thus conclusively proving his point that economists, especially economists writing in the New York Times, don't understand opportunity cost. Naturally, there are two different answers to the two different questions-in-the-question. The answer to question (A) the "total value of everything you must sacrifice", is $60 since you're giving up both the value of the Dylan concert and the value of the discount in order to see Clapton. The answer to question (B) the "value to you of attending the Dylan concert" is $50. However, the four multiple choices provided make it clear that Frank is looking for an answer to question (B) rather than question (A), which is why the correct answer is (d) $50.</blockquote>Vox Day is arguing that if you DON'T buy the ticket, then you lose the $50 value of the ticket, and you lose the $10 value of the discount, and you don't have to offset this loss against the purchase price of the ticket that you didn't buy. Ken Lay call your office please!!! I think Vox just discovered a way to save Enron.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-74047324216094059502010-11-04T21:13:00.001-07:002010-11-04T21:49:45.323-07:00Some bad history from "The Daily Dish"Rush Limbaugh made a minor stir this week <a href="http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_110310/content/01125110.guest.html">by calling the Federal redistributive project into question</a>: <blockquote>Looked at within the prism of liberty and freedom, as our founding documents spell out, the Declaration, the Constitution, in nowhere in any of our founding documents was it ever said that people earning X would be punished for it. It was never said in our founding documents that people earning X would share a greater burden of funding the government than people who didn't.</blockquote>Formally speaking, Limbaugh is correct. The founding documents of the United States make no assumption that the rich would have to accept exceptional taxation that would be spared to the poor. On the other hand, this does leave open the question of when progressive taxation emerged as a political concept. <a href="http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/11/rectifying-the-ignorance-of-rush-limbaugh.html">Andrew Sullivan pondered the question and came up with a bogus answer</a>: the progressive income tax originated with Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.<br /><br />Hilariously, <a href="http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/11/rectifying-the-ignorance-of-rush-limbaugh.html">Sullivan even imputes sinister motives to the Conservative movement for defying Lincoln (and Adam Smith too) on tax policy</a>: <blockquote>I'm sympathetic to Limbaugh's general argument - although I believe the debt and alarming inequality should temper one's preferences in this respect in the current circumstances. But it tells you something about today's "conservatism" that it is fiercely opposed to both Abraham Lincoln and Adam Smith on taxation and Friedrich von Hayek on universal health insurance.</blockquote> In a sense this is correct. The Civil War years certainly saw the first imposition of a progressive (such as it was) income tax. The <i>real</i> question here, which Limbaugh is implying and Sullivan is ignoring, is where the idea of greater government impositions upon the rich, in general, originated as part of the American social ethos. The real answer is that the redistributive project originated from the experience of Americans during the early years when America was primarily a slave-holding, plantation civilization.<br /><br />In colonial America, the rich derived a disproportionate benefit from the social imposition of peace and order because the rich owned slaves and the poor didn't. The bulk of the population would have been required risk life, limb, and property in order to police the slave-holding system and prevent rebellions. As compensation, the rich were expected to condescend to the poor and share the benefits of slave-produced wealth. Over time, this bargain evolved into the sense that slavery was necessary in order to promote the sense of white racial solidarity that made whites feel more equal.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-80978238525231980682010-10-25T22:20:00.000-07:002010-10-25T22:37:12.765-07:00A great reason why California proposition 19 is a dumb idea.Hypothetically speaking, let's say that you own a steamship company. You observe that people in North America love eating bananas and that people in South America have lots of spare bananas hanging around. You could make money by shipping bananas from one continent to the other. What selling price do you aim for in your North American markets? Do you (A) have the United States make bananas illegal so you can smuggle them into the country and sell them for $20 a pound; or (B) dramatically reduce costs as much as possible so you can sell bananas in the United States at 80 cents a pound?<br /><br />The real life banana companies go for (B) because a cheap price for bananas allows that fruit to penetrate markets, attract more consumers, and still make a profit. The backers of proposition 19, perversely, think the answer is (A). In other words, they think the dramatic expansion of marijuana consumption that will follow greater legalization will end up making marijuana less profitable to the drug gangs. The truth is the exact opposite.<br /><br />Of course, proposition 19 also allows individual smokers to cultivate their own small plots of marijuana. Technically, this will reduce the price that drug gangs can charge by some small amount. It won't put drug gangs out of business. You don't see Phillip-Morris going out of business because college students are growing tobacco in their dorm rooms, right?Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-80393485514819697282010-09-23T00:05:00.001-07:002010-09-23T00:13:33.827-07:00A pathetic president<a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/09/22/obama-announces-new-approach-development/?test=latestnews">President Obama has a new plan for economic assistance around the world</a>: <blockquote>Addressing world leaders, Obama offered no new commitments of U.S. dollars, but rather a blueprint of the development policy that will drive his government's efforts and determine where the money flows. His message was that the United States wants to help countries help themselves, not offer aid that provides short-term relief without reforming societies.<br /><br />"That's not development, that's dependence," Obama said. "And it's a cycle we need to break. Instead of just managing poverty, we have to offer nations and people a path out of poverty."</blockquote>President Obama's foreign policy is that countries mired in poverty are just going to have to do more with less, because the United States can't keep throwing money at a poverty problem that isn't going to just go away. President Obama's domestic problem, however, is to continue to throw money at a poverty problem -- economic malaise and 9%+ unemployment "as far as the eye can see" -- and hope that it just goes away.<br /><br />The picture attached to the Fox news article underscores the point about our incredible shrinking President.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-73144270196893527382010-09-16T23:11:00.000-07:002010-09-18T17:44:24.802-07:00Vox Genius strikes again.According to Vox day, <a href="http://voxday.blogspot.com/2010/09/mailvox-defending-free-trade.html">voluntary exchange is a generally bad idea</a>: <blockquote>The second and much more serious error is in the statement that "voluntary exchange benefits both parties". This is both logically and empirically false because it posits a non-existent human rationalism without temporal limits. While it is true that value is subjective, thereby allowing the possibility to defend totally irrational actions as at least nominally rational, this still doesn't avoid the problem of how the subjective values that the Misean acting man assigns are necessarily momentary in nature. What the acting man defines as a beneficial exchange at one moment he may very well not define as beneficial in the very next moment for a wide variety of reasons. And it is this fatal flaw in the logical foundation that causes the entire edifice in support of free trade to collapse.</blockquote>Most people tend to revise their positions when they derive a contradiction, but not Vox. So, having "proven" that free trade is a really stupid idea, how does he account for that fact that free-trading South Korea is so much more prosperous than its relatively non-trading neighbor to the north?<br /><br />The way that reality works is that voluntary exchange and free trade are <i>almost certainly</i> economically good ideas in the presence of perfect information being possesed by both parties. There's always that slight possibility that, say, a meteorite strike will take out human civilzation, thus preventing you from purchasing your morning cup of coffee. Voluntary exchange and free trade are therefore not absolutely certain to be of mutually benefit even with perfect information possesed by both side.<br /><br />In the presence of limited or asymmetric information, voluntary exchange and free trade are <i>generally</i> of economic benefit. Yes, it is true that the possibility of irrational decision making, rapidly changing conditions of worth, and human trickery -- in general, risk -- make exchange problematic. There have been some developments that have been discovered that mitigiate the effects of risk. For example, advanced civilizations typically develop an information economy in which some economic actors specialize in providing reliable economic data in exchange for monetary renumeration. Even primitive societies deal with risk by creating institutions such as tribes and kinship groupings. Risk management is one of the keystones of economic success, right?<br /><br />The key misrepresentation that Vox Day makes in his blog post is assuming that all potential transactions are plagued by utterly disabling levels of risk, which of course makes the possibility of useful exchange disappear. In the real world, that is simply not true.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-89147193074448490992010-09-06T11:52:00.000-07:002010-09-06T12:51:06.218-07:00The President of the United States is stuck on stupid.The major problem with the Obama presidency is that Obama himself is too politically weak to rein in a completely inept, out-of-control Congress.<br /><br />The roots of this phenomenon appear to go back all the way to the fallout of the Clinton trial in the Senate in 1999. The major political effect of the Clinton trial was to discredit the conservative leadership of the Republican party to the extent that a Republican moderate, John McCain, was able to seize control. Control of the Republican party gave McCain a clear shot at winning the Republican nomination in 2000. McCain also wasn't shy about leveraging his party power to increase his odds of becoming president. He was more than willing to open the Republican primaries to the general public in order to build a Republican moderate/independent/liberal voting alliance to defeat the conservatives. I think it can also be taken as a given that Pat Buchanan didn't leave the Republican party by accident in 1999.<br /><br />By the 2000 primary season, McCain winning the Republican presidential nomination was almost a <i>fait accompli</i>. Of course, the conservatives fought back and managed to engineer the presidental nomination of a fusion candidate, George W. Bush (i.e. Mr. "Compassionate Conservatism"). The end result was a situation similar to the Tyler administration: a conservative president with a weak base of support squaring off against a <i>de facto</i> party leader who is master of the Senate. <br /><br />The election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 represented the same process occuring in the Democratic Party. After the 2000 elections, both Bill Clinton and Al Gore ended up being weakened as Democratic party power brokers. Clinton spent most of his time earning megatons of money for his wife's future presidential bid. Al Gore left formal politics to launch into a new career as a climate crusader. This left the Democratic party in the hands of the Democratic master of the Senate, Ted Kennedy.<br /><br />Kennedy's first candidate for the presidential nomination was his own protégé, John Kerry. After Kerry's loss of the presidency to Bush in 2004, Kennedy ended up forging the Massachusetts-Illinois alliance that led to the nomination of Obama in 2008. Obama was chosen to be the nominee because of his obvious non-qualification for the position, his personally immunity to criticism in the mainstream media, and because he was personally enough of a cynical "operator" to accept being a presidential puppet. <br /><br />The end result is that Obama has quickly morphed into perhaps the weakest president in all of American history. He has done nothing to lead the United States on any question. His legislative achievements in office all consisted of him free-riding on his Democratic Congress, acquiescing in whatever legislative mish-mash they decide to send to him. His presidency has consisted of golf and going on vacation; he is literally a president with nothing to do.<br /><br />The end result is a massively strengthened Republican party that is going to ride a tidal wave of support into this year's elections. Paradoxically, this is expected to lead to a strengthening of the Obama presidency. Why? Because the mass extinction of Congressional Democrats will leave Obama alone as the remaining major party leader. Whether this will be enough power to get Obama re-elected in 2012 will be the next question.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-83244931329964299172010-08-09T20:22:00.000-07:002010-08-09T21:06:21.077-07:00George Lucas turned out to be the responsible one. Who knew?It's interesting that a huge chunk of our science-fiction culture got tossed into the garbage can over the last couple of years. <br /><br />2009's film "Star Trek" decided to totally reboot the "Star Trek" canon. The means of doing this was having a Romulan ship accidentally travel backwards in time, thus creating an alternate timeline that wipes out the original timeline. The net effect is that everything from the "Star Trek" continuity that post-dates the original series pilot episode, literally about 95% of everything "Trek" that has ever gone on-screen, has been wiped out. It never happened now.<br /><br />This is only exceeded by the "Dr. Who" series 5 episode "The Pandorica Opens" which blew up the entire observable universe except for Earth's solar system. The series 5 finale "The Big Bang" even has the Doctor himself vanishing into nothingness. Of course, the Doctor and the universe get restored, but it is still unclear whether any major changes to the "Dr. Who" continuity have been made. At the strictest possible interpretation, literally the entire 40+ year television history of "Dr. Who" may now be non-canonical.<br /><br />On the other hand, the "Star Wars" franchise is still going strong after 33 years, off and on. George Lucas has never been forced to reboot the "Star Wars" continuity aside from some cosmetic changes. He's never created an alternate timeline, or a parallel universe, or blown the universe up and recreated it. As pissed off as "Star Wars" fans tend to get over things like Jar Jar Binks or the Ewoks, they have to concede that George Lucas's creation has endured.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6378542.post-33261816031551211372010-07-31T11:46:00.000-07:002010-07-31T12:20:01.725-07:00Who the hell do you think you are, Prince Charles? Al Gore?<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1299099/Prince-Charles-My-duty-save-world.html">Prince Charles seems to have this delusional belief that <i>he</i>, not Barack Obama, should be the Annointed One</a>: <blockquote>The Prince of Wales says he believes he has been placed on Earth as future King 'for a purpose' -- to save the world.<br /><br />Giving a fascinating insight into his view of his inherited wealth and influence, he said: 'I can only somehow imagine that I find myself being born into this position for a purpose.<br /><br />'I don't want my grandchildren or yours to come along and say to me, "Why the hell didn't you come and do something about this? You knew what the problem was". That is what motivates me.<br /><br />'I wanted to express something in the outer world that I feel inside... We seem to have lost that understanding of the whole of nature and the universe as a living entity.'</blockquote>Consider the following. Al Gore is much poorer than mega-biillionaire Prince Charles. Al Gore only has a mere mansion or two compared to the Prince whose ancestors where <i>pro forma</i> owners of an entire nation. Al Gore's only formal political office is gone, never to return, compared to the royal-for-life Charles. And Al Gore himself is only a couple of generations removed from the hillbillies compared to the unparalleled breeding of the future King. <br /><br />In some bizarre paradox of fate, the doctrine of global warming somehow makes Al Gore the natural king of the planet Earth that Prince Charles will never be. Al Gore's vision of human society is one in which vast hordes of peasants live lives of stark, utilitarian efficiency in order to offset the carbon footprint of keeping Al Gore's private jet in the air. Gore's radical environmentalism is a divine right of kings in all but name, and yet, a non-trivial fraction of the peasants-to-be buy into it. Prince Charles, on the other hand, has the real divine right of kings on his side, but where he to mention this in public, people would literally laugh in his face.<br /><br />And then there is Barack Obama, whose spirit lives on an ethereal plane far above any mere Earthly monarch. His next stimulus package is going to be the construction of a full-scale Egyptian pyramid devoted to himself. This would have the benefits of providing his cult a secure focus for worship, housing his mortal remains when his spirit ascends to the heavens to become one with the Sky God, and, incidentally, providing a lot of "shovel ready" construction jobs for the unemployed.Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16505887900674170018noreply@blogger.com0