Agiel

Probably a good idea, whatever that flag stood for in the past, it just stands for racism. Not for it, though people (like me) are free to think that the guys who have it emblazoned on the hoods of their cars or flying by the antenna are huge pricks. The issue I take with it is more even absent the connotations of racism, it's a flag celebrating treason.

I give (most of) the NMA crowd a lot more credit than the folks at, say, the Codex, even if I'm not _as_ hard on Bethesda as they are. They do good work for the Fallout wiki at the very least. If Bethesda is improving the shooting, then I don't suppose they were going to finally make a game with decent AI.

I'll bet you that they're 10 foot tall, subterranean Jewish Freemason bankers too.

I was going to see Le Petit Prince instead of Inside Out anyways.

Danish Leo 2A5DK filling up at the pumps. Well, self-propelled guns more like rather than tanks for this one, but you get the idea.

Cradle, a Myst-like game made by some former STALKER devs, is coming out July 25th after a long and arduous development period. Yeeeeeeaaahhhh!

Reminds me of the "Boobquake" thing a couple of years back in response to an Iranian cleric saying indecent women's dress was responsible for earthquakes. I think that's feminism everyone here can get behind.

No one at all has ever doubted that it is possible to increase employment and the minimum wage at the same time. The impact of the general economy is usually going to be larger than the impact of the minimum wage. The impact of that general economy could mean that employment rises, stays the same or falls, whatever happens to the minimum wage. But that’s not the interesting thing we’d like to know. Which is, what is the effect of raising the minimum wage on unemployment? Freed from the impacts of everything else happening in the economy? And there the standard answer is that it will raise unemployment and no, no one has managed to come up with a convincing case against this standard wisdom. Do note what actually happened in that general economy over that same time period. The US unemployment rate fell, over that year, from 6.6% to 5.6%. Seatac’s performance is, including the usual boundaries for error, actually the same as the US economy’s. Which isn’t all that surprising really as the minimum wage rise at Seatac affected 1,500 people (yes, that’s all) and we’d not expect to see any effect at all in macroeconomic figures from so trivial a change. However, we are seeing changes in the rather larger case of Seattle itself, as I predicted we would: Restaurants are closing at higher than normal rates. And Seattle is already a fairly high wage place: As Don Boudreaux likes to point out one of the reasons we don’t see large job losses (as opposed to small ones) from rises in the minimum wage is because we’ve had a minimum wage for a long time and have already lost a lot of jobs as a result. And there’s more such reporting going on too: Human labor really is an economic good like pretty much all of the others. Raise the price and the demand for it will drop (another way of putting this is that human labor is not a Giffen Good). Please do note though what is the prediction. Not that there’s going to be a wiping out of employment opportunities, nor that the economy of Seattle is going to become a howling wasteland. Rather, that less human labor will be employed at $15 an hour than would have been employed if the minimum wage had not risen to that amount. And for people who would like to have a job but now cannot find one that’s bad news. Kind of wonder what that means for recent grads going into entry-level but college diploma-required positions in fields like creative services and IT and nurses. Fresh out of college I made $16/hr with medical, vision, dental, and massage and chiropractor with it. But now people are speaking of $15/hr minimum wage in LA, so the person with that job would make only marginally more per hour than a burger flipper still in high school Hopefully "a rising tide raises all ships" comes into play for those positions and they get a corresponding pay increase as well.

I went on the New Vegas Nexus this week and I found this: http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/58606/?tab=1&navtag=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nexusmods.com%2Fnewvegas%2Fajax%2Fmoddescription%2F%3Fid%3D58606%26preview%3D&pUp=1 Now the maker of this mod was an enterprising fellow.

Even if quite a few people reacted poorly to the android questline in Fallout 3, I find the idea of the remnants of MIT still kicking around in the post-apoc interesting. If Obsidian makes another West-coast Fallout game, they should respond with implementing the remnants of Caltech in it, with a few references to the pranks they'd pull on MIT in there.

No, no, no. "Robits."

I'm eternally disappointed with the Nexus being so fixated on better sex and animated prostitutions mods, and not be enterprising enough to make a mod where you can spin revolvers, Ocelot-style, or fan the hammer of the single-action guns, or live out my fantasy of being Lucas McCain.

Finally came around to picking up the "Enemy Within" expansion pack for XCOM. After re-installing the game I downloaded a few mods from the Nexus and Jesus Christ, trying to get my head around the mod installation process is giving me an aneurysm. I think I'll stick to planning the air strikes of Operation Desert Storm for now, thank you very much.

We've talked about the "drone doctrine" and runaway AI controlled guns going on killing sprees being the precursors of Skynet, but what do "robits" mean for the economy? https://medium.com/basic-income/self-driving-trucks-are-going-to-hit-us-like-a-human-driven-truck-b8507d9c5961 In a society that sees greater and greater mechanisation and automation, where does that leave the working population of that society in 30 years (if that) time? For every industrial revolution the world has undergone (and the lack of capitalisation of "industrial revolution" is intentional, as is the use of the plural), we've managed to see at least a new set of jobs around the new industries created that replace the jobs that were rendered obsolete on an almost 1:1 basis, and that manages to keep most of the general population employed. But in a notional future, how many people can be employed with the advent of autonomous production lines and 3D printers? Anecdote: I worked my way through college in retail and became acquainted with people who have had to do that for a living (plus 1 or 2 other jobs on top of that), frequently they were one catastrophe away from ruin. And after graduating from college I took up a position as a product photographer and photo retoucher for a fashion company that was very much production-oriented before finally getting promoted to a content artist. I was extremely grateful for that job since while I was able to be gainfully employed so soon after graduating (or at least get a position that had opportunities for growth, or gain experience as proof that I could be relied upon), I couldn't have said the same for about at least a fair portion of my graduating class. In the notional HAL-9000-oriented workforce of the future, what jobs for us squishy meatbags are left now that the only jobs on the market are CEOs, maintainers of HAL-9000, and his marketing team? I could definitely see that job I took up after college being done by a program in 20 years time (and there was already a great deal of automation being done with it, thanks to "Actions" in Photoshop) if it doesn't get shipped overseas before that, so some poor bastard who graduates from college will probably be SOL. Conservatively that can mean 25% unemployment; can our society function as it has with 1/4 of the working-age population idling about?

I think the question we should be asking is: "After Fallout 4 comes out, will Obsidian get to make a 'Fallout: New ____'?"

This. The Soviet Union really was just the old Czarist Empire in new clothes. The dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the subsequent break-up of the Soviet Union was part of the same breakdown of the old European colonial system represented by India and the like for the British Empire and Algeria and Indochina for the French, it just happened a little later for the Russian Empire, the only difference being that the Empire was land-based rather than sea-based as the British and French Empires were; only half of the pre-collapse population of the Soviet Union was Russian, and given the demographic problems plaguing Russia now even if its military hadn't spent itself into bankruptcy, the demographics issue would have had a similar result at maximum a few decades down the line. Without the vestiges of the old Empire, Russia is "just" (emphasis not mine) another European country, albeit one that's abnormally large and doing its damnedest to go it alone a la Norway.

In honour of the XCOM 2 announcement: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BqoEJUWKVRFSKXOA2Ks3Ce7Kvphmg0kAFKcuXJHgmr0/mobilebasic?pli=1

http://i.imgur.com/dWIIMJp.webm How to reload an AK with one arm out of action.

From the History Channel Youtube channel, but worth a watch. In terms of quality, almost erases the stain of all the years of pawn shops, Duck Dynasty, and Nazi "aliens": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcVzfOmt4Tg Supplemental piece from Gwynne Dyer:

Again, not my footage. But it all looks awesome and well edited (and the tune is quite jaunty as well).

"Trust me, I'm an engineer."

Sounds like the casting decisions for "The Good Earth" to me.