Enoch

Balderdash. There is no evidence whatsoever that... (Excuse me for a moment-- the doorbell just rang; apparently, someone has sent me a candygram!)

Yeah, voter registration and ballot printing and distribution have been handled at the county or city level in every jurisdiction I've voted in, too. Generally, states set the laws (within Constitutional bounds) and the counties administer them on election day. There is some potential for federal involvement, but that all takes place well before election day-- I'm thinking of DoJ's review of changes to voting procedures in covered jurisdictions under section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

What's wrong with polygamy, huh? It's even in the Bible. Jacob (AKA Israel) had multiple wives, and he had a whole nation (God's Chosen) named after him! Much like other banned sexual/marital practices, such as incest, bestiality, and marriage of/sex with minors-- but unlike homosexual relationships-- polygamy correlates strongly with abusive relationships and near-abusive relationships where one "partner" has a domineering level of power over the other's life and choices.

Had an awesome evening last night. Ordered pizza. Talked the wife into a quick romp in the 40 or so minutes before the pizza arrived. The delivery got there immediately after that was concluded to the great satisfaction of all involved (I was just washing my hands when I heard the knock at the door). Then we ate pizza and drank beer. And after that, we watched a football game on TV (and the team I preferred won!). Call me a stereotypical American heterosexual male if you must, but the beer/pizza/sex/football combo is pretty much the gold standard, at least on a weekday when there isn't time to do any serious home cooking*. * (This may or may not be a euphemism.)

Voted this morning. Got to the polling place at 6:40 AM, 40 minutes after the polls opened, and was out at 8:00. I waited on line, reading a Dashiell Hammett novel, trying to politely ignore the older gentleman behind me who didn't bring a book and kept trying to make conversation, and pondering whether this was all worth the one-in-ten-million chance that my vote will actually matter. Oh, and one of the candidates for a county board position came by and shook my hand.

Yeah, I played it a couple weeks ago and rather enjoyed it. The controls can be a bit troublesome, but apart from that, it's a very charming game with an entertainingly surreal storyline and some fun puzzles.

Confrontational social situations.

I'm certainly fed up with the constant political advertisements. I watched a few NFL games this weekend, and it was wall-to-wall mudslinging in the ad breaks.

The best completely-thrown-together Halloween costume I have come up with over the years was back in college. I walked into my dorm room and decided that I would go as the most frightening thing I saw: my pile of laundry. I was a shambling mound of clothing, attached to me in various fashions. I also had a pair of briefs on my head, which was key. Edit: Also, aaaawwwww!

Next weekend. But we both have to work Mon-Thurs, which means that most the packing needs to happen today and tomorrow. We currently have way too much stuff for our current place (a 1-bedroom apartment), so taking everything out of where it has been carefully stowed to put it in boxes leaves pretty much no room for anything else in the joint. Fortunately, we're going to a 3-bedroom house, so unpacking will not have quite the same problems. (It'll have new problems, like not having any furniture.) But first, we have to make it through the week.

Packing sucks.

I found the Bethesda Ruins about 3 hours ago. Everyone there is dead now. I was hoping for an easter egg or something, but that's it: Bethesda Ruins with some raiders inside. Too bad. I actually work in Bethesda. That's a shame. I'll be moving there a week from today. Is there anything interesting in the Rosslyn-Courthouse area of Arlington? Anyhow, the developers' offices are actually out in Rockville. You can see the building (with a "Zenimax" sign, which is their parent company) if you drive north on I-270 through the Rockville-Gaithersburg area.

The British version of the Atari store has the manual available for download. Link.

And if I exited the Earth's atmosphere the next time I jumped for a rebound on the basketball court, the theory of gravity would be pretty much gone, too.

Halloween tradition: Eyeball Skeleton -- Eyeball Skeleton Captures the essence of the holiday perfectly: little kids having fun by obsessing about monsters.

You do realize, of course, that, as the number of races rises, the chances that the developers will have enough time and resources to create unique content for all of them falls dramatically? I'll wait until I've seen the SoZ content before I decide what kind if things I want to see in a new expansion (which may or may not be a good idea at this point).

Nothing really at the moment. I had been playing Deus Ex (for the first time), but I got a little distracted and my efforts petered out at the beginning of the Paris area. The game seems to be progressing such that the stealth-based gameplay depends on either constantly burning charge on your cloak, or being really really lucky. As I am a notorious resource miser in this kind of game, I tend to about using up my charge, which usually throws me into run-and-gun situations that I don't find particularly fun. Also, when the mood strikes me, I occasionally open up World of Goo to try to earn a few more OCD challenges. But the lack of stuff to play now is strategic-- moving day is next Saturday, so I can't afford to spend all my packing time on games.

I also was amused by his complaining about getting a weak energy weapon "too early," as if the skill balance in FO 1&2 wherein energy weapons were non-existant for 3/4ths of the game and totally pwned in the last 1/4 was good design.

Same. Although it's been a long time since I revisitied Alpha Centauri, so depending on mood I might pick that one instead.

Not much new, but there's a fun picture: That's one unfortunately placed cattail.

Ugh. I spent most of yesterday afternoon/evening fighting a rather virulent adware infection on my laptop. This one messed with the registry such that it locked me out of the Task Manager and prevented AVG and Spybot S&D (the two anti-malware programs I had on that PC) from launching. It eventually took a combination of Smitfraudfix (which successfully opened up my access to those two programs), AVG, Spybot, Malwarebytes, and some Safe-Mode manual deletion to remove all of the symptoms I was seeing. As long as I feel like I'm making progress and have a plan of attack, I find that kind of maintenance strangely satisfying. But looking back at all the time it ate up, I get pretty angry.

Some local media coverage: WaPo: Fallout 3, Starring D.C. Honestly, the local angle on the game is a pretty big selling point to me. My office, my apartment, and the house I'll be buying in 2 weeks are all within the game's geography.

Ooh! I get to play at being Funcroc again! GameBanshee Interview with a crowd of Obsidiarians. 11 Cohorts in total. New background feats include Draconic, Fiendish, and Fey heritage, which apparently have a series of successor feats to amplify their benefits.

that's a complete cop-out. everything touches everything in an economy, and when the federal government creates artificially low levels of risk, it effects every aspect of the economy. artificial risk, enoch. i'm sorry if you don't understand, but that permeates the entire system. here's a good article on the problem: http://mises.org/story/3165 I'm sorry, I have a tough time taking seriously an article that concludes with the following: It's a whole lot of manichean, "market=capitalism=good, government=socialism=evil" advocacy. Everything good that happens is because of markets, and everything bad that happens is because of governments. Reducing all social and public policy questions to a single axis with "good" on one end and "evil" on the other betrays a rather sophomoric understanding of how the world works. are you joking? seriously, where have i EVER said that there is no risk, instability or periodic fluctuations. you are now making the exact same type of strawman argument, incapable of reading or understanding what i have said. "your examples [of the business cycle] have never actually been shown, or demonstrated, to exist in a pure-free-market economy." "the capitalist system wouldn't be susceptible to [people making mistakes] because mass bad decisions couldn't happen" I overstated a bit. But not a whole lot. "Mass bad decisions couldn't happen"? How was I supposed to read that? try the first 100 years of US history. the value of the dollar actually increased. booms and busts did not begin until we began to regulate the economy. did you forget about that? Antebellum America had major periods of contraction in 1819-1824, 1837-1843, 1857-1860, as well as minor ones in the late 1790s and late 1800s. As an aside, increasing real currency value is rarely a good thing (and, at that time, with a specie-backed currency, it was a function not of any particularly good economic management or performance, but of population growth outpacing growth in gold mining). Investment and credit markets tend to freeze up when negative inflation puts nominal interest rates at or below zero.

OK, that's just laughably idealistic. The implementation of some state of mythical supercapitalism isn't going to abolish human nature. Believing otherwise is every bit as nuts as Marx's dream of a socialist worker's paradise. People have always done dumb things from time to time, and sometimes people do dumb things en masse. Yes, markets do adjust and correct for mistakes better than pure command-and-control economies, but it still takes time before confidence returns and business gets going again. nonsense. you have even less evidence to support your position than i do and you call my position "idealistic?" the only evidence we have is "less regulation means more growth and more wealth, and more regulation creates booms and busts." period. human nature is entirely the reason capitalism works. It's not idealistic to believe that a bunch of organisms as stupid, venal, messy, corrupt, and short-sighted as human beings are can come up with and successfully implement an economic system (or any other system, for that matter) that is completely safe from risk, instability, and periodic fluctuations? Seriously? And, outside of the most simplistic of blackboard charts in Econ 101, I've never seen anything close to the "evidence" that you claim we have so emphatically. All of the evidence on performance in the real economy relative to regulatory involvement is so crowded with noise that it's very easy for ideologues on either side to dismiss anything contrary to their thinking as caused by external factors (as you did when I mentioned that the business cycle has been generally calmer since the relative growth of government involvement in the 20th century). None of the data from the real economy is clean enough for us to know definitively what the overall lesson is. We make educated guesses, but none of them are certain. artificial risk, enoch, artificial risk, created by government regulation. Once again, economies are complicated, and you can't assign a single cause to any effect. There were dozens of "but-for" causes of the current problems, and the a good number of them (probably a majority) were bad decisions made by people in private business (and it's looking like many of the bad decisions made in government were decisions to decrease oversight and regulation rather than increase it). If you really really really want to scapegoat government, you can probably twist yourself in circles in figuring out how every one of them made their choices because they smelled some bureaucrat's fart 20 years ago. But if you've already decided who to blame before doing any analysis, well, you're not doing analysis at all-- you're just spinning to confirm your pre-existing ideology. And I'm not particularly interested in having that discussion.