Enoch

I seem to be in the minority in that I found Durlag's tower rather tedious; I lost interest somewhere in the 2nd or 3rd dungeon level and never bothered to finish it. Maybe I just don't have the patience for pure dungeon crawls. (I have never been able to replay either of the IWD games for long.) Anyhow, last night I started up a Sicilian campaign in M2TW. I went to bed shortly after assuring that the Doge of Venice sleeps with the fishes. (Serves him right after betraying our alliance!)

Lester Young - I Didn't Know What Time It Was Not sure about the rest of the personnel, and I don't particularly feel like hunting through the CD shelves to find the liner notes.

Today's Washington Post has an article about the selling of video games, with Bethesda's exhibition of F3 as its centerpiece. Here's the link (may require free registration). Be sure to check out the video, too, especially to see some of the swag the reviewers got to take home (I want that Vault-tec lunchbox!).

Sick day today. Spent most of the night last night feeling like I was about to vomit and shivering. Feeling mostly better now, but I'm still exhausted. Unfortunately, I've got a presentation to give at work on Thursday, so now I'll probably have to go in tomorrow on the holiday for at least a few hours to get ready.

If this gives them money to invest in reducing traffic problems in Northern VA, more power to them.

2 Words: Iran Contra. Crimes that compromise the national security of the U.S. >>>> possibly dodgy land deals.

There are a lot of reasons why the Libby trial smells a little bad. - The prosecutor investigating the case determined that there were no violations of the relevant intelligence-protection statute, but kept investigating, looking for procedural violations in complying with his investigation. Not illegal, but not particularly nice either. This is the same sort of conduct that had liberals calling for Ken Starr's head a decade ago. - The special prosecutor's job description may well have been unconstitutional, but the judge dismissed this argument (which was authored by a dozen well-regarded Constitutional Law scholars) out of hand. - The key evidence leading to conviction was that Libby had a different recollection of a phone conversation he had with Tim Russert than Russert did. But the judge refused to allow the defense's request that a memory expert be called to testify. - The judge's sentence was unusually harsh. The sentencing guidelines for this type of crime recommends 15-21 months. Libby got 30. - After the trial, Libby requested that the sentence be postponed until his appeal could be heard. Things like this are granted pretty normally in non-violent cases. Not here. I'm no Republican, and on the whole, I'm glad that Libby was tried and convicted. But I don't like it when a criminal defendant gets harsher treatment simply because of his political associations. The guy has been thoroughly disgraced, and he still has to pay the $250,000 fine. The larger point that the Bush administration is not above the law has been made. That's enough for me.

I was under the impression that this wouldn't happen for every area. They have stated elsewhere that it is possible to wander into areas where you'll get your butt handed to you if your character & equipment isn't up to snuff. I'd imagine that the areas where the end of the main quest occur would be one such location. That said, the game is still a long way off, and overall pacing, balance, and the finer points of difficulty in various areas are the type of things that I imagine wouldn't be finalized until they have a pretty complete build.

R.E.M. - Hairshirt

I won't miss the groinshots. The only real fun part of them was the flavor text, and we already know that's out (which I'm OK with-- it was rather immersion-breaking: "Ooh, I just wasted that raider, now lets see how cleverly the developers described his pain"). Eyeshots were always silly. Unless you're inches away from the target (and the target is completely stationary), there's no difference between aiming for the eyes and aiming for the head. And lets not forget that they've added the possibility of targeting the enemy's weapon. We can now practice that staple move of kid-friendly Westerns: shooting the gun out of our opponent's hand.

Here's one more from Gamespy. Has a few details I didn't see in some of the others.

Springsteen - 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) I'm preparing for the upcoming holiday.

The "I know it when I see it" line wasn't Scalia. It was Potter Stewart, in his concurrence to Jacobellis v. Ohio, in 1964.

Beautiful day around here.

I am waiting out an extremely slow Friday afternoon at work. Nothing is going on here at all.

Old news v. New news. People sit up and listen when the U.S. is accused of rights violations, because it's surprising. Chinese rights violations don't inspire nearly as much interest because people are used to it. News organizations like to run stories that get people interested. (Most of the bias people allege in news organizations is merely a bias in favor of sensationalism. Technical stories like the warning signs about the tech bubble that GD mentioned are passed over in favor of sensational ones-- in that case, the contemporaneous issue of Presidential stains on a blue dress.) Plus, it's a lot easier and cheaper to report on events in the U.S. than it is events in China.

Update!! SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WATCH 461 IN EFFECT UNTIL 11 PM EDT THIS EVENING Tonight...Mostly cloudy. Numerous thunderstorms and showers this evening...Then a chance of showers and thunderstorms after midnight. Some thunderstorms May be severe this evening. Lows in the lower 70s. Northwest winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70 percent. Link! (Does anybody really care about any of this??)

First off, tax deductions don't help the poor much at all-- if you make under $30K/year or so, the standard deduction is usually better (and easier) than itemizing. Also, there are reasons to suspect that, even if there weren't the insurance moral hazard problem, price competition for medical services would be less than robust. First off, people often don't have time to shop around for needed medical services. Second, behavioral economics suggests that, with things like health care, consumers tend to overpay dramatically for very marginal increases in efficacy, due to oversensitivity to the possibility of a negative outcome. (I.e., pill A is $100 is effective for 80% of the population. Pill B is $200 and is effective for 81% of the population. Most people pick pill B, even though, for 99% of them, the two will have identical effects.) As to the increased costs of government operation, I'm not sure that a government bureaucracy could possibly be less efficient than the system we have now. The key benefit of a single-payer system (where the gov't pays all the bills) is that every doctor's office can fire the half of their support staff who currently do nothing but send paperwork back and forth between their offices and a dozen different insurance companies. Also, all the informational costs associated with the competition between private insurers would go away. (If you've ever gone through the piles and piles of plan summaries, provider directories, and cost schedules when picking out a new health plan, you know what I mean.) Advertising by insurance plans is also a huge cost that is eventually borne by enrollee premiums. Executive salaries and shareholder profit figure in here, too. In terms of % of costs spent on "overhead" items like this, gov't-run Medicare & VA systems are far more efficient than the private sector. That's the dream scenario for many American liberals like Moore. It is also still a political impossibility. And it comes with risks that quality of care will be sacraficed too much, that centralized control of funding will stifle innovation and research, and that consumers still lack incentives to moderate their use of the system. Some middle-ground proposals are out there, but I'm not really up to speed enough to talk about them.

Great. 100 degree weather broken up by the occasional thunder storm. ugh. Is it possible to work in your bathing suit, by any chance? :D I doubt that qualifies as "business casual." But I work in an air conditioned office, so it's not so bad. My only exposure to the outside on days like this are the walks between my office and the Metro (1 block), and the Metro and my apartment (3 blocks).

again, this is NOT a capitalism model at work, not even close. health care, and the insurance industry, is probably the most heavily regulated in the US. consumers cannot even sue the very insurance companies representing them. your logic is baffling on this one... on one hand, you're faulting a system heavily corrupted by the government, and on the other, you're advocating more government interference. if the government got out of the way, standard capitalistic models of competition would take over and things would naturally improve - and the insurance companies, and health care systems, that weren't operating properly/efficiently would bankrupt themselves. Except that the moral hazard inherent in insurance contracts is a widely-recognized failure of free markets. Price competition fails when the person making the purchasing decision is not the person who bears the immediate cost. The problems with the U.S. health care industry don't come entirely from government involvement. Veterinary health is simpler because insurance is rare, so the people deciding to purchase treatment are the ones who bear the costs. This results in robust price competition. Also, societal values differ, in that if an animal needs a medical procedure that its owner cannot afford, we're generally OK with letting the animal die. The same is not true for humans.

My local weather: (<-- that's a link) This Afternoon...Partly sunny with a chance of showers and thunderstorms. Highs in the mid 90s. Southwest winds 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 30 percent. Heat index values up to 100.

Pixies - Wave of Mutilation. I hadn't listened to any Pixies in probably over a decade, but I picked up Dolittle a couple of weeks ago, and it's been fun to rediscover.

I haven't seen any Moore films, but based on their portrayal in the media generally, I tend to agree with Wals that he does more harm than good to the progressive policies he champions. On health care generally, I have always been flummoxed by the staggering inefficiency of health care in the U.S. Every physician's office I've been to has at least 2 or 3 staff members whose only job is dealing with the various insurance companies. These kind of overhead expenses inflate prices dramatically. HMOs, which are essentially doctor's offices that are run by one particular insurance company, avoid some of this, but the quality of care stinks because the doctors are under heavy pressure from their bosses to deal with stuff as quickly as possible. And don't get me started on marketing costs. @ GD: Of course private hospitals are nicer than government ones. They overcharge. They get away with overcharging because of the moral hazard problem wherein the person making the decision on what level of service to purchase is not the person who will bear the direct burden of paying for it. That is, if I know that my private insurer will cover my costs, I don't have any incentive to constrain my purchases, and vendors don't have any incentive to compete on price. (They also overcharge paying customers because ERs are forced by law to treat anyone who walks in the door, even when it's pretty clear that this person has no means of paying them. This essentially places the burden of providing health care for many poorer people on hospitals, who pass this cost on to their other customers. This is one reason why hospital owners are beginning to come around to the idea of more government involvement in the system.) So government facilities stink because there is no competition forcing them to increase their quality of service, and private hospitals can be nice, but are monstrously expensive because they have little real competition on price. There has got to be a way to mitigate the flaws in one or the other to make the system better.

WoW screenshots always look ridiculously confusing to me. I can't understand a single thing that's going on in all those icons and float-texts. I'm sure it becomes second nature after a few weeks with the game, but it looks like a terrifying learning curve to me.

Honestly, with a few very rare exceptions (usually Civ2 games where I'm a democracy trying to hold off the fundamentalist hordes long enough to launch my spaceship) I have never found late-game Civ to be much fun. Too many units & cities to manage, most of which are usually doing something unremarkable. Unless I'm really forcing myself to finish a particular game, I'll usually just restart. Honestly, I don't if there's much they can do to fix this. I guess Alpha Centauri did it pretty well, but that's because of the storyline elements that game introduced-- I tolerated the tedium because I wanted to know what would happen with the mindworms and the tech development (blind research was a great feature of that game, and the VO quotes accompanying each discovery were really well done). Unless you really enjoy assembling modern armies and using them to crush your enemies (which a fair number of people on Civfanatics seem to), I don't think that late-game Civ is going to be fun for you. But the early to mid game is fun enough (unless I get screwed with the resource draw-- what do you mean there's only 1 iron on this continent!! ) that restarting doesn't bother me.