Enoch

There were a handful of areas on the map I didn't bother unlocking, including a couple of caves. So maybe that's where a lot of the information was found. I just stuck mainly to the quests given to me, and the areas associated with those quests, or the areas I'd come across as a direct result of walking toward those quest locations. The best part of Honest Hearts was the pure exploration, which included finding and reading all the Survivalist's journals. It's especially cool if you've been to the actual Zion National Park. Apart from the journals, I thought the writing felt a little flat, in that I didn't really see much reason to care about the characters that the DLC introduced. I was curious about Graham, and the initial conversation with him was interesting, but I never really bought into the whole "decide the fate of these tribes" thing as being an important thing to do. It lacked an element of mystery to draw the player in, IMO.

I've submitted a claim under my homeowners' insurance, so we'll see how it goes. We needed to replace that part of the roof anyway.

Yeah, getting Lockpick and Science up are usually among my highest priorities, as few things wound me more than leaving a locked door/safe/whatever behind, not knowing what was in it. (A Speech option in conversation that I don't qualify for is also heart-wrenching.) Some things can be opened with either, but there are more Lockpick-only stashes and locations than there are Science-only. Which is probably fair, given that Science has other benefits (what Gorgon said, plus a fair amount of in-dialogue use). Getting Repair to 90 when you're in the mid-teens is worthwhile for the Jury Rigging perk (lets you repair items with similar-but-not-identical items, e.g., fix power armor with metal armor) and for the ability to make Weapon Repair Kits. "Good Natured" is, I think, by far the most useful Trait (-5 in Combat skills, +5 in non-combat skills). You need points in a wide variety of non-combat skills, but you're probably only going to be putting points in 1 combat skill (maybe two). So it's a pretty big net gain. "Four Eyes" is also a nice one-- once you get further along than Primm, it's pretty easy to find plenty of eyeglasses, so the Trait works out to be +1 PE for the vast majority of the game, with the drawback that certain full-head helmets are off-limits. But if you're a sniper, you're wearing Boone's beret all the time anyway. If you're playing Sawyer's mod (and I'm having fun with it so far), get Survival to 35. (Or at least to where a Lad's Life can raise it to 35.) You'll be doing some scrounging for food, and that level opens up a lot of basic-but-useful campfire recipes, like how to cook a steak.

So, perhaps you've heard of that surprise line of storms that rolled through the eastern U.S. last Friday? Yeah. Not fun. At about 10:30 Friday night, we had massive wind gusts, followed by more typical summer thunderstorm fare. Several sizeable limbs were knocked out of our neighbor's enormous ginkgo tree. One of those limbs broke my roof. Well, not the main roof. Our dining room kind of sticks out of the side of the house, and it has a metal roof over it (as opposed to the slate roof up top). The branch broke through the metal and the wooden planks underneath it, opening up a hole into the insulation layer (but not through the interior ceiling). Shortly after that, our power went out. It stayed out for two full days, until 11 PM last night. Those two days happened to be two of the hottest days of the year-- temperatures breaking the 100F (38C) mark. On Saturday morning, we cleaned up the tree limbs, and I tacked some heavy-duty tar paper I had lying around up over the hole. In general, we spent the weekend sweating, hanging out in the basement, and chatting with neighbors. We also drove around, trying to find places to sell us ice, to let us hang out in AC, and to let us charge our phones. (I never bothered to buy a car charger for this phone-- I figured I'd never need one, as I don't commute by car and most errands are within a 15 min drive.) The Public Library was great for these last two points. Oh, and just to add insult to injury, I seem to be allergic to ginkgo fruit. The tree that violated our house is a fruit-bearing ginkgo, and an awful lot of its underripe fruit were dropped in our lawn and gutters by the storm. As those fruits tend to rot and smell terrible, we raked them and bagged them up yesterday morning. Normally, they fall around November, and I'm wearing pants and long sleeves when we clean them up. After doing so yesterday in shorts and a t-shirt, I now have an itchy red rash that reminds me very much of a mild poison ivy scattered about my forearms, calves, neck, and face (the latter two areas from wiping sweat away, I guess).

Clearly, you've been taking Monte's advice to heart, then.

I considered it, but then I decided I'd do something that I care more about, like watch Italy kick Germany's butt. I don't want to imagine a world where I would enjoy watching soccer more than I would enjoy analysis of a complex, high-profile legal opinion.

just fyi, the opinion is difficult to read, but it appears that the court actually struck down this argument of the government requiring a person to enter the stream of commerce and instead supported the law under the alternative argument, that congress has merely enacted a new tax, BUT if you happen to already have or buy health insurance, you are exempt from the new tax. which of course, is not new, there are other taxes or tax rebates you can exempt/earn by engaging in certain activities. thats not a new power for congress, nor does it, by itself, set any new precedents. the opinion is 65 pages long though, and i didnt read all of it. maybe one of the other lawyers on this board will? the problem is the way the argument was framed from the beginning by both lawmakers and the media. i'm guessing it was phrased this way by the government to get the law to pass, because most people would not have supported passing new taxes, but calling it a "mandate" for some reason was less terrifying for voters? i dont really know, i havent any particular insight into the minds of congress. tldr: under the supreme court ruling, you are NOT required to buy insurance (because it would be unconstitutional to make you), but if you do buy insurance, then you get a tax exemption. I think the consequences of not complying with the mandate were put into the tax code for precisely this reason-- to ensure that the Act rested on as many Constitutional powers as possible. Interestingly, for the purposes of this litigation, the parties also had to argue that it was not a tax. The Anti-Injunction Act bars suits challenging tax provisions until the tax has been actually assessed. So, if the "penalty" is a "tax" for these purposes, the portion of this case that dealt with the mandate gets dismissed, and we all wait until 2014 to see whether it's constitutional or not. The Chief Justice did some legal sleight-of-hand here, arguing that the official label in PPACA of "not a tax" governs for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act, but has no bearing on the question of whether the mandate was a permissible use of Congress's constitutional authority to lay and collect taxes. It's a somewhat glib hand-wave, but it's credible enough, and nobody involved wanted the uncertainty about the law's underlying legality prolonged until 2014 when the penalty provision comes into effect.

I think "Frightened" has just taken over He's dressed as a powder ganger and running straigth at you. How could you not put one in his head. Didnt everyone do that. I actually shoot him afterwards. I don't know why, I guess he just rubbed me the wrong way. I shot him because I took the "Four Eyes" trait, and he was wearing the first pair of glasses I saw on a character who I could get away with murdering. Sorry, Calax, but I need that +2 PE.

The language of the opinion is an interesting balance. The mandate was rejected by a majority of Justices on the grounds of the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause (the 4 more liberal Justices would've upheld on these points). It was upheld-- with the Chief joining the Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan-- only as an exercise of Congress' power to levy taxes, which was essentially the Administration's 3rd argument in defense of the law. That is, as they read PPACA, it establishes a condition of "Lacking qualifying health insurance" which subjects a citizen to a larger tax liability. Sort of like "not being blind" in present law. And the secondary question where the Court did invalidate a portion of the law might end up being significant, too. It held that Congress couldn't withhold a State's entire Medicaid funding if that State didn't go along with the expansion of Medicaid that was in the Law. Not sure how that one is going to play out.

So, all it's missing to be like real hunting is the standing still and freezing your ass off in the woods for 4 hours without seeing anything interesting. I assume there's a "gut your kill" minigame?

Yeah, Sawyer's FNV mod is interesting. And tough. I'm only level 3, and have gotten as far as clearing the Bison Steve in Primm. (Although I held off on Ringo's quest for awhile to keep the Powder Gangers non-hostile.) 100 carry weight (5 ST character) is certainly an adjustment, and I'm scrounging for food a lot. I like the changes to the various Merc armors to make them competitive with Leather early on (Leather with 6 DT, or Merc armor with 4 DT and +10 E-Weaps??). Still really working out just how much food, water, and stims (which now weigh 0.25 each) I should be carrying along when I leave my homebase (temporarily located in Victor's house).

We remember because we're older than you. Note: Somewhat paradoxically, this is also the reason that we forget.

Hmm. Any chance that this corresponds with the basic game maybe getting a little cheaper? I've been pretty effectively spoiled as to plot, but I still do want to play it at some point (with reasonable expectations).

As I'll most likely be once again going through a video card RMA (2nd straight fan that started going all clicky within a couple months), I'll soon be switching temporarily to the basement computer. So I think I'm going to take a shot at New Vegas again, with Sawyer's mod installed. Thus, I ask: anybody have UI mod recommendations?

Well to the extent that you allow that government has at least some legitimate functions, then it needs at least some revenues. And from rather long experience, most nations have come around to the opinion that some form of generally applicable mandatory taxation (passing over as ridiculous the hardcore Randian 'voluntary taxation' bit) is the best way to get those revenues. (User fees work for certain types of governmental functions, but they run into problems to the extent that these fees fund goods/services that either are difficult to exclude people from-- crime prevention, for example-- or that you don't want to exclude the indigent from, like public education.) You hint at wanting to be selective about the expenditures your taxes pay for, which is an understandible sentiment. Opinions will always differ on what exactly the legitimate expenditures of a government should be, but the western world has generally decided that some form of representative democracy is the least-bad way to resolve those differences. And, while it really sucks when the bulk of your countrymen vote to fund things that you think are stupid/wasteful/etc., absent some valid appeal to an overriding prinicple (e.g., some provision of a written constitution), that's just one of the costs of doing business in a democracy. Anyhow, The justification for graduated taxation is usually the argument based on diminishing marginal utility of income/wealth/expenditure. The shorthand normally used is the Rawlsian "veil of ignorance"-- assume that you have sentience before birth, and can design a system of taxation without the benefit of knowing whether you're going to be rich or poor, smart or stupid, etc. The outcome of that exercise is one of hedging your bets-- taxing the "good" outcomes relatively heavily in order to make the "bad" outcomes less onerous. There is, however, a point where this takes on the appearance of class warfare. It's nebulous and opinions will differ, but I think that most people would agree that the democratic process has been abused to the point of unfairness by the time you get to "one for you, nineteen for me" extremes. (Raising class-warfare-type concerns in present debates in the U.S. about moving the top income tax rates from 36%-ish to 39%-ish, though, is rather ridiculous.) Also, as a practical matter, extreme-top-rates end up making your rich folks into tax exiles. And, then, of course, there are all the various exceptions, exemptions, deductions, credits, etc., that get written into tax codes for policy reasons. Each incremental step usually makes some sense, but they tend to accumulate over time and turn the whole affair into something mindbendingly complex and prone to various dodges and abuses. I'm going to reserve comment on the morality of using such abuses for now. From an institutional point of view, the best solution here is to blow the whole thing up and re-write it on blank paper from time to time. (The last time the U.S. did this on the federal level was in 1987, and we're due for another round.) Means of taxation is, of course, a related discussion. In general, you can tax income, you can tax wealth (property taxes), and you can tax expenditures (sales taxes or value-added taxes). Each of these approaches have strengths and weaknesses in terms of fairness, practical challenges, administrative costs, potential for fraud, and other considerations. Most jurisdictions I've seen end up using a little of each of these.

That's a clever observation that feels true to me, but I give Bale some benefit of the doubt, here. That is, to Bale, the core of the character is a ruthless, violent vigilante, who just happens to put up the appearance of being a billionaire businessman/philanthropist/whatever during the daylight hours. His Wayne is unconvincing because he's still playing Batman, and Batman's Wayne is unconvincing. With Keaton, the shoe was on the other foot-- he was comfortable playing Wayne, but you never really got the sense that that particular Bruce Wayne would actually want to do all that Batman stuff.

Heh. My annual golf game will be in a couple weeks. It goes down similar to the outings Gfted described, except that it's with my brother-in-law and a couple of cousins. I'm quite terrible, but those rare instances when I can string together a few not-awful shots are so damned satisfying.

Thanks. I've been meaning to pick up the HR DLC, and here it is for less than $4!

The first computer owned in my family was an IBM PS/2, sometime around 1988. I don't recall exact specs, but I remember that it was pretty cool because it had a hard drive-- 20 MBs!

Arcade does have a sidequest, but it opens rather late in the game and (I think) requires a history of actions done in his presence that he approves of. However, it is (IMO) one of the most satisfying quests in the game, particularly if you've played the original Fallouts. If Veronica is your measuring stick, all of the other companions are going to seem withdrawn. Arcade tends to have things to say in circumstances involving sciency stuff, Caesar, and the Followers.

Alpha Centauri! Nerve staples for everyone!

A college roommate of mine once worked as an usher in a Major League Baseball stadium. By his account, "look for pretty girls in the audience" is pretty much what all the cameramen do with any time when they weren't required to be following the play on the field.

A suitably pulpy suggestion for this crowd: Dead Harvest, by Chris F. Holm It was described to me as "Raymond Chandler's Faust," which is a reasonably appropriate quip. A narrator who is a Collector of marked souls for Hell (a deceased human who works for demons, per the terms of a demonic contract) is sent to collect a soul who he concludes to be Innocent, refuses, and flees with the supposedly-innocent girl, pursued by the powers of both Hell and Heaven as he tries to figure out how, why, and by whom they were set up. The writing isn't especially excellent-- it takes on the trappings of classic noir detective fare, but so far hasn't gotten past stylistic mimicry of Hammett, et al., to develop much style of its own. But the conceptual novelty and admirable thriller-pacing mostly overcome that and keep me reading. It's the first volume of a planned series, with the second, The Wrong Goodbye planned for release this fall. Has a lovely faux-vintage-pulp cover. I'm about 2/3rds of the way through, and enjoying it a lot.

Some states will issue a "walker's license" if you go ask for one-- i.e., an official statue-issued ID that functions as a drivers' license in all ways except the whole "licensing you to drive a car" thing. In other news, Happy Bourbon Day!

It's less a function of purely redistribution than it is of that higher incomes pay more tax, and per capita incomes are generally higher in the "bluer" states. Also, locations of major military installations make a big difference in terms of where money gets spent. As for the "extra economic growth" thing, well, good luck with that. Sounds like wishcasting to me.