Enoch

I'm similar-- in a world with no believable characters to empathize with, the natural choice is to be a sociopath.

I'm going to be building a new rig over the next few weeks, and I just pounced on an in-store-only deal at Microcenter (which is funny, in that until recently I hadn't even been aware of the fact that they had a store less than 10 miles from my house) offering $60 off if you buy both an i5-2500K and a Z68 mobo. Combined with the discount they were offering on the CPU (it was $180, compared to $214 at newegg), I couldn't pass that up. I went with the ASUS P8Z68-V. Now, it's wait and see if there are some Black Friday deals on GPUs, SSDs, Memory, Cases, and/or Monitors...

I have high resistance to nostalgia, so I have no doubt it'll still be awesome. I'm just afraid it'll prove to me without doubt I'm now a grown-up and don't have the time to play games like I used to. I'm actually doing this now. But I've been going in stages-- played through most of Chapters 1-3 about 6 months ago, put it on the shelf for awhile, and am now taking it from Brynnlaw through ToB. It's still good, but I am susceptible to IE fatigue in a way that I wasn't 10 years ago. It's actually only the 2nd time I've ever played ToB-- the only parts I really remember from my first try are Gromnir's cameo and the telegraphed end-boss. Anyhow, I just finished off the Fire Giant dude.

I really meant to work from home today. It's a holiday that I get off, but the wife doesn't, and I've got a big tedious project that has to be done by the end of the month, so I planned to put some time in and try to get a little ahead of schedule (or, more accurately, a little less-behind-schedule). And now it's almost 1PM and I haven't opened document 1. I'm getting close to giving up on the search for motivation and going to the grocery store instead. At least if I have a nice dinner waiting for her when she comes home, I can't be said to have wasted the whole day.

All the numerologists and such are having a happy. Since we had 11 minutes past the 11th hour, on the 11th day of the 11th month of the 11th year of the current century. so 11:11 of 11/11/11. The numerologists, and Nigel Tufnel.

There are occasions where I simply can't get enough of this song.

I'm playing the "figure out which components to buy for the building of a new PC" game. Hopefully, the next few weeks will produce some Black-Friday-type sales. (I'm guessing that there won't be much on wonky stuff like PSUs, but it could produce nice savings on a new monitor, for example.) Also, Throne of Bhaal. After that, assuming everything goes well, it's figuring out which games to buy out of the new stuff and all the games I haven't bought over the last 9 months or so. Tentative plan is to buy something uber-current like Skyrim or Arkham City to test the machine and keep me busy, then wait and see if titles like Shogun 2, Deus Ex, Witcher 2, or DS3 turn up for cheap in post-holiday sales.

How about 1952? Nerve stapling.

I was nodding in agreement until I came upon the last sentence, when I turned green with envy. I was more wondering how he gets oranges and lemons off of the same tree.

Well, China is an odd case in a great many aspects. It is, as Nep notes, no longer the cheapest labor supplier out there, and it's trying to manage a transition to a more functional internal market economy. Under the frame I set out in my post earlier this morning, I guess that puts them a few decades earlier in the "what do we do with all these people who want work" calculation. But it's exacerbated by the fact that they have so many more people than anybody else. They're starting to get past the simple assembly tasks, which have generally not been producing enough value-added to fund a particularly satisfactory standard of living. And, to a certain extent, they've been playing a similar mercantilist game to that which Germany has been using-- holding the Renmimbi at a relatively set point so that a weaker Dollar doesn't make their goods rise in price in America. That has worked because of their general bilateral dependency with the United States, but it's a ticking time bomb given that the U.S. can control the value of the Dollar and is a pretty huge net debtor relative to the outside world-- eventually, the benefits of Dollar inflation are going to start to outweigh the costs. I really don't have much of a guess as to where, in general, things are going over there. For one thing, it's not exactly a haven of honest financial reporting, so reliable data is quite tough to get, and nobody really knows what the honest figures would really say. They've spent a lot of money on somewhat dubious infrastructure projects (a common indulgence for a government primarily run by engineers) and on contracting for raw materials supply (much of which is in nations that don't exactly have the best history in terms of stability and honoring contracts). I doubt that they're going to get the ROI they expect on those expenditures. But those are pretty short-run thoughts.

I've been trying to think a bit about this whole slow economic spiral the developed world finds itself in, from the what-bullet-point-historical-summaries-will-say-100-years-from-now level. It seems to me that the nations of Europe, North America, and Japan are a few decades into struggling with the question of what an ordinary shlub with no particularly marketable skills can do to earn a living and support a family, given that microchips, robots, and cheap offshore workers have greatly reduced the need for unskilled labor. 200 years ago, the answer to this was easy-- subsistence farming. But ever-larger (and ever-more-efficient) farming operations have made that an increasingly inefficient use of land resources. 100 years ago, the answer was to do what those cheap offshore workers do today-- repetitive tasks based on manual dexterity or non-roboticized assembly. The industries involved were sufficiently new and innovative that there was enough surplus from these operations to support a pretty solid wage level for its time. And the marginally more educated could do the related calculation and documentation tasks that are handled largely by computer now. Now, there's government work and service industry work, neither of which create much in the way of positive multiplier effects for the economy as a whole (often quite the opposite). There's some construction work, but that's very sensitive to economic cycles. There is, of course, still a good amount agriculture and manufacturing going on, but robots and computers have greatly decreased the number of people required to do the work, and greatly increased the qualifications that employers need these people to have. The floor of a steel mill that used to employ 100+ man shifts can now be run by a dozen or so people, all looking at computer screens. Countries are trying all kinds of different ways of handling this problem. First and most important is simply borrowing money from future generations to support economic activity today. This is most obviously appparent in government debt and central bank activities, but probably moreso a problem in how regulators have allowed the financial industry and the companies they support to take on astounding degrees of leverage under the mistaken assumption that all that risk can be fully understood hedged effectively. As for employment, America has kept its huge service sector afloat by greatly incentivising home ownership and investment in residential construction. Germany has kept its manufacturing going by turning Southern Europe into the equivalent of a 17th-century mercantilist power's colonies-- markets for goods who can't respond to one-sided trade via political action or currency adjustment. Both of those strategies are blowing up at the moment. Long-term, the differences between the First and Third worlds are bound to diminish at a slow and inconsistent pace, absent some change in the ways that goods, services, and companies cross physical distances and political barriers. (At some point, we'll probably see a re-invigoration of trade barriers and a fall of the WTO framework as faltering economies turn to isolationist politicians.) Nations will be divided more by how well governed they are than by the legacy of how wealthy and successful their ancestors were. (And, of course, there will always be some regions-- I wouldn't call them "nations"-- whose governance and rule-of-law is too weak to support anything beyond the most rudimentary of economic development.)

That's a pretty apt description. Greece has been, essentially, a 3rd world economy for decades. It has no real competitive advantages other than having nice beaches and ruins that people like to come visit, and there's a pretty long history of regular defaults on government debt to boot. They were offered admission into the currency union because the elites of northern Europe wanted more markets for their goods that wouldn't be subject to currency adjustment when trade got lopsided. Normally, if trade between nations is imbalanced, their exchange rate adjusts such that the net Exporter's goods get very expensive and the net Importer's goods get rather cheap. But put both countries on the same currency, and give control of that currency, in effect, to the finance ministers of the big exporters, and you have a recipe for 21st century mercantilism-- you just have to bait the hook with the availability of extraordinarily cheap lending via the ECB. So Northern Europe lends money to Greek banks and the Greek government at rates so low that they'd be crazy to say no, the Greek government and banks pass this money on the Greek citizenry via high wages, generous pensions, and easy credit, and the people spend money on imports from Germany and France. The Banks make money; the Exporters make money, and the Greeks get to enjoy a 1st-world standard of living... But only for so long as nobody pays attention to the size of the debt that the Greek government is building up. An across-the-board total lack of appreciation for the quite clear long-term consequences of actions.

How wonderfully condescending, Enoch. I guess another way of reading that is,

I am not going to touch the healthcare discussion except to say that it's extremely complicated, all the ideologues are wrong, and both sides of the common-parlance debate regularly base their arguments on ideas that are howlingly stupid. This actually brings to mind an interesting example-- Working captial funds in the DOD. Support infrastructure is generally managed separately from military units, and they have taken to doing so on a customer-provider basis. Each of the services has a "Working capital fund" which does work when ordered by field units. The easiest example is maintenence. Field unit has a dozen broken humvees, places a repair order with the WCF, gets the vehicles transported to the repair depot, pays the WCF out of its Operations and Maintenance appropriation, and the WCF fixes the equipment and generally runs the depot out of this the charges it is paid. (It's a 'revolving fund' type structure-- the depot is supposed to charge as near as possible to its actual costs so that it doesn't have to get funds appropriated itself.) The neat part is that it works cross-service. For example, USMC owns and operates a fair number of helicopters, but all the helicopter maintenance is done by either Army or Air Force depots, who have more specialization in that kind of thing. Actual management of the WCFs isn't very good (and the services like to use maintenance orders at the very end of the fiscal year as a way to stash expiring appropriations balances), but it's an interesting structure that I think gets to some of what Wals is talking about.

I'd say that the defining aspect of a service being "consumer-driven" is that it is subject to the threat that the people using the service will choose to take their business elsewhere if an alternate supplier offers better or cheaper service. It's tough to pull off for a government entity, given that funding generally comes from the treasury, rather than from the pocketbooks of the customers walking in the door.

Well, I am over-simplifying in that I have mostly omitted the other complicating factor that is the condition of the banks, as well as the backdoor-bailout that is the ECB's netting cross-border payments system. There are 2 primary mechanisms by which these problems spread from country to country. The first, as discussed in my prior post, is the price that markets are willing to pay for government debt-- a loss of confidence in one Eurozone country tends to bring a loss of confidence in other similarly situated Eurozone countries. The second is the financial condition of the banks. European banks are directly exposed to any sovereign default within the Eurozone to a rather great degree. (In short, one of the key benefits that came with a nation joining the Euro was access to ECB "repo" lending. A nation could sell sovereign debt to a bank, and that bank could use that debt as collateral at the ECB lending window to get ECB financing. This meant that the nation got to issue debt cheaply, relative to what markets would otherwise demand, and the bank got to profit off of the spread between the short-term sovereign bond rate and the ECB lending rate. The win-win nature of this transaction is largely how sovereign debt levels got so high in the first place.) One estimate stated that the whole Euro banking system's exposure to PIIGS debt is equivalent to about 150% of its aggregate tangible common equity. So, in the event that Greece is allowed to default, and if other nations follow due to the pressures I described earlier, the other Eurozone nations are going to find themselves back at the same decision point they saw in 2008-- either allow the financial system to collapse, or commit tax revenues to bail out the banks. The cross-border netting system is what most likely comes under pressure if there isn't some default allowed. This is a little more outside my confort zone, but I'll give it a shot. When a 3rd-world country has bank failures and sovereign defaults, it generally does so because markets will only lend to it or to its banks in currency it doesn't control (usually Dollars, but occasionally Euro or Yen) and the flight of private capital from the country has left it without sufficient foreign currency reserves with which to pay. Peripherial Eurozone countries are experiencing capital flight-- domestic banks are the ones buying up their home country's sovereign debt (they figure that they're already screwed in event of a sovereign default, so they need to support the system for as long as they can), while foreign banks limit their exposure and domestic businesses and individuals find places to put their money that are outside the domestic banking system (mattresses, commodities, Swiss accounts, etc.). But because the Eurozone countries are on the same currency, the ECB nets out cross-border transactions with lending. Thus, when money flows out of an Italian bank and into a German bank, there is an automatic corresponding lending transaction from the Bundesbank to the Italian central bank. In theory, there is no limit to this, and although these balances could be paid off with hard assets, in practice they aren't. And governments can use their domestic banks to take advantage of this system and get Bundesbank funding. If the at-risk nations aren't allowed to restructure their debt in some manner, pressure on this system is going to keep rising. Under ECB law, if a central bank defaults, all the other Eurozone central banks are required to recapitalize the Euro, in accordance with their relative share. And if any constituent central bank decides to stop recognizing the claims of another central bank, the Euro is functionally over-- rather than keep piling up central bank debt that they know wouldn't be repaid, the Germans would exit. This is very similar to how the Ruble died as the cross-national currency of the former Soviet states-- it became worth a different sum in Minsk than it was in Moscow.

Greece is the one having trouble keeping its head above water. The key metric for these purposes is being able to pay your debts as they come due. As their outlays and incomes currently stack up, Greece is the only one that is seriously worried about making next month's interest payment or about having difficulty rolling over expiring debt. Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain aren't presently in that situation, but could be right there if future developments cause their borrowing costs to rise. The particular future development that could do so and is now on everybody's mind is a major default on Greek debt that signals to markets that the ECB and the German government have reached the end of their tolerance for bailing out Eurozone members. This is why much of the focus of the present efforts by the ECB and the various finance ministers has been to contain the problems to Greece. If the Greek situation is managed without disappointing markets too much, based on available information, there isn't a whole lot of reason to worry about default from those other countries. But if Greece defaults, markets start worrying about Portugal and Italy. If Portugal goes, they worry about Spain. If Spain and Italy go, they worry about France. If France goes, everybody worries about everything.

There's a fun diagram in Sunday's New York Times, setting out the web of debt exposure between the major players. Although the most serious part is probably the second subheading under the point numbered 7-- there is no reliable information on who is holding how much indirect exposure to the debt of these countries, via defaul swaps and other derivatives. It's All Connected: A Spectator's Guide to the Euro Crisis

Just to join in on the toenail conversation, I have no particular opinion on the attractiveness of my toenails. But they do annoy me from time to time. Specifically, the toenails on the big toe on each foot angle somewhat upwards. Which makes it damned hard to find comfortable shoes, and causes me to wear through socks at a rather rapid pace (as the toenail is always rubbing the sock against the top of the shoe).

I think the fantastic element in religion in fantasy games isn't so much that one religion is particularly dominant. It's that the faith(s) is backed up by provable, repeatable miracles. Sure, it's part of the whole "magic is real" fantasy, but it also cuts out the existential uncertainty that underlies so much of the actual human condition. You can have magic without so fundamentally altering the way in which people see the world.

Well, I'm not a big fan of "destiny." There might be a way to manage this, under the "a little bit of everything" scenario. Balance the harm such that everybody suffers somewhat, and hope that the worst outcomes can be averted. Macroeconomies are slow-moving beasts, generally, and they're more resilient than the skittering about done by financial markets and politicos. And the delaying tactics that central banks can pull out of their bag of tricks can be powerful. Crashes are emotional events, and difficult to really project. But, at the same time, it is very difficult to see what could happen that would improve things measurably in the next few years. If you're making projections, decade of stagnation is probably a safer projections than a crash is. Longer term, there needs to be some leadership and recognition in the financial sector of the economy of the big western powers. The point of a banker is simple-- to decide which enterprises to fund with the collective wealth of a society. A financial sector in a primarily-private-enterprise-driven economy is in a hugely powerful position, and one that requires a great trust by the rest of the populace-- there are a thousand opportunities for a banking industry to decide that the best place a society's money should be invested is, well, in the financial industry (or in short-term gimmicks that do little other than create opportunities to charge nice fees), rather than those productive enterprises that offer strong real rates of return. And, over the past few decades, the competitive and regulatory forces checking this kind of behavior have fundamentally broken down, in Europe and in America. Ultra-concentrated financial companies, colluding openly with one another. Regulatory capture. The political-economy philosophy that gives bankers the widest possible latitude being accepted as plain truth by both relevant American political parties. Banking didn't used to be sexy. It fundamentally shouldn't be. It is a very somber responsibility to decide where the collected wealth of a society should be put to use. When it works well, a competitive capitalist banking system totally kicks the ass of capital allocation decisions in more centrally planned economies. But it hasn't been working well for at least 25 years now, which has resulted in some huge fundamental misallocations of capital (Greek public employees; American sub-prime mortgages; Irish real estate; Iceland) that are going to take some serious pain all around to work out.

Euro-debt thingy: Essential problem: Some countries in the currency union have attained debt levels beyond their reasonable ability to repay, abetted primarily by core-Euro and US banks (who lent to them despite clear evidence of a lack of ability to repay) and core-Euro governments who didn't bother policing sovereign debt when admitting new currency-union members because they couldn't wait to get more markets for their exports that were within their mercantilist control. Somebody has to pay for this. The candidates: 1) The governments that accumulated the debt. Satisfying in a knee-jerk political sense, but probably not practical, given economic and political realities. 2) The banks that made the loans and whoever else holds the paper now. Doing so so soon after shocks of 2008 presents a distinct chance of causing a number of major financial industry failures, and probable further bailouts by the taxpayers and central banks. Also, there is some fear (probably promoted by the banks currently holding Greek debt) that even some managed default would spread fears of non-payment to other Euro-users, resulting in sharp market devaluation of the currency. 3) The governments of the rest of the Eurozone. A really tough sell to the voters, even if they have been unwittingly benefiting from the fruits of intra-Euro mercantilism for the past few decades. 4) Everyone who holds Euros, via central bank devaluation. 5) Some combination of the above. Other alternatives: A) Continue to play for time and hope that miraculous economic growth bails everybody out of this. Extraordinarily unlikely to succeed, but this is the most politically expedient course and appears to be the strategy that most government types are going with. B) Kick the worst offenders out of the currency union, and let them devalue their replacement currency to deal with their debts. Logistically difficult, and may have the same effects as #2 above. Even if trends continue as present, it would take decades for Brazil (about $1.6T in annual GDP) to be on the same economic playing field as the US (over $14T in annual GDP).

Hey, if you can get past the Black Mountain mines without dying of boredom you deserve a medal. Hope you play as a mage, though. Nope, gunfighter. And I have the sense I'm boned. Yeah, if you haven't played the game before and are without the benefit of replay meta-knowledge, chances are extraordinarily good that you're boned. For all its charms as a setting, Arcanum had such a ****ty RPG rules system that I can't recommend it to anyone. It's almost as if they went out of their way to try to make roughly 70% of the adequate-sounding character builds into "gotchas" that produced seriously underpowered characters. Anyhow, I'm actually playing Baldur's Gate II, for the first time in many years. I'm pretty far along-- at the "everything in SOA is done but Suldanesselar" stage, and I'm currently putting some time into Watcher's Keep. I've hit the "Lum the Mad" level, which is generally where Watcher's Keep gets tedious to me. It becomes less "organic progression through interesting challenges" and more "find a tough encounter, reload and rest up, then use the cheese tactics most appropriate to that enemy." I'm presently debating whether I should keep going through the Keep, or play out the SOA endgame and come back to Watcher's from TOB. Any thoughts on advantages/disadvantages of each approach? I'm actually kinda looking forward to TOB in spite of the epic cheese, as I've only played through that once, back when it was first released.

I know 19th century houses in the US isnt' necessarily common, but I thought homes built from wooden materials was? Just curious, being Scandinavian I couldn't imagine living in something that wasn't made out of stone. Most suburban American residences are built on a wooden frame. The framing is usually wooden joists, laid over with plywood sheeting (older homes, pre-1950ish, will have diagonal plank subflooring instead of plywood), and topped with whatever flooring material the owner wants (wooden planks, tile, wall-to-wall carpet, etc.). Actual hardwood plank flooring is prevalent in older homes, but is relatively expensive now. "Vintage" wood floors are often a selling point for older properties. We have a house that was built in 1936. Brick exterior, with wooden interior framing, some steel girders in the basement, diagonal plank sub-flooring, hardwood floors, lath and plaster walls, and a slate roof (which is nearing the end of its useful life).