Enoch

Yes. (For the un-initiated, it is in a form similar to salami or bologna, but with different flavoring and generally cut to about 1/4-inch thickness and pan-fried. Best served with an over-easy egg or two and some cheese on a kaiser roll.)

<3 is a sideways heart. Generally used in online/sms communications as an expression of love. Clearly Wals is not facebook friends with any 14-year-old girls. (And before you go all pedobear on me, I'm talking about my cousin, who ends nearly every post with either a "<3" or by mysteriouslyyyy repeatinggg the lastttt letterrr of everyyyy wordddd. And occasionally by combining the two in an extra-confusing "<333")

This is something I need to hear more about. My current line of thinking has been that games tend to inflate stats too much, causing problems such as encounters becoming too trivial, and maybe responsible for the problems with leveled encounters, such that if you tone down stat advancement you may not need the leveled encounters at all. I want to know where I'm going wrong in that line of thinking. I think you're confusing the granularity of RPG character progression with its scope. Josh is talking (I think) about how big each step is in the progression of stat/skill/ability increases. I think you're talking about how large the difference is between beginning characters and advanced characters. They're related concepts, but not exactly the same. You can get from "basic bumpkin-with-a-sword" to "awe-inspiring colossus of power" in few large steps, or in lots of barely-perceivable steps. (Alternately, you can progress from "competent hero" to "somewhat more competent hero" over the course of a game in a similar manner.)

Ive always wondered this about RV's, isnt whatever you save in lodging costs surpassed by your fuel and campground costs? That's is a good question. I get 10 mpg or so, which can be pricey. Alternatively I get 20 in my family SUV, so I fill up twice as often in the rv. So a weekend trip isn't a great deal of savings. But if I go somewhere for a week, I save much more. An average hotel is $100 while a campsite with hookups is $40. So a hotel for 5 nights will run $500 while a campsite is $200. Where I really save, though, is the food. I might eat out twice on a weeklong rv trip, but in a hotel you have no alternative. Same with lunch and breakfast. Add in the fact that my rv is my bed and all my comforts of home, and it is a great choice for travel. If you really want to make that a fair costs comparison, you've got to include the amortized cost of purchasing/renting the RV in the calculation.

Today I saw Sid Meier's face on the side of a bus. The Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development's "Maryland of Opportunity" ad campaign is using him as an example-- with the not-at-all grandiose tagline "Civilization Began Here."

The US credit raters are important because a lot of mutual funds and other investment vehicles have built-in rules incorporating their ratings. For example, many low-risk bond funds will automatically divest themselves of any asset rated less than AAA by 2 of the 3 major ratings agencies (S&P, Moody's, Fitch). My English skills are failing me, not understanding 'moritoriums' in that context Would suspending capital gains taxes really be such a hot idea? It was reckless speculation that to some degree brought about the mess in the first place. I seem to remember once upon a time in the old country, they had different tax rules depending on how long you held onto your shares/stocks/whatever to encourage investment (long term commitment) and discourage speculation/manipulation of short term buying and selling. I seem to remember the discretionary spending being a not unsubstantial sum of money (yeah, followed the debate a bit on the news during that weekend before the deadline), but what exactly does it mean? Money that isn't "ear marked" for a specific purpose? "Discretionary spending" in the U.S. federal budget context refers to spending that is controlled by annual appropriations acts. This generally means everything that isn't automatically paid in accordance with past statutory promises (i.e., entitlements like social security and medicare, and interest on the existing debt). In common practice, it is often divided into Defense and Non-Defense categories. Fun fact: for 2011, expected federal revenues are not projected to even be enough to pay for the non-discretionary part of the budget. This is largely due to a temporary payroll tax cut in effect for this year only. In terms of lost revenue versus stimulative effect on the economy, a capital gains cut is among the worst policy options. First off, with the declines in the real estate and equities markets, very few people actually have gains to cash in. (And even if they do, many are still benefitting by losses carried forward from previous tax years, which in some situations can wipe out the tax on current gains.) And the stimulative effect would be minimal-- the people benefitting most would be the bankers and hedge fund managers who got us into this mess, and the gain they would get from the tax break would be more likely to end up invested outside the United States than spent or invested domestically in a way that would stimulate the U.S. economy. Great for Brazil and Malaysia; not so great for America.

I got it in the Steam sale a few weeks ago for $7.50. A friend with pretty similar gaming tastes (he's actually the DM of the bi-weekly PnP session I attend) had recommended it to me, so I pounced when I saw it at that price point. The exploration, puzzles, and lurking in the shadows to take out opponents one by one (and watching them freak out as more and more of their friends disappear) are all quite satisfying. The brawling and the boss fights have been what gives me trouble. But the game gives you plenty of tips as you go so that you never feel frustrated. Some would probably say that the constant tips popping up to tell the player what they should be doing ("Press Q for a Quick Batarang throw to stun Bane as he charges") are annoying and demeaning, but as someone who doesn't get much satisfaction out of developing and using muscle-memory reflexes for games that I play, I appreciate it.

On the desktop: Arkham Asylum. I'm pretty terrible at the combat, but thus far I've been just good enough to keep the plot and the exploration going, which pretty consistently entertaining. (I finish pretty much every fight at about 10% health-- even the ones with crowds of unarmed mooks.) On the near-netbook: Crayon Physics Deluxe. I love this game, but I'm trying to save most of it for a flight I have to take to the west coast and back next week.

I wouldn't quite call that "confirmed," but it's a credible rumor/leak. Operative excerpt:

I feel compelled to note here that GOG has all Might & Magic and Heroes of Might & Magic titles discounted this weekend.

S&P's actions are a political statement. The ratings agencies essentially represent the interests of the elites of the financial industry. And what is the point of the ratings agencies opining on Treasuries, anyway? The role that ratings agencies fill is as shorthand information providers-- you go to them when you need a quick supposedly-objective check on the creditworthiness of a company or asset that you don't have the time to investigate yourself. But no asset on the planet is as visible as Treasuries are. Everybody who has any business making serious investment decisions has seen the data on them, has an opinion on their reliability, and has already built this opinion into the projections upon which they base their investment decisions. Why would anybody care what the ratings agencies say? Plus, even if you take their recommendations seriously, their concern is more with those cavalier folks on the right (including a number of presidential candidates) who were against raising the debt ceiling at all and who were willing to induce a federal default for no better reason than to embarrass the current administration. In a sense, this downgrade is less about any particular policy than it is about the statement that the Republicans in the House have made that playing politics with the Full Faith and Credit of the United States is no longer off the table. Which is something that any sane investor would be at least a little concerned about. Lastly, it's still a game of relative, rather than absolute, risk. If the risk on Treasuries is less than AAA, what investment could be AAA? Certainly not any dollar-denominated investment, when the primary effect of any U.S. Gov't default would primarily hit the currency overall, rather than Treasuries in particular. And how can the risk on Euro-denominated investments be better, given that there's a meaningful chance that the Euro currency union could still break apart at the seams? (By the way, any new rounds of Quantitative Easing (which would be QE3, at this point) are in the hands of the Federal Reserve, rather than the Administration.)

I know it can get somewhat trite, but sometimes Springsteen's would-be-epic blue collar americana stuff just gets to me. Maybe it's because I'm from New Jersey (in fact, born to parents who went to the same High School as Bruce did, a couple years behind him). Anyhow, this , with an extended narrative intro, is a representative example.

That was what Jimmy Carter used to say before his ass made a great big thwack being kicked out of office. All we need is some strong leadership. If US made it through the Great Depression and WW2 it can get through this as well. The deficit reduction commission came up with a really good bipartisan plan which would actually help economic growth greatly, there just has to be some political courage to pass it. Well, in the Carter example, the answer the next admin brought was to ignore the federal debt. Combined with Volcker's actions at the Fed, the result was a pretty harsh recession, but with a pretty quick recovery. But that was a different kind of downturn than the one we face now-- most evidence indicates that financial-induced recessions are more stubborn and troubling than the more commonplace inventory-overhang, exogenous-shock based recessions. And letting the debt grow at the pace that the Reagan folks did probably isn't an option anymore. On the example of the Depression, recall that it took a decade's worth of stagnation and false starts before we really got anywhere. Also: The deficit reduction commission was exactly that-- designed to reduce the deficit. That's a quite different goal than helping economic growth. That said, I agree that some kind of bipartisan grand bargain in that area, with re-write of the tax code and a hard look at both defense and entitlement spending, would be a useful step. But with the House of Representatives holding an effective veto on anything that smells at all like an increase in federal revenues, I don't see it going very far. (Senator Baucus has been hinting at independently introducing tax reform legislation, though, so something might come of that.)

Raising taxes means less revenue for business and consumers. If I have less money I will buy less stuff. If I buy less stuff the companies and retailers I buy from earn less, and on top of that their if operating costs went up because of a tax increase it's doubly bad for them. If a business has it's operating costs increase it will raise the price of it's product if possible, or retrench (meaning fire employees) if they can't. Those employees were tax payers while they were employed, now they are not. Raising taxes does increase revenue in the short term up to a point. But it becomes self defeating real quick. It's called the Laffer Curve and it's been around for a long time. There is a great quote attributed to Winston Churchill "For a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket trying to lift himself up by the handle.". Eh. It's a feedback loop in the system. The effects that you describe certainly happen, but there isn't much evidence that they actually will overwhelm the original "gov't draws in more revenue" signal in most circumstances. And the exact same thing can be said for decreasing government spending. It's simply a question of where the feedback loop is weakest and whom you'd like to bear the burden of a government lowering its annual deficits.

I'd content that they don't have the ability. The same broad-scope sequence of events would have played out nearly identically had McCain won the '08 election with large GOP majorities in both houses. Probably earlier and with somewhat less federal debt (I'm thinking of the Recovery Act, here), but otherwise not all that different. As to Gold, it's value is just as ephemeral and confidence-based as paper currencies are. It's only the tradition of it as an inflation hedge that has it riding so high. That might last, but it might not. Well, you can go nuts trying to figure out the "why" of equities markets. But most informed parties are calling the confluence of yesterday's drop and the debt ceiling deal as mostly coincidence. The recent reports on U.S. GDP (and the antipated report on U.S. employment tomorrow) coupled with a new round of nervousness about Eurozone debt issues are more at the heart of this particular downturn than the puppet show in Congress. From a longer-term point of view, the game that the Fed (and, to a lesser extent, the Administration) has been playing has been staked largely on keeping stock markets relatively high and hoping that this spills over into consumer confidence (which is what actually drives the real economy). But without any real change in the ability of consumers to spend (i.e., employment, wages, consumer credit, and residential housing appreciation), pinning hopes on keeping the Dow high was probably never going to work. It was the approach that best served the interests of the big Wall Street banks, though, and that has been what drives the policy for the last 20 years. Today's drop was simply a sign that trying to fix things by re-blowing an already-burst bubble isn't going to work.

You're confusing your terms there somewhat. U.S. aggregate debt is around 100% of GDP. "Borrowing" usually refers to the annual fiscal shortfall-- the difference between what the government takes in and what it spends. It's something of a "no duh" point that total debt is higher than it was during the Bush years-- every year the government doesn't run a surplus, it goes up. And there haven't been any surplusses since right around the first round of Bush tax cuts. As for how the Obama folks are handling fiscal and economic matters, generally, I can't say I'm pleased. But the chief problem is that, when push comes to shove, they're basically acting as a 3rd term of GWB would. (Which, in hindsight, should've been obvious when they named their Treasury Secretary.) Instead of making a serious attempt at fixing the Wall Street issues that brought things down in '08, they've stuck with the bankers and tried to re-inflate the debt bubble that popped (debt, in this context, referring to corporate and consumer debt). For all the complaining, the Dodd-Frank Act was a half-hearted wave in the direction of "reform"-- there was a moment where it was possible to do something useful, and they let it pass. That said, the government is in a bind right now, as there really aren't any good options (and haven't been since the '08 crash became inevitable around '05 or '06). Increasing federal debt will hurt the economy. Raising taxes will hurt the economy. Cutting spending will hurt the economy. Letting the Fed quietly inflate the dollar to reduce the real value of the nation's debts will hurt the economy. It's a question more of relative efficacy of these options and of whose ox gets gored. As I've said before, America is looking somewhat screwed over the course of the next decade-- we'll end this with a lower standard of living than we started with. But the rest of the developed world is looking more screwed. The dollar may end up being worth $0.30, but everything else will be worth $0.10.

Care to elaborate? As everyone is aware, the US is almost entirely comprised of immigrants. Im not aware of any group specifically singled out as not being alowed entry. Certainly, Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_of_1965 which abolished the previous, National_Origins_Formula There were also 19th-century policies aimed to actively exclude immigrants from China and Japan. There's a long history of nativist politics in America, in spite of its immigrant roots. Early on, nativist groups were primarily anti-Catholic. By the late 19th century, they took on more racial tones (recall that thinkers like Herbert Spencer were still quite well thought of at that time), particularly with regard to Asians and folks from central America and the further Southern and Eastern portions of Europe. However, prior to the 1920s, business interests (who wanted a continued source of cheap immigrant labor) were successful in keeping the nativists from implementing any seriously restrictive policies.

Yeah, I'm not sure what is going on with the USPS. I was just reading the Statement of Net Costs information in the report I linked, and they showed a profit. That didn't really jive with the vague impression I had of their overall performance, either. As to "within budget," that gets policed reasonably well. Agencies are legally required to monitor their spending and report any expenditures (or obligations to expend) in excess of the amount approved by law. This is called the Antideficiency Act, and any violations have to be reported to Congress, which has the Government Accountability Office post them online. And Congress takes agencies exceeding their appopriations pretty seriously. Agencies are also required to produce financial statements and have them audited by independent auditors, who, among other things, test controls over Antideficiency Act compliance. The big caveat here is the Department of Defense. The requirement for them to produce an audited financial statement has been in effect since 1991, but they still cannot produce statements with sufficient supporting data for auditors to state an opinion on their reliability. They currently have a big plan under way to be auditable by 2017.

Yeah, as Tale points out, it's not a particularly apt analogy. For the most part, the benefits of government programs are non-monetary. And the parts that do generate monetary revenues are generally the parts that do so by exercising some inherently governmental activity wherein the main costs are non-monetary. (The IRS brings in a hell of a lot more money than it spends.) Anyhow, pulling out my handy Financial Report of the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2010, the Treasury Department reported a few government entities whose earned revenue exceeded their gross cost of operations. Those included the Postal Service, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Import-Export Bank of the United States, and the Farm Credit System Insurance Corporation. If you drill down to sub-components of agencies (the consolidated Financial Report only lists the big Departments and those smaller entities that are independent of them), you'll find some other programs and entities. For example, although the overall Department of Commerce spends more money than it brings in, Patent and Trademark Office, which is part of Commerce, makes a profit every year.

Well, on point one, the problem is that the current U.S. healthcare system (and even the pre-PPACA one) was muddied enough for both sides to blame the other. By which I mean that, while most of it is privately run, significant portions are paid for publicly (Medicare for the 65+ crowd, Medicaid for the poor, Tricare & VA for military and veterans, etc.), and all the privately run stuff has some level of both state and federal regulation. So, everyone knows the system sucks, but the people on the Right blame the government interference for all the problems, while the people on the Left blame the healthcare providers and drug companies. Which means that it gets argued about in the same "shouting talking points past each other and never bother to get into serious objective analysis of data" manner as most political arguments in the States, and any attempt to fix things gets heavily watered down by the other side. Plus, the truly politically powerful people weighing in on the issue are the ones who don't have any incentive at all to keep costs down (Medicare beneficiaries, healthcare providers, insurance companies, and drug companies)-- the people who tend to get hit hard by those costs are either relatively low-influence (lower-middle-class types) or don't make it a major part of their efforts to influence policy (big employers who offer employee health plans, but who generally exercise their political influence in areas more central to their business operations).

There's a conversation to be had under those terms, but it's pretty clear (particularly in this post) that WoD is speaking more broadly than that.

Well, if you're adamant in labeling everything governmental as "evil," in insisting that, to pick two arbitrary examples, an engineer at NASA and the Secretary of State don't "earn" their paychecks, and in denying that prudent governmental actions can ever enhance the wealth of a society, then there really isn't much point in talking to you about this. That kind of thinking makes for nice bumper stickers, but doesn't stand up to any kind of evidence-based analysis. As with any human endeavor, there are things that government does well, things that it does poorly. Leave the "good" and "evil" out of the conversation and do the work to figure out which is which. Edit: In case Wals' sneaking in ahead of me confused things, I should make it clear that this was addressed at WoD.

Define "earn." Is all income or wealth in the absence of "earning" morally suspect? Is all income or wealth generated in the private sector automatically considered "earned"? What's more "productive"-- a company selling fire insurance policies, or the NYC Fire Department? Try telling a road construction crew that the government spending that makes up their paychecks "produces nothing." Or a public school teacher. Or a NIH researcher. Or a doctor in a VA hospital. Or a food safety inspector. Or a Marine. (Might want to duck after that last one.)

I really don't know how one would go about cheering the f*** up. I'm always quite cheery when I'm f***ing, so I've never thought to ask. Maybe you're f***ing the wrong people?

You're talking as if that spending isn't taken away from someone else who would've produced more income, jobs, and GDP than a corrupt government program could ever do. Well, yeah. Isn't the whole premise to the thread the idea that the government spends way more than it takes in? What an introductory macroeconomics class would call the "G Function"-- the portion of GDP that reflect spending by the various levels of government net of the taxes and other revenue collected-- is a very large positive number. It is borrowed from future output, of course, but reams of objective data shows that people don't do much of anything to adjust their present habits based on anticipated higher future taxes due to budget deficits. As to relative wastefulness, generally, I won't argue that governmental organizations carry a fair amount of waste. But so do most private entities. The reality in the business world is that tendencies to collusion, oligopoly, and monopoly are everywhere, and that this produces some shocking examples of waste. Having the corporate board meeting in Bora Bora? Waste. Hiring the VP's nephew into a sinecure position? Waste. Executive compensation well beyond any reasonable estimate of the value that the execs return to the firm and voted on by members of the Board of Directors who are themselves executives at other firms and whose pay gets benchmarked based in part on the compensation they vote for? Waste. The vast majority of advertising expenses devoted towards "brand identity" and squabbling over market share between competitors offering near-identical products or services? Waste. Corporate charitable contributions? Waste. Sure, there are market forces to police this kind of stuff. Just like official oversight bodies and scrutiny in the public and in the press police government waste. Neither are nearly sufficient to eliminate it, of course. Which doesn't mean we should stop trying-- just that glib citations to wasteful governments don't have much persuasive value. If you have data relative to a useful benchmark, I'd be interested to see it, but until that point, I'll assume its anecdotal and ideological.