Enoch

Because I am at exactly the stage of inebriation to find Beefheart entertaining and not at all annoying: Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band-- The Blimp (mousetrapreplica)

Also, I just took a look at the legislation that will actually address the debt limit issue, and now I need another drink. It's going to be causing a lot of work-related headaches for me over the next few months. I mean, the core provisions were passed as amendments to the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985! (Which, ironically, is what Congress produced the last time that there was a self-inflicted "crisis" because the opposition tied the nation to the railroad tracks and demanded a ransom before voting to raise the debt limit.) So, now, every time I need to understand part of the new law, I'm going to have to find the text of a 25-year-old law, along with all the amendments and legal interpretations (at least part of the original has been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court) it has gathered over the years to find definitions sections and other important context.

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Hey, it could be worse. The U.S. could be in as bad a situation as the Eurozone is. Anyhow, it looks as if the immediate debt-limit faux-crisis has been averted (pending the Senate vote tomorrow). The austerity measures will hurt, certainly-- even if certain spending is wasteful from a particular point of view, it's a profit for somebody, and taking it away means taking away income, jobs, and GDP. (Sure, there are areas where the government is doing a lot more than it should, but that doesn't mean that the transition to them doing less won't be painful.) And, the political process being what it is, when the details are hammered out, they probably won't do much to get at the real reason why America's long-term fiscal situation is a problem-- that would involve tackling health care costs in a meaningful way, which would anger too many people both on the left (medicare/medicaid beneficiaries) and on the right (healthcare providers and the pharmaceutical industry).

Yeah, I think we're going to need some excerpts from that "compendium of examples" to understand what the bleeding hell you're talking about.

Here's the core of the current U.S. debt crisis: a number in section 3101(b) of Title 31 of the United States Code is too low. It takes a simple act of Congress to amend the U.S. Code. That's it. The only question is how large a pound of flesh the various factions in Congress are able to extract in exchange for their "yes" vote. (And how soon we'll be back in the same situation again, as they don't have the sense to just abolish the limit and be done with it.) Yes, the aggregate level of federal debt is higher than I'd like it to be, but, based on the judgment of the marketplace, which is still willing to buy Treasuries at quite a low risk premium, it's certainly not high enough to constitute a "crisis" absent the artificial statutory limit. About Australia, I get it. It's a stable developed economy, with generally sensible governance and reasonable debt levels, that isn't going through the current political troubles that America is or the intra-eurozone problems that burden the big economies on the Continent. And it has been a major beneficiary of the huge Chinese fiscal stimulus, given how much of its economy is resource-extraction-based and how much of those resources are sold to the PRC, helping it get through the current global downturn better than most. (In some circles, investment in Australia is actually used as a proxy for investment in China. Because, as I mentioned, relative to other stable, developed nations, Australia's economy is pretty heavily focused on raw materials extraction and export, and because the chief buyers for those exported materials are in China, the variation between the Aussie economy and that of the rest of the developed world tends to be driven heavily by the level of Chinese demand for raw materials. So, if one projects further growth in China, investing in Australia is a way to profit from it without exposing one's self to the political and corporate-governance risks that direct Chinese investment often brings.)

It solves the initial allocation question-- i.e., how do you decide to whom to issue that money? The role of a financial or banking sector in an economy is pretty simple: It is the job of the financial sector to decide where a society's aggregated assets should be invested. In order to maximize the long-term competitiveness of a society, the banking sector should be making those decisions based on what endeavors offer the highest likely real rate of return. And if you allow the mechanisms of the money supply to flow through private businesses competing for market share and returns to capital, you tend to get decision-makers who have the correct incentives governing that decision. One of the key lessons of the 20th Century is that, when prudently regulated, a capitalist banking sector tends to make more efficient decisions than does a system run with more political control (which, from a technical political-theory point of view, would probably be called fascist, but is more closely associated in the modern mindset with the communist regimes that previously lurked on the unfashionable side of the Iron Curtain). That said, the "prudently regulated" bit is quite important. Because a banking sector has an enormous power over the overall functioning of an economy, there have to be some checks to ensure that it is in fact worthy of the trust that the rest of the society gives it. The incentives that private parties have in free market democracies all create tendencies towards monopoly, oligopoly, and the exercise of political influence for private gain, so the state must police its industries (particularly finance) to minimize the efficiency-sapping impact of those kinds of exercise of market power. And that's largely at the root of what has happened. Under this view, the portion of GDP generated by the financial sector can be seen as something of a tax-- the part of our overall productivity that is rendered to the people who are making our investment allocation decisions for us. For most of the post-WW2 period in the U.S., this portion held pretty steady around 4%. It started rising above that level in the 1980s, as the de-regulation cogs started to turn and as the workplace culture changed inside the big Wall Street investment banks. (Most importantly, they started transitioning from small private partnerships to publicly traded corporations, and there's a big difference between what kind of risks a person is willing to take with their bosses' money and what kind of risks they are willing to take with money provided by millions of anonymous shareholders.) In short, when deciding which endeavors to fund with the assets of the society, the answer "Other Bankers like Me" started turning up more and more often. (Sidenote: also a factor was the frequency with which the question was answered with "Southeast Asia" or some other foreign nation instead of somewhere closer to home.) By the time the wave crested, the financial sector in the U.S. was around 8% of GDP. Essentially, with the "hands off" regulatory attitude, there just got to be too much lending. Which means too much debt and too much risk. Leverage is a magical thing. Say that you find an investment opportunity that you're pretty sure will return 10% in a year. If you fund the whole thing out of pocket, you make a 10% return. But if you get get 10-1 leverage, borrowing $9 for every $1 you put up, your return on the initial investment is 100% (minus your borrowing costs). The problem, of course, is that if you're wrong, it only takes a 10% decline in the investment to wipe out 100% of your investment. By late 2008, some of the huge investment banks were at 30-1 overall leverage, and their regulators were fine with this because it was assumed that these companies were being run by the most sophisticated managers that money could buy and that no regulator could protect their investors better than those managers could. In that environment, any kind of shock could be enough to precipitate a catastrophe. It turned out to be the overvaluing of sub-prime real estate that provided the match, but had that not happened, it would've been something else instead. Too many piles of oil-soaked rags lying around for it not to catch fire sooner or later. And Wals is incorrect in saying that only rich people suffered. The global recession is mostly a de-leveraging event. Companies, governments, and individuals have responded to this crisis largely by attempting to reduce their debt levels. Lots of big businesses are still getting over the shell-shock that happened when the commercial paper market essentially shut down in late 2008, so they're keeping oodles of cash on hand instead of investing it in hiring, expansion, or other things that keep the economy moving. In the aggregate, we've basically got lots of people either defaulting on debt or putting more of today's earnings into paying for yesterday's expenditures. That means less present consumption and fewer present jobs.

Bonus info: the new Trait that sets your level cap at 30 (and also provides some Chem-related bonuses) is called "Logan's Loophole." So, like much of OWB, probably not a favorite of those who object to the out-of-timeline referential humor.

Actually, on OWB, does the "store" in the Sink ever refresh its inventory? I came into the expansion a bit too dependent on .308 ammo (This Machine and the Sniper Rifle), and it's running pretty low on me. I'm finding .357 and .44 everywhere I go, which I can break down for components, but the problem is the Primer-- the only shell other than .308 that uses "large rifle" primer is 45/70 Gov't, which is even rarer in the wild. Now even my Shotshell Primer (to make 12 Ga. for the Riot Shotgun) is running short. I could really use a refresh of those Powder/Primer packs that the store had when I first showed up. Advice to anyone going into OWB or HH on hardcore mode with a Guns-centered build: Break down all the ammo you have in your storage base before leaving, and leave most of the Lead behind. You can find lots of scrap metal to use for the Lead component when you get to the expansion, but the cases and (especially) primers can get quite precious, and breaking them down before leaving the Mojave makes them weightless.

On the FemSheps: I just can't get past the idea of somebody whose job involves frequent life-or-death firefights with enemies bent on her destruction not having their hair either too short to be a nuisance or securely tied back. I made up my Femshep's face based on the idea of what a chick who decides to enlist in the military tends to look like. Which means none of this "makeup and tweezed eyebrows" nonsense. (Well, to the degree that they let you get away with it-- the ME1-2 character creator doesn't seem to have an "eyes" option lacking in mascara.) When I designed the face I used, I was thinking of a radio interview I had heard once, wherein a female soldier reflected on the culture of military forces stationed in combat zones. She said that, no matter what you do, as a woman, people are going to view you in one of two ways-- as a slut or as a bitch. The first option only leads to trouble, so any woman with any sense decides to be a bitch. As such, either #1 or #3 would be the best option. And the whole second row is just silly.

Yeah, the beginning is rough, particularly in hardcore mode when the cloud does slow consistent damage. I'd advise to go to the medical clinic as early as you can (maybe recruiting Dog/God first for survivability), because that's where . Once you can do that, the impetus to rush that the slow Cloud damage creates is much-reduced, which decreased my stress level considerably. I'm only partway thought Old World Blues, but Dead Money is still my favorite of the DLCs. If you stick with it through the frustrating "we wanted to make a horror game" section, the narrative payoff is fantastic. The gradually-revealed backstory and the plotline of current events dovetail nicely together into what is one of the better short stories in the Fallout universe. (I'd put it behind the main storyline to FO1 and FNV's Vault 11, but not by much.)

I find that the pineapple 'topknot' gets in the way. Cut it off, along with the very top of the fruit, and the very bottom (to make it sit flat on your cutting board). Then take off the skin with downward slices, all the way around the fruit. At that point, you just have to deal with the fibrous inner core, and there are a lot of ways to go about that. I usually just quarter the whole thing, and then remove the fibrous part from the inside of each quarter.

I'll be the first to admit that the joke density in FO2 wasn't to my taste, and that this is part of the reason why I think FO1 was a better game. But, to me, this isn't because it was jokey, per se, but because a significant percentage of the jokes were simply not funny. It's not my call to say what is or isn't "Fallouty," but I like games better when they avoid attepts at humor that fall completely flat. I haven't gotten far enough into OWB to have a cogent opinion on the overall quality of its humor, but I haven't seen anything yet that approaches the memorable un-funniness of, say, the Hubologists or the Vice President. So far, I'm willing to except the premise of the expansion-- it is being done in the spirit of what you might see in a Fallout-universe midnight B-movie screening at the drive-in. And if they can pull that off, I'm all for it.

I'm not a Cali attorney, but I'll state for the record that Gromnir has shown enough expertise in the past (particularly in the First Amendment area where he claims specialization) for me to trust his legal bona fides. And if he's being honest about his experience with a U.S. Attorney's Office, that's a pretty big deal. The USAOs do most of the in-court grunt work on behalf of the federal government-- prosecuting federal crimes and representing the United States when it is a party to civil litigation. Lastly, although I've done exactly zero criminal work (actually, exactly zero trial work at all), his arguments conform with my "just enough criminal law training to pass the Virginia Bar Exam" understanding. Undoubtedly, some criminal lawyers are better than others, and all else being equal, wealth tends to lead to being more likely to have an above-average criminal lawyer defending you. But being a high-profile defendant also means that prosecutors are more likely to focus closely on the case. It could be argued that fame cut the other way for folks like Martha Stewart or Plaxico Burress. Also, seriously? They're having their conference in Long Beach?

Fallout was funny right from .

OK, I've played it long enough to get through the big lengthy conversation at the beginning. It's entertaining (in a wacky mad-scientist who makes a lot of **** jokes way), but it really displays the weakness of the FO3/NV dialogue setup. It's disconcerting to talk to 5 different cyborgs while the camera is focused only on the one in front of you. I get that Obsidz did the best they could with the differences in the voice-acting (although a couple of the voices aren't quite different enough from each other) and with what caps/font/etc. notations they could make in the subtitles. But it's still jarring. Also, the new radio station is neat. I like that recording of 'Round Midnight. I hope it sticks around for use after the DLC is completed.

That's been happening to me for just about a week now. I thought possibly because I keep signing in on my mobile. I golfed today. It was windy. when the sun went down it became extremely enlarged. i wasn't certain if it was going to explode or not. do suns normally get so large when setting? i have never seen this happen before. the sun was huge. Apply ice twice on 10-mins-on, 5-mins-off cycles for 1 hour per day. If not remedied within 3 days, consult your physician.

Well, the booze on the other end of the drive will be free. More like "be absolutely freakin' sure that you want to go to law school." From a financial and quality-of-life point of view, it can be a truly terrible decision for a lot of people. Scads of folks are ending up either with loans they can't pay off, or stuck in jobs that they hate but can't leave because it's the only way they can pay off their loans.

Tonight I drive to New Jersey!

Meh. Is the amount of time and effort required to do what funcroc does (set up google alerts on all confirmed Obsidz staff and follow the right people on twitter) really all that much greater than, say, the people who volunteer to be moderators on this forum? The world is full of people who put unusual effort into things that most of the world outside of them would consider strange.

OK, I bought it. Thanks for the input. At that price, I'll take the chance that I disagree with Nep. Plus, an IRL friend of mine has recommended it to me in the past. If I hate hit, I'll yell at him and make him buy me a beer or something.

So, Arkham Asylum for $7.50 today. I've heard some praise for its "sneak about and come up with clever ways to surmount obstacles" elements. What's the ratio of that to twitch-based gameplay? Other worthwhile features that bear mentioning? Or should I just buy it already?

Here's a handy reference.

Copious Google Alerts + first-rate Twitter and Linkedin stalking. Edit: Although, in the interest of perpetuating an entertaining board mythology, any other Obsidz folks who may be lurking around these parts should really PM the correct answers to funcroc.

Well, a competent and objective educational professional can, I think, point at a teacher and say 'you suck' with a pretty high degree of accuracy. But only after observing that teacher first hand for a period of time and taking many of the factors that you list into account. Better local-level management of school systems would be greatly helpful, as those are the people who would have the information to make a judgment about teacher quality. But if you give local management real authority over teacher pay and/or termination, you need to have lots of controls to ensure that those people are in fact competent and objective (hint: they often aren't). At some point in here, the costs, risks of lawsuits, perverse incentives borne of poor assessment methods, and such become daunting enough that the best option is to stop pouring resources into a pursuit of teacher accountability and instead focus efforts on other avenues of improving educational quality.