Enoch

Petraeus should run for president, that's the second time he saved our bacon. Eh. It's too focused on the canard of sunk costs and on the bravado of insisting that any outcome other than "success" is wholly unacceptable. By that logic, the U.S. would still be occupying Vietnam. You're not going to get a good answer to the "What should we do in Afghanistan in 2011?" question if you base your analysis solely on what we did in 2001. You have to look at the situation on the ground today, ask what improvements are possible, at what cost and with what risks, and decide whether those costs/risks are worthwhile to achieve those improvements.

On a whim, Icewind Dale. I'm sure I won't make it very far into the "here's yet another map full of near-identical encounters for you to slog through" stage, but party creation and bouncing around Easthaven is still entertaining. The town has some more clever writing than I remembered. Went with a 5-person group: Fighter, Fighter/Cleric, Fighter/Thief, Druid, and a Fighter that I'll dual to Mage at level 3. I considered starting the Druid as a Fighter, too, but my die-roll patience is not unlimited-- getting a character who can make that switch (min 15 STR, 15 CHA, 17 WIS) with enough DEX and CON to get AC and HP boosts takes a lot more re-roll clicking than I'm willing to attempt. I also considered filling the 6th spot with a Bard, but, although they are generally good additions in IWD games, I didn't feel like dragging some poncy minstrel around the frozen north. Instead, I lucked into an extra-good roll when making my pure Fighter, so I gave him a high CHA to handle the shopping and chatting. (He's also a gnome, and because of this every commoner in Easthaven assumes that he's Fiddlebender, the only gnome they've heard of.) Biggest annoyance so far: The soundtrack doesn't loop while in party creation.

I'd be hard-pressed to call Tyrion the "best character." He's certainly entertaining, but that's largely because he's a pretty clear author-surrogate. He's the one whose values system is most similar to that of the audience, he is wrapped in an ugly package so that the less-likeable characters can exhibit their shallowness in his direction, and he is given the author's privilege of having witty retorts that took hours to think up ready at a moment's notice. A fun character to have around, but hardly the most interesting or original creation in the story. (That said, I haven't been watching the series, and Dinklage's performance has been widely praised, so perhaps he's elevating the source material a bit.)

Scheduling re-paving work on roads at night time is a lovely thing for the convenience of drivers. It is less lovely for those who happen to live around the block from the road being re-paved. 3AM grinding and removing of old asphalt...

Springsteen -- Jungleland R.I.P., Big Man.

Yeah, there's a bit of a perverse incentive in play for divorce lawyers. Lawyers in private practice are sometimes criticized for prolonging disputes in order to rack up more billable hours. Generally, the lawyers who do this are dumb, because their long-term best interests are served mostly by having happy clients, and clients generally don't like it when negotiations take longer than they should. But this feedback loop is pretty weak for divorce lawyers, simply because repeat customers aren't a big part of their business plan. That, and the people who excel areas like that tend to be people whose strongest skills lie in manipulating people's emotions. (I don't particularly like dealing with angry or sad people, so I avoided just about every non-mandatory topic in law school that would involve dealing with emotionally fraught clients. Never took Family Law, Wills & Trusts, or any criminal law classes beyond the one required one.)

Ever look at the "Misc" tab in your inventory? The place is lousy with un-discarded quest items. You only notice the helmet because it shows up as Apparel. (Also, the Codac 9000 as a weapon.)

By the way, in case any of you didn't know, the global capital of Spam-based cuisine is Hawai'i. It's never really been economical to do and large-scale ranching there (more lucrative export crops like cane sugar and pineapple take up much of the farmland), so until long-haul refridgerated sea transport became commonplace, normal beef and pork were really expensive. But Spam really caught on there as, essentially, the everyday protein to eat that didn't come out of the sea. It was used with and adapted into a whole lot of culinary traditions on the Islands, and people who grew up there often have a strong affection for the stuff. Plus, it goes well with pineapple.

That's the sheer craziness of spam at work. Also, the sheer craziness of Japan.

Particularly true of the people with the business administration degrees who specialize in marketing. There are some noble reasons to want to become a lawyer, and a great many attorneys do conduct their affairs with a high degree of integrity. And some business administration specialization is always going to be necessary to keep large institutions running smoothly. But I can't really see anything even resembling integrity in marketing-related fields. The attitude of those entereing those particular businesses seems to be "You know what's awesome? Selling out. Also, influencing other people to sell out along with you!"

To be fair, nearly anything thinly sliced and fried with garlic and chili is going to be pretty damn tasty. IMO, Spam is most effectively used as a bargain replacement for pricier fatty cured meats (bacon, pancetta, etc.) when building a flavor base for soups, saucy baked dishes, and the like.

Hey, man, we have souls. The title to them may or may not be clouded by remainder interests subject to contractual conditions subsequent, but nearly every lawyer I know still retains present possessory rights of enjoyment of that particular asset.

Easily explained within the rule of the ME universe-- she obviously stopped and crouched behind a box for 20 seconds at some point while Shep was chasing her.

Getting back again with Liara after sleeping with Jacob. The fight with that other Spectre chick was neat, although the plot-forced-stupidity of initially trusting her was annoying. (The Shadow Broker fight was... unique, but less fun.) The SB's dossiers on other characters were an entertaining read. The conversation with Liara on the Normandy (for a non-romancer) was very well done-- a rare expression of actual vulnerability from Shepard that FemShep voiced beautifully. (The quiet, sad "Come back soon" to the empty room just after Liara walked out was unexpected and awesome.) That said, I quite liked Dead Money. The companions were all great fun and I really dug the backstory, especially in how well paced its reveal was and in how well it tied in to core Fallout themes of sunny optimism and gee-whiz tech, smacked in the face with the grim reality of human betrayal, but with some actual notes of redemption at the end. It was as good a "Fallout Short Story" as anything I've seen outside of the main FO1 plot and FNV's Vault 11. The gameplay had its flaws (horror elements generally just get me stressed and annoyed), but I enjoyed the ample opportunities for the player to feel clever (I loved using rooflines to get around things, picking the right companions for the different situations, and finding and taking out the hologram generators).

Pretty much, although I wouldn't put the "sad" label in there. I'm more than willing to admit that there are partisans in all of the established schools of thought who understand the field miles better than I do, so I don't want to call them names out of ignorance. I have little more than a dilettante's understanding of macroeconomic theory, but the historical results tell me that most of the established schools have models that work ... some of the time. There's a lot of noise in all of them; noise that, depending on the circumstances, can be louder than the signal. Much of what I posted above comes from a more (second-hand) micro-level understanding of the firms involved. The incentives are all out-of-whack with doing what bankers are meant to do in a free-market economy. It's a position of huge power and responsibility, and the concentration, combination, and mimicry in the industry has effectively insulated it from competitive forces. The big players either all profit (enormously) or they all fail, and the society as a whole won't let the latter happen.

Not to mention the fact that, at 52, he's spending his nights out drinking with a 22-year-old model.

The difference being that the S&Ls were a lot of small entities, and they weren't tied together with big investment banks, hedge funds, insurance companies, or trading outfits. They had a separate regulatory scheme that was a bit less rigorous than the commercial banks, and it let them get into trouble.

Wals is right. Housing gets the blame as the immediate cause (and mis-allocations of resources in housing certainly don't help), but the mechanism of this decline was how ****ed up the financial sector of the economy was (and continues to be). When all your leading financial institutions are A) at 30-1 leverage, B) so intertwined via insurance, contracts, swaps, and other transactions that one failing is likely to bring them all down, and C) making up over 40% of all the reported corporate profits in the country, it really doesn't matter what the cause immediate is. In those circumstances, the next major unanticipated negative event (and there are always major unanticipated negative events-- usually around 1 per decade) is going to be disastrous. There have been forces mis-allocating resources in the American economy for a long time. (To some extent, this is true for any economy. There are always inefficiencies, but they don't always add up to something this bad.) The role of a banking sector in a mostly-free-market economy is to take custody of the accumulated wealth of a society and allocate it to those endeavors that offer the highest likely real rate of return. The portion of that wealth that went into the operation of the banks is essentially a fee paid by the greater economy in exchange for this service. And, for a long time, it was worth it-- superior Western capital-allocation decisions were the major reason why the 'good guys' won the Cold War. Of course, the model does present risks. By putting private bankers in so important a position, the whole system is vulerable if these guys are incompetent or corrupt. This was demonstrated ably by the largely-finance-driven boom-bust cycle that America saw during the 1870-1930 period. But the Depression-era regulatory safeguards actually worked pretty damn well for a couple generations. Starting in roughly the 1980s, though, when the big Wall Street investment banks started going public, the decisionmakers in the financial industry began leaning on the scale a bit-- deciding too often that the endeavor that offered the highest likely real rate of return was ... them! The financial industry as a whole climbed from 4% of GDP (where it had been pretty stable for most of the Postwar period) to 8%. To a certain extent, this was legitimate, as the US was increasingly exporting financial services to developing nations (e.g., bond offerings to fund projects overseas). But a lot of it was mysterious. Investment decisions generally get made based on quarterly reports, stock prices, and other short-term results, and nobody is better than Wall Street at shining up short term results and hiding the downside off the books, in ultra-complicated risk disclosures, or so far into the future that most investors wouldn't notice. And the general tolerance for risk in the financial industry zoomed up. Back in the old partnership days, when the traders were playing with their bosses' money, they were deathly afraid that they would face serious consequences if their bets went bad. They became less careful when faced only with the wrath of anonymous shareholders and wrapped in a newly trader-driven corporate culture that was very protective of their experimentation. As the banks got bigger and more profitable, they exercised more political influence, on both sides of the aisle. The financial sector achieved that rare complete victory in American politics in the '90s-- both parties acknowledged as a matter of course that the logical and philosophical argument that was most favorable to the banks was unquestionably true. As such, many of those Depression-era regulations that had worked pretty well for decades went un-enforced or were rolled back in the '90s and '00s. I'm not one to ascribe to active conspiracy theories, but the financial industry leaders have worked out a way to effectively loot the rest of American society. We didn't have a "sub-prime mortgage crisis"-- we had a "sub-prime generation of financial and political elites" crisis. And, frankly, we're still having one. (Aside: The other big mis-allocations of resources in America, besides the financial sector, are the overinvestment in housing and the ridiculously expensive nature of American healthcare. The housing over-investment is pretty simple. There are positive externalities to home ownership, which the government wanted to make real to consumers, but they over-compensated. The tax preference in favor of home ownership is enormous, and it gets bigger and bigger the more you earn and the bigger house you buy. Thus, on the aggregate, American society has too much of its wealth sunk into where it's living, and too little of its wealth invested in, well, making and inventing stuff to keep an economy competitive. The healthcare over-investment, on the other hand, is incredibly complicated. But the end result is clear-- America invests 18% of its economic productivity just in keeping its people healthy enough to do the things that are actually ecnomically productive. Every other modern economy spends less, and most of them manage to get better results.)

Well, late in the game, unless you're on one of the weirder or more islandy map types, there are probably only a couple areas on the map where barbarian camps can spawn. And, if you're smart, you already have a couple naval units watching those sites so that you can farm experience points from them. Otherwise, yes, in order to land a lot of troops at once, you need to have a respectable naval force escorting them. As I recall, upkeep and happiness were quantitatively tweaked, but the core system is the same. Keeping a focused empire of a few larger cities is a solid strategy if city spam bothers you.

The major rebalancing patch that came out in (IIRC) March made the game much better. If you last played the game before that point, it's worth revisiting. Most of the DLCs have just been additional Civs and/or scenarios. I don't find the barbarian triremes all that annoying-- you just need to have enough ships screening your embarked troops so that you see enemies before they get into striking distance. The naval invasion checklist is: First, sink or disable the bulk of the enemy's naval forces; Second, embark your troops with high-view-distance naval units to screen your approach and to spot and deal with lone opportunists; Third, get there and kick ass.

Yo, Dawg, we heard you like planes, so we put some planes on your plane so you can fly while you fly.

Sure, monster-bounty quests make sense in the gameworld as constructed. But that doesn't necessarily make them a fun way to spend an afternoon. It's lazy quest design. The fact that they had a narrative excuse for their lazy quest design makes it a little more tolerable, but it certainly doesn't make it unfair for a reviewer to point out that the design was lazy and the execution was un-fun.

I believe this is being talked about wrt Social Security. There are currently two tiers of retirement: 1) Retire at age 65. This nets you a certain amount. 2) Retire at age 67. This nets you a higher amount than retiring at age 65. I think Ive heard/read somewhere that they are now talking about backing the reitrement age to 72. True, but this is not just about what age people are wiling to work until. Jobs have to be found for them. Perhaps more importantly, the jobs those people are occupying before they retire are jobs 'needed' for other people. This is what I meant about a ballooning population. You've got pressure from young jobless at the other end of the system. God, this is depressing. Indeed, the chief immediate benefit of Social Security when it was passed in the '30s was to allow a lot of older, less productive workers to retire, opening up jobs for younger, healthier, and generally more productive workers. America's productivity-per-worker jumped up. As to Wals' other post, there is a #5 on the list: Accept a lower standard-of-living across the board. This is something that Americans might have to get used to. The post-WW2 boom in the U.S. was an amazing thing. With every other industrialized nation on the planet bombed to ****, America had competitive advantage out the wazoo. It was considered relatively unremarkable for a man to earn enough in 35ish years in the workplace to pay for his own education and support a non-working spouse, raise children, and pay for both him and his spouse to have a long retirement. But that comparative advantage simply couldn't last. Partly because the rest of the world wasn't going to stay blowed-up forever, and partly because American institutions and policies got complacent. Really, no president since Eisenhower has made maximizing American competitive advantages much of a policy priority. (As an aside, women entering the workforce in large numbers beginning in the '70s were a big help in delaying this decline.) And there have been both accidential and malicious fundamental mis-allocations of societal resources that will have to be painfully corrected at some point-- primarily the portion of national resources being invested in relatively-low-return enterprises like the financial sector, the healthcare sector, and defense/security. Getting into a position to re-build American competitive advantages is probably going to mean that a lot of people are going to have to accept being generally worse off than their parents' generation was.

I suppose it's time for the semi-annual trawl through the privacy settings to uncheck all the new automatically-checked boxes that have cropped up.

You can do it piecemeal, leaving some stuff at the Bunker and fast-traveling back and forth a couple times. I've figured out why Honest Hearts isn't really speaking to me as much as Dead Money did. There's no mystary. Once you chat with Graham and Daniel, and once you find the bulk of the Survivalist journals, the plot relies on either empathy for the NPCs or the largely gamist drive to finish and get back to the Mojave to keep the player interested. There may well be further narrative rewards that I haven't gotten to yet, but I just don't have that "What's really going on here?" impetus that Dead Money and the other good Fallout sidequests had. Absent that, the steps along the way feel somewhat mechanistic-- I'm chasing down quest markers rather than working to puzzle out a problem.