To start with the very obvious: in order to sell anything from art work to zoology degrees, people have to have heard about the product. There are several ways to do this. A company might put up billboards around a town- though this works best if those displays are mistaken for bombs and cause a police panic. Alternately, one could release a video which packs a major emotional punch, and uses some advanced storytelling techniques to good effect. Those are examples of “viral” marketing strategies. They’re (generally) low cost, and low success rate. They rely on creating infectious memes that other people will cheerfully spread.

At the other end, there’s the Superbowl ad buy. At least one company spent $4 million for 30 seconds of air. This sort of high-visibility, non-targeted broadcast ad can be very successful in letting potential customers know about your products– assuming they didn’t use the bathroom, get a call, change the channel, or (as often happens at my place) have a cat jump in front of their face.

Most companies target their ads towards the sorts of people they think are most likely to be potential customers. This is why General Dynamics Land Systems advertises Stryker craft at the Pentagon metro stop. Seriously guys, the Pentagon has some of the best billboards ever.

Time, money, an interesting creative approach, correct targeting, and proper use of an Oxford Comma can all serve to pique consumer interest in peaking at your product. Once it’s released, it’s the product’s job to sell itself. Ross Perot’s money got him into the 1992 presidential debates, which allowed Ross Perot’s craziness unsuitability for office to shine.

When a company or industry has AAA marketing for mediocre products, we should expect an explosion of initial sales, followed by sharply diminishing follow on sales. Those sharply diminished sales are the market’s way of making prepubescent retching noises. Those noises may not always be deserved, but customers have plenty of things to spend money on. If a game, book, movie, or kitty toy is merely average, people will stop talking about it once something newer and shinier catches their eye. If it’s actively bad… well. There is too such a thing as bad press.

Even the best spin, as told by a master, only gets you so far. Just ask Baghdad Bob.

Kotaku link via Brandon Cackowski-Schnell at No High Scores.

It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for Sleeping in, having Dim Sum, and going to work. Sundays are for doing household chores. Sundays are for Brunch. Sundays are for taking a day of rest. Sundays are for learning your coffee shop actually sells bikinis.

This week an Iranian nuclear scientist was assassinated- the US insists it knows nothing. This week Google rolled out it’s new search algorithm, one which integrates social information along with its link marketplace. And this week Mitt Romney took one more step towards becoming the Republican Nominee for US president.

I really do love the word “theodicy”. It refers to the sorts of moral problems that arise from taking seriously the idea of an omni powerful, omni seeing, omni benevolent entity. The problem is that bad things happen. How and why would an entity such as described above let that happen? And what would that entity’s moral responsibility be towards the rest of us?

Speaking of cruelty: Kids. Each person has something which makes them stand out from the crowd. Nearly everyone has had the experience of being teased for something beyond their control. This would seemingly be fertile ground for empathy, and yet… and yet it doesn’t seem to. The abuse we received conditions most of us to accept it as normal, and to therefore dish it out when it becomes our turn. One of the central struggles of my own blog is to see past the surface differences and to note the intrinsic similarities of humans across time.

Campaigning for president in New Hampshire is nothing like being President of the United States. The job of the US president is bigger, less personal, less concerned with the minutia of daily life, and more concerned with creating the conditions for more than 300 million people to lead happy, healthy lives. Why, then, should anyone take the New Hampshire primary seriously?

Here’s a deal I’m almost willing to cut: in exchange for passing SOPA, IP protections revert to the historic seven year length. And software, biology, and other natural laws will be declared ineligible for IP protections. Sounds fair to me.

Jesus Christ people. Just go fucking vote for the Democrat in November.

Star Wars is the crude oil of my childhood dreams. George Lucas seems to have tapped on the shoulder of the part of me that will forever be an 11 year old and said “Lasers? Swords? Why choose?” Unfortunately, Lucas doesn’t seem to have been able to do anything else very well. The news that he hired a vocal critic to write his next movie is a good omen. I’m really looking forward to this one.

Related to the last post: creators need to know the limits of their medium. Gaming is the ultimate in “show don’t say”- except that a good game designer doesn’t show, they make a person feel. Ken Levine went on to tell one of the greatest stories in gaming. It seems he learned his lessons very well indeed.

We knew this already, right? We knew that Wall Street deliberately picked the worst possible mortgages to put into the CDOs. I guess since Wall Street doesn’t know why they’re being attacked, we should tell them again.

I am honestly not sure what function Wall Street serves, other than being a casino with a high buy in.

The headline does most of the work here. It also does a great job at removing the one claim that Yoo and others might have had to being public servants. If they honestly held that the Executive Branch must naturally have the power to do anything the Executive deems necessary for the health and safety of the Citizens of the United States, then they would naturally hold with Obama’s recess appointments as well. Since they do not, they reveal themselves as partisan hacks.

This week, the theme has been: Games of power and games of narrative. In the comments section, tell me why you think my kitty is adorable.

So here it is. 31 December 2011, The ultimate day of the year. It’s been a good one for me, personally.

When 2011 opened, I had been-with only intermediate exception- unemployed since late 2008. My unemployment insurance had long since run out, and the job situation was beyond bleak. My bank account had run dry, and with it, so had my ability to buy food. January sucked. February sucked worse.

Funny thing about immanent starvation: it tests your boundaries. I had sworn that I would never let family connections find me a job, and yet… and yet I knew I couldn’t stretch those last 2 boxes of pasta for more than a week. So I let my little sister get me a job with the restaurant in which she had worked. I would be a host (the lowest-run of the restaurant industry) reporting directly to one of her closest friends. I got my first paycheck a couple days before my 33rd birthday. It was for $17.

A month or so after that I was formally diagnosed as having Attention Deficit Disorder. I began taking medication and it utterly changed my world. I was able to watch an entire hour-long TV show without needing to also be reading a book! I could walk from one end of my (smallish) restaurant to the other without forgetting a 3 digit number! I was able to distinguish between boredom and inattention. It was glorious.

Also: the medication my shrink and I settled on doubled as an anti-depressant. Turns out that I was also clinically depressed for much of 2009 and 2010. Who knew?

As a result of this medication, my own drive unshackled. I was able to actually work, and work well. My bosses noticed. I was promoted, given extra duty, and promoted again. My financial situation improved dramatically. I was able to stop looking at the cats and thinking about dinner…

In the middle of the year, I began to think that I might be stable enough to start dating again. Just barely stable- but doable. That’s when the internet gods dropped Lex into my life. A couple of dates and we became an official couple. Witty? Check. Pretty? Check. Gay? Only in the sense that she’s generally “having or showing a merry, lively mood”. It’s possible that I’m more than a bit smitten.

As 2011 closes out, I find myself with a slightly greater income than I managed while collecting unemployment, but with a greatly improved sense of self worth. Throughout 2009 and 2010, my life had been in free fall. One piece at a time had seemed to fall apart, get lost, break, or disappear. In 2011, things got built. This is worth much celebration.

It’s Christmas morning. Christmas is for waking up surrounded with loved ones. Christmas is for eating Latkes and remembering that not everyone uses the same methods in their search for the divine. Christmas is for reminding ourselves that even the poorest among us- even those too poor to afford accommodations inside an inn– are human beings. Christmas is for creating new family traditions until we get them right. Oh hell. And Christmas is for football.

This week the Iraqi Civil war flared back up again as US soldiers left the country. This week saw the deaths of an iconoclast: Christopher Hitchens, an iconic freedom fighter: Vaclav Havel, and an iron-fisted dictator: Kim Jong Il. Also also: a “space ball” crashed into Namibia- there is no word on whether Superman or Jesus walked out of said ball.

Christmas is so institutionalized into American culture that even my family– which contains no Christians– gets together to celebrate it. Because of that institutionalization, the meaning of Christmas is often lost. So in brief: Christians believe that a/the deity was born into human flesh to teach humanity to be good to one another. The trick to happiness, this deity said, is to treat everyone as well as you would the deity who controls your fate. If you have more than you need, he said, why do you hold onto it? There’s more, of course. Much more.

It’s almost funny, in a way. The Christmas story tells of a trio of wise men who paid homage to the newly-born deity-made-human. And so naturally this week two famous wise men and a stooge died. This isn’t really about that, though. This is about what we owe the rest of our species.

“We got a tailwind, bitches!”

The criterion presented here for Greatest US General seem far too limiting. For instance, rather than eliminating from consideration anyone who didn’t “fight[...] an enemy that was equal or superior to the United States in military and economic power and the general had to be fighting the main body of the enemy in that war”, I’d require only that the general had to be fighting a against a force-in-being that was the equal or superior of his/her own. Frankly the idea that no US general from WW2 can be considered great because they never faced the main German or Japanese army is asinine. How different would Kursk have gone had Patton not tied down hundreds of German tanks with the Sicilian campaign? Sherman’s Savannah Campaign utterly crippled the nascent Confederacy. To say that Sherman isn’t among the greatest generals because he had the wisdom to cripple the enemy’s ability to fight, rather than murder the fighting men themselves ignores Sun Tzu’s teachings. Obviously, I look forward to the rest of the series linked to.

It seems odd to say that people can’t get married by a Church unless they have state sanction. I know people who have been married in the eyes of a deity but not the law.

Microsoft has been working on the next iteration of the Xbox. What I find most interesting is that the head of this project is a woman. She seems to have done great work on the new UI, and I’m interested to see how far she takes the convergence project with the new hardware. The Xbox 360 really ought to have been the center of everyone’s living room, but (until recently) the user interface wasn’t good for that. Also: the name is terrible.

It’s hard to know how seriously to take this Dutch magazine’s explanation for using a rather racist word. On the one wrist, America sure does seem to have gotten it’s cultural claws into everything. It would make complete sense that we would have exported our negative stereotypes. On the other, well. I’d like to think that we would have started exporting the fact that you can’t use that word anymore. In defense of the Dutch, I only recently learned that “wog” is the British version of the N-word. So I can see how they would have missed the negative connotations.

One of the reasons I follow sports I don’t particularly care for is so that I can make light conversation. People emotionally invest in sports, but not (usually) to the same extent that they do in politics or religion. This is one of the great things about video games. People can enjoy them socially, create friendships around them, and- unlike with professional sports- actually participate in them together.

Nothing says “Christmas” quite like porn. Ok, maybe not literally. But the human sex drive is one of the most fundamental forces of our existence. So it’s not really surprising that pornography has been prevalent throughout our history. And it’s not surprising, therefore, that the people who have been on the business end of it have been the first to push the edges of new technologies.

I’ve gotten a bit preachy today, I know. Christmas morning is for opening presents, and finding toys. How much do we value those toys? Not metaphorically, but in actual cash terms. It’s worth remembering that most of what we buy in the 21st century is not physical product, but intellectual ambition.

Best quotes of 2011. Pet peeve warning: this “top 10″ list starts at “1″ and counts up to 10. Why do people make lists like that?!

The Swedes spend every Christmas with Donald Duck. Well, and why not? I’m going to do a little snoopy dance in celebration.

Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for figuring out how to become better at the position you were just promoted into. Sundays are for waking up and smelling the Christmas tree. Sundays are for sleeping in. Sundays are for godliness and brunch. Or perhaps, just perhaps, Sundays are for waking up early and going to work.

This week: Proving that the world learned something in 1929, Europe, America, and other large economies finally got their acts together for a European bailout deal. Egypt held it’s first round of parliamentary elections- results were announced after this post was written. This week AT&T whined that the FCC realized that if AT&T bought one of AT&T’s competitors, there would be less competition. Also this week: The Syrian uprising has turned into a full scale civil war. Good luck to the good guys.

In this space, I often criticize cops for doing bad, bad things. I honestly do think that it’s better to point out when power is abused than to note when it is used responsibly. And yet, I’m going to point out this story, where the police officers had the chance to trump up charges against a citizen protester– and declined to do so. Their small act was as utterly in line with the best traditions of the First Amendment as it was utterly out of line with expectations of unionizing workers throughout American history.

Beards ‘n Maps.

Interesting study about nakedness and perception of agency. I’d love to know the extent to which these findings are cross-cultural. For instance, many cultures have a culture of shared bathing among strangers. In those cultures, nudity and desire must (presumably) have some greater measure of divorce than they do in less public cultures. At any rate, one more thing to be wary of before making snap judgments about strangers.

Greatest prank ever.

I have just barely dipped my toes into the world of Frozen Synapse. It looks awesome and feels huge. What’s perhaps most interesting is the way the company has turned conventional wisdom on it’s head with regard to it’s business model. They declined to make a “free to play” game, and they declined to appeal to a huge audience. They declined to make an iPad game. And they appealed to a traditional gamer crowd- by declining to make a traditional game. The key, I think, was to fulfill a desire their audience didn’t know they had.

This is a great stick.

The greatest freedom is freedom from “arbitrary”. Clear rules, set up in advance, with understanding of the expectations due from all sides. This need is a deep part of the human psyche. Look at the Book of Job in the Torah- one person is tormented for reasons that seem utterly arbitrary. Every reader of that story walks away understanding that there has been a deep injustice. Labor agreements cannot simply be about compensation. At least, not as long as employers hold ultimate control over a worker’s schedule. It is simply too easy for an employer to abuse their unlimited power over a worker’s ability to afford food. Frankly, actual compensation is the least important part of Labor’s demand.

“Oh poor bastard.”

I’m not sure why Cracked turned into a great online magazine, and Mad limps along in a weird timewarp of nothingness. When I was a kid, both magazines tried to woo the same maladjusted-child demographic. Cracked wasn’t nearly as successful. And yet here we are in 2011, and Cracked is turning out funny social commentary aimed at adults. Also: can it really be the case that America is still terrified of black men and white women getting it on? If so, how much less terrified would we be if Hollywood showed such relationships as utterly normal?

An Ode to UC Davis.

When reading a survey of Alabama newspapers from the 1963 civil rights struggle, it is easy to conclude that the media was unsympathetic to the plight of African Americans. Looking at it from this perspective, contemporary newspapers are considerably better than their progenitors. I’m not sure that this is the best lesson. Instead, we see a group that challenged the existing power structure, and a media that was on the side of the powerful. Viewed in this light, modern media fares considerably less well. Very few newspapers in history actually wanted to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”.

Newsflash: Lobbyists are getting their money’s worth from Congress.

The framers of the American Constitution were terrified of arbitrary use of power. So they set up a system where everyone who had power would be answerable to a whole lot of people. The President would only have the power to do what Congress told him (so far, always a him). The judicial branch would make sure the States and Congress didn’t get out of line. Congress had the power to decide what kinds of cases the courts could preside over. The president got to appoint judges- and congress got to say “no” if those judges were horrible. And Congress was answerable to voters and states. Congress has declined to check the presidency, and the whole system stands imperiled.

Apple is pushing abortion-seeking women towards anti-abortion organizations.

Petroleum demand is climbing. Petroleum is hovering at $100 per barrel. Saudi Arabia can extract oil for roughly $2 per barrel. If Saudi Arabia is claiming they don’t need to drill for more oil, it’s because they either love Canada (cost: $50 per barrel to acquire), or don’t have any oil fields left to tap. Since the Saudi family maintains it’s hold over the Arabian people by controlling the oil wealth, my guess is that they don’t love the Canadians more than they love power.

If McDonalds sells “Angus burgers”, then “Angus” can’t mean “premium”.

This is a great and nuanced look at illegal immigration. I do think the author missed an important angle. He asserts that “I know already that many here will argue that this isn’t racism; and that if it were white Canadians working illegally we would be having the exact same conversations. But I remain dubious of this argument; for me it just doesn’t pass the sniff test.” I’d say that we’d be having equally racist arguments, but that “white Canadians” would be found to be of a different “race” from “white” Americans. Those poor English/French mongrels.

Money can’t buy happiness, but it sure is a precondition for it.

A Hyatt hotel decided to hold a “Housekeeping Appreciation Week”, and decided not to give those housekeepers money. Nor extra breaks. Nor so much as a free lunch. Nope. The management team at Hyatt Regency Santa Clara decided that to appreciate housekeepers, they would paste housekeeper’s faces onto supermodel’s bodies. This is the way that management tells labor that they don’t consider themselves coequally human.

86 year old man reflects on his life.

Within the last few weeks, a major game’s company made the claim that it wasn’t worthwhile to develop for the PC market- 95% of the people who would end up playing the game wouldn’t actually give the developer money. Another developer disagrees, claiming that it’s only 83%. I’m not sure if that 12% difference is why the later publisher is so willing to make games for the PC, but they have been fantastically profitable in doing so.

Despite the fact that I’ve been complaining about arbitrary practices all post long, don’t confuse that with “random”. Here’s a great post on randomness being important to storytelling.

I become more convinced daily that the key skill of the 21st century will be the clear translation of information into graphical formats. That’s right: the graphic designer will be the highly paid specialist of the next job boom. Artists with philosophy degrees will have the last laugh.

If you click just one link:

Leonard Cohen asserted that “Everyone knows the dice are loaded. The Occupy [City] movement has been demonstrating that not everyone is aware of this. Far too many of us saw our inability to find a job and felt alone. Far too many of us saw that we were unable to afford the lifestyle of our parents and believed it was a personal failing on our part. We’re not alone. We didn’t fail. The system changed. America became a third world nation so rich that none have noticed. Occupy [City] has been about fighting back. Here’s hoping for effective action in the next phase.

This week’s theme has been about power. Well. Isn’t is always? In the comments, leave a message about a time you abused power.

What do you mean you haven’t seen the Muppets yet?

It’s Sunday morning. Sundays are for reading in bed. Killing orcs, because Orcs Must Die!™ Sundays are for grading papers. Sundays are for prepping character sheets. Sundays are for playing games, visiting friends in the hospital, and being Occupied. Sundays are for having a chocolate hangover. Sundays are for having a day of(f from the) rest.

This week, police got violent against various Occupy movements- most notably across a small bridge from where I live. This week European leaders saved the world economy by decreeing that bankers who made bad loans to Greece would take a loss on the deal- rather than a profit. Also this week, global warming was disproved when snow hit the East Coast of the US. Also also: Saint Louis became the best Baseball team in the world.

Speaking of Baseball: the penultimate game of the World Series was possibly the best of all time. The eventually winner… here’s a graph.

When I stopped owning a car, I relaxed in places my wallet didn’t know I had. No more car insurance. No more stockpiling cash for inevitable breakdowns. No more exorbitant and ever-rising gas prices. I know that not everyone is able to live somewhere where a car is optional. I fully understand that- in most of North America- people live in places designed for cars. I want people to understand that this is a problem to be solved, rather than a public good which must be embraced.

Please, no one explain this to me.

I am a huge classical music fan, but I’ve never been to the symphony. Now that I think about it, this is bizarre. The article I’ve just linked to is an ad for a book that is an ad for the author’s company. Nevertheless, I am intrigued that parking is the single biggest factor keeping potential symphony-goers from enjoying a nice evening. That’s right. Available parking is a bigger factor than quality of music. Given that very few of us live in places where symphonies have to compete with one another, this makes a great deal of sense. It does, however, tend to support my belief that Americans need the freedom that comes with good mass transit.

The world economy sucks because Europeans seem to have gotten here most recently. All things considered, they’re probably going to be the ones to have had the most lasting impact on these continents. I’d love to believe that the Chinese hit San Francisco at some point before Columbus got to the Bahamas, but it doesn’t seem to be true. Were it true, it doesn’t seem to have mattered.

I will sell your children.

Occupy [city name] has struck a major chord. Or maybe 3 major chords- that’s all you need for punk rock. What they’ve been extremely good at is opening the Overton Window enough to begin a discussion about wealth inequality. When your uncle someone or other explains that the rich are just like you and me, you can explain why they’re not.

One of the most depressing studies I read in college was an examination of ethnic and sectarian conflict. The short version: those sorts of conflicts almost invariably end with either mass displacement or genocide. The idea that an American might have been involved with perpetuating such a conflict is sad. The idea that such a person could find themselves gainfully employed by a major US politician is terrible.

Sunday Morning Comics!

Back in the days before digital, companies had to guess at the impact of prices and promotions on their bottom line. A company might have no idea if a temporary discount on a durable good would lead to lower overall revenue. VALVe is very good at running market tests and understanding the data they gather. It actually seems to spring from their strengths as game programmers.

What we are afraid of– by state!

Earlier today (I am writing this on Saturday), a potential customer called my restaurant and asked for something I was pretty sure we couldn’t do. I asked them if I could place them on hold, (which is the way my company demands I treat potential customers) and got a manager. The manager said “can’t be done”, and looked at me expectantly. I shook my head at him and he sighed and grabbed the phone. They don’t payme enough to say “no” to customers. Turning down money is something that you only ever want to entrust to the very top levels of your organization. I’ve never been sure why companies don’t understand that every interaction with a customer- or potential customer- will have monetary repercussions. Of course, good customer service is something Americans seem unwilling to send a market signal in favor of.

The myth is that if they work hard and play by the rules, anyone can get ahead in America. this is false. For as long as I’ve been alive, only the top 10% of income earners have been getting ahead. The American dream died a long time ago. We simply cannot call fair a system in which only 10% of people see their hard work rewarded. And we must call out the implied lie which calls 90% of the country lazy.

One of the reasons that I like Google is that they’re upfront about this kind of data. Also: I’m scared to live in a world where police think they have the right to hide their bad behavior.

If you click just one link:

A recurring theme on this blog over the past year and a half has been the need for more labor solidarity. Those longshore workers are fighting for us all. I hope they win.

DUCK!

A game like Crysis, for instance, is incredibly pretty. The game is lush with foliage to hide behind, and has rich vistas full of areas to explore. Those are the key points: the foliage isn’t merely decorative- it serves a gameplay function. A player is allowed to scan the ground and find their own cover. A game like Gears of War compensates for the lack of console power by hand-crafting pop-in, pop-out cover. The PC’s allows designers to create an organic play experience for gamers.

Or take a game like Arkham City. I’m glad that when the game is released next month I’ll have more awesome textures than if I buy it for my girlfriend’s PS3. But had it been built ground-up as a PC game, some of the design decisions might have been very different.

The PC is a less controlled, more anarchic platform. Rocksteady might have decided to take a traditionally PC-centric approach and allow for- encourage!- modding. For instance, when I saw the trailer at the above link, all I could about was a MOBA set in the Batman universe built on the Arkham City engine. Remember that MOBAs exist because Blizzard is a developer who thinks about the PC first, and only occasionally nods towards consoles.

I understand why most (large) developers create games primarily aimed at console players. Developing for a pair of fixed platforms must be orders of magnitudes easier than trying to support all the various hardware configurations that a PC can come with. Let us not, however, pretend that graphics are the only thing being compromised away.

It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for frantically looking for razors and panties before a date. Or Sundays might be for working and hiding hickeys from your boss. Sundays might be for recovering from a very 1$ wedding. Then again, if you’ve been running from Earthquakes all week, Sunday mornings might be for getting as much sleep as you possibly can. Further north, Sundays might also for sleeping- because you’ve been working 40 hours in a row. Maybe, just maybe, Sundays are for LoLing about while your girlfriend reads Mother Jones.

This week: The US managed to check another monster off the hit list. Also: the Heir apparent to the Saudi throne died. Also also? A major flood hit Bangkok. And, of course, this week the Occupy Wall Street movement continued.

Occupy Wall Street is, frankly, inchoate. I’m not sure what they can accomplish other than their own existence. And yet. What they’re offering is not really a solution, but a lens through which to see that America has a problem. With so many people being so spectacularly unable to get by, it can’t be all the individual fault of each individual American. Occupy Wall Street is making it polite to say the thing which has been whispering in the back of the American psyche for years: the game is rigged. How are we going to fix it?

In countries where unions have power, different unions will often times strike together. Factory workers might be treated so badly that truck drivers will refuse to move product created under those conditions. Being called out on their bad behavior hurts the precious fe-fes of the American capitalist , and so Congress banned the sympathy strike. By shear coincidence, this took away the most portent weapon in Labor’s arsenal.

Police are a State’s way of enforcing it’s laws and displaying that it has a monopoly on the use of force within its territory. When a State’s use of force is auctioned off, it becomes delegitimizatized. Mercenaries are now prowling American streets, answerable to no one but their own paymasters. I’m sure I didn’t vote for this.

This week’s installment of “Vaccines: they work!”: it seems we’re one step closer to a malaria vaccine. Malaria affects roughly 1/4 Africans every year. With luck, that will soon become a distant memory.

Another thing that works? Science. It turns out that when every climate scientist in the world says something, they’re probably not wrong.

Put the fucking phone down and drive.

When I say that the game was rigged by Wall Street, people often think that I’m somehow saying something obviously wrong, or obviously radical. I’m not. It’s cold, documented, fact. The difference between myself and a Libertarian is that “Cavet Emptor”- to them- is the greatest freedom. To me, the greatest freedom is to destroy the noxious malady of constant wariness.

It is, of course, a logical fallacy to say that you must be correct because Ahmed Maher agrees with you. Even if it is not an argument, it is certainly a signpost on the road to righteousness. Protip: don’t be the group that this guy thinks is worth protesting.

Republicans have some very bad ideas about the economy. For instance: they are convinced that the reason people aren’t buying things today is that they’re scared tax rates will go up tomorrow. Republicans have released economic plans that economic experts have laughed at. We are not being told that the experts are laughing at those plans. Instead, we’re being told that the Republicans have a plan, and that Democrats oppose it. Well gosh. I feel all informed and stuff.

I went all of 2009 and most of 2010 without working. It was so taxing on my psyche that I have been seeing a shrink to get past many of the effects. When I did find a job, it was at literally 1/3 what my pay had been. I am not alone. 10 million people not earning money. 10 million people not making things. And millions upon millions more making less than ever. Want to know why companies are sitting on huge piles of cash instead of building things? No one can afford to buy.

“Anything to declare?” Yeah, I just got back from the freaking moon!

If you click just one link:

Check out this Atlantic piece on College sports.

Mr Pink!

It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for retracing the steps of the Beatles career, from the comfort of your couch. Sundays are for installing games on your new windows partition. Sundays are for walking with vigorous strides– or at least remembering to send out a copy. Sundays might be for rediscovering your love of music festivals. Or Sundays might just be for furiously tapping out a post so that people can snuggle in bed and read.

This week, protesters continued to Occupy [a park near] Wall Street. Scientists are still vigorously trying to prove that faster than light travel is still impossible. Also this week: Slovenia’s government fell when it failed a confidence vote. Also also: The Italian government failed to fall. Depressingly this week: debt-easing inflation failed to occur.

One of the more interesting reactions to the death of Steve Jobs has been high lighting the deaths of other people. I will not play the a game where I try and explain who’s life was more worthy of celebration. I will point out that humanity has been blessed with some truly fine specimens.

I pay very little attention to the media. It has much less to do with my own ideological biases (which, granted, are far to the left of what the media is comfortable talking about), and more to do with the fact that the media is incompetent. I honestly do believe that many of the problems the US finds itself in would be solvable if we had a media capable of reporting a fact in the most relevant way possible. Since they cannot, American democracy is asked to exist within an information vacuum. Lacking information with which to make good decisions, we make very bad ones indeed.

Despite bizarre insistence to the contrary, vaccines are a useful tool for making humanity better off. As an interesting side note to the story: Windows users can know that their money was reinvested in helping eliminate polio from India. Win/Win? Indeed.

Apparently the US government has decided to arbitrarily shut down certain websites. I say “apparently” because this is the first I’ve heard of it. And I say “arbitrarily” because the accused are not allowed to defend themselves.

Imagine if you had a phone. And imagine if that phone could be used to track your physical location and every place you visit on the internet. Now imagine if someone wanted to collect and sell that information without so much as giving you any of the money. It is this sort of thing, I think- more than the banking system itself- which so inflames the Occupy Wall Street folk. It’s the basic sense that corporate life has seeped into every corner of America, and left democracy a pale, sickly, shadow of what it had been.

I remember the way the press hounded President Clinton over the Lewinsky affair. The press was literally jumping out of bushes in hopes of startling Gary Condit into admitting that he murdered his lover. Imagine for a moment that the media treated the presidential assassination scandal with the same level of intensity. What if President Obama were unable to do walk his dog without being asked the circumstances under which he were able to murder Americans at will? The press does not care. And so America slumbers on.

The government does good and useful work. Anyone who says otherwise is objectively pro-domestic abuse.

Let’s fix the tax code. Let’s restore the inflation rate to the historic average. Let’s never again bail out a company and keep its management team afloat. Let’s stop pretending that everything in America is just fine. It isn’t fine. It hasn’t been fine for 10 years.

Matthew 6 is one of the most interesting chapters of the Christian Bible. In it, the Christian Messiah attacks the very foundations of his society by telling his followers not to be douchebags. Seriously. I’m going to quote a bit: “But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” Oh, he goes on for a while. He also tells people-his followers- not to pray in public. In this middle of this epic anti-douchebag PSA, the Christian Messiah delivers what has come to be called “the lord’s prayer”.

Sunday Comics!!

When someone buys stock in a company, they’re buying a small piece of that company. People do this because they expect to make money from owing a piece of that company. That company is legally required to provide an accurate accounting of its activities. It seems that there is some interesting and strange evidence that they aren’t. Who the fuck do Wall Street tycoons think they are? They lie to the American public, they lie to the American government, and they seem to be lying to the people who own their companies.

Two of the most pretentious things in the world: cheese and fonts.

One of the best things that Occupy Wall street has done is point out the contradictions at the heart of American society. One one side, you have a dream of democracy. On the other side, you’ve got the simple fact that the parasitic 1% of America looks down on the rest of us, knowing they can buy and sell us at their whim. This is what the revolution was fought against. Never let it be said, however, that it’s no laughing matter.

Victor: You bought two dead animals – killing each other – because renting them is a bad investment?

The American political system is deeply, deeply flawed. Of the two major parties, one has a variety of solutions to America’s various ills. Some of these are right, and some wrong. The other party’s most credible attempt at fixing the economy is to fire more people.

If you read just one link:

The failure of Digital Rights Management.

This week’s theme has been the death of the American dream. In the comments section, let me know whether you prefer cheesy pretense, or pretentious cheese.

D’oh!

If I understand this correctly, this means that I’ll be able to buy a copy of (say) Arkham City, install it onto my tablet, and- assuming that tablet has an HDMI port and a USB port- plug into my TV and play the game with a controller.

Assuming I’m right, where does a dedicated gaming machine like the Xbox fit in? And what does Sony do to compete?