Remember BattleTanx?

This article in the Economist about dwindling populations reminded me of one of my favorite N64 games, BattleTanx.

With women quickly vanishing from the face of the Earth, thank the Lord that humanity was smart enough to band together into deranged tank-driving hordes! That'll solve the problem! I can remember whipping around the pixelated corners of "skyscrapers" (more like small-town tenaments) firing rockets at my evil, hoe-stealing enemies. I also remember being a huge fan of the fastest "tank", which resembled a post-Armaggedon era Beetle:

All my friends would pick those big bulky Abrams and I'd be laughing my butt off, blasting them with machine gun fire. Now that I'm old, wise and have a lot of thinking time on my brain, all I can think about is: When do I get to play some more Capture the Booty?! I mean, the premise of this game is: kick the crap out of all the other dudes so you can grab some booty! Considering how poor I'd fair at such a scenario in real life, I'm happy that there are virtual options open to me. Ya, things in the BattleTanx universe don't sound so good for women, but what can you do!? A woman-only virus has killed off 99.99% of the female population! That brings me to my next conundrum, why are these guys getting so organized if it's all to get a single woman. Yikes.

In the Storyline part of the game, you're playing a married man, who recruits an army of fellow tank drivers in his quest to get his Woman back (wooooman). Here's what I wanna know: How the hell did he convince these other tank drivers to help?? Assuming he's a moral sort of stand-up tank driver, Our Hero would only be able to say something along the lines of:

"Help me get my woman back and I'll allow you to help raise my children! You might even get to be the child's Wetnurse!"

If he were an evil sort of leader, I don't even want to know how he got his homies to grab their 'nines and come a-runin'.

Proof

Liberterian economists think that regulation hampers the proper running of capitalism. I think what they intend to say is, regulation stops the market from functioning efficiently. Capitalism and the market are two different things. Capitalism being a method for running a market.

Here's all the evidence you need for the profits of industry being aided by regulation. South Korean anti-piracy laws regulate the downloading of media products. The media industry is then able to profit from their labors. Media companies are producing goods, correct? They should be compensated for those goods, correct? At least, that's what a capitalistic system would have everything be. Hence the need for regulation, in the form of anti-piracy laws.

A new era

What's going on?

I just met a homeless man standing outside Taco Bell. He was begging for money so that he could stay at a hotel and get clean. I didn't want to just hand him money, because I wondered what he would really use it for. I asked him if he would want some food and he accepted my offer. But even after buying him the meal, he persisted in asking for money for a hotel room but I turned him down. I wished him luck and made my way home. I don't know how David ended up outside a San Mateo Taco Bell. I do know that here is a man who is very down on his luck. And meanwhile, as David and thousands like him struggle to find a place to stay for the night, the wealthiest 1% are looking into purchasing their next luxury home.


We need a change, America. We started with Obama. But we aren't done. If we are going to take on Big Business, we have to organize. Because they have more money than any of us do (combined), but we have our numbers. We have to unite. We have to stop being cowed by what we see as the status quo. We have to stand up and rise as one! For the sake of American humanity!

Here's what half the people who ever read this (ie, one of you) will undoubtedly think: David, the guy standing outside of Taco Bell, is an alcoholic, who complains about the woes in his life. Oh really? What about 90% of New York or San Francisco 20 somethings. Are they not alcoholics? Honestly, I think 20 somethings of all cities in this country consume more alcohol per capita than most homeless people. After all, they have a lot more money to their name. And who doesn't complain about their life?? Everyone does. It's human to complain about your life.

Those of you who think half of the Americans in this country are lazy welfare hogs, all I have to say is: Open your eyes to reality. Reality is this:

The fact is, the wealthiest command this country's resources. And despite all that capitalists might claim, the "trickle down" economics of Reagan fails. America, the people on Welfare got there because there are no opportunities available. Maybe some of these people aren't the most cunning. They aren't innovators like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, or titans of industry like Rockefeller or Carnegie. But should that preclude them from having a decent job? Don't they deserve an opportunity to have a job that pays them enough to make ends meet? 9% of Americans do not have that chance. 35% of Americans earn less than 25k a year, and 50% of American families earn less than 50k a year. Add that to the above. These aforementioned are struggling to get by while 1% of our population commands a significant proportion of our nation's wealth! What has happened to us America?! How much worse does this need to get?!

Now I know what I've said previously, and I mean what I said. I don't like complaining. What I like is action. What we need to do is stop talking. And start standing up. Aside from a few isolated cases, the banking industry foreclosed on America. The largest bailout in history was borne on the backs of Americans, and the status quo has continued. The rich have continued to get richer and the poor, poorer. Change needs to happen. This system of ongoing inequality will get worse before it gets better, but I hope that justice comes to all those who have stolen the treasure of the people and brought uncounted suffering into the lives of so many.

Why do people play games?

It all makes sense to me now. The reason why people play video games. The reason why I want to play video games even though I know it's just a waste of time.

Here's the reality of any war on Earth, the people who really end up suffering are the innocent civilians who just want to go about their daily lives:

The reality of war is that there is no Good and Evil. Americans look back to WWII with nostalgia because we've successfully convinced ourselves that it was a war between Us (Good) vs Them (Evil). Never again in the subsequent 60 years has there been such a war. America keeps getting itself into conflicts but fail in attempts to portray themselves as the Good guys. Why? Because of globalization and the availability of information, the humanity of our opponents is clearer than ever. Moreover, the reality of American global interests is ever clearer.


Rather than consider the fact that we're involved in two misguided war efforts, where we force American ideologies on other ethnic groups, we can instead turn to video games where our opponents look like this:

The enemy is evil! He wants to eat our brains! It's a whole lot easier to figure out who's evil in this game!

Video games are a great way to avoid thinking about difficult issues, ie, the reality of our world. Same thing goes for sports:

We root for OUR team. The other team is evil! It's that simple. We can turn our thinking brains off with this kind of competition.

In a real war, turning your brain off will get you killed. Turning your brain off will cause you to make stupid decisions. Stupid decisions like torturing prisoners:

Or maybe killing civilians:

Reality is a whole lot messier than a video game or a sporting match.

Maybe part of my desire for video games is that I want to avoid considering extremely complex and difficult issues.

Aren't we glad we live in the 21st century?

I was thinking back to that amazing book, What is the What. We learn about how awful circumstances were during the second civil war between Arab Sudan and the Dinka-held South. There are some terrifying scenes in that book, that make you question humanity. But just think about how such a situation played out in previous centuries. An ethnic group travels to another territory. This traveling tribe possesses superior weaponry than the current occupants. Fast forward a decade, and you have a new resident ethnic group: the one's with the guns. Where did that old group who had been living there for centuries and who had a "rightful claim" to the land go? They either died, fled, or were assimilated by gun-toting oppressors.

Nowadays, whenever an ethnic group tries to do what is historically prudent for our species, they get shouted out from all corners of the world! All they want to do is use superior technology to wipe out an ethnicity that's sitting on valuable land resources. What's the harm in that? Now, UN Peacekeeping forces try (rarely successfully) to mediate these conflicts and set up refugee cities to accommodate displaced ethnic groups. Meanwhile, international pressure slowly builds against these nefarious would-be oppressors, until they have little recourse but to stop the fighting or go extinct themselves!

Even though there are cases in this world where genocides continue, world opinion has never been so focused against it. See, there is a good reason for globalization, San Jose Mercury News!

I must be stupid

We have two political parties in our country, and there's little difference between them. Both claim that the other screwed up the country while in power, and yet realistically, BOTH have been in power for over a hundred years! They may have lost a majority here or there over the decades, but their power and influence is the major reason for the face of our current government. Everyone at this point claims that our government is a wreck, that our country is falling to pieces. And it's always someone else's fault. Democrats blame the Republicans, Republicans blame the Democrats, Union leaders blame Big Business, Big Business blames lazy people sitting on welfare. We've seen the same kind of people come and go from government, and we ask ourselves how we got this point in our country. Why is our country "declining"? How could we have gotten to this miserable point?

Plenty of people have grandiose visions of where they think the country should be. But they never ask questions that are far more important, How are we going to realistically get to where we want to go? If now sucks big time, what do we think is needed to make our lives and status not suck? Instead of lopping people's heads off, let's start making some changes. And realistically, if matters are so bad in this country, then why the hell aren't we seeing an uprising? Why aren't people taking to the streets? In the 1960s, millions marched on Washington. What happened to that kind of activism? We are in the midst of two wars! We have soaring debt! Money market managers are walking away with untold millions while 50% of our country gets by on less than the federally established poverty levels!!

The last great march on Washington I heard about was not a call for drastic changes in our legal code regarding the status of race or the rights of the impoverished. It was a call for people to stop acting like crazy fanatical idiots in politics.
If we were really pissed about all this, we would do something about it. And there's the rub of it. We blame congressmen, but I bet those guys are working a hell of a lot harder than the average Joe. Really, We as a people have failed ourselves because we fail to get active. So there's your answer of who's to blame. We are. Wake up America. We are electing all these "corrupt officials" who are taking this country to hell with their "inane" government policies. We are supporting these wars with our bodies and our blood and our treasure. We are giving out the taxes that support welfare programs and bail out the rich. We are working at jobs that don't provide an adequate living wage for our families.

Why did we let this happen? Because we work 40 hours a week and then we go home to take care of our families? Or because we've convinced ourselves that we need to look fit to impress all the people around us, so we spend hours at a gym every week? Or because we have dreams of being the next Hendrix so we spend hours a day playing guitar? And let's be even more realistic, is it because after a "long hard day" at work, we think we deserve a break so we go home to our televisions and video games and let the evening dribble away from us?

If this country sucks America, it's OUR fault. We stood by and let it get as far as it has. Stop acting like it's all the politicians' fault. If you see something wrong in your life that you think the government is responsible for, stand up and make your voice heard. This country was founded on the idea of populist democracy. Elected officials are meant to serve the people, of which we are all a part of. Take a stand for something, for anything, if you're feeling so inclined. But otherwise, understand this: Our country is only "going to shit" if you think it is. If you don't have any particular reason for thinking otherwise, then you might as well concede the fact that you, personally, are doing FINE and that as far as you can tell, the economy and the country are doing fine as well.

Stop listening to the pundits, America. Listen to yourselves. If you are managing to get by, chances are, YOU ARE FINE. If other people are not doing fine, then they have a responsibility to try and get their voices heard. And if you hear their voice, and it resonates with you, THEN it is time to act.

Take this unemployment fiasco for example. Pundits talk about our high unemployment rate constantly. You know who I never hear about? The unemployed people. They never say word one about this whole thing. I don't see them on the street, I don't see them marching on Washington. It's not as if they are being locked away in sweatshops all day, they don't work! Maybe it's important for us to find work for the 8-9% of Americans. But if the shit were really bad for these guys, don't you think they'd be on the streets shouting about it? Don't you think they would try and organize? If you're reading this and you're thinking, "Umm, shut up, guy! My life IS crappy. I AM unemployed and it's AWFUL. I look for jobs everyday and I don't find anything." Well, in that case. GET UP AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! Chances are, if you are unemployed and struggling to get by, then there's likely to be someone else out there who isn't doing so hot either. Social media has made organizing easier than ever. You must have SOME TIME in your day to try and do this??

Government has no incentive to enforce actual changes to our jobs situation because it's always just the usual clamoring. They don't get inundated by the unemployed. Their days are consumed with phone calls from special interest and lobbying groups. The days of popular activism seems to have ended. Yet we act as if the problems facing this country are historic. If that's the case, then sholdn't we stand up in defiance? I think the reason we don't is that our country isn't actually as bad off as everyone makes it out to be. Actually, let me rephrase that. Our country could be going in the shitter, I have no idea as an individual citizen whether that's true or false. Here's what I do know: Basically, my life is fine. And my guess is that the lives of a lot of other people are fine. So many people's lives are fine, in fact, that they don't really think it's necessary to get off their couches and do something drastic like stand outside of Washington for days on end.

Until the day comes that the fan stops moving from all the poop clogging it's mechanical arteries, true change will not come to this country. That's what I foresee. Until enough people are out of work and actually starving no great change will come to the state of this country. Circumstances are simply not dramatic enough for radical change.

So until our Julius comes, complain on America. I know you don't have the balls to actually do anything about it.

What is the What?

Do you want to find out the truth about the What? I think you should! It's a dreadfully real and frightening story about the precariousness of life. It will teach you the preciousness of your own life and the chances and opportunities that have been afforded you. And it will show you that even with all the obstacles that you have had to face, opportunity is still abounding.

Afterward, you can look into the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, and know that something good has come out of the terrible suffering that a single man endured in Africa.

Cool article about government debt increases

Here's a cool blog post about how much government debt increased under different administrations. It's not the most accurate reflection of a President's actions; a policy that one president enacted might not begin to add to debt until after that President leaves office. For example, Obama already has a higher yearly percentage increase of debt than his forebear, Bush II but most of the policies that add to this debt are the wars and tax cuts which Bush implemented before leaving office. It's a nifty little graph nonetheless.

GDP as a measure of Economic Health

Amidst a dearth of work in the office, my coworkers and I began to engage in an office taboo: discussing politics in the workplace. One made an excellent point about the state of financial affairs in our country, GDP is the commonly accepted measure for economic health, but she felt it was too simple a measure of economic reality.

Afterall, GDP only considers production as a determinate of economic health. A developed economy like the United States doesn't have the need for tremendous levels of production like a developing country such as Brazil, India or China. So why are developed countries with high standards of living attempting to operate at growth of GDP levels equivalent to the developing world? The standard of living in developing countries is much lower, and the need for basic goods and services much greater in these countries. Their GDP levels are much lower than developed countries. Basically, if incomes in a developed country are already higher, then why is it even important to have high GDP growth if we're already adjusting for inflation?

What exactly does GDP factor in?

1. Wages, Salaries, Income
2. Corporate Profits
3. Interest on Investments
4. Farmer's Income
5. Income from non-farm unincorporated businesses (small business)

Then we subtract income taxes from all of these profits and adjust for inflation. This, in a nutshell, provides a GDP value for an entire country. Is there money that GDP not measure?

1. Savings (ie, investments) - if you have money in a bank account, it's technically not money your earning, only the interest is income which is why that is included in the above and not the investment itself.
2. International products owned by the country's company - GDP only reflects domestic products. If China is producing your country's goods, then that's not a domestically produced product. However, the corporation is likely reaping profit and that would be reflected in the GDP? (I dunno)

What my coworker pointed out that's so astute is this: GDP growth is the single most widely recognized value for determining the economic health of countries, but countries like the United States are inundated with products and a majority of the people in the country already have basic ammenities. We assume that countries need to see yearly gains in their productivity despite already being highly productive (US has far and away the highest GDP in the world) and possessing extremely high quality products compared to the rest of the world.

Really, the United States has an EXTREMELY healthy economy. So does most of Europe (EU has the #2 largest GDP). What worries economists is not that their GDP might be shrinking, but that it is increasing at a much lower rate than it used to. Is this actually a cause for concern? Per capita, the US is still one of the most affluent countries in the world. The countries with higher per capita incomes all have extremely small populations and half are oil exporters. A lot of those countries may have high per capita incomes but their income disparity is even higher than the US' (which is already high).

US citizens do not need to worry about their economy as a whole, it's already producing an enormous amount every year! So what's the deal, why are Americans not happy if their economy is actually doing really well? As far as I can tell, the reason Americans continue to hurt despite a vibrant economy is that the dividends of production are being felt increasingly by an upper class minority rather than a broader middle class. Put another way, the rich are getting richer, the poor are increasing in number, and the middle is shrinking. As the middle shrinks, the number of families with less money to spend in our economy grows, and they become more dependent on government aid (the government has to spend more).

People spend money in an economy because they have to, the market is our capitalistic means of handling the self-interest of an entire nation's worth of people. The premise of such a system is that people are receiving money for services/goods that they provide, which they can then exchange for the goods/services that they desire. If people are receiving less money for the services they provide, they have less money to spend on all that they desire. And if you're not able to get much of anything that you need to survive, you're going to be unhappy.

Polls claim that Americans are most concerned about the job situation, companies are claiming that Americans aren't spending enough to warrant job creation. Other people claim that the government taxes too much, and that's stopping job creation. Let's remember that we have a booming economy, the biggest in the world by far. Even though it's not growing at the rate it used to, it's still massive and corporations are reaping huge profits. High unemployment exists because corporations, the biggest employers in our country, eek out higher rates of production from fewer employees. Even as employees are working harder than ever, it's the management and executives who are reaping most of the benefits. Our economy is FINE, it's the balancing act that redistributes wealth to lower income earners that is suffering.

One of these balancing acts is the minimum wage. People long ago realized that living in a city like New York would be impossible even with the minimum wage laws Congress has passed. Cities in similar situations have passed living wage ordinances. Here's a cool website that tracks the minimum living wage estimate for any particular geographic region of our country, compared to the actual minimum wage of that State. Our extremely low minimum wage compared to our extremely high per capita income compounded by the fact that almost half of our country is barely earning a living wage means that those lucky few who consider themselves upper income earners are in vastly better shape than the majority!

What has happened here? We are the wealthiest country on Earth. Our economy is booming, don't let any analyst or pundit fool you. Just look at our GDP for crying out loud. GDP doesn't need to grow for it to still be HUGE. And yet, our country has returned to the dark days of the depression and industrial revolution! We are not in the midst of an economic recession. We are in the midst of economic robbery.

Vacuous Hole

Work can be a great experience. It's chock full of the sort of lessons that school just cannot provide.

It can also, on occassion, be mind numbingly dull. It is the very rare astute and brilliant individuals, who amidst all that inane sleep-inducing nothing time, manage to get something productive done. I am not one of those people.

Shochu

Kiken Na Aneki

Economist

Xianjiang

Specialty cookies

Water recovery!

My blog



Oh well.

TH White at his best

"Argument is only a display of mental force, a sort of fencing with points in order to gain a victory, not for truth. Opinions are blind alleys of lazy or of stupid men, who are unable to think. If ever a true politician really thinks a subject out dispassionately, even Homo stultus will be compelled to accept his findings in the end. Opinion can never stand beside truth."

T. H. White, The Book of Merlyn

What a guy. Good grief. 

Did you know?

With all this talk of debt limits, we the lay people get a special peak into the political chaos surrounding the US budget. A lot of the elements that are typical of an American budget debate are missing, however. University political scientists will tell you with disdain that it's a sign of how far right the political base of America has shifted. Republican leaders insist to the press that this is how much the people have come to mistrust Big Government with their money. Both seem to be playing counterpoint, but they're really just talking about two sides of the same coin. The annual budget has grown astronomically as a percentage of GDP (note that the CBO graph I just linked to offers much more conservative views of government spending than this one by Paul Ryan supporters).

Democratic pundits claim that income tax revenue has fallen dramatically since the Tax Reform Acts in the 1980s. Even so, government programs (and therefore, government spending), have continued to rise unabated. Even as recently as 1981, highest earners expected taxation rates as high as 70% of total earnings!! This was the status quo for two decades, a sigh of relief compared to their previous levels of taxation. For the highest earners before 1964, it was 90% of yearly earnings! How did the 1980s implementation of such a different system of taxation affect our government?

When talking about our historically low tax rates, Democrats typically refer to tax rates in the 1960s... Which country's income taxation rates are we referring to here? Even in 1960, when the the average household was earning somewhere around $35,000 a year, their income tax was 44.5%! That means they paid nearly half their income in taxes! That's not a lot of discretionary spending money left to the family by today's standards. The equivalent of the 60th percentile nowadays pays a meager 25% of income. That's nearly half the amount, and the next highest quintile is also covered by that percentage and the 28% tax bracket. That brings up another odd point about taxation rates in our country nowadays: married couples earning $70,000 pay the same percentage on taxes as people earning nearly twice their levels (up to $139,000 pay the same percentage)! Our country has grown a great deal richer, but actually pays less percentage-wise, in taxes. That begs the question, how is it that taxation rates now resemble the 1960s, when taxation rates were so much higher back then?

I've found graphs from 3rd parties that describe the above situation, but I've grown tired of using graphs from sources that aren't necessarily deserving of trust. Whether or not the government defaults, their graphs are the best; the data gold mine. I want to examine government income tax revenue. 

All data from IRS.gov

There's total government income (which includes not only income tax, but corporate, commodity, etc), which seems to rise steadily until 1994 where it really takes off... until a sharp fall in 2001 (tax cut?). Looking through the federal tax brackets, it's difficult to find any reason for the steady increase of government income tax revenue. Now let's take a look at total income throughout America compared to the total income tax the IRS took in:

Income tax has never made a huge dent in the total personal incomes of Americans. Although it might seem from this graph that the percentage of income tax taken into government coffers compared to total income has gone down... it's actually at about the same levels as the 1960s (there it is!). And compared to total GDP, income tax revenue stands at just a percentage point below the average (let's keep in mind though, that a single percentage point adds up to A LOT of money at these levels).  The conclusion? Despite a tax bracket system that seemed much more severe, the 1980s on have seen very little change in the percentage of total income earned to taxation, in fact, that percentage has been higher on average than in previous decades!

I'm left wondering a few things: What's the deal with those crazy percentages for tax brackets before the 1980s? My guess would be a huge reform of the tax code in the 1980s which took away many of the complicated deductions allowing people to avoid actually paying over 50% of their yearly income in taxes. Otherwise, the amount of money going to government coffers in the 1960s would have been much greater than they were.

What conclusions can we draw from all of this? Income taxation (and therefore government revenue) may be lower than it was in the '90s, but that still doesn't excuse the massive increase in government spending compared to total tax received. Of course, we haven't been looking at other forms of taxation (corporate, commodity, excise, etc)... have those levels changed dramatically in recent years? Should government be limited in the amount it spends related to GDP? That makes a lot of sense, after all, a government shouldn't spend more than it's people are generating. But if there's a limit, what's the target? Is government efficient when it comes to spending? I tend to think that private forces are more efficient than the public sector, but that this does not necessarily mean that public forces are unnecessary. Despite being less efficient, public services are extremely important when a service needs to be provided universally on moral grounds. Either that, or a private provider needs to be heavily monitored and regulated by the government when providing a universal service (as in the case of electrical services through PG&E).