Unpopular Ideas Club

URL upgrade

2011-04-28T19:56:00.000-07:00

I have purchased and transferred my blog to unpopularideasclub.com. No more slumming with the .blogspot plebs. This is the last post at this address. All further content will be at my proprietary url.

Giant Ward Map

2011-04-27T11:40:00.000-07:00

I have become frustrated with the lack of detail on the map from the Board of Alderman's website, so stitched together numerous googlemap screenshots and made this huge 3500x6000 map of St. Louis City wards.

Feel free to make use.

FULL SIZE HERE

On to Rhode Island

2011-04-25T16:14:00.000-07:00

I won a local legacy GPT yesterday with my same countertop deck. To be honest, there were only 11 people, and the whole top 4 scooped to me, because the material prize was the same for everyone, and we'd just be playing for the byes, and I was the only one who expressed interest in possibly going to the GP.
Brief recap
Rd1 - Elves 2-0
Rd2 - UW countertop 1-2
Rd3 - doomsday 2-1
Rd4 - UGR countertop 2-0
Top 4 consisted of [2x UW countertop, elves, merfolk]

I'm still having trouble with the mirror. It feels like a coinflip who gets down counter+top first, and the only way to break out is resolving Jace. I did not add the green splash for this tournament, but I'm now convinced its critical to have comfortable chance in the mirror.

As for Rhode Island, I will definitely be flying if I do in fact end up going. Spending 40 hours in a car is not an option.

I gave in

2011-04-22T01:00:00.000-07:00

Facebook wins.

New Phyrexia in vintage

2011-04-21T12:29:00.000-07:00

This is based on the mass spoiler list here, which apparently has gotten some people in jail, presumably for violating non-disclosure contracts or some such legalese.

This is a pretty interesting set. New Phyrexia cards in rough order of presumed impact:

Praetor's Grasp

Extract has always been borderline playable, and Sadistic Sacrament for a time was an important check on certain linear decks. In the era of Time Vault domination, this is almost strictly better than Grim Tutor. Ignoring the life loss of course, you get a tutor effect that simultaneously denies the same combo to your opponent. Either stealing their Time Vault, or extracting Yawg Will, to use at your leisure, secure from hand disruption to boot. Very solid. I'd expect to see sideboards filling up with these, if not some maindeck copies.

Mental Mistep

I predict this card will radically change Legacy, however it will also become a significant part of vintage. Many of the best cards in Type 1 are played, specifically because they are mistakenly undercosted at 1.

Surgical Extraction
I've always respected Extirpate, even though it doesn't get much play these days. Trading split second for free is on net a decisive upgrade. I like this card. Could see it replacing Ravenous Trap as goto instant yard hate, since its more versatile versus non-dredge.

Slag Fiend
If workshop agro goes back to its Mountainous roots in order to regain Goblin Welder, which leads one to Bazaar, which leads to this 1 mana Tarmogoyf. Could easily be a 10/10 for R.

Gitaxian Probe
Free cycling, plus gives information. Strictly better Street Wraith, other than can be countered.

Jin-Gitaxis
Not insane to think this could be an Oath creature. Probably requires Krosan Reclamation. Unfortunately getting cards at endstep means you cant immediately vault-volt, but does give you ample disruption for their one turn window.

Phyrexian Metamorph
This is strictly better Sculpting Steel. Can kill legendary creatures, can help win welder wars, stop bleeding vs tgoyf. Pretty good.

Noxious Revival
Ive played Reclaim before, and this can also time walk opponent making them draw a fetchland again for example. Turns out everything is better at free.

Beast Within
Basically instant Vindicate. Ive seen Putrefy being played. This is better. More likely to be able to kill Iona for example, or the Oath in the first place. Also good IN oath, as another means to give them a creature instant speed.

Moltensteel dragon
He packs a punch and cheaper than other evasive Workshop-castable monsters.

Hex Parasite

Sort of a gorilla shaman for Jace/Tez and also disrupts stax. Dark Depths synergy too. A more versatile, repeatable Hexmage. Pretty niche, but very cheap.

Whipflare

Instant Pyroclasm! However most fish decks are mostly running creatures with toughness>2. Still Pyroclasm has been played before, and this is almost strictly better.

Dismember
1 colorless to deal -5 is worth noting. Doesnt kill the really big monsters, but quite costeffective for everything else

Gut Shot
Kills Dconf, Lobra, Welder for free. While nice in the abstract, I'd rather pay 1 mana and be able to hit a wider range of creatures, or gain some extra utility, ie Darkblast, Chain Vapor, Lava Dart, Swords to Plowshares, etc.
I do not see this being playable.

Omen Machine
Quite expensive, probably not as disruptive as Uba Mask

Due Respect
Root Maze type effect with cantrip. Very doubtful worth it at 2.

Psychic Surgery
Kind of cheap and most non-workshop decks shuffle a lot. Maybe this can nick off some key stuff over the course of a game? Doubtful worth a card.

Spined Thopter + Porcelain Legionaire
2 colorless for 2/1 flyer or 3/1 first strike isn't the most exciting thing ever printed, but both are efficient

Torpor Orb
Synergy with Phyrexian Dreadnaught. Hoses Flash, giving even more reason to parole that archetype. A non comprehensive vintage-relevant list of effects of this type, in addition to Protean Hulk and all the related combo creatures: Ingot Chewer, Myr Battlesphere, Trinket Mage, Vendillion Clique, Wispmare, Spellstutter Sprite, Sower of Temptation, Gilded Drake, Sundering Titan, Dragon Breath, Worldgorger Dragon, Duplicant, Manic Vandal, Solemn Simulacrum, almost all of dredge's Dread Return targets, about half the playable aggro goblins, Eternal Witness, Flametongue Kavu, Tidehollow Sculler, Precursor Golem.
Contrary to popular belief, this does NOT stop Painter's Servant, Meddling Mage or Phyrexian Revoker.
Slightly interesting combo with Wormfang Manta and some kind of blink effect (maybe Venser planeswalker) but in a world with Vault-Volt, pretty academic.
Conclusion: Much too narrow to be worth a card.

The Bitch

2011-04-18T21:19:00.000-07:00

Ayn Rand is polarizing to say the least. Although I certainly agree with less than 100% of her ideas, one thing that irks me is the endless cheap shots thrown concerning her eccentricities.
It'd be more productive to discuss what of value she had to say to incorporate into one's own ideas. Which may indeed be nothing, but lets determine that for sure instead of being so dismissive.

I primarily admire Ayn for her championing of ruthless industrialism. "Build smokestacks to the moon" indeed. She excoriates people who deserve it. She's not afraid to completely alienate those insisting on denying uncomfortable realizations about social forces. In the course of this, she definitely split hairs and made enemies needlessly, but number of friends is not the measurement of correctness. I respect her absolute refusal of compromise, as a principle in and of itself. Of course, this is not the most effective way to achieve political goals, in a PR-centric world, but the merciless intellectual brutality is satisfying to me.

The distracting nitpicks that undermine the perception of Ayn Rand, are kind of like Hitler being vegetarian. This wasn't strictly just a personal foible; Adolf had an indirect Nazi justification for not eating meat via strengthening the health of the master race, or something to that effect. However, clearly vegetarianism was a tenuous conclusion of his ideas, not a central assumption. Anyone who brings this up in an actual debate about the ethics of eating animals, is a useless troll.

The point is that Ayn spent too much effort finding strange little conclusions from her set of assumptions that look silly. Maybe her core ideas are right, and many of her detail conclusions are irrelevant, or perhaps not even properly derived from the core. Lets say you put forth a theory called "Addition" that states:

"Write out all the numbers you know on a line from left to right, in order, one by one. Don't leave any gaps. Then pick a number. Then pick another number. If you start at the first number, then clear your mind and count your way to the right until you've moved as many spaces as the second number. The space you are on now is the third number. The relationship between these three numbers is: First# + Second# = Third#."

Then you write several dozen books about this theory and in one of them you say, "...and from this we conclude 8 + 1 = 9, just like 49 + 3 = 87."

Hence, maybe your theory is right, but you are bad at following its own conclusions in every instance.

Or maybe in one of your books you write "...and the most important thing to remember is that 12 + 17 = 29."

But in current public discourse, the expression 12+17=29 is universally considered quaint/silly/obscure/bizarre/impractical/etc. So maybe one of your very specific conclusions is right, but unpopular, and so roundly mocked that its not worth arguing about or even mentioning, when its easier to just try to prove the core model and let all the conclusions eventually be accepted along with it.

Ayn Rand produced a lot of valuable ideas, some of which are quite inspiring. I cannot deny the Randian influence in a lot of my own philosophy. Unfortunately, Ayn had an abrasive personality and spouted off about a lot of sideline issues that gave the enemy camp cheap ammunition. Her most important contributions rarely get a fair trial, due to the above types of abstract mistakes. She was also, to be blunt, flat wrong in enough of the genuinely important cases to matter.

Dislikes about Ayn:

-Too esoteric/academic. A huge chunk of her work is attacking academics on their own turf. She may be right, but she's in the wrong trench. Average people don't listen to ivory tower leftists any more than ivory tower libertarians. If theres a shoot out up in the tower, the status quo just keeps rolling along unfazed, no matter who wins.

-Minarchist. I think this is her most unimaginative failing. If Ayn had spent less time bitching about Confucianism and making up words like "psycho-aesthetics", and more time examining the logical conclusions of market forces, she would have found Objectivism should have been unyieldingly anti-statist.

-She was a philosopher and in no way an economist second. This is the primary source of both my agreement and disagreement with Ayn. I put economics as the absolute priority, and have since derived a roughly similar philosophy as a byproduct, but this means I don't care about all the philosophy that went into her economic byproduct theory. To Ayn, the philosophy is all that mattered, and thus the economics that were implied didn't have to be justified versus other economic theories directly.

-Was unreasonably critical of arbitrary cultural tendencies that could easily exist in min/anarchism without bothering anyone nor undermining liberty on a wide scale.

-I like her novels, but they are pretty pedantic. She makes her point. Over and over. I don't know if she thinks she's clever in making every character so rigidly good/evil, but I believe "shades of grey" would have made the books more literarily valuable and probably even better expressed the ideology. In terms of character development, everyone starts out either innately proud and productive, or treacherous and self-loathing, and only become more so as time goes on. More on this later.

Atlas Shrugging

2011-04-17T16:43:00.000-07:00

Although I'm not an objectivist for reasons I will save for another post, I am undeniably part of the target audience here, so was obligated to see the new adaption Friday night. I was mainly just hoping this movie would not be painfully bad, and I'm pleased to report Paul Johansson's effort soared above my low expectations. The actors portraying Dagny Taggart and Hank Reardon were quite good. The script was faithful, and managed to keep the political drama from becoming too dry. I have several complaints, some more serious than others.
-The most standout flaw was the casting and direction in regards to Fransisco. This actor barely had a pulse, let alone charisma. D'Anconio is supposed to be a Paris Hilton-esque persona. A super-rich entitled brat, constantly over-the-top and debaucherous. I wanted to see him snorting cocaine off cleavage, and being LOUD and HAPPY. Not just looking bored, posing for photos with escorts. Fransisco is supposed to be an unignorable emotional counterpoint to the so-very-serious heroes and villains with their futile striving and petty machinations. He should be an exuberant nihilist in the midst of all this self-important pathos. Instead he blended into the background.
-Not nearly enough smoking. As in none, except for a tiny bit of foreshadowing with the ($) cigarettes from Hugh Akson at the end. As I recall, Dagny is clearly depicted as a chain smoker in the novel, and most the other characters are often described lighting cigarettes.
-There wasn't enough establishment of Wesley Mouch. Some of the people I saw this with have not read the book and were only loosely familiar with the story. To them it was not clear that Reardon initially hired Mouch as his lobbyist and basically inadvertently launched Mouch's career. The movie only ever shows Mouch in the company of the evil politicians, so if you are trying to follow this story for the first time, its easy to not catch that detail. There needed to be at least one scene with Mouch ingratiating himself to Reardon, because this is important to show that Reardon's willful lack of oversight of his lackey is partly the cause of the thievery cabal's rise to power.
-John Galt's dialouge sounded really stiff and academic. Yes, I know Ayn Rand expects people to immediately respond logically to unsolicited formal, politically charged statements. But normal people approached by strangers on the street spouting philosophical rhetoric are immediately written off as crazy, and the listener's only thought would be how to end this encounter quickly and safely. The script should have kept it much more vague as to how Galt is recruiting people.
-The character of Eddie Willers had a very different attitude than in the novel. Book-Eddie is deferential and almost timid. Movie-Eddie is downright adversarial. James Taggart is far too self-conscious to tolerate being questioned by a subordinate in that way. Movie-Eddie was noticeably off-putting and killed more than one scene.

All that aside, I highly recommend Atlas Shrugged! Whether you have read anything by Ayn or not, this is a good movie in and of itself. It hits the right notes, and projected at least a glimmer of the industrial-triumphalism that makes Rand satisfying at her best. I'm very pleased this did not abjectly suck, because I was not looking forward to hearing smug potshots from the mainstream, nor libertarians succumbing to denial and bending over backwards in apologizing for it.

Libya bet

2011-04-15T15:52:00.000-07:00

So the check I had to mail to Ireland finally cleared. Unfortunately at the time I first looked this up I was hoping to short-sell a market prediction of 79%. Now its only 58%, but still I suspect anything over even-money is too optimistic, so went ahead with the bet. I just sold one share to see how the interface works before committing any significant money.

Certainly 79% was ludicrous. We went into Iraq in 1991 with much more gusto than this, and Saddam stayed in power another 12 years. The military industrial complex has many self interested reasons to go into Libya, even probably with ground troops eventually, but these goals can be accomplished without removing Gadafi.

Free trade apologism

2011-04-14T23:33:00.000-07:00

This guy does not like free trade. Well, I do not like him.

Point 1- Free trade doesn't prevent a country from deliberately over-consuming and running trade deficits.

This is a highly nationalistic position that assumes it is inherently bad for the industries of country X to be owned by people from country Z. "Selling off existing assets" might be a viable strategy. Country Z might have a comparative advantage in management, while X specializes in labor. Z owned factories manned by Xian workers in Xland might result in highest overall output of the various combinations.

If a trade deficit is undesirable, then protectionist tariffs are a poor solution. This just hurts the purchasing power of an already under-producing nation. If there are ANY barriers to entry within the productive sectors, those should be eliminated first. Most likely a country running a trade deficit has some, if not multitudes of, government imposed dead weight losses on production, ie corporatist redistribution, nationalization, legally recognized cartels, etc. If ALL centralized controls are removed, and Xland is still experiencing a trade deficit, this implies one of two scenarios:

A) Xland currently has no capacity to produce at all, with or without government intervention, and is importing survival foodstuffs. Forced reduction in consumption by tariffs would be tantamount to a planned famine. If the country is taking on debt, its because the lenders expect Xland to eventually build infrastructure and make things.

B) Xland is producing, but truly living beyond their means. So yes, this is unsustainable, in that eventually bills have to be paid. The longer the deficit persists, a greater percentage of income is devoted to debt service, so a given over-consumption level becomes exponentially expensive. At some point, X-ians creditworthiness is called in to question and their consumption gets cut down to what they can really afford. There are no tariffs necessary to achieve this, because without government tax-and-spend, the only source of international credit are people who want to get paid back. Thus debt cannot rack up limitlessly.

Point 2 - Externalities

If Xland has unaccountable polluting factories, that is not Zland's problem. If on the world market, Xland is offering widgets for less than any other country, then if Zland singles out Xland products for a tarriff, that is punishing Z-ian standard of living, for Xland's crime.

If the X-ians are unable to sue their neighborhood factories for damages, they should at least get the proceeds of selling widgets to Zland out of the deal. Both parties are still better off internationally via free trade, even if internally, one country's citizens are being oppressed. Ideally, X-ians would be able to sue their government/industrialists and eliminate the externality, and then proceed to compete with appropriately priced widgets. However, in the absence of this right, its neither fair to X-ians nor Z-ians to prevent the sale of what is being made.

As for positive externalities, this seems to be an intellectual property argument? I've argued against IP at length. It seems like Mr. Fletcher is saying that Xland would be better off not selling any new-widgets to Zland, rather than risk selling some new-widgets to Zland and risking Zland become better at making new-widgets. I counter that any sales are better than zero. Also if X-ian producers are concerned about Z-ian reverse engineering, they can raise the price for new-widgets themselves voluntarily to reflect the value of the design. They do not need Xland government to do this for them.

Point 3 - Resources move slowly when economy changes

True, changing production strategies is non-instantaneous. However its unclear how this is free trade's fault. A centralized plan would either continue the low-value activity indefinitely, or be even slower at re-organizing capital and labor to the high-value task. Instituting tariffs only hides existing inefficiencies longer. Shielding domestic industries from foreign competition, muddles the price signal which would inform re-tooling decisions, and prolongs the transition period. Furthermore, a lot of malinvestment that busts and needs to be reallocated, was originally directed by government incentive. Ie the decreed low interest rates and legal quotas for unviable CRA mortgages that spurred excessive housing construction.

Point 4 - Free trade increases income inequality

This is a non-problem. Even if one's income remains static while the capitalists are improving, the mere fact that more production is occurring means that products on the whole are cheaper, so purchasing power is expanding.

Point 5 - Capital flight is somehow bad.

Fletcher claims that the ability to relocate capital abroad is bad domestically. Why would you invest in another country? Because they can offer better return than your homeland's opportunities. Emphasis on return. When Xian investors earn interest on investments in Zland, the GNP of Xland is increasing. If the best possible opportunity for Xland capital is to put it into Zland, then Xland is by definition worse off if its citizens' liquid assets are forced to stay home, via extra taxes on foreign investment or some such.

Also the ability to move capital across borders is pretty critically important as a check against kleptocrats, and less extreme government manipulations.

Point 6 - Comparative advantage theory is too concentrated on short term.

Fletcher makes an analogy to a secretary and a banker, who in the short term are best off by striving to be the best at their jobs, but in the long term, the secretary should be trying to become something other than a secretary.

Back to the international trade example. If Xland is currently a subsistence agriculture backwater, then free trade means that Zland can come build factories, (keeping most the profit of course, greedy villains that they are), bumping X-ians up to higher paying unskilled labor, and more products are imported (again thanks to free trade), Xland's standard of living increases, so percentage of population devoted to survival decreases, meaning labor becomes more diverse, and things like higher education, etc become affordable. Free trade will naturally upgrade both productive quality and quantity over time. However, this occurs over generations, and is easily derailed by autocrats playing massive negative sum games for the benefit of oligarchs. By being the best subsistence farmers and unskilled laborers they can, if allowed access to foreign investment and to keep their wages, X-ians will eventually build the tools necessary to advance.

Any attempt at intervention, via 'infant industries' or similar is only going to keep people in poverty longer, and further away economic independence; or is just redistribution from somewhere else, which means the global economy is slightly worse off on the margin.

Point 7 - When the economies of foreign trading partners improve, their labor becomes more expensive, and so too their goods.

So we shouldn't buy cheap stuff, because that will make the makers of the cheap stuff better off, and then their stuff won't be so cheap anymore?

Pretty horrendous argument. So instead, if Xland is currently the sweatshop paradise, Zland should:

Either pay more for the same stuff from Wland, or via tariff, or just go without and endure lower standard of living. This way Xland will remain trapped in low-paying labor indefinitely, so Zland can continue not enjoying their cheap goods.

Win for interventionism!

The Last Lieutenant

2011-04-13T01:00:00.000-07:00

The Last Lieutenant

This is a serious Norwegian movie from 1993 about their forebears feeble attempt to politely dissuade the Nazi army from taking an extended vacation in their territory in 1940. The story follows Esper Stormblade (seriously. I think.) a retired coast guard captain. He glares in grandfatherly disaproval as the Norwegian high command runs a tightly competitive race to surrender the fastest. If you know anything about WWII, you will comes across frequent references to "occupied Norway", but not much discussion of what effort it took to get that way. Answer: Very little.

Esper rounds up a bunch of naive farm boys and middle aged blue collar types and heads to the mountains to form La Resistance with lilting accents. He is very gruff and gives lots of good subtitled speeches throughout the movie, and manages to not be cliche.

They have 150 troops, and we see them undergoing some impromptu infantry training, and they're all nice guys. So nice in fact, on their very first guerilla ambush which goes perfectly, (except the part where they show up to soon and almost shoot a guy on a tractor) taking about twenty prisoners, killing maybe five Wehrmact in the process, with zero friendly casualties. Well Norway's finest are pretty shaken up by all this, and they dig graves with full honors and cry a bit. Then they go back to HQ, flirt with girls, read umlaut literature, and reminisce about how their fishing trawler almost got capsized last season. In short, these guys are desperately out of their element. This becomes readily apparent when one of their elite grunts cracks under the pressure of, gasp, guard duty, and lets all his POWs go. Outraged, Esper puts him in front of a firing squad, but at the last minute relents and gives a speech both shaming the perpetrator and admitting they are all in a shitty situation. At this point, Esper and his two right hand men sit down and begin to process all the dire warnings that their ex-superiors have been smugly dispatching while speeding away from any hint of front lines in a flurry of abandoned paperwork. Esper's little display of indignant patriotism got his team an easy cheap shot, but the real-deal fascist war machine is rolling through the countryside enroute. Esper is not a zealot. He does not want to march 150 productive citizens to slaughter. Esper decides to sleep on it, but the Luftwaffe makes up his mind for him with a quick bombing-run/wake-up-call. Forlornly, reality sets in and the men are disbanded and Esper literally sits alone in the road waiting for the tanks. Roll credits.

All right enough mockery. Americans have been spoonfed war movies for decades about heroic bravery and solemn determination and noble sacrifice, etc. Norwegians just wanted to live their lives. They didn't want to get killed and they didn't want to be a puppet state and they didn't want to have to kill anybody either. Its an impossible situation.

Last Lieutenant succeeds because its a war movie about people who don't want to fight in the first place, don't have a chance, come to realize it and give up before they all get massacred. Because thats what people do when they want to live to see tomorrow. They don't give cliched gung ho speeches and miraculously win because they care more, and if they have a choice in the matter, they try not to walk blindly into total death. So I found this to be a refreshing change to, "goodguys always win against impossible odds", or "goodguys martyr themselves for the cause", type war movies.

Wells Fargo Advises trust central bankers

2011-04-12T20:25:00.000-07:00

I went with the boss* to hear Wells Fargo Advisors CEO Danny Ludeman speak at Olin Business School last week. This began with a 20 minute long circle jerk of self congratulatory introductions between Wash U administrators, United Way spokesman, and our Wells Fargo community outreach specialist. If I transcribed every word spoken into the microphone that morning, highlighting every instance of the word "support", the page could be confused for a point blank blood splatter.
Ludeman's topic was pointlessly vague and content rife with platitudes. "We have to prepare for the future... without forgetting our roots in the past... which are rooted in the community... success comes from honesty and integrity..."
Typical corporate speaker tour patter. There were a few morsels of substance to be found. Ludeman commented that his company was getting more clients actively concerned about their retirement than ever before "because Social Security might be bankrupt in 20 years." Also Danny was pleased to report that the Great Recession is surely drawing to a close, as all economic indicators are up, up, including the savings rate now up to 5%, from 0% at height of the bubble.
After a lukewarm conclusion, again with redundant philanthropy cheerleading (why not tell us how you actually produce wealth before crowing about how great it is to give it away?), the floor was opened to questions. After going to dozens of these speeches and being used to having scruffy libertarians carefully screened out, I was shockingly called on first, amongst the packed auditorium.
I asked, verbatim, "What do you tell your clients when they ask about inflation risk? Its great that the savings rate is up to 5%, but if the government spends it for you and devalues your account, the economy is no better off."
Ludeman deferred to his "analysts and experts" but assured me the Wells Fargo team does not predict any dramatic inflation acceleration.
Oh. We're done here.
So SS is predictably going to be completely bankrupt by 2030 (optimistic), but down the street at the Federal Reserve, restraint will be maintained? What politician is going to tell the AARP, "sorry, no checks this month" and expect to be in office 31 days later? They will print whatever they have to! SS will be bailed out, and then bailed out, and then bailed out again, forever. And yes, this means inflation, hyper-actively.
Upon some further research, WF is no stranger to bailouts. Chairman Kovacevich refuses the crown three times, but in the end takes $25B of public money.
This guy Ludeman is thick with the central banking cartel and is taking his clients on the same long con.

*

I take grandma to one of our jobsites for progress pictures and scold some workers. Sorry John.

Tangled

2011-04-07T23:55:00.000-07:00

My roommate Mary is apparently a student of classic fairy tales, and brought a group to go see this. Not bad for Disney fare, but you're not missing much if you skip it. As usual, I have a few spoiler-laden questions and comments.

-Length of her hair varies really dramatically from like 20-30ft when shes running in foreground, to like 200-300ft in for example the canyon swing scene.

-If cutting Rapunzel's hair undoes all the healing she did on the witch, then shouldn't the male hero's palm gash reopen, and the queen keel over?

-It seems pretty clear that the witch had home-steaded the magic flower as a natural resource, and the king stole her property. Benefit of the doubt, the circumstances of the soldiers' discovery did not lend itself to thinking this flower had been cultivated by someone for 100+ years. Clearly, witch needed to confront the soldiers immediately and stake her claim before the irreplacable flower got ground up into a poultice. If she had, this could've ended with a tidy Coase theorem parable.

-Lastly, can Rapunzel self de-age? If Rapunzel is herself going to age normally and die, then the witch is just buying herself another 60 years or so, which I guess is worth fighting for, but not an immortality strategy. In any case, what does the witch get out of all this? She is just living for its own sake, with no ambition? She has already lived a Gollum-like existence in a forest lean-to for over a century, and then she's just going to sit in a tower for as many more decades as possible? She's not even making canny compound interest investments!

Professor Chomps

2011-04-06T01:00:00.000-07:00

This video is a few years old, but I still see it making the rounds.

My response

"there was rising standard of living in slave societies"

Everyone who participated in the industrial revolution at all was obviously categorically better off in 1900 than in 1800, whether they had slavery or not. Also, every slave society who did not industrialize (Sudan, Persia, etc) improved very little. Clearly the dominant variable for standard of living increases during this time period was industrialization, and slavery had marginal influence.

"substantial economic growth under Stalin"

During Stalin's reign, USSR gdp/cap went from $1370 to $3050. Meanwhile USA went from $6500 to $10200 over that period. In the 1953-1989 period, USSR went from $3050 to $7100. USA went from $10,200 to $23,500. So in terms of growth rate, its true they did ok. Also keep in mind that meanwhile we did not have millions of people starve to death.

"Russia went to 3rd world because of capitalist reforms"

Extreme logical fallacy. Russia is 3rd world because communist self-loot economy utterly collapsed. Capitalist reform is the only thing that kept them from completely nose diving Cambodia style.

"same is true of Cuba"

From 1959 to 2003, Cuban gdp/cap has skyrocketed from $2000 to $2300 in a mere 44 years. An amazing .0034% growth rate.

"US has illegaly withdrawn from WTO"

If only it were true.

"blah, blah Castro wanted autonomy, scaring Kennedy's advisors"

Fine, we shouldn't meddle with Latin American governments. You will not find me ever arguing for interventionism.

Chomps never denies that capitalism has improved standard of living, so theres nothing solid to refute here.

Lastly, while its true Russian gdp/cap did crash pretty hard in the 90s, they are now growing 3x faster than the Stalin era. Also this figure is based on total average of all former Soviet satelite states, so the numbers are weighted down by places like Tajikistan which have devolved into medieval theocracies. Some of the more western places like Latvia and Estonia barely suffered at all, and are better off now than in 1989.

As for Stalin's allegedly positive impact, its important to realize how completely WWI devastated Russia. Doing anything other than running 24/7 human meat grinders, would have produced the same startling statistical upswing. In 1922 (Stalin's inauguration) industrial output was 13% of what it was in 1914. Due to Stalin's belligerence and general world antipathy to communism, foreign investment was nil. So Stalin financed the rush-industrial strategy by restricting citizen consumption (read: 100% taxes and reduced rations) and reinvesting what would have been wages into state-organized industrial construction. By 1933 real wages were down to 10% of the pre-Stalin rate. Then WW2 happened and FDR saved the day, pumping billions into Soviet economy via Lend-Lease, and giving Stalin massive new playpen in Eastern Europe to drain.

Professor Chomps is anarcho-communist, and speaks well against government in general. Even given his Soviet-apologism, Noam is way, way more tolerable than say Ralph Nader, as aging far-left intelectuals go.

Vote April 5th

2011-04-05T21:25:00.000-07:00

There is no better expression of Murphy's Law than being a libertarian invested in American politics. Everything always goes wrong. The worse option is always pursued. The status quo is never upset. The good guy always loses. The freshest example is today's defeat of Jesse Irwin, who I have gotten to know in the past three weeks, and helped canvassing on three different occasions. Irwin lost 70:30, which sounds like a landslide, but to be fair, if I knew nothing specific about this campaign, and heard that a 29 year old first time candidate with no name recognition was running as a Republican in St. Louis City, I'd predict the outcome more like 98:2. 30% is a respectable threat. Vollmer realized he was actually in a race before it was too late, and pulled in favors with the unions and the half century old Democratic machine. This is a venerable apparatus that is hard to ambush.
The 10th Ward Alderman race may not have been the Earth-shattering opening salvo I was hoping for, but the potential for a Ron-Paul-Republican renaissance in the City is not impossibly out of reach. Jesse Irwin isn't going away. And I am just arriving.

EDH vs Vintage

2011-04-04T01:00:00.000-07:00

My roommate, ex-Pro Tourist Josh Smith, got the idea in his head lately we should stop killing time with the godawful Commander format, and get back in to Vintage which has >0 opportunities to achieve those precious tokens of geek glory, of course top8 appearances. Never one to say no to the format of kings, this has sat well with me.

Oh you enjoy Commander/EDH? Allow me to crush your happiness. First of all, its supposed to be a multiplayer format. This is automatically terrible, because magic players are impatient people, more so than the general population. Waiting for your opponent to finish their turn is the most boring part of magic. So triple that.

I've played a smattering of four player EDH. I wish I had brought along some pornography.

Then there is the banned list compiled by people who have done things so wrong for so long that laborious retarded spells like Biorhythm are not only successfully resolved once, but so often to be deemed a problem. But not Oath of Druids, a 2c card that is pretty much EBT win-the-game; more so when there's two extra players to provide creature triggers. Or Ad Nausea/Necropotence with 40 life, or Yawgmoth's Will in general, etc.

Granted, the Ban list got a little saner when they added Academy and Channel, of course for the wrong reasons, but nonetheless, combo has gotten a little slower, in that the non-Oath plans are definitely less reliable now. This requires playing a little more defense and a narrower focus on setting up the Oath win. It is now the case that a very streamlined disruption deck that can match counter for threat the whole game through, is a fair match up (ie creature-light Sygg, with disciplined card choices). Notice I said 'fair', not favorable.

Banning Rofellos and Braids though is annoying, since those were actually Tier 1 competitors (well, Rofellos definitely) to 5c degeneracy.

If you're just dropping Tarmogoyf and building up to your Dragon or whatever, ie 95% of the decks out there, its still an utter cake-walk. Even a dedicated counterspell deck will be marginal challenge unless it has a cheap engine to significantly outdraw combo, AND provide a permanent hurdle like Counterbalance or Arcane Lab-ish things. Just having a lot of counterspells is insufficient, if the rest of the deck is just creatures or overcosted cool stuff.

I also detest this attitude that the purpose of EDH is to somehow elevate "casual play". If you aren't making the most efficient possible decks in the card pool, or attacking a metagame posture, you are not casual, you are lazy. If you find a cool, yet impractical interaction, you can tell your friends, "hey look what happens if you were to somehow get these two junk rares in play together" and they will acknowledge your clever theory, and then you can play some real magic, without having to waste time contriving a series of shitty drawn out games where maybe that theory might be pathetically demonstrated.

Anyway, I'm providing my list at end of this post. This is a recent overhaul in order to beat the dedicated hate from Sygg one-on-one, abandoning the pretense of preparing for multi-player matches.

Leaving this fool's errand behind, been testing Vintage with the current crop of tier decks. First up was old Iona combo Oath vs one of the new generic blue decks, and then Oath vs Cobra Gush. There seems to be a core list of 45 overlapping cards in all these varieties, and then a pool of about 60 cards which you can pick from at random to be the rest of your deck and sideboard, and do fine.

Despite all these decks running a good collection of counters, it feels strangely uninteractive. We're both just ignoring each other as much as possible in the race to assemble Vault-Volt. Turn 1 tinker for Myr Battlesphere? So you're attacking for lethal on turn 3, and probably done contributing to the game in the mean time; bet on me.

Time Vault is a disaster!

It wins from all but the most tortuous narrow positions at negligible investment. It makes stupendous enemy board positions just freeze harmlessly like the tsunami at the end of The Abyss. It makes all these others highly efficient strategies look like they're spinning gears next to just playing a couple tutors or drain into Tezeret.

*Sliver Queen
badland
bayou
bazaar baghdad
boseiju shelters all
breeding pool
city brass
drowned catacomb
exotic orchard
flood strand
forbidden orchard
gemstone mine
island
maze ith
misty rainforest
overgrown tomb
poluted delta
reflecting pool
savanah
scalding tarn
tarnished citadel
tropical island
tundra
underground sea
verdant catacomb
volcanic island
watery grave
wood foothill
chrome mox
lotus petal
mana crypt
mox diamond
mox opal
ancestral vision
pact negation
mana vault
sensei diving top
dark ritual
duress
thoughtseize
imperial seal
vampiric tutor
carpet flower
eladamri vineyard
mirri guile
nature claim
brainstorm
chain vapor
dispel
mystic remora
mystical tutor
ponder
preordain
sleight hand
enlighten tutor
orim chant
silence
defense grid
felwar stone
helm awakening
isochron scepter
scroll rack
manamorphose
cabal ritual
demon tutor
tainted pact
flash of insight
skeletal scrying
krosan reclamation
oath druid
regrowth
seal primordium
sylvan library
ancient grudge
recoup
abeyance
ray revelation
nostalgic dream
mana drain
muddle mixture
ensnaring bridge
vedalken shackle
firespout
yawgmoth will
city solitude
krosan grip
wheel fortune
timetwister
grim tutor
phyrexian arena
holistic wisdom
necropotence
fact fiction
damnation
ad nauseam
tendrils agony
cadaverous bloom
future sight
time spiral
tidespout tyrant

Red Scorpion

2011-04-03T15:53:00.000-07:00

I was reading about lobbyists and the notorious Jack Abramoff scandal on Wikipedia and discovered to my shock that before he founded the unbelievably sucessful business venture of Lying Inc, Mr. Abramoff had delusions of Hollywood grandeur in the mid 80s. Im guessing he got invited to some swanky parties on Sunset Blvd, snorted a few too many lines, and had an epiphany that he was born to be a script writer.

Money gets you what you want, so Abramoff's pet project was greenlighted by an obscure South African film company, and the end result was RED SCORPION starring DOLPH LUNDGREN!

I actually saw this movie when I was ~13, obviously unaware at the time, along with the rest of the world, the irony of seeing "A Jack Abramoff Production" in the opening credits. I stopped at two different video stores, but neither had Abramoff's one hit wonder in stock. So I torrented it and 19hrs later was set to relive some childhood memories through a very different lens.

Red Scorpion is a near carbon-copy of Rambo 3, with the twist of telling the story from the Russian perspective. It opens in the basement of a Johannesburg office building, aka the "Soviet Command Center". A white haired Red Army hardliner is ranting about the slow progress in their mission to spread the revolution to a fictional African country. Ignoring large poetic license taken in depicting African geography, is almost certainly a stand-in for Botswana.

Dolph, playing himself as a Spetsnaz operative, is summoned before his sinister superiors and ordered to assassinate Sudata, the anti-communist insurgent leader. Dolph asks for a picture, but could have just been told "kill the first black guy you see wearing wire-rim glasses". The Russians have conveniently captured Sudata's right-hand-man. Perhaps my ears decieve me, but I swear they introduce him as Kunta Kinte (so Toby). Dolph is choppered in to the Soviet forward base in Afro-Narnia and within hours has executed a gratuitously violent good-cop-bad-cop plan to get himself arrested by the local base commander and imprisoned along side Toby. They are quickly joined by a Danny DeVito-esque American journalist covering the occupation, with all due professional objectivity. Scratch that, he screams endless hatred for all things USSRish in every scene.

Droopy face thug Leon from Blade Runner is their warden and enters the cell to demand Devito-lite teach him how to operate the American tape recorder he just confiscated like 2 minutes ago, and has already given up. Toby is used to doomed causes and creates a scuffle, even though there are two guys with shotguns in the room. But Dolph has an ulterior motive to not be passive and surprise drops these extras like they were Apollo Creed with brain damage.

Enduring relentless vitriol from Devito, the reluctant allies manage to sneak out of their apparently sound-proof holding cell still echoing with 12guage blasts, and stowaway on one of those ever-present Axis-of-Evil covered trucks.

They are discovered at the next checkpoint and a lukewarm desert car chase ensues. I lold when Devito leaned out the passenger window, haphazardly fires a sawed-off at a pursuing half-track and the thing instantly fireballed in one hit. Unnecessary. So after some mandatory clinging to truck sides/roofs while under fire, they ditch their pursuers and lead the Russkis to believe they have perished in a cliff fall. While continuing on foot, Toby gleefully extols the virtues of the village over the next rise, who are wonderfully hospitable and ethnic and exemplify everything thats right about traditional African culture. Cue smoldering ruins. How awkward, Mr. Spetsnaz.

They make it to the ragtag rebel camp without further incident. Look, they may not have matching uniforms or guns, darn it, but they are so very determined. "The land speaks to us", also, "it must be returned to the people". Sudata, the man responsible for this remarkable philosophy, makes his appearance. Dolph manages to avoid openly slavering at the mouth and keep his cover. As night falls, Dolph inner-turmoils a little, but works out his confusion by imprinting his knuckles on sheet metal and chanting Red Army drill cadences. Confidence in mission restored, Dolph uber-sneaks into Sudata's tent on Operation Stab Darky, but Sudata didn't become Insurgent Commander for nothing, and Dolph slashes only lumpy blankets. The gig is up and Dolph is pistol whipped and left for the Russians, while Devito jumps up and down and shrieks I TOLD YOU SO. For the audience, this is a major turning point in the movie, because its the last scene in which Dolph is wearing pants. Its short-shorts from here on out.

Shackled in the local Gulag, Dolph is browbeaten by Hard-Liner, and then turned over to the Cuban attache. For some reason Hard-Liner is not telling the Cubans about Dolph's real mission, but then puts them in charge of executing him? So of course they leap at this opportunity to educate themselves in most awful fashion possible. Cuban Steve Buscemi starts performing Depraved Heart Acupuncture on poor Dolph, but gets too close to gloat and suddenly has a broken neck. So heres a valuable lesson for torturing Russian circus strongmen for information, who are going to be executed immediately after. Step 1: cut off hands.

Cut to the SECOND brutal desert trek of the movie. Dolph colapses on a dune, and ducks roving helicopter spot lights, but his haste has led him to inadvertantly stumble into a scorpion nest. This accident leads into a 20 minute sequence with Dolph being discovered unconscious by a klick-klick bushman, nursed back to health, taught to hunt warthogs via spear, makes fair-trade sandals, takes a vision quest, gets a tribal tattoo, and comes out the other end a humbled and changed man. Keep in mind the going-native process is a substantial chunk of the movie, and I think you'll agree with me, this absolutely called for about a 90 second montage, maybe set to Toto, yes?

Meanwhile, the Soviets have performed a tactically brilliant poison gas strike on the stone age tribe and their strategic sharp stick cache. Fully disillusioned by this pointless genocide against people who are not even aware of the Russians existence, Dolph tosses his dog tags and returns to the rebel base, just as Sudata is succumbing to mortal wounds sustained off camera. Over-ruling Devito's fanatical anti-Russian complaints, both Sudata and Toby recognize the authority of the Red Scorpion tattoo and put Dolph in charge of the whole eclectic army.

Cut to the opening salvo of a long Revolutionary Spirit car alarm frontal assault, with Dolph wading into the thick of close quarters machine gun battle, kitted out with multiple assault rifles, but still the short-shorts. Every shot without Dolph in frame could have been directly lifted from Rambo 3. After some arbitrary feats of strength and ridiculous action melee cliches, Dolph corners Hard-Liner and lays down his bitter accusation. Hard-Liner keeps up the pretense of political righteousness, "We're here to liberate an oppressed people." To which Dolph exqusitely ripostes, "but who are really the oppressors?". BURN.

Dolph walks away in disgust, but of course Hard-Liner shakily draws his sidearm, and Dolph whirls after ten paces and blows him to smithereens. Credits roll to the sound of Little Richard with machine guns sampled as percussion. Seriously.

So Jack, if you could do it all over again, which do you regret more: ripping off your lobbying clients for $80 million, or creating RED SCORPION?

Perfect Magic Part 3: Legacy

2011-04-02T22:10:00.000-07:00

After agonizing over the intricacies of trying to get to player A's mainphase in Legacy with a full grip or at least more cards than B, and denying B access to spirit guides, while not sacrificing any Serum slots, Kyle Walton suggested Land Grant as another Serum Powder type effect to lock out enemy options. This turns out to be a quite elegant solution which removes almost all of B's ability to interact.

Player A activates Serum Powder when its his first mulligan decision, exiling [Serum Powder, Gemstone Caverns, Force of Will, Commandeer, Foil, Disrupting Shoal, Mindbreak Trap]
Then A gets first opportunity to make turn 0 plays, and drops Leyline of Anticipation. Player B can drop Void and/or Sanctity, doesn't matter.
With first priority of the game, A announces Land Grant and reveals the other five cards in his hand to be [Elvish Spirit Guide, Simian Spirit Guide, Dark Ritual, Ad Nauseam, Grapeshot]. This very neatly denies any possibility of B using mana, without having to bend over backwards to use the mana first in upkeep and maintain card parity, sans Ancestral Recall.
The only free counters left are Misdirection and Pact of Negation, so Land Grant resolves and A searches up Bayou. With Ad Nas and a win condition both accounted for in A's hand, theres not a lot B could do with pitch spells in response to Land Grant that matter. B could use Soul Spike pitching Cabal Ritual and Nourishing Shoal->Autocthon Wurm to get up to 38 life in face of incoming Tendrils, or attempt to Misdirect A's enchantment removal from Sanctity to Void, pitching Pact. Both of these are easily overcome by devoting an extra mana to 1c counterspell. Or take some extra damage to draw Abolish, Plains and Misdirection on Ad Nas.
A goes to mainphase, plays his land and mana, casts Ad Nas, drawing every non-land zero drop in magic which is free 40+ storm. With mana from Chrome Mox, Mox Diamond, Lotus Petal and Mox Opal, A has enough to Erase the Leyline, REB the Misdirection, and Grapeshot for super-lethal.

Interestingly, if A doesn't know the system, B has access to the exact same plays. If A doesn't Serum Powder, then B has to either do it himself on the hope A won't Leyline into Land Grant, or keep all the free counters available to disrupt A. If A neither Serums nor drops blue leyline, then B can do both and win in the same way, just substituting Lotus Petal for Grapeshot, because he won't be able to play the land. This just means B would have to take a little extra damage drawing one more red ritual and Grapeshot off Ad Nas.

Perfect Magic Part 2: Vintage

2011-04-01T16:16:00.000-07:00

After discussing this concept thoroughly, it appears I was barely scratching the surface of the complexity in my first post. My first insight is the major impact of Serum Powder on this thought experiment. Also discovered that counter-intuitively, the smaller the card pool, the more complicated this becomes, because less opportunity for starting player to control their opponent's options. A few clarifications.
-These should be treated as 60 card decks.
-Cards are only declared as having a definite status when its doing something. Players can't just say they have X in hand at any time to deny the opponent using that card.

I'm going to first demonstrate a solution for Vintage, before tackling the very much harder than expected problem of solving Legacy.

Leyline of Anticipation creates a lot of uncontainable variations, by effectively changing the starting player at cost of a card, so A will eliminate that in the Serum stack. Additionally Gemstone Caverns opens up a ton of options for B, so that also needs to be sniped. The remaining question is whether either player can make use of the 2xspirit guide->manamorphose plan in upkeep. If B can put it to use, then A needs to either 1) allow it to happen if its survivable, 2) use manamorphose first, 3) put manamorphose in the Serum stack. However only six cards other than Serum itself can be banned in this way, and if Anticipation and Caverns are already must-eliminate, that leaves progressively more free counters at B's disposal. Without Anticipation and Cavern, the only way for B to make mana is via Spirit Guides, which could turn into Pyretic/Desperate Ritual and Shimmer Myr and allow Chalice of the Void with 2 remaining cards, which shuts off all the copious mana and Pact of Negation. Or undisrupted, B could turn Pyretic into Seething Song, into Manamorphose, Ad Nauseam, with 2 cards left over. And even if unable to win at instant speed, B can draw all the artifact mana and cheapest win conditions to deny them to A and win on the following turn. Even without Manamorphose, B could use spirit guides for things like Pyroblast and Autumn's Veil and generally being annoying. So A has to be able to either stop this, or find a way to use spirit guides/morphose itself, or consign morphose to Serum exile.
If A executes the same plan and puts Ad Nauseam on the stack with two cards left in upkeep, there will always be more free counters for B than can be put away with Serum. For example with this Serum stack:

[Serum Powder, Gemstone Cavern, Force of Will, Disrupting Shoal, Mindbreak Trap, Misdirection, Leyline of Anticipation]
B will Commandeer the Ad Nas, pitching Pact of Negation and Foil, leaving A defenseless.
If A tries to use Spirit Guides for a less all-in plan, for example to Manamorphose into Ancestral Recall floating U, then if B attempts to Commandeer he pitches Pact Negation, and either Foil or Disrupt. If B picks Foil, then A Disrupts, and B is out of the counter war, with hand count at 7 to 4 in A's favor. If B pitches Disrupt, then A either has to Dispel or Foil. If A Dispel's then B will Foil the Dispel, letting Commandeer resolve, so final hand count is 3 to 4 in B's favor. If A Foils then its 4 to 4 with a mana in pool for A and no more free counters. Foil will pitch any island and either Soul Spike as priority unless B has already used it, or Vine Dryad. A can use the extra mana to cycle Quicken, which puts yard count up to 6, in case Cabal Ritual is necessary.
If B has already Soul Spiked, exiling Dark Ritual and Ad Naseam, then B should have 1 card in hand, and A will turn his 4 cards into Black Lotus, Time Vault, Voltaic Key, Tolarian Academy.
If B keeps his 4 cards, then A has to worry about Abolish, so will make his 4 cards Black Lotus, Dark Ritual, Ad Nauseam, Tendrils of Agony.
If B doesn't fight over Ancestral, then A goes to main phase 7 cards to 7 with Commandeer, Pact, Foil, Daze and Disrupt all still in the mix. B doesn't have a chance, because A drops U-Sea into Black Lotus, for Dark Ritual, into Ad Nauseam, w 3 cards left. If B Commandeers pitching Daze and Disrupt, A casts Pact, B Foils pitching Nix and Dispel, but still loses to A's Force Spike and another card. If B lets Ancestral through and uses Soul Spike to eliminate Ad Nas and Ritual, its the same set of alternatives where A sets up Vault-Volt and has enough mana to counter either Abolish or Foil with whatever is left of the the 1c counters.
B can respond to Manamorphose in upkeep by casting Vine Dryad pitching Protean Hulk, and then Snapback on the Dryad pitching Ancestral. In this case A resolves Manamorphose and recoups some card advantage by casting Dark Ritual into Meditate, which would bring A back up to 7 cards to B's Vine Dryad in hand plus 3 others, which is a clear win as shown above. If B has also Soul Spiked exiling Dark Ritual and Ad Nas, then B's only card in hand is Vine Dryad, and A will spend the UB on Perilous Research and go into mainphase with 6 cards to 0.
B's best play is to attempt Commandeering the Manamorphose, and gain the mana and extra card, which would be quite a coup. If B pitches Foil and Pact Negation, then he definitely gets the Morphose, and will cast Ancestral Recall and Orim's Chant, meaning A just has to play Island and pass with 3 cards to B's 7 after draw step. This is a disaster. The conclusion is that Commandeer is too dangerous to leave in B's hand, so put that in the Serum stack and let B have Misdirection. That means B can either Foil the Manamorphose, dumping Pact, which A will Misdirect pitching Snapback. Or B lets Manamorphose resolve in order to attempt to Misdirect the Recall, pitching Pact, but A will use the other mana from morphose to cast a 1c counter. In the former case, A ends counter war with 5 to 4 cards. In latter 6 to 5. In both cases there will be no more free counterspells. If B lets Recall resolve then its 7 to 7 and the same plays work as shown above. Once A is in main phase, the Vintage artifact mana is totally overpowering.
So this should be a locked solution tree for Type 1 card pool. To summarize:

-A begins game by activating Serum Powder to exile itself, Gemstone Cavern, Force of Will, Disrupting Shoal, Mindbreak Trap, Commandeer, and Leyline of Anticipation.
-As soon as A has first priority he will exile both Simian Spirit Guide and Elvish Spirit Guide and put Manamorphose on the stack. B will lose any attempted counterwar and/or be down a lot of cards trying to pitch-spell Recall out of the game.
-A will resolve Ancestral Recall and be either at 5 to 4, 6 to 5, or 7 to 7 cards depending how B attempted to disrupt. If B pitches Ancestral, A will Perilous Research and be at 6 to 3, or 4 to 0 if B tries to counter.
-A will use Black Lotus et al to easily get 5 mana for Ad Nauseum, unless B has used pitch spells to eliminate this option, in which case A puts together Time Vault + Voltaic Key with counter back up.

Legacy is exponentially more complicated, and Standard I don't even know where to start, since your opponent actually gets a turn. In Extended Gregg discovered a turn 1 kill if we waive the restriction on not duplicating cards. Memnite, Accorder's Shield, Mox Opal, Mountain, Pyretic Ritual, Manamorphose into URR, Tome Scour target self milling 4xVengevine, Goblin Bushwhacker kicked for 24 damage. Unfortunately this loses to the 4x Mindbreak Traps the opponent is holding. That combo is almost Standard legal except for the Manamorphose. In Standard one could cast Memnite, Accorder's Shield, Mox Opal, Mountain, Pyretic Ritual, Burning Inquiry discarding 3xVengevine, Goblin Bushwhacker kicked for 19 damage. Unfortunately then your opponent gets 8 cards which means he can do the same thing except insert another Memnite before the Bushwhacker and deal 21 back vs your all tapped team.

After spending way too much time thinking about this, I sense I am close to an optimal Legacy solution, but there are still some loose ends to be resolved before I post Part 3.

Perfect Magic

2011-03-31T01:00:00.000-07:00

Here's a Magic card thought experiment. Both players have a hand full of wild cards. Any card in hand is whatever they want it to be. Once a card is declared it can't be used again by either player, ala mental magic. A card remembers what it is if it changes zone after being declared, ie bouncing an Island to Daze means if you go down to one card in hand, its stuck as an Island. If you put a known card back on top with Brainstorm, its still there to be drawn. For simplicity we'll assume that if a declared card gets shuffled into the library it ceases to exist, meaning if you draw a card subsequently, it could be declared as the thing shuffled back again. Legacy card pool only. If you cast Cabal Therapy or similar, the opponent gets to decide whether or not they have that card in hand, but if they don't, they can't declare it until they draw another card.

Is there a way to guarantee the player going first (or second) wins? After lots of experimentation, it seems the optimal strategy is a race to resolve Ad Nauseam. Since you declare each card as it comes up, you control exactly how much damage you take, and then have overwhelming resources. One of the key tactical considerations is using pitch spells to control your opponent's options.

Starting player A plays Underground Sea, Chrome Mox imprinting Force of Will, Dark Ritual, Cruel Bargain, with 2 cards left. Then player B casts Disrupting Shoal exiling Meditate. Player A Spell Pierce with the Mox. Player B exiles Simian Spirit Guide and Elvish Spirit Guide to pay for Pierce. Player A bounces his U-Sea for Daze. B lets Daze resolve, then with his last three cards Commandeers pitching Misdirection and Foil. Now A has just a U-Sea in hand and Mox in play, and B has 4 cards after his draw step. There are numerous ways this becomes Ad Nas, but I would play City of Traitors, Lions Eye Diamond, Lotus Petal, cycle Street Wraith, in response break LED for BBB, drawing Ad Nas, and cast it, leaving the Petal still available. Then you can draw Sorrow's Path, Mox Diamond, Mox Opal, Cabal Ritual, Zuran Orb, Mishra's Bauble, Urza's Bauble, Tendrils of Agony; going to 4, and cast lethal Tendrils.

Lets try again. Player A begins, but B plays Gemstone Cavern exiling Daze. A is afraid of playing into this open mana, and goes for something different. A plays Tropical Island, Manabond, goes to end step and drops Wasteland, Ancient Tomb, Island, Snow covered Island, Horizon Canopy. The plan here is to Canopy into Last Word for whatever B attempts, on the assumption B will only be able to get off one card advantage spell. But B is smart and sets up for Ad Nas and just Stifles A's Canopy draw and goes off.

B starts with Caverns->Daze again. Of all the free counters, Daze helps A the most, since he will be the only player with an Island, and a land in hand could become fodder for Foil eventually. A plays Seat of the Synod, Lotus Petal, Mox Opal. Taps Opal for Dark Ritual, Cruel Bargain with 2 cards left. B casts Mindbreak Trap. A taps Synod for Pierce. B taps Cavern and exile a spirit guides, so Pierce resolves with no effect. By still having another spirit guide available, this prevents A from using the card-neutral Disrupt with his other mana. Instead A has to use Petal to Dispel the Mindbreak. B still has 3 cards left, so lets the Dispel resolve, and again Commandeers the Bargain ftw. But if instead A does use Disrupt, then B pays for it with the other spirit guide, so the Mindbreak resolves, leaving A to pass the turn with empty hand and tapped artifact land. B has 3 cards after draw step, so uses the [City Traitors, LED, Street Wraith] plan to go off with Ad Nas. A rule we learn here is that anytime a player has +3 cards over the opponent with an empty stack, is effectively a win.

The problem seems to be that A must use too many cards generating mana for his business spell, and there are too many free counters for B to sit on. So maybe A's best option is to just make a land drop and pass the turn. After all, if B can win defensively with 5 cards to A's 7 in the Cavern scenario. Then A should be able to win defensively at 6 to 6.

So B starts with Caverns->Daze, A just plays U-Sea and Mishra's Bauble, activates it and passes. Endstep, B casts Funeral Charm on discard mode. A lets that happen, so after B's draw step, both have 5 cards. B plays City Traitors and casts Manamorphose floating 1. A Pierces, B spends his 1 and exiles a spirit guide. Now its 4 cards to 2 in A's favor, with morphose still on the stack. If A commits to countering the morphose, he can Force pitching Misdirection, and B has to protect his card draw so will Disrupting Shoal pitching Future Sight. A lets that resolve and then B with zero cards in hand spends his Manamorphose mana and draw to Night's Whisper, which is now his 3rd spell of the turn so A can Mindbreak and be left with a card and tapped island to B's empty hand and tapped 3 mana. On his turn, A draw steps up to 2 cards which become Ancient Tomb and Meditate. Against an empty hand this becomes Lotus Petal, Dark Ritual, Cabal Ritual, Ad Nauseam. A's graveyard is Bauble, random card to Funeral Charm, Force of Will, Spell Pierce, Mindbreak, so after Petal and Dark Ritual, Cabal has threshold, which gives a black floating after Ad Nas, ftw.
Back up a step, if B had led with Night Whisper instead of the Manamorphose, then A couldn't Mindbreak and the other 2for1 counters have been used. B casts Lotus Petal and passes with one card. A draw steps up to 3 cards and plays Vault of Whispers and targets self with Sign in Blood. B breaks Petal to Disrupt. A exiles the remaining Spirit Guide and draws 2. A has to pass, dangerously since there's no more useful 1 card free mana and no more 2for1 counters. B draws his one card with 3 total mana, one of any color. Meditate seems best, but Mindbreak is still available to A, and he has to go off here with only 4 cards total and Petal has been used. Instead B casts Pain's Reward, B is at 18 from Night Whisper and A is at 17 from Sign in Blood and Force of Will, so B immediately bids 16, going to 2. Now he can Chrome Mox imprint Mindbreak Trap and play Crystal Vein, sacking into Meditate. Keeping the chain going, B pitches Sorrow's Path to Mox Diamond, cast Dark Ritual for Cruel Bargain, going to 1. With these 4, B casts Mox Opal, Tinder Wall, sacking for RR, Manamorphose into 2 black and a 5th card, then Cabal Ritual with threshold and Tendrils of Agony for 22.
Maybe instead of Sign in Blood, A should play Drowned Catacomb and pass with 2 cards and UU available. Then B starts his mainphase with untapped Cavern, Traitors, Petal and 2 cards. B casts Pain's Reward, A casts Envelop, B casts Dispel which resolves, A casts Force Spike countering Pain. Now its A's turn and he can Sign in Blood, and play Gemstone Mine with one card left. If B tries to Meditate, A will Red Elemental Blast. Then A has 3 mana and 1 card on his next mainphase vs B's empty hand and thus Cruel Bargain, and there's still enough acceleration left to go off.

Magic is a very complex game. Is there a way to guarantee that A will win? A flowchart of relevant possible counter moves B can use and how they are overcome?
Theres two main branches, games where B holds 7 cards into A's first mainphase, and games where B starts with Gemstone Cavern, and if so, what card he exiles. Daze seems right, but depending on A's optimal plan, it might be something else, perhaps even Ad Naseum, though we've demonstrated above that chaining draw4s is sufficient for lethal Tendrils. It might be worth exploring other methods of winning like Show and Tell or Entomb+Reanimate on Iona. Using Orim's Chant/Silence/Abeyance as a must counter starting spell might be a way to force opponent to 2for1 themselves out of the game. The games seem to be decided rather quickly, but Ancestral Vision might be an option if can play conservatively enough. Dredge?
Theres also some interesting engines like Predict milling Deep Analysis. Standstill and Ideas Unbound are big card advantage if they work. Shared Discovery is unlikely to be castable, but if one were to incidentally get say Basking Rootwalla, Narcomoeba and Bloodghast, etc in play through other efficient means, its broken. Chain of Smog could lead to interesting decisions.
I will explore this further and post again.

Lists of some notable cards:

Free Counterspells = Pact of Negation, Force of Will, Misdirection, Disrupting Shoal, Mindbreak Trap, Commandeer, Foil, Thwart

Free Mana = Elvish Spirit Guide, Simian Spirit Guide, Lotus Petal, Mox Diamond, Mox Opal, Chrome Mox

Draw4 for 3c = Meditate, Cruel Bargain, Infernal Contract, Pain's Reward, Trade Secret

Draw3 = Standstill, Ideas Unbound, Ancestral Vision, Shared Discovery

Draw2 = Night Whisper, Sign in Blood, Predict, Deep Analysis, Thoughtcast, Perilous Research, Scarscale Ritual, Skulltap

Draw many = Ad Nauseam, Future Sight, Diminishing Returns

Relevant 1c Counterspells = Spell Pierce, Disrupt, Force Spike, Dispel, Nix, Red Elemental Blast, Pyroblast, Envelop, Guttural Response, Mana Tithe, Spell Snare, Stifle, Ricochet Trap, Divert

Mana Acceleration = City of Traitors, Ancient Tomb, Crystal Vein, Dark Ritual, Cabal Ritual, Tinder Wall, Rite of Flame, Seething Song, Eladamri's Vineyard, Pyretic Ritual, Desperate Ritual

Zardoz

2011-03-30T02:00:00.000-07:00

Saw this allegedly cult classic bit of 70's British sci-fi cheese. While certainly bizarre, was more enjoyable and comprehensible than I had been led to believe. Still definitely a waste of time, but not quite the impenetrable wall of surreal nonsense I've heard it described. Spoilers.

Zardoz has easily the strangest opening ever filmed. A party of red-speedo clad savages on horseback, follow a house-sized floating stone head (the titular Zardoz) until it exhorts them to cull the local population and commands abstinence, with specific anatomical terms. Then a literal fountain of firearms vomits out for their use. After some celebratory shots in the air, the camera focuses on one particular zealot: Sean Connery at the nadir of his career.

The backstory claims that Western civilization descended into a dark age before 1990, and the world's scientific elite retreated into some number of force-field protected villages in rural England. There they invented an AI called Tabernacle, which became intelligent enough to solve the problem of aging for them, and can reconstruct them if they suffer physical trauma. Also, they somehow gained Evil Eye psychic powers, and other New-Agey futurist tropes.

Thus the scientists became immortal hedonists, and occasionally create religions for the illiterate outside world to have wars over, to keep the population at a less threatening number. Domestically, they have simple cultivation and processing and trade with the other Eternal villages, with the giant stone head idols pulling double duty as cargo caravans.

But of course theres always trouble in paradise. When has fiction ever depicted happy immortals? They are unable to build new force-fields for villages, and have maxed the carrying capacity of their existing territory. With no death, not even suicide, there's no opportunity for population growth. The same small community has been increasingly bored with each other for centuries, and not even gratuitously topless shepherding is worth noticing anymore. Tabernacle erased their memory of how to destroy itself, upon their initial request, foreshadowing exactly what they would eventually want to do.

So they bicker and find reasons to single each other out for group-think punishment, which is actually the movie's cleverest bit. Every crime is punished by aging. A few months for an assault, up to decades for a subversive coup attempt. Violate the social code often enough, and end up trapped in deathless senility. To make matters worse a plague of apathy is spreading through their tribe, where members are so bored with the lack of change they've entered a permanent catatonic state, even without breaking the rules or being aged.

Enter Sean Connery, who has somehow stowed away on one of the Zardoz heads, shot its pilot, and infiltrated an Eternal village, bringing excitement and controversy to the locals. There are three apparent leaders; a kneejerk traditionalist who wants Connery immediately executed, a lesbian pseudo-scientist thinking Connery is some kind of mutant with useful characteristics, and a glampunk Oscar Wilde stand-in who simply relishes the prospect of some chaos. Connery is put to work while debates over his fate continue.
Eventually Connery's outsider status allows him to be the one and only force to lead a revolution against Tabernacle and end the tyranny of immortality, via a hall-of-mirrors metaphor for "hacking" the New Age AI. The movie concludes with a prolonged murder montage as the grateful Methuselahs throw themselves before the barbarians' guns. Yawn. Lets just let this one settle deep into the 70s cultural ashbin.

Shooting trip 3-19-11

2011-03-29T01:00:00.000-07:00

Two Saturdays ago, I went with a group to the Little Indian State Park range, and shot some video.

Return to legacy

2011-03-28T12:51:00.000-07:00

Made top 4 in 39 person legacy tournament yesterday with basically the same UW countertop deck I've been running this year.

1 academy ruin
1 karakas
3 wasteland
2 mishra factory
1 seat synod
1 misty rainforest
1 polluted delta
2 scalding tarn
4 flood strand
2 tundra
1 tropical island
3 island
2 plain

4 brainstorm
4 swords plowshare
4 sensei diving top
3 enlightened tutor
2 spell snare
1 pithing needle
1 engineered explosive
4 counter balance
2 trinket mage
1 crucible world
2 ensnaring bridge
3 mindsculptor
1 humility
4 force will

side
1 tormod crypt
1 dispeller capsule
1 pithing needle
2 seal cleansing
1 circle of protection red
1 wall tanglecord
1 energy flux
1 ethersworn canonist
2 e bridge
4 shroud leyline

Only change I would make is to cut Humility which was worthless. By the time I have 4 mana, I need something that absolutely stabilizes, not leave them with some 1/1s that could finish me off. Frankly, I'd like to replace this with a cheap blocker like Wall of Shards, and same with the Tanglecord in the board, and thus make the trop a basic. Lastly, the 2nd Seal of Cleansing should become the 2nd Academy Ruins for matchups where tormod or EE recursion matters a lot.

Round 1 - GBU midrange
G1 We both mul to 6. He dazes my SDT I think, but I get CB t2 and resolve an ensnaring bridge vs a goyf. I draw another top, then resolve Jace and fast-track ultimate, while he's locked.

G2 I get t1 sdt, He gets t2 Dconf, Im holding FoW, CB and plow. I let dconf resolve, then plow it and let him force it, this is just bait to get CB down with Force back up, since that card advantage trumps dconf. This works as planned. Then he misses his first dconf trigger and mixes his draw for turn into his hand. I call judge, who is supposed to examine his hand, and reveal the highest cmc to both players and then he takes that much damage. Instead the judge had him reveal his entire hand and take highest cmc damage, which was FoW. This was pretty clutch information since enemy is also holding Jace and Extirpate, which greatly influenced how I left my sdt stack from that point forward. I CB counter his jace, and he eventually gets to extirpate my FoWs, which allows him to counter some of my additional threats like Crucible and Jace. But he never deals with CBtop so in the long run I kill his team and go the distance with factories.

Round 2 - Colin Wu w Time Spiral
G1 - I assumed he was playing his usual techy countertop build, and got blown out by hightide chain on t4.
G2 - I greedy keep [e-tutor, plains, factory, waste, ruins, bstorm, snare] luckily my tutored ethersworn canonist resolves on t2, and I draw blue mana on t3, which lets me counter his cunning wished snap. I draw a Fow to pitch my bstorm to on his chain of vapor. canonist guarantees I win all the counter wars and he's dead the following turn.
G3 - I have better mana this time, plus shroud leyline t0. I tutor for canonist on Colin's t3 endstep, he Meditate in response, which I Force since 4 cards are worth more to him than an extra turn is to me. He doesn't counter war, making me fear he is saving it for Canonist. But no it resolves. For the rest of the game my draws are Force, Leyline, Force, Leyline, Force, and I hardcast all three on his various attempts at bounce spells. It turns out Colin was in fact playing Wipe Away, but for some reason he always Merchant Scroll or C Wish for other things, misreading me as out of counters.

Round 3 Brandon Adams w Doomsday
G1 - I have t1 sdt, and t2 CB. Brandon has a full, full grip though and builds up lots of mana, he finally attempts to go off on like t8, and makes me use up a lot of mana switching my top card, and resolving some rituals in the mean time. It all came down ironically to my having put needle on polluted delta much earlier, which kept him from getting the last blue mana he needed to Meditate and perhaps gone off.
G2 - I open with double leyline, which made me feel a little safe, though Brandon is running E-Truth and Reverent Silence. He gets t1 Xantid which doesn't really matter since most of my defense is permanent based. I tutor for Canonist on his endstep and resolve it t2. That guy absolutely pulled his weight today. Brandon gets off Doomsday behind Xantid, and I play inexcusably loose here, but was not in any real danger.

Round 4 vs Dredge
G1 - He gets pretty fast team built up, and I have t3 e-bridge, but can't get my hand count below 1 and he has 4 or 5 1/1s which kill me.
G2 - Board out all the counterspells. He has needle on tormod, but I stabilize at 8 life w e-bridge vs 8 power worth of zombies. Eventually Trinket for Tormod, then Jace to bounce Trinket for EE, kill his needle and wipe out his 40+ card yard.
G3 - More of the same. I e-tutor for tormod on t2 and knock him back 3 turns worth of yard development, while all he has is a Putrid Imp onboard. This gives me ample time to get Ebridge and then counter+top.

Rd 5 ID
Rd 6 ID

Top 8 vs Dredge
G1 - He makes just land drop t1, then t2 Breakthrough which I Snare. I plow his first 2 creatures after that, with Jace behind Ebridge for enough turns to ultimate.
G2 - I get academy ruins + Tormod pretty quick. Basically this match up is a bye.

Top 4 vs Calcatera w GBU midrange
G1 - Nick mulls to 5, but my 7 isn't great and worse after losing roll and hit with t1 Thoughtseize. The reason I kept though is I know his list has no basics, and I had double wasteland vs his first two land drops. and he never gets another blue mana, so I get to do whatever I want

G2 - I have countertop and Ebridge vs 2xtgoyf. But he resolves Jace and then it becomes very difficult to actually counter his threats, and even though I have Crucible on top of my library, and playing as tight as possible, eventually he fate-seals + K-grip and I lose my bridge and dead to 12 power worth of lurgoyf.

G3 - We fight a lot of counter wars. Nick has 2xtgoyf + dconf and known nature's claim in hand, vs my just 5 lands and SDT. Its 10pm now and I punt bad. I see e-tutor in my top 3, but just flat forget that engineered explosives is in my deck, so instead I'm wondering how to protect Ebridge vs his artifact removal. I just die to combat damage instead of wrathing him.

It was a fun tournament. I really wanted to drop Energy Flux vs one of the several Tezzeret agro decks present. I'm quite satisfied with this archetype despite the pros abandonment of counterbalance. Turn 1 top, turn 2 CB still feels like the most unfair thing one can do in this format. Good job to Nick Calcatera winning the Timetwister.

Chess experiment

2011-03-26T01:00:00.000-07:00

Here's the situation. Assume you are good at chess. Not a pro, but quite competent, unless you actually are a pro. You are playing against Deep Blue, on say a 2 hour clock. Normally, this is utterly hopeless, but there's a catch. You get unlimited, unilateral take-backs, as far back as you want, even to starting position. However, you don't get any time back, but DB's clock resets to the amount of time it had on that move number, most recently.

Given this advantage, could you possibly win? Is there an amount of clock time where you have a chance?

Assuming I'm not going to dedicate myself to chess proficiency, I could probably never beat my new office computer's chess program on the hardest level in a straight game. Yet by abusing the takebacks and experimenting with lots of different lines of play whenever I felt like I had a slight advantage, I am able to win most the games. These were untimed though.

WORLD WAR THREE (taking bets now)

2011-03-25T01:00:00.000-07:00

Not to be hyperbolic, but it is undeniably the case that we are now in a war spanning multiple countries on multiple continents, with battles fought in multiple theaters, and lasting for multiple years. Expanding the hot zone to Africa meets the multi-continental criteria of a world war. "Affecting the majority of the world's most populous and powerful nations" is a little more nebulous depending on how seriously invested one considers Europe to be in tagging along with the Obushama campaign. Though BRIC's tepid words of encouragement from the sidelines undermine the hypothesis.
I'm sure other bloggers with more studious approach to current affairs have explored the motivations involved, but it doesn't take any particularly soul-starved dose of cynicism to think the UN generally, nor US specifically, care at all about the fate of Libyan civilian's political or actual lives.
"People in Africa are being blown up by mortars and/or having their ballot boxes stuffed!"
orly? Are you sure you mean Libya? Not Sierra Leone ("Hell on Earth"), or Botswana (You're 32 years old? Way to beat the odds!), DRC (Your elections have 'irregularities'? Ours have atrocities!), Liberia (Boasting the world's most photogenic child soldiers), Zimbabwe (We're getting really good at this 'planned famine' thing), Sudan (World leader in slave exports!), Cote d'Ivoire (Don't like the ~~weather~~ government? Just wait 10 minutes, lol! But seriously, the trucks are on the way. Run), Madagascar ("plagued by political violence"), Rwanda (We took genocide mainstream), Angola ("Permanent warzone"), Chad ("one of the poorest, most corrupt countries in the world"), Mali (Female literacy = 17%, female circumcision = 92%), etc?
Gadafi's kleptocrat police state is a prosperous model of stability next to the above collection of abject human misery. Of course Libyans should be encouraged to topple the last great megalomaniac of the Cold War, but not on my dime. Also suspicious is how eager Gadafi has been to toe America's party line in the past decade, which in any other era would have given him a free pass to shell rebellious civilian neighborhoods into bloody memory holes, with nary a glance from Western media; but now all that lip service we've always craved is being rather flagrantly ignored. Muammar was backpedaling and ready to ask "how high" all over the place. But now the rules of the game aren't about containing Russia/China, its open expression of Pax Americana. So maybe the homefront cartel has designs on that estimated 2mbpd, or more ambitiously wants permanent stewardship to eventually squeeze into the Suez. My one definite prediction is for the people of Libya, it only gets worse from here.
On Saturday 3-18-11, Hillary Clinton had a press conference where she emphasized this was a NATO operation, with minimal American support, and perhaps eventually US planes might be involved in enforcing the no-fly zone, but that certainly no ground troops would be entering Libya. The UN has also insisted that no troops be sent to Libya. Less than 48 hours later, a USAF jet has crash landed in Libyan territory. Given that rapid escalation, I'd like to offer odds on reversals by the end of 2011.
1:2 foreign ground troops of any kind entering Libya
1:3 the troops are approved by some Western nation/organization (including UN) and not for example another African power acting independently
1:5 American advisors or support personnel of some kind among them
1:9 regular American army/marines involved

Jesse Irwin - 10th Ward Alderman

2011-03-24T12:44:00.000-07:00

I met Mr. Irwin and heartily endorse his candidacy for Alderman in the 10th Ward. He's self-described Ron Paul Republican and has solid campaign plan, plus specific, realistic political goals. Irwin is an agreeable, rational, highly motivated candidate, with a real chance.

I'm in the 19th Ward, but anyone who lives around the Kingshighway/Manchester/Chippewa area should check if you're in the 10th, and if so, vote for Jesse Irwin on April 5th. Alderman is a low-stakes position with typically apathetic voter turnout, so its an easy coup if a couple hundred new people show up. Even better, help him make calls or knock on doors.

Mass murder games

2011-03-16T09:14:00.000-07:00

From XKCD:

This rings very true. Shooter games with NPC human enemies have always been slightly disturbing to me. The utter lack of self preservation instinct demonstrated by the cannon fodder in these games, makes me wish I could just demand their surrender, or convince them to flee and they might actually successfully escape from me, and I could advance in the game without having to scorched-Earth the opposition. Aren't most wars considered decisively won if one side loses >10% of their forces? The protagonist you are controlling is always this relatively unstoppable archangel; rational human beings should be terrified of you.

Current decks

2011-02-22T01:00:00.000-08:00

This is what I'm playing in every format.

Standard

4 colonade
4 uw mirrodin
4 glacial fortress
4 plains
4 island
4 tectonic edge

4 preordain
4 journey nowhere
4 everflow chalice
4 mana leak
4 wall omen
2 cryptoplasm
2 stoic rebuttal
2 day judgment
3 mindsculptor
3 beleren
2 cat sun zenith
2 sun titan

side
4 kor firewalker
4 shroud line
2 condemn
3 mirran crusader

The logic here is mainly to combat Valakut, which is allegedly the most robustly dominating deck in standard. Cryptoplasm helps accomplish this by usually sitting there as an 0/4 Omens copy in case their first Primal Titan gets a single Valakut trigger. Then it becomes the Titan, I journey their Titan, and swing in to get Tectonic Edges.

Spreading Seas underwhelms as Valakut hate thanks to sorcery speed, and unlikelihood of sniping a lone green source. Sideboard shroud leyline seals the deal though. I love this card. I'm also warming up rapidly to Mirran Crusader as extremely potent defense vs the majority of tribal/midrange decks: Vengevine, elves, vampires, etc.

I've always ran 4of Firewalker in standard whenever I have white mana in my deck. I'm willing to load up slots to completely dominate a matchup for 2 mana.

I prefer instant speed win conditions whenever possible, hence my love for Cloudthresher, so Cat Zenith is a plus in counter mana scenarios.

What remains to be seen is if this is better than the stoneforge decks that swept Paris. I suspect I will be adjusting to account for that real soon.

Extended
4 exotic orchard
4 reflecting pool
4 creeping tar pit
4 vivid creek
2 vivid grove
2 vivid meadow
1 vivid crag
1 cascade bluff
1 flooded grove
1 mystic gate
1 celestial colonade
1 island

4 preordain
3 path exile
3 lightning bolt
4 mana leak
2 runed halo
2 volcanic fallout
4 esper charm
4 cryptic command
4 jace mindsculptor
1 day judgment
2 cloudthresher
1 wurmcoil engine

side
1 path exile
1 relic progenitus
3 duress
2 runed halo
3 raking canopy
1 day judgment
4 leyline sanctity

One thing I can say conclusively is that faeries is very favorable. The whole game plan is just carefully maneuvering to resolve canopy. Like use jace as test spell, whatever it takes to get raping canopy on board. Or preordain and draw a shitty card just so that canopy stays on top so they cant duress it and you can resolve it next turn, etc. the naya mathcup was pretty rough with my prior version, but shroudwall definitely helps a lot, making vengevines bleed you a lot less. upping the fallout count has been quite effective also. The mana has been very smooth. I couldn't be happier with orchards, haters. I've never been unable to cast cryptic or thresher. jund and red are unfavorable g1, but become really good if I land t0 leyline, and generally easier w more walls and paths. valakut is ~50/50 g1, and becomes quite easy postboard, more so vs RG than wargate, because RG can't counter hardcast leyline.

Legacy

1 academy ruin
3 wasteland
2 mishra factory
1 seat synod
4 misty rainforest
4 flood strand
2 tundra
1 savanah
3 island
2 plain

4 brainstorm
4 plowshare
4 diving top
3 e tutor
2 spell snare
1 needle
1 explosive
4 cbalance
1 counterspell
2 trinket mage
1 crucible
3 e bridge
3 mindsculptor
4 force will

side
1 tormod
3 spell pierce
1 needle
4 shroud line
2 k grip
1 e bridge
1 energy flux
1 crucible

For reasons discussed elsewhere, I vastly prefer ensnaring bridge over the 4c creature hosers, including elspeth. I'm not sure if trinket mage is fast enough, but this deck is in kind of poor shape without a top online, and needs to counter or pith aether vial approximately 100% of the time. I used this to top4 a legacy event at Ogres this past weekend.

Classic

4 mishras workshop
4 wasteland
4 barbarian ring
3 mountain
1 strip mine
1 tolarian academy
1 ancient tomb
4 bazaar baghdad
1 sol ring
1 mana crypt
1 mana vault
1 mox opal
1 grim monolith

4 goblin welder
4 chalice void
3 thorn amethyst
4 sphere resistance
2 null rod
3 crucible worlds
2 ensnaring bridge
1 trinisphere
4 smokestack
4 lodestone golem
2 duplicant

side
2 tormod crypt
3 relic progenitus
2 greater gargadon
2 null rod
2 ensnaring bridge
4 viashino heretic

I really like ensnaring bridge everywhere it is legal now. I might radically change to a blue tinker list when Blightsteel becomes legal though.

Lastly, congratulations to my roommate Josh Smith, late of the Paris pro tour. My parting advice: "Be glorious."

At least there was a decent travelogue.

Convicts can work cheaper

2011-02-21T19:18:00.000-08:00

Here's an idea: convicted felons, once released back into society, have the unilateral option to sign employment contracts under minimum wage.

Felons, as a demographic, have negative risk associations, and thus their wages are discounted versus non-felon employees. For low skill jobs where wages are already at the legal price floor, felons are in most cases unhirable. If the equilibrium wage for this job is actually below the minimum, even for non-felon workers, then there's an opportunity to eliminate a big chunk of dead weight loss.

Also, normatively, the minimum wage as "employee protection" is presumably less sacrosanct when dealing with people whom society has already deemed deserving of punishment.

There should be no "took our jobs" counterargument, because felons are already in the same labor pool competing for these jobs, they're just losing. Furthermore, felons are (for now) still a small minority of job seekers, so even if they had full employment, this would only redistribute a small number of marginal opportunities to people who's value can be more accurately compensated without legal overhead.

Lastly, this is at the felon's discretion to make the offer. If they want to be protected by minimum wage laws, they can, but at risk of carrying their competitive disadvantage into the job market. An employer might advertise a job at $7.25 for those without criminal history and $2.00/hr for with. If the employer would otherwise legally discriminate by not hiring convicts at all, this only increases a felon's options.

Overall, I present this as a way to ease reintegration for a vulnerable category of citizens, without burdening the state with any additional spending, and in fact improving the economy by removing a small set of price controls.

2011-02-16T11:52:00.000-08:00

Although I've said before there is nothing more boring than listening to other people's dreams, I had one saturday night worth retelling. Although most of my dreams are typical surreal gibberish, I will occasionally have long, internally consistent scenarios play out.

I dreamt I was a south Vietnamese police officer in the midst of the Saigon offensive. So the atmosphere had been tense, but normal city life was ongoing earlier that day, then the north attacks in the middle of the night. The regular southern army crumbles fast, and the Americans are nowhere in sight. There's an extended sequence of me and my captain in a pitched street battle, killing a bunch of NVA. We are retreating and both get wounded. I get shot obliquely through the chest so it breaks ribs coming and going, but doesn't hit lung. Captain gets shot in a limb or something. We flee into a warehouse basement where there is already a family hiding. He has a WWII-era submachinegun with 4 bullets left, I have my irl 380 with one bullet left. We both faint on the concrete floor and wake up unknown time later to one of the civilians telling us that a patrol is entering the building. I recommend surrender. Captain argues we can kill up to five of them and scare off the rest. I think 100% 1 shot kills is extremely optimistic even if we ambush them, and we can realistically only count on killing two at most, and furthermore there is no other exit from this basement, so even if we did successfully bluff survivors into withdrawing, they are clearly promptly going to report where we are and return with more men. So our only option would be to follow them out, where it would become obvious we are not shooting at them, and bluff is over. Also we have both lost a lot of blood and in massive pain, so aren't really in condition to rush anyone and be intimidating. Also, while being captured certainly holds its perils, the north is not trying to exterminate the south; they are trying to control the country and its inhabitants, so they won't necessarily execute us.

Finally captain sees my point and we do surrender to the group of four enemy soldiers. We're separated and I'm taken to a makeshift command center for the northern army. It's dawn by this point. The enemy commanding officer is droning on with communist victory slogans, and I have the temerity to interrupt and point out that if he doesn't intend to shoot me, then I'd appreciate some medical attention. Then we derail into a political debate about some of his more obvious nonsensical doctrines, before I remind myself to shut up and go with the program in order to live another day. It sort of ends there. My dreams tend to be rather fatalistic.

Mirrodin Besieged in Vintage

2011-02-02T10:46:00.000-08:00

There is one standout playable from this set, and a few other strong contenders, with some peripheral sideboard options not to be ignored.

Blightsteel Colossus - clearly the fastest stand alone Tinker win ever printed, strictly obsoleting the venerable Darksteel Colossus at long last. Now the argument for kill of choice has shifted significantly towards speed over protection.

Worried about tarmogoyfs and most artifact destruction? Sphinx of the Steel Wind

Worried about all conceivable targeted removal? Inkwell Leviathan

Worried about edicts and soot? Myr Battlesphere

Just want to end the game asap? Dsteel, wait, new and improved Bsteel! Twice as fast!

Phyrexian Revoker - fits very nicely into any fish build, but control decks will probably continue playing Needle if they want this effect, because its so important to hit Bazaar on turn 1, and other emergency must-stops.

Spine of Ish Shah - this looks like weldable Vindicate, but is basically not getting hardcast in a deck chock full of resistor effects. My argument has always been a card that can only enter play via Welder should not be run. If you were to break this rule, there are more devastating options like Sundering Titan or Possessed Portal. The difference between 6 and 7 is relevant even in workshop decks. For one, its really unlikely to have 7 on turn 2, but you will have 6 available on turn 2 a noticeable percentage of games. So hardcasting Duplicant early is doable, not so much Spine. This is pretty major difference when facing turn 1 orchard+oath or tinker Bsteel.

Steel Sabotage - Annul has seen some sb play. This trades enchantment countering for artifact bouncing. Could be dependable option for storm vs stax.

Crush - The reticence to print instant hard artifact kill at R is strange to me. This doesn't touch Lodestone or Steel Hellkite, so I'd still try to splash for Ancient Grudge or Nature's Claim, or just keep playing Rack and Ruin or Shattering Spree, etc.

Leonin Relic Warder - efficient hate bear. The ability to hit either artifact or enchantment is a major argument over the strictly enchantment haters War Priest and Kami/Unicorn. WW is a minor argument against.

Neurok Commando - the quality of Ophidian class creatures is experiencing decent power creep. Shroud is a good option, but the evasion and mass-draw potential on Cold Eye Selkie is still tops.

Tezzeret Agent of Bolas - for 5 mana you can auto-win with old-Tez, or for 4c have a much better draw engine with Mindsculptor. It still takes 3 turns to kill with this guy even if you have an untapped artifact turn he resolves. I guess its nice to be able to come in, make a blocker, but then the successive quality of drawing is just pretty weak sauce if you don't hit Vault Volt right away. Certainly neo-Tez is a card you'd love to have in play, but for the cost, there are just better options.

Ichor Wellspring - cute little draw engine with Welder and/or Smoky, but not worth paring down the lock density in stax.

Go For the Throat - There are so many 1c ways to kill creatures, its probably worth paying 3 for major answers like Threads of Disloyalty or Perish, rather than pay 2 for a slightly more flexible answer.

Green Sun's Zenith - There are some tier > 1 decks that play green creatures that may at some point like an efficient way to search for specific ones. Enjoy.

Shimmer Myr - Mentioned as possible answer to Hurkyl's/Rebuild in stax. So was Leyline of Anticipation. This is too niche. The plan for Hurkyl has always been strangle them fast enough that they either can't cast it at all, or have to use it prematurely and can't win during their single turn respite.

Nothing archetype spawning, but definitely Tinker gets an unneeded power boost.

The School Cartel

2011-01-31T11:44:00.000-08:00

I watched this documentary at a Show Me Institute sponsored event. It showcases in thorough detail, the degenerate corruption of New Jersey, and by extension all American, public schools.

He highlights the pieces of a well-oiled machine designed to sponge wealth from the taxbase to a select class of bureaucrats. Teacher's union has managed to push school board election to off-days, so that frequently the only people bothering to vote are those employed by the education industry and their relatives. Teachers, and more importantly administrators, choose the public servants with whom they will be negotiating salaries. Together they have agreed to continually subdivide districts to multiply the number of administrative jobs, which they award via patronage to add to their diehard vested interest voting bloc.

Increasing school budgets is an easy populist sell, but the money gets concentrated in the hands of an ever bloating overhead staff list. The network of self serving overseers and hungry pockets always assures itself more money from the public trough, with less of it going to actual education output, year after year. Every election cycle they end up with more favorable budget, anti-competitive regulation, and job security; further emboldening them to exert less effort in actual teaching, and commit even extra-legal embezzlement. School board meetings never discuss children or curriculum, only who's brother-in-law is getting the new assistant director position, and when is the next scheduled tenured pay raise.
So this is not shocking to anyone who understands the misapplied incentives of any socialized project. There were several St. Louis school board officials and state representatives in the audience, as well as a lot of single-issue education activists. They were understandably alarmed at the picture shown. The broader lesson here though is, this is how every government agency operates. What is limiting this strategy to just DoE? Why wouldn't there be redundant, nepotist administrative padding in say, the police department, SSA, Bureau of Indian Affairs, etc, etc. Its just that your kids are involved in the former, so people have cause to discover the corruption in this isolated case.
This why any alleged cost savings in national health care will instantly be swallowed down by unaccountable overhead drains. And so on in every government mission, from the Mesopotamian Campaign, to flat mail delivery.

Bob Bowden champions charter schools as pseudo-market competition to the union monopoly. While certainly a superior alternative, charters are a timid step toward any kind of optimal solution. Still publicly funded, still tightly under the reign of DoE. His most damning point against status quo opposition to chartering, given the catastrophic drop out rate, is their apparent preference for kids going to no school at all, rather than allow non-union opportunities.
Nonetheless, what is the plan? There is this massive army of bureaucrats aligned against any change. They will tactically undermine any "reform", as seen in their obstruction of new charters, when such are even legal. So how will things ever change? The union has already won the propaganda battle for hearts and minds, equating charters with unscrupulous exploitation, and budget cuts with overt punishment of the innocent. The public education industry will continually lower standards and raise costs indefinitely. This is probably the last generation of America's leading standard of living. Twenty years from now, America will be unable to produce, and unable to borrow. Ni hao!

Welcome to Fabulous North St. Louis

2011-01-26T16:46:00.000-08:00

Freedom to Fascism

2011-01-25T10:41:00.000-08:00

I watched this documentary.

Its better than Michael Moore's crap, but political activist documentaries are always subpar no matter what their affiliation. First of all, Russo's oft-harped point of "theres no law that says you have to pay income tax".
Well there is. Its article 26S1. And it does also describe all the forms of income that are taxable, and does state that you have to file a return, etc.
Now whether this law is constitutional, or been overturned by the supreme court, or is otherwise invalid, is another issue. But the law is definitely on the books. Aaron spends at least half hour wandering around questioning the existence of the law itself, and finding a wide array of ignorant civilians and "experts". Why the IRS brass is so reticent to just quote this law when pestered by tax deniers is a mystery that I will chalk up to bureaucratic obtuseness. Proposing "there is no law" is misleading, if what you really mean is "there is no constitutional law".
Also some research finds that one of Russo's expert witnesses, Irwin Schiff, was convicted of tax evasion, despite an insanity plea. Yet hes presented as an academic legal scholar. I happen to be a fan of the Schiff family, but Irwin is more pariah than spokesman.
For those interested in the IRS side of the story here is their comprehensive refutation of law-based anti-tax arguments.
The principled libertarian argument against income taxes does not care about technical legal loopholes. We should be arguing the policy side, not the legal side. So I wasn't thrilled with the income tax part of the movie.
Act two, lambasting the federal reserve, was more interesting, and I learned some things. However, Russo's plan is to disolve the Fed, because government is borrowing money from them (that they, a private organization, are authorized to print ex nihilio) and then charges us unbelievable amount of taxes to pay the interest. Instead Russo would rather government print its own money, to avoid the interest payments to these fatcats. Wait a minute, how is government having unlimited ability to print money so it can spend trillions, better than borrowing unlimited fiat currency from a private bank, so it can spend trillions? Why don't we just not spend trillions, and then it doesn't matter if theres a federal reserve or not?
Russo makes it sound like government is being taken advantage of by evil corporate bankers, and if only government could free themselves of this awful yoke, they'd be free to spend it on socially responsible things instead of banker profits.
Bullshit. If thats the only change, I'm certain we'd be worse off, and spending would be even more dramatic. As it stands, the Fed, who may or may not be in league with central government, has at least some amount of
control to reign in spending, by making the interest rate prohibitively expensive for congress to borrow. If they are getting rich in the process, its the lesser of two evils.
Russo also finds room to make the strange non-libertarian case for increased border security.
Finally there is some justified scare-mongering about the Real ID law and implantable RFID chips.
Overall the movie was passable, and informative. The stock footage comic relief I could have done without. An edited version that cut out the heavy handed tax part would be better. Maybe in favor of a brief explanation of the rationale behind not wanting taxation at all, giving benefit of doubt on its legality.

LRA4

2011-01-09T09:27:00.000-08:00

Until recently, if I came across a strip mall which consisted of say:

-Payday loan

-Chop suey place with hand-painted sign

-African hair-braiding

-Cricket franchise

-Package liquor plus beauty supplies

I would assume I was in a downtrodden area. Now though my reaction would be, "Are you serious? Five active businesses in one strip? What a thriving neighborhood!"

My collection is up to three houses. Total expense including all transaction costs = ~$5000. Here's some preview screenshots from my upcoming post-apocalyptic first person shooter Reutilize the Authority:

Fully Expended

2011-01-07T21:18:00.000-08:00

The Expendables

I saw this towering inferno of feces over the holiday. No expense spared on assembling the action cast wish-list. Its like the survivors of the star-crossed USS Hasbeen all washed up on the same island which happened to be ruled by a cartoonish dictator with a hot daughter.

You know what I never want to see again? Somebody killed by a thrown knife. These characters have 100% accuracy in throwing knives directly into jugulars, from any position, at any range, under any conditions, and they do it probably 10-12 times in this movie. Besides being physically implausible, its simply meaninglessly worn out as a violence trope.

Also never want to see again: Jason Statham in anything. Came in first place in your personal shark jumping contest somewhere around the time you took a paycheck from Uwe Boll. Shouldn't you be doing gritty reboots of your signature characters by now, or romcoms or something?

Getting shot at is scary. No Country for Old Men, among other successes, really raised the bar in depicting the terror of gun fights. The Expendables is poster boy for not-getting-it. When your character development consists entirely of which unique, deliberately inefficient weapon/technique each Bad Dude employs, you have both failed in creating empathizable personalities, and failed in creating exciting spectacle.

This is the bane of modern action movies. Certainly there are examples from the dawn of the genre, but its so assembly-line cliche now. You have these interchangeable idiots who are practically emotionless about bullets flying, and win by arbitrary decree of script writer, like Deus Ex Apathy. This is not a movie about war, its a pathetically immature violence daydream.

The Expendables practically prides itself on its unoriginality. Look at all these names that have been samey two-dimensional violence fantasies in the past 20 years, plus some professional wrestlers! Come see the lowest common denominator of all their careers at once!

However, all this is just background for my real complaint: Tron Legacy. 1982 Tron was a childhood favorite of mine. So when it was Tron's turn on the nostalgiasploitation auction block, my expectations were low, but could not bring myself to suppress all hope. And so I still managed to be disappointed. TronL took the art style and superficially similar universe of Tron82 and pasted it over an Expendable-esque fisticuff arbitrariness. There's so many cyber-fight scenes in TronL, it just gets kind of boring, despite the cutting edge visuals. Tron82 was not genius, granted, but it was definitely out of the box. It had some heroic-quest, fish-out-of-water tropes, but was novel in many ways. It was surreal, non-sensical in parts, but was boldly different. The computer world metaphor was fairly thin, but at least vaguely resembled the industry of the era, which was still mysterious to most of the general public.

TronL barely updates its universe, despite the radically different nature of computers three decades ago. Tron82 makes a kind of internal sense at least, where the actions of the outside world are reflected within. Centralized corporate server control is represented as oppressed peasants. The outside world is actively using the system, and the tiny dramas of the anthropomorphized programs' lives has a direct impact up the chain of reality, because they are the highest tech available, and their services are in high demand by the never-seen "users". In TronL, the computer-world is just closed off inside some mothballed Cray, 21 years obsolete. Its merely a danger to those who fall into it, not relevant to anyone else in the real world. Evil Lebowski is just a Kim Jong Il-esque molehill lord, next to the Orwellian specter of Tron82's Master Control.

TronL makes an abortive attempt to introduce a compelling villain, via upper class hipster hacker Cillian Murphy. He's a good actor for sinister roles, and his one scene shows him undermining the protagonist's propaganda-of-the-deed with some crafty spin control. However, we never see this character, nor the real world again. At least not until the tacked on ending when the hero Weird Sciences the female lead into a sunward drive off.

Want to make a movie about video games/computers crossing over into the real world? Try for less self-seriousness and more magical realism, ie the spectacularly entertaining Scott Pilgrim. If you are doing something original, go full bore. Even if you fail, you will more often than not get a cult classic, ie Tron82. TronL will be forgotten.

Extended

2010-12-23T13:02:00.000-08:00

I had never played a single game of Extended prior to this month. However, Lorwyn+Alara was my all time favorite Standard environment. Although I had more large scale tournament success with Jund in Alara+Zendikar, Vivid Control from Lorwyn era is probably the most fun I've had playing non-Vintage.
So now that Extended is effectively just Lorwyn standard-plus, I can't resist reliving the glory days. In fact I am so enamored of this card pool, I propose that Extended be made an eternal format from now forward. My impression of the original conception of the formats:
Vintage = 100% of card pool
Legacy = 99%
Extended = 50%
Standard = 10%

But now there are so many sets, Extended is like 15%, so its purpose as a bridge between Standard and Legacy has faded. Now its just double-standard, and as Josh observed, "no one likes a double standard."
A format that is solely to play 90% identical decks to Standard from two years ago seems tacked on. Its as if there were active tournaments for every combination of historical Standard environments, and they just arbitrarily promote the one that is one generation of sets removed from present Standard.
So I would either have Extended be a turn-over format that represents approximately half of the entire magic card pool at any given time, or make it eternal, locked in at Lorwyn->forward indefinitely. The former suggestion would imply a current Extended environment of Judgment->forward. Every two sets that are released, knocks the oldest set out of rotation.

While on the topic of format changes, my bets with Greg(gg) have passed the first milestone with no results to report. I recommend the following restricted list changes-
Vintage
Flash = Unrestrict. in the absence of 4x Brainstorm, Ponder and Merchant Scroll, this archetype deserves parole.
Gush = Restrict
Library of Alexandria = Ambivalent towards status quo or unrestriction
Preordain = Restrict. This is definitely better than Ponder, and I agree with the philosophy of avoiding critical mass of single U card selection.
Shahrazad = unban and restrict. This card is highly awkward rules-wise, but is very non-competitive. At 1x, not even a dedicated troll could really disrupt a tournament in any noticeable fashion.
Time Vault = errata to crap rare.
Scorched Ruins = errata to Phyrexian Dreadnought rules
Lotus Vale = errata to Phyrexian Dreadnought rules

Classic
Brainstorm = restrict
Flash = unrestrict
Gush = restrict
Preordain = restrict
Sensei's Divining Top = restrict
Note that this would leave Ponder and Library unrestricted.

This is my current Extended list

4 reflecting pool
4 exotic orchard
4 creeping tar pit
1 celestial colonade
1 UW mirrodin
1 UB mirrodin
1 island
4 vivid U
3 vivid B
2 vivid W
1 vivid R
3 lightning bolt
3 path exile
4 preordain
2 thoughtseize
4 mana leak
2 vendilion clique
1 maelstrom pulse
4 esper charm
3 jace mindsculptor
2 day judgment
4 cryptic command
1 cloudthresher
1 bogadarn hellkite
side
4 leyline sanctity
2 jace beleren
3 volcanic fallout
4 nature's claim
2 duress

I don't like big sorcery speed win conditions, because its such a chore to resolve them in the mirror, and any big guy is going to be marginally better or worse than any other vs aggro and midrange. Flash ftw.
I've been pretty unimpressed with the wall plan. Plumeveil is embarrassingly dead vs the mirror and scapeshift. Omens cycles, but is an underwhelming road block for agro. I cut this whole tactic from the deck in exchange for the vastly superior Vendillion Clique and Thoughtseize.
I'm not sure why Ultimatum is held up as the end-all wincon for this archetype. Its fairly mediocre vs decks that flood the board or have recursion, ie Vengevine. Its devastating vs vivid/scapeshift, but so is a resolved Jace, which is far simpler task, hence three Mindsculptors.
My main contribution to Extended tech though is Exotic Orchard. Why this isn't default 4x in almost every deck is mysterious. The metagame is diverse and color-dense enough that this always at least an untapped tri-land and usually rainbow Reflecting Pool 5-8. Full set Orchards+Pools is how I would start any manabase in the format. I hate the filter lands. I have 1c spells in every color. Filter lands are very unconducive to efficient mainphase+enemy turn mana use. I also am big fan of Tarpit. You can play a long game of reactive control, and then quickly smash 6/turn a few times and end it when they are exhausted, without needing to draw any of the sparse creatures.

Dog tags

2010-12-15T16:52:00.000-08:00

I went exploring industrial skeletons today, like this well known eyesore. There were some serious looking guys chainsawing broken pallets into firewood on the crumbling parking pad, so I passed on the interior tour for now.

On my way out, I passed the river front legal graffiti wall

It so happens I had been re-striping one of our company's parking lots this morning, and had a can of yellow line-painter on hand.

Official street cred

I've come to appreciate a good scary dog. Sizable percentage of occupied north city houses are home to snarling security systems.

I've been bit by stray dogs twice in my life. If you have never seriously tangled with an angry dog, and somehow think you can just kick them away or otherwise fight them off, without suffering any damage in the process, you are wrong. I will never attempt to help a loose dog.

Guest Post by Josh Smith: Tourney Report: Paris PTQ, St Louis First

2010-12-14T11:34:00.000-08:00

So, I've been playing magic for quite a few years, but yesterday I won my first PTQ. I would like to write a proper tournament report, but my notes from the event are nonexistent and my memory is pretty bad. I do however have all of the cards, so this lets me at least recreate my deckbuilding thought process for anyone who's interested and after this I can say a few things I remember from the event.

Let me say before I post the cards that for me, deckbuilding is an iterative process that is very dependent on the mana curve. I think everyone considers their deck as a whole when building, but for me, I like to think things like "based on my mana curve, what am I likely to be able to do on a given turn (turn 3, turn 4, etc)." I use this to consider not only what mana and how much mana to play, but also to inform my cuts so that I have a relatively low curve, if possible.

Lands
2 glimmerpost

White
2 Auriok Sunchaser
Fulgent Distraction
2 Ghalma's Warden
Glimmerpoint Stag
Glint hawk
Kemba, Kha Regent
Loxodon Wayfarer
Salvage Scout
Seize the Initiative
Soul Parry
True Conviction
Vigil for the Lost

Blue
Grand Architect
Halt Order
Lumengrid Drake
Plated Seastrider
Scrapdiver Serpent
Screeching Silcaw
Steady Progress
2 Turn Aside
Vedalken Certarch

Black
Blackcleave Goblin
Contagious Nim
Dross Hopper
Exsanguinate
Fume Spitter
2 Ichor Rats
Moriok Reaver
Plague Stinger
Psychic Miasma
Skinrender
Tainted Strike

Red
Assault Strobe
Barrage Ogre
Blade-Tribe Berserkers
Cerebral Eruption
Furnace Celebration
Galvanic Blast
Shatter
Vulshok Heartstoker

Green
Copperhorn Scout
Tel-Jilad Defiance
Tel-Jilad Fallen
Wing Puncture
Withstand Death

Artifact
2 Auriok Replica
2 Clone Shell
Darksteel Sentinel
Echo Circlet
Glint Hawk Idol
2 Golden Urn
Golem Foundry
Golem's Heart
Grafted Exoskeleton
Horizon Spellbomb
Ichorclaw Myr
Iron Myr
Livewire Lash
2 Moriok Replica
2 Neurok Replica
Nihil Spellbomb
2 Origin Spellbomb
Perilous Myr
Razorfield Thresher
Soliton
2 Steel Hellkite
Sylvok Lifestaff
Throne of Geth
Trigon of Corruption
Trigon of Mending
Trigon of Rage

Step one in building a sealed deck is usually doing a comparative evaluation of the colors and figuring out which two (or three) colors I want to play. Step one in building this deck involved putting the hellkites into what would have been a fantastic 2-card deck if I had just stopped there, and then a little of this because of same. Next came REAL step one:
White - I want to play this color because it's really deep, including a couple replicas, and two solid rares. I started with white in the deck.
Blue - Not nearly as deep or powerful as the white, and short on decent removal. I needed something that would complement the white better.
Black - Lots of infect cards, but not really enough to make a deck, plus I don't really like infect in sealed unless you have decent black and green support cards, which this pool kinda lacked. I was sad to lose skinrender, fume spitter and the replicas, but the next color shores up my weaknesses a lot better.
Red - I love barrage ogre and furnace celebration, and the blast and shatter were really what I was looking for.
Green - Like I said this infect deck is going nowhere, and I'm not going to play infect guys in a non-poison deck (with very rare exceptions), so there's only like one playable in this color, not counting the Horizon Spellbomb, which I will play in basically any deck.

Here's my inital sorting, before I made any cuts:

1cc:
glint hawk (definitely playing, card's fantastic)
salvage scout (not very good, but I was thinking I might need to get back a hellkite. Oh, such greed.)

seize the initiative (wound up cutting this for not being an artifact)
galvanic blast (rujk card is sick)
2 origin spellbomb (I'm not sure there's an upper limit on the number of these I would play.
sylvok lifestaff (I don't think I've ever cut this card from a limited deck, but it doesn't look that great on face. cheap artifacts (1 or 2 cc) are really important in a metalcraft deck and this card is solid)
horizon spellbomb (so versatile!)

2cc:
2 auriok sunchaser (I wanted low drops and these guys are terrific if you can support metalcraft)
glint hawk idol (auto-include in white decks)
iron myr (my only mana myr. I longed for one or two more, even off-color would've gone in the deck)
perilous myr (perilous for the OPPONENT maybe)

shatter (this card is fantastic and was a welcome answer to some things I would've had serious trouble with otherwise)
livewire lash (always play this card)

3cc:
kemba (great with my two equipment! I considered playing echo circlet for his benefit, then came to my senses)
2 auriok replica (solid gray ogre with a sometimes invaluable ability that add to metalcraft. A++++++ would play again) (though, in decks with lots of three drops, I could totally see cutting one or both. That's not this deck.)

fulgent distraction (I thought of myself as removal-light and figured I might need to tap their guys, plus I had not too many 3 drops. This wound up on the cutting room floor)

4cc:
2 ghalma's warden (I don't think I've ever actually played this guy before and . . . I didn't today either. pretty expensive and just a big guy even with metalcraft. On turn four I would rather be playing two artifacts to get my sunchasers active)
glimmerpoint stag (a decent creature, for not being an artifact. wound up in the deck)
Blade-Tribe Berserkers (cut this one. I initially saw my deck as fairly aggro, what with the multiple 2-drop flyers, but I had better cards than this often-just-a-hill-giant)

Trigon of Corruption (very happy to have the removal, even though I couldn't reload it [or could I?! stay tuned.])

5cc:
Barrage Ogre (I really like this card. I recommend it to anyone playing red)
2 Clone Shell (with these I'm sure to get a dragon every game! but I had too many things that cost more than four and I wound up cutting one)

6cc:
Darksteel Sentinel (a very solid six drop that also happens to be noticeably worse than my other three six drops. I cut him too.
2 Hellkites ("HOP ON MY BACK!")

True Conviction (seemed ok.)

Notice that at this point I was not playing furnace celebration -- I wound up playing it, but I wasn't yet sure I had enough things that sac. 31 spells in this iteration, time to make major cuts.

-2 ghalmas warden
-blade tribe berserkers
-clone shell
-darksteel sentinel
-seize the initiative
-salvage scout
-fulgent distraction

now I have 23 playables. at this point I could probably have just tossed in 17 land and gone for it, but I felt light on removal, and I really like furnace celebration. I had 6 sac outlets (5 self-contained and the barrage ogre) not quite time to celebrate. I agonized over whether I should play the celebration with what I had and play 16 land (plus myr and green spellbomb for 18 mana sources) but I really wanted to play 17 land, so that I wouldn't miss hitting hellkites. Ultimately, I cut the glimmerpoint stag for the very synergistic Golden Urn and played 11 plains and 5 mountains. My (somewhat flimsy, perhaps) rationale was that I wanted to make my early game as solid as possible, hitting glint hawk, his idol and metalcraft for sunchasers on cheap artifacts, and the urn gives me something else to sac for celebration, another bit of food for the ogre, and in the worst case scenario, gains me enough life to buy the time to find a hellkite.

The Tournament

My round one opponent kept a one-lander on the play in game one. I've heard before that drawing is better in this format, but I played at every opportunity. My deck had the ability to get aggressive and I didn't want to get overrun by a quick infect draw. Also, one of the reasons to draw in this format is that you can make up lost tempo with myrs (thus making the card advantage relatively costless) but I only had one mana myr. Anyway, this fellow discarded a couple times before playing anything other than his first land, and he was never in that game. I don't remember game two, but I know that he got mana and had some infect guys and some non-infect guys. I don't recall ever being very worried that game.

Round two I played a fantasy shop regular who thought he recognized me, and he looked kinda familiar to me too. It was his first PTQ, and he had some bombs, but my bombs were better so I won both games. I do remember getting kemba and lifestaff in both games, but in game one I actually MOVED THE LIFESTAFF ONTO MY FIRST CAT and said go. Rookie mistake that I didn't repeat, though he noticed it at the time. Both games also involved a furnace celebration, iirc.

Round three I played someone who I've played a number of times before, but whose name I can't recall. He had a decent black/red deck that would have scared me quite a bit more if he had applied more pressure game one, before I could cast my Hellkite (with the other one under clone shell, hl). Game two I also got Hellkite under clone shell, so when he furnace celebrationed the clone shell, I informed him "You're not gonna like this" and flipped it over.

I hadn't lost a game at this point. Round four I played Justin Pearson, and he had a very good GB infect deck that managed to hand me my first game loss. I came back in games two and three and recall shattering a sword of body and mind the turn he played it, in response to the equip ability. In hindsight, I probably could have waited for a better time to shatter. Against Justin, for the second time in the day, I refilled the charge counters on Trigon of Corruption by bouncing it with glint hawk. Definitely a fan of that play.

At this point there were four 4-0s and we all just IDd with each other two rounds in a row. I spent some time talking to Donovan who was my round five ID opponent. He explained that he never had any intention of going to Paris, since he would be busy with work in February, so his plan was to rare-draft and then concede to the first person he got paired against who he knew in top 8. Bad News: he played the first round of top 8 and lost. Good News: he was seated to my right for the draft.

Fortified with the quality passes from Mike on my right, my deck was a solid GWr, with Genesis Wave, Asceticism, 2 molder beasts, 2 arrests, arc trail, revoke existence, myr smith, palladium, gold and leaden myrs, and other solid cards. I played three GB infect decks in a row, and only lost one game, the other games weren't particularly close. I remember my opponents mulliganed a lot. The fact that there were three people drafting infect means that none of their decks could really be that good, unless the packs were really deep with infect cards, which I don't think they were. I did pass up the chance to get a fairly mediocre infect deck, shipping multiple plague stingers, tel-jilad fallens, blackcleave goblins, etc. I did cack an untamed might that I didn't play. Honestly, I was trying to get a RGw or RWg furnace celebration deck, but I got no celebrations. molder beast was an acceptable substitute, given my already high amount of removal.

I feel like I should point out that I owe a ton of thanks to the people who helped me succeed yesterday. I've talked to Gregg about Scars limited several times per week since the set came out, and his experience has been invaluable. I also learned some choice advice from Gerry Thompson's blog. Jim Boncek loaned me the sleeves that I used all day, and none of the judges seemed to have a problem with me hovering near almost every judge call. Also, it's minor, but Matt Schmaltz probably did more to influence my sealed deck-building than any other person. It's a shame he likely won't be coming with me to my second PT, as he did to my first. I will probably be drafting at ogre's slightly more often than before, in preparation for the PT, though I did miss tonight's draft what with writing this stuff and all. I was going to say how preparing for this pro tour will really cut into my time playing Starcraft II, which I just bought on Friday, but no one wants to hear how heavy my gold is.

tl;dr version: open lots of bombs and draft next to someone who knows what's good and passes it anyway, whenever possible. Oh, and if you're gregg, actually going to PTQs works much better than not in terms of earning Qs.

North City Adventure 3: The Reutilization

2010-12-11T01:00:00.000-08:00

Hello, I'd like to buy your board-up

Found this Silent Hill esque abandoned hospital:

My overpowered camera flash doesn't do justice to the atmosphere of these dungeons.

Entering without breaking a once proud Sears department store. Based on ubiquitous "Christmas 1980" flyers littered about, can safely assume this building has been shuttered for 30 years now. Its hard to capture the scale of this collapsed interior. These pillars are probably about 20' from the exposed floor beams to ceiling.

Standing on the landing of a rotting grand staircase looking into pit of despair

Probably some posh stuff for sale here three decades ago. Retail archaeology.

Hastily fenced off scorched high school at 20th+Salisbury. This is one of my favorite neighborhoods for images of devastating attrition.

Looks like WWII

So here is north St. Louis City. None of this is anywhere you'd want to be after dark, but the area I've noticed with the highest density of barely standing brick piles is the red shaded rectangle formed by Salisbury, 70, Adelaide and Florissant. College Hill is the most dilapidated neighborhood in the city, though it has some close competitors.

In the red zone. These are all different addresses. Illustrative of dozens more.

This one has four walls and a roof, but no right angles

So many eviscerated buildings with their guts spewed out

I like how the drywall outlasted the brick on this one

You'd think just being able to keep out the elements would make a house stand out in this area

Tree growing out of the roof. Every window and door of this one was completely bricked up, so I couldn't get in, but you can't contain nature.

Human habitats:

Now heres the highlight. Apparently some kind of abandoned weapons testing lab. Full of mysterious industrial equipment and ominous warning signs. This is a sprawling complex swiftly being reclaimed by woods.

This thing is at least half a mile long in each direction, this is a tiny sampling of all the rooms.

The Roulette Lobby

2010-12-10T01:00:00.000-08:00

Imagine you could play roulette and keep the winnings, without fronting the bet. Obviously you are best served by playing as often as possible, for as high stakes as possible on every spin. The croupier though doesn't really want your business. So you bribe him to let you jump to front of the line and to raise the table limit for you. You're effectively willing to pay the croupier on the side up to anything < [table limit]/2 (assuming a 50/50 red/black wheel for simplicity), and you're expected value is still free money. In fact this is so lucrative for you, its worthwhile to hire someone the croupier trusts, maybe another retired croupier, to butter him up and be more amenable to you playing more often for more money.

This is the nature of the lobbying industry. Once an issue reaches the stage of Senate floor debate, there tends to be equal chance of passing as not passing, regardless of lobbying dollar input on either side. The lobbyist critical input then is pushing which questions get asked. If the answer is always "yes" 50% of the time, regardless of the question, and you are the sprocket manufacturer, you'd certainly pay a lobbyist to have "Should we subsidize sprockets by $1 billion" be asked, rather than "Should we subsidize sprockets by $1 million". Early in the political process, lobbyists latch onto politicians (ie the croupiers) and bid for the front of the line and setting the stakes their clients get to play for. So who is paying for the player's bets? Taxpayers of course.

The analogy is mine, but the mechanism was explained by UMSL poli-sci professor David Kimball at last Friday's Pachyderm Club lunch meeting, which I attended. This is a club for local Republican committee chairman, and similar officers. A competent statistician would exclude me from the data before reporting the mean age of this gathering; nonetheless I found the lecture very enlightening and will be returning.

Discount shotguns

2010-12-09T01:00:00.000-08:00

I want to get a new pistol grip tactical shotgun, but can't justify owning five shotguns, so am looking to relinquish any number of these four, and would rather sell to someone I at least sort of know, so am listing them here first. The prices are based on a brief internet search of classified ads, and knocked at least $50 off in every case. No delivery, pick up only.
Measuring tape is locked at 4' for scale. Click for high-res photo.

A = 12 gauge bolt action
JC Higgins - Model 583.16
Rare gun. Works fine. $150

B = 16 gauge pump
Remington wingmaster 870
Works fine $400, comes with box of shells

C = 20 guage pump
Browning Invector BPS
Works fine $300, comes with box of shells
Lots of rust/scrapes on receiver and other cosmetic damage. Normally this goes for like $450

D = 12 gauge pump
Sawed off Winchester 1897 (exact same gun and modification as seen in No Country For Old Men! coincidence, I'd already done this before I saw the movie)
This is safely above legal minimum, as confirmed by an ATF agent. Thats a fun story I may share some day.
Will fire normally when shell is in chamber, but does not reliably feed shells from tube.
Not very practical, most the time has to be manually loaded direct to chamber, so with nothing to lose, I made it cool looking.
Normally goes for $500. Due to malfunctions and being dismembered, bargain price of $100.

If you want to trade magic cards for guns, I am still in the market for a Time Vault and Imperial Seal. Otherwise, cash only.

Land Reutilization Adventures - Part 2

2010-12-08T01:00:00.000-08:00

I bought this place:

$2400 from Fannie Mae. The bottom tier negative-summers have reduced it to a copper-free shell. Plan is to eventually upgrade it to minimum livable functionality and rent.

Some other notable sights all over Ncity:

Not sure what is being attempted here, but entropy appears to be winning

8 inches of sludge

This row of seven consecutive board ups is bordered by grass lots. Zero legal residents on this entire side of the block. Thats my car, if the Ron Paul sticker didn't give it away.

Fortunately not on my trepass list

The floor is covered in coloring books and Barbies. Cozy little squatter family.

Not a lot of penetration through the siding. Note to self: don't use birdshot in drive-bys.

curse of the dog mummy

Open living room hole into the basement/cesspool

I theorize there are not a disproportionate number of house fires in north city. Just that once a place burns, no one ever fixes it, so the evidence of such fires persist forever, and accumulate over time to give the appearance of serial arson.

Water freely pouring into yet another flooded basement

Some of these places have been abandoned so long, they missed the Ma Bell payphone round up last decade.

Resting up for another long night of shoplifting?

Random MLK hellhole

Rear view of another typical tear-down

Your tax dollars at work. Remains of 2005-era HUD efforts.

Inverse correlation- churches/capita vs income/capita

Beautiful roofless 3 story factory ruins

How many months? One?

"Four walls" a necessary but not sufficient selling point

Vroman, Urban Planner

2010-12-07T01:00:00.000-08:00

I wish MODOT director was an elected position. Basic road network is clearly far and away the number one source of interaction between citizens and government, so pledging a major efficiency upgrade seems like an easy sell.

1. Any 4 way intersection where its not always legal to turn in any direction, from any direction, is unacceptably poor design. Widen lanes, cut back visual obstructions, whatever it takes to let people turn left, etc, on to a lane that cross traffic can access.

2. In 3 way intersections where a one lane street dead-ends into a 2 lane street, right lane traffic opposite the side street, should never stop. Turning left onto the 2 lane street would require staying in the left lane until can safely merge. Like this:

3. Eliminate red-light cameras. Of course.

4. Death to Complete Streets

5. End legal enforcement of traffic laws. Stop lights, speed limit signs, etc would still be provided as a public service for safety suggestions and logistical smoothing, but no penalties for ignoring them, in and of itself. When accidents occur though, drivers could still be found financially or criminally responsible by insurers or courts.
6. I've always been frustrated by St. Louis's lack of convenient North-South corridors, especially in South county. To that end I propose eliminating most, if not all, traffic lights on Lindbergh and Kingshighway, and raising speed limits. Feeder roads and overpasses for local access. This would involve buying up a lot of real estate, especially on the Kingshighway project.
7. Continuing my North-South acceleration pipe dream, my most radical suggestion is to extend 170 all the way to 55. This means cutting through the parking lot of Brentwood Promenade, then commandeering the entirety of Hanley Industrial court, about a mile of Hanley proper across Manchester. Next skirt through the wooded creek area behind Marshall and Shrewsbury to cross Big Bend, and then south of 44, repurpose the entire length of River Des Peres Parkway, and the last leg being Carondolet until it hits 55. Exits at 64, Hanley, Manchester, Laclede Station, Big Bend, 44, Landsdowne, Watson, Loughborough (extended to cut through Wilmore park and over River Des Peres), Gravois, Morgan Ford, 55.

Just from looking at the satellite image, this would require leveling at least 50 private homes, possible 20 more, depending if access road is needed for the subdivisions cut off from Des Peres Parkway; maybe 20 smaller businesses; 4 large commercial buildings; and half of a major shopping mall. So the real estate alone is probably minimum $100M, not counting the parkland and greenspace being sacrificed. Just make it toll. I'd pay.
Since I can't just privatize the whole system, then given unlimited budget and power, with no regard to cost-effectiveness, or highest and best use, this is my chosen outcome:

Given irresistible statist power, this is how I will reshape your city.

Organ Scandal!

2010-12-05T01:00:00.000-08:00

Oh noes, creepy government repo-fest shenanigans!

I find it interesting that at no point does anyone mention in the article what the extracted organs were used for, beyond the official purpose of measuring radiation exposure. Were transplants done with the extra supply? How many lives were saved?
I am puzzled by the extreme aversion to an open market in organs. Is the main objection still phobia of inspiring opportunistic murders? If people actually were being killed for their organs, surely the low hanging fruit for homicide investigators would be to patrol transplant hospitals and demand each product be accounted for.
The plus side is enormous. A price mechanism connects providers and consumers more efficiently than the lottery or first-come-first-serve or other arbitrary distribution method currently in place. More organs are supplied, more transplants get done, at lower cost to everyone involved. People on the margin who otherwise would be averse to allowing organ harvesting upon their death, will be swayed by the cash benefit to their surviving family.
If a deceased individual's organs are of value to others, his heirs would be paid for the service provided. This is effectively free life insurance to every healthy human being. So working class people who might not otherwise have been able to afford life insurance, can capitalize on their natural resources, in the worst case scenario. Additionally, they now have an excellent incentive to remain healthy.
True, their organs devalue with age, but during the most productive period of their lives, they have a hedge against financial catastrophe for their family losing the breadwinner. By the time they reach old age when their organs might have no market value, they will have had the time to execute whatever retirement plan they'd normally be using. So they are no worse off when elderly, and strictly better off when young.

Updates

2010-12-04T01:00:00.000-08:00

November 26th deadline has come and gone as expected.

Soviet occupation of Afghanistan total duration: 9 years 1 month 22 days

American occupation of Afghanistan total duration: 9 years 1 month 27 days and counting

Welcome to the Quagmire

Party Like its 1979

Thanks to Josh for getting my copy of "WE" signed by Gary Kasparov! Allegedly he approved of my choice, "Is good book to sign." It seemed the most appropriate thing off my bookshelf on short notice. As a student of dystopian literature, WE ranks high. At least the version I have, the translation is kind of rough in spots. There were a few passages I really could not follow what was going on. But overall its extremely dark and groundbreaking work.

Lastly, Gregg demanded more explanation of this post:

Gregg: I dont really understand your post about financial crisis not being a crisis.

if credit expansion is causing a bunch of bad investments that have to be liquidated and then turned into actually valauble things.. that seems very wasteful and bad

me: but ppl do demand housing. building a ton of houses and making housing cheap is in and of itself good.

sure, other things were underproduced and relatively more expensive, but trading [many] houses for [few] blank is just an update in terms of trade

Gregg: they demand some amount of housing, and the amount they actually demand it also causes changes in the capital structure of the economy .. when it turns out people don't want as many (or as big of/as good of) houses as it seemed during the credit expansion period, then you wind up with a surplus of houses but also a bunch of capital goods which are literally doing nothing excepting rustiny away

me: the market will always clear though

Gregg: I mean, yes the market will respond to whatever, but that's not really a comforting argument. the market will adjust prices to clear inventories if 90% of all cars in the country simultaneously detonated, but that's still a real problem

me: thats a problem, bc we'd have fewer assets, not more.

if we suddenly had double the cars, thats good, even though ppl who invested in the first production run would lose when the sale price halves

Gregg: wealth is praxeological - it's not just physical objects, it's physical objects that have value to consumers .. we have less wealth than we should have because of the housing boom, because instead of creating other valuable goods, we were creating less valuable houses

me: yes we have less wealth than we should have, but we still have more wealth than we did a year ago

Gregg: that'd be like saying it'd be fine if we turned 50% of the cars in the US into the same weight of water heaters.. we still have a lot of stuff, but it's probably less valuable

me: inefficient, slow, positive growth, does not connote to "crisis".

its more like saying we take all the steel that would go into next year's cars and next year's water heaters, and due to govt decree, we make only water heaters w 100% of the supply. yes, this means that cars are going to be expensive, factories that were expensively retooled to make heaters, are going to be expensively retooled to make cars again. Huge waste, but at least if you want a water heater, its practically free. and any # of water heaters > iron ore in the ground.

Gregg: unclear that we have more wealth.

we have more wealth according to GDP, but GDP is a really poor metric

me: imagine a platonic ideal GDP then.

it seems hard to argue that if there were a divinely correct measurement of national productivity that we would show ourselves with fewer goods in 2010 than 2007

Gregg: the # of goods is irrelevant - and the main problem with 'booms' is not the goods produced, its the changes in the capital structure of the economy.

which causes actual damage to the economy, because the economy's structure is not in line with consumer demands.

so you have huge swaths of the economy that have to be realigned and liquidated.

and every dollar that's spent doing that is pure waste

me: I understand all that

Gregg: okay, so we have enormous segments of the economy that have to be liquidated so that they're actually producing wealth, and not pseudo-wealth - we're talking many billions of dollars of here - that seems to be appropriately called crisis.

me: are we better off today today or 2 yrs ago, ignoring what could have been.

Gregg: I have no idea.. it's not just visibly obvious.

I think the tacit assumption a lot of people make is that we're constantly making economic progress, but there's often little justification for it

me: knowing the bubble was false and that wealth was not real makes 2006-7 look even worse compared to today

Gregg: well, yeah, if the market is allowed to adjust properly, the bust period will actually be wealth-creating (and the boom period will be wealth-destroying).. but the fact that we're recovering implies we're recovering from something

me: all we're recovering from is a clerical error that claimed we were more wealthy in 2006-7

Gregg: it's not a clerical error - it's a bunch of malinvestments caused by systemic problems in the economic system

like real, actual billions of dollars were spent on stuff people didn't want.

and we're still expanding massive amounts of credit so it's not like we've moved into some pure, healthy bust phase

me: I know that govt is making it worse, and Im criticizing their justification of dealing w a 'crisis' in order to make such huge intrusions in economy. If they didn't use the crisis rhetoric and just proceed with raw central planning as simply the order of the day, it would be more honest

Gregg: well the govt created the crisis.

obviously the solution to the crisis is not to intervene.

but give credit where credit's due - they really did effectively fuck up the economy

me: they created incentives to overproduce housing. the outcome should be that housing consumers get it really cheap, mortgage speculators get hosed, and everyone else gets back to making higher demand/shorter supply items.

me: this is only a crisis for the ppl who basically begged for the govt fueled hype

Gregg: its not like it was just the housing market, that's just where it was most obvious

me: true

Gregg: credit expansion is problematic because it makes investors act as if consumer time preference is low, while simultaneously causing consumer's actual time preference to increase (investors see low interest rates and start investing in products with long time horizons - consumers see low interest rates and have less incentive to save money and more incentive to buy now)

so that's going to affect everything

im sure there were other stupid measures that made it worse for the housing sectors or whatever

me: yes, everything govt does is bad. you will never find a more sympathetic audience.

my only point is that inefficient productivity is better than no productivity or outright destruction. the market for what was produced must be allowed to equilibrize. thats normal economics. not crisis.

its a stretch, but something similar to this couldve happened wo govt intervention, if for some reason housing industry all had simultaneously deluded expectations. they would all have lost money, and ppl would get really cheap houses, and anyone who invested behind the industry's pipe dreams, has to undergo painful retooling process

Gregg: inefficient productivity is only quantitatively different from no production, though, and even not that different from outright destruction, inasmuch as during the boom phase people are liquidating what should be profitable businesses in order to malinvest those resources in what should be unprofitable businesses ... I agree that you let the market work things afterwards, but it really is a legitimate waste of resources

malinvestments of course happen on a free market, but they don't happen so systematically without manipulation of credit/interest rate

me: I dont think you can say that inefficient productivity, in the abstract, is only quantitatively different than outright destruction, wo then saying that a guy who working at mcdonalds when he most efficiently could be going to law school has just commited an investment "crisis of degree". thats not a crisis, bc hamburgers are getting made

Gregg: the difference between the malinvestments that happen on the free market and the malinvestments that happen during a credit expansionary period - in the one case, they're isolated, unrelated events (entrepeneurs reading the market incorrectly) in the other case, they're directly caused by the signals the market is sending - in fact, malinvestments are caused precisely by the signals sent by government-interfered markets, because the interest rate is artificially low

Gregg: I mean it's not a crisis because it's voluntary (and he prefers working at mcdonalds for whatever reason than going to law school) and because it's relatively small-scale

me: I agree w you this was an institutionalized extended period of chronic malinvestment, that would be statistically impossible to happen from normal market signals. my only point is that it is reasonable to think real terms standard of living is higher in 2010 than in 2006, or pick a yr at height of boom.

'crisis' to me, implies things are getting worse in absolute terms. like Sudan

Gregg: in terms of the praxeological definitions of wealth, the high point of the boom will be the local minimum in terms of wealth.

like during the boom period, we're systematically downgrading wealth into less-wealth.

during the bust period we're turning some of that less-wealth into more-wealth

me: lets say I make $40k yr, and invest some and consume some, but my net worth is going up $10k yr. but then one year I accidently add a zero, spend more than I should, but then discover the error the next yr. so my net worth looks like this:

yr 1 = $10k

yr 2 = $20k

yr 3 = $300k

yr 4 = $30k

crisis I lost $270k!? no I still am up $10k over the "boom year", I just spent it all, and lost the year, and should be at $40k. but Im still better in yr 4 than yr 2

Gregg: I think that's a mischaracterization of the boom. it'd be more like if during the boom year you decided that the world was going to be imminently submerged in water, so you liquidated everything that couldn't survive it and built yourself a huge aquarium-like house.

then of course the flood doesn't happen, and you have a shitty house and sold off all your valuable possessions

me: lol. Its not that perverse. they built standard houses. ppl live in houses. if supply goes way up, price goes way down. good for consumers bad for investors who expected permanent price floor.

it comes down to if there were accurate measure of living standard, whether

[2006 LS] - [2006 debt] < [2010 LS] - [2010 debt] is true

Gregg: and i mean if we missed out on tons of capital acculmation / wealth production, even if we profited $1, it's not like we can just be OK with that.

0 is an arbitrary point here, its the opportunity cost that's relevant

me: I agree, but missed opportunities =/= crisis. once you see what youve been doing is crazy, the crisis is automatically over, bc now you can proceed w real wealth creation

Gregg: well.. not exactly. we have still have a socialist planning board setting the interest rate, so the problem isn't solved

me: right, we have a crisis of govt, but that is no different than its been since FDR

Gregg: right.. what's the point though? govt policies have been legitimately destructive

me: but why call this the 2008-2010 economic crisis, and not the 1932-2010 economic crisis?

surely its way way way more severe if you look at it that way, bc the compounded missed opportunities of the last 80 yrs are staggering, all due to socialist intervention

Gregg: that might be fair - the assumption is that the market is allowed to do more of its own thing during the bust period, but that's not necessarily true, and government intervention during that part tends to be pretty heavy-handed, too

ME4

2010-12-03T01:00:00.000-08:00

The majority of magic I play these days is Classic on mtgo, exclusively for stakes. The testing isn't worth my time if opponent does not have financial incentive to perform. About a month ago I got the idea in my head that Standstill was an underutilized draw engine of choice and proceeded to lose at least $20 worth of tix in the course of being proven wrong. I've since switched to a fairly stock Oath list. Disrupt is the tech. Theres an interesting dynamic, due to Classic's limbo state between Vintage and Legacy in terms of power level, which makes Spell Pierce and Disrupt counterspells of choice. In Vintage the spells are all broken, but due to moxen, you can't reliably nick off their key stuff with Daze, etal because of the bonus mana floating around. In Legacy, the spells are less powerful and/or tend to be creatures, so narrow criteria like that are not worth the dead cards. But in Classic we have both the must-counter non-creature cards, without the acceleration of Vintage, so that these lower-tier counterspells are absolutely worth the cost reduction, and venerable stuff like Mana Drain is unplayable slow. Counterbalance is also way more powerful here than I expected, due to the high concentration of 1c spells.

So I watched with some interest the previews of Master's Edition 4. And I'm very pleasantly surprised. Clearly no Power 9, but every other build-around card from Vintage now exists. Workshop, Library, Fastbond, Time Vault! I was really not expecting to see reprints of all these old powerhouses all in one set. So congrats to Wizards for once exceeding my expectations in regards to an eternal format.
This card pool expansion will severely shock the metagame with the addition of Workshop prison and Gush combo, probably pushing Oath off tier one pedestal. Storm combo probably suffers from Stax's sudden arrival. I'm shocked they put the hated Vault in, but at least they pre-emptively restricted Trinisphere this time around. I would definitely move towards restricting Brainstorm and Gush at next opportunity, maybe even the currently unplayed Merchant Scroll soon after.
I am wondering if Red Bazaar Stax with 4x Mox Opal may not be the best choice now. Also the Time Vault combo Oath I pioneered in Vintage may have some cross over value here. I will certainly be trying all these options and more, so anyone who wants to take my money in the Classic 2man tourneys, my mtgo name is of course vroman.

Civilization 5

2010-12-02T01:00:00.000-08:00

I don't play a lot of computer games, but my one crush has always been Civ series. I fondly remember getting Civ1 back in grade school, and have sunk many days into breaking every version. Ignore the rest of this post if you've never played any of these games before.
The basic strategy Ive consistently employed to great success across versions is:
-Hyper-expansive, build basically nothing but settlers for usually about first 50% of the game
-Demilitarized appeasement foreign policy. Just give them anything they want to leave you alone, and stretch a bare minimum military to the limit (or none at all, depending on version)
-Ignore sciences entirely, and pursue happiness only when absolutely necessary.
-Wealth + industrial powerhouse. By not investing in military or science, specialize in income and improvement turn over.
-Depending on what win conditions available, usually late game transform landslide population and production advantage into unstoppable Tank waves

This works more or less still in civ5.

I dont mind spending most the game at -1 happiness, and then whenever a happiness building finishes/new luxury connected, jump up to +3/4 for a turn or two until a bunch of cities grow and drop it back to -1. I only rush buy a coliseum or something if Im getting close to -10 after continually building cities while in neg. Production penalty for happy < -9 is brutal and worth avoiding. However, the growth penalty is ignorable so long as you continually get above 0 from time to time. So happiness is the real bottleneck for growth within cities, so I never build any of the growth buildings.
Likewise, with science, whatever residual science you get just from population gets me techs frequently enough that I never run out of priority builds, so I never build any of the science buildings. At beginning of the game I just tell it to get to Railroad and not think about it. Then from there to Globalization and done.
I do like culture a lot, because the social policies are like non-exclusive wonders. I build everything that makes culture. For real wonders, the only make or break ones are Forbidden Palace and United Nations. FP in my games is usually a whopping +50 happiness or more. No better ROI in the game. UN is just the cheapest victory option. Other than that, the wonders are more numerous and less game-swinging than in past versions. Most are nice bonuses that I don't mind investing in, but not critical survival points. I do NOT see much benefit to building:
Angkor Wat
Pentagon
Colossus
Great Lighthouse
Great Wall
Great Library
Hagia Sophia
Pyramids (your workers will get there in the long run)

Among the rest I would prioritize
Cristo Redentor
Eifel Tower
Notre Dame
Sistine Chapel
Hanging Gardens
Oracle

Everything else is nice, but marginal. Basically, the criteria is whether the Wonder is helping you get through a bottleneck. So things related to happiness are priority one, and culture amplifiers are worthwhile.
The fact that city's now have innate defensive value, and can do default range attacks is even more encouraging of the demilitarized strategy, since an ungarrisoned city is no longer a huge liability. Also military units are slightly more expensive than in past versions, which makes it less attractive to build large armies.
In terms of staving off the enemy, a few important things are to pack cities as densely as possible, so that attackers are always in range of multiple free hits. Walls are actually worth it in this game once border brushes against an enemy. I also like the bombarding units for the first time. Basically the plan is to make enemy bleed at lowest cost and deter border crossings. Just getting a couple catapults behind walls and upgrading them all the way up the tech tree will shred most of their waves. Unlike previous civs, its harder to transmute a huge population and production advantage into an unstoppable offensive late game military. So the victory plan is just fill every nook with cities, hold ground with most cost effective defense possible, make mad money, ally with every city-state in the world, and then build UN and get diplomatic victory on first try. Since growth is pretty much solely determined by happiness, I build trading posts in almost every square possible, rarely farms. The industry bonus on railroads is pretty sick.
For social policies I always get Liberty and Order, and usually one of Piety/Patronage/Commerce depending on whether I am struggling against -1 happiness barrier (Piety), have monopolized the city-states at this point (patronage), or none of the above (commerce). The former choice results in the peculiar combination of a Theocratic Communist Republic.
On city improvements I build-
Always at every opportunity:
monument
circus
coliseum
temple
market
mint
monastary
workshop
bank
opera house
seaport
theatre
windmill
broadcast tower
factory
stock exchange
solar plant
stadium
nuclear plant
courthouse

Sometimes
walls (only on border)
castle
military base
harbor (only if no land trade route available)
hydro plant (this is negligible benefit if the city only intersects river on 1 or 2 squares)
garden (ambivalent)

Never
barracks
granary
library
water mill
armory
lighthouse
stable
university
military academy
observatory
public school
arsenal
hospital
medical lab
research lab
spaceship plant

In general the queue is:
1. production acceleration
2. money
3. culture
4. happiness (usually buying these directly along the way)

One of the good things with this breakdown, is that theres not many build priorities in ancient era, so you're not falling behind by concentrating on settlers early.

To recap: Always be building settlers. Do not be afraid to be a terminally unhappy nation. So long as your total # of cities is increasing as fast as possible, its not important if they are all individually small. They will always get big in the long run, so ignore growth improvements, especially if you have Maritime allies. When enemy gets angry, let them throw themselves into your territory and get torn up by city + unit bombardments, always losing more of those pricey units than you do. Try to avoid building units if at all possible. Let your allies donate them to you, and just build range units if you do. Never conduct offensive wars, unless you have a hopelessly weak neighbor you can cakewalk through. If you are a full era or more ahead of them, and are reasonably confident you can conquer them without losing a single unit, then no reason not to take those cities. Otherwise, wars are bad investment.
Ignore science, you will get there when you need to, just from population size. Keep your income up as top priority so you can buy happiness improvements periodically to get out of negative, and also to completely monopolize the city-states. This gets the hard to find luxury resources and votes for the Diplomacy win. Culture points are well worth it as priority two behind income. Together this strategy should run circles around the AI at least through Emperor difficulty.

Garry Kasparov

2010-12-01T14:01:00.000-08:00

I heard a lecture by Mr. Kasparov, via the Show Me Institute last night. He spoke about the institutionalized corruption that constitutes Russian government. Despite all the Soviet era propaganda complaining about the "fascist" west, Putin's regime nowadays looks a lot like Mussolini's. A small collection of major firms control all the heavy industry, mostly chaired by ex-KGB officials. They are tight with central government and a steady flow of payoffs and favors keeps prices high and competition down. In an almost Feudalistic parody, the unearned wealth transfer from the general population to the oligarchy continues as ever before.

Kasparov made a few quite interesting points. He took the stance that the purpose of the Declaration of Independence and similar documents from that era was to define the relationship between citizens and government, not necessarily how to select rulers. A democratically elected leader who proceeds to violate rights, is automatically illegitimate. Furthermore a leader who takes power via violent coup, but happened to respect rights (can't think of any examples really), wouldn't necessarily be an enemy. This is mainly in response to Putin and other authoritarians in Russian and world history who have loudly and proudly proclaimed their democratic credentials.

Kasparov also quoted obscure president James Polk who avoided mindless democracy worship:

“One great object of the Constitution was to restrain majorities from oppressing minorities or encroaching upon their just rights.”

And was also highly critical of central banks and national debt:

A national debt has become almost an institution of European monarchies. It is viewed in some of them as an essential prop to existing governments. Melancholy is the condition of that people whose government can be sustained only by a system which periodically transfers large amounts from the labor of the many to the coffers of the few. Such a system is incompatible with the ends for which our republican Government was instituted. Under a wise policy the debts contracted in our Revolution and during the War of 1812 have been happily extinguished. By a judicious application of the revenues not required for other necessary purposes, it is not doubted that the debt which has grown out of the circumstances of the last few years may be speedily paid off.

Kasparov seemed refreshingly realistic about the slave-state nature of Russia now, and in the past. I would go further and say that Putin is just a more brazen example of what is the default backbone of the modern nation-state. The West and the East have followed parallel evolution to enlightened kleptocracies. America may be more genuinely democratic and the transfer rate from population to elite less rapid, but it's the same gangster model.

The Russian oligarchs however now face some back pressure from loosened emigration restrictions. They cannot abuse their people endlessly or they will all vacate to China, USA, Ukraine, etc. Some equilibrium may be reached that more resembles the "soft-fascism" of American big business.

Kasparov started to lose me later on in his talk, where he took on shades of neo-con and seemed to be at least tacitly accepting the necessity of the war on terror. I would have been impressed if he had seen through the propaganda surrounding the middle eastern campaign as just another corporatist money churn. Then he went on a long tangent about alternative energy and deflating the oil industry, who are big contributors to corruption in BRIC countries, and have steadily exported this corruption to how American public-private confluences operate.

I object to this backwards tactic. If oil is more cost effective than solar or what have you, then boycotting oil, and inefficiently subsidizing a replacement, is the same argument that if government props up corn farmers, we should go to pains to never eat corn products. Health conspiracies aside, the purpose of an economy is to get the most goods for least cost. Deliberately consuming fewer goods, at greater cost, just to spite the oligarchs, is a tall order for a popular movement. Surely, we should just cut the oligarchs off at the source, and then let the market decide how much oil and corn should be produced and where. I have no illusions that "cutting off the oligarchs" is equally futile plan.

Kasparov is an impressive man, and brave to confront his home country's police state. After this talk, I had a somewhat related chat with Gregg about the importance of Constitutions.

Gregg: libertarians who fetishisize the Constitution/Founding Fathers/etc. are the worst types of libertarian, T/F?
me: "worst" as in most likely to hold other patently unlibertarian ideas?
Gregg: well, worst just as in more bad than the rest, generally
me: are you just making two categories? constitution-philes and constitution-apathy?
Gregg: or constitution-averse
ok, they're worse at least in this sense: they claim to be anti-government but enshrine documents which a) explicitly approve of certain government functions and b) have enabled massive government expansion over the past 2 centuries
me: I would say vocal support for constitution literalism is prone to be held by ppl who would never be mistaken as libertarian, but that self described libertarians who do make constitution priority-1 are not necessarily weaker in ideological purity, at least among minarchists
Gregg: constitution clearly allows for the government to have all sorts of powers that exceed what minarchists find acceptable
me: Im of course going to say that avg big-tent libertarian is strictly worse than a well read anarchocapitalist.
narrow interpretation of 9+10th amendments would satisfy most libertarian minarchist goals
me: I guess Im just confused what the "worst libertarian" actually means in terms of ideology spectrum. like the rand paul anti-immigration camp?
Gregg: probably something around there, maybe closer to barry goldwater type
Gregg: though goldwater was admittedly quite a hawk
me: there are some pretty hardcore guys who are constitution fetishists. Id say the more useful rubrik is willingness to cut spending if were to hold power. like most respectable minarchists are going to cut fed budget by 99%. Goldwater would cut prob atleast 50%, which would be amazing, but is clearly a different species
me: "what would you actually cut" is not something these ppl usually put into concrete terms, and does not make for passionate rhetoric, but would be a way to algorithmically rank them on the scale
Gregg: but I don't think you can be a minarchist and pro-Constitution.
like Constitution grants government the power to promote the sciences.
clearly out of the scope of minarchist-acceptable government.
me: most these ppl think the constitution is minarchism incarnate
ie, this is the blueprint right there
Gregg: maybe they have some weird definition of minarchy, but I've never seen it defined as anything more than courts, military, police, and maybe roads
me: where is the science reference
Gregg: Article 1, Section 8
in context of patents/copyrights
Gregg: coining money also clearly outside the scope of minarchist government
Gregg: ive been reading some austrian econ lately so on a bit of an anarchocapitalist kick
me: yeah much longer list of powers than Id thought
never actually read that before
but, no airforce!
Gregg: haha
some have also made the argument that paper money isn't allowed by the constitution since only the power to coin money is granted
but I mean it's so ridiculous, because it's not like any of these rules have ever stopped anyone from doing anything
me: promoting sciences seems pretty clearly just issuing patents, not like outright subsidized govt research labs
Gregg: which is why I think anyone who is rabidly pro-Constitution is naive or delusional
the stupid piece of paper has literally never done anything. i mean the people who it's supposed to restrict are the ones who pick the people to interpret it
and even when the interpretation backfires on them, they do it anyway
me: thats kind of unfair, strict-constitutionalism could just be considered their platform. "I want a govt that follows these rules. vote for me"
I mean if the consistution had never been written, and we had the same govt we do today (not implausible, given total unrelation), and some party came along and wrote more or less this exact document without the anachronisms as their platform, that would not be better than status quo, assuming they somehow had a chance?
we know constitution has no magical power, but why is it wrong or naive to say I want ppl in power who follow it?
assuming anarchism was not the goal
Gregg: well it seems to be, if nothing else, a tactical error, because by creating rules, you create a way for the government to play by the rules..and then if they can find way to bend those rules favorably, it enables all kinds of absurd behavior
Gregg: like - if you're pro-Constitution, and so-and-so President is able to argue convincingly that the constitution allows this-or-that expansion of power.. what ground do you have to stand on?
me: its not that govt is bending rules, they are flat ignoring them
Gregg: you can find Constitutional lawyers who can make prima facie plausible cases for the Constitution allowing basically anything the government is currently doing
me: yeah, they are well paid liars
me: I guess the constitution-literalists have the implicit assumption in their party line that "we must follow the consitution, and the constitution REALLY means [some kind of castrated bundle of minimal power]"
Gregg: plausible, but my point is that liking the Constitution, or constitutions in general, is a really bad idea

Economic crisis actually just economics

2010-11-17T19:57:00.000-08:00

I continue to take issue with the label of financial "crisis". What is the purpose of an economy? To turn available labor and resources into things people want, then trade them amongst each other. We built a lot of houses. People want houses, maybe not as much as was thought, but those houses are still there. If houses were burning down all over the place, yes that would be a crisis. But making a lot of stuff, and then not having it sell as well as anticipated, is not a crisis, because you still have more stuff than when you started. Better, those who DO want this specific stuff get it at cheaper prices, via fewer competing bidders. In hindsight, it would have been more efficient to have built less of this stuff and more of other kinds of stuff. However, due to the (ever-lowering) cost of information, an economy will never be perfectly maximized. This was merely a change in degree, not nature, of the constant background level of malinvestment.

Sure its a crisis for those individuals who made side bets, orders of magnitude in excess of their ability to pay, on the exact sale price of the stuff being made by other people. But its always a crisis for YOU, when your investment goes bad. There is always somebody losing an investment every day in a market economy. On net, there are more winners than losers, which is where GDP growth comes from, but in the 24/7 churn of business experiments and commodity gambles, there will be personal financial crises breaking non-stop.

It just so happens this time those suffering a crisis hold the ear of national media and political attention. So now their problem is our problem.

The other part of an economy, once you've made stuff, is selling it to each other. That is not being allowed to happen. Every trade is an attempt by both parties to mutually better their lot. The more transactions, the closer the economy gets to utility maximization. Goods eventually land in the hands of those who value them most on the margin, via a myriad of middlemen, retail supply hierarchies, and speculators. We did the first part, we built the houses, now its time to let them gravitate towards those who value them most. And if the highest bidders make offers below the break even point for the sellers, sorry you overpaid, but still best course is always to take what is offered, not sit on it and lose the whole purchase price. If its wrong strategy for individuals, why does it become a good idea collectively?

So we do not have an economic crisis. We have an economy. Stuff was made. That stuff needs to get sold. Legally restricting transactions is tautologically going to make things worse. Fewer trades is worse by definition.

My new hobby

2010-11-14T17:10:00.000-08:00

is exploring city owned board-ups in North St. Louis. If you want a virtual taste of this experience, spend a little time on streetview in 63107.

The Land Reutilization Authority is the government agency that confiscates property from delinquent taxpayers, and has something like 9000 addresses in its portfolio now. About half are listed for sale to the public, and of those, half have some kind of structure on them. The internal decision making as to why so many are not for sale is opaque, but probably has something to do with waiting to give sweetheart deals to politically connected developers. The ones that are available though are practically being given away for a couple thousand each. There is a somewhat involved application process though. One can't just cut a check and get the properties no questions asked. So I've spent a large portion of the last two weeks venturing out with a cordless drill, sight seeing what they have to offer. Here are some particularly interesting spectacles:

This is a 360 panorama of a 6 building corner from the "inside". All of the facades appear intact, but the back sides have all collapsed into each other, so its just a surreal fort. Its like Alice in Haiti. Click the picture to see the cut off portion.

Doing it wrong. Anecdotally, the average life expectancy for government housing, from fresh construction to board-up is 4 years.

Typical squatter den

I like the three or four generations of brick work on this one. How many times can a property be condemned before they give up and bulldoze it?

St. Louis has its own little rust belt near Natural Bridge and Goodfellow.

An average street scene off the main drag in 63107.

Second story bedroom view into Oz.

Sometimes a building will look relatively solid from the outside, but is in fact hiding some kind of bizarre tesseract cavern.

Other times, they are reduced to 2 dimensions.

If you were wondering, none of the above are on my short list. But I have found a handful of comparatively pristine properties in above average commercial areas.

N.City tour unlocked achievements:

-Met a squatter face to face

-Been solicited to purchase drugs (5 times!)

-Heard a gunshot in close proximity

-Seen arrest in progress (twice)

-Seen a taped off murder scene, with crime lab guys barking orders

Locked achievements

-Propositioned by a hooker (Apparently have to wait until dusk. No thanks. Long shadows -> time to GTFO)

-Found a body dump

-Witness looting

Machete

2010-11-12T09:53:00.000-08:00

I saw this movie. Robert Rodriguez has succeeded in making the ultimate self-mocking action exploitation movie. Danny Trejo plays a monosyllabic, implausibly nimble, killing machine version of himself. Ignoring the deliberately gratuitous fire and gore, the movie is steeped in immigration politics, and has a few surprisingly perceptive moments. There is the cliche human drama element of people struggling for a better life, but there is also an explicit, and basically correct, description of the economic motivations on both sides.

Employers already willing to break the law and hire illegal aliens have a vested interest in enforcing status quo immigration law. Deniro plays an emphatically racist politician who naively advocates totally shutting down the border. His henchman, Jeff Fahey, is the real power and seems to be serving vague business interests and using Deniro as a puppet. The corrupt capitalists do not want amnesty, because then the legal wage price floor comes into effect; nor do they want isolationism, because they do not share interests with protectionist labor.

I also liked a scene where some hired thugs wisely surrender to Machete, rather than submit to being stock-role cannon fodder.

The climax of the movie completely abandoned any pretense of suspension of disbelief and could be best described as similar to the ending of Blazing Saddles, substituting uzis for pies.

Some very funny parts, and general cleverness abounds.

Voted again

2010-11-02T11:09:00.000-07:00

I voted for more Republicans than I ever had in one sitting. Probably because none of these races are that important.

Blunt vs Carnahan vs Some Libertarian

I voted for the no-name libertarian because Blunt is a hawk and good ol boy operative. Anyone who's ever claimed Jack Abramoff as a friend should never be allowed near public money, nor his lobbyist wife. Blunt is also pretty statist in general, supporting federal centralized education and internet controls.

Akin vs Lieber vs Libertarian

I voted for Akin because he voted against the bailout and for Fed Audit, and has been relatively consistent against spending.

Schweich vs Montee vs Libertarian

I voted for Schweich because my CPA father said he appears genuinely competent and qualified.

Corrigan vs Dooley vs Libertarian

I voted for Corrigan because he promises to reduce property taxes and reduce spending, albeit vaguely.

Jotte vs Dolan

I voted for Jotte. No libertarian in the race, and he talks about fiscal responsibility at least.

John Diehl vs No one

Some Democrat prosecutor vs No one

I will never vote for an unopposed candidate, so wrote in myself for both of these.

Prop A end city earnings tax = Yes.

Prob B regulate puppy mills = No. I approve cost cutting businesses.

Amendment 1 - Should Assessor be elected position = ok

Amendment 2 - Disabled vets be exempt from prop tax = sure

Amendment 3 - End real estate transfer tax = Yes

And of course voted to fire all the judges.

Gun Control debate

2010-10-28T01:00:00.000-07:00

Last month I attended an open forum gun control debate hosted by a youth-oriented church. There was a surprisingly full range of positions represented. It was neither overwhelming pro-gun Christian conservative nor anti-gun urban liberal. I'm pretty confident I set the goal post for "pro" though. My main contribution was after noticing that all of the other gun advocates were constantly caveatting, "...except for convicted felons of course..." and being careful to endorse background checks, while denouncing other forms of ownership restriction. I support the right of ex-cons to purchase weapons.
-They have served their time. If these people are still considered too dangerous to own a firearm, they should logically still be in prison.
-If citizen disarmament is a concern (which it was to many of the pro-gun attendees) then this establishes a precedent whereby Feds can start handing out increasingly draconian felony convictions for unrelated activities without touching the 2nd Amendment directly.
-Under the general argument that a firearm is a manufactured commodity undeserving of any special regulation, and that felons should not be restricted from participating peacefully in the economy.

Following from the last point, an anti-gun debater makes the analogy to cars which are legal personal property, but that citizens accept that they are subject to a host of government regulation concerning public safety. I stood alone in rejecting the acceptability of driver regulation.
Someone else brought up the reductio ad absurdium of personal nuclear weapons. However, personal nukes are a self-negating Catch-22, in that, if you are rich enough to acquire one, you have enough to lose that you'll never use it.

It was an entertaining evening, but I find it hard to believe anyone left swayed by the opposing camp.

Anarcho-Republican

2010-10-27T07:30:00.000-07:00

Stating this now before I have to go under oath some day. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Tea Party.
Demonstrative of my aversion to the shallow rhetoric of this coalition, is current local poster boy Ed Martin, MO 3rd Congressional candidate. There is a strong argument that Ed represents a solid lesser evil vs the Carnahan dynasty. Nonetheless, Martin is a thorough jingoistic protectionist, staunch welfare statist, and Reagan-ite deferrer of tax bills. He rails against Federal spending in the abstract, but somehow admires New Deal style stimulus projects. He's tacitly pro-war, and emphatically in favor of status quo Social Security. Thats already 50% of Federal budget right there he is afraid to touch.
This is my biggest irk about the mainstreamization of Tea Party momentum. Yes, taxes should be cut. However, spending always gets paid for in the long run. If you cut taxes, this lowers the threshold of profitable commerce, good; but without reduced public spending, the debt piling up in the mean time will undermine any progress. This is why Reagan is vastly overrated. Loudly advocating tax cuts in isolation is a classic populist softball from the conservative camp. Other than perhaps reforming the tax code to reduce dead weight loss (ie a flat tax perhaps) taxes are nearly irrelevant issue in the absence of budget cuts.
Obama is threatening to spend $3.6T in 2011. Based on this graphic, here is my platform. Rather than flippantly declare "end it all", I am trying to craft a compromise between my most extreme anarcho-capitalist desires and remotely credible suggestions I could make to "rebel" GOP candidates like Ed Martin.
So the Anarcho-Republican plan:

Step 1 - Immediate spending cuts
-End the wars, sell foreign bases, excess hardware, slash military staffing. 90% budget reduction.
-End all payments from Federal to State governments. This includes $260B in Medicaid, $43B in highway funds, and a host of education and other miscellaneous programs. States will be individually responsible for these costs, and can either shuffle their internal funding, suspend these programs, or raise state level taxes as their respective citizens elect.
-Cut all housing related welfare and simultaneously end subsidies to the mortgage industry. Housing prices will fall to an equilibrium level where low income people will not need government assistance. This represents a huge wealth transfer from the financial services elite to the lowest cohort. Progressive.
-End foreign aid. Appears this is about 90% of the "International Affairs" category.
-If military liquidations are insufficient, continue selling Federal assets (parkland, etc) until the current debt is cleared, thus saving $251B in interest.
-End all agricultural programs. American farms are productive and competitive enough to keep food cheap, the subsidies are just gross corruption.
-Lots of "small" (<$2B) redundant or otherwise unnecessary programs.
That knocks the budget down 45% to about $2.1T, without even touching Social Security, Medicare, Veteran's benefits, and non-housing income supplements.*

Step 2 - Funding
-No more government debt. End the sale of Treasury bonds.
-No more taxes! Of any kind. No tariffs, no income tax, no capital gains, etc. Eliminate the IRS. Save billions in man hours for every business. Traditional tax systems are invariably regressive because the income brackets are never severe enough.** Purchasing power increases due to more cheaply available imports.
-Government operations funded solely through inflation. They need $2,100,000,000,000 this year? Print it. This represents a sizable tax on holders of cash, but one in which there is no opportunity for fraud, nor any of the huge private sector dead weight loss in having experts trained specifically in tax maneuvers, nor government staff tasked with collections. Also this is highly progressive, because those living paycheck to paycheck will not feel the effects at all. If the amount being printed is quite clear, then the inflation rate is calculable in advance and wages will track closely with prices. Only those accumulating cash are being taxed.
-No interest rate targeting. Interest rate will float according to the market demand for loanable funds and the need to incentivize savings that are constantly bleeding value from inflation. Money will only be printed to exactly cover Federal budget, with no room for macroeconomic manipulations. Inflation will directly correlate to spending.

At this point we have a highly streamlined economy with many government barriers removed; at peace; with everyone's favorite welfare programs still in place; and a very fair, stable, funding mechanism. I don't see how this would not be attractive to both mainstream liberals and conservatives, except I suppose for the dogmatic hawks. I don't even mention anything radical like opening the border or shutting down the drug war!

*Hypothetical Step 3 - Long term budget cuts
-Social Security, despite being timelessly popular, is inevitably a Ponzi scheme. To phase this program out, I would cap the benefits as they are currently ($X in 2010 dollars), and, pay each person when they retire $X*2010age/65. So everyone 65 and over in 2010 continues to receive 100% of $X (remember in 2010 dollars, so $X will rise with inflation) until they die. Someone who was 64 in 2010 will begin being paid 64/65 of $X in 2011, until death. Someone who was 30 in 2010 will begin receiving 30/65 of $X in 2045. Everyone who was born in or after 2010 will receive 0/65 of $X in 2075 and beyond.
-Other welfare programs I imagine being obsoleted in a less algorithmic fashion, simply on the strength of anti-socialist arguments gradually winning out.

**For example if the lowest bracket is 30% and the highest 50%, someone making $25K losing $7,500 feels the loss far more than someone making $100K losing $50K. If an income tax were to remain in place, the only way to make it progressive is: eliminate the bracket system; pick a poverty line, say $10K; only tax income in excess of that line for all income levels, at a flat rate. For example the rate could be 30% and thus the $25K earner is taxed $4500 = ((25-10)*.3) and the $100K earner is taxed $27,000 = ((100-10)*.3). Thus despite the flat rate, the low income individual is being taxed at 18% and the high income is at 27%. This also eliminates distortions caused by wanting to avoid income that would push one into a higher bracket.

Not quite Hamas apologism

2010-10-26T16:45:00.000-07:00

I have long abstained from voicing an opinion on the Israel-Palestine war, other than insisting America not be involved militarily nor financially. The history is murky and anecdotes from both camps are highly politicized.

I have recently concluded that the Palestinians are economically demonstratively the "good guys".

The Israeli settlers are protected by Israeli soldiers paid for by Israeli population at large, and via military subsidization from the USGOV and the global Jewish diaspora.

The Israeli soldiers are unwilling conscriptees or career soldiers who accept the offered risk:wage ratio. The people who enjoy the benefit of the West Bank occupation, the settlers, pay a vanishingly small portion of the cost of the operation.

The Palestinian resistance to the Israeli presence on the West Bank, bear essentially the entire cost of the fight personally, with their own lives. There are some minor transfer payments collected by the various terrorist groups, but these are dwarfed in comparison per life lost by Israeli military expenditures.

It is a safe assumption that if the West Bank settlers had to pay the entire cost of their position, they would choose to relocate instead. The Palestinians who wish the Israelis to be replaced by themselves or other Palestinians, are already solely paying for the entire cost of their effort.

Without any close investigation in to the history of atrocities in the region, I conclude only from the distribution of costs and benefits among the warring parties that the Palestinians must be in the right. In terms of overall goal that is, not necessarily in every, nor even any, specific action. I take from this a general rule, that in any conflict in which one side socializes costs, and the other keeps military costs private, the collectivized party is invariably the aggressor.

Incredible machine

2010-10-20T09:39:00.000-07:00

I saw The Incredibles for first time last night. Am I the only one who empathized with the robot? Not because I wanted the heros to get killed, but the robot's struggle for autonomy struck a chord. Theres not a clear transition point between the robot being remotely ordered to destroy the city, and then shooting at the heros trying to regain the remote. Benefit of the doubt that the robot would not choose to maraud of its own will?

Rinderpest

2010-10-15T10:20:00.000-07:00

I'd never heard of this livestock disease before it was announced it no longer exists. I am inspired. What better expression of Man's dominion over nature than a deliberate targeted successful extinction?

We can kill our way out of problems.

Sometimes 1 out of 3 is just fine

2010-09-23T02:01:00.000-07:00

I've had conversations with several left leaning libertarians lately. I have noticed a pattern of assertions:

1. CAFOs are horrible

2. CAFOs benefit from regulatory capture and subsidy

3. Unprotected, CAFOs are unprofitable

1. Capitalists exploit workers

2. Current ruling class arose via ongoing mass theft

3. Sans state interference, profit margin equilibrium goes to zero

In both cases I

1. disagree philosophically

2. emphatically agree

3. disagree logically

But this quickly becomes a non-debate, and agreement is at hand. Rather than be dragged in to an argument as to whether industrialized livestock or wage slavery are immoral, I will choose instead to be thankful my opponent advocates less, not more, government. As for their conclusions about the post-state market, I am quite certain they are incorrect. But again, I am pragmatic enough to make allies with people who make the right choices for the wrong reasons. I mean if the Alex Jones crowd thinks there should be less government because that would disempower the UFO overlords, so be it.

If it did come to pass that globalized agribiz and/or the entity known as joint stock corporation, actually go extinct in a true free market, then I admit I mis-predicted, and gladly move on to the next opportunity. I am not a vulgar libertarian with the tunnel vision to think that a stateless society would be exactly like my life now, except with more purchasing power. I am prepared to accept the fact that sea changes in culture and even seemingly efficient economic institutions, can and will occur in directions I will not enjoy.

The challenge then to left libertarians is to remain consistent in opposition to statism even if the end result, via free exchange between individuals, is more commoditization of lifeforms and increased income inequality.

Ogre's $1K win

2010-09-22T18:50:00.000-07:00

Upon the sunset of Jund's existence after two years of more or less consistent Standard domination, I seized the last opportunity to run over a tourney this past Saturday. My list courtesy of Gregg Keithley:

9 basic

4 GB fetch

4 jundland

8 landmen

2 m10 land

4 bolt

4 leech

3 terminate

2 sylvan ranger

4 thrinax

4 blightning

2 maelpulse

4 bloodbraid

2 bitblast

2 mitotic slime

2 grave titan

side

4 ruinblaster

4 thought hammer

3 doom blade

2 slave bolas

2 necrogenesis

I've played a few local weekly events with the above and done quite well, usually splitting for first. However, I did not do any gauntlet testing. My experience is that it felt a little weak to Baneslayer, but absolutely chewed up ground agro decks like the mirror and Naya. I've since learned to patiently reserve removal vs anything fielding white mana, and if need be, take a few swings to make sure I get through counters.

Round 1 bye

how lucky

Round 2 UW enchantress

Game 1

Enemy spreads a couple early lands, and journeys some of my guys, but I got 2 blightnings through and creatures started sticking.

I board out slimes and thrinaces for ruinblasters and doom blade.

Game 2

Enemy drops t2 firewalker, which I have never considered very stiff challenge for Jund.

I get t2 leech which I think ends up doing 20 damage to him. I make him use up all his counters on some blightnings, and he gets the enchantment that makes angel tokens whenever he casts enchantment. He makes I think 5 angels this game, and zero of them live to either attack or block. I had bitblasts and doomblades galore.

Round 3 mono-red vs Joey Mispagel

Game 1

I win roll and have greedy keep with no green. I play Lavaclaw and Joey sends t1 Guide which cheerfully delivers me a free Forest. I then get t2 leech and trade with a Teetered 4/2 Guide. My cup runneth over with instant removal, and I bolt 2 Ball Lightnings and Terminate a Hell's Thunder. Meanwhile a Thrinax and Blightnings have been knocking him down, until he gets in range of manland alpha strike.

I board out the 5c+ creatures and Rootbound Crag; bring in doom blades+necrogens.

Game 2

Pretty close, we are just racing since I don't have as much removal this time, and he has just enough to get me to zero between a Quenchable Fire and Hells Thunder before I send lethal.

Game 3

Joey has no plays until t3 when he makes unblockable Hellspark and I have Thrinax. He Searing Blazes it, and I play another, which he Bolts, gambling that he will rip Earthquake. He does not and my token team plus a Bloodbraid and Blightning kill him.

Round 4 Jund vs Yi

Game 1

We both do a lot of Jund things, and Im on the ropes, but a timely thrinax fogs for awhile as Yi draws about 7 land in a row. Then I finally draw Grave Titan and steal the game.
I board out 2 bolt and 4 blightning. I know most Jund pilots like to keep blightning for the mirror, and it definitely can take people out of games, but I prefer to have every spell effect the board if possible, plus the Obstinate Baloth factor. I bring in ruinblasters and slaves.

Game 2

Yi draws a lot of ruinblasters and I never have more than 4 lands. My hand has Titan, Slime and Slave. I take a lot of damage from Thrinax waiting to Slave it, which never happens. Cut off from my powerhouse spells, I can't keep up.

Game 3

I keep greedy hand of [3 landmen, 2 land, slime, titan]. Thankfully my first draw is Leech which holds down the fort, until I get Slime. Yi kills it somehow and I have tokens gumming shit up until Titan wins more.

Round 5 draw

Round 6 draw

Top 8 jund

Game 1

I draw 3 thrinaxes which represent the bulk of the midgame. Then I blightning away some gas, and draw mitotic slime, which is insurmountable.
Game 2

We throw our hands at each other, and are quickly reduced to topdeck mode where he has no team, and I have just a ruinblaster, no landmen either side. I get him to 4 and play Lavaclaw, then he casts Obs Baloth. I draw another Ruinblaster, and he trades with Lavaclaw, putting him back to 4. He casts another Baloth. I draw Leech and pass. He draws a card and holds it. I swing in and he trades with Leech, apparently holding dead, and back to 4 again. Enemy drops a THIRD baloth and is again at 8. I rip bloodbraid into ranger and swing. He takes out the elf and is at 4 again. He draws Bloodbraid into Leech. I draw Pulse, kill the baloth and swing. We trade down to my ruinblaster vs his bloodbraid and he at 2. He draws another blank, and I draw Slave bolas ftw.

Top 4 Naya vs Zach Newman

Game 1

I am on play, he gets T1 heirarch, then t2 cobra + heirarch#2. I cant resist card and tempo advantage and pulse Zach's heirarchs. I kill a Baneslayer, and a long stall develops. I read him as holding steppe, and Im at 3 life after a lot of combat exchanges. I have to be very careful with mana because Lavaclaw is my only non-green creature. I wittle down his team, and Zach gets a second Baneslayer, but I rip Terminate ftw.

Game 2

Zach leads w land go. I bolt his t2 fanashana and terminate his t3 same. Finally he sticks a Knight and Im out of removal. The following turn I draw doom blade, but Zach is keeping the Knight untapped. He drops Baneslayer and I take 10 damage from it before being putting a bit-blast on his knight forcing him to tap it to get 5th land in yard (cascade leech), then untap to blade the angel. He drops a vengevine and I trade with something, bc I just draw necrogen. This goes on to make about 8 tokens, and I just send suicide waves and eventually deal 30.

Finals draw vs Gregg Keithley

I successfully talk Gregg out of gambling $100 on one match of Magic and finally get to go home, $300 richer.

So long Jund, we had a good run. Looking forward to abusing Mox Opal somehow in Scars.

MTG Bets with Keithley

2010-09-21T14:28:00.000-07:00

Whenever a planeswalker with cmc 3 or less is printed, it will appear main or side in the top 8 of a vintage tourney of 30+ players within 12 months of becoming legal.

$10 Yes (vroman)* vs $10 No (Gregg)

Gush will be restricted some time within the next 4 B&R updates

$15 Yes (vroman) vs $10 No (Gregg)

Frantic Search will be restricted some time within the next 4 B&R updates

$10 Yes (vroman) vs $20 No (Gregg)

Preordain will be restricted some time within the next 4 B&R updates

$10 Yes (vroman) vs $10 No (Gregg)

Jace the Mindsculptor will be restricted some time within the next 4 B&R updates

$10 Yes (Gregg) vs $15 No (vroman)

Burning Wish will be unrestricted some time within the next 4 B&R updates

$10 Yes (Gregg) vs $20 No (vroman)

*these amounts are how much this person gives up if wrong

DCI doomed to repeat history

2010-09-20T15:24:00.000-07:00

DCI has unrestricted Frantic Search and Gush in Vintage. Frantic Search has been marginal for a long time, and while free draw always has potential for degeneracy, FS actually proving overpowered as 4of would be unforeseen. On the other hand Gush has more than proved broken, twice now. Reckless decision.

I would much rather have seen a linear strategy like Flash be legalized than a more generally useful draw card. All the same logic that would be used in favor of Gush being safe now, also apply to Flash (ie less brainstorm, ponder, merchant scroll). Most importantly Flash does not have any synergy with the Time Vault strategy, while Gush most certainly does. I fear this decision is just going to return us to the boring 2003 and 2007 environments.
If DCI wanted to shake up the vintage metagame, some much more interesting things they could have done:
-Unrestrict Flash, see above.
-Apply the Phyrexian Dreadnaught errata to the identically worded rules of Scorched Ruins and Lotus Vale. Even if they were preemptively restricted, having two more pseudo Black Lotuses in circulation might be more dangerous than quad-gush, but at least it would be something new.
-Restore Abeyance to white Time Walk. Give something snazzy to non-blue why not.
-Ban or errata Time Vault into uselessness. A 1xGush + 0xVault environment would be much more worth exploring than 4xGush + 1xVault obviousness.

Since this will all be ignored, I have no compunction abusing Gush+Vault this time around.
I predict Gush, Frantic Search, Preordain and Jace Mindsculptor get restricted a year from now.

Plant science panel discussion

2010-09-15T11:37:00.000-07:00

I attended a panel discussion at the Danforth Plant Science Center titled "Feeding the World". First there was a reception where lots of WashU and Monsanto suits mingled. The highlight of the hors d'oeuvres was samples of a vitamin fortified rice meal the Center is producing and mass shipping to Africa, in cooperation with some branch of the UN. The hostesses were eager to explain the program to a queue of rich old ladies. I quipped that it tasted better than ramen noodles. My father suggested that one would not want to live on it though. If the United Nations was airlifting it to me for free, I think I could.

The panelists represented three distinct view points:
Phil Miller - Corporate mouth piece
Thad Simons - International bureaucrat
Paul Anderson - Private think tank

Miller is the regulatory liaison for Monsanto, one of the most egregious corporate welfare recipients outside the banking industry. He reeks of corporatism and actually used the phrase "public-private partnership". Miller trotted out over-population tropes, "poverty trap" rhetoric and stern calls for the importance of regulation. Of course, so you can capture it and scorched earth your competition. When asked how to prevent monopolization in agricultural technology, Miller suddenly gained a pro-market attitude and asserted that competition makes innovation the best return on investment. This logically explains why Monsanto spends far more effort on stifling competition than innovation.

Thad Simons represents the European public agency point of view. He predicts a near-future sharp increase in food prices. How is he invested? He spoke favorably of locavorism and typically vague sustainability concerns. Locavorism seems innately incompatible with "feed the world" type mass-agricultural initiatives. His response to the same monopolization question, was simply to call for stronger anti-trust laws and invoked the greatness of Teddy Roosevelt and the FDA. Also a staunch agriculture regulatory fan.

Lastly Paul Anderson was the only encouraging voice, who seems to have legitimately thought about the issue and not just promoting the vested interests of a company or agency. Anderson called attention to the fact that distribution is a far worse bottleneck than production. He made the comparison of North and South Korea, which are environmentally identical, but the confiscatory totalitarianism of the north cripples distribution, whereas the comparatively laissez faire south easily meets the needs of its people by first world standards. Lack of physical infrastructure, another symptom of kleptocratic governments, also hampers internal markets. Anderson specifically noted that it's important for local farmers to increase output so they can SELL their excess and improve standard of living beyond subsistence. He pointed out the lack of credit markets in these countries is what prevents farmers from improving efficiency. My favorite comment from Anderson explained that every African government has an agricultural department and these are uniformly corrupt failures. Western engagement with these entities only empowers the most avaricious elements of the local ruling class to control the source of foreign funds. Apparently being the head of an African DoA is the most powerful position short of Glorious Leader.
Anderson did pull his punches in regards to regulation, and sort of head-nodded along when his fellow panelists rushed to defend tighter safety and economic controls. He also had to toe party line in regards to the wonderfulness of DPSC's charitable missions.

The point of the panel was to seek donations for the above mentioned rice project, I think headed for Sudan. My question, which obviously did not get picked by the moderator, was "If you live in a country where at the end of every harvest, your local equivalent of the Lord's Resistance Army rolls up with AK47s and machetes and takes 100% of what you've grown, what does it matter if you are getting 100 bushels to the acre or 20? I recognize that DPSC is doing commendable work in improving crop yields, but this only benefits people with secure property rights. Why pretend you have a chance of positively impacting dictatorships? Regime change is outside your mission area. Whatever money spent on African PR campaigns could be spent on the labs that generate useful technology for those with the freedom to use it. Comments?"

Voter Quorum

2010-09-13T08:15:00.000-07:00

I agree with this idea. Assume that a random sample of proposed legislation will be 99% craven populism or economic favoritism. Thus anything that creates barriers to passing laws is good. Freezing government as it is right now, would be preferable to running the political process any further, since it must be taken for granted that dominating incentives to make things worse will never go away.

A threshold of 50% of registered voters seems reasonable. So long as such a requirement does not degenerate into a demand for mandatory voting.

Shoot First, Blog Later

2010-09-01T10:10:00.000-07:00

I have stopped carrying my miniscule 22 Beretta in favor of a Walther PPK 380. The one and only reason for this change is that the Tipo Flobert variety of the 950B which I own, does not have a safety. This makes me uncomfortable to carry it chambered. The PPK has a right handed safety.
The odds of an unchambered semiauto pistol accidentally firing are, for all intents and purposes, zero. The odds of a safetyless, decocked, chambered gun accidentally firing are very small, but greater than zero. The addition of a safety reduces this towards zero by an order of magnitude, which is within my comfort range.
The sequence of [draw, chamber, fire] is too slow and complicated vs [draw, desafety, fire], especially since the former requires two hands. The latter can not only be done with one hand, it can be done discretely before drawing, if some warning is given. In an actual self defense emergency, an unchambered weapon is questionably reliable for actually being ready in time. Hence the "Condition One" doctrine.
All my arguments in favor of smaller guns and the 22 caliber still stand, and I'd prefer a safetied 22 pocket gun over the PPK certainly. PPK is on the compact end of midrange pistols, and still fits in a pocket, but I would eventually like to replace it with something smaller. In the meantime, the significant stopping power advantages of 380 over 22short should not be discounted. Here is some great information on varieties of mouseguns, yet does not discuss which, if any, of these choices have thumb safeties, a feature not always obvious from photos.
Anyway, under excuse to make sure my Walther was reliable, Josh and I organized another trip to the range this past Sunday. Pictures below.

Christina does a commendable Sarah Connor impression

Aaron fires through 16 round mag from Josh's 9mm

One of the other range patrons that day was very proud of his "terrorist targets"
Leaning into 5.56mm recoil. Back up 380 waiting

Aaron has been slowly learning how to work his green-dot sight over the course of several range trips now

Kevin undeniably owns the scariest guns in the group. In addition to this crowd favorite tricked out AR15, we all got the opportunity to be humbled by his ridiculously overpowered 10ga shotgun, which feels like getting slammed full strength in the shoulder by a rubber mallet.

Don't get within 25 yards of Josh's .303 Enfield

I believe there is a Beatles song that describes this scene

Racial politics continued

2010-08-31T16:54:00.000-07:00

Menendian has responded to my post. I highlight some excerpts here.

Quote

I am vehemently anti-libertarian, not because I disagree with many libertarian policy proposals (I agree with many, if not most), but because I think it fundamentally misrepresents the world in two critical ways.

Then wouldn't the pragmatic thing be to endorse libertarianism, if the output is a political environment you prefer, regardless of what you feel are incorrect motivations?
For example, a few years ago there was a vote in MO over tax funded stem cell research. The debate broke down explicitly along religious vs science lines. I am obviously hardcore pro-science in the abstract, but spoke against the issue, due to public funding. I have to assume that a government paid for research program will not be cost effective, and/or will be somehow ideologically tainted. This unfortunately threw me into the theocratic camp. I was somewhat concerned with emboldening luddism in the future when there might not be any socialized cost wrinkle to the issue. Still it was worth it to me to represent the ignored economic angle, in the short run.
Quote

First, it downplays or misunderstands the ways in which human beings are deeply interconnected and in relationship by projecting a worldview in which we are largely autonomous, separate selves. The libertarian self is essentially, and aggressively Hobbesian.

I am very aware of the interconnectedness. I see the world as a collection of 6.8 billion self interested agents all subconsciously attempting to compute optimal payoffs in their local corner of an insurmountably massive game theory grid, 24/7. Life is, and always will be, a struggle. Libertarianism's sole purpose is the answer to the fundamental economic question: how to fulfill as many of people's unlimited desires as possible with our limited resources.
Quote

Secondly, and more importantly, the libertarian project is fundamentally flawed because it fails to understand what law (and the state) really is. Law is merely the name for a form of social control that exists in more organized societies, but it no less exists without a state. That's the biggest mistake that libertarians make, thinking that they can do away with the state and have all of the freedom they desire.

I have no problem with "social control" in the sense of norm-violators being shunned, and rights-violators being punished, etc, but the rampant wealth siphoning which is the outcome of corporatism, redistributionism, regulatory rent seeking, and bold faced kleptocratic corruption, all hallmarks of nation states, are self evidently bad.

Related, there is distinct line of thought among some apolitical and casually left individuals to instinctively distrust fiscal conservatives, including Rand Paul, Tea Party types, the Republican party in general, and pretty much any candidate right-of-center, as closet racists. Since I have diminishing overlap with the above list of groups, yet almost zero common ground with Democrats, I get stuck on the "other" side of this conversation.

One answer is to refute this head on and deny the accusation, while disowning individuals on public record making racist comments, as aberrations. The opposition complains that Republican leadership's failure to more tightly rein in and/or denounce such behavior is indicative of tacit acceptance.

This is all pretty subjective, and I am not going to work overtime defending mainstream Republicans, but the bottomline which I feel knee-jerk anti-racists are missing is this:

Without conceding that Republicans are racist, it doesn't really matter, even if they were openly racist, so long as the society they are capable of generating is the lesser evil. For example, say Rs were rather blatantly discriminatory, but had a strikingly free market platform in every other respect; while the Democrats were strictly egalitarian, but very command+control regulators and bailout friendly, etc. It could easily be the case that the R-world economy is so much better, that an oppressed minority could be better off there, than in the equality-prioritized world.

To make it more abstract, say you can step through a portal where your life is exactly the same in both worlds.

Society R, whites make on average $12/hr, nonwhites make on average $9

Society D, everyone makes $6

If you undergo no costs whatsoever to switch between worlds, and you are black, which do you choose?

If it were me, and say 10 years from now, China has become the economic powerhouse and America is a depressed backwater, and I had the options of scraping out a living in my homeland, or becoming an unwelcome immigrant in Shanghai, constantly snubbed in favor of native Chinese, I would still gladly make the tradeoff for markedly improved standard of living.
So the point being, that perceived racism, closet or otherwise, should not instantaneously be a deal breaker. Its not impossible for an actively racist society to be strictly better for the minorities, than an egalitarian one.

It still remains to be proven of course, that conservatives can actually offer the economic improvement to justify the fear of discriminatory institutions. I would go further to say that A) mainstream Republicans probably can not make that claim very convincingly unfortunately, and B) Libertarians and strongly libertarian leaning Republicans, not only can provide the better payoff, they can do so without discrimination! Ie you can take Society L where everyone makes $13/hr.

The Tea Party is a good example of this. They cling to lots of vaguely ethnocentric distractions like protesting the World Trade Crater Mosque, and gung-ho American labor protectionism. And yet, I tentatively would predict that if this coalition actually assumed power, they would pursue enough deregulation and spending cuts, to be on net, a positive step towards free markets.

All I am saying is: the fact that a group is suspected of racism, or may in fact be racist, should not, in and of itself, eliminate them from consideration as the best among available options.

Many people, will make a polarizing choice to avoid alleged racist orgs, regardless of costly alternatives. This is what I am arguing against, the misplaced priorities. Racism is bad, but it is not irredeemably bad.

To formalize it:

Given that the degree to which a society is free market vs centrally planned, is proportional to rate of standard of living improvement;

It follows that minorities will be better off in a free market in the long run, regardless of whether that society is discriminatory or not.Given that conservatives tend towards free market and liberals tend towards central planning;

It follows that minorities should elect conservatives, if it can be determined they are truly free market, and ignore fears of racism.

Clearly it would be best, even with the above assumptions, to have nonracists in power over racists, all else held equal, and I am not suggesting racism is a necessary tradeoff, if it can be costlessly avoided.

Rand Paul is right(ish)

2010-08-18T16:51:00.000-07:00

Lets look at Rand Paul's outline of political stances.
I agree with Rand about 85%. I hold more or less polar views on the bioethics and immigration categories, and Paul's anti-war feelings are a little tepid for my tastes. The remainder though is quite inspiring. I suppose if you ever find a candidate you agree with 100%, you are probably looking at your own name on the ballot. So Rand Paul is strikingly wrong on a handful of issues, but on net would be a welcome addition to the Senate.
I establish this backstory in order to discuss Rand's controversial Civil Rights Act statements a few months ago.
Speaking for the anti-Paul critics, I appoint my magic card rival Stephen Menendian, who got face time on Huffington Post. Nice work Steve.

First let me tell a personal anecdote regarding the consequences of racial job discrimination. I currently work for the business my grandfather started in 1951. Between that time and his death in 2005, grandpa was the sole decision maker and as far as I know, never once hired a non-white employee. All my memories of my grandfather are very fond ones of an incredibly hardworking, charitable, devoted family man. Though its pretty unavoidable looking back he was passively racist. And he suffered because of it! By subtly passing up qualified colored workers, we got stuck with a lot of burn out white trash guys. Many headaches developed over the years via his perverse hiring criteria. Gramps was a visionary businessman on the big picture deals, but certainly cost himself a lot in the details. This is exactly the result one would expect when arbitrarily limiting oneself to a smaller pool of applicants via a non-relevant criteria. Its a Gresham's Law scenario where the bad apples are foisted off on to the firms who refuse to compete for the full range of workers. Not only do you lose good black workers, you tend to get the worse white workers as well.
Since I've been responsible for hiring, we have actually had a disproportionately high representation of black and hispanic workers, relative to St. Louis demographics, even accounting for this income bracket. Not because I want to help out minorities for its own sake, but because I'm an unapologetic capitalist. I want to pay as little as possible, and this is who shows up to accept our offered rates, while meeting my minimum standards. In fact in my dedication to laissez faire, I am an even more color blind employer than typical corporations, since things like criminal records, functional illiteracy, and active drug addictions, do not deter me, if the applicant comes recommended. Given the unfortunate higher likelihood of low income minorities coming from environments that have left them with such negative characteristics, my company is slightly easier job opportunity.
Discrimination is bad practice for both employee and employer. But Smennen makes it clear he doesn't care about the efficiency arguments of non-racism, its solely a moral issue to him. I could make the more abstract case that there is no difference between the two. I will remain on more familiar territory today.
We'll take the simple case of a sole proprietorship as opposed to publicly traded company. This business is some individual's property, just like his home. An employment contract is an invitation by the employer to show up on his property, do some work, and receive payment. The invitee is free to decline. I do not see this as fundamentally different from an individual inviting individuals into his home for social purposes, which they are likewise free to decline. The fact that money changes hands is the business of these two people after they have agreed to meet on the owner's property. There is no reason an individual should have any less discretion in who he extends invitations to at his business, than at his home. If said businessman were to foolishly only offer invitations to work for pay to select ethnicities, this is not force or theft against them.
Like, Rand Paul, I would support a non-discrimination policy for tax funded posts, and other public functionaries, but it is really not the government's place to enforce morality upon citizens that does not transgress others rights. One does not have a right to a job at any particular business, any more than they have a right to walk in to a stranger's house. To say otherwise, would give government carte blanche to enforce other moral paradigms regarding citizen's private behavior; for example their sex partners, etc. Since we have relatively little control of what moral agenda is advanced by the ruling party of the moment, it is a wiser policy to reject government's power to dictate morality at all.
This said, I do think Smennen has a point that Rand is dissembling somewhat by trying to obfuscate exactly what portions of the Civil Rights Act he opposes. I presume Steve's analysis of the legal history is correct, and thus as a libertarian, I, and Rand, should indeed openly oppose the Fair Housing Act in entirety. I would stress that there exist far higher priorities though for the goal of reducing government interference. We are so far removed from an acceptable political environment, that I would hesitate to even call it progress should the FHA be repealed as a first step.
Paul is in a difficult position of course, since the logical conclusion of laissez faire leads to very politically incorrect places. Rand is presenting himself as more mainstream than his father, which is hard to do and remain ideologically consistent. I sincerely hope he does not give in to populism. Still, Rand Paul is undeniably a step in the right direction.

Black Swan advice

2010-08-13T01:00:00.000-07:00

I don't read many nonfiction books. Most of my econ/political reading comes in blog/article form these days. The commitment to an entire book is severe. That said, I did read Nassim Taleb's Black Swan. Recommended.

Here is Mr. Taleb's 10 point platform to avoid financial crises in the future with my comments in bold.

Certainly if this were simultaneously and immediately implemented, we would be much better off. Still, his plan is suboptimal.

1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become too big to fail. Evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum amount of hidden risks – and hence the most fragile – become the biggest.

Agree

2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing. We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.

Sounds good, better would just be "No socialisation."

3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus. The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.

No shit. Except who is the 'we' that is putting "our" trust in "such experts". If the talking heads on Fox News are the trusted experts by default, then we don't really have a choice in the matter. I never trusted any of these people to begin with. Sure it would be great if we could summarily purge the institutions responsible, but these are large well organized self interested heirarchies, who are largely in bed with those who craft public opinion. Its not a question of who we trust, its who makes the decisions whether they are trusted or not.

4. Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks. Odds are he would cut every corner on safety to show “profits” while claiming to be “conservative”. Bonuses do not accommodate the hidden risks of blow-ups. It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards.

Good advice. Maybe future contracts would only pay out bonuses farther down the line. Ie your 2010 bonus is paid out in 2015, if and only if in retrospect its still clear you did a good job (or even if the company is still in business, as the ultimate check of your management skills).

5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity. Complexity from globalisation and highly networked economic life needs to be countered by simplicity in financial products. The complex economy is already a form of leverage: the leverage of efficiency. Such systems survive thanks to slack and redundancy; adding debt produces wild and dangerous gyrations and leaves no room for error. Capitalism cannot avoid fads and bubbles: equity bubbles (as in 2000) have proved to be mild; debt bubbles are vicious.

This seems like a slippery slope. Not everyone is an idiot. There are frequently legitimate reasons for crafting complex hedge bets, if you think someone else is under/over valuing risk. The problem is the regulatory environment effectively subsidized risk taking, so it was undervalued and sold too cheap and thus supply of the simple contracts were exhausted. In order to satisfy demand for investments, financiers had to invent increasingly derivative investment products, in effect selling insurance on insurance on insurance on some 5th party loan. Without government distortion, risk would be properly valued and the demand could be satisfied with the existing number of "real" 1st party investments and insurance.

6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning . Complex derivatives need to be banned because nobody understands them and few are rational enough to know it. Citizens must be protected from themselves, from bankers selling them “hedging” products, and from gullible regulators who listen to economic theorists.

Disagree. See above. There would be far less market for uber-hedged investments without government interference. Taleb, I give up on your Sphinx riddle. How can citizens be protected from gullible regulators, via regulation?

7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence”. Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumours, be robust in the face of them.

Good analogy.

8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains. Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab.

Good analogy. Peter Schiff got there first though.

9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible “expert” advice for their retirement. Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).

By definition, nothing is an absolutist permanent store of value. Markets are what defines value. Theres no escaping this basic fact.

10. Make an omelette with the broken eggs. Finally, this crisis cannot be fixed with makeshift repairs, no more than a boat with a rotten hull can be fixed with ad-hoc patches. We need to rebuild the hull with new (stronger) materials; we will have to remake the system before it does so itself. Let us move voluntarily into Capitalism 2.0 by helping what needs to be broken break on its own, converting debt into equity, marginalising the economics and business school establishments, shutting down the “Nobel” in economics, banning leveraged buyouts, putting bankers where they belong, clawing back the bonuses of those who got us here, and teaching people to navigate a world with fewer certainties.

Maybe Im getting the wrong idea here but "Capitalism 2.0" sounds like buzzword euphemism for "mixed economy".

Gay Illegal Immigrant Marriages

2010-08-12T01:00:00.000-07:00

In recent lose-lose political news, the feds are overruling California's gay marriage ban and Arizona's papers-please law. I am solid proponent of individuals seeking out mutually satisfactory relationships of their choosing, with any level of implied contractual obligations; and if they desire, labeling such as marriage. Also I am on record encouraging expansion of the labor pool, no questions asked. So I certainly disapprove of CA/AZs respective irrational legislation. That said, my priority has to remain decentralization in the abstract. Thus I would prefer to allow a subset political unit make a bad decision, than reinforce an encompassing political unit's power to intervene. On a personal calculus level, as a non-CA/AZ resident, the impact of their laws are quite tangential to me, while I fear setting more precedent for federal authority to overrule a hypothetical good decision from MO that defies federal approval. Not that I have any particularly high confidence in Missouri state legislature ever doing anything heroic that would raise DC's ire.
So at risk of throwing my lot in with the troglodytes who insist on controlling their neighbors' decisions re: partners and employees, I urge caution in celebrating this as a pro-freedom development. In the end, the feds are the boss of us all. Do not trust them.

Also on the theme of losing in politics, condolences to the Schiff campaign. Get back to making money, Peter!

Unpopular Ideas Club

URL upgrade

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I gave in

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The Last Lieutenant

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Tangled

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Vote April 5th

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Perfect Magic

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Jesse Irwin - 10th Ward Alderman

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Mirrodin Besieged in Vintage

The School Cartel

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Guest Post by Josh Smith: Tourney Report: Paris PTQ, St Louis *First*

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Rinderpest

Sometimes 1 out of 3 is just fine

Ogre's $1K win

MTG Bets with Keithley

DCI doomed to repeat history

Plant science panel discussion

Voter Quorum

Shoot First, Blog Later

Racial politics continued

Rand Paul is right(ish)

Black Swan advice

Gay Illegal Immigrant Marriages

Guest Post by Josh Smith: Tourney Report: Paris PTQ, St Louis First