Of Silent Passings

From The Fringe Element

I have previously mentioned how the origins of D&D are intertwined with southern Wisconsin. I have been chided, probably in response to the articles I have written regarding Gary Gygax. I have been chided for not recognizing the passing of Dave Arneson. Arneson is pictured above as the bearded guy on the left. The bearded guy in the center being accused of being the murderer is Gary Gygax.

Dave Arneson was instrumental in the creation of D&D back in the ancient days before anyone had thought of a role playing game or a character sheet, or a Dungeon Master. These words are so significant in my life that these men seem to be earth shattering geniuses. I find myself hard pressed to separate out how their original ideas have changed the face of gaming or created whole new dimensions of the paper, miniatures, board game, and video game industries.

Sadly, I never paid much attention to the names on my books which would have given me some inkling of the great men to whom I owe the many hours of nerdy squealing joy. Equally sad is the fact that often we never hear of significant people until after they have died. Arneson Died last week on Tuesday. He was only in his early 60's.

UPDATE: According to our commentator(commenter?) the man I identified above as Dave Arneson is actually Mike Carr. From my perspective this is conflicting information coming from third parties. If Wikipedia has taught me anything it is the value of verification on the internet. So, if anyone can positively identify those in the above image I will go off of that in the future. My goal was to post an image related to this article and not just swiped from Wikipedia, and thereby enrich the imagescape of the internet. However I would warn against using the images I post as a reference since it is abundantly clear I do not know who these people are.

The Friday Bacon

First Person Reporting. ZOMG!

There is(are?) still thirty minutes left to file your taxes as of my typing this. However here in Cleveland it may be more difficult to file your taxes than in previous years since the post office will not be staying open till midnight. At least not all of them. Only the main branch of the post office will be open till midnight tonight because of budget cutbacks stemming from the recession. Someone saw this coming and positioned an advertising blimp over the city for all the people lining the streets waiting to get into the post office. Unfortunately my camera sucks and this is all I got.

UPDATE:

There also may have been a basket ball game. But this is the level of reporting you get from a blog.

Time Warner Seeks to Destroy the Internet

Like a cartoon villain, Time Warner has enacted a devious plan that promises to destroy something that brings joy to the people like you and I. If you haven't heard about this yet, Time Warner has begun testing a tiered system where they charge you by both the speed and total amount of bites you operate at in a month. If you aren't feeling outrage right now, then you don't understand what I just said.

Time Warner is attempting to take advantage of the average person's ignorance of how computers and the Internet operate by manipulating ambiguities in language to make it seem like there is somehow a finite amount of Internet out there. When operating under that vague understanding of resource use that is so obvious in the physical world, it seems reasonable that they would want to charge us for how much of something we use. The thing is that this is a deception. There is not a finite amount of internets out there that one day we might us up much like we might one day use up all the oil. There are just limits on how much can be delivered to a certain number of users at any given moment. Which is why the erroneous "tubes" analogy is so attractive.

It is helpful to think of this from the end of the ISP. Faced with the need to consistently upgrade their capacity to handle many more and more customers at the faster and faster speeds that are needed to run the more and more intensive operations we perform over the Internet the ISP decides, not that the costs will one day become prohibitive(because as the Wired graph shows, that simply isn't true. And simple logic tells you that if they faced a problem of overhead they could simply raise their rates. They are the cable company after all), but that since this technical reality creates users of different needs, using a different metric vastly changes your rate structure and you can balloon your revenue.

The simple capitalist, free market logic is obvious here. Where you have a monopoly in your individual markets you can charge whatever you want. Since most regions of the country are serviced by a single cable company or ISP they can all do this without fear of being out competed by the numerous other companies out there. The only customers that will be spared are those that live in competitive markets. And sure enough ATT has started testing this idea out themselves. Now Comcast, the big villains of the last bandwidth war are looking competitive because all they have is a cap.

The slightly less obvious reason that is highly compelling for a cable company to do something sinister like this is that they are a cable company. They are primarily in the business of offering TV entertainment and people going over to the Internet to get their shows whenever they want(even their own customers) deprives them of a customer for their other services, and of ad revenue since people are having difficulty finding satisfying advertising solutions on the Internet. Largely because you have accurate measures of how effective your ads are on the Internet where they are cheap, but have to pay top dollar for television ads that are widely believed to be entirely ineffective.

The tiered structure is basically Time Warner punishing online gamers and online movie watchers for getting their entertainment elsewhere.

The tiers are also very low. Or at least in the way we measure Internet use anymore. Time Warner points out that their first tier, 1G, satisfies the needs of a third of their customers. These are basically the people that don't use the Internet. I admit that these people will probably pay less for the same amount of Internet. Anything above your grandmas Internet use enters an onerous tiered system where you pay for each gigabyte you use. In a month.

Apart from the possibility of viruses and malware using Internet without your consent and beyond your control, this is an attack on the basic philosophy that has led to the Internet and computer use as we know it. We all converted over to cable Internet because it was fast and primarily because we didn't have to pay for every minute of Internet use through a dedicated phone line. It freed up so much of the initial cost barrier of the Internet and increased the speed to the point where it became the multi-media communications tool it had always promised to be. This type of Internet service created the concept of the computer as the always-on, always-connected Internet terminal. This philosophy of the personal computer is central to the way we think of computer use and central to how software operates. Going back to a tiered structure where one pays based on an almost arbitrary metric is an attack, an attack based in greed, but an attack on the philosophy that was foundational to Web 2.0. We will never be able to proceed to Web 3.0 with this albatross around our necks.

That is where monopolies hurt business. Even regional ones. This was a lesson we learned around the last great depression and hopefully with a Democratic congress it is not a lesson we will have to re-learn the hard way. There is at least one Congressman trying to fight back. He has proposed the interesting philosophical change of calling the Internet a utility. I like that. If phone service was essential to daily life enough to be called a utility then the Internet is as well.

You should write to your representatives at the state and federal level. Raising Cain on the Internet will only go so far to produce resistance to this move by Time Warner and Ma Bell. You have to get the honest perspective of the people to the government before the industry twists the story.

It's easy to question the validity of an economic argument that relies on the business generation of the Internet. If you are a moron, or have been living in a cave since 1990. It is easy to point out that many small businesses and individuals have been able to expand their sales and start new businesses because of the low overhead cost of the Internet and its ability to reach an international consumer base. But there are specific businesses that will be impacted by this kind of tiered Internet usage structure. Online gaming is the first that comes to mind. This is now the primary business model for game manufacturers. Every gaming platform is connected to the Internet. The single player content is often secondary in importance to the users of the games. And every gaming device now can download new titles entirely from the Internet. This new business model for the gaming industry that drastically reduces overhead and cuts out the middle man would be jeopardized by requiring gamers to engage in a cost benefit analysis of whether the game would be worth the additional tiered charges.


I currently use Time Warner service to access the Internet. But that will change as soon as I can find an alternate service provider. The only thing a corporation can understand is their own greedy, short term, self interest. So the only way to communicate with them is with money. So I will be taking mine away from the finks at Time Warner for even thinking about using the byte as a metric for billing.

The Friday Bacon

The Ben Franklin Report: Fraud around Every Corner

When it comes to expertise in winding down failing financial institutions, there are few more expert than William K. Black, who in a previous position, served as a regulator on the front lines of the S&L Crisis. Sitting down with Bill Moyers, Black makes a very strong case that the entire housing bubble was the result of fraud and inherently fradulent practices, whereby information was not disclosed by the borrower, or in many cases was not even so much as required for the loan. The full half hour interview is probably one of the most consise descriptions of the various problems of the financial industry. Among the most serious allegations in the interview, is that the Prompt Corrective Action Law, a product of the S&L crisis, has been completely ignored. The law sets forth the various categories of capital, ranging from Well Capitalized to Critically Undercapitzlied. If, for instance, a bank were undercapitalized under the provisions of this bit of law, it would be required to submit a Capital Restoration Plan that "is based on realistic assumptions, and is likely to succed in restoring the institution's capital". Even if the plan is accepted by the relevant federal banking agency, the undercapitalized bank is not allowed to acquire any interest in any company or insured depository institution. Thus, if this law were enforced, the banks that have been the recipients of bailouts would not be allowed to gobble up their former competition, at the going market rate or the weekend shotgun wedding rate. If the re-capitalization plan is not acceptable for whatever reason or has been improperly implemented, the executives and directors could potentially be dismissed if they have been employed for longer than 180 days. However, even if they survive management improvements, they will take a hit to the pocket, as the bank is required to seek FDIC approval of any bonus, which have so famously come to be a sticking point in the public debate.

Sean Oleander writes a piece which neatly serves as a continuation of Prof. Frank's points, pointing out the roles current administration officials played in the blissful years during which this crisis-to-be was allowed to metastisize.

One need look no farther than the treatment of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice to see that the rule of law was tattered beyond recognition during the Bush Administration. While some may see a certain continuitiy in the financial community to be an asset in such interesting times, but perhaps a better description would be collusion. How much is a bailout worth in campaign donations? Like the War in Iraq, the current financial bailout was planned with very little trancparency by industry insiders, and, again analogous, the cost to the Treasury, even within the first 12 months of operations, have gone far beyond projections.

The problem is all the more immediate with the Social Security Trust Fund failing almost a decade earlier than scheduled. Having served as a piggy bank since the Reagan Administration, the fund is going to start depleting itself, forcing President Obama and Secretary Geithner to borrow more money in the form of treasuries than they might be forced to otherwise. How much more money will be poured into deep, dark holes before the information asymmetry and fraud that is at the heart of the ongoing crisis is resolved? With the establish protecting its mighty Samson from a haircut, the federal government will probably just spend itself out of existence before admitting the problem.

Ben Franklin Report: The Mark to Market Rule

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As if in direct response to Colbert's challenge to create something, anything to believe in to turn the recession around, the Financial Accounting Standards Board changed the Mark to Market rule. Unfortunately this was actually in response to intense pressure from Congress and the Banks. This lets banks revalue their toxic assets before reporting them on their books. (Which makes me wonder why this was done just after the end of the first quarter.) The banks that took on more risk than they could manage don't just get to value these assets at whatever they want, they get to value these pieces of steaming crap at whatever they think someone would pay if anyone was interested in buying a steaming pile of shit just because someone called it golden.

Of course this looks exactly like what we have been doing so far in relation to this banking fiasco. We looked at the disaster and saw that the people in charge had established a system of perverse incentives that encouraged highly risky acts and called them extremely safe because of a complete lack of regulation. Our response has been to give even more huge shit tons of cash these very same people that fucked us for fun and profit and by removing any other regulation that insists we call a spade a spade. I am finding it harder and harder to resist the urge to call for murderous mobs to converge on Wall Street.

The Wall Street response to the reduction of regulation was obvious. Though, two years ago, if you said that Dow 8,000 would be good news people either would have thought you were crazy or they would have been terrified.

In this article, John Berry tries to criticize the negative reaction to the rule change that I outlined above. But he is comparing apples to oranges when he says,

The family doesn’t have to put up money to cover the difference between the mortgage and the lower market value. Nor should the Atlanta bank have to take a big hit on its reported income because some other mortgage-backed securities owner sold in a depressed market.

He is comparing the effect on banks that have to back their lending by having 10% of that value on their balance sheets. Which of course home owners don't do. And the family that is upside down on their mortgage will have to pay that money on the mortgage that is more than the value of their home just because they bought at the wrong time.

Lots of pundits and apologists for the financial industry keep trying to accuse home owners that face loosing their residence of buying beyond their means. Through this argument they try to push some of the moral culpability for this fiasco on people who only wanted a nice house. They didn't buy above their means, they listened to the market. The market told them what they were worth. It's not their fault the market lied to them because they couldn't have understood the market. Seriously, if huge banks couldn't see this coming when they specialize in finance, then its simply irrational to accuse home buyers of wrongdoing just because the effect of their actions is to further reduce the property value of their neighbors.

Berry does make a legitimate point about the removal of reality in accounting. He asserts that the Atlanta bank he is referring to in the above quote intends to hold on to its mortgage backed securities until they mature. Meaning the bank will be getting all the money from the mortgagees. This is the family in his apples to oranges scenario who has to pay the full value of the mortgage even though the house is worth less. (But hey, at least it still provides the same amount of warmth and shelter. Its just that breakfast nook they added doesn't mean they can afford to send the kids to college.) This means that the banks assets are really worth nearly their full value because the bank will get paid what it originally bargained. So the accounting rule lets them value their assets at what they can reasonably expect to still get paid over 30 years and they can lend out more money to consumers and businesses which increases liquidity and gets the markets moving again and leads to more manufacturing, more jobs, and more spending. Everyone's happy.

Except that just brings us back to where we started last November. No one knows how many mortgages will go into arrears or how many will be devalued through the proposed new bankruptcy rules. The short of it is we don't know if the mortgage backed securities will be worth what they were originally bargained for in 30 years when they run their course. All we do know is that they will be worth less. If not become worthless.

The Friday Bacon

Opening the fridge...



juice, chocolate, oranges, some leftovers....

On closer inspection...



BACON!!!

Sunday News Roundup: We're Still Here

Tazers: The CBC's As It Happens, had a segment focusing on the judicial review of the RCMP's use of tazers and in particular their deployment of tazers and the resulting death of Robert Dziekanski.

Environment: Earth Hour was yesterday. Did you turn off and unplug?

Space: Shuttle Discovery landed safely yesterday after upgrading the International Space Station. NASA TV was incredibly boring. The peaceful and safe use of space in the spirit of international cooperation continues. Thank God that our forays into space display the very best our species has to offer.

War: Continued victories in Iraq. Perhaps even progress? Though the entire escapade is a huge distraction from real threats and future battlegrounds. Maybe I spoke prematurely regarding the peaceful use of space.

The Friday Bacon

The Friday Bacon

The Friday Bacon

Bacony breakfast the day after Thanksgiving last year.

Anticipating The Worst: Update

Ohio state legislators are beginning the process of seeking permission from the federal government to allow local law enforcement officers to enforce immigration laws. This is not intrinsically racist, unless you believe that having an immigration policy is racist. However, if you listen to the segment in this link, toward the end there is the comment made that this is being justified in relation to job competition.

I haven't heard of any race riots yet (though there has been an obscene level of unexplained gun violence) but comments like this one cause me to be concerned. When made by politicians, particularly those that have been in office through the beginning of this crisis, or those who may have voted for legislation that could be seen as having contributed to this recession, comments like this seem to be a crass attempt to redirect public outrage away from our elected representatives and the corporate crooks responsible toward a marginalized and politically defenseless group. I think I am looking for a more serious word than "crass" but I don't want to pull a Godwin's Law at this stage. Though when it comes to vilifying an ethnic minority in a time of great economic crisis it is hard to come up with alternative adjectives.

Again, what worries me is the speed with which this is progressing. This was already an issue politicians and talking heads used to distract people when times were good. Now that jobs are scarce, the economic fear mongering that has been invalid for so long is starting to get traction at the fringes of the sane media. Note that the link above is to an NPR station.

Feingold's Proposed Amendment to the Constitution

The Friday Bacon 3/6/9

Fazolis club submarino has bacon on it. I used to eat these all the time.

Gun Control in Washington D.C. - No, This isn't a Repeat

I had previously remarked about the bill moving through Congress that would give full voting rights to Eleanor Holmes-Norton (D-D.C.). In those comments I also remarked that it was interesting that John McCain was voting against more equal representation of the nations citizens on what appears to be party lines because the seat is expected to be solidly Democratic. People have tried to throw a red herring into this debate by claiming that only states can be represented in Congress. Which is an interesting academic debate from a legal perspective but in reality is a smoke screen for partisan bickering. I find it hard to believe that anyone actually has a principled stance on the nature of the state when it comes to representation in Congress like they do about gun control or abortion. It's a politicians issue and I seriously doubt that framing the issue in this way will get any traction.

To be sure, the Republicans aren't the only ones with partisanship dirt on their hands. The Democrats brought this up because they wanted the extra seat, and threw in the extra seat for Utah as a token gesture. That seat is likely to be just as solidly Republican but Utah was due that seat in 2000 and would be getting it in 2011 anyway after the next census so really, the Democrats aren't giving the Republicans anything of similar value to what they are attempting to give themselves. Still for me this is a freedom and democratic representation issue.

The real fun came in last week when the Republicans dusted off their old roadblock issue, gun control. This article comes from the same ignorant perspective that most MSM coverage of guns has but covers some interesting angles on the nature of gun politics in the Capitol. It pisses me off that in their effort to be as childish and partisan as possible the Republicans are dragging gun control into the mix. Sure it worked, but bringing an unrelated issue into the debate was crass and only indicates that these Republicans don't take a principled stand on anything. It's all politics.

The thing that pisses me off about this is that there is a legitimate reason for the Republicans to bring this up but they don't see it. They don't see it because they don't care about the Second Amendment. All they care about is political power and what they can get away with.

The real issue is the 5-4 decision in Heller. For gun rights Heller is Roe v. Wade. Heller affirmed that the Second Amendment protects the right of the individual to keep a pistol independent of any militia. That is a reasonably narrow interpretation but D.C. interprets the holding even more narrowly to only mean that individuals may keep a loaded single action pistol in their home. Which would mean a definition of "firearm" that is even more restrictive than the now expired Brady Bill and would mean that it is illegal to transport a firearm in any kind of working order. Lots of people on the abortion issue are eyeballing the Supreme Court and not just because of Justice Ginsburg's recent illness. (may she always be healthy and live to be 100) If D.C. can argue for their narrow interpretation successfully or if the balance of The Court shifts, the triumph of gun rights will have been short lived and the jubilation of gun nuts will turn to rage. Federal preemption of further suit by the fascists in D.C. will preserve the rights of law abiding citizens and help close a chapter of wasteful, ineffective, and unconstitutional legislation.

The Friday Bacon

Ummm... store brand.

The Ben Franklin Report: Tax Revenue

California state Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, Democrat, introduced a bill in that state's legislature proposing the legalization and taxing of recreational use of marijuana. Ammiano's arguments immediately touched on all the major points that the pro-legalization crowd has been making in between bong hits for decades now. To me the most significant argument is the fiscal one.

Legalization of a nonviolent activity lowers the number of criminals, reduces police costs of pursuing recreational pot smokers, reduces numbers of criminals in prison, reduces prison costs, eliminates need for violence in pot buying transaction and so reduces violent crime, brings marijuana production into the light of day where it can be regulated which produces tax revenue and regulation, regulation of production and use and quality has health benefits, which further reduce costs to society, and creates jobs.



Sure its not a new argument and it is the one that most young potheads are likely to jump on first because it seems like it would be so appealing to the forever cash-strapped government. "Lets just let them tax pot and then they will rush to make it legal, man." The major proponents of such thinking being in a chemically induced type-B personalities, rarely get any traction in mainstream politics. In trying economic times such as these I would expect a well reasoned argument that points out, not only the increased tax revenue ($1 billion in California alone) but also the potential cost savings in other programs, would get a better reception.

However, these arguments have failed before and its not because they are poorly reasoned, despite my poking fun at potheads. There are the usual histrionics that are thrown about by the anti-drug lunatics about the impending collapse of society, and "Oh God, won't somebody please think of the children!?!!?!" Despite the truth that legalized recreational drugs do lead to negative health consequences, and beer and tobacco companies do target children with advertising, those are threats that have proven to be small and that we as a society have obviously chosen to live with. It is also popular to point out that history(the repeal of prohibition, Amsterdam) has shown us that when certain recreational drugs are legalized it eliminates the demand in the informal market for the goods, which directs the attention of professional criminals to other activities. Then the reduction of interaction between normal Joe Sixpack (Johnny Jointsmoker?) people and hardened criminals and the police reduces violent crime. All of this is still to leave out the potential beneficial impact on our foreign relations.

I suspect that the main reason this type of legislation fails time and time again is that it has to be voted on by politicians. Politicians who can count votes. It doesn't matter how many potheads and marijuana activists get together because their voice will still be marginalized in the minds of the elected officials. It's hard to be taken seriously when the thing you are advocating for is illegal and all you want it for is recreation. (Hence the medical marijuana movement) The other reason elected officials will never vote for legalization of recreational marijuana is that they don't want to have their name associated with the downfall of society if all the histrionics of the sour-faced Republican old lady's turns out to be true.

I am Libertarian, and there are two ways to look at the recreational marijuana issue from that perspective as long as you believe that marijuana smoking is no different than tobacco or alcohol use. There is the Ron Paul view that whatever you do with your body is none of my business as long as it doesn't affect me. Then there is the long term Ted Nugent view that says this does affect me because on the aggregate there will be societal health costs from the negative health impacts of drug use.

I suppose I fall into a third category that doesn't care. Sure there are health costs, but like I said above, there are social costs involved, but most social costs of marijuana are created by its illegality, the real social costs stemming from health and high driving when likened to tobacco and alcohol are clearly so minimal that our society has decided (and I agree) that the benefits of legalization outweigh the costs.

So why don't I smoke? There are various reasons but mostly its a political statement. In my experience pot smokers can tend to get over enthusiastic about their recreational drug of choice and become zealous advocates of its use, and distrust those that do not. Sure, this could easily be because it makes one paranoid, but just being in the room makes you just as arrested when the cops show up. My true friends respect me even if they don't respect my decision and offers to partake are made out of common politeness arising from commensality. (After all, what can be a more ritualistic "breaking of bread" than a shared consumption of something that not only involves shared risk but that gives a spiritual sense of significance?) Still, my reflexive aversion to perceived peer pressure, my history of refusal that has lasted so long it has become part of my identity, combined with what I fear is addictive behavior continue to keep me away even though I think legalization of recreational use of marijuana would be a good thing for the country.

I will leave you with this video a friend posted to Facebook.

The Friday Bacon

My mother in law cooks bacon a whole package at a time on the low setting on an electric range. Very crispy.

You already have seen them (or you haven't), and you probably don't care why I think they are my top five for the year (nor should you.) Thus, in the interest of being in the fringe, I am going to attempt an explanation as to how this movie is speaking to us about the current political and social landscape, as all good movies should (except super stylish genre flicks, those are timeless.)

Do I think these films were intentionally made to be elaborate extended metaphors? Unlikely, though who knows. Either way, every artist projects more than they intend.

Number 3: Slumdog Millionaire


Slumdog Millionaire very well may win the Oscar for best picture, and with good reason. This movie has no one you've ever heard of, and because George Burns was right: show business is a hideous bitch goddess, you will probably not see these actors in many other Western productions. There has not been a film that has won Best Picture in a long time that had less "star power." (You know, star power in Hollywood and star power in Mario have similar meanings.) The life of this production in the box office and in the awards circuit is not unlike the boy at the center of the plot. So, if you are an old, boring person with nothing better to do that obsesses over the Academy Awards even though you have not seen any of the films that have been nominated because you like awards ceremonies and celebrities more than you like good movies and are looking for a cute, underdog story (sorry for the run-on sentence) here it is.

The plot of the film revolves around a boy who grew up in the slums, loves a girl, and survives despite the world shitting over him (symbolically and literally.) The "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" portion of the film is not what it seems. Him being on the show is not about the money and its power to get him out of the slums. He is on the show for its wide exposure, and the fact he knows his love interest watches it. It is important that the main character doesn't do it for the money, and is not happy about it because of the money. The plot of him on the show reeks of Hollywood coincidence. He only knows the answers because of specific life experiences he has had. However, even though he knows most of the answers, he is still stalling. He wants to be on TV as long as possible. This kid is the epitome of likeable. He is the brown Frodo, except he is doing it all for a girl. Awwwwwwwwwwwww. He is good through and through.

This film is the most depressing while still the most feel good movie you may ever see. And this is important. I was recently reading a story on Reddit (maybe?) that talked about mice who have been conditioned to be defeatist. The mice would learn helplessness in one situation. They then would be put in a similar situation, but one with a way out. The article tried to make the point that humans do the same thing. It claimed that we have been conditioned by our overlords (lizard people or robots, one could only assume) to be defeatist. In dire times (like, oh say, our current depression) we no longer look for nor are able to see the platform that gets us above the rising flood waters of economic collapse. Slumdog Millionaire's main character would disagree.

Almost every question he answers in the game show stems from a life experience he had that sucked. Oh man, did this kid go through some depressing, dark times. However, he is goal orientated. He wants the girl. It doesn't matter what the goal is though. A girl, a trannie, your own ranch, great scientific discoveries. He knows where he wants to be. He doesn't always know how to get there though. But unlike those stupid, white lab mice, this kid is looking up for the platform at all times. Maybe it would never would have appeared. Maybe there is no good in the world. But if you don't look up for the way out of this cruel experiment then you are always going to be stuck in the slums. So, what does it hurt to look up? Worst case scenario, you still end a fucking slumdog.

Oh, and I forgot to put above ***SPOILER ALERT***