The Dord of Darien

Election 2008: Aftermath

I actually voted this year for the first time. Was it worth it? I dunno; define "worth." On the one hand, my vote was absolutely and completely irrelevant. On the other hand, it was also free. So I would say voting was worth exactly as much as it cost.

For every office on the ballot, I voted Libertarian if possible, and Republican if not, with one position that I wrote-in my brother for — the state ended up going Democratic in every single slot, as expected. I voted against the final tally on two out of three ballot questions — we still have state income tax, which I voted against (only a churl would suggest that perhaps the money collected by the state income tax was used to campaign in favour of maintaining it), and we banned dog racing for no particular reason, which I also voted against. On the other hand, we decriminalised marijuana, which I am overwhelmingly in favour of — I’ve never smoked pot in my life and have no plans to do so, but, seriously, it is completely fucking absurd to send people to jail for it. I’m not a big fan of civil penalties and would rather it were completely legal, but, hey, baby steps. Civil offense is better than criminal offense, and it’s a step toward finally ending the stupid war on drugs.

We also had a non-binding referendum to declare health insurance a "human right." That’s completely fucking insane, but I’m sure it passed; I haven’t actually checked, of course, because "non-binding referendum" is functionally equivalent to "meaningless box to tick."

All in all, this election season was an overwhelming win for the forces of goodness and justice if only because Hillary Clinton is not president-elect. That’s worth the price of admission right there.

November 6th, 2008 Posted by Darien | Bullshit | one comment

What government bailouts can teach us about World of Warcraft, part II

After the bailout package was rammed through Congress — against the wishes of both congressmen who I actually like — people were shocked and amazed that the executives of the companies that had just been handed a trillion dollars of our money threw a giant celebration.

Why is it a surprise to anyone that, when a system is put in place to establish incentives for failure, failure becomes glorified? In a sense, those people and those companies "won;" I mean, hey, they got a shitload of free money, right? So the incentive to succeed — or, more to the point here, not to fail — would be… what again? This is the exact same scenario that appeared when Blizzard first implemented rewards for the losing side in a battleground. All of a sudden the "powerlosing" strat became viable, and people who actually attempted to play the battleground and actually tried to win were consistently heckled by the others for "dragging the game out" instead of just losing as quickly as possible to facilitate the accumulation of rewards. In turn, Blizzard has added system upon complicated system in an attempt to encourage people to play the game instead of sitting at the Relief Hut and waiting for the horde to win — deserter debuffs for people who go AFK, a "kick vote" system like you may find on many FPS servers, and so forth. None of this has solved the problem, which I emphasise did not exist before incentives for losing were added to the game.

Perhaps if more government officials played World of Warcraft they’d understand.

November 6th, 2008 Posted by Darien | Bullshit, Games | 2 comments