David The Machine

After reading this article, I feel vindicated: A’s for Good Behavior.

Here I am, with graduate-level degrees, but a poor pre-college grade record, and why? I had poor handwriting, and hardly ever completed my homework. I did well enough on the tests to get by, but I was given poor marks for not showing every step along the way in the tedious tedium that was grade school math homework. There were a few terms where I was denied being on the Honor Roll for poor penmanship grades—everyone knows that genius is illegible.

There was a point in high school where I just gave up pushing for high grades because of these arbitrary roadblocks. I’m glad there’s the recognition to make them die in a fire.

Instead of doing productive things, like updating this blog, I’ve been leveling up more alts on WoW.

My most recent feat has been to quest/dungeon grind up to the point where I have a character in each class at level 70 or above. Most of which are on my main server, Azjol-Nerub. Only 2 aren’t 80 by now, and probably won’t be by the time Cataclysm hits the shelves. But then, I’m an efficient quester when I put my mind to it.

As always, World o’ Warcraft has been my main timesink. As you may know, the next expansion is about to hit, and the few active remaining guildies and I have been trying to complete some missing achievements before the Cataclysm strikes.

We have had to go to the extraordinary measures of pugging in people from trade chat for Yogg+1, which has had poor results. This is why I hate pugging. Azjol-Nerub’s Horde side has slim pickings from available puggers, but I’m going to stick with the server. I will be persistent.

A great man has passed, and his name is Norman Borlaug.

I first became aware of his work via Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, in this following clip:

What this man did is great deed in promoting human life, and extending humankind’s understanding and control of nature. It also served as a direct counter to the ’60s era “panic” about mass starvation and famine arising from overpopulation. There’s still plenty of ingenuity and room left for people to live, and men like Norman Borlaug are the people who have seen the problems and solved them.

I am pleased as punch that Atlas Shrugged is getting more media attention these days. It’s even the positive kind of attention.

I enjoy digging into new people and ideas and learning everything I can about them, especially if the people have profound ideas. The most lasting passion that I have had has been for the ideas and stories of Ayn Rand. It started off as a side research foray into learning more about Rush, whose drummer and lyricist had dedicated an album to “the ideas of Ayn Rand”. That album was 2112, the novel was Anthem.

Now, in my years since I read Atlas Shrugged, I’ve come across a few people who read it without picking up on the deeper plot, that those who are committed to living their lives in this world owe everything to keeping their minds in touch with reality, and owe nothing to the people who won’t raise a finger to help themselves and use guilt in the living to eke out their so-called survival. One person remembered it as “that book about trains”. Oh well, let’s hope that this upsurge of interest in Ayn Rand’s writings will be the “fountainhead” of a surge towards a continuation of the enlightenment’s true goal.

I grew up watching the imported science fiction show, Doctor Who. The Doctor is a time-traveling alien who has an affinity for Earth, and a penchant for running into trouble and setting things right in every episode.

Part of what set the tone and character of the show was its eerie theme song, and it is something that vies for “that song that runs through your head all the time”.

The process spearheaded by Delia Derbyshire in recording this theme song was a long and groundbreaking one. Considering the sort of equipment they were working with, the result sounds utterly unlike anything that can be done with a regular or synthesized instrument. The work that went into even one second worth of the recording and the conscious attention to every detail makes it a masterpiece.

[edit: changed video to one that works]

Where it comes to World of Warcraft economics, the Greedy Goblin resonates the strongest with my thinking. He posted recently on guild “taxes”. I put taxes in square quotes because there’s a major difference in what a guild does to collect these “taxes” versus what a government does to get money out of their citizens.

A guild is a voluntary association, set up in the game by using the various amenities that Blizzard provides to guild leaders to provide for pooling of resources. A government is “an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area.” The guild leader can enforce his rules by restricting a person’s access to these pooled resources, or to even kick the offending player out of the guild. A government can use its police powers to extract a person’s property and worse.

So if a player doesn’t pay their “tax”, the worst that can happen is they are not in the guild anymore. Calling it a “tax” confuses the difference between a guild and a government.

As far as what it takes to fund a government, I can tell you what I learned in the way to get my economics degree. Along the way, I took a course that discussed and analyzed taxation. The fixed fee, “head tax”, is the economically best means of taxation.

The reason why the head tax is considered best, economically, is that other taxation schemes influence and distort individuals’ economic behavior. Flat taxes, sales taxes, VAT, progressive taxes, you name it—all these give people a reason to reevaluate their consumption and labor choices.

In the case of a guild, similar reasoning applies, but you have to keep in mind the voluntary nature of a guild, the nature of raiding, and also personal motivation. It is a travesty that a commenter on that Greedy Goblin post has mentioned along the way that BoE greens, blues, and epics all go to the guild bank instead of being put up to a roll for the raid participants, yet requiries that raid participants bring their own consumables. Another commenter said his guild bank is sitting on a cash pile worth 32K g, plus tons of enchanting mats. These are the spoils of raiding, but they’re not going to the raiders.

Raiding does have a cost, and people prefer that the costs be more predictable than not. If there is a “fee” that covers a base amount of consumables and provides insurance for repair costs, that is preferable to having everyone suffering huge losses due to repeatedly wiping. Everybody in the raid is there for that next piece of gear and the badges serve as a good consolation prize, and every extra bit of loot a player can bring home from the raid is a return on their investment for their own consumables, so what I will call guild bank communism won’t work to keep the best players around. Having a voluntary system in place that lets people smooth out their raiding expenses will.

“Hmm, server’s down for maintenance in the morning, must be a Tuesday.”

Here’s a visual metaphor of what government intervention in the economy will do to your life savings.

How could a reasonable person who has found their way into this country’s legislature be for any of this, if they had a sliver of sense left knocking around in their skulls? Forget about any moral questions that it’s the role of a government to protect individual rights, that is, only acting to defend its citizens against predators in human clothing. Ignore the fact that one of the first things you learn in a macroeconomics course is that public spending crowds out private investment. Pretend that the mounting public debt has deleterious effects on everyone in the world. The driving idea here is that the individual is not important, the group takes precedence, and that if the individual must be sacrificed for the sake of the group, sacrificed by way of forcible taxation and inflation of the currency. And the politicians reflect this in their campaign strategies and promises, all so they can kiss babies and get reelected, all while standing on the grave of individual rights, personal responsibility, and the growth of the free market.

This all goes to show that unless there is a deeper change in the ideas that people hold in this culture, this country will continue to be legislated into the grave, and the rest of the world will go down with it.

After a weekend of dutifully checking in on my toons every hour on the hour, I got the last pieces of random loot that I needed to earn my Love Fool title.

Others have not been so lucky. And luck has a lot to do with it. Aside from that bag of candy requirement, the only other annoying part of the achievement was to run an Arathi Basin battleground so I could finish out I Pitied the Fool. The PvP requirements are my least favorite parts of these achievements. I can handle the randomness aspect—it is the great equalizer.

While I’m not in a guild that runs 25-man content, I consider myself to be a hardcore player. If anything, this achievement system allows me to earn the rewards that were once available to the loners in the game who lack the urge for the twitch-fest that is arena. These achievements take prolonged effort to earn, and reward determination over raw twitch skills, which is what I’m in the game for.

With all that said and done, I’m happy I got that achievement done and over with. The next title-earning achievement coming up is Midsummer. Happy hunting!

Edit 2009.02.20: updated link to Ferarro’s blog