Jesus was Totally a Capitalist

Under the entertaining headline “Profit `Not Satanic,’ Barclays Says, After Goldman Invokes Jesus”, Bloomberg released an article detailing efforts of three executives to justify the profits of bankers as compatible with Christianity.  I’m not really interested in judging the success of their efforts, however I am forced to applaud this particularly ballsy rhetoric:

“The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an endorsement of self-interest,”

This was offered up by Brian Griffiths, of Goldman Sachs International.  Goldman Sachs, if you were unaware, has been somewhat profitable this year.  Apparently people are a bit upset about this, and I suppose accusations of unfairness have been flung about.  I understand the need for PR and all that, but damned if you can’t respect the cajones on a man willing to walk into a St. Paul’s Cathedral and explain that Jesus really doesn’t mean at all what you thought he meant.

Actually, Jesus was a closet Libertarian.

Some basic economic points

Sometimes I simply can’t help myself.  I feel obliged to note some rather glaring lacks in the sophistication of the arguments of others.  Fact of the matter is the world is complex: other perspectives may hold sway, and you may be wrong.  If you’re convinced of your correctness, you’re DEFINITELY going to be wrong.  And you’ll never see it, because you’re never looking for it; you’re looking for justification of your correctness.  Honestly, this is the whole of critical thinking: looking for how something is wrong.

Consider the scientific method, that most basic of systems for attempting to test rational models for applicability to reality.  For any problem to be examined, the set of possible hypotheses which describe the problem is infinite.  It is not possible to determine a hypothesis is correct, only that it is incorrect; this is easily demonstrable when you realize that the set of possible experiments and outcomes which relate to the problem at hand is infinite, where as only one experiment may be performed.  The set of outcomes for that experiment may be described by more than one hypothesis, thus, if the experiment conforms to your hypothesis, it merely implies this hypothesis is not wrong.  Thus, the scientific method is not about demonstrating a hypothesis is correct; it’s about demonstrating it is incorrect.

So on to the economic points I wish to make: here’s a post from Gevlon, and a relevant quote (I’m going to ignore some of the more blatant assertions which are not backed up by any data):

the only valid reason to get a loan is to buy something that pays you more money than you pay for interest. If you want to start a business, that’s an example. If you want to buy a used car to skip taxi fees, or to not waste time (time x your hourly pay = money) on the public transport. Getting loan for “fun” things or to enable socializing is a terrible idea.

It seems Gevlon is reaching, here, for the idea that the loan should not cost more than the consumption derived…which is a bit different than buying something that pays interest.  Specifically, a loan is financially justified if the future value of the loan amount is lower than the present value, including interest both on loan repayment and income streams generated in the duration of repayment.  For instance, purchasing a car, used or otherwise, involves a flat cash value.  By taking a loan now, you pull forward the income you would instead have saved in order to purchase the car now.  The reason for doing this is that the value of cash, generally, decreases,  and rates paid on liquid deposits are generally low.  So the credit deserves a premium based on liquidity (current availability) and offsetting both inflation and potential interest the lender might otherwise generate.  If a borrower generates sufficient income to pay for the loan in the intervening time, by taking the money now rather than later, they can maximize the liquidity and present availability of their cash flow.  This need not be for an interest generating purpose, it need merely be a future cash flow maximization scheme…and honestly, it need nearly be LIKELY maximization.  In general, robust economic decisions are “satisficing“, not optimal, due to the existence of substantial Knightian uncertainty.

The failure in the case of borrowing is when predictions about future income flows turn out to be incorrect.  In the case of the recent financial crisis, this became manifest due to the failure to recognize that demand for homes (and home prices) could not rise forever: the available competing finance options simply became to costly, but bets made on ever-increasing house prices suddenly became losses simply due to the lack of price appreciation.  There actually 2 major balance sheet types this seemed to have the most effect on: first, mortgage borrowers dependent on the rising value of their assets (i.e. home) to facilitate the leveraging of their home to cover future expenses and, second, on the major financial institutions that leveraged into these bets.  I’ll note that the linked chart is dated January 2009; since that time the mortgage toxicity has spread beyond sub-primes.  The onset of the recession has initially impacted the poorer, simply due to a lack of available buffer room.  For the duration of the Great Moderation, the availability of cheap consumer credit has helped soften the impact of recessions, with borrowers attempting to pull forward future earnings to help them now.  The reduction in credit availability initially impacts the lowest collateral borrowers first; almost by definition those are the poorest borrowers.  However, given the rates of delinquency and default for the poorest, I’d suggest we were approaching the limit of defaults in that sector.  Default rates and bankruptcies have continued to increase throughout this year, suggesting that the wealthier echelons of American society are now postponing debt payment (or seeking to have it cleared entirely).

(source Calculated Risk.  click for larger version)

Why I might venture back into Azeroth for 3.3

Random dungeon in cross-realm LFG.  Seriously.  If Blizzard is correct that cross-realm LFG lowers time waiting for a PUG, then the concept of being able to queue for a dungeon run, much like queuing for a BG, would be enticing.  That this would include the new dungeons, while providing decent badge rewards is merely icing on a potentially delicious cake.  It’d mean I could log in, hit up a couple heroics, get a decent reward, and log out…all for the price of maybe an hour and a half of my time.

I’m not a sure of their Looking For Raid stuff…how do they intend to handle multiple raid IDs, or are they planning to move away from that system for raids?  Or do I only get one shot at a raid, and if my PUG falls apart and I can’t reassemble them the next day, I’m screwed?

Also, Ghostcrawler has been back to talking again.  I wish, once again, that he would stop.  The continual attempts to explain Chill of the Throne tend to sound condescending, and he continually accuses his audience of being ready to twist his words.  While this may be true, he is deliberately twisting their perceptions of their intent in order to make them feel guilty and trust him.  Simply because your audience will use irrational arguments doesn’t mean you should either to bolster your claims.  Frankly, just stop trying to hold this conversation spread out across threads with people.

And what follows 3.3?  Well, Blizzard has a pretty well established pattern here.  Monetarily, they care more about the subs than expansion box sales, which means they care deeply about maintaining interest in interim times.  Expansions are there to redefine the focus and remake the world for people, in ways that (hopefully) draw new customers while retaining the majority of existing players.  This means expansions need to be solid when they hit…particularly now.  Blizzard won’t be putting Cataclysm in our hands until late next year at the earliest.  Any earlier would interfere with the Starcraft 2 release and stomp on the momentum of 3.3.  Keep in mind that 3.3 is still a bit out.  It doesn’t look like all the items have hit the PTR, nor all the content been finalized.  We may see it by January, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it slips into the new year.  Blizzard usually gives new patches about 4 months to die down, so the earliest I could possibly see Cataclysm would be next May.

Ghostcrawler has alluded to Icecrown being the “final tier of raiding”.  This would seem to say they don’t intent to add additional raid content…but not that they don’t intend additional content.  I suspect we’ll see 3.4 midway through next year.  3.4 will bridge the gap between whatever happens with Arthas and the Cataclysm of Deathwing, allowing some content to hold out the life of Wrath while Cataclysm continues development and launches late next year.

I could be wrong, though.

The Importance of Philosophy

Philosophy is my vocation.  In general, I find that I’m something of a loner in this: most people couldn’t give a rat’s ass about philosophy.  In  a conversation I had earlier with a fellow blogger, I pointed out that the answer to any of the great questions of philosophy was unlikely to change how anyone lived their life, and for most people this seems patently true.  I should probably have said, though, that most people don’t THINK that the answer to any great philosophical quandary would change how they lived their life.  That may simply be because everyone thinks those questions actually are answered.

In fact, most philosophy has revolves around debates over things that seem trivially obvious.  “What is the nature of stuff?”, “How do we know?” and “What should we do?” are questions that seem to have simple answers.  By inference, it seems like we must already have the answers because we talk about stuff, we say we know about things, and we have pretty solid ideas of what we should do, so surely we’ve already answered those questions.

On the whole, many philosophers get into philosophy by proceeding from that perfectly reasonable assumption and then trying to do the apparently simple task of answering those trivial questions.  In fact, they usually start asking substantially more practical questions; among the first Western philosophers (at least in the Platonic tradition) were a group of men termed the Pre-Socratics.  Of these, the very first recorded “philosophers” were the Milesians.  The Milesians delved into philosophy as physicists or cosmologists: they were attempting to explain the way the world’s physical properties came to be and interacted, and to frame this they relied on an idea of a basic “substance”.  This became a metaphysical pursuit, because the nature of this initial substance was of core importance to understanding the things we see comprised of it.  As they discussed this, it became more difficult to nail down what the exact nature of such a substance was.

From this came another question: can things change?  Seriously, this was an important debate and came from a very simple observation: you can’t create something from nothing.   The Eleatics, embodied in Parmenides and Zeno (author of the famed paradoxes), felt that if you can’t create something from nothing, then whatever substance makes up everything must be eternal and can never become anything else.  Because it is the primary constituent of all things, it’s properties are effectively inatlerable: it’s properties are the basis of all properties.  Since you can’t create something out of nothing, then no new properties for this substance can be created: there’s nothing to create them from.

The above is a fairly sophisticated argument, and illustrates the basis of the importance of philosophy.  Obviously, we see things change all the time.  By the same token, it is (and was even more so at the time) unthinkable for something to come from nothing.  As people explored perfectly reasonable discussions about the ramifications of each of these in generally pragmatic terms, it became clear that they seemed to fundamentally disagree with one another.  This is a problem: if two basic assumptions about the way the world is disagree, then one or both need to be rethought if we’re to have a decent picture of the world.  Attempting to resolve this contradiction produced the above argument (the Eleatics effectively argued that the apparent change was an imperfect reflection of the eternal reality, which was changeless).

Why is that important, though, really?  Why should it matter if two basic concepts of how the world works seem to contradict each other, particularly since it seems to work out for us if we accept them?  Simple: if you don’t know that they work absolutely, you can’t know that they’ll always work.  If, in fact, they do contradict one another, it is the case that at some point they lead your idea of the world to stray from the reality of the world.  This implies that eventually you’ll misjudge how the world works.  That’s a practical consideration.

But beyond that philosophy serves to get at a single point: Why?  Why like this, why here, why now, why me and what the fuck should I do about it?  If you look, none of that seems obvious.  You can’t even fallback on a nihilistic “No reason” answer, because the why remains: why “No reason”?  Philosophy is the search for the understanding to answer that question.

And I, personally, do it because wisdom is very, very beautiful to me.

On the Dearth of WoW Posts

I just can’t summon up the energy to care about WoW.  I still follow the goings-on over on MMO-Champion.com, so I know what’s on the PTR for 3.3, but I haven’t found any interest.  It’s simply more of the same stuff we’ve seen all through Wrath.

I’m thoroughly MMO burned out at this point anyway, so now is as good a time as any for a break.  I’ve been playing Rock Band and Borderlands (which is a fantastic game, btw), working on hobbies and watching stuff.  I’ve also been tracking economics and spending thinking time on the little micro-economic consumption function I threw together a few posts ago.  But I haven’t been playing Aion or Champions…or WoW.

Cataclysm may be able to change that.  It’s introducing a lot of changes in the way classes work, and when Blizzard does that, they usually change up how players interact with the world as well.  BC brought us the introduction of the current Honor System and Arenas, changing the face of PvP, along with 25-mans (instead of 40s) and Kara, a dedicated 10-man.  Wrath hauled out open-world PvP and the combo 10+25-man dungeon experience.

I actually first saw the suggestion of 25-man dungeons reused for 10s on EJ, and thought it was a good idea.  I’ve since changed my mind.  Blizzard has been absolutely gung-ho that the end-game of WoW for PvE is raiding with Wrath, yet this wasn’t always their stance.  25-mans were the big pinnacle for the people who could swing-em.  They did the cinematics and cool fights as a reward for those people, not because they were necessary for story progress.  When they saw that people liked interacting with Illidan during the first dailies, they decided that meant people liked interacting with the bosses…which meant they wanted to raid!  That’s not, I think, what it meant.  People like rewards for their actions.  They like to feel like there is a story around their actions, but they also want to do their own thing.

The Isle of Quel’danas was a roaring success because it had stuff to do for everyone involved.  It had a big 25-man raid with challenging battles for the raiders, it had a tough 5-man for the small groups, and it had fun dailies with reasonable rewards for soloers.  It expanded on all the elements of WoW that had brought people into the game in the first place.  Had it expanded the PvP game and added a 10-man, it would have been a damn near perfect expansion of what the game offered: a polished experience for all types of players.

Wrath initially offered that as well: a compelling questing experience, interesting (though perhaps overly easy) 5-mans, solid raids, and expansions to PvP.  However, Blizzard then narrowed their focus on the end game.  Dailies tended to be unfocused, drizzled throughout the world as ways to grind rep with disparate factions, heroics were quickly overcome, and the raids…well, Blizzard decided that they wanted to open up raids to everyone, to let everyone see the awesome stuff only the elite raiders had been seeing.  See, they heard complaints that they spent too much time on content only 1% of the population saw as “Let us see it ,too” rather than “Spend more time on us”.  So the endgame of Wrath was…a gateway into raiding.  Every possible “barrier” to raiding was removed, under the assumption that everyone wanted to raid…and every reward was focused on raiding.  This produced the situation where the only real thing left to a PvE player at the endgame to do was…raid.  So they did, as best they could, of course.  What else could they do if they wanted to play this game they enjoyed?

Blizzard succeeded in spite of itself, I think.  Now, I’m definitely projecting my own opinions.  I know plenty of people wanted more casual raid-action, and many people wanted to see the neat things the 25s saw, but I know I don’t like having given up a better end-game solo experience and challenging 5-mans for it.  I don’t think I like having given up custom 10-mans.  3.2 tried to help the lack of concentrated dailies, but they were all built around the damn tournament mechanic, or flying across the freaking continent.  It failed to match up to the elegantly well concentrated dailies on Quel’danas.  And the trials made me hurt inside.

Perhaps 3.3 helps address some of these issues.  I haven’t seen much on the quality of the new 5-mans, nor on the sorts of solo content that can be found in the push to the Frozen Throne.  I suspect we’re getting a patch 3.4 as well, because I don’t think we’ll be seeing Cataclysm in 6 months, and they need new content to fill that gap.  Perhaps that will draw me in; it’s likely to be the patch that begins the lead up to Deathwing’s return.

Fallout 3: War never changes, and neither does post-apocalyptic terrain

I beat Fallout 3 last night (yeah, I was late to the party).  I thought I’d pass along some thoughts.

Setting

The details of the Fallout 3 setting annoy me.  I LIKE post-apocalyptic worlds, but I don’t like theirs, because their details don’t match up.  Look, it has been 200 years since the apocalypse: why does it feel like it only happened 20 years ago?  Seriously, there is at least one woman there who acts like she’s living in the pre-war era…so how exactly has she learned to mimic people who lived 200 years ago?  We have problems doing it now, and the historical record is pretty reasonable; how much harder for a lady living in a 200+ year old crap heap?  If this were a unique example, I’d ignore it…but it’s not.

Seriously, the setting is absurdly inconsistent.  Humans have haunted the Capital Wasteland for 200 years, coming up out of the Vaults deposited throughout the area and seeping in from areas not quite as affected by the bombs and fallout.  It would be a major source of material, information, and shelter.  And the advance of wildlife ought to be rapid.  Even taking into account the dramatic devastation of the bombs and the subsequent radiation, much of current life would have continued on outside affected areas.  After 200 years, this life would have made its way back into the capital wasteland.

As for the human resettlers, lemme tell you about the probability that bands of non-hunter gatherers would have let government remain anarchic, with sherrifs ostensibly being leaders: 0%.  Sadly, Bethesda failed to sell any of the towns as being large enough to really qualify as much more than small village.  There were more mercenaries and raiders in the world than there were people to hire them or be raided.  There were more slavers than potential slaves.  Oblivion sold the giant castle a great deal more effectively than any of the towns of the Wastes.  On top of this, the Vaults were supposed to be genetically viable…meaning their populations could actually successfully breed without the issues of breeding with close relatives…and yet I never really had that sold to me.  I mean, there wasn’t even an attempt at it.

And none of these humans built anything new.  At all.  Oh wait, there’s one new thing: the Project.  Which leads me to my next point: the strange conglomeration of technologies that hadn’t been put to any use in expanding the things people care about day to day: living, getting food, making places for their children, whatever.  After 200 years, the best they could do was live in a virtually unmodified derelict aircraft carried or the metal scraps torn from a nearby airport.  I don’t buy it.

Let’s just ignore Lamplight Caverns ever happened.

Despite this, every single freaking building in the entire game had electricity of some sort powering some of the lights.

Terrain

I’m gonna split terrain off from setting.  The setting is the world, the terrain is the stage: and their stage props never varied in Fallout 3.  Seriously, the wastes are an unrelenting landscape of scrub, twisted trees, bare rock and sand.  The city is a grey skeleton of broken buildings and rusted cars.  Those are the two outdoor terrain types; that’s it.  Inside is worse.  I guess theoretically, you get to see more terrain types inside than out, but the diversity seems…illusory.  You get ruined concrete office building, ruined concrete subway, ruined concrete sewer, or ruined concrete and metal vault.  And since it’s all lit poorly (to sell the ruined atmosphere), what you end up seeing is broken shit and collapse, rusted bits, and lots of grey and brown.  If you’re in a ghoul infested place, the corpses are on the ground.  Raiders like to string theirs up on hooks and chains, while Super Mutants seem to prefer chopping them up and putting them in sacks of netting (called, quite originally, “Gore Bags”).

I quickly became more tired of the environments in Fallout 3 than I did in Gears of War, and that’s saying a lot because Epic actually applied shaders to make everything look brown in that game.  Bethesda didn’t apply any post-processing effects to make their world brown (the oasis proves that).  Their art is just fucking dreary.

Yeah, I get it: it’s a dreary world.  Even the desert, though, is not all brown everywhere.  Seriously, even their SKY is a weird yellow glow most of the day (unless you look sort straight up, then it gets kinda bluish, sorta).  The twilight sky is a slate gray conglomeration of clouds.  Night is solid black.  Where’s the color?

Gameplay

Honestly, Fallout is a dodgy first person shooter and VATS tired me really rapidly.  The cinematics are cute in theory, but really rapidly felt like they dragged on for too long.  On top of this, the UI in the game is just…poor.  Navigating menus, reading maps, organization…all of them seem poor.  The Local Map, in particular, can be damn near useless in a variety of dungeons, except for the most basic navigation.

Final Thoughts

I still beat it.  I still played each night for hours.  Because there was a lot of fun to be had.  Really, that’s my biggest beef: there was a huge amount of potential that wasn’t quite delivered on.  It was a poor FPS, and a limited RPG.  Ultimately, I didn’t feel like my character decisions were fully realizable.  It shouldn’t really be a mistake that I focus on Big Guns rather than Small Weapons at the start of the game.  And yet…it was.  I never got many big guns, and had to make do with being mediocre with the many small weapons I found.

I liked the dialog options, the choices that could affect the game and the changes that came about due to my actions.  I liked the GAME.  But mostly, I liked the potential that never really as delivered on.  It was a game that could have done something amazing with itself, but settled on just getting by.

A quick complaint about the assumption that lower business taxes = capital expenditures (labor, equipment, etc.)

I was reading Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis, just to see what was said.  I quickly discover an Austrian School dislike of, well, government.  Now, I’m generally convinced that the Austrian School has long had a Randian sort of bent on politics, which informs its economic policy prescriptions, rather than an economic analysis which models an actual economy and on which its prescriptions are based.  They seem to have an idea of what they want government to look like, what the best government look like, and prescribe that regardless of what the people being governed want, which seems mildly ironic for libertarian-oriented thinkers.

I still haven’t figured out why governments are exogenous to economics, why the operations of government aren’t considered the operations of another economic agent, with potentially different motivations.  Heck, you can even model it using standard neo-classical rational agent modelling, just assuming that the economy can be represented by two different sorts of agents: public and private agents.

We see, for instance, in Mish’s post discussing his own thoughts on problems and solutions raised by John Mauldin, that both of them feel federal workers are overpaid:

The average federal worker makes $75,419 a year, while the average in the private sector is $39,751.

Apparently this can’t possibly be because the government is competing for highly-trained workers in the labor pool and thus needs to offer a commensurately high wage in order to attract workers.  Government workers are somehow benefiting from a weird sort of socialism, where they have no choice but to take a higher wage and everyone else was left out with absolutely no opportunity to benefit from this.  Now, the context notes that this is supposed to be part of a government austerity budget in order to reach a fully balanced budget.  But a secondary rationalization remains: federal employees are paid, on average, more than private workers, and somehow they need to feel their share of the pain.

This request for an austerity program is made in the same essay as a request to reduce or remove corporate taxes.  Really?  This seems to be made in the context of the supply side argument, because implicitly the assertion is made this will increase investment…presumably helping the economy and eventually improving federal revenue.  Or perhaps this “solution” is disconnected from the balanced budget requirement; we need to do both for entirely different reasons!  Nevermind they’ll obviously have impacts on one another.

We also see the flat tax rear its head in this context, alongside a VAT (value-added tax (wikipedia’s take)).  First, I hate “one size fits all” solutions.  Seriously.  The impact of a given policy varies depending on the context.  We assume this is true in real-life situations, why is it not true for government policies?  Taxes are, pure and simple, wealth-costs imposed by the government, a debt incurred for the act of being an economic participant.  They can serve as wealth flow managers (and usually do).  A flat tax, on its face, has a wealth-flow neutral effect: all wealth is taxed consistently.  Ostensibly, this is purely to fuel government revenue, though, as my prior discussions have indicated, I am not sure a government requires this.

In a way, taxes are interest payments made on economic activity, made to facilitate the government debts incurred providing services which facilitate economic activity.  The government, in a certain sense, has been given a profit motive which is predicated on social stability.  Because government revenue (and therefore the profits taken by agents active in government) is based on total economic activity, the government as a whole has incentives to insure social stability (or the social form which satisfies economic growth requirements; there’s a lot of fudge room allowed here).  The hope is that social stability involves fairness in adjudication of economic disputes, so the government will treat other economic agents fairly and impartially, focusing purely on the economy as a whole.  Now, I don’t mean to imply people really sat down and thought about governments like this before setting them up.  The best attempts at doing so are blown away by the forces of history and the government sector’s adaptation.  Keep in mind that the people in government are people just like anyone else…they’re just trying to get by, profit, feel good about themselves, or whatever.  They have as many motivations for being in government as the various people in the “private sector”.  As far as they’re concerned, they ARE in the private sector.   The job they took is just another job, one that happens to be provided by a business dubbed “a nation” rather than “a corporation”.

I go into all this in order to first point out that the government doesn’t need a balanced budget.  It needs a balance sheet and internal financing, but its revenue need not match its expenditure…any more than a business’s does.  Second, to try and question the idea that government should be thought of as somehow different from any other social group…and that, if it’s no different from any other group established by people, and it is engaged in economic activity, then it should be considered like any other economic group, be it corporation, non-profit, or small business.  In a way, I’m not sure there’s a need to differentiate between groups or individuals but between economic behavior patterns which differ between agent-types (where a group can be an agent).

Now, the title of my post gets at the point of this, which is supply-side economics.  Taxes serve, partially, as a wealth flow control, as stated earlier.  If this is the case, what we want to determine is how we want wealth to flow in order to satisfy the whole social stability requirement.  Wealth needs to flow to real investment in order to facilitate employment expansion, but it also needs to flow into the hands of consumers.  Choke off consumption via taxes, and real investment expansion becomes too costly to be warranted.  Choke off real investment and the economy can’t grow rapidly enough to support its demographics.  This flow needs to take into account the application.  In an economy where all wealth holders are servicing heavy debt, that is, they have non-production related costs related simply to existing, taxes are going to flow into those BEFORE consumption.

Look, our social order generally places obligations before desires.  We have a personal obligation, in general, to survival and then a social obligation to uphold our agreements.  Debt is an agreement, whether tax debt or financial debt, so after we’ve insured basic survival (because frankly, we’re all generally going to put our own survival before paying a debt to someone else.  Even the counter-party prefers getting the money later from you than you being dead and unable to pay ever), we need to meet our obligations.  And if we don’t feel the need, the law generally insists and goes to great pains to help us see things its way.  So whatever revenue receive is going to go first into required (inelastic) consumption, on things like food and electricity, and then on tax and debt servicing.  Everything left over then gets divided between personal wealth expansion (positive savings, I suppose) and leisure consumption.  As debt grows, the cost of servicing the debt increases, so if income and taxes remain constant, personal wealth growth + leisure consumption must necessarily decline to help cover the cost of debt servicing.  Once the cost of debt grows to the point that survival + debt + taxes > income, personal savings (which I suppose is just equity) must be liquidated in order to cover the cost.  There obviously is some bound to this, at which point further debt simply cannot be serviced.

This all implies that additional income will first get applied to survival + taxes, then debt to the point that the cost of debt does not impact the desired growth of equity.  In this comment, I note that a tax cut would not alter savings habits, or increase consumption, because it would generally be saved.  I have just explained the micro reasons for this above.  This holds for any economic agent which has leverage and is beholden to its obligations, so a corporate tax cut is unlikely to spur real investment until the agent receiving the cut feels it would get more benefit making capital expenditures than reducing leverage.  Capital expenditures are necessarily a cost, and can only facilitate revenue if there will be demand for a good produced with that good.  Revenue will only generate equity/leisure consumption if that revenue exceeds the cost of the revenue.  In this case, if demand for the good is so low that any more produced would sell for less than the cost of production, it’d be better to spend additional income on cost reductions…which, when debt servicing costs are high, means reducing leverage (now is a such a case).

Thus, the argument that businesses would increase hiring (which is a capital expenditure) with lower taxes fails to take into account the current context.  If we were in a situation where aggregate debt obligations were low, then a tax reduction would generally mean that the resultant money would go into equity growth.  However, we are not in such a situation, so that reasoning doesn’t necessarily (and doesn’t, in fact) apply.

By the way, the above division of the economic, non-government balance sheet into survival spending + obligations (debt + taxes) + leisure is the basis of the argument for a “progressive taxation” system.  Survival spending is probably an improper term here, and should be “cost of living”, which varies depending on one’s social status, culture, etc.  It should be understood that an agent’s apparent social status has an important impact on their ability to maintain their current position in society.  As much as we might call a sweet sports car a needless expense, in some social circles it’s a necessary pre-requisite to being in the social circle.  The same could be said of things we consider more necessary, such as childcare for families with two working parents.  I know it seems strange to conflate the two, but from a macro-level, they’re effectively the same: if the agent considers something necessary, it’s part of their “cost of living”.  Generally, we can say cost of living likely increases as income increases.

With no taxes, equity+leisure consumption = income – (CoL + debt service cost).  Now, while cost of living increases with income, we know their exists some floor under which CoL cannot drop.  Survival demands some food, water, and shelter.  Therefore, we can say that CoL = basic needs (BN) + social costs.  BN is basically a constant and can never really decrease.  In general, economic growth, as measured by spending, is going to derive from leisure consumption and cost of living expenditures.  Equity in this model works as a supplement to income: it is deferred spending to help produce future income.

Progressive taxation is based on the premise that cost of living and debt service costs are born more heavily by lower nominal incomes, relative to the income distribution of the society.  This is due to the observationt hat CoL costs and and debt service costs increase slower than income as income increases.  Because debt service costs and cost of living are obligations, it seems odd to make it more difficult for those obligations to be met, which taxation does.  As those obligations decline as a percentage of income, more of that income moves to leisure (non personal or socially necessary spending) or equity (deferred spending).  The preference from a social stability standpoint is not to make it difficult to meet one’s obligations.

Mac OS v Windows: This debate was old back in 2000

I came across this opinion piece about Windows v. Mac (H/T Big Picture), which really did capture a lot of my angst on the windows/mac debate.  This sums it up well:

Still, bad though it is, I vaguely prefer the clumping, clueless, uncool, crappiness of Microsoft’s bland Stepford gang to the creepy assurance of the average Mac evangelist. At least the grinning dildos in the Windows video are fictional, whereas eerie replicant Mac monks really are everywhere, standing over your shoulder in their charcoal pullovers, smirking with amusement at your hopelessly inferior OS, knowing they’re better than you because they use Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard.

Windows, for me, sits comfortably at that point in the spectrum where it won’t fucking do everything for me, but does a fair amount of the stupid crap.  Linux does squat for you, and the various distros give you a million ways in which to not have various stupid things done automatically for you.  Mac OS, on the other hand, happily does EVERYTHING for you, more or less locking you out of some of the cooler things.  The damn operating system pops out of the same mold that every chic indie kid whose parents have too much money and too few brains.

First, MS does have issues with UI development.  I totally agree.  I disagree that Apple has that shit locked up, though.  Using the ipod features of my iphone usually makes me cringe, as it lacks many of the more important bits of managing my music library (like, say, sorting a subset of my songs based on metadata.  Apple apparently decided it already knows the best way to sort my damn music, and if I know better I can make a playlist).

Windows is frankly where my hacker’s heart lies.  Yeah, it crashes (though far less now then in the good ol’ days of Windows 98).  So does OSX.  Know why?  Applications, actually.  See, the Garbage In, Garbage Out principle applies here.  If you want to keep programs from messing up a computer, you have to limit what they’re allowed to do.  Windows didn’t, so badly written programs could mess things up.  Apple swung the other direction and locked apps off from doing a lot of the more interesting bits, plopping them behind a variety of software APIs and account limitations.  MS has since been following suit, trying to deal with all the security complaints it has long had levelled against…and the only way to do that is to lock up the apps.

Now, Vista gets a bit weird, I admit.  Part of that is MS trying to deal with their legacy applications.  People don’t upgrade all that often, and they upgrade different software at different times.  Unfortunately, that means MS needs to try and support old Win Apps while moving to a different OS paradigm.  Vista is the intermediate result.  Lemme tell you, thank God for .NET (stupid COM, what a retarded idea.  Mozilla, I’m looking at you and XPCOM when I say this, too).

Maybe I feel this way about Windows because I get it.  I’m still running XP on my home machine, with Vista on my work box, and I’ve spent years wrestling with Windows to figure out how to make it do what I want.  Back in college, I also got to play with MacOS 9.  Let me tell you, I hated those macs more than any Windows machine I have ever used before or since.  They crashed relentlessly, for no reason, and were still slower than the Windows machines.  My home machines, Windows 98 then and XP more recently, I keep locked down to avoid that.  Unfortunately, you can’t expect the average person to do that.  They want the damned thing to work, and Mac gets closer to that.  Vista tried to step that way, and fucked it up with UAC (which just serves as a constant reminder of what the user doesn’t really get…and that the damned thing won’t “just work”).

I admit, the iPhone has not lived up to my hopes and dreams.  I’m admittedly given to pushing back on almost any major hype, so part of this is my personal cynicism shining through, but I’m still waiting on my mobile computing device.  Some good ideas are there, but others are missing and many that are there are really rough.  For instance, I miss tactile feedback when using my phone.  I don’t want to have to look at it to do everything…but I do.  Oh, and my biggest heresy is I don’t really view it as a solid gaming platform.

All of which is to say: Apple lovers, calm the fuck down.  Seriously, Steve Jobs is not the second coming.

Not much to say

I blog here in order to comment (at length) about topics of interest (to me).  This will include things like WoW theorycrafting, random MMO game design thinking, economic theory, and a little bit of philosophy.  I also bitch about Ghostcrawler when I can summon up the energy to care.

Unfortunately, I haven’t really seen much lately that conjures up the sort of semi-coherent discourse suitable for my blog…so I’m left without much to say.  That hasn’t impacted my readership numbers recently, as my post on Goblin and Worgen class options has managed to drive a pretty steady rate of site views.  That blip is slowly tapering off, and I’m still left with nothing to talk about.

Part of this is because I’m burned out on WoW, which translates into being burned out on hardcore MMO play.  I’m digging into Aion casually and still have a Champions Online account which I log into, but both of these have seen me on with only a fraction of the passion I devoted to WoW play when I was afire with enthusiasm.  These games aren’t inferior to World of Wacraft, in anyway I can see, but rather, they’re both MMOs in that vein…and burning out on WoW means burning out on MMORPGs for the time being.

Thus, a recent game buying spree saw me picking up a lot of the single-player console games I’ve been skipping on due to my play time being eaten up by WoW.  Right now, Fallout 3 is eating up my time (it’s a game with a lot of big ideas, but delivery can often be…questionable.  It’s also obviously built using Oblivion tech).

So yes, not much to say…though that will likely change to.  The most likely reason for the lack of posting is just that I’m tired.

A Daily Twist

Blizzard seems to have hit on an ingeious way to drive players into outdated raids: raid dailies (or weeklies).  Check out MMO-Champ’s 3.3 preview for the quick and dirty.