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« December 2016 | Main | February 2017 » January 27, 2017Russia Russia Russia It's not going away, so here are two perspectives. One from the Jacobin, which considering the source, goes about how you'd expect (it's a view i generally agree with and it repeats points i've blogged before), and one from Newsweek which makes the interesting case that Democrats are returning to their hawkish Cold War roots. The problem with the latter view, in my opinion (and this is acknowledged in the article), is that the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore, and Russia isn't even pretending to follow a Communist ideology. Smearing leftist critics of Hillary Clinton's faction as stooges of Putin just seems laughable to me; i don't understand how anyone can do it with a straight face. Related to all of this is Syria, of course. I read this today. Can't vouch for its accuracy but it was an interesting read. By fnord12 | January 27, 2017, 12:48 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link Thomas Frank on How Dems Lost the Midwest At first, it surprised me to learn this. I knew that Trump was critical of trade deals, of course. But I have always thought of farmers as big fans of free trade, since the US exports a huge amount of food. Farmers turned against Jimmy Carter because of his grain embargo on the Soviet Union, for example, and farm lobbyists are forever pushing for opening up trade with Cuba. But these days, things are different. The way Perry tells the story, family farmers are now in the grip of a handful of immensely powerful international food companies, and the trade deals our government has been agreeing to for decades have only helped to strengthen those corporations at their expense. Unlike nearly every other national politician, Obama seemed to get it back then: he promised to enforce antitrust laws against big food conglomerates and to do something about corporate livestock operations. "He really ran a campaign that related to agriculture," Rhonda Perry recalls. "Part of his platform," she continues, "was about reining in the corporate power and the monopolies that these companies have - it was about ensuring that there was going to be fair and competitive markets. None of those things happened." ... What did crop up persistently when I talked to this group was a disgust with the perceived moral haughtiness of liberals. More than one member of the club referred to himself as one of Hillary Clinton's "deplorables", for example. There was resentment of "Ivy League graduates" who felt entitled to "micromanage the rest of the country". The man who told me that - a fellow wearing a US Army Retired cap - also told me that "if you want to be an obnoxious slob, you have a right to be one". By min | January 27, 2017, 9:22 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link I mean, i love it, but... Dean Baker means well, but this reads more like "How Mexico Can Invite A Coup From The CIA" to me. By fnord12 | January 27, 2017, 8:30 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link Shadow Government needed I've made the point before that that Democrats need some sort of shadow government apparatus in place. Again, i'm not advocating for setting up some sort of Illuminati thing; it just means that you run a parallel mock government so that, as a party, you continue to build policies and react to current events. And it provides a source of bureaucrats (used non-pejoratively) to fill the mid level positions when you get back in power. I'm also realizing, after seeing this Intercept article about people at the EPA who are afraid to speak to the press, that it could provide a safety net to all these people afraid of losing their jobs. It would give them a place to continue doing their work and keep them financially stable. Obviously funding would be a huge issue, and the idea isn't that it could just employ everyone or at full salary. But it just struck me, in this time of #TheResistance, that people in places like the EPA are too terrified to speak out because of the fear of losing their jobs, and there's no support structure from the Democrats to help them. Update: Not to take away at all from the fact that EPA workers are scared of losing their jobs, i think with good reason, but today the New York Times had this: By fnord12 | January 27, 2017, 8:10 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Sadly, i've internalized this This isn't a new Penny Arcade but i think about it a lot when i sit down to write some cranky comic reviews. By fnord12 | January 26, 2017, 10:04 AM | Comics| Link
Caught car. Now what? A conservative columnist that had been doing full-throated advocacy for "repeal and replace" of Obamacare before the election has now finally looked at the details and determined that it's too complicated and the Republicans should just leave it alone. He's getting reamed from all sides, understandably. I mean, i appreciate the honesty, but der. This is getting attention because it "proves" right (obviously it's really just one random guy) liberal pundits who've been saying that Republicans don't really have a plan for the "and replace" part (beyond "something something state lines"). And it also "proves" that Obamacare (formerly Romneycare) really is as "free market" as you can get while still providing (vaguely) universal coverage. So really your choices are to abandon that principle (i.e. ditch the "and replace" part), which Trump has said he's not doing, or go to the left, starting with a Public Option or (better yet) Medicare For All. By fnord12 | January 25, 2017, 4:05 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link to snitch I didn't see these ads when i was a kid so i never got the opportunity to turn in my teacher. Not sure if my middle school's copies of Oregon Trails and Logo were legit. By fnord12 | January 25, 2017, 2:21 PM | Liberal Outrage & Video Games| Link
If you want unity, get behind us for a change Good article from Sarah Jones. Key line: "...the same camp that is championing establishment ideology is also claiming that any attacks on that ideology are a blow to Democratic unity". Plenty in there about our horrible Senator, Cory Booker, too. By fnord12 | January 24, 2017, 2:59 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link Winning the unions Michael Tracey has a write-up of Trump's nixing of the TPP and it's pretty good, but i was hoping he'd incorporate a related development that he highlighted on Twitter. Namely that after formally cancelling the TPP (or ending the US' involvement with it, which is effectively the same thing), Trump met with the leaders of Hillary supporting unions, and the leaders walked away being very pleased with the meeting. As people note in the "comments", this is potentially really dangerous to Democrats. The Democratic party relies heavily on the unions' money and ground game. The Dems better get a message for them. By fnord12 | January 24, 2017, 1:04 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link Caught Well, we were complaining that they were only eating the bushes over to the right, making them all skinny and sad-looking compared to the rest. So i guess we can't complain now. They still only target the middles of the bushes. Guess there's no point in straining your neck when there's plenty to eat at face level. Guess it wouldn't be wise to ask that our neighborhood get a sudden influx of giraffes. I always have to remind myself that it's awesome that this beautiful wildlife just wanders around in our backyard. Because the initial reaction to seeing deer eating your bushes is, "Fuckers! Get da fug out of here!". Hey, those bushes are the only thing keeping us from having to interact with our neighbors in the summer, so you can't blame us. By fnord12 | January 24, 2017, 8:12 AM | My stupid life| Link
Can we please revise the mission statements of "fact checkers"? Jan 14th: Bernie Sanders's claim that '36,000 people will die yearly' if Obamacare is repealed is given four Pinocchios by the Washington Post's fact checker. Today in the Washington Post: Repealing the Affordable Care Act will kill more than 43,000 people annually. And no, the problem wasn't that Bernie undercounted by 7,000. To be fair, the latter is actually a rebuttal of the former, and kudos to the Post for publishing it. But how do you go from awarding something four Pinocchios (which is such a weird metric. It's been a while, but i don't remember Pinocchio cloning himself every time he lied.) to publishing an article saying that it's true? And the headline even uses the dangerous word "will", which was what caused the original claim to get bumped from three to four Pinocchios. And it's not like the Post has issued a correction or any caveats. Their "fact check" still remains on their website completely divorced from this article. Basically you can have any reality you want. Fact checkers should really be limited to verifying actual facts. They should leave policy analysis for policy analysts, and in that capacity they need to recognize that there are a lot of variables and possible interpretations. A lot of the caveats in the first article were just fine (e.g. a lot depends on exactly what the "replace" part of "repeal and replace" would be), but when you end with issuing Pinocchios or whatever, you're not just providing necessary context to readers. You're actually giving them a false sense of certainty. By fnord12 | January 23, 2017, 12:42 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link
News captured Guys, a garbage can was on fire during the Trump protests. Luckily there were one or two reporters around to get a picture of it. Nice work, guys. The Washingtonian has more. Also i hear that someone punched a Nazi in the face. I have a photo of that: By fnord12 | January 22, 2017, 12:46 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Luke and Jabba team up to fight the Empire David Brock his gross. He found a loophole in campaign finance laws so that his Super-Pac could collude directly with Hillary Clinton, he attacked Bernie Sanders on specious, ridiculous grounds (the Podesta email hacks reveal that even other Hillary supporters thought they did more harm than good), and he even paid an army of trolls to attack Bernie supporters online. David Sirota, on the other hand, is a really good reporter with a lot of integrity. And is a firm progressive (e.g. was a Bernie supporter). I read him regularly. So this is a big surprise that i'm having trouble wrapping my head around. This is the line that makes me feel best about it: This line, second best: Daou was Brock's Salacious Crumb, so Sirota replacing him, if he retains his integrity, can only be a step up. By fnord12 | January 20, 2017, 12:56 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link Billionaires getting nervous Davos Elite Seeks Fixes to Defend the System From Populists. They're even considering conceding to a "higher tax burden" to pay for more social spending. By fnord12 | January 20, 2017, 8:20 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link Healthcare in America Ryan Cooper has three related articles. One on why Obamacare sucks. One on why repealing it will nonetheless kill thousands of people. And a (devastating) case study of someone trying to navigate the current system. By fnord12 | January 20, 2017, 7:54 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Democratic socialist, actually Ending MLK day with the strange but apparently necessary reminder that he was not a conservative. By fnord12 | January 16, 2017, 7:21 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Civ 6 I've been playing the Civilization series since Civ 1, and i think the first three games are among the greatest computer games. When Civ 4 came out, i gave it a quick try but it was at a busy time in my life and i couldn't handle all the changes and gave up without giving it a fair chance. Civ 5 got universally bad reviews so i skipped that as well. But over the past few years Min and i have occasionally fired up Civ 3 for some local multiplayer marathons. And sometimes we'd run into little glitches or annoyances - most notably a problem with camera behavior in multiplayer - and whenever we'd complain we'd have to stop and remind ourselves that we were playing a game that was over 15 years old. So when Civ 6 was announced, we got excited. Surely all those little problems would be fixed, so it was time for us to take the time to learn the new game. And our winter break was the time to do it. The good news is that we have another computer attached to our television that we were considering upgrading, and this pushed us over the edge on that decision. So for now we wouldn't play multiplayer, but we could at least try the game together (and bicker about whether to build city improvements or troops!). A side note: once we had the game, i did install it on my laptop to see how bad it was. The load times were prohibitive, but once the game finally loaded - and we're talking several minutes - it seemed to run and look ok. I didn't keep playing to see if the time between turns got worse as the game went on and the AI had more to do. The game also comes with a Benchmark feature that seems to test your computer to see how well it can handle the game. But the feature took so long to run i assumed it was hanging and ended it. We also ran the Benchmark feature on the TV computer, and it turns out the results are incomprehensible to me anyway. min: OMG people do not know how to make graphs anymore. Label your axes, people! And there should be a legend! Just as examples, in Civ 3, Writing allows you to engage in diplomacy, and unlocks the new tech improvements Literature (which lets you build libraries), Philosophy, Code of Laws, and Map Making. In Civ 6, Writing lets you build libraries, and unlocks Currency (only). In Civ 3, Mathematics lets you build catapults and unlocks Construction and Currency. In Civ 6, Mathematics increases the speed of your naval units by one and is unlocked by Currency. I'm not even saying that Civ 3 is right and Civ 6 is wrong. Just that the changes seem entirely arbitrary, and serve mainly to make sure that people coming in from previous versions have to learn everything from scratch. And the whole point of me choosing to play Civ 6 as opposed to, say, Age of Empires or any other random similar game, is that i have some familiarity with the system and like it. I don't want to learn a whole new game. The Civ name is what brought me here. To be fair, things have always changed between games, but in the past it's always seemed to be in service of making the game more balanced or accommodating larger rule changes. For example, i accept that Temples no longer reduce unhappiness in cities, because a) managing citizen happiness no longer seems to be a factor at all in Civ 6 and because religion has become a major new aspect of the game. But i can't see why they'd flip around the attributes of Mathematics and Writing, etc., in what feels like a completely random way. Related to this is the fact that the country leaders have changed. This isn't super important since in my opinion the leaders should be eliminated or selected randomly anyway. But it's just jarring for Pericles, not Alexander the Great, to now be the leader of the Greeks. It's even weirder for the Romans to not be included in the game at all. In part, the idea seems to be an attempt at adding diversity; Gorgo, Queen of Sparta is also a choice for the Greek leader, for example. But not every country has a choice of male and female leaders. And i suspect that the real motivation here is the ability to sell expansion packs that include additional civilizations and leaders. I also want to acknowledge that we're coming in from two versions behind, so maybe these changes felt more gradual to people that were keeping up. But imo that just pushes the source of the problem back. Firaxis should be very careful with every minor arbitrary change that they make if they don't want to alienate older loyal players. And if nothing else, it shows my state of mind (disoriented and cranky, which, granted, is nothing new) when it came time to evaluate the bigger changes. min: He was so cranky. But the new tech tree is pretty bad. It seems bloated with lots of useless tech that don't give you meaningful gains. After spending 10 turns researching something, you want to get something useful in return. Not some crappy policy card that gives you an unimpressive +1 to a "Harbor Adjacency Bonus". Bwah. Districts This is theoretically by design, the idea being that cities will now have to specialize instead of every city building every improvement. Kind of like how Detroit (in its day) was an industrial powerhouse but never became the financial capital that New York was (and vice versa). But ofc Detroit did indeed have some marketplaces and New York did have some factories. And Civ 3 managed to approximate all of that fairly well without making it explicit. I've had plenty of cities that, thanks to their locations, had better production and/or commercial power than others. But i was still able to marginally improve the abilities of other cities by building factories, marketplaces, etc.. An additional complication is that within districts you have more choices. The one that sticks out is that after building an Encampment district, you can either build a barracks or a stable. Barracks makes your ground troops better, whereas a stable improves your cavalry. So it's not even that you have to devote a city to specialize in building troops. You will actually need two such cities if you intend to have a mix of units. min: because, apparently, you can't possibly have both a barracks and a stable in your encampment. either my horses have a place to sleep or my soldiers do but not both? this makes sense how? I was open to this idea and i still think the concept could be interesting. I think the biggest blocker is the cost of the districts. I think in the future Firaxis should consider going with more of the SimCity "zoning" concept, but i think an even better idea is to come up with a way for districts to grow organically. For example, if i continue to emphasis commercial improvements, it may naturally occur that i get a commercial district, and based on terrain and population restrictions that may therefore cause me to forgo getting an industrial district in that city. So i like the idea, but in practice it was backwards and prohibitive. War You do eventually get to research tech that allows you to stack two units (and later more) into an "army" but we found two stacked units to be significantly less effective than two individual units (and that seems to be the general internet consensus). I think Firaxis should have just stuck to its guns here and kept it at one unit per tile. min: What is the point of stacking my units if they're going to be worse than 2 separate units? Why even make that an option? Who would want to do that? Now instead of 2 units that can each attack once per turn and each do 40+ points of damage, i have 1 unit that goes once in a turn and does mebbe 50 points of damage. Do you see the problem here? Are you following me? Can you do basic arithmetic? Ignoring the "armies", i think this was a good change, entirely in the plus column. Workers So what i would have liked to have seen is the ability to manage workers at a macro level. Set percentages for workers that are doing irrigation vs. mining, or whatever. Have a worker queue so that you could change orders but only after they finished their current jobs. Give orders like "build roads between all cities" to 10 workers at once. Firaxis clearly saw that managing workers was a problem, but they solved it in a very different way. First, workers now only have a certain number of "charges". Three by default, can be expanded a bit based on tech and policies. Second, they don't build roads anymore. So a worker can irrigate a grassland and build two mines, and then he's gone and you have to build another one (and they aren't super cheap). There is no automation anymore (obviously, with only 3 charges, you wouldn't want the computer deciding what to do). As for roads, they are built by traders, which is a truly bizarre decision. Managing trade routes in this game is a nightmare that deserves its own section (but this review is already too long), but the idea that you get roads by sending traders to a city is weird in and of itself. I didn't know that Marco Polo pooped out a road behind him when he traveled to China. And if i just want roads between my own cities, i have to send traders to each city? There is no indication of which of your cities have had traders sent to them already when you're on the trade route selection screen. It's impossible to manage. A later upgrade to the worker unit allows them to build roads, but then you are back to the problem of charges. I don't know why "charges" were applied to workers but not to military units. The same logic that says a worker can only build three things before becoming exhausted should apply to how many times a soldier can fight, too. Not that i want that, but the selective application of this concept raises questions. This does "solve" the problem of managing a large group of automated workers, but in the same way that strangling your children in the third grade would solve the problem of paying for their college. min: They stop being cute around age 5 anyway. min: goddamned missionaries! where's my Atheist Prophet? why couldn't i defend against missionaries with science! So we simply attacked India militarily (hey, we were playing as Norse vikings) min: also der. you send missionaries, we send infantry.. If it weren't for other factors, i would say that we should play another game now that we understand the religious aspect and give it a fair shake min: no! no religion! *shudder* god talk gives me the heebie jeebies.. I'm a little uncomfortable with religion being so prominent in the game - i have a friend who for a while refused to build temples, etc. at all because he didn't want to drug his people with the opiate of the masses - but of course religion has been an important part of the history of civilization so i understand it being in the game. For what it's worth, we tortured ourselves by playing through the tutorial before starting a real game, and the tutorial made no mention of all this religious stuff, so i don't accept 100% of the blame for missing how important religion was. Government In Civ 1-3, there were only a few forms of government, and each one came with its own plusses and negatives. For example, Democracy increased economic growth but citizens became war weary much faster. Whereas in Communism production was spread out equally among all of your cities (itself a positive and negative). I'm oversimplifying and there were multiple benefits and detriments to each government type, which made weighing the differences between them a lot of fun and also fairly consequential. In Civ 6 there are twice as many governments, some of them very granular (e.g. Merchant Republic), but the choice doesn't feel very important. Each government type provides what feels like a minor bonus, and no negatives. Each government type allows for a different mix of policy slots. For example, Merchant Republic gives a bonus of "+2 Trade Routes and 15% discount on gold purchases", and allows one military policy, two economic policies, one diplomatic policy, and two wildcard policies (which can be filled with any of the other types or a special fourth type). For comparison, Monarchy's bonus is "+2 housing in any city with medieval walls and 20% bonus influence points" and has three military policies, one economic policy, one diplomatic policy, and one wildcard. Without getting into all the details of the game, i assure you that the bonuses of either government types are not game changers. And the policies are even less significant. A typical Military policy is "Logistics: +1 Movement if starting turn in friendly territory". That's basically garbage, so whether you get 3 of those or 1 in comparison to your number of economic policies ("Skyscrapers: +15% production toward Industrial era and later wonders") is meaningless. And you get new policies constantly based on the tech you research, so just about every other round we sat and agonized over these inconsequential choices. It eventually occurred to me that these policies - which are shaped like cards that you drag into your deck - are based on games like Magic: The Gathering or Munchkin. You're not really setting policies, you're just picking which (minor) bonuses you want. So this was really disappointing. Not only did Policies turn out to be a dud, but the basic concept of Governments has been watered down to the point where it doesn't really matter. Great Leaders min: you could also "buy" them with any "Faith" points you've accumulated. why is there so much religion in my Civ game!? Spies and Traders I noted the weird road building aspect of traders above, but you also have to manage the routes for each trader that you build, and after they complete a route you have to choose a new route and weigh the very minor rewards of that route. And there's a weird limitation (that we never quite understood) to what cities you can reach. You can trade between your own cities or with other civilizations' cities, if you can reach them. So every few rounds you're dealing with a trade screen and after staring at it for a while we'd just pick something at random and it never felt like it mattered. I have a vague recollection that you could build traders or convoys in Civ 2, but i liked the way it worked in Civ 3, where you just negotiated with other countries to trade resources. Actually, that aspect is in this game as well so i don't know why we also needed to build and manage traders. min: i think it was so that we could get frustrated by more pop-ups blocking the board. Camera Tooltips There is a "tooltip delay" option in the settings, but the maximum time is 2 seconds, which is barely anything. Different tooltips do appear on the city product screen, where they mainly serve to obscure the other items on the list when you're trying to decide what to build next. UI AI Other Stuff I guess my overall thesis is that Civ 3 was great and just needed a few fixes and instead we got a very changed and kind of unfinished game. By fnord12 | January 12, 2017, 3:39 PM | Video Games| Link Cory Booker is a bad liar Jezebel has a response from Booker on why he voted against the drug amendment: Suuuuure. I'd be really concerned about importing drugs from that third world hellhole, Canada. Without looking anything up, i will guarantee that Canada's safety standards are much higher than ours, so Booker's position is bullshit. And of course the point of this bill isn't to actually do it, but to highlight how ridiculous it is that the same drugs that are sold here in the US are sold in Canada at a fraction of the cost. But i'll remember Booker's explanation the next time a real progressive is lectured about "making the perfect the enemy of the good". By fnord12 | January 12, 2017, 3:01 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link Cory Booker is horrible Cory Booker was one of 13 Democrats who just voted against the Sanders-Klobuchar amendment to import drugs from Canada. Here's Bernie's (pre-vote) video on the subject (Facebook warning, but i was able to watch it without an account; just click "not now"). The vote was 46-52 and would have passed if it wasn't for these 13 "Democrats". (To be sure, might not have passed in the House, but as Sanders notes in the video, Trump is in favor of doing something about drug prices, and there were some surprise Republican votes in the Senate, like Ted Cruz). Booker also recently endorsed the Goldman-Sachs candidate for governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, over Assemblyman John Wisniewski (a Bernie supporter in the primaries). Anyone who remembers Corzine knows we don't need another Goldman-Sachs exec for a governor. Our other horrible senator, Robert Menendez also voted against the amendment and endorsed Murphy. But i'll be surprised if his corrupt ass makes it all the way to his 2018 primary, whereas Booker is expected to run for president in 2020. By fnord12 | January 12, 2017, 7:57 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link |