RSSWednesday, March 10, 2010
Final Fantasy XIII thoughts.
Bought the game for the 360, despite the fact that it's a port and theoretically not as nice-looking as the PS3 version, because:
- It was an excuse to buy a 360 and the price/features on the bundle were really nice.
- The difference is so slight that it won't matter sitting 10' away from a 37" TV.
- The PS3 is a piece of crap.1 And Sony hardware is needlessly overpriced. And the 360 has a 3-year warranty.
1 I can say this because I have actually done game development on it.
On to the game. After a couple of hours of gameplay, here are my first impressions. Very minor spoilers follow:
... Read all of "Final Fantasy XIII thoughts."
Posted by Dave at 5:00 PM | Comments (0)
Who cheats?
According to Yahoo! News and the infamous ashleymadison.com, the top professions for marital infidelity are very different between men and women:
For Women:
1. Teachers
2. Stay-at-home Moms
3. Nurses
4. Administrative Assistants
5. Real Estate AgentsFor Men:
1. Physicians
2. Police Officers
3. Lawyers
4. Real Estate Agents
5. Engineers
With the exception of real estate agents, which I'll address later, these lists make total sense. According to the "study", women mostly cheat because they're not being emotionally fulfilled by their partners. It makes sense that women who are underpaid, overworked, or just generally unappreciated at work and unhappy at home are more likely cheat than those who at least get some fulfillment from their occupation.1
For the men, powerful and prestigious jobs seem to top the list. Powerful, wealthy, and prestigious men have always had a tendency to believe that the rules don't apply to them - and in reality, they're usually right.2 The "researchers" also learned that powerful/prestigious men felt that they deserved extramarital sex, which they overwhelmingly sought simply for pleasure and excitement (and not to fill an emotional hole).
For both men and women, the top jobs are all high-stress with relatively long hours. Note that #2 on the women's list is specifically "stay-at-home mom" and not "homemaker" or "housewife" - I think that's significant. People don't give stay-at-home parents enough credit; it's a very hard, time-consuming job with no pay. But stress and long hours leads to both general unhappiness and (with the exception of the moms) lots of time away from the home with members of the opposite sex other than the person's spouse. Opportunity has to at least be a factor in these rankings.
Real estate agents are an interesting case. Real estate is both higher-stress and more prestigious than your average job. But I think the key here is that real estate agents are constantly meeting new people in their own socioeconomic class who live close enough to cheat with. Equally important, they work odd hours, so very little of their coming and going would seem suspicious. Again, opportunity has to be a major factor.
1 Also note that the top jobs for women are also mostly among the most common jobs for women, so there is considerable selection bias. In fact, the biggest flaw in this entire "study" is probably not normalizing for the percentage of the overall population in each profession.
2 Note that neither "politician" nor "professional athlete" made the list. I think that's mostly selection bias (there are far less of them than of the other professions) and partly because of the spotlight put on people in those fields. If you're Tiger Woods, you're certainly not going to go on a site like ashleymadison, no matter how confidential it claims to be.
Posted by Dave at 2:04 PM | Comments (0)
Monday, March 8, 2010
Penny-Arcade has been removed from my bookmarks.
It's just not funny anymore. Seriously. People complain about XKCD not being good anymore (and today's certainly wasn't very good), but it still has flashes of brilliance. PA is just self-referential and dumb. The last two comics didn't even make sense.
I realize that the PA team is now way more important to the gaming community through things like PAX and Child's Play than through their webcomic, and they probably make more money on conventions and paid art gigs than by running their site. But they need to remember that the reason people like the PA brand is because of the comic. The comic stinking like week-old roadkill in summer means no new customers, which must eventually result in the failure of their business model.
Posted by Dave at 12:48 PM | Comments (3)
Sarah Palin used to go to Canada for health care.
The Calgary Herald is reporting that Palin's parents used to take her across the border for that horrible "socialized medicine" then have in Canuckistan:
"... we used to hustle on over the border for health care that we would receive in Whitehorse. I remember my brother, he burned his ankle in some little kid accident thing and my parents had to put him on a train and rush him over to Whitehorse and I think, isn’t that kind of ironic now. Zooming over the border, getting health care from Canada."
Note that Whitehorse is in the Yukon Territory, about a 3-4 hour drive from Skagway. Juneau is about a 4.5 hour trip, but requires taking a ferry, which might not be running right when you have a medical emergency. So even if one had a moral objection to socialized health care (or to freeloading on another country's publicly-financed system!) it doesn't seem unreasonable for a Skagway resident to travel to Canada for acute care.
That is, if they were traveling by car.1
1 Or were even able to; there appears to be a small road connecting Skagway to the border, but it's through a national park and Google Maps won't use it to cross - and that's in 2010.
But Palin specifically said that they put the kid on a train, which means that they were at the mercy of whatever the train schedule was. I can only assume that passenger trains didn't come all that more often than ferries to Juneau.2 And in the past, Palin has said that her family used health services in Juneau as well.
2 Which are, incidentally, run by the government and considered part of the state highway system. So, like most public transportation, they probably run more often and for lower fares than you'd expect from a private, for-profit service.
If good old American fee-for-service health care in Juneau was so much better than wait-in-line-forever commie health care in Canada, why would the Palin family have used both at their convenience? Why wouldn't they have waited a few extra hours to use the far-superior American product? Unless... unless of course the Canadian product wasn't really all that bad (likely), or was a lot cheaper (also likely), or was even maybe a bit better, especially in remote places like Alaska or the Yukon, since a government-backed system is likely to provide better incentives for doctors to practice in under-served areas than a marked-based one (again, quite likely).
Odds are, we'll never get a straight answer about this from Palin, so we only have what she told the Canadians to go on. But these real-world experiences of working-class people are the the sort of comparisons we need to be making if we're going to evaluate how American health care and coverage stack up to other countries'.3
3 Also note that Canada is a bad example - they have one of the worst, least-efficient universal health systems of any major industrialized country. They do have better health outcomes than the U.S., mind you, but not as much better as most European countries, Japan, etc.
Posted by Dave at 12:27 PM | Comments (1)
Thursday, March 4, 2010
GOP fundraising plan: scare the poor, bribe the rich.
The Republican National Committee (RNC)'s fundraising strategy document has been leaked, and boy - it's a doozy (full document at this link). Of especial interest are pages 29, 30, and 31, which are reproduced here for your enjoyment:
Notice that the strategy for direct marketing to small donors (which the presentation expects to be 80-90% of all donations) relies mostly on scaring the bejeezus out of them. That's also the focus of the next two slides.
The strategy for the rich is basically peer pressure and offering "access". It's pointed out later in the presentation that a recent federal court ruling dictates that offering "access" or "consideration" in exchange for money is not necessarily legal "corruption" (even though any sane person would see it that way).
Later in the presentation, a schedule of events shows a number of dates when rich donors will be offered tickets to sporting events and vacations in exchange for money.
Can't offer the American people anything constructive? Scare them! (Seems to be a theme here.)
You can see the GOP adopting some of the teabaggers' imagery here. Though I can't figure out how Scooby-Doo is supposed to scare or motivate voters. I thought people liked Scooby-Doo!
Posted by Dave at 9:10 AM | Comments (0)