Follow-Up on Big Game

Having had some time to consider my last post, and in no small part due to our good friends at zombiehunters.org (who of course had a detailed thread on weapon choices for Jurassic Park, including in-depth analysis of T-Rex anatomy), I've found a tentative solution to my dinosaur/dragon quandary.

Turns out the the theoretical mass of an adult T-Rex is roughly the same as that of a mature African elephant, at about 4.5 tons. While there'd theoretically be some variances in bone and muscle mass and placement, anything that works to put down an elephant will work as well or better against a T-Rex. All sorts of ways to put down an elephant, with varying degrees of expediency. African poachers don't bother with things like big-game rifles (which cost about $5 for every round), or even heavy military hardware (interestingly, .50 BMG weapons and ammo are fairly common in that part of the world). They just use AK-47s loaded with cheap FMJ military ammo. They empty a magazine or two, and then go have a cigarette while the animal bleeds out.

I've got a lot better than an AK-47 already. But I worry about the time it would take for a T-Rex to bleed out. They've purportedly got aggression issues that suggest need for a quick put-down. I've also never been a big believer in the mag-dump as a tactic, and not going to default to it here, since there are aimed-fire options. The posture of a T-Rex means that tactics that work on humans (but which usually won't work on big-game) will work on a T-Rex. Specifically: shoot them in the throat.  Fired into soft fleshy substances, a .308 soft-nose hunting round makes a permanent wound cavity about the size of a softball, and does severe tissue damage (a 'temporary cavity' of torn soft tissues, veins, and arteries) to an area the size of a basketball.   There's a reason that international treaties bar them from military use. An M1A magazine holds 20 rounds. That's a lot of tissue damage - even to something the size of a T-Rex - with a fairly large target area (on the centerline, under the chin or into the mouth) packed with big veins and arteries, besides important things like wind-pipes and spinal columns. Even going for pure head-shots (almost never as good an idea as people think it is) would work better than with elephants, since a T-Rex's skull structure is much less robust than an elephants, and would at very least encourage the pursuit of less well-armed meals than me.

So pending further analysis (or some cool application of thermite, which I'll keep on the table), my dinosaur/dragon plan is to put a few magazines of soft-nose big game ammo in with my Aliens package (M1A, 1911, short-sword), and to aim for the throat.

Big Game

I've had it pointed out to me over the years that my brain doesn't work the way that most other peoples' do. Whatever. Who cares. But I can't begin to deny that strange things tend to happen in my head, particularly while I'm unconscious. Like I've mentioned before, I used to have incredibly painful, disturbing dreams, leading to extended periods of insomnia. Also like I've mentioned before, I figured out the problem that was leading to those, and they stopped happening. Which, of course, was an evolutionary process, rather than a totally new paradigm.

Over the period of my night-terror years, I tried every conceivable method and theory of dream manipulation. Attempts at lucid dreaming, conscious dream keys, self-hypnosis, dream logs, binaural tones for relaxation or meditation, you name it. I can give you a colorful commentary on any or all of them, including their effectiveness (and recreational value) when undertaken in conjunction with alcohol, and/or pharmaceuticals. In the end, what finally worked was change in philosophy, rather than a change in technique. Which, in retrospect, is not surprising at all, but it seemed pretty revolutionary when it happened over a decade ago.

In any rate, my dreams are still occasionally disturbing, but now in a much more pro-active fashion. For example, I remember a recent dream where I was sitting in my truck in a parking lot, and two guys with shotguns simply climbed into the back seat. They announced their intention to steal my truck and kidnap my fiance. Once upon a time, this would have been just the preamble of a truly disturbing dream sequence that might have gone on for hours (subjective time), and subsequently kept me from sleeping again for a week or three. Instead of that, the dream reached a conclusion that remained a bit disturbing, but included the end of the dream in short order, and me suffering only a few hours of subsequent tossing and turning. Specifically: After those guys climbed into my back seat and announced their intentions, I killed them. Both. By ambush, and with me never giving either of them them a chance, much less a warning. I shot one of them five times and his buddy three times, at essentially point blank range. It wasn't easy, since the mechanics had me shooting lefty, twisting my body from the driver's seat and firing between the front seats at guys in the back seat from under my right armpit. I didn't have a lot of confidence in my accuracy, so I opted for overwhelming application of force. It seemed to work under the circumstances.

I remember another fairly recent dream, when Freddy Kruger made an actual appearance, attempting to chase me and my brothers around the school we went to as kids. I grew up with the original Elm Street movies, and remember being terrified of that character. But Freddy's most recent appearance in my subconscious wasn't bad at all. A scrawny 5-foot-8 burned guy with some knives? Come on. Bring that weak shit the playground, and you end up in a dumpster, bleeding, trying to pick up your teeth with broken fingers. So yeah. Me and my brothers beat the hell out of him with steel pipes and a baseball bat. Turns out that there's not a whole lot to worry about, so long as you stay calm, control your fear, and consider yourself as the party with initiative.

I got to thinking about all this after last night night saw a dream that I had literally never had before. One that caught me completely unprepared. DINOSAURS. I didn't appreciate the novelty of it at the time, and it really could have been a lot worse, since we had the luxury of defending a semi-prepared elevated position (the upper floor of a house). Not to say that it was easy, since - in retrospect - I came light. I was in my Zombie-Apocalypse loadout (AR, Glock 19, tire-iron). Turns out that dinosaurs call for at least the Big Bad Wolf package (automatic shotgun, 1911, and a boar-spear) even if all you're dealing with is velociraptors (or Utahraptors, if you want to get picky about the genus of that type of lizard standing about human-height). But even though I started out under-equipped and made things worse by braking my carbine, the real problem I kept having with the dinosaurs was that I had no idea how to fight them. Zombies? Sure. Plenty of ways to deal with them, whether your talking about the truly undead, or just the masses of fucking morons we have to face down every day.  Likewise, there are any number of ways to deal with movie monsters, villains, natural disasters, or even being trapped in a city that is slowing being stomped down to ground level by Godzilla. (Yes, I've had that dream.) Again, all you have to do is stay calm, and consider yourself the party with initiative.

That having been said, it always helps to think ahead, and I hadn't, and it wasn't a lot of fun dealing with dinosaurs on the fly. Interestingly, the ones that were theoretically the most versatile, cunning, and deadly (the raptors) were easiest to deal with, simply because of transferable skills and plans. Raptors were lot like hunting werewolves, although the raptors were less agile, and MUCH better jumpers. But how do you deal with a T-Rex? Regardless of the fact that I was raised on Jurassic Park just a much as I was raised on Elm Street, I had never really considered how to go about putting down a bus-sized predatory dinosaur.

Next time I face dinosaurs, I'll make sure I've got the Big Bad Wolf loadout with me, and I'll have to think of something specialized for T-Rex/Dragon applications. (Thermite, possibly.) Might be important some day.

Vacation Ideas

Well. Some things have changed.

In fact, they've changed so much that I don't have time to really do justice to everything that's happened in the last year or so. So I'm kinda gonna have to just gloss over the things that've happened. If I don't gloss it over, if I postpone writing anything until addressing the details, I probably wouldn't post anything here for a long, long time. I don't yet have the words.

So I'm going to try to jump back into writing by relating an example of how my perspective has changed recently. The Las Vegas Outdoor Sports Expo is in town this weekend. And I'm considering gathering up Jen and our parents and going with Tommy. I'm genuinely curious what sort of adventure and vacation packages are available for my current demographic, and I'm sure there are some serious options, since I'm sure there are a lot of people like me who have disposable income. Lets dispense with the bullshit, go to the expo, and see the best they've got.

While it's not necessarily an adventure getaway, I'm curious as to whether there's somewhere in the world that can offer me a week in a bungalow on a tropical beach. Think Thomas Crown's little shack on Bermuda. A place like that. Ten minutes from town; close enough for take out or delivery, or for the book store. Full kitchen. Well stocked fridge and pantry. Wine cellar. King size four poster in a room made mostly of screens, shutters, and light tropical breaze.

And then add in all the things that would really matter. Nursery for boy, with excellent electronic monitors, and with every conceivable light and sound option. In town (10 minutes by jeep down a well-lit paved road) there's full medical services, and a little cabin your parents can rent. (The cabin has a full nursery.) Dog friendly. And they can roam freely, since you've got the beach to yourself. (No, don't worry about where they crap. We got it.) 

And the kicker. The whole bungalow is wired to resonate with binaural delta tones. Those deep vibrations, down below one hertz, that you feel in your bones when you're falling asleep in an underway cruise ship. The best part of relaxing on a plane or a train. In this place on the beach, there's a button on the wall that you push, and the whole place goes into 'car ride' mode.

Find me a set of young parents anywhere who wouldn't pay a shit-ton for a weekend at a beach cabana where there's a 'car ride' button. A fucking button you can push to get your baby to quickly and naturally chill out, calm down, and Go The Fuck To Sleep.™

Wow.

I'm getting a little choked up just fantasizing that such a thing might exist. I love being a dad, and I've got the best, most type-B baby anyone has ever seen. But I'd still pay the asking price for vacation with my wife  where there's a button that more or less guarantees us a 20 minute or longer nap on demand.

So in the absence of anything else to do, we might go take a look at the expo this weekend. I want to look around to see what sort of options are available along these lines. And I'm going to be hugely disappointed if nobody has a 'car ride button' option on a nursery-equipped tropical bungalow, because that shit would be pure fucking gold. 

The Hunger Games

Back in the dark, drunk days of high school, I had an class where we read Much Ado About Nothing. If you're not familiar with it, it's a Shakespeare drama about several parallel love stories in early16th century (or so) Sicily, notably the Claudio/Hero and Benedick/Beatrice pairings.  Claudio/Hero is VERY storybook. They swoon at the sight of each other, and spend a lot of time gazing longingly at each other's flawless beauty. The usual melodrama. In the entire play, there's only about a dozen lines or so in which Claudio and Hero actually say anything to each other. Contrast Benedick/Beatrice, both of whom are entirely too sharp, witty, wordy, and self-impressed for their own good. They start out hating each other, get tricked into admitting that they love each other, and spend the entire duration exchanging hundreds of lines of sharp, lively banter.

I distinctly remember the teacher in the at-issue 11th grade English class commenting on the chances of long-term success for each of those two relationships. B/B will clearly have no problem going on into perpetuity with with joking banter, teasing, good-natured insults, and perhaps the occasional full-fledged knock-down-drag-out-yelling-match-followed-by-amazing-angry-make-up-sex. On the other hand, C/H... Are they ever going to talk at all? What's going to happen when they actually have to interact in a way OTHER than just longing for each other?

Based on my (admittedly limited) sampling, most tweeny dramas are based on straight-ticket Claudio/Hero relationships, with similar relationship trajectories. I've posted in the past about how if you took out all of the Bella/Edward dialogue about how they really do love each other and really do want to be together, there's no other dialog left over. Edward puts up with Bella's drama, pretty much exclusively because she smells nice. Is that shit going to last when she's no longer a potential menu item? What else is there? Ever read/watch The Vampire Diaries? What exactly does that Elena chick have going on that these incredibly powerful, wealthy, gorgeous vampires are falling over each other for her? Imagine yourself as an immortal vampire in a teenage body. You've spent the last 100 years or so more or less continuously in high school. (Let's conservatively guess that Stefan - 162 years old per wikipedia - has had at least fifty trips through 12th grade prior to his current gig.) And now here's a little brunette chippy. Yeah, she's cute, and yeah, she's a dead ringer for a girl who screwed you over once up on a time. But cheerleader princesses usually go from smoking hot straight to battered handbag, sometimes before 30. In the end, how is this Elena chick anything more than just another high school small-town cheerleader princess?

This is what our young readers (and sometimes not so young) feast upon. Yay for us! Yay for the future!

But as always, there is hope. I just recently spent a week in the Bahamas with some of the inlaws (my sister in law SHE HULK, and her husband SUSHI CHOPS), over which I re-read Stranger in a Strange Land, and then polished off the Hunger Games trilogy. While I could do on and on about any noun listed in that sentence, I'll try to limit this post to commentary about Hunger Games.

I liked it, and I note that it follows the usual lines for a successful fantasy fiction work: a vivid world  (similar enough to ours that we relate, but different enough to be interesting) in which empathetic characters interact in a way to elicit an emotional response from the reader. But the emotional response elicited from these particular books is hardly something you'd expect to be as successful as it has been.

While the soft-core trashy romance seems to have infinite space on its bandwagon, the Hunger Games really don't fit in that category. These are not romance novels in any meaningful use of the term. I like what it says about our young adults that books are being bought and read from OUTSIDE the 'Teen Supernatural Romance" section of the bookstore. While there are distinct love interests, and the conflict between the various love interests is a central and recurring theme, its not the whole story.

Also, the central relationship is definitely not Claudio/Hero. There is impetus behind the romantic angles other than simple "Oh he's so dreamy!" While most of the dialogue is internal (par for a first-person narrative), our Hunger Games Heroine actually has conversations and interaction with her love interests. Amazingly, she does not quake and tremor or feel her knees grow weak when she feels their eyes upon her. Rather, she looks them in the face and treats with them as an equal. Bella Swan acts exactly like a self-centered idiot teen girl, ignoring all other factors (including the fact that Edward is a GIANT douchebag) to try and make the fairlytale work with the first guy she's ever been with. Elena Gilbert acts exactly like a self-centered idiot teen girl ignoring all other factors to pursue her own eternal fairytale, since at 17 and confronted with All This, she knows exactly what she wants. (Except for quite WHO it is she wants. Go figure.) In contrast, Katniss Everdeen does have this little situation of multiple suitors where she can't decide, but she hates the drama involved, and really can't deal with it right now anyway. She kinda has some other important shit going on, what with feeding and protecting her family, a pesky national revolution, and saving her own sweet ass to get to a point where whatever choice she makes actually matters

Also unlike pretty much every other popular tweeny heroine, Everdeen is a legitimate badass. Bella's appeal to Edward is that she smells nice. I'm not sure what Elena really has going for her that ropes in these guys who should know better (my theory involves beer-flavored nipples), but God knows what it might be. Everdeen has confidence, competence, and will. Actual skills that she uses to save her own life, and the lives of others. If you're a Heinlein fan, Katniss Everdeen and Friday Baldwin are nearly the same character, just at different ages and in different worlds. Her appearance has pretty much nothing to do with her love life, and not just because she spends substantial portions of the book dirty, starving, burned (by acid or by fire), bleeding, and/or generally beat to hell. She's gorgeous because she fights through all that shit, fights well, and takes shit from nobody along the way.

She is in no way a princess, and her character has points that are directly shocking (like where she relates in all seriousness her regrets about her failure to drown her sister's cat). But interestingly, the hardness of Katniss' character does not make her inhuman. Rather, her hardness comes across as the necessary solution to the world she inhabits, which is much MUCH harder than you'd ever expect to see in a tweeny bestseller.

The overwhelming sentiment you'll get from these stories is that these books are fucking DARK. A dystopian police state. Serfdom and enslavement. Starvation. Graphic death in more or less literal gladiator games. (Google 'Minotaur myth.') Murder. The story the presentation are NOT cheerful. They're downright macabre. And unlike pretty much every fantasy fiction adventure work ever written (very few exceptions, but they do exist), the Hunger Games series gets one thing absolutely right: people who spend any appreciable time in combat end up batshit, irrespective of whether they're among the killing or the dying. The Hunger Games' central characters - including Katniss, all her strength and capability notwithstanding - do in fact go insane over the course of the series, from constant exposure to the gladiator games they're forced to play.  Under constant fear, stress, and worry over their lives and the lives of their loved ones, they get bent, or outright break.

Stark though it is, I find this a hugely refreshing change from fiction's usual treatment of death and dying, particularly among the Hunger Games' young-adult target demographic. We're talking about the generation raised on action movies that put "First Blood" to shame, as well as graphic video games, like Grand Theft Auto. (That's the one where you steal cars, kill people, and enjoy regular blow-jobs from hookers.) These are things kids have been raised on recently. Of course, GTA - as the halcyon example - was never intended for exposure to anyone underage, especially when it was first released way back in 1997. But at least one member of everyone's social group had (or has) an older brother, inattentive parents, or both. You remember him. Hell, sometimes the only reason we tolerated that kid at all was BECAUSE older siblings or absentee parents granted him access to shit like Grand Theft Auto. Result: glorification of violence and/or killing. While I don't subscribe at all to the video-games-lead-to violence school of thought, it's tough to argue that gore is glorified to unhealthy levels these days, and it's not unreasonable to believe that such things may tend to desensitize people to violence and the actual effect of violence on the human psyche. (Google 'On Killing,' by Dave Grossman.)

Hunger Games, I have no doubt, draws at least some of its success from the suspense angle intrinsic to life and death human combat. The effects of such things on Katniss is a central part of her development. But she's a participant against her will, and the violence is in no way glorified. Quite the contrary: we see lots of 'good guys' - central actors and likable characters - shuffling off the mortal coil, occasionally in slow, painful fashion. All in all, I suspect that Hunger Games presents its young-adult readers with something they've never really experienced in fiction before: a passable take on watching friends and family members being killed. It's quite well done, and very much NOT what you'd expect to find in the 'young adult' section.

All in all, I liked the stories a great deal, especially the portrayal of a female lead as a capable, rational victim of circumstance, rather than a swooning princess helpless beneath circumstance. The stark hardness of the characters and the world is unsettling, but the exact opposite of glorification.

If I ever have daughters, they will be openly and repeatedly forbidden to read the Hunger Games until they're at least 16.

That's the best way I can think of to guarantee that they'll read it as soon as they can sound out the bigger words.

Time For Atlas To Shrug It Off

About five minutes after somebody first suggested the idea of systematic governmental welfare programs, detractors started hypothesizing about the catastrophic end-game of such programs in any real republican system. If the electorate is given entitlements beyond the specifically enumerated benefits of "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness," where do such entitlements end? What's to stop voters from granting themselves (either directly, or through proxy granted to elected officials) ever larger benefits, the cost of which must be bourne by the taxpaying public? Why bother to work for a living, when you can simply vote for a system which requires others (who do work) to provide you with whatever you need?

Of course, the response of the Left to such a suggestion has been to scoff. Come on, dude. Get real. Look how much wealth there is in our society. We just need a small portion of that to guarantee a stable life for everyone. We're not talking about providing a free ride to everyone; we're just going to help out those who really need a little bit of help. A society where those on welfare can literally out-vote and out-spend the remaining public? No way. Never going to happen.

Well, it's happened.

Our good friends over in Greece are in the process of finding themselves a new government. The process has been underway for quite a while, and shows no clear signs of resolving. What's happened is that over the last fifty years or so, Greece has trended socialistic to the point that a substantial portion of their economy is funded by taxes, most notably the pension plans for large blocs of voters. You know: the money that people depend on for food, shelter, and so forth. Over time, the voters (again, either directly or through proxy) have awarded themselves a whole lot of relatively cushy lifestyles, the costs of which must necessarily be satisfied by whatever portion of the country can be gotten to pay taxes. This was not a problem when economic times were booming, especially the way things boomed in the 80s and 90s. Plenty of money to fund those programs (and buy those votes), and while such spending would not be sustainable into perpetuity, by then somebody else would be in office. Let them find a solution. So long as they don't touch the pension programs for retired political officers (and they won't; they're relying on that too), who gives a damn.

Then we broke our global credit system.

At this point, there's no longer enough money in the Greek tax system to pay for all of the things that the Greek government has promised to its voters. It's not close. Actually, it hasn't been close for quite a while. Greece got by for longer than anyone suspected by cooking the books, incurring debt, and deficit spending, but they appear to have drained that well. Those fucking tightwads in Berlin are refusing to put in one little extra hour of work every day for the rest of their lives to fund pensions for early retirement of Greek citizens.  They're refusing to shell out for police, fire, and politician salaries in Athens. At this current juncutre, the Greek government has to find ways to deal with all of the obligations it's taken on to its people, and also find a way to deal with all of the billions that it already owes to others; debt incurred in sustaining benefits for as long as it did. Of course, the politicians who are making these efforts expect to be well paid as well, both during their terms in office, and into perpetuity after their terms end.

Some efforts have already been made, which might actually work, given a decade or so. Underfunded, unable to pay for basic civil services (much less the comforts promised to its people), and no longer able to get anyone else to agree to pay for those things, Greece agreed to a stark set of economic adjustments, in an attempt to get its national economics out of the red. In return for adopting such austerity measures, the rest of Europe (mostly Germany) agreed to chip in to keep the Greek economy afloat during the time it took to get healthy. It was a shitty solution for everyone, but it kelp Greece solvent, and kept Greece - a member of the euro-zone - from totally fucking over the currency market of the whole continent. It might even have worked, at least well enough to keep us all chugging along until the threat of economic chaos across a dozen nations could be defused.

Alas, it doesn't look like it's going to work out that way, since this ended up being an election year in and around Athens. The voters - handed the dirty end of the austerity stick - are pulling their support from politicians who brokered the austerity deals. An ever-increasing mob is rallying behind political parties which overtly support the recanting of those agreements. (As above, those agreements are the only reason the rest of Europe is eating a loss to keep Greece afloat.)  All Greek political parties are pluralities, and none of them seem able to forge a coalition sufficient to take charge under the Greek republican model. The country is seeing unemployment at about 20%, suicides are up 40% this year, high taxes and tougher times are projected. Oh, and the public suffering from all this will go to the polls on June 17 to take another run at electing a government.

Into the current social climate, throw two opposing political parties. One group of politicians - the ones in support of austerity - more or less sell the position that "yeah, we need everyone to take several big bites of this shit sandwich, so we can keep our current government and economic system." The other group of politicians are saying "Fuck austerity. Fuck the politicians. Fuck our national debt. Fuck the rest of Europe. Vote for us, and we'll abandon this austerity thing and get things back to the way they were." Whether or not either party is capable of coming through on their promises matters even less there than it does here in the U.S. Care to wager on who's going to ultimately prevail in Greek politics?

My money (ha ha) says that the Greek voters elect leaders who will scrap the austerity deals. This will ultimately result in all loans to and from Greece being devalued. Down to zero. Nobody in any financial market will give any credit to an instrument backed by a guarantee of payment from Greece, and all outstanding obligations to Greece will be "money down a rathole" investments, and - where possible - cancelled. Lots has been said about how this will effect global economic markets. Suffice to say that it will not be fun. Governments and banks around the world will replace the "Value owed by Greece" figure with a big ZERO. Books will no longer balance, and there will be much chaos and gnashing of teeth. Not a whole lot to do to stave this off, or to prepare. But since it's the credit system that's at risk, might be a good idea to have a wad of cash on hand. (Dollars. Not Euros.)

Inside Greece, the abandonment of austerity deals will mean the death of most pension and entitlement programs (which have no funding absent the deals), but those programs aren't working so well anyway. At this point, its not like the voters have a whole lot more to lose.

Personally, I don't see any way out of this except for a Greek national revolution, either overt or implied, with a critical and necessary step for recovery being acknowledgement of bankruptcy, and abandonment of some or all prior financial obligations. The Greek government cannot sustain its debts, and cannot meet its obligations. The Greek government has nobody left to fuck over except the Greek citizenry, who are clearly not on board with that game governmental game plan of austerity measures and reneging on prior promises. The Greek people are not going to take that, just so they can keep their current government. All in all: time for a new Greek government. Barring the appearance of some politician  who will get everyone on the same page and sell austerity by sheer force of charisma (Satan?), the Greek political/economic system is either going to fall apart completely, or be controlled by a leadership that tears it apart intentionally.

So yeah. Turns out that some of those political theorists were right. Given opportunity to vote themselves more benefit and entitlement than their economy can sustain, people will vote themselves more benefit and entitlement than their economy can sustain.

For Sale: YOU.

For-Profit business operate because people will pay them money for something that they can provide. So ask yourself: when a company provides you something for free, how do they continue to turn a profit? The answer is pretty simple: when a company's business is based on something they give you for free, the product that they are actually selling is YOU.

There must necessarily be a thrid-party to that business model to provide the funding that makes possible the services rendered to you "for free," and that third-party rationally expects to get something out of it. Most cot-coms over the course of dot-com-dom have been based on this sort of business model, where online services are provided to the public at little or no cost, and where commerce depends on income from a third party - almost always described as "advertisers." Since most dot-coms have ended up as investment disasters, one can safely assume that, almost always, this business model sucks. The fact of the matter is that it's tough to provide the clients (meaning: the ones who pay money to the service provider, IN NO WAY TO BE CONFUSED WITH YOU) which a role in the process that the clients are willing to shell out long-term big-bucks to enjoy.

 This is not to say that it can't be done. Take the halcyon (and in many way, the only) great success story among the dot-coms, Google. Their business model provides its clients (again, this does not mean you) with something they will pay shit-bags for. To put it concisely, Google has become a 21st century oracle. The single greatest middle-management enterprise in the digital age. It's a fixer. Comes at you with a big smile, steers you towards whatever it is that you're looking for, all for free. Thanks anyway man, but you don't need to tip for the service; it's just what I do.

 Google makes billions on kick-backs from the businesses it directs you towards.

 I know what you're thinking, but you're wrong. Google is in NO WAY like a cabbie who collects a Ben from the strip-club door-man for every car-load of asian businessmen. Nope. All the payments from the clients to Google are legitimate business transactions, drawn from dedicated "advertising" budgets, and are fully acknowledged and taxed.

 But the end result is the same: money changes hands when the service provider (Google) steers business (you) towards the client (not you). Those client pay so Google will send you their way. Any they pay a lot, because if Google is not directing the product (you) towards them, its directing the product to the competition. When a Google user types in "best pickup," how much would GM pay for the top spot on the list generated in response? How about Ford. Let the bidding begin.

 Keeping this in mind, consider that everyone’s good friends at Facebook just made a shitbag of money. Facebook (hereinafter ‘FB’) went public in a big way, marking a big step along the way to world-domination. Of course, a lot of the commentary that surrounded the IPO involved either the company’s founder, or were about FB's models for profitability. Articles, almost without fail, comment on Mark Zuckerberg’s propensities for hoodies, and compare FB’s IPO with that of Google. Sometimes in the same paragraph. As for the hoodie thing, I don’t see why it gets so much play. Hell of a lot less pretentious (and a hell of a lot more comfortable) than a black turtleneck. Add in that most of Zuckerberg’s detractors – all the way back to the dipshit twins from Harvard – were dress-shirt and khakis types. If you were set up so that you needed NOTHING from ANYBODY, tell me you wouldn’t be dressing comfortably. As a guy who has to wear suits – even occasionally – let me assure you that they fucking suck.

Turning to actual business models for Facebook, there’s the never-ending comparison to Google. Most dot-coms (meaning: pretty much everybody except Google) boomed at the IPO, and then crashed pretty sharply. As middle-managers almost by definition, most dot-coms don’t produce anything except some form of service (mostly providing access to you for a paying client). Add in that the services they provide are typically driven by discretionary trendiness, and almost always lack the stability of a long term business plan. Take Zynga, for example. Raise your hand if you really thought that Zynga games was going to fly as a long term business entity, much less as a decent investment? Their only customers are the grass-root public, and each transaction nets them a grand-total of a few bucks. More importantly, their business model is utterly dependent on two things: the tastes of the fickle public, and that publics’ supply of disposable income. If either or both wane, business plummets.

 With such an unsteady business model, there’s almost never any guarantee of long-term income. The company can almost never afford to pay out a decent dividend when they can’t even project sales for the following quarter, much less the following fiscal year. At that point, the only way the stocks of those companies have any attractiveness to major investors (meaning: mutual funds and banking houses that buy thousands of shares at a time) is if the stock has some value as a commodity in and of itself. This value as a commodity is why dot-com IPOs have an initial boom. It's trendy, and people want to own it because its cool, regardless of whether it's worth anything.

But eventually, the day-traders get over how shiny and cutting-edge the business’ name is. Dropping the fact of their ownership of that stock stops impressing people at the wine-and-cheese mixers. At that point, even the day-traders realize what the major investors knew from the get go: no matter how much they personally love whatever service the dot-com provides, their portfolios are better served by investing in companies that do more than push ones and zeroes.

 Facebook has followed this trend, opening at about 38, and quickly loosing substantial value. It's currently at about 31, and people who know what they're talking about say that it should stabilize somewhere around that price. Alas, it turns out that Facebook is only worth about $80-billion, rather than $100-billion.

 The big question is what the future holds for FB. The financial success of FB depends on FB allowing paying third-parties to participate in your interaction with your friends, in such a way that the third-parties will pay for the participation. The question is: is Facebook going to develop a business model to sell its product (you and your friends) to paying clients. Unlike Google, it can't provide its clients (still once again: not you) with an ongoing stream of product (you). FB is simply not in the business of facilitating commerce, through which it might win some sort of financial kick-back. Facebook provides - at best - a way for their clients (not you) to either chime in or to listen in on your various (mostly social) FB endeavors.

Under current advertising models and trends, FB can't prove a form of interaction that people will pay a whole lot for.  Banner ads, for example, generate almost no commerce, and so do not garner FB substantial income. If FB started bombarding users (even moreso than currently) with those sorts of ads, users would start to sour. Any more direct involvement in your interactions with your friends would probably just outrage people.

"Hi, this is Jeff at Hyundai USA. I couldn't help but overhear your online chat session with your sister, when you mentioned that you needed a new car. Have you considered the new Ultima? It has the best warranty in the business, you know."

NO FUCKING WAY.

Absent a decent profit stream from banners and other foot-note advertising, and absent a viable model of more effective advertising to push, FB will have to look into other ways to profit.  In the end, businesses are not going to shell-out big bucks for the ability to stand in the online crowd and hold up signs while you post about the amazing cheeseburger you just had (#killedit!).

This leads to the possibility of selling a product alternative to the ability to chime in. If clients won't pay for the ability to CHIME in, maybe they'll pay for the ability to LISTEN in. Facebook knows every bit of information you've posted on it. It knows every bit of information you've EVER posted on it. How much do you think that information might be worth, to someone, somewhere?

 But don't worry. I'm sure FB won't get greedy. Those are personal details. Private, and FB knows it. I don't think anyone will object to Facebook selling information on broad demographic, and that sort of over-arching analysis. Tracking of trends and fads, market analysis, but certainly not access to and analysis of individual persons. Or races. Or political groups. Facebook will keep those details sacred. Certainly, Mark Zuckerberg would NEVER consider the value that might be realized by selling access to all the things we put up on his servers. Never. He's way too nice a guy to ever do anything like that.

Caught Up In a Vice

I read an article today preaching the dangers that alcohol poses to human health on a global scale, which suggested that the World Health Organization consider issuing some sort of mandate attempting to reign in the problem. According to the article, American alcohol consumption is relatively mild at an average 9.4 liters of ethyl alcohol per year (about two bottles of wine a week). However, in places like Moldova, the average is twice that, and people - beginning at age 16 - consume on average the equivalent of a bottle of wine every other day. Factoring in all causes of death that pass a laugh-test connection with alcohol consumption (including, e.g., cardio-vascular diseases, auto accidents, violence), the article opines that alcohol causes more deaths and represents a greater threat than any other factor to the human condition, including obesity and cigarettes. The kicker on the article is the suggestion that there should be an international convention on alcohol regulation, under which the problem can be addressed.

I'm sure you're not surprised to find that I think it's all a bunch of horseshit.

Humanity has been getting drunk since before the dawn of recorded time. Although the earliest chemically-confirmed beer traces (from Iran) are only about 3,300 years old, safe to say that man was drinking the sauce long before then. The consensus oldest surviving work of literature ever discovered is the Epic of Gilgamesh, circa 2100 BC. A central plot element is King Gilgamesh having to deal with Enkidu, who's causing problems for the good people of Uruk because - among other reasons - he's hammered. The oldest human residential site discovery by archaeologists is Jericho, near the West Bank, which dates back almost to the Holocene era, or about 11,000 years. Evidence suggests that the residents of Jericho were drinking beer at least 6,000 years ago. Some of the earliest non-literary written materials we've discovered include beer recipes and beer trade records. Some of the earliest religous records we've discovered, a Sumarian poem honoring the goddess Ninkasi, contains a beer recipe.

All in all, safe to say that man started brewing the brew about twenty minutes after he figured out how to use a container to store liquids. And we've been using containers to store liquids for a long time. Makes sense too: don't really need to find (or - ultimately - build) containers to store WATER. Why bother. That shit is everywhere. Build your hut by a river and you've got an endless supply. Booze, on the other hand, is worth holding on to.

This trend his persisted through the ages. Ever wonder why the cultivation of grains is so widespread in the world? Beans are just as nutritional and at least as easy to grow. Beans are also much MUCH easier to get from the field to the table, since the hulling process - google it - is relatively easy for beans, and much more difficult for grains. But fermenting grains gets you beer. Fermenting beans just gets you soy sauce or miso. Think it's coincidence that people have always leaned towards grains?

Most people don't realize that when Dr. Louis Pasteur was looking for a way to keep liquid foods from spoiling (pasteurization), he wasn't looking for a way to keep MILK fresh. Incidentally, his method of keeping beer fresh by heating it to kill the bacteria - perfected by Pasteur in 1862 - was being used in simpler form by the Chinese to keep wine fresh as early as the 12th Century, and had spread to Japan by at least as early as the 16th Century. Moving forward through history, see if you can separate the development of industrial refrigeration from alcohol production. 'Cuz you can't. Ideas to keep things cold were certainly there, but it was the need to make and distribute booze that got the ideas off the drawing boards.

People can (and will) talk endlessly about divinity and about angels meeting apes. But for my money, the desire for and act of intoxication is the second-most significant driving force in human social, economic, and scientific development, behind only armed conflict. And this extends far beyond alcohol, of course. Ever heard of the pharmaceutical company Merck? It spent 160 years as an uremarkable family-owned store-front pharmacy in Darmstad before they isolated morphine and started industrial production in 1827. They've done some other things since then. How about the beverage company Coca-Cola? Early (1886) recipes really had only three primary ingredients: water, cocaine, and caffeine. They did okay as a business. On the whole, does this trend really seem like something that you're going to have any success in halting?

Any attempt to reign in man's desire for and act of intoxication with booze is destined for failure or disaster. It's not going to work, except to help build empires for certain families (specifically including those with names like 'Kennedy' and 'Roosevelt.') If it does work, it just means that people are going to turn to even less healthy methods to meet the desire for and act of intoxication. Islam bans intoxication from fermented products. Think it's a coincidence that Muslim regions have been the world capital of opium production since the 7th Century, including (much later) recreational use? (The Koran, by the way, was developed and written from about 611 to 632.)

Of course, there is no cure for stupid, and no lack for either recycling of old ideas, or for crusaders wanting to save us all from ourselves. But how about if we try to focus on scaling back things we have a prayer on? Alcohol use (which somebody, somewhere will inevitably describe as ABuse, regardless of how moderate it might be) is part of the human condition. It predates metalworking ferchrissake, and is a lot more fun for the user. There's nothing the WHO might say or do that's gonna make even a little bit of difference.

The Election Year

I think it's awesome that American culture generates a billion dollars of commerce every four years, solely to use mass media to inform and educate the public about the merits of political candidates. Wonderful that we care so much about full disclosure and analysis of our prospective leaders that we go to the lengths we do. Seriously, try to get away from the political storm, even for a day, and even this early in the election year, and see if you make it. By the time November rolls around, we're going to know absolutely every gritty detail about the history and politics of the Republican candidate. Isn't our system great?

Ironically - and I think this is a point worth seriously considering - we might at that time know even less about Barack Obama than we think we know now. That seems like it might suggest something important, doesn't it?

Whatever. Political commercial season sucks, since no political candidate yet - despite cumulative millions spent on devising campaign strategies - has figured out how to make a decent political campaign commercial. (Which also seems like it might suggest something, eh?) Nothing like months of 30-second spots, ten times a day, of being told ugly details of someone you're never going to meet, and who your vote doesn't get elected anyway. (Google 'electoral college.') But its IMPORTANT that you listen to them as they talk about 'the issues.' Yay, us!

For what it's worth, and (hopefully) resolving my civic analytical duties regarding who gets elected, and why: Hythloday Today officially extends endorsement to... Mitt Romney.

Honestly, my political views - particularly regarding social services - are aligned substantially further to the right than his. But under the current political climate, there is no way that any of the further-right candidates would defeat Obama in November. I'm not a Gingrich fan to start with, but you only need to poke around a little before you realize the field day that the news media will have with him as an opponent to Obama. All in all, he's a worse candidate than McCain was, because at least you could be confident who McCain was really representing, and predict which way he would jump. Newt, not so much. Romney, in contrast, is going to get grilled on a lot of issues (read: the Mormon thing), but I think he'll hold up better, based on charisma, personal success record, and the ability to project strength and authority. Newt always comes across to me as slightly apologetic, which is not going to work.

And the bottom line is that Romney is the furthest to the left of the candidates from the right, which makes him able to court the largest segment of the vote. Those ads you hear about how Obama is praying that Newt wins the Republican nomination? They got a point. If Newt wins the nomination, Barack will be turning cartwheels in the hallways, because the absolute truth is that Barack will garner a hell of a lot more of that middle-ground split than Newt can possibly hope for.

Newt cannot beat Obama. It really is that simple.

Besides which, the new wave of social conservative theory really is the best reasonable hope for the United States right now. Any political science sophomore can tell you about the progression of the right towards the left over time. At this point, I honestly don't think Barack gives a shit what changes get made to Obamacare. He managed to move our system SUBSTANTIALLY to the left. As a political scientist, he also knows that it's almost impossible for the right to get that ground back. Things will be massaged, policies and programs might be axed, but some of it is going to persist forever. The United States has passed national healthcare. He gets to claim that legacy. That's been the steady-left shift that's been going on since 1776.

We don't have a lot of history to use as an analytic sample for the shift from republicanism to democracy (and I'm talking now about the literal political systems, not about the American parties, although I suppose it applies to them as well). But we got thousands of years about the broader shift towards liberalism, including the concurrent grown of socialist policies. Despotisms, to organized monarchies, to republics, and the first rumblings of true democracy; got libraries filled with that shit. And just looking at generalities, looks like a big part of the survival of nations comes from how those in control (typically the right; being in control is why they're conservative) manage that trend toward to left. Historically speaking, either the system changes to allow liberization to happen slowly and progressively (as has happened in the United States for over 200 years), or else you get sudden increasinly violent fits, fires, and riots when the pressure builds, and it happens suddenly. Personally, I think the best thing for us to do is to keep the progression going as smoothly as possible.

Along those lines, and for mostly economic reasons, the best thing for the United States right now is a centrist President. Somebody who can at least get everyone at the table to address the issues, and agree that EVERYBODY is going to need to give ALOT before acceptable solutions are reached. Get everyone on the same page, so even if the system does absolutely suck, and even if everybody knows you're completely full of shit, at least people know what the system is and what it's going to be. Get rid of the political uncertainty and start agreeing on what we both know the end result is going to be, so commerce can start happening with confidence again.

We're already totally fucked on the budget thing. Really: raise your hand if you ever honestly and realistically believed that the United States will EVER pass a balanced budget. Have you looked around lately? Are we really that far removed from 'Idiocracy' these days? We're not going to tighten our belts now, preemptively. We're going to put it if off until sometime later when we might finally be left with no other choice, no one else to blame, and no one else to rob. The best we can really hope for right now is to stop using up all the other choices, scapegoats, and victims so quickly. Let's keep ourselves a little time to find new choices, scapegoats, and other victims, like we always have in the past.

The United States government will continue to run in the red. But that's life. Lets acknowledge that our politics are going to run at a loss, and do what we can to get our ECONOMY strong enough for the excesses of our government be manageable. If we get politics stable, and get commerce running smoothly, it will be able to keep the flow going. Some bubbles will burst here and there (same as always), but hopefully not so seriously nor so frequently as to crash the system, and we will all keep whistling along until the (already worthless) dollar can be phased out for something else. All we need is to find that something else; something that we can bring ourselves to believe is more valuable. Which is actually a pretty tall order.

In the meantime, lets keep the system under control, limit the wars and the riots to something that can be contained, and we'll all just keep on keeping on, at least (hopefully) for the duration of my lifetime. By then, I'll have prepared my children to prosper in the course of their lifetimes, just like my parents taught me what I needed to proper in this one.

Mitt seems like the right guy to keep things under control for the next four years, while we all do the best we can and wait to see what happens next.

Survival of the Fattest

CB and I were talking about the insurance industry the other day, and she raised the point that nobody who's in any sort of sales or customer-service industry today has the slightest clue what's is like to actually have to work hard to get results. Really. There have been hiccups here and there, but the American economy has been booming for decades. People - even those who are conveniently labeled 'low income,' either for political or for other purposes - generally have no problems making ends meet, and squeezing substantial luxury into those ends.

This is not to say that there are no people in this country who cannot make ends meet, and who literally go hungry because there is no money left at the end of the month for food. Those people do exist, and in increasing numbers. But I honestly believe that's a fairly recent development. Up until very recently, you had to go WAY down to a very small percentage of the populace before you got to a demographic too broke to indulge in some level of luxury consumerism. Until recently 'poor' meant that someone's 40" TV was a projection model rather than a flat-screen, that they only had basic cable, and had to suffer through the inconvenience of a single car shared by the whole family. Tough times indeed.

Living on the recently-ended unending prosperity of unlimited credit limits, nobody really had to work to sell much of anything, including luxury goods. Nobody had to go out and court the public in any involved way to get goods to move. All anyone really had to do was make the goods or services available, and find a way to inform the public that they were available. Work hard to SELL something? Why bother? If Douchebag Consumer A, here before you at this moment, is unwilling to swipe his card to take a (whatever) home, no problem. Douchebag Consumer B, who will walk in the doors momentarily, won't hesitate for a second before adding a token additional amount to his already crushing credit burden, so he can take a (whatever) home. Regardless of whether he actually needs it, and sometimes regardless of whether he actually wants it, there's a good chance that he'd buy it, just because it's there, and with no need for any more of a sales pitch than putting on the shelf in front of him. That's how fat our economy was. To a large degree, it still is.

Take the pornography industry, for example. Talk about a discretionary expense; it's pure hedonism. If ever there was a economic niche that people would cut from their budgets, THIS IS IT. Yet even today it's a multi-billion dollar a year industry. According to some statistics, over $3,000 is spent on porn EVERY SECOND. This, coupled with other obvious points, and you really have to wonder. Like the fact that over 50% of Americans are technically obese, and the fact that people of hypothetically 'limited means' will pay $40 a month for a gym membership they use once a week. Mebbe this country might actually benefit from some LEGITIMATE lean times - not to be confused with the present - where we might be compelled to lose a few pounds, cut a few luxuries, and actually earn the money we spend as a society, rather than just piling up debt. While a slight necking down of NINJA and similar credit lines has supported more and more of that last point occurring, neither of the subsequent two points seem to be gaining any traction. There is no impetus for anyone to be lean and efficient to be successful, a situation which continues to persist.

With the general availability of credit, and with the government's ever increasing support of Robin Hood economics, I don't see how anything is going to change, and certainly not until there is at least one more substantial credit-market crash. We are so used to rampant consumerism, and so enabled to overspend by creditors (even today), that we as a culture are going to spend until we literally can spend no more. Seriously, the dollars in your bank account are of value only because every other currency on earth sucks even worse than dollars do. Every single asset underlying the value of dollars is horrendously over-extended. Strangely, the best thing to do in times like this is to actually have dollars on hand (cash). Let me know if you want to hear the reasoning.

I'm not sure I have any real point to offer from all this; the real reason I got launched onto this train of thought was from dealing with idiotic sales people and poor customer service habits that about here in Vegas. I'm sure its worse elsewhere, so I'm sure you have it locally too. Wouldn't it be nice if people actually treated you like they NEEDED your money and your business, instead of treating you like they're doing you a favor by deigning to accept your money and your business?

My Man-Crush on Christopher Nolan

I just watched Inception for about the 20th time. I suspect that it's going to become one of those movies that, when I see it's on, I can't help leaving the TV on that station to let it play out. Short list of movies that are like that. Thomas Crown Affair. Fight Club. How to Train Your Dragon. Jaws. Avatar. A few others. All of them masterpieces, and each in their own way. The only thing all of them have in common is, interestingly, great and distinctive musical scores.

What I love about Inception is the depth. The clear thought that was put into every angle, every character. I blogged what is now years ago about American culture, portrayed through movies, using Fight Club as the halcyon example of how action drama can be elevated to art, not just through violence, explosions, and camera tricks, but through depth and nuance that are sometimes hard to see. Fight Club has enough depth that a college-level literature course could spend a month on it. Inception has more. Even having had a few glasses of wine, I don't think I can adequately convey just how highly I think of these movies.

In any rate, Inception director Chris Nolan will be releasing another Batman movie in the not-terribly-distant future (July, 2012). Fairly little has been released about the plot and storyline. Christian Bale will be back as Bruce/Wayne Batman, and it will feature both major and obscure villains from Batman mythology: Selena Kyle (catwoman, played by Anne Hathaway) and Bane (played by Tom Hardy). Quite a lot of Nolan veterans in the cast, besides Bale and Hardy, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Marion Cotillard. (Could be the booze, but I find myself contemplating Ellen Page in a Batgirl costume. Mebbe seen Whip It too many times. I have a thing for petite willful women, and Page would kick the hell out of Alicia Silverstone's air-headed version.) All in all, the only sour note so far has been that Nolan plans the movie as a vehicle to conclude his take on Batman.

While I have no doubt whatsoever that Nolan will continue to make excellent films - with a few inevitable side-steps along the way - I'm interested to see how he plans to tie a bow around his Batman universe. I expect it to be outstanding, hopefully enough to satisfy Batfans for the next 10 years or so. Nolan abandoning the franchise unfortunately means that Warner Brothers/DC will hire some over-hyped douchebag to take another run at directing the character for however long the public will buy tickets; whoever happens to be the current incarnation of Joel Schumacher, circa 1995. Len Wiseman is probably near the top of the list. Or somebody from his stable, like Markus Nispel. Fair to say that one or (if we're very lucky) two worthy follow-ups are likely, inevitably followed by a steaming pile of dog-shit that will bury further attempts at comic-book movies for a decade. One-liners and chase-scenes will be offered as substitutes for dialog and drama, with the usual results. Gotta love Hollywood, eh?

But we will get one more Nolan rendition of Batman. So. My prediction: the Nolan Batman storyline will conclude with some great pulling-the-wool-over-the-eyes. Some great deception or obfuscation, which comes at great cost to a central character, but which frees them at the same time. All of Nolan's films highlight the concept that ignorance is bliss, which must sometimes be inflicted on others. The stories convey that reality is subjective. They involve situations where creating (or adopting) the reality that is required involves sacrificing a reality that most people would call "real." Leonard Shelby found his happiness by choosing to ignore and leave behind the reality he has been seeking for years. Likewise, Dominic Cobb found happiness when (by implication) he stopped caring whether or not his reality was real in the grander sense (the significance of the still-spinning top is not that it's still spinning, but rather that Cobb is no longer watching to see if it topples). In The Dark Knight, the reality of Harvey Dent's end was intentionally concealed, at great cost to Our Hero. Both Insomnia and The Prestige likewise have pervasive themes of obfuscation and subjective interpretation of "truth" and "reality." Nolan LOVES the emotional impact of a character transcending reality, by disregarding it. The Dark Knight Rises will be the same.

In interviews, Nolan has asserted that - unlike in comics, where storylines necessarily proceed into perpetuity - movie franchises must have some reasonable closure. I like to think if anyone can wrap up Batman with a clever, impossible to follow twist (which leaves Batman alive, as there must ALWAYS be a Batman), Nolan is the man for the job. Ideally, Nolan will create a storyline that will be difficult enough to follow-up on that the inevitable next director will decide to approach the character from a totally different angle. But alas, the sort of dipshits who will line up for the Batman director job in Nolan's wake are not the type to try to do something original.

But hey, it's about time for us to move past superheroes anyway, since we've pretty much used that up. Seriously, if we're resorting to Thor and Captain America, what's next? Aquaman? Seems we've also been through wizards and dragons, pirates, vampires, zombies, slasher horror remakes, and space drama all within the last decade. Could be mistaken, but its been over a decade since The Matrix, so I believe we're due for some man-against-the-world martial arts action flicks.

The TwiHards

I do occasionally consider a change of career. Lately, I've been spending some time thinking about becoming a telephone psychic, since I can read a tarot deck, and since I learned that some of them charge $600 per hour. No, that's not a miss-print. There are people in the world who make $10 PER MINUTE to shuffle cards and talk on the telephone. I'm thinking maybe that could be me. Could even work out pretty well: I tend to come across pretty well on the phone, when people can't see me rolling my eyes, nor see the mocking expression on my face. This seems important, since those would be common occurrences when addressing people who accept and rely on advice from a deck of cards in the making of decisions. I think that career could be a real possibility.

Of course, I've always been candid about my intended fall-back career: writing B-movie scripts and trashy romance novels. This is the excuse that I offer for having recently picked up and read CB's copies of 'Twilight,' and the following works. Of course, I use 'works' in the loosest possible sense of the term.

My overwhelming response is to wonder at the success of that series of books. I have considered that the average high schooler can barely read, and that their emotional state renders most of them clinical sociopaths from the ages of 14 to 22 (assuming they outgrow it at all), but still. Endless drivel about how Bella simply looks at Edward, and has to take a second or two before she remembers how to breath? How she can't imagine life without him? Endless prattling about how gorgeous he is and how she really can't believe that he's into her? How of course she forgives him for everything he does, immediately, mostly because she doesn't think she deserves him at all? Really? REALLY? This is the sort of writing that earns the author millions?

I'm not sure why this should surprise me, but it kinda does. Maybe I'm a bit of a snob about my literary tastes( or maybe not), but these books are... awful, actually. I sincerely hope that Steph Meyer is one of those authors who thinks its hilarious that her readers are as devoted as they are.

I suspect that part of the issue is my admitted problems dealing with the teens-to-early-20s demographic as a whole. Hell, even as I was reading the books, it seemed a bit creepy to me that Edward, over 100 years old, was in love with a 17 year old girl. Okay, it was more than just a bit creepy, even (or perhaps, especially) when you consider that the author is Mormon and presumably open-minded about unions spanning generation gaps. I was a bachelor well into my 30s, and - living in Las Vegas - had pretty broad dating opportunities. It really didn't take long at all for me to adopt the firm guideline of a maximum allowable age gap of 6 years or so. Really, what were we going to talk about if I had finished law school before she finished high school?

Along those lines, what exactly is it that Edward and Bella connect over? Really, I'm curious. Reading both the language and between the lines, it seems he puts up with all of the drivel and bullshit that makes up her life as a 17-year old high school girl because she smells good. She puts up with all of his condescension, control-freak tendencies, and general douche-baggery (of which there is plenty), mostly because he's gorgeous. While I'm pretty sure that these sorts of arrangements underlie most if not all high-school relationships, I'm not sure that it's healthy for girls to be willing to commit themselves to such deals for all eternity.

So while all this strikes me as exactly the sort of thing that teenage readers would eat up with a spoon, it still depresses me that this is the sort of thing topping best-seller lists. And all in all, it really shouldn't surprise me that the Team Edward vs. Team Jacob debate really gained as much traction as it did. That's gotta be right up there with Survivor, American Idol, and Seinfeld in terms of contrived drama, with the added benefit of being expressed in small words, nearly all of which are known and/or can be sounded out by the target audience.

While real literary analysis is probably not warranted, I'm not going to be able to help myself from wading into the themes. Naturally, there is the almost-universal zero-to-hero angle you find everywhere from the Chronicles of Narnia to Harry Potter, but - interestingly - I think that's one of the more believable angles of the Twilight books. As someone who moved from a big city to a small town, I have no problem believing that a 5.5 to 6 in a big metropolitan pond suddenly rates an 8.5 to 9 in a small pond.

The close corollary 'I-can't-believe-something-this-good-is-happening-to-me' theme is there, in spades, and seems to be the driving force between the Bella/Edward thing as a whole. Seriously, if you took out the drama and dialogue (again, using terms loosely here) about how they REALLY DO love each other, and remove all exchanges where one is assuring they other they they really do want to be together, what all is left?

Answer: pretty much all that's left is another blatantly stereotypical meme: the internal and external conflicts over the wonderful-backup-boyfriend-she-doesn't-love. Oh, Jacob is so wonderful and always there and always saying the right thing and clearly, horrendously in love with Bella. As he is clearly the 'nice' one among her dateable prospects, he gets exploited mercilessly while she languishes over the gorgeous guy she loves. She doesn't WANT Jacob, she just NEEDS him for the actual emotional parts of a relationship, and to fill her pay-attention-to-me quota while Edward is off being dark and moody. This, of course, is all part of the love held for these books by young readers: pretty much every girl (or indeed, every PERSON) on earth will at some point have a hypothetically dateable prospect who loves them, who they don't love, but from whom they love attention. (Admit it, you've put some quality people in the 'friend zone' while you chased someone just like them, but not them. Doing so does not make you a bad person, it just makes you human.) So of course readers eat it up and keep buying books while Jake loves Bella and Bella loves the attention. And since he says he only wants her company, he's getting a positive quotient out of it, notwithstanding overt emotional leeching.

This, obviously, comports nicely with the teenage female world-view. While I haven't actually been able to finish the series quite yet (I can only take fairly small doses at a time before I start getting dry-heaves) I have no doubt whatsoever about how the Edward vs. Jacob thing is going to end. Spoiler alert: Edward is going to get the girl. But I also have no doubt that - part and parcel to final resolution - Jacob will either find his own true love, or die a monumentally heroic death; those are the only resolutions that a teenage female reader would accept. After all, Jacob has been a dutiful and attentive lap-wolf, and the only unforgivable transgression he ever made - other than being a genuinely nice guy - was that he's not as dreamy as Edward. Sadly, I think a heroic death is more likely, since Jacob finding his own true love would mean him finding someone he likes more than he likes Bella. That concept would be a tricky sell to the audience in a first-person narrative based primarily on the mood swings of the narrator. How to make Bella happy about not just losing the relationship that's actually based on personal interaction, but losing that relationship TO ANOTHER GIRL? Thus, I fear that while Jacob will go out well, he is not long for the world.

Reading these books has provided me with some interesting insights in the cravings of the book-buying public, which I confess I lose sight of occasionally. Clearly, any effort I might make to become any form of main-stream writer is going to require overcoming internal psychological barriers about what is and is not publishable quality, and about what I will and will not be willing to have my name attached to. If nothing else, these factors pretty much guarantee that I will be publishing under a pseudonym.

Responses?

Jobs Loss, and the iHipster

Alas, technology mogul Steve Jobs has shuffled off the mortal coil. Besides (Steve) Jobs, the last decade has also seen the deaths of (Bob) Hope and (Johnny) Cash. With the loss of Hope, Cash, and Jobs, we seem to be descending ever faster into at least the first level of hell with the loss of things everyone loves. Given the rate of loss of the good things, I'm seriously worried that next up will be (Kevin) Bacon.

In any rate, the loss of (Steve) Jobs has of course signaled a plunge in Apple stock, notwithstanding that Jobs left the company's CEO seat in August. But he was still - technically - chairman of the board of the directors. Besides, Apple's stock, and its reputation as a whole, has historically been based on excellent marketing and hipster mystique, so was destined to drop when it's guru did. What I really wonder, like lots of other people, is where the company is going to go from here.

The initial technology developed by Apple (mostly by the Other Steve) was good, but not spectacular. Mostly, it was good because it could do about everything a PC could do, but could be produced out of the Other Steve's garage. Funny that developments in the meantime resulted in the tables being turned: over the years - and notwithstanding that the technology has been proprietary to Apple, while the PC has dozens of manufacturers - the Mac has become substantially more powerful a platform than can be provided by any popular software for the PC, but with the production cost far outstripping the PC, and the added problem that nobody outside Apple is able to provide decent tech support. Other than the computer graphics industry (which genuinely benefits from the increased processing power of Macs over PCs), pretty much everyone who uses a Mac is paying a huge markup for computing power far beyond their requirements. Really, other than playing computer games (which are processing-power intensive, because of the graphic interfaces) the average computer user needs a mp3 player, a word processor, email and internet applications, and possibly basic accounting software. Except for music and online functions, decent versions of all of those programs date back to the Commodore 64. None of those applications, including the music and online functions, really require gigacycles per second of processing power. Amazingly, the public managed to figure this out, and for lots of years (especially after the Windows OS made PCs about as easy to use as Macs), most people bought cheap PCs that could do everything they needed done, rather than expensive Apple/Mac computers that had capabilities they didn't really need.

But Apple and Mac computers re-entered popularity - not through financial or technological advance, but rather through hype and pop culture - when Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997. After helping found the company in the 70s, Jobs left Apple in 1985 to become the controlling shareholding of Lucasfilm's computer-animation spin-off. (Pixar. You may have heard of it. I think I might have mentioned the historic connection between Apple/Mac and the computer animation industry as well.) Getting him back as CEO resulted in substantial changes in Apple's operations, which we still see today. First and foremost, Jobs kicked off some truly spectacular ad campaigns, with a very specific target demographic. Way back when Apple was first successful, one of Jobs' programs was to get kids using computers: Apple donated thousands of Apple IIe desktops to public schools. I grew up in Sunnyvale, California (Google it). My elementary school, my junior high school, and my high school (which is the same high school that the Other Steve graduated from) had an Apple computer in every classroom which was almost never used, as well as a dedicated computer lab, where there were 20-30 more machines. This dates back to 1981, when ANY computer was really expensive, so this was not just a token outlay by Apple. But it turns out that one megacycle and 64 kilobytes of RAM was more than enough to get kids turned on by (or at least interested in) computers. Getting kids involved was explicitly part of Jobs' grand plan, based loosely on the Wayne Gretzky-ism of "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." Jobs is on-record as a huge fan of this quote.

So guess who Steve targeted his marketing towards when he re-took the helm at Apple? While Steve was busy at Pixar from 86 to 97, lots of kids who tinkered with Apple computers in grade school/junior high/high school grew up, got degrees, and started earning disposable income. People who who can't remember a world without Apple computers, finally at an age where they're climbing ladders, and making headway in wresting control of The Establishment away from the older generation(s). Chords were struck by commercials with young, hip, Justin Long - sporting zip-up hoodies and facial scruff with roots in Pearl Jam's 'TEN' tour - poking fun at a stodgy Bill Gates look-alike with pure dialog before a plain white background. Other ads were released on the exact opposite tack: purely technical (and spiffy) blue-screen transition work, set to catchy tunes from indie rockers, without even a voice-over. All of it was - in typical Steve Jobs fashion - innovative, fresh, and beautiful in subtly nuanced simplicity.

People ate it up, and we saw the culmination of Steve Jobs' decades-old efforts. Under the light of the Jobs 2.0 marketing campaign, and out of soil seeded with lavish outlay of the Apple IIe 20 years ago, we saw the birth of Steve Jobs' greatest and least appreciated creation: the iHipster. Apple under Steve Jobs pulled off the Oceans Eleven heist of the business world: it created a product, and then created the market for its own product. Sure, Apple made neat stuff, but lots of companies do that. That's not the remarkable part. The remarkable part was convincing the public that the iHipster was something they wanted to be, and that paying the premium for Apple stuff was TOTALLY worthwhile.

You know the iHipster. Odds are that you might be one. The young, savvy, technology user. The 20-40 year-old upper crust (and/or any pretenders thereto) of the Fight Club generation. Traveling light, fast, and green, thinking outside the box, and trying to break free of stagnation and stereotype. Nothing except Apple products will do for the iHipster. The iHipster thinks nothing of paying the markup for Steve's computers, phones, and other electronic toys. It's Apple. This is THE company of the generation. Started in a garage by a couple guys. Built from nothing except innovation. Non-establishment at its core. Dude, haven't you seen the commercials?

Brilliant.

Alas, alack, the King is dead. While he has already been cannonized in the computer world, Apple is now back were it was in 1985: with a good product and excellent goodwill, but without Jobs. I'm curious to see where things go from here, since the reality is that the iHipster image really has nothing to do with Apple's actual operations, or with any other reality. Indeed, Apple is every bit the corporate monster that the iHipster purports to rail against. Example: have you ever actually read the iTunes user agreement? All 68 pages of it? Suffice to say that if you have ANY worries about Big Brother, Dystopia, or the New World Order, you should be a hell of a lot more concerned about Apple than about the United Nations.

While Apple hesitates not at all to recruit talent with the innovation of its founders, and loves to point out that the company made millionaires out of lots of people, that's fluff. The truth is that Apple treats its employees like absolute dog shit. People are hired, assigned absolutely outrageous quotas, worked until they burn out, then fired based on their failures to meet the original outrageous quota. Oh, and any ideas that employees come up with while working at Apple (even those developed in the employee's own time, say, for example, while tinkering in the garage with their high school buddies) are contractually the property of Apple. Didn't you read that fine print? Their standard employee agreement is shorter than the iTunes contract. A bit.

Apple is currently green(ish), but only after it (and Jobs) was repeatedly and thoroughly lambasted by people who are legitimately green. While I don't doubt that Jobs owned a Prius, that's primarily for press-release purposes. (His usual ride was purportedly a $130,000 Mercedes.) Yes, he was paid ONE DOLLAR per year by Apple. But he also owned 5.4 million shares of Apple (currently trading at $405.80 per share) and another 138 million shares of Disney (currently: $35.39) from their takeover of Pixar, so bragging about earning just a dollar was really just a flaunting of how little he really needed payment at all. Without going into details, suffice to say that Jobs spent at least his share of time acting like a petty asshole (google 'Lisa Brennan-Jobs'), and really only got around to being charitable when he had so much money that he literally couldn't spend it all.

So, given that Apple's business current sales model is based largely on perception and/or illusion, and given that, while there are plenty of businessmen capable of running Apple, none of them look nearly as natural in a black turtleneck, 501s, and running shoes, I wonder what the future holds for Apple. Because while they are currently amazingly successful by any measure, the guy who made it all run is gone. Absent their guru - and setting aside the questionable points of the iReligion - is there someone ready and able to step up and convince the iHipsters that they need to keep paying the Apple markup?

The Road Here

“It was not their irritating assumption of equality that annoyed Nicholai so much as their cultural confusions. The Americans seemed to confuse standard of living with quality of life, equal opportunity with institutionalized mediocrity, bravery with courage, machismo with manhood, liberty with freedom, wordiness with articulation, fun with pleasure - in short, all of the misconceptions common to those who assume that justice implies equality for all, rather than equality for equals.”
― Trevanian, Shibumi

After my recent ramblings about economics, and in the course of several vacations (to say nothing of having 'news' inflicted upon me pretty much every day), I'm thinking more and more about the United States in decline. And we've done it to ourselves.

My summer included such things as trips to Hoover dam. And riding the gondola from the shores of Lake Tahoe up to Heavenly. On various occasions, CB noted how remarkable it was that humanity was capable of building things like that, notwithstanding that most people on the streets cannot be trusted to tie their own shoes. To a large degree, America's creation of great works comes from allowing the best and brightest to succeed, by giving them means and resources to rise above the staid masses of mediocrity.

But somewhere along the way, we've turned into Ayn Rand's America from Atlas Shrugged. At some point, the balance of power changed. Rather than all of us benefiting from the capability and industry of the unleashed best and brightest, we've shackled the best and brightest, barring them from rising above the mediocrity. The Hoover dam represents one of the greatest investments ever made by the United States. Yes, $50 million was a lot of money in the 1930s. But that bad boy has been providing vast amounts of cheap electricity, uninterrupted, for SEVENTY YEARS. It would NEVER be approved for construction in America today. No way. Would never even make it out of committee. Hell, even the gondola at Heavenly; can you imagine the paperwork, environmental impact studies, and Sierra Club lawsuits that would be involved in building a chain of chairlift towers and machinery over several miles, from the heart of a California municipality up to a Nevada ski area on the other side of a mountain ridge? Civil building permits. State approval from both California (where the downtown lodge is in South Lake Tahoe) and Nevada (where the slopes are). Federal approval, since you've got a business enterprise spanning state lines. No way you're going to get all that; the construction costs would be dwarfed by the "campaign contributions" you'd need to make just to get permits and approvals from local, state, and federal politicians.

Doesn't matter that the end result (either Hoover dam or the Heavenly gondola) is a veritable cash cow, with returns vastly exceeding start-up costs. Regulations have been enacted. "Interested" parties need opportunity to voice their concerns and to be appeased. The ambitious and capable who might get the job done will not be allowed to do so, because power has shifted into the hands of the lesser minds, who's primary concern is and has always been the maintenance of the status quo.

Once upon a time, kids in American schools were convincingly told that they could grow up to be anything. And they could. Then. Do well in school. Start a business. Make millions.

These days, our educational system is more interested in pretending that kids of different intellect and capabilities are all the same, and as a result focus their efforts on the lowest common denominator. They're not allowed to leave a child behind. No matter that some such children are disinterested, delinquents, or just simply fucking morons, they MUST be nursed through the system. Sorry; we're going to have to cancel the AP programs. We need that money to triple the size of the remedial programs, which are not going to be able to squeeze blood from stones regardless. The government has So Ordered.

Starting a business used to be the American dream. Be your own boss, and do what you love. For the most part you can forget about that. You need permits. You need to adhere to the regulations. Face the inspections. Hire the requisite demographics, regardless of their qualifications. And even if you do all that, you can forget about making the millions. Our government has taken the overt position that small businesses are a good thing (never mind those issues listed above), but big businesses should bear the costs of public healthcare, welfare, and payment of the national debt, whether they like it or not. The government has So Ordered.

Existing "big businesses" will never face this in any meaningful way. They can simply move their operations overseas and/or exploit tax loopholes crafted especially for them. Your business, as a NKOTB graduating from "small" to "big," is unlikely to have those options. Should your "small" business be successful, and then become a "big" business (in the discretion of a government strapped for cash and free to change its arbitrary classifications pretty much at will), you will be ripe for plundering. At that point, taxes will come crashing down, and make you wonder if maybe you should ELECT to cut back your productivity, to stay a "small" business. Thus, and amazingly, American politics and economics dictates that if you own a business, it's in your interest to KEEP IT SMALL.

All in all, it's probably easier to work for somebody else, and let them deal with that bullshit. Or better yet, you should try to get a government job, which doesn't pay all that well, but from which it is pretty much impossible to be fired, regardless of your productivity/incompetence ratio. (See, e.g., United States Department of Energy.)

In the end, even the best and brightest these days are steered into middle-management jobs in "industries" that produce nothing but paperwork (I'm not passing judgment, since I'm in such an industry), where they expect grand salaries (again, not passing judgment, since I have such expectations). Those less than the best and brightest will have the same expectations (they're just as good as anyone else! Their parents, teachers, and politicians all said so!). Even they can rest assured that - just like in school - the government will make sure that they get the same benefits and treatment as everyone else. The government has So Ordered.

Given this situation, the sad result will be ongoing plundering of the capable by the mediocre. We see incompetent employees kept on, riding the coat-tails of their more capable co-workers, because The System won't let them be canned for their bullshit and incompetence. We see bosses who's primary job is finding employees smarter and more capable than they are, and taking credit for those employees' efforts, while convincing the employees that they're lucky to have a job at all. We see a national tax system where less than half of the populace actually pays taxes, and were politicians talk not about getting more of the populace to contibute, but about getting the contributing populace to CONTRIBUTE MORE.

Makes you proud to be an American, doesn't it?

Decline

The sad truth of the matter is that the United States is a nation in decline. Not that it's effecting me a whole lot, of course. While I'm not without my own financial woes or looming problems, I got launched on this train of thought while enjoying CB's company over another exceptionally bourgeois weekend at the Red Rock Hotel and Casino. In fact, this recent trip put the last trip to shame from a culinary perspective, yet somehow managed to cost slightly less than our last similar outing. Go figure. In any rate, the only real issue I've had lately with finances is wondering whether or not the dollar is going to be worth anything after any given day of stock market activity, and whether or not I just just simply spend every dime I have, and convert hypothetical solid liquidity (which is becoming more and more a contradiction in terms) into tangible chattels.

But while watching our national debt issues being spun by the media and politicians, and with The United States of American being declared a bad credit risk, I got to considering the long-term future of the United States. At least for the time being, we are a nation in decline, with the greatest evidence being the general disparity between parents and their adult children. Rather than parents moving in with their children as they grow physically infirm, adult children are moving back in their parents, because the parents are financially firm. These days, children aspire to the levels of success achieved by mom and dad, rather than dazzling mom and dad with successes and the reaching of new heights.

To a certain degree, this trend of parents having to play host and financier to their insolvent adult children is a little dose of justice. In many cases, the success and stability currently enjoyed by elderly Americans exists because they've spent their lives gathering wealth in an economy based largely on borrowing from the future. Only fair that they help out the younger generations, since those younger generations are charged with paying off the debt incurred by the older generations. The American populace and government has spent $14 trillion that they didn't actually have in order to get where they are.

From my own financial perspective, this is not an overwhelming problem. Both CB and I are highly educated, capable, and motivated when we need to be. So long as the legal and associated system remains operating in any meaningful form, we will be able to get desk jobs. And if there are no desk jobs, we'll find work doing other things, since we also have too much pride to spend substantial time on any sort of wellfare. To one degree, this means that we will feel the effects of a national economic decline worse than others, since we will remain in the minority who work, pay taxes, and so forth. But it also means that we will never be dependent on parents or Big Brother for our meals and comforts.

But beyond the issue of how to make ends meet (which I'm not worried about except insofar as I might have to eat more grains and veggies and less filet mignon), I've been thinking about the future because CB and I have been seriously discussing the issue of children, which has me thinking about the world such child(ren) might be brought in to.

Given the Way of Things, the United States economny may be unlikely to recover. On paper, the United States is over $14 trillion in debt, and that doesn't count toxic assets held by banks and other financial centers. The reason that Bank of America owns thousands of foreclosed upon homes: it LITERALLY cannot afford to put them on the market. So long as no new valuation is assigned to a property (as is the case in a sale), the theoretical value is the most recent purchase price. The reason that we are where we are is that nuances of the '90s and 00s financial booms supported vast overvaluation of real estate. Your took out a loan. The bankers used the value of your mortgage note as capitol, which was loaned to others. The higher property values rose, the more capitol the banks were able to generate for loans in vestments.

Then the crunch came and passed. Houses are no longer worth the price of the loans given to buy the property. What does that say about the value of the loan (which is secured by the property), which the bank lists as a debit to balance some credit? Much of the "money" in circulation is supported by only by a bank's listing of a loan value. If the house underlying that loan is foreclosed upon and sold, the bank needs to admit that it's accounts are undercapitolized, as the actual value of the debits not longer meets the actual value of the credits. Multiply this by the millions of homes and properties that the banks gave loans on, which are no longer worth the value lent. So the banks allow those properties to sit empty, to preserve the lie that they are an asset, rather than a liability. The sad truth of the matter is that many of the property loans made in the last decade or so are upside down, and represent financial liabilities, which banks are listing as actual assets. The privately owned totality of the United States is, to one degree or another, a toxic asset.

So. Besides the $14 trillion that we acknowledge as national debt, there is the hole that represents the cumulative liability of every upside-down property in the free world. More and more Republicans are likely to be elected to office with hard-line positions on debt management, but the truth of the matter is that we really have overspent to the point of no return. Nobody really wants to stop spending, much less start paying off debt. The only real question seems to be how long we can preserve the lie that our books balance, and thereby prevent the sudden and catestropic loss of value of every account evidenced only by a dollar value in a computer somewhere.

I think this will actually last quite a while, since - with the wonders of our global economy - everything in the world is valued in dollars, and NOBODY really wants to own up to the lie we've all been living. So we will keep spending, allow interest to continually accrue, continue to borrow more money to pay existing liaiblities, and so forth. It will get really fun if interest rates rise. Anecdotal note: the United States nation debt is largely funded with T-bills and other notes based on variable rates (prime), currently dirt-cheap at 3% or less. If the interest rate rises to as must as 5.7% (which is the average for the last 20 years or so), the United States debt will grow by $5 trillion in the next decade, BASED ON INTEREST ALONE. So realistically, the United States Treasury CANNOT raise the interest rate, which takes away a check-and-balance on the financial system, with all sorts of interesting consequences on inflation and other financial factors.

Given the numbers, the still-hidden toxic assets, and the inability of elected officials to make hard decisions (the ones that cause austerity for the electorate), one would think it must necessarily come to an end, and perhaps sooner rather than later. Eventually, people are going to realize that a dollar is no longer worth a dollar, and slowly, steadily, move their assets into other values, while shifting their liabilities into dollars. That's the hope for an orderly transition; that the change happen slowly, rather than catastrophically. The worst case is a sudden upheaval, which might result from such things as Texas Secession, or China calling its loans due.

But alas, like Rome, the Holy Roman Church, and the British Empire, the United States will ultimately decline and be subsumed. A younger, healthier world leader will arise, and human existence will continue on as it always has. Until the zombies come, that is.

In the end, I guess what I'm really wondering is, in the course of maximizing the ability of my hypothetical child(ren) to succeed, should I or should I not be considering a move to another country? Or at least to Texas?

Game Theory in 2012

Game theory, as a field of intellectual study, spends a whole lot of time defining and mapping the way that forces interact, and how things could potentially go wrong. It's actually pretty boring to most people, since the models and theories of the field are generally pretty obvious, and since the math used to express the theories is appealing only to people who genuinely like working with math. But even though math generally sucks, most people can nonetheless appreciate game theory and its applications. Hell, Nash's Equilibrium theory was in fact generated in the course of discussing which girl of a group should properly be pursued, so as to maximize the chances of a drunken grad-student getting laid on a given Friday night at the bar.

The technical expression of the theory is that, in any given game, a group of players is in Nash equilibrium if each one is making the best decision that he or she can to maximize their own returns, taking into account the decisions of the others. The application of the theory is that in a closed system and given a sufficient time-line, any number of competing factions openly pursing mutually exclusive benefit will reach a state of equilibrium, wherein each faction settles into a fixed strategy (accepting the payoff from such strategy), and abandons all other possible strategies as less productive than the chosen strategy. This state of equilibrium can in fact be proven mathematically, with all sorts of interesting implications in all sorts of different fields.

Insofar as it relates to trolling for co-eds on a Friday night at the bar, all this game theory shit is just a really long and complicated way of saying that unless Joe Schmoe is the one of the hottest and most desirable guys in the room, he's probably wasting his time hitting on one of the hottest and most desirable girls in the room, and any persistent attempt to do so is almost always contrary to anyone getting laid, particularly Joe.

Of course everyone at the bar is allowed to pursue whatever strategy they like, and can reach for whatever (or whoever) they think they can take. Given the fairly short timeline of a given Friday night, there will be the occasional incident where Joe hooks up with hot girls tacitly out of his league, and likewise there will be times where Joe must bottom-feed or else (gasp!) go home alone. But according to the theory (and the supporting mathematics), given a set time-line, the guys and the girls in the room are going to reach a state of equilibrium in pairing off, with each of guys and girls finding reasonable matches based on accepted norms such as one girl per boy, and whatever scale and degree of social/sexual male/female desirability as can be explored in the available time-frame. In the end, and given the available time-line before last call, game theory says that it's in Joe's best interest to be reasonable in targeting his efforts, spare himself the trouble of being shot down, and skip to the end-game where - ideally for Joe - he gets his pole waxed by the best girl in the crowd that he might reasonably win that night. This is not "settling." It's Joe playing the best game he can to reach the desired goal of the at-issue game, which for today's purposes happens to be trolling for meaningless ass in college bars.

And to think people say that analytical math is no fun.

Besides providing complex equations of largely indecipherable mathematical symbols, game theory provides language, terms, and descriptors to analyze interactions. This is important. Besides breaking down college bar meat-market dynamics, even. Any linguist can tell you that the complexity of a possible idea is inextricably linked to the ability of the thinker to form and articulate the idea. There's a clear chicken-or-egg relationship between thought and linguistics, regardless of whether development of language supports the development of new ideas or whether development of ideas spurs the creation of new language. Especially since, like the chicken and the egg, we've clearly reached a point where each follows the other. We need terms and language to express ideas. This art of idea building, by the way, is the real value of a liberal arts education: the ability to take fairly simple language and build it into ideas, which ideas can then be sold at value sufficient to spare one the burden of lifting heavy objects for a living. It works, trust me.

For an example of such an idea, created out of various simpler concepts, and built up in the hope that somebody might find it interesting enough to give or ascribe some form of value to (in this case, entertainment), take this:

The world is of course going to end soon. The Aztec calendar says so, and that was created using stone-age technology and astronomical observation. Given their primitive state, the Aztecs must clearly have known secrets of the universe beyond the grasp of current scientists and prognosticators. Or something. Even current prophets (profits?), burdened as they are by all the interference and clouding of their predictions by all that science shit of modern civilization, say The End Is Coming. Some of them go so far as to say that the rapture has already passed - with those Taken by God numbering so few that nobody has really noted their absence - and we are already into the trials and tribulations. Which aptly explains things like, for example, Casey Anthony.

Of course, they're all idiots. Everybody who still has a brain knows that When The End Comes, it's going to be zombies. In some ways, the Zeds have already taken over the world, and are making substantial headway in their efforts to appropriate, control, or nullify all brains not already under their sway. Don't say you haven't been warned.

Whatever. But with The End of Days looming, I suppose it behooves us to do our best to look forward to the What Might Bes. Now then, continuing in the liberal arts trend of cobbling together ideas, slapping on a coat of paint, and trying to sell them for more than there actually worth: Among any number of other theories and guidelines, Game Theory postulates that the effect of a breakdown in any system is based on the degree of the breakdown, and the pervasiveness of the system. This is just a complex way of saying that the breakage of important shit matters more than the breakage of trivial shit.

Take religeon, for example. Except for the families of those involved, nobody game a damn about those crazy Heaven's Gate guys with their shiny Nike's and $5.75 to pay Chiron's toll for a seat on Hale-Bopp. Too small a sample, too far on the fringe, and the end result is just a lot of off-color humor and a house destined to appear on Ghost Hunters. Nobody really takes religion seriously as a defining bedrock of society, and even hard-core types will generally admit that the whole "creation of the world in 7 days" thing is a metaphor, rather than how things actually went. Among all our institutions and factions, church is typical a middle-weight at most, and theological developments almost never make a difference in our world.

But there have been times when religious developments have literally reshaped the world. Not so much recently, but discussed before, there was a period measured in centuries when the Catholic Church was the defining power in the lives of the entirety of the western world. So much so that it was largely unthinkable that its strength over peoples' lives would change. Entire generations pledged fealty, and parties were held where dissenters were hanged, set on fire, or just tortured until they toed the line. The Church was EVERYTHING, and while there were always factions and objectors, nobody took any of them seriously.

Of course, it didn't last. The system became so large, complicated, unwieldy, and internally non-supporting and/or nonsensical that the catholic church fragmented from within, and created its own worst enemy (Protestantism). Which internal fracturing of an institution in itself is an inevitability, by the way. But with the rise of Protestantism and the concurrent fracturing of the mighty pillar of Catholicism, there was utter chaos. The church was the central pillar of the European world. Deprived of the stability of that foundation, a whole series of wars swept through Europe (the Hundred Years War), with the end result of religions - the prior BMOC - losing nearly all of their political standing, in favor of the still-persisting model of Nation-States based on local political representation of the populace.

The leadership and influence of the catholic church was so pervasive, so ingrained into European society, that its breakdown was catastrophic. The breakdown itself resulted in a century of warfare between the nations and modes of thought that stepped in to fill the power vacuum, and the end result was an entirely new political-social structure. Not coincidentally, pundits of the collapsing Catholic Church were not shy about trumpeting the apocalypse and subsequent End of Days. For them, it was.

Applying to the present this lesson regarding a central pillar of society breaking down, ask yourself: what article, institution, or thing is so pervasive in our society and in the world today that its breakdown would throw the world into chaos? What loss or breakdown would create a power-vacuum so vast as to spawn a hundred years of war among contenders to assume ascendance? Narrowing the issue to 2012, is there some pillar of our modern world, upon which rests unimaginably vast systems and balances, which appears to be cracking, and where the collapse would result in large-scale re-organization and re-calculation of the haves and have-nots of the world as a whole?

The answer is YES. And the pillar in question is the dollar.