Lost in Translation

You know those guys who get tattoos of Chinese characters that really don't end up meaning what they thought? There's an Asian version of that problem. When I lived in China, a few times I had to gently caution someone about a t-shirt they'd bought with an inappropriate English phrase on it, one that would make them terribly ashamed to wear if they'd understood what it meant. More often, I'd see horrible mistranslations like these.

The lesson, I suppose, is to stick to your own language unless you're really quite fluent.

Where the Boys Are

... and some of the girls, too. This video is best watched full-screen and sound blasting. Some profanity, though.

Groups of players in EVE Online are organized into corporations (corp / corps - yes, the plural is pronounced "corpse" - maybe Obama plays?). Many (though not all) corporations focus on fleet combat -- training players, building the right ships for their missions and tactics, and then running them. Fleet commanders have to recruit volunteers to fight, organize fleets around a particular type of mission, employ scouts to find enemy ships, fleets, or installations, consider logistics such as fleet composition, travel time, solar system features like asteroid belts and other stellar "terrain," repair and re-arming mid-fleet, and of course be good at (virtual) combat command and control.

Each fleet role -- commander, scout, tackler (focused on grabbing and tying down enemy ships), damage dealer, logistics ship, etc. -- has particular player skill, in-game character skill, and ship requirements. Different corporations develop different strategies and tactics depending on their goals. The deadly corporation Rooks and Kings, for example, developed the famous "pipe bomb" tactic which we see near the end of the video.

Besides combat, though, EVE has a more or less complete economy which is about as free market as it gets. The raw components for the ships we fight in are mined from asteroid belts, planets, and moons by players, then sold to other players who build the ships, then sold to other players who transport them to trade systems, then sold to yet other players who sell them to me to go blow up. Prices constantly shift based on supply and demand, and a lot of players pay for their ships by playing the market. Speaking of markets:

Inflation can be a headache for any central banker. But it takes a certain type of economist to know what to do when a belligerent spaceship fleet attacks an interstellar trading post, causing mineral prices to surge across the galaxy.

Eyjólfur Guðmundsson is just that economist. Working for the Icelandic company CCP Games, he oversees the virtual economy of the massively multiplayer video game Eve Online. Within this world, players build their own spaceships and traverse a galaxy of 7,500 star systems. They buy and sell raw materials, creating their own fluctuating markets. They speculate on commodities. They form trade coalitions and banks.

It’s a sprawling economy, with more than 400,000 players participating in its virtual market — more people, in fact, than live in Iceland. Inflation, deflation and even recessions can occur.
...

In Eve Online, Guðmundsson oversees an economy that can fluctuate wildly — he says it expanded 42 percent between February 2011 and February 2012, then contracted 15 percent by the summer. His team will periodically have to address imbalances in the money supply. For instance, they can curb inflation by introducing a new type of weapon, say, to absorb virtual currency — not unlike the way a central bank might sell bonds to shrink the money supply. (In theory, Eve Online’s currency has real-world value — the highest-level spaceships, the Titans, are worth the equivalent of $5,000 to $8,000.)

...

“We’ve even seen large alliances trying to manipulate aspects of the market to control the supply and affect prices,” Guðmundsson says. “It’s a lot like OPEC.”

In some ways, the economy of Eve Online is a libertarian experiment on a grand scale. There are few overarching rules. Labor markets quickly bounce back from recession because there’s no minimum wage. Players can voluntarily band together to create all sorts of innovative arrangements, including corporations, trade alliances and financial institutions.

Eve Online’s banks aren’t supported by a central bank or lender of last resort. Much like Ron Paul has proposed for the United States, there’s no fractional reserve banking, in which banks need to keep only a portion of their deposits on hand at any time and can lend the rest out freely.

“That increases the burden on banks to be diligent and efficient,” Guðmundsson says. On the downside, the financial system is sometimes ripe for abuse — one large bank, EBank, collapsed in 2009 when its founder seized its virtual funds and traded them for real-life cash on the black market. ...

The article ends with some interesting speculations about applications in real life.

So how does the new player learn? You can apply to EVE University or join one of the other newb-friendly corps. Watching training videos is a pretty good way to learn specific skills.

Need to know your corp's fleet doctrines for the ships you fly? Join Fleet-Up. Need to keep track of markets around the universe? Eve-Central. Want to quickly play around with different module fittings on a ship to maximize its performance for a particular mission and your character's particular skillset? EFT. Need voice communications for fleet action? Mumble. Want to keep track of who's killing who? Try your corp killboard. Scouting for a fleet and need quick maps of regions and systems, with recent data on kills, jumps, and players in system? Dotlan. Just spent two hours in Jita shopping for good deals on interceptors, then planning and executing a supply run only to get ambushed and incinerated by a pirate fleet three jumps out from home, losing the ships, modules and ammo you'd planned to fly over the weekend, and need to chill out? Try some EVE music videos:

What's the value of all this? Besides fun, I don't know. I do know that fleet planning makes one really think about logistics, that commanding a fleet of volunteers in virtual battle is like directing a mass cat attack, and that the whole thing reeks of free market economics. Kinda cool.

So the Greeks got their bailout again

But it looks like the terms of the agreement are even more strict than what they rejected in their popular referendum.

Well, it seems that being completely out of money will do wonderful things to focus the desire to make a deal.  In reality, the Greek government had no choice.  They could accept the deal and keep themselves afloat a while longer (until this money also inevitably runs out) and deal with the consequences of having to tell the Greek people "yeah, about that referendum..." later, or not take the bailout and simply collapse now.  It is still my considered opinion that by continuing to kick the can down the road, they're just making the (inevitable) collapse worse.  But those in power in Greece wish to remain in power for as long as they can.  But mark my words, they're finished one way or the other.  The people who elected and supported them will see this as a rank betrayal (and honestly, rightly so; you can't claim to run on rejecting austerity measures only to accept even harsher ones without consequence), and the ones who didn't support them in the first place are certainly not going to suddenly change their mind in favor of saying "I told you so."

So having turned to the far-left and having them fold, I now expect the Greeks to turn to the far-right, who will fare no better, but will at least give the people a scapegoat of Jews and foreigners to blame.  And that will pretty much end as it always does.  So, we still have that phase of this tragedy to look forward to.

Return From the Wild

That storm cloud on the left is hung up on Mount Mitchell, the highest peak in the eastern United States.  I had camped on Commissary Ridge the night before, which connects to its shoulders, and was in that storm all night.  There was wind like I've never heard, rain and thunder.  In the morning, just at dawn, packed up the kit and backpacked back to the road.  Just a few hundred vertical feet down, and I found this view from below the storm. 

How America Changed in the 20th Century

In a moderate-length article at Ancient Faith, an Eastern Orthodox website, Joel J. Miller argues that, because of changes in American society in the 1940s, same-sex marriage was inevitable.

Back in 2010, economist and conservative intellectual Thomas Sowell published the book Dismantling America. The Hoover Institution interviewed him about it, and he talked about changes in the US across the 20th century in explaining how our nation is being taken apart. Some highlights of the interview were his comments on patriotism, his childhood in the Harlem public schools, his thoughts on Barack Obama, his comments on same-sex marriage as it was working its way up the courts, and why African Americans shifted from the Republican to the Democratic Party. I became interested in Thomas Sowell in particular after finding out he was very influential on the young Clarence Thomas.

Both the article and interview gave me new things to think about as I wonder how we got where we are today. I think I'll give Sowell's book a read.

A Reality Show for the Hall

Popular Mechanics has an article on the History Channel's show, Forged in Fire.

History's newest competition show ... challenges smiths from across the country to, in the first of three rounds, forge a sturdy, deadly knife under a strict time limit. Following rigorous testing and an elimination, the smiths must then create a suitable hilt for their knife. Finally, when only two smiths remain, they have a week to replicate a particular historical weapon that not only retains its edge and cuts clean, but is period-accurate. The winner of each episode walks away with $10,000.

The show's three judges determine whose steel is most worthy of the prize. Baker, a veteran of Spike's Deadliest Warrior and Hollywood prop man, is the authority on historical accuracy and aesthetic beauty. Mastersmith J. Neilson examines the technical qualities and tests the durability of the swords, while martial artist Doug Marcaida determines how effective the weapons would actually be in their natural habitat: combat.

Stirring the pot is Wil Willis, a former ranger and pararescueman ...

There are some cool photos of forging and some of the contestants' blades with the PM article, and it looks like you can watch the full episodes at the History Channel's site.

Dystopian America

I recently read Dan Simmons's 2011 dystopian novel, Flashback.

From the back cover:

Some twenty years from now, the United States is near total collapse. But 85 percent of the population doesn't care: They're addicted to flashback, a drug that allows its users to re-experience the best moments of their lives. After former detective Nick Bottom's wife died in a car accident, he started going under the flash to be with her; now an addict, he's lost his job and is estranged from his teenage son.

Nick may be a tortured soul but he's still a good cop, so he's hired by a top government advisor to investigate the murder of the advisor's son. Soon Nick becomes the one man who can change the course of an entire nation turning away from tomorrow to live in the past.

Simmons draws on the events of the last few decades, ending historically with the first years of the Obama administration, and offers a very dark, possible future. There are ongoing race wars, a new Mexico has reclaimed large swathes of the southwest, Texas is again an independent republic, and most Americans, including the hero, care far more about reliving their glory days than solving the problems.

Although it's science fiction, this is at heart a pulp detective novel with dark twists and turns along the way to solving a murder. Despite its 550 pages, it moves quickly and is a pretty good read. Simmons occasionally takes a break from the action to preach to the reader about obscure things like the disastrous effects of national debt and enabling Iran, but it didn't really diminish how much I enjoyed the book. (Maybe because I agree with much of what he says?) I don't want to spoil the ending, but I will say that it is unusual. If you enjoy these kinds of stories, I highly recommend it.

As a last note, parts of the book feature trucker convoys through the anarchic wastelands of the American West which reminded me a lot of the song Grim posted back at the end of June:

Uh-oh

They say this didn't work out well for the Neaderthals when we started trying it.

That explains it

From a three-part New Yorker article about sleep disorders:

If you sleep six hours a night for twelve days, Adusumilli says—and that’s about how much many Americans sleep all year round—your cognitive and physical performance becomes virtually indistinguishable from that of someone who has been awake for twenty-four hours straight. (The same effect is produced by six days of four-hour nights.) And the performance of someone who has been awake for twenty-four hours straight is similar to that of someone with a blood alcohol level of 0.1 per cent. In other words, “normal” amounts of sleep deprivation have us acting like we’re drunk. (Charles Czeisler recalls presenting these facts to a Times journalist; when the journalist handed in the story, the editor said it couldn’t possibly be true. Most people in the newsroom were sleep-deprived, and they still managed to produce the Times every day. Surely an intoxicated newsroom would be incapable of such a feat.)

In my whole life, I've almost never used an alarm clock to wake up in the morning unless I had a plane to catch. It's one reason I don't like traveling.

Mismatched sets

Laura, a young woman in Bogota notices a man in a butcher shop, William, who looks so like Jorge, one of her co-workers, that she assumes she's caught him moonlighting. She takes a picture of him back to Jorge, who is struck by the resemblance. Jorge shows the picture to another friend:

"Tell me what you think of this photo," he told his friend, handing him the phone.

You look fine, the friend said.

"Except it’s not me," Jorge said. He could not stop staring at Laura’s phone.

. . . Jorge moved to his desktop computer so he could see the images more closely. He clicked once more on the photo of William and the friend holding shot glasses. Now that the image was large, he could examine what he had failed, incredibly, to notice when he looked at the photo on his phone. He leaned in close, his nose practically touching the screen. The man’s hair was slicked up like a rooster’s crown, and the shirt was all wrong. But there was the full lower lip and thick brown hair that Jorge knew well. The buttons on the man’s shirt were straining slightly at the hint of a potbelly, in a way that was intimately familiar. Jorge felt a rush of confusion, and then his stomach dropped. The friend sitting next to his double had a face that Jorge knew better than his own: It was the face of his fraternal twin brother, Carlos.

Going to the Wild

Going to go ride for a while. I think the Grandfather Games are going on right now. Might be worth stopping in.

Back Tuesday or so. Here's some relevant music to these hills, and to things Celtic.

Gentlemen Can Be Ungentlemanly If Necessary

I've long advocated being a gentleman.

To do so, though, requires that you constitute yourself a defender of your country and its civilization. It is not enough to say, as did Dutch humanist Oscar van den Boogaard:

"I am not a warrior, but who is?" he shrugged. "I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it."

No, that is not a gentleman, though he wears the finest clothes and writes the finest novels, keeps the best society, and has the finest manners. He has only the accidents of a gentleman. He has nothing of its essence.

The essence is to bear arms, in defense of country and civilization. That is the real thing, the root of the tradition. The arms may be symbolic, or they may be actual. The defense must be devout.

Today I read about men who were no gentlemen.

On the afternoon of July 4 in Washington DC, a teenager with a knife boarded a crowded metro train and attacked a 24-year-old man, Kevin Joseph Sutherland, stabbing him 30 or 40 times and kicking his head repeatedly until he was dead. No one tried to stop him....

That no one did displays not just cowardice but also a callous and unthinking selfishness. The Reddit eyewitness had no idea at the time how many more people Spires would kill, no idea if he would attack the 52-year-old woman or an elderly passenger. He just let him walk off the train into the subway, covered in Sutherland’s blood.

This is essentially the opposite of the spirit of United Flight 93—the heroic selflessness that prompted a group of courageous passengers on 9/11 to attack their hijackers, forcing them to crash the plane in a Pennsylvania field.

The basic theory I advanced more than ten years ago in "Social Harmony" was that we need old men to be dangerous. This 18 year old was totally un-moored from our civilization. He was a murderer, an armed robber, and his society was so soft that no one in a train car full of people tried to stop him.  Older, larger men did nothing.  Even if they were too late to stop the killing, as knives work fast, they needed to stop him from leaving until police could arrive. A virtuous citizenry would have that courage. They would pull together to enforce the common peace.

Maybe we've become too nice, and not rough enough. Present company excepted, of course. A dangerous world can only be tamed by what Louis L'amour used to call "men with the bark on." This guy isn't nice, he dresses and grooms himself in a terrifying manner, and he uses obscene gestures and language. Yet he has the spirit of the thing. He's a guy who dares to be an apostate from Islam, a convert to Christianity, and a proud American. He has understood what is valuable about our civilization, and he has constituted himself a defender of it.

We must do better.

Havok Journal: ISIS Must Die

How much brutality can you stand before we decide that something must be done? There is a point when we become numb to such behavior, when after that we become used to such behavior. I don’t want to be used to something like that and yet with innumerable occurrences, I can no longer feel the way I did before.

We lose a bit of our humanity when we learn to harden ourselves to something like this. I had calluses on my soul before. I don’t want them back.

Understand clearly, this is the pattern of the Islamic State; this is how they will rule and there is no turning back. No nation, which started out with brutality and bestiality has ever stepped back from that level of force. They started their campaign this way and nothing has changed in the few years since it began.

UPDATE: Jim Hanson has an op-ed on ISIS today as well.

Old guys rule

The pleasure of seeing expectations confounded: young athletes get made up convincingly as geezers, then show up on the basketball court or skateboard park. It's a good joke on everyone, and no hard feelings.

Bad Habits

Same band as last night, this time singing about cocaine.



I don't care at all about cocaine -- I'm one of the last Americans to have never done any illegal drug -- but I was wondering about this song for a while. I heard it in this documentary about the Angels, and for a long time I thought it was an ode to BDSM: "everybody take a whip on me!" That turns out not to be the relevant lyric at all. It's an old tune, done by Woodie Guthrie.

By the way, forward that video to 8:24 to hear Jerry Garcia give an ode to bikers. "Is that out front, or what?"

"Are you afraid of them?"

"Sure."

"Why?"

"Because they're scary, man."

Root for the Socialists. It's Important.

There was a famous election in which David Duke ran against a legendarily corrupt politician that produced the slogan, "Vote for the crook. It's important." (The same politician produced the aphorism about political death meaning being caught in bed with "a dead girl or a live boy," the truth of which might now be questionable). At The Week, Michael Brendan Dougherty argues that conservatives should root for the socialists in Greece.

Conservatives may say that people get the governments they deserve. But the Greeks actually did something that was unthinkable in this country, kicking out both of the major parties that led them into debt-peonage. Syriza was their Tea Party, and like the Tea Party it boasts some grandiose and irresponsible rhetoric, flagrantly breaks Godwin's law, and is generally unruly.

This is what I mean when I say that I expect us to have a conversation like this down the road. The ones who've been striving hardest against reckless spending are the ones being told they have to accept the consequences, including the disarmament of the Greek military at a time of national crisis. Doubtless we will hear the same things in our hour. We should look differently upon them, as we would want others to look differently upon us.

Too far?

Oh, my. I assumed the village flag in this HotAir newsclip was for funnsies, but apparently not.

Beating China on price?

Will the Chinese equivalent of WalMart soon have to start importing cheaper U.S.-made consumer goods? I wouldn't bet on it quite yet, but a Boston Consulting Group study claims that we're closing the gap in manufacturing costs and might actually get cheaper than China within three years, mostly as a result of drastically reduced fuel costs, which is turn will be mostly because of drastically reduced fracking costs. As the article notes, all other things being equal, American companies would prefer to eliminate the risk and delay inherent in shipping "cheap" goods here from halfway around the world. We have to get pretty uncompetitive before that starts making sense, but maybe we can innovate our way out of the jam. Or maybe the EPA will find a way to outlaw fracking, to keep us from doing anything competitive or unfair or harmful to Gaia.

Tonight's Music

A little piece about the Cumberland river.

The Greek Perspective

We've been talking about the crisis in terms of the English-language commentary on it, and in terms of the clash between German and contemporary Anglo-Saxon economic philosophy. What we haven't really heard about is what the Greeks think, except insofar as it has been represented by Germans or Frenchmen or English or American thinkers. A Greek whose acquaintance I made in the last few days sent me this graphic to explain how the crisis looks to him.

From his perspective, the Greeks are proposing to pay 3.5B of the 4B Euros being asked. The creditors group is demanding the 4B (officially), but the way it has come up with for Greece to afford it is to violate its basic national security requirements. The Greeks were already proposing defense cuts at half the level the creditors would prefer, but -- at a time when Greece is facing a heavy influx of refugees, and possibly infiltrators, from the crises caused by ISIS and in Africa -- the creditors are demanding cuts to the bone.

Now national security in the face of an immediate threat is one of the few cases in which we often think it is reasonable for a sovereign power to run a deficit. After all, what are your alternatives?

Under this reading, the Greek position suddenly looks a lot more reasonable. They're willing to meet their creditors most of the way, but they aren't willing to commit suicide to close the remaining gap. And, by the way, isn't it really to all of Europe's advantage if Greece is able to maintain sufficient defense forces to deal with the influx of refugees? That seems like a problem it is carrying for the rest of Europe, to a certain degree. Might not the rest of Europe help to carry that burden a bit, or at least not kneecap the Greeks while the Greeks are carrying that burden for them?

Just so you know how it looks from the other side.