I’ll have things to say about class, but I’ll say them after class. For now, I have 15 minutes to kill, so here’s an ICQ I got from Marechal:
So I am reading in this economics textbook, Marius … and everything I am reading says regulation is bad. They’ve got graphs and charts and stuff proving it. So then I’m like … “Well, duh.” Call me a Republican, a capitalist, and a patriot, but yeah .. … so I don’t understand how you can be so pro-regulatory with minimum wage laws and lots of taxes and rent controls and welfare. It’s bad economics. What am I missing???
What’s missing is, essentially, two things. First is the lessons of the Industrial Revolution of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which in short form tell us that unrestrained capitalism is enormously detrimental to people and society; combined with the second, which is 250-300 years of political philosophy that tells us, essentially, that the duty of government is to provide the best possible deal to as many of the people it governs as possible.
We’ll deal with the second concept first. It is essentially the ideal that the United States was founded on. Life, liberty, the persuit of happiness, no taxation without representation, etc, etc. Extrapolate this to the French Revolution and others throughout the world. Along with that goes a lot of earlier Enlightenment thinking, the English parliamentary movement, and a couple of others that escape me. The point is that modern government is built on the idea that it exists to serve the people.
Back to the first concept. The lesson that can be picked up from the Industrial Revolution is that business cannot be trusted to look out for the well-being of it’s workers. Whether government actually looks out for the well-being of the governed is debatable, but we KNOW that business can’t be trusted. That’s as true of the 1870s as it is today – contrast the robber barons with Enron, frex. But we have minimum wage laws to provide a living wage to workers, because business, left on it’s own, will not provide this – note the 19th century’s company store syndrome for one, child labor records, and unsafe/unhealthy working conditions.
And it’s classtime. More later.
Hurt like hell. Read on.
So I just got back from my first class.
“But Erik, it’s 10pm!”
Yes, it is. I went to class at 7. Yeah.
Good stuff, though. History of 20th century science. It’s something I know comparatively little about, so it should be fairly interesting. We can but hope.
But the bulb in the projector, see, wasn’t doing so hot. And it’s one of those newfangled computer ones, see, that project straight off your computer. Good times. Except when they start going out, and the screen turns red, then goes all RGB pixelated and crap. For three hours, in bad lighting. Ow. Ow ow ow.
And tomorrow, we get to wake up at 8:30, go to class at 9:30 for an hour and a half, get an hour and a half off, go back at 12:30 for 3 and a half more hours, get an hour off, and then go back until 6:30.
Do we love life yet? Oh yeah we do.
I would like to note that there is, in fact, a Hell, and in Hell there is a special place reserved for the people responsible for allowing the student parking lots here to be used as visitor parking during the football games, which means I am currently parked in the middle of nowhere.
There is also a special place reserved for those people who brilliantly decided that we don’t need more parking, when in fact this is not the case.
There is also a very extra special place reserved for whoever it was that last year decided that the student lots were SO special, we had to move our cars during games, or they’d get towed. Yay for that particular thing lasting all of one game.
There is also a special place reserved for OSU Parking Services (services? They give me services?) for charging me $120 for a parking permit.
Fuckers.
Speaking of burnination, this was way too much fun.
http://www.homestarrunner.com/trogdor.html
Quoth Cole, in reference to Terminator 2:
“And Trogdor laid firey burnination upon the playground.”
Which of course makes more sense if you read Strongbad. And watch T2, but we’ve all seen T2, here, right? Right?
You, in the back there. I saw that. You’re in trouble. We’re coming for you.
Also, the Battletech section over there on the right has actual content now. ‘coupla mechs, ‘coupla aerospace fighters, and my very own Snow Raven unit, complete with a good amount of fluff. ’bout time it made it up.
Listening to A Perfect Circle’s Thirteenth Step right now. I’m ambivilant about the album as a whole, but that’s because I’m used to Mer de Noms and it’s not, and because I’m addicted to the third track.
“With your halo slipping down…”
(our, uh, floor theme is “At the Beach” this year, if you were wondering. *shrug*)
Not much happening, really. Met a few people, went to MW:DA where I got my head handed to me twice, then proceeded to do major league stompage in a game that involved:
The Bannson’s Legionnaire charging Malisa Nova Cat and missing the 10-to-hit charge.
Malisa Nova Cat retaliating with a full alpha strike.
A Bannson’s peasant company pulling off a 17-to-hit capture on my Scorchers.
A Bannson’s peasant company needing a 17 to capture my Po tank in hindering, and missing by 1.
Me getting my first full sweep in a long, long time. Good fun.
Back here in the real world, the main event is…monster cookies are back! After five years, they’re back! Soft cookie goodness, for only 99 cents! Happy! Happy!
Well, here we are. Back in Corvallis. Back at OSU. Back at Callahan. Back in 322. The fifth year for the most of it, the third year for the room.
Movein was decidedly non-suckful. We all knew what to do, knew where it all went, and it was all accomplished inside of an hour. The RAs are mostly either the old crop, or people I knew before, so about every five minutes it was like “ERIK! YOU’RE BACK! GREAT!”
It’s good to be loved. ;)
Of course, last night I got really tired at midnight after the packing fun, and decided to go to bed…
Life utters the words ‘refresh’
You feel suddenly awake!
Doh.
So I was up until 3:30am, got up at 7:30am, and was really freaking tired all day until I got that nap in. This is good.
And apparently the freshmen have begun their social networks without my interference, such that nobody has stopped to say hi yet. That’s new and different.
For those of you who remember the little review of a book called 1632 a bit back…
Picked up 1633 yesterday. Read it pretty much in a day and a half. It’s bigger than the first book. This is good, in ways. The world is much more fleshed out, now, along the lines of Island in the Sea of Time. And there are plans for an obscene number of new books. This can be nothing but good. OTOH, the story sort of dragged. I suspect it’s a setup book for 1634, but…
Oh well. Good times.
Also, before the Blakist whacking rituals, we saw Terminator 3. This was good. T3 is good times. But not as good times as T2 was. T2 is…damn. Quite a movie. Whereas both T1 and T3 were sort of…good. But not great. The T-X sucked, IMHO. Hot, of course, but the T-1000 was far more badass. John Conner going somewhat around the bend was kind of neat, though. And it amazes me that they found three actors who look very similar to each other, for each incarnation of John, plus dad.
And I go back to school on Tuesday. This is…good, I think.
So we played the second session of our MW3 game tonight. Wherein after being massively dropped on by Blakists, and all nearby settlements blown up with nuclear weapons, Our Heroes run to the hills, where they recruit a few conscripts for La Resistance: The back hills hick with half a machine shop, the random investment banker, the random doctor, and the random hillbillies with 4 kids, one of whom is their only ICE engine repairman.
So while half the PCs stay back to guard the fort and build stuff, the other two take off in the investment banker’s Lamborghini aircar to scout out the main town in the area. As it turns out, they’re spotted by Blakist air patrols, and a squad gets sent out to arrest them. Well, the one of them pretty much pulls a Terminator (we just saw T3 today, btw. It owns), whips out his mech-class multibarrel 50 cal MG and takes down most of the squad in a hail of bullets, while the other guy runs over another Blakist with the aircar (who lives, amazingly, and even fights for a round), then crashes it into a jeep and gets knocked out. And the other guy takes down the rest of the squad, takes a prisoner, and that’s that. And I’m being like “Damn, that was good moving there.”
Except they got greedy. Had their prisoner call in a Blakist medivac chopper to take it over, then called their own base to get their own chopper in to strip it. Well, the Wobbies intercepted the latter transmission. Sent another squad in a gunship. Squad lands, gets owned in a firefight with the party, then the choppers open up, killing half the party. Right as the PC chopper arrives, takes down one chopper, but gets shot down by the other. They try to shoot down the other one, but it kills them. End of session, end of characters.
So we’ll see what they come up with. All I know is, no matter what, this shit is fun.
Well Toast, this one’s for you. I was going to reply in the comments, but it sort of outgrew that, so:
yeah, I sorta remember us talking about Iraq quite a bit… interesting how you already back then never used al qaeda as an argument, while the entire press was basically screaming about it constantly. Good thing :)
Still waiting for some report on the whole Weapons of Mass Destruction though. None found yet, right? Wow, why am I not surprised?
And does anyone but me see the irony in vetoing that resolution? France, Germany and Russia?!?!? Bah I say, bah!
The Iraq debate was an interesting one. Knowing what I know now, I’m not sure I’d have said all of what I remember saying, but.
I never used AQ in my arguments because it was abundantly clear to me even then that no matter what the administration was saying, the links between the two were weak at best, and frankly we had a lot better reasons to be doing the thing. Like WMDs. And me, I still believe that Saddam WAS trying to work on the things, trying to hide…something. He clearly had no intention of complying with the UN. It worries me that we haven’t found much, but it was a good reason.
There are also the reasons of Saddam just being a really bad guy in general, our continuing low-grade war there, and a particular need of ours to have a state in the Middle East that will showcase democracy in the region and give us some sort of friend there besides Israel, who isn’t exactly the one we want to be showcasing, and the Saudis, who, well, aren’t. Much less assorted other undemocratic bunches. And I guess when it comes right down to it, I viewed, and view all of those reasons as being good ones. All of this spewing about “pre-emptive war” is, I think, a disguise. Nations will do what they want in the end, anyway.
And of those, long-term, the democracy one is going to be big. Because I think this is it. This is the West (including Europe, here) versus extremist Islam in Cold War II, which is likely to be more of a hot war than the last one. And we’re going to be here for probably much of our lifetimes.
Which isn’t to disguise the fact that the Bush administration has done a horrible job of going about diplomacy. I had always sort of thought that vaguely, but poking around Wes Clark’s website and thinking a bit on the 90s, it occured to me that Clinton would have found a way to get Europe on board and doing more or less what he wanted anyway. Bush made a little stab at it, but not really. And that’s a bad, bad thing. And even Bush is starting to realize that. He’ll be lucky if he gets anything. Were I the UN, Europe in general, I’d probably tell him to fuck off just out of spite, which may well be what they’re doing. I don’t like it, but can’t really blame them.
The problem, of course, is that in the coming election, we’ve got a foreign policy choice ranging from Bush on the one hand to a whole range of Democrats on the other, ranging from pure isolationism (yeah, that’ll work…) to the pretty good ideas of Edwards and Dean, to Clark, who’s got about the only worthwhile game in town that I can tell. OTOH, we know Bush’s domestic record (hurty), Edwards and Dean who have pretty good ideas, and Clark, who so far as I can tell hasn’t got one yet.
We shall see.