PRESIDENT BUSH HATES CHILDREN!

House Defies Bush Veto, Gives Health Insurance to Kids

"Thanks to yesterday's Congressional approval of an expanded State Children's Health Insurance Program, four million uninsured children could qualify for coverage.

They could qualify -- but they almost certainly won't. The measure passed the House of Representatives by a 265-159 vote, falling short of the majority needed to override President Bush's promised veto. "

Maybe children are on his list of evil doers...

DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS, YEAH

Dungeons & Dragons Discussion Board

Topic: D&D Edition 4

werehairbear 09-09-07: 1:53 a.m.
Hey, guys, did you hear they're making a new version of D&D? I hope they make it harder for characters to die in the new edition. As far as I'm concerned, when I'm Dungeon Master, characters should only die if it's important to the dramatic arc of the story or if they annoy me.

DrizztDoherty 09-09-07: 1:59 a.m.
Ah, I don't worry about characters dying that much as long as one of them survives and can cast Resurrection, or can pay a cleric to do it. In fact, in the campaign I run there are magical insurance policies, and sometimes the monsters say, "I just saved a ton of money on my resurrection insurance!" Well, just that one time, I'm still recovering from the beating.

Goku1443 09-09-07: 2:12 a.m.
You let your players cast Resurrection? How cheesy. In my game, if you want someone raised, you need to get the High Priest to do it for you. First, you have to do a quest to get someone to tell you where the High Priest is. Then you have to do a quest before they'll let you in the temple. Then you have to do a quest before they'll let you talk to the High Priest. Then you have to do a quest to prove to the High Priest that you're serious. Then it's time for some REAL questing. After that you can get your friends raised, just in time for the obligatory post-resurrection debt quests.

LordOrcus 09-09-07: 2:15 a.m.
I can't believe you guys let characters come back from the dead. In my campaign, if you're dead, you're dead. No takebacks, no comebacks and NO RESURRECTIONS. You just grab a fresh character sheet and start statting out a new character, one level lower than the last one. I guess some people just can't handle a hardcore campaign. I just wish they'd make the character-generation rules faster, though. It really sucks when you have to take a half-hour break three times a night.

assassin-of-gnomes09-09-07: 2:21 a.m.
ONE LEVEL LOWER? You call that hardcore? In my campaign, if you die you start your next character over at first level. You get to clean the boots of the other characters for a while, until you get enough experience points to carry their torches. That's if you don't end up biting it in the "initiation ceremonies" the other characters come up with. Don't like it? DON'T DIE! That's hardcore. Anything less and the players are just going to treat Dungeons and Dragons like some sort of game.

CleanseByFire09-09-07: 2:32 a.m.
What, are you playing Candyland: The Extra Nice Edition? When you die you get to START OVER? In my campaign, once your character dies, that's it for you. You're out of the campaign. Get out of my house, you're done. I'll call you when I start a new campaign. Leave the chips.

screamsofthedamned 09-09-07: 2:37 a.m.
You let the players just LEAVE when a character dies? Do you make them warm milk and tuck them in at night, too? Maybe give them a little foot rub? In my campaign, if your character dies, he doesn't come back, but you do. You have to sit in on all the games and watch everyone else play, knowing that you were a pathetic loser who couldn't even keep his character alive. HARD. CORE.

gary 09-09-07: 2:45 a.m.
Let's just say that when a player lets a character die in my campaign, that player never plays D&D, or any other game, ever again.
- - -

JIHAD FOR DUMMIES

DAN RATHER KICKS BUSH WHILE HE'S DOWN

Now that Bush's ratings are at a low and his staff are leaving his sinking administrative ship, Rather figures he can win.

Oh Saddam, How Far You've Fallen















Donald Rumsfeld & Saddam Hussein Shaking Hands
(Baghdad, December 20, 1983)

"When shall we... meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?"
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth (First Witch at I, i)

Israeli Defense Minister Tells Hamas PM To Watch His Back
I just love it when Heads of State threaten each other.

Hi, Would You Like to Buy A Kidney?
No, not kidney beans, the two little round things you have which filter out by-products from your bloodstream. Oh, and incidently, you have two of 'em and only need one to survive. The going rate depends on country:

$6,000 = average going rate.

$500 - $1000 = Iraq after Gulf War
$2,000 = Manila = 1,282 Big Macs
$20,000 = Israel
$30,000 - $50,000 = America =9,523-15,873 Big Macs

These are all in the common US Dollar currency, and a reflection of how much each person from their respective country values their own kidney. In order to make this more applicable, I've converted to dollars to Big Mac Purchasing Power, how many Big Macs you could buy with that money.

Me being a wannabe economist, think that you can probably find black market prices of various organs, enough to figure out just how much a human life is worth. What is interesting, looking at this data (and it is a small sample I know) is that life is worth differently compared across countries; i.e. if you're from America -- the value of your kidney is worth 100x that of someone from Iraq. Interesting arbitrage opportunity there; if I were Iraqi, and wanted to sell my kidney, I'd buy a ticket to the U.S and sell it from there.

There are also many interesting things you can do with this data. If the value of a life is the present value of all expected income, and expected income is measured in productivity units of, say Big Macs, one might say that Americans were expected to produce more than other people.

Humph, you might say, my present value is worth millions more than what I'm being paid now; well either the labor market rate is wrong, or you're not doing a very good job marketing your human capital. Too bad either way.

Would I be able to wear a T-Shirt saying "nigga"? The possibilities are endless...

The actor Damon Wayans has been engaged in a 14-month fight to trademark the term "Nigga" for a clothing line and retail store, a search of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's online database reveals."...

It was rejected as "immoral or scandalous."

Fun Fact: Ol' Dirty Bastard used the term 76 times in the 1999 album Nigga Please, not counting repetitions in a chorus."

Meanwhile, more fodder for the lawyers:

If Wayans succeeds in persuading the Trademark Office to permit the mark, he may have to deal with Keon Rhodan, a 29-year-old entrepreneur in Charleston, South Carolina, who has been using "Nigga" on a line of T-shirts, hoodies and other attire for six years in a part-time, trunk-of-his-car business."

Tax Auditor Found Dead in Office After Two Days
Nope, won't happen to me -- I never leave my apartment.

Man Kills Roommate Because of Toilet Paper
This reminds me of the time when my roommate came at me with a knife. Apparently I had left my toilet seat up one too many times...

3 Years for Saying the Holocaust Didn't Occur

This man received 3 years in prison for saying the Holocaust didn't occur.

One Man's Chance, is Another Man's Misfortune
Windfall profit taxes on oil companies have no efficiency problems if the money just transferred directly. However, there are serious incentive problems associated with an ex post taxes. Taxation in general reduces the initiative of these companies (or any company) towards any profitable project -- it reduces research and consumption -- and may increase the likelihood that they hide any profit they generate.

A very large part, however, occurred simply because ExxonMobil happened to be standing in the right place at the right time holding a bushel basket (or a huge oil drum) collecting surplus profits resulting from chance and other people's misfortune."

It's interesting to note that when people are standing at the right place at the right time, and make money, there is moral outrage, but when their in the wrong place at the wrong time, there is not.

On the topic of Ex-Poste taxation, think of the government and the oil company engaged in a game (or contract). The government can unilaterally tax - take - steal? -- from the oil company a windfall tax, but once that happens, that will change the company's behavior toward the government. They will report less profit or they will work less hard, decreasing the present value of future tax flows to the government. If they think it's worth it, they'll do it... One interesting thing is the discount rate that the government places on that present value, it can be subjective, or taken as the interest rate-- if they really need the money badly now, that future tax flow really becomes small.

Last fall, the Republican-controlled Senate approved a one-year tax increase of $5 billion for the nation's largest oil companies."

My prediction is that the accountants at the oil companies are already hard at work trying to change their profits into something... less profitable.

As to people who must drive to work: A 2005 CNN poll found 58 percent of drivers experiencing severe or moderate hardship when gasoline was at $2.22 a gallon. Now the government is predicting $2.41 a gallon for this year."

Two points of fact here: 1.) Those hardy brits once paid $6 a gallon and 2.) The government is already making a chunk of money here; in fact, they might be why gas prices are so high!:

Taxes - Taxes, including federal and local, account for about 31 percent of the total price of gas in the United States. Federal excise taxes are 18.4 cents per gallon, and state excise taxes average 20 cents per gallon. There may also be some additional state sales taxes, as well as local and city taxes. In Europe, gas prices are far higher than in America because taxes on gas are much higher. For example, gas prices in England have risen as high as $6 per gallon, with 78 percent of that going to taxes."

LPU'S
It's so hard to do research... to come up with a good paper which meets the exacting standards of academia; in light of this, I've decided to harness probability by releasing my hundreds of trained monkey minions to typing at computers and maybe they'll produce an economic paper.

Oh wait -- it's already been done with grad students, and it's even worse than you think: not one publication among us.

Speaking on the subject of publishing, here's an exerpt from The Chronicle of Higher Education on the LPU -- the Least Publishable Unit --

"In order to appear to have more publications on their CVs, young scholars are often advised to break their research down into pieces and publish those pieces in multiple articles -- i.e., LPU's.
As we talked, my young colleague described the larger picture of her investigations in molecular biology, and how she believed they would lead to a major publication within the year. But she also acknowledged that she was working on a couple of smaller papers that could be submitted to second-tier journals and that were likely to appear quickly and with little revision.
In other words, she has taken the advice of her faculty mentors and produced LPU's while also pursuing the brass ring of a major publication in a leading journal....

Having a couple of LPU's will ensure that the bean counters cannot assail her record. We both know that there are those among us who would easily ignore her aggressive pursuit of grants and a single brilliant paper in Cell if her four years here did not include the magic two papers. She's a realist and so am I, and our meeting ended on a positive note. I was confident that she was exactly where she needed to be to achieve tenure this time next year, and she was confident that she was doing the right thing by generating some LPU's."

...we're just a bunch of monkeys, churning out those LPU cycles

What is very funny, is watching two people arguing, neither of whom have any intention of changing their minds.

In support of teaching evolution:

The recent ruling by Judge John E. Jones III in Pennsylvania that Intelligent Design cannot be taught is correct.

In his ruling, Jones said that while intelligent design, or ID, arguments “may be true, a proposition on which the court takes no position, ID is not science.” Among other things, he said intelligent design “violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation”; it relies on “flawed and illogical” arguments; and its attacks on evolution “have been refuted by the scientific community.”

ID is not science, and if schools are to teach science, elucidating students in the Scientific Method, then they should not teach it. For reference, the scientific method is:

1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.

2. Formulation of an hypothesis to explain the phenomena. In physics, the hypothesis often takes the form of a causal mechanism or a mathematical relation.

3. Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations.

4. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments.

Intelligent Design fails under points four. The Flying Spaghetti Monster also fails. Incidently, so does evolution.

I've found this to be one of the better discourses on this subject.

It must be nice to have the legal system behind your pet idea. I wonder how one goes about achieving that.

My friend said that writing about my life would make my site more interesting...

Here goes...

I woke up.
I graded 160 essay questions, in a harsh manner, repeated multiple times on multiple questions.
I stared at the lack of progress on my dissertation.
I posted this.

The rest of my day would be too interesting and risque to speak of. It would cause heart attacks in older men and induce fainting in women. I won't even begin with the story about the midgets.

If you ever need to tell that special someone about a special something, and you live in Los Angeles... here's a good website.

"In Los Angeles, there's an easy way to tell your sex partners you have HIV or another STD. Send them a free inSPOTLA ecard, ANONYMOUSLY or from your
email address"!!!

As with all things involving email and anonymity, please use responsibly.

So why do families in poor underdeveloped countries have lots and lots of kids? Well, the customary answer is that kids provide for you in the future, and you need lots and lots of them because not many of them are going to live.

My friend suggested that utility was increasing in the number of kids you had. I counterproposed that children were a form of contractual enforcement; that the more kids you had, the greater the costs of either party ditching the other. However, if you think about this enough, it doesn't really make sense.

Someone suggested that utility was actually decreasing in kids over time. So, new kids equals higher utility. Maybe.

We had the brilliant idea that there was a increasing return to scale or some type of skilled labor complementarity at work here... it just gets easier to make 'em, darn it!

The discussion turned from production of kids to naturally... trading children... I'll give you little Tommy here for your Timmy plus three marbles and a cupcake...Why don't we see this? (Bsides all the ethical and moral dilemmas that brings up) The fact that we don't observe this happening says that there is some type of inefficiency screwing up the market mechanism.

After thinking awhile we finally think we got it. It's similar to another problem involving cars and dealerships and why cars depreciate instantly once they're off the lot. Drumroll please... the Lemon Problem. The kid might be a lemon, and you'd be stuck.

Porn With a Purpose

Two European eco-crusaders are taking their love of nature to the extreme by running a porn site to raise money for the cause. "Everyone must try to create something good using what they have," said Tommy Hol Ellingsen, half of the provocative pair. "We had nothing, just our bodies." The site features hard-core videos of the eco-hippies (and their crunchy companions) getting nasty in a Norwegian clear-cut and other locales. But it also dishes out raw facts about environmental destruction. And talk about going green -- the couple has raised almost $100,000 by selling site memberships. Now the problem is finding nonprofit groups who aren't spooked by the money's illicit provenance. "What is morality when people are destroying the world?" asks Ellingsen, who calls some green groups "too boring."-- Lewis Wallace

I am wondering what they mean by "crunchy."

Courtesy of Wired News