Quotulatiousness

March 11, 2015

“Some of our contractors worked a ridiculous amount of genitalia into the background”

Filed under: Business, Gaming — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:55

I’d expect some legal action is pending over this little contracting embarrassment for Undead Labs:

Undead Lab’s State of Decay became a cult hit when it released back in 2013. Last year, the developer announced State of Decay: Year One Survival Edition. This updated iteration packs in previously released DLC along with a 1080p graphical overhaul. And once the visuals became clearer, developer Undead Labs realized their contracted help for the game hid an abundance of phalluses in the game.

While working on State of Decay, Undead Labs hired contractors to help build some of the backgrounds. For reasons unknown, those contractors scattered a collage of genitalia across the backgrounds. However, the original version of the game was a low enough resolution that the naughty bits flew under the testing radar.

“Some of our contractors worked a ridiculous amount of genitalia into the background,” says Geoffrey Card, senior designer at Undead Labs in an interview with XBLA Fans.

H/T to John Ryan for the link.

Venezuela, then and now

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Kevin D. Williamson looks to the not-too-distant past to see how Venezuela got into the economic disaster they’re currently facing:

Venezuela had a good run of it for about five minutes there, at least in public-relations terms. When petroleum prices were booming, all it took was a few gallons of heating oil from Hugo Chávez to buy the extravagant praise of House members, with Representative Chaka Fattah (D., Philadelphia) issuing statements praising Venezuela’s state-run oil company “and the Venezuelan people for their benevolence.” Lest anybody feel creeped out by running political errands for a brutal and repressive caudillo, Joseph Kennedy — son of Senator Robert Kennedy — proclaimed that refusing the strongman’s patronage would be “a crime against humanity.” Kennedy was at the time the director of Citizens Energy, which had a contract to help distribute that Venezuelan heating oil — Boss Hugo was a brute, but he understood American politics.

Celebrities came to sit at his feet, with Sean Penn calling him a “champion” of the world’s poor, Oliver Stone celebrating him as “a great hero,” Antonio Banderas citing his seizure of private businesses as a model to be emulated in the rest of the world, Michael Moore praising his use of oil for political purposes, Danny Glover celebrating him as a “champion of democracy.” His successor, Nicolás Maduro, continued in the Chávez vein, and even as basics such as food and toilet paper disappeared the American Left hailed him as a hero, with Jesse Myerson, Rolling Stone’s fashionable uptown communist, calling his economic program “basically terrific.” Some of the more old-fashioned liberals at The New Republic voiced concern about Venezuela’s sham democracy, its unlimited executive authority, political repression, the hunting down of government critics, the stacking of elections and the government’s perpetrating violence inside polling places — but Myerson insisted that Venezuela’s “electoral system’s integrity puts the U.S.’s to abject shame.” Never mind that opposition leaders there are hauled off to military prison after midnight raids.

Vice President Biden, who can always be counted on to cut straight to the heart of any political question, ran into Maduro in Brazil and, noting the potentate’s thick mane, commented: “If I had your hair, I’d be president of the United States.” Tragically for the Sage of Delaware, hair transplants don’t work that way.

That is all going down the memory hole. The Obama administration has announced economic sanctions on Venezuela’s rulers and its intelligence agents, citing the “erosion of human-rights guarantees” – erosion, as though this were something new, as though Hugo Chávez hadn’t been a tyrant back when President Obama’s ally Representative Fattah was carrying his political water all over the eastern seaboard. In the New York Times’ account of Venezuela’s woes and Maduro’s misrule, there is no mention at all of the critical role the American Left played in lending legitimacy to Chavismo, of the so-called liberals and progressives who denounced legitimate protests against Maduro’s brutality as nefarious U.S.-backed coup attempts, who remained — and remain — silent on the regime’s censorship, political repression, torture, and economic incompetence. William Neuman of the Times did find an economist — a leftist economist, he assures us — who went so far as to say that certain aspects of the Chávez program “needed to be revised or even discarded to set the nation’s economy on the right track.”

Something that cannot go on forever, will not go on forever

Filed under: Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Ace of Spades H.Q., Monty brings the weekly DOOM post:

Boomers fret that their kids are ruining their retirements. Millennials, meanwhile, fret that their parents and grandparents are ruining their futures. That’s the reality of the welfare state, babies: it pits those who fund the government cheese against those who receive it. The welfare state was always a game of musical chairs, and it may be Millennials who are left standing when the music stops. Or they may wise up and just refuse to play the game any more.

I often catch heat for bashing on Boomers in this space, but mostly I’m trying to point out that the problem will require everybody to accept some unsavory truths. Boomers being mad at the young ‘uns, the young ‘uns being mad at the Boomers: they’re both getting mad at the wrong people. The problem is with the federal government, and at some point everybody is going to have to accept that the promises made by this corrupt bunch of assholes cannot be kept, and it’s morally wrong to burden future generations to pay for these lies.

For older people, the problem is one of sunk costs: we have to accept that much of the money we “paid in” to the welfare state was summarily squandered. There is no giant pile of money sitting in a vault somewhere. There is only an ocean of debt. For younger people, it’s a matter of accepting that a 65-year-old retiree can’t simply turn on a dime and reverse a lifetime’s worth of decision-making. Decisions driven by rules and incentives prevailing at the time the decisions were made. (In retirement planning as in investing more generally, uncertainty is the worst enemy.)

The perverse actions of the federal government over the past sixty or seventy years have put retirees fundamentally at odds with younger workers — the incentives are completely inverted depending on which group you happen to be in. It is this aspect of the welfare state that I loathe the most: the fracturing of familial and generational bonds, the mortgaging of the lives and labor of children (and generations yet unborn) who are being given no say in the matter. One of the absolute bedrock principles of liberty — political, social, cultural — is consent, and our children did not consent to have these burdens placed upon them.

Ultimately, a new compact between old and young is going to have to be forged. Young people need to understand that retirees, as a rule, didn’t choose to be put in the spot they’re in. Retirees need to understand that it’s morally wrong to expect young people to forgo their own financial futures to finance the retirements of their elders. There needs to be an understanding among all adults, young and old, that “fair” is no longer in the cards. We have been cheated, all of us, and the money is long gone. The best we can do now is mitigate the consequences of the fraud perpetrated on us. But the first step in that mitigation process is accepting that the status quo is unsustainable … and ethically reprehensible.

China’s “Catch up” growth

Filed under: China, Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

In Forbes, Tim Worstall looks at last week’s announcement that China is (slightly) lowering their economic growth forecast.

On that larger scale though what people are worrying about is this. Catch up growth is easier than growth from the technological frontier. What is meant by this is that it’s a great deal easier to generate economic growth if you have an example in front of you of how to do things. To take a trivial example, if you can go and buy a mobile phone, take it apart to see how it works, it’s a lot easier to copy that technology than it is to invent it for the first time. And this is true of how you make cement, how you put up buildings, how you farm a field and so on. And at root that’s what economic growth is: becoming more efficient at doing all of these things as well as everything else. Each time you become more efficient at doing one task you free up resources to be doing something else. Thus you get both the original thing plus the new one from the same resources: this is the very definition of economic growth.

However, there’s a limit to such catch up growth. In certain areas China is right at that technological frontier (in some areas ahead of the rest of the world in fact). Which is where things become more difficult: there’s no one to copy. Therefore that invention has to happen domestically. This is obviously more difficult. But also it rather requires a certain set of institutions. The rule of law, property rights and so on. These aren’t things that China notably has (although things are very much better than they were decades ago). It’s those headwinds that need to be beaten. Bringing in these new institutions, embedding them in the society and the economy, without causing so much disruption as to slow down growth while they are done.

The standard jargon for this is “middle income trap”. To be crude about it the general feeling is that it’s pretty easy to go from dirt poor to middling income. The essence is really just to stop doing stupid things that hold economic development back. China’s done that very well even though they did start from a very low level of an immense number of very stupid things that Maoism did to hold economic growth back. The middle income trap is where the transition over to those institutions that promote technological frontier growth don’t appear (or are not imposed). And thus the stunning growth peters out.

QotD: Inequality

Filed under: Economics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The left has a habit of framing “inequality” (their current social-justice hobbyhorse) in economic terms, which is fortunate because it makes debunking their nonsense easier. The left’s fundamental bit of chicanery lies in their failure to define “inequality” in any rigorous way. This is very intentional, for it allows them to frame inequality however they please — generally in the usual race/gender/class terms and using money as a yardstick. Rich white men have too much money; poor brown people (especially poor female brown people) have too little; therefore equality demands a reapportioning of the money so everybody has more or less the same amount. This is not socialism, they insist (bizarrely, given that this is pretty much the textbook definition of socialism). This is fairness.

[…]

Ultimately, the left’s vision of “equality” is not an empowering vision; it is a cramped and stingy philosophy of reduced expectations and lowered hopes. The unspoken (but never unclear) theme is that it is the State, not individuals or families, who should own and dispense of wealth. A happy man, in the view of the left, is one who receives money from the State and then spends it on consumption with no thought given to the future (for the future belongs to the State). Legacy is what the State says it is. The citizen should always be a creature of the now, concerned with nothing but short-term needs and gratifications, and with no allegiances beyond the vital one to the State.

Monty, “Wealth as an end and wealth as means to an end”, Ace of Spades HQ, 2014-06-24.

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