It didn’t matter what Joe Biden did – pull the country out of a pandemic, dodge a recession, tame inflation, grow jobs, grow wages
Joe Biden didn't do any of those things. He took office with vaccines rolling out and the economy already stimulated enough to avoid a recession and drive further reductions in unemployment. Then he overstimulated it with the ARP, aggravating inflation, and refused to restart student loan repayments, further aggravating it. He hasn't really made any meaningful contributions to fighting inflation; that's been handled by the Federal Reserve, which operates independently.
Real wages are up about 2% in the 4 1/2 years since the beginning of 2020, compared to 3% in the first three years of the Trump administration. They're actually down since Biden took office, although that's largely an artifact of lower-paid workers being laid off disproportionately in 2020. As deep as my contempt for his irresponsible populist policies has been, I do concede that the anemic real wage growth under Biden may not be his fault; COVID was a major disruption that may well have put us on a permanently lower growth path. But he certainly can't claim it as a victory.
Mixed reviews. Seems like people like the game but hate the launcher.
I didn't love the launcher. But I only remember the game.
I also remember a lot of people complaining about the wall of separation between base game and DLC. It's not like Fallout or the Witcher, where you can find gear in the DLC and bring it back to the main game. You play the base game, and then you play the DLC, and you don't get any "rewards" for beating the DLC.
I guess I get it, but it doesn't really bother me. The journey is the reward.
Back in the mid 90s, when Sierra was having its last hurrah, I got King's Quest VII. It was no King's Quest VI, but IMO it's better than its reputation. I especially liked the background design. There was one particular area, the forest area at the bottom of this map, that really captured my imagination, especially the scene with the maiden statues.
A few years ago, I replayed it, and thought I might enjoy an open-world game with environments like that. So I got to wondering if there was an open-world game set in Ancient Greece. Sure enough, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey had been released a year or two earlier, and that's how I got into the AC series. I liked Odyssey a lot, but it wasn't quite what I had been looking for. It was (mostly) a realistic, or at least realistic-looking depiction of ancient Greece. What I had really wanted was kind of a cartoonish, fantasy version rooted in Greek Mythology.
And then like a year later Ubisoft made that game, too, and it was great! Immortals: Fenyx Rising was exactly what I had been looking for: A cartoonish, fantasy version of ancient Greece, full of marble statues, pink-leafed trees (well, in one area), and minotaurs, all narrated vaudeville-style by Zeus and Prometheus. I didn't know that I wanted that last part, but it turns out that I did.
It's clearly inspired by Breath of the Wild, which I still haven't played, so I can't compare and contrast, but in addition to the standard Ubisoft open-world formula, it has a bunch of environmental puzzles both out in the open world and in self-contained underworld areas. The puzzles were a bit easy, IMO, but there's a whole DLC full of harder puzzles. The approach they took to DLC was interesting. Instead of just doing more of the same, they had three very different DLCs:
1. Oops! All Puzzles!
2. Chinese knock-off.
3. Top-down brawler.
Overall, I don't think the DLCs lived up to the standard set by the base game, but it was a pretty high bar. They were all right.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have sold well enough for a sequel in a high-interest-rate environment; the sequel was a casualty of Ubisoft's decision to focus on its core properties.
I played through the whole series for the first time back in 2021-22, and I think they held up...well...well enough for me to play through the whole series. Even the black sheep like Unity and Syndicate were pretty good. The first one was the only one that felt like a bit of a slog.
Didn't care much for the management mini-games, which felt like a bit of a chore. For me, the appeal of AC is exploration, stealth, and (if you screw up the stealth) combat, not menu-based mobile games.
That is, people have about 11% more money to spend than they would have had if not for the excessive stimulus, and prices have, accordingly, risen about 11% more than they would have if inflation had stayed on its previous path.
"Well, people are just spending more because of greedflation!"
No. No matter how much prices increase, people can't spend more if they don't have more to spend. Under monopolistic pricing without excessive stimulus, what you would see is nominal consumption expenditures continuing along the pre-pandemic path while prices rose and real consumption spending fell. What we're seeing here is nominal consumption expenditures rising above the pre-pandemic path while real expenditures follow the pre-pandemic path. This is not consistent with the greedflation story, and is perfectly consistent with the excessive stimulus story.
The VP is far less likely to make a fool of herself to low information voters – her target audience
You can say that again. She was just out pandering to people stupid enough to believe the "greedflation" narrative. Can you imagine? How do those people even dress themselves, let alone find their way into a voting booth?
I don't see any good reason not to require considerably more community service than that. It's not like Seattle has any shortage of trash and graffiti to clean up, and they need to pay their debt to society.
I just looked it up, and apparently there were over 60,000 Jewish people in Seattle 10 years ago. I would not have guessed that there would be that many.
Democrats want us to know that they're very concerned that children aren't getting enough exposure to drag queens, and also that their opponents are weird.
Without making predictions about where the market is going, I get the sense that financial journalists haven't really adjusted to the DJIA getting up to the 40,000 range. They'll write about it falling a thousand points using words like "plummet" and "nosedive," but that's only 2.5%! A 1,000 point fall was a pretty big deal when it was at 14,000, but not so much at 40,000.
Suppose, purely hypothetically, of course, that journalists are not, in fact, a bunch of crypto-conservatives. How might we explain this behavior?
Well, maybe they wanted Biden out of the race and replaced with a younger candidate because they were concerned that the thing that actually happened might happen before the election, leading to a Trump victory. With Biden out, they could then focus on Trump's age without it backfiring due to Biden being even older.
Again, that's purely hypothetical. I'm sure that the NYT and NPR really are staffed with crypto-conservatives. Their plan to put Trump back in the White House by harping on Biden's age really blew up in their faces, didn't it?
there’s a fundamentally different weird between ‘guy talking about how kids should be able to vote but their parents get to do it for them’
I don't endorse this policy, but it does not strike me as any crazier than the status quo, where, e.g., people who have no understanding of economics are presumed competent to choose who will be setting economic policy, and a person who pays net zero taxes has just as much input into how taxes are spent as someone who pays millions of dollars per year in taxes.
I understand that "one adult, one vote" is the central dogma of our civic religion, but it's not like there's any rational basis for it.
Ironically, most of the Democrats complaining about Biden and Trump being too old were simping for Sanders when he was in his mid or late 70s. Republicans are right about Biden and Harris, of course, and about competence mattering more than age, but it takes some chutzpah to say that while backing Trump.
How would a false allegation of mass murder not be a blood libel?
I would expect, in a saner world, some sort of censure from one or both of the universities with which she is affiliated. In an even saner world, she would not have been affiliated with them in the first place.
Kimberle Crenshaw, one of the leading scholars of CRT, the originator of the concept of intersectionalism, and somehow a professor at both UCLA and Columbia, promotes a blood libel, exaggerating by multiple orders of magnitude the number of unarmed black women---and black women in general---killed by police.
There will be no consequences for this, because everybody already knows that CRT is charlatanism. Its entire purpose is to speak moral truths wholly unburdened by petty concerns about facts.
Calling Harris a DEI pick is neither racist nor incorrect, but it is beside the point. Biden explicitly promised to choose a female running mate, and given how batsh*t crazy Democrats went over race in 2020, it's hard to believe that her ancestry wasn't a major factor in the choice. It is, at the very least, a well-grounded suspicion.
But politics isn't like STEM. It doesn't select for the best and brightest, because voters don't want the best and brightest. Joe Biden is a mediocre white man, and if he had chosen a white male running mate, he would have been a mediocre white man, too. Constraining his choice to the 7-8% of the population who are women with substantial black ancestry didn't prevent him from choosing the best person for the job, because no one who was even close to being the best person for the job was ever on the table at all.
There's an archive of Eton King's Scholarship tests here; the question was from the General Paper I in 2011. It was one of a series of questions based on a passage from The Prince.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Is Harris Limiting Press Access Helping Her?”
The fate of democracy is on the line here, Jaybird. This is no time to be playing games!
"
Her policies are her scandals.
"
I guess that'll play well with low-info voters, but she's really testing my distaste for Trump.
"
Joe Biden didn't do any of those things. He took office with vaccines rolling out and the economy already stimulated enough to avoid a recession and drive further reductions in unemployment. Then he overstimulated it with the ARP, aggravating inflation, and refused to restart student loan repayments, further aggravating it. He hasn't really made any meaningful contributions to fighting inflation; that's been handled by the Federal Reserve, which operates independently.
Real wages are up about 2% in the 4 1/2 years since the beginning of 2020, compared to 3% in the first three years of the Trump administration. They're actually down since Biden took office, although that's largely an artifact of lower-paid workers being laid off disproportionately in 2020. As deep as my contempt for his irresponsible populist policies has been, I do concede that the anemic real wage growth under Biden may not be his fault; COVID was a major disruption that may well have put us on a permanently lower growth path. But he certainly can't claim it as a victory.
On “Open Mic for the week of 8/12/2024”
Second-generation and later Asian Americans are pretty good at it, too, and perhaps to a lesser extent white gentiles.
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Deeper into Assassin’s Creed 2”
Mixed reviews. Seems like people like the game but hate the launcher.
I didn't love the launcher. But I only remember the game.
I also remember a lot of people complaining about the wall of separation between base game and DLC. It's not like Fallout or the Witcher, where you can find gear in the DLC and bring it back to the main game. You play the base game, and then you play the DLC, and you don't get any "rewards" for beating the DLC.
I guess I get it, but it doesn't really bother me. The journey is the reward.
"
Back in the mid 90s, when Sierra was having its last hurrah, I got King's Quest VII. It was no King's Quest VI, but IMO it's better than its reputation. I especially liked the background design. There was one particular area, the forest area at the bottom of this map, that really captured my imagination, especially the scene with the maiden statues.
A few years ago, I replayed it, and thought I might enjoy an open-world game with environments like that. So I got to wondering if there was an open-world game set in Ancient Greece. Sure enough, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey had been released a year or two earlier, and that's how I got into the AC series. I liked Odyssey a lot, but it wasn't quite what I had been looking for. It was (mostly) a realistic, or at least realistic-looking depiction of ancient Greece. What I had really wanted was kind of a cartoonish, fantasy version rooted in Greek Mythology.
And then like a year later Ubisoft made that game, too, and it was great! Immortals: Fenyx Rising was exactly what I had been looking for: A cartoonish, fantasy version of ancient Greece, full of marble statues, pink-leafed trees (well, in one area), and minotaurs, all narrated vaudeville-style by Zeus and Prometheus. I didn't know that I wanted that last part, but it turns out that I did.
It's clearly inspired by Breath of the Wild, which I still haven't played, so I can't compare and contrast, but in addition to the standard Ubisoft open-world formula, it has a bunch of environmental puzzles both out in the open world and in self-contained underworld areas. The puzzles were a bit easy, IMO, but there's a whole DLC full of harder puzzles. The approach they took to DLC was interesting. Instead of just doing more of the same, they had three very different DLCs:
1. Oops! All Puzzles!
2. Chinese knock-off.
3. Top-down brawler.
Overall, I don't think the DLCs lived up to the standard set by the base game, but it was a pretty high bar. They were all right.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have sold well enough for a sequel in a high-interest-rate environment; the sequel was a casualty of Ubisoft's decision to focus on its core properties.
"
I played through the whole series for the first time back in 2021-22, and I think they held up...well...well enough for me to play through the whole series. Even the black sheep like Unity and Syndicate were pretty good. The first one was the only one that felt like a bit of a slog.
Didn't care much for the management mini-games, which felt like a bit of a chore. For me, the appeal of AC is exploration, stealth, and (if you screw up the stealth) combat, not menu-based mobile games.
On “Open Mic for the week of 8/12/2024”
The "greedflation" conspiracy theory debunked in two charts:
Nominal personal consumption expenditures are up about 11% over the pre-pandemic trend line. You know what else is up 11% over the pre-pandemic trend line? The personal consumption expenditures price index.
That is, people have about 11% more money to spend than they would have had if not for the excessive stimulus, and prices have, accordingly, risen about 11% more than they would have if inflation had stayed on its previous path.
"Well, people are just spending more because of greedflation!"
No. No matter how much prices increase, people can't spend more if they don't have more to spend. Under monopolistic pricing without excessive stimulus, what you would see is nominal consumption expenditures continuing along the pre-pandemic path while prices rose and real consumption spending fell. What we're seeing here is nominal consumption expenditures rising above the pre-pandemic path while real expenditures follow the pre-pandemic path. This is not consistent with the greedflation story, and is perfectly consistent with the excessive stimulus story.
"
You can say that again. She was just out pandering to people stupid enough to believe the "greedflation" narrative. Can you imagine? How do those people even dress themselves, let alone find their way into a voting booth?
"
I don't see any good reason not to require considerably more community service than that. It's not like Seattle has any shortage of trash and graffiti to clean up, and they need to pay their debt to society.
I just looked it up, and apparently there were over 60,000 Jewish people in Seattle 10 years ago. I would not have guessed that there would be that many.
On “Group Discussion: The Return of the Jorts”
"By OT Editors"
What's the opposite of the royal we?
On “Tim Walz Tapped to be VP Kamala Harris Running Mate”
Democrats want us to know that they're very concerned that children aren't getting enough exposure to drag queens, and also that their opponents are weird.
On “Tim Walz announced as Kamala Harris’s running mate”
She risks losing the TikTok vote if she's seen getting too chummy with a Jew.
"
Liberal and socialist are opposites. I will die on this hill.
On “Asian Markets Have A Horrible Monday, US Markets Set For Fall”
Without making predictions about where the market is going, I get the sense that financial journalists haven't really adjusted to the DJIA getting up to the 40,000 range. They'll write about it falling a thousand points using words like "plummet" and "nosedive," but that's only 2.5%! A 1,000 point fall was a pretty big deal when it was at 14,000, but not so much at 40,000.
On “Open Mic for the week of 8/5/2024”
Suppose, purely hypothetically, of course, that journalists are not, in fact, a bunch of crypto-conservatives. How might we explain this behavior?
Well, maybe they wanted Biden out of the race and replaced with a younger candidate because they were concerned that the thing that actually happened might happen before the election, leading to a Trump victory. With Biden out, they could then focus on Trump's age without it backfiring due to Biden being even older.
Again, that's purely hypothetical. I'm sure that the NYT and NPR really are staffed with crypto-conservatives. Their plan to put Trump back in the White House by harping on Biden's age really blew up in their faces, didn't it?
On “The Race Is On, And It’s Getting Weird”
An assumption that makes no sense.
"
I don't endorse this policy, but it does not strike me as any crazier than the status quo, where, e.g., people who have no understanding of economics are presumed competent to choose who will be setting economic policy, and a person who pays net zero taxes has just as much input into how taxes are spent as someone who pays millions of dollars per year in taxes.
I understand that "one adult, one vote" is the central dogma of our civic religion, but it's not like there's any rational basis for it.
On “Open Mic for the week of 7/29/2024”
Ironically, most of the Democrats complaining about Biden and Trump being too old were simping for Sanders when he was in his mid or late 70s. Republicans are right about Biden and Harris, of course, and about competence mattering more than age, but it takes some chutzpah to say that while backing Trump.
"
How would a false allegation of mass murder not be a blood libel?
I would expect, in a saner world, some sort of censure from one or both of the universities with which she is affiliated. In an even saner world, she would not have been affiliated with them in the first place.
"
Did his administration just call its own plan "bold?"
"
Kimberle Crenshaw, one of the leading scholars of CRT, the originator of the concept of intersectionalism, and somehow a professor at both UCLA and Columbia, promotes a blood libel, exaggerating by multiple orders of magnitude the number of unarmed black women---and black women in general---killed by police.
https://x.com/sandylocks/status/1818334908382588985
There will be no consequences for this, because everybody already knows that CRT is charlatanism. Its entire purpose is to speak moral truths wholly unburdened by petty concerns about facts.
On “None Dare Call It A Conspiracy, Because It Wasn’t”
Calling Harris a DEI pick is neither racist nor incorrect, but it is beside the point. Biden explicitly promised to choose a female running mate, and given how batsh*t crazy Democrats went over race in 2020, it's hard to believe that her ancestry wasn't a major factor in the choice. It is, at the very least, a well-grounded suspicion.
But politics isn't like STEM. It doesn't select for the best and brightest, because voters don't want the best and brightest. Joe Biden is a mediocre white man, and if he had chosen a white male running mate, he would have been a mediocre white man, too. Constraining his choice to the 7-8% of the population who are women with substantial black ancestry didn't prevent him from choosing the best person for the job, because no one who was even close to being the best person for the job was ever on the table at all.
On “Eton’s Ethically Equivocal Entrance Exam Essay”
There's an archive of Eton King's Scholarship tests here; the question was from the General Paper I in 2011. It was one of a series of questions based on a passage from The Prince.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.