More math mistakes

According to a picture that is making the rounds on Facebook, Halliburton will make enough money to pay off a $200,000 fine in "just 23 seconds".

$200,000 per 23 seconds is $274 billion per year. The "23 seconds" number appears to come from an article in the Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/26/halliburton-fine_n_3659293.html

This article claimed it uses the 2012 revenue numbers. However, Halliburton's revenues are actually only about $28.5 billion per year:

http://www.halliburton.com/public/news/pubsdata/press_release/2013/Q412_Earnings_Release.pdf

The Health Care Law

So, a couple weeks ago was the Supreme Court decision about whether the individual mandate to buy health insurance in PPACA (also known as Obamacare) was constitutional. It turns out, it is, but not for the reasons you might expect.

There were basically two main issues. One is where the "Commerce Clause" - the power given to the federal government by the Constitution to regulate "interstate commerce" - covers the health care law. The other was whether, even if the Commerce Clause doesn't apply, the individual mandate can also be considered constitutional because it is a tax, and thus falls under the government's power to levy taxes.

It was a close 5-4 decision in favor of the law, and the swing voter, Chief Justice John Roberts, wrote in his opinion that the Commerce Clause does not apply, because in order to "regulate interstate commerce" there first has to be commerce to regulate, and people who don't want to buy health insurance are those that are not engaging in any relevant commerce in the first place. One counter-argument to this is that people who aren't insured will still eventually need health care and end up "engaging in commerce" sticking others with the tab. Roberts rejects this argument, because the fact that someone might engage in commerce at some point in the future doesn't justify forcing him to now. For instance, all of us will buy food at some point in the future, and the government can regulate food sales, but the government can't force me to go to the grocery store right now and buy a specific food item.

However, Roberts does cast the deciding vote in favor of the law's constitutionality on the grounds of the Taxing Clause - that it can be viewed as a tax on not having health insurance, and the government has the power to levy taxes. PPACA states that anyone who does not have health insurance must pay money to the IRS along with their normal federal taxes. Although PPACA does not call it a "tax" - it calls it both a "penalty" and a "shared responsibility payment"*, legal precedent requires that "every reasonable construction must be resorted to in order to save a statute from unconstitutionality" - i.e. if you could make the statute constitutional by re-wording it a bit, then it's constitutional.

One issue that was not discussed in the opinions was the following. Let's say that instead of saying that you have to pay a penalty of $X if you don't buy insurance, the law just raised everyone's taxes by $X across the board, and additionally said that if you do buy insurance, you get a reduction in $X on your taxes. That certainly seems like another "reasonable construction" that is functionally equivalent to the existing law. And it is very clearly constitutional: The government obviously has the power to raise taxes, and the government gives tax breaks to encourage you to buy/do certain things all the time (buy a house, get married, etc.) and nobody claims those are unconstitutional. (I am not the only one to notice this.)

As far as the Commerce Clause part goes, a major argument against constitutionality was as follows. The idea of the individual mandate is that people not buying health insurance imposes increased health care costs on others, so the government can mandate that people buy health insurance. So by that logic, since people eating unhealthy foods also increases health care costs, that means the government can mandate that everyone buy fruits and vegetables. (One version of the argument specifically mentions broccoli, although that was not part of the final opinion.) And since the government mandating that everyone buy broccoli is clearly an unconstitutional government overreach, mandating that everyone buy health insurance is similarly unconstitutional.

Here's my response to that argument:

First of all, why is it so obvious that the government forcing us to buy broccoli is unconstitutional? Again, suppose the government were to raise our taxes, use the proceeds to buy broccoli, and then provide it to us for free. Clearly each step in this process is constitutional, and the result is economically equivalent to making us buy broccoli, except with extra overhead.

But a better way of analyzing this question might be to think about why we have constitutional limits on government power in the first place. The point of such limits isn't to prevent the government from doing anything that might be a bad idea. There are lots of things the government can do that are clearly bad ideas (say, raising everybody's tax rate to 100%) but that the government clearly has the power to do. The thing that protects against these kind of bad policies is that if politicians enact bad policies, their constituents can vote them out (of course, it's not clear how well that incentive works, but at least that's the theory.)

Rather, the purpose of constitutional limits is to stop the government from doing things that are politically popular (or are inclined to do anyway for other reasons) despite being bad ideas. In other words, things that we expect the government to be over-eager to do in comparison with the actual merits. For example, consider free speech. We know that governments can be particularly eager to restrict speech, both because such restrictions can be politically popular in the short term (especially since it can be hard politically to defend the right of people to engage in unpopular speech without appearing to endorse the content of the speech) and because it can be used to squelch criticism of government. That is why it is important to make sure that the government can't easily prohibit speech. Another example is the prohibition against unlawful searches and seizures (and other limits on police power.) We know that police would likely search more intrusively than is warranted in the absence of such protections (again, because most decisions about how to search are made by individual police officers, who are not as subject to political discipline, and because it can be difficult politically to advocate for less intrusive searches without being accused of helping criminals) so it makes sense to have those limits.

So, is the power to force people to buy things a power that government has the tendency to overuse? I don't think so (at least, not more so than other government powers that nobody claims are unconstitutional). The main argument that I tend to see for why the government would overuse the power to force people to buy things is that it could be used to give favors to special interest groups. For example, if Big Broccoli gives a lot of money in campaign contributions, it could "buy" a law that forces people to buy broccoli, irrespective of its actual merits. However, I think that the risk of this happening is significantly LESS than the risk of providing favors in other ways (e.g., subsidies to broccoli producers), because forced purchases are a significantly MORE transparent and publicly visible way of providing political favors than are other methods such as tax breaks and subsidies.

In other words, if the government is going to give away political favors to Big Broccoli, I would much rather that they do it by making everyone buy broccoli, because that way everyone will know what is happening, and we can have a political discussion and ensure accountability. In contrast, giving political favors the current way (like hidden tax breaks and subsidies) is much more problematic, because most people don't know who is being given what special favors, so there isn't as much political accountability.

But anyway, I am glad that the health care bill has passed and been ruled constitutional, so that we can find out what's in it.**

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*I really have to find a clever way to use this wonderfully euphemistic name for a tax. Maybe in Dungeons and Dragons, when the evil king taxes his people to get money to raise an undead army to conquer the world, he could call the tax a "shared responsibility payment." I mean, raising corpses from the dead counts as health care, right?

**I think that Pelosi has a very good point here, even if she expressed it using a poor choice of words. Before the law is actually implemented, it is very easy to come up with all sorts of scare stories - like the whole "death panel" thing and stuff. But once it is actually implemented, after a few years we will be able to tell whether any of those scare stories came to pass. I believe that once we actually see how it works, people will like it. I mean, my understanding is that most people who are on Medicare like it, even if they don't realize it's a government program.

Credit checks and employment

An article from the Fort Collins Coloradoan caught my eye, in part because it deals with a similar issue to the "avoid ghetto" GPS app: whether giving more information can make people worse off.

The article discusses efforts by Colorado lawmakers to prohibit businesses from running credit checks on prospective employees and using the results in hiring decisions. Obviously, the reason employers run these credit checks in the first place is because they think the people with better credit tend to be more responsible and thus better workers, as well as being less likely to steal from the till. The argument for banning such checks is that they can create an "unemployable class" of people because people can't improve their credit without income and can't get a job unless they have good credit, and also that it's possible to have bad credit even if you are financially responsible (say because of a layoff).

The readers' comments are predictable. Most of them say that it's just wrong for employers to "discriminate" based on credit checks, while there is a minority view that the government should not have a right to tell businesses how they can make hiring decisions. (I would like to point out the comment by Jeff Emmel, in the first category, which blames the problem on "too many people chasing too few jobs." If true, this seems to negate the idea that credit checks are the problem. If there are N people looking for a job and there are M openings, then at least N-M people will fail to get a job, regardless of what methods are used to screen applicants.)

Here is my analysis. A traditional economist would likely say something like the following:

If credit checks really provided no useful information about the quality of an employee, businesses would have no reason to use them. Any business that did use them anyway for whatever reason would face a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace because they would be screening out qualified employees, and a business that didn't use credit checks could gain an advantage by grabbing all the good employees that were rejected by others. Thus, if the practice really has no benefits, there is no need for a law against it; it will die out naturally. If it doesn't die out, that is evidence that it is in fact providing useful information.

Of course, exactly the same argument was made with race, gender, etc. discrimination laws, and look how that turned out. But this case is different. The difference with racial discrimination was that customers had a preference against minority employees so businesses reacted to that, but we needed to get minority employees into restaurants and stores so that people would learn to overcome their prejudice. In this case, customers neither know nor care about the credit histories of the employees with whom they interact. Also, credit checks are a relatively new thing in employment, so unlike the issue with race discrimination, we're not starting from a status quo where everyone discriminates so nobody has a chance to realize what they're missing out on.

One could argue that it really is true that people with poor credit tend to not be as good workers, but that there's a public benefit to giving those people jobs that outweighs any harm done to employers. This position is not unreasonable; after all, someone who is consistently poor does cost society money to maintain because they are more likely to need welfare and other social services. But it is important to realize that this argument only applies if there is a greater public benefit to giving a poor-credit person a job than giving whoever the replacement would be a job. And most importantly, if there really is a public benefit to giving particular people or classes of people jobs, a better way to do it is with subsidies and incentives targeted at that group and let businesses decide whether the incentive is worth the cost, rather than through the indirect way of banning credit checks.

However, I can also think of several counter-arguments to the above.

1. It may be true that the practice will die out eventually if it is not providing useful information, but that could take a significant amount of time. In the meantime, many people will still be affected.

2. Let's say that half the people who have poor credit really are financially irresponsible, but the other half have poor credit for reasons completely out of their control. Then it makes sense from the businesses' perspective to avoid the risk, but the innocent half is still caught in the crossfire. (However, the arguments in the last paragraph above still apply.)

3. Suppose that it is possible to "manipulate" your credit rating*. Then everyone will manipulate their rating in order to get a better chance, but of course all this manipulation is a zero-sum signaling game, so it's a waste of effort. (If everyone manipulates their rating up by X points, then everyone is still in the same order so it gives exactly the same information as before, but nobody ends up better off.)

4. As for the comparison to racial/gender discrimination laws, there's another consideration which cuts the other direction. One problem originally identified with racial/gender discrimination laws was that it's essentially impossible for a business to prevent itself from obtaining information about an applicant's or employee's race or gender. Thus, for instance, a business might want to fire an unproductive worker but might have a difficult/expensive time proving in court that the firing was not because of race/gender, so it might decide not to. In contrast, it is very easy for a business to avoid obtaining information about an employee's credit history, so this is a non-issue.

5. It may be possible that there is a public benefit to giving jobs to certain classes of people - which tend to overlap with the people who have lower credit scores - but the first-best solution of "subsidies and incentives targeted at that group" is impractical due to other constraints such as political feasibility. So banning credit checks could be a good "second-best" solution.

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Perhaps surprisingly (but maybe not), very few of the comments in the article itself or the reader's comments directly address any of the questions above. I wonder why?





*This "manipulation" need not be anything shady or illegitimate. The only thing relevant for this analysis is that the "manipulation" has no relevant effect other than improving your credit score. Given all the advice about "how to improve your credit score" that you can find all over the place, it's very likely that this type of "manipulation" is possible.

Oil subsidies

The article "Time To Put An End to Big Oil Subsidies" by Allen Greenberg, in the Northern Colorado Business Report, draws a contrast between farmers, who have stated their willingness to forgo subsidies in a time of high deficits, and oil companies, who want to keep their subsidies. While I generally agree with Greenberg's position that oil subsidies should be reduced or eliminated, there is one sentence in there that does not make much sense: "it should be easy to recognize that subsidizing a profitable business simply makes no business sense." This does not seem correct to me. The point of subsidizing something is to increase the maount of it, so it can potentially make sense to subsidize anything you want to increase the amount of - whether it is currently profitable does not enter into it. (In particular, assuming efficient markets, in an equilibrium condition any productive activity has a net profit of exactly zero on the margin - if the marginal profit was positive, people would do more of it; if the marginal profit was negative, people would be doing less of it. Putting in a subsidy makes it more profitable, which leads people to do more of it until it's not more profitable anymore.)

Also, a policy of only subsidizing activities which are currently unprofitable could easily have perverse effects. For instance, companies might deliberately try to be less efficient so that they would be "unprofitable" and thus deserving of subsidies.

EDIT: Link to article is here.

There's an App for That?

Recently, Apple has come under criticism for contracting with Chinese electronics manufacturer Foxconn to produce iPhones, because Foxconn allegedly provides its workers with poor working conditions. This claim is disputed: for instance, critics point to several incidents of Foxconn employees committing suicide, but the overall suicide rate among Foxconn workers is less than the national average. Many consumers are demanding that Apple stop using Foxconn as a supplier until Foxconn improves its employees' working conditions.

However, the thing I want to talk about here is slightly different - imagine if the roles were reversed. For instance, let's say that it was a large European company with an American supplier, and the European company's customers thought it was horrific that not all Americans have health insurance, so they demanded that they cut ties with all American suppliers that don't offer their employees full health insurance. What do you think our reaction would be? Probably something along the lines of "What right do those people overseas have to dictate to us what our health policy should be?" (I mean, that's a significant part of the response to the U.S. government's attempts to mandate health insurance; just imagine if it were foreigners trying to pressure us in this way.) It seems like a similar argument could be applied to the actual situation: "We in the United States have no right to dictate to the Chinese what their employment policies should look like. If the Chinese don't like their current employment laws, they can change them. True, it might be the case that their political system doesn't give employees enough power to organize and change the laws, but it's not our place to make that judgement." (Again, imagine the reaction in the U.S. if foreigners said that U.S. companies should be boycotted because the U.S. political system has problems.)

Shipping Jobs Overseas?

One of the members of our local Belegarth group, John Degraffenreid, is running for Congress as an independent candidate. One of the planks of his platform (direct link won't work; click on "Platform" then "Trade") is that it is "time to hold corporations accountable for moving jobs overseas" and that American corporations should be required to pay overseas workers a "fair wage" to protect other countries from being "taken advantage of" and to eliminate the advantage of "moving jobs overseas."

Of course, most economists would say that most "moving jobs overseas" is actually a net benefit because each country can specialize in what it produces best, thus improving overall output - i.e., if a company saves money by "moving jobs overseas" and importing products rather than producing them in the U.S., that just creates jobs for the people in the U.S. that produce exports to exchange for the imports, and this analysis is not affected by whether the reduced costs are caused by the overseas workers being "taken advantage of". Of course, this argument has been discussed to death, and I don't really have anything new or interesting to say about it.

What I find more interesting is the implied moral claim that there is something blameworthy about a corporation "moving jobs overseas", such that the corporation needs to be held "accountable" for it. (Of course, I'm not picking on Degraffenreid here; lots of the public and politicians seem to have similar view, which is part of why I find this interesting.) Consider the following two cases:

A. Acme Corporation currently employs 100 American workers. It has an opportunity to expand into a new market and hire 50 more American workers, but instead decides to stay its current size.

B. Acme Corporation currently employs 100 American workers. It has an opportunity to expand into a new market and hire 50 more American workers, but instead it builds a factory in Pakistan and hires 200 Pakistani workers instead because it is cheaper.

I doubt very many people would say that in case (A) Acme Corporation did anything blameworthy, but in case (B) they would say that Acme Corporation was "shipping jobs overseas." But in either case, the change in number of American workers was exactly the same - zero. What principle could justify the difference? You can't just say that corporations have a responsibility to hire as many American workers as possible, because that would make (A) as blameworthy as (B). One possibility is to say that corporations have a responsibility NOT to hire foreign workers, but that seems hard to justify. Why is giving an American worker a job good but giving a Pakistani worker a job bad? I can understand why Americans value other Americans more than they do Pakistanis, but I don't understand why people would put a negative value on Pakistani jobs.

One possibility is that people think that Pakistani workers aren't actually being helped by the new jobs. But that doesn't make sense, because if the new jobs were really inferior to whatever they would be doing in the absence of the new jobs, then why would anyone take the new jobs? Another possibility is that people think that corporations have a responsibility to hire foreign workers AND pay them well, so that their lot would be improved by even more than before. But that doesn't explain attitudes like Degraffenreid's, since he says (probably correctly) that making American firms pay foreign workers more will induce them to hire fewer foreign workers. (Unless the idea is that it is better to help a few foreign workers a lot than to help a lot of foreign workers a little each.)

Possibly a better explanation might be to go back to the principle that "American companies have an obligation to hire as many American workers as possible", and explain the reluctance of people to assign blame in case (A) a different way. One possible explanation would be that my premise (that people don't assign blame in cases like A) is false. After all, people do sometimes consider companies blameworthy when they lay off workers, and Barack Obama did exhort companies to start investing and spending more if they had the money to do it. Another explanation might be that people think that (A) is theoretically blameworthy, it's just that "not expanding as much as you can" is much less visible than "opening up factories in foreign countries".

Here is another question: let's say that reforms designed to "bring jobs home" were implemented, and because of that, corporations pulled their investments out of Pakistan and brought them "back home" to the United States. In that situation, would Pakistanis be right to complain that the corporations are "sending jobs overseas" back to the United States? If so, then why does a corporation that operates in both the U.S. and Pakistan have greater obligations to American workers than to Pakistani workers? If not, then what is the relevant distinction?

Finally, consider the following third case:

(C) Acme Corporation currently employs 100 American workers. It sees room to expand and hire 50 more American workers. Instead, it buys more machinery to make each worker more productive, so that it doesn't need to hire any new workers.

I think most people would think there's nothing wrong with (C); or at least much less wrong with (C) than with (B). Sometimes people do lament the fact that technology puts people out of work, but certainly I have never heard any politician saying that we have to slow down progress on labor-saving technology in order to preserve jobs. But in both cases (B) and (C) you are choosing an option that allows you to hire fewer American workers in order to reduce costs. So a general principle that "it's wrong to hire fewer workers just so you can reduce costs" is not the driving force here.

A possibility is that there is some sort of (implicit) cost-benefit analysis going on. That is, people think that reducing costs is a legitimate benefit, but that it has to be balanced against the (perceived) costs of putting people out of work. With labor-saving technology, it's really obvious that the benefits are enormous: if we had never developed any labor-saving technology whatsoever, we would still be hunter-gatherers living in caves. But with international trade, the benefits are a lot less obvious, so it is easier for people to think that the costs exceed the benefits.

Of course, a lot of this is just speculation, and I don't know what the right answer is. I found an interesting web site called "Experimental Philosophy" that discusses research where they do surveys to ask people these types of questions in order to understand how people actually form judgements about these questions (like what makes someone morally responsible for something, or when it makes sense to say that someone "intended" for something to happen.) Reading that web site is part of what gave me the idea to think about this issue in this way, although I don't see any posts on that web site that discuss political/economic questions like this one. Also see here for a related discussion about "moving overseas" and moral responsibility (although I think that discusses a slightly different issue).

Saving Green By Going Green, Followup

Today, I sent the following letter to my congressman Cory Gardner:

I am writing to urge you to vote against the TRAIN Act, which will delay implementation of key environmental protections that could save thousands of lives. While proponents of the TRAIN Act claim that they are interested in ensuring that the benefits of regulation exceed the economic costs, their actual actions clearly show that this is not what they are concerned about. First of all, the EPA already does cost-benefit analyses of its regulations. If TRAIN Act proponents believe these analyses are flawed, why wouldn't they just fix them, rather than wasting time starting all over? Second, the latest version of the TRAIN Act explicitly blocks the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule and Mercury and Air Toxics standards. If proponents were really interested in making an honest inquiry as to the costs and benefits, why would they write into the bill what conclusions they want before even doing the analysis? Finally, the pro-pollution lobby's own words prove their dishonesty. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a key pro-polluter lobbying group, on the front page of its website (www.americaspower.org) states that proposed EPA regulations would "eliminate more than a million American jobs". However, if you click through to their own analysis you will find that is not true - they actually claim it will eliminate 1.4 million "job-years", totaled over an 8-year period, which is not the same thing. If the pro-polluter lobby can't even get basic facts straight, why should we believe anything they say?

I'm not too hopeful as to what Gardner will think about this issue, given that he is a staunch conservative and as far as I can tell from his votes, has hasn't voted on the pro-environment side on any recent bills. I don't see anything on his web site where he supports "protecting the environment." However, one of the proposals he supports, the Business Cycle Balanced Budget Amendment, says it will "force government to budget itself in a countercyclical manner", which actually makes economic sense. However, the actual proposal says that the budget limit for each year is an (inflation-adjusted) average of revenues for the past three years, and I don't think that's what "countercyclical" means.

Saving Green by Going Green ... Or Is It?

Today, I received an email from the Environmental Defense Fund urging me to protect clean air by calling my congressman and urging him to vote against the TRAIN Act, a law that will create an independent committee do do cost-benefit analyses of new EPA regulations before implementation. Opponents of the bill argue that it is unnecessary because the EPA already does cost-benefit analyses of its regulations and the new law would just duplicate that effort and delay implementation of the regulations. On the other hand, proponents say that the EPA analyses may be biased (after all, they're not exactly a disinterested party) and that an independent analysis is necessary to make it unbiased. (Actually, the latest version of the act does a lot more than just call for cost-benefit analyses; it also explicitly blocks certain regulations, see here.)

What I was interested in is just what, in particular, proponents believed the flaws of the EPA studies were. The American Association for Clean Coal Electricity, (ACCCE), a power-company lobbying group, has a web page that discusses the issue from their point of view. They identify two perceived flaws: first, that the EPA considers only one proposed rule at a time and does not lump multiple proposed rules together in its analysis; and second, that the EPA does not consider other negative economic effects such as lost jobs. (Note that on the association's front page, they claim that the regulations the TRAIN Act will block will cost 1.4 million jobs. However, on the actual page that discusses the TRAIN Act, they say it will cost 1.4 million job-years, totalled over an 8-year period. These are very different.)

Anyway, the first criticism does not, at first, seem to make any sense. If regulation A has costs which exceed benefits, and regulation B has costs which exceed benefits, then added together, regulations A and B will collectively have costs which exceed benefits. The only way this will not be true is if either:

(a) The benefits of implementing both regulations A and B are less than the benefits of implementing A alone plus the benefits of implementing B alone.

(b) The costs of implementing both regulations A and B are greater than the costs of implementing A alone plus the costs of implementing B alone.

This, of course, raises the question of in what circumstances these can be true. For case (a), I can think of a simple example: suppose that both regulations will reduce exposure to the same pollutant, and the pollutant has a hormetic dose-response relationship. But for some reason I don't think that's the case that the ACCCE is thinking about. For case (b), I can think of a different case, that seems to be the case that the ACCCE is discussing. Suppose that both regulations reduce the production of electricity, and electricity (like most goods) has diminishing marginal value. Then just looking at each regulation individually, and estimating the cost by multiplying the current price by the amount of reduction (let's say), will understate the total costs. In the diagram below, the true cost is C+D but the "looking at each regulation individually) approach will give you something closer to C.
We can now estimate about how big this difference is. For the sake of argument, I will use the assumptions that are most favorable to the ACCCE's position. They mention that there will be a total reduction in coal power production of 30 to 100 gigawatts (GW) due to "these and other rules". 100 GW is equivalent to 876,000,000 MWh over the course of a year, or about 25 percent of the total U.S. electricity consumption 3,741,485,000 MWh per year. Of course this is not a good estimate of total electricity consumption lost because some of the capacity lost in coal gets replaced by other energy sources. If I am interpreting the chart labeled "2016 CATR+MACT impacts" of their own report correctly (it's on page 6 of the PDF, or page 5 going by the page numbers on the page), it looks like about 60 percent of capacity lost in coal gets made up in increased natural gas. So you end up with a total of about 10 percent reduced consumption. According to the review here, the short-run price elasticity of demand for electricity is about 0.2. So 10 percent reduced consumption corresponds to about a 50 percent increase in price. That means that the triangular area D is about 25 percent of the area C.

However, my understanding (at least based on what it says here) is that for most of these regulations the benefits exceed the costs by at least several times. So just a 25 percent error won't make a significant difference.

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The comment about jobs, however, is more interesting conceptually, and I think they have it backwards. Here's how I am thinking about it. Let's say that electricity and labor are perfect complements, so a business can produce a "widget" by using one worker and one unit of electricity. Suppose that currently the business is producing X widgets, and so it is using X units of electricity, and the new regulation will increase the price by Y. Suppose you ignore the issue of jobs. Presumably that means you assume that the business will just produce the same number of widgets as before. Then the total cost is X times Y. But suppose you take jobs into account, and you take into account the fact that now the business will produce fewer widgets because the cost of producing them went up. But if they made this change, then that means the change was beneficial (compared to just absorbing the extra cost). In other words, the "reduction in jobs" is partially a benefit because it means that you are now using less of the more expensive electricity.

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Of course, conservatives aren't the only ones who often use faulty economic reasoning when talking about environmental issues. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama claimed that oil companies had 68 million acres of land they were "not using" and that we needed to make them "use it or lose it." Most importantly, this claim was false: most of the 67 million acres of "non-producing land" was actively being explored and prepared, it's just that no oil was coming out of it yet. But even if it was true that oil companies were deliberately ignoring large portions of their land, why is that necessarily a problem? There are only two reasons I can think of as to why they would do that. One reason is because they think that oil will become more expensive in the future and they would rather wait and sell the oil when it's more expensive rather than extract and sell the oil now. But if that's the case, then the oil companies' actions would raise the price now (when it's cheaper) and lower the price when they get around to extracting it (when it's more expensive), thus reducing the volatility of oil prices over time. Isn't that a good thing; to save it for when it's scarcer? Another possible reason is if they are colluding to reduce supply in order to raise the price now. But that theory doesn't seem to hold water because oil is traded on a world market, and the vast majority of world oil and gas reserves are controlled by companies outside the United States, so it doesn't seem like U.S. oil companies could reduce the world supply that much just by drilling a bit less. And in any case, if the problem is that we are using too much oil, isn't it good if the oil price goes up because that means that people will have an incentive to switch to renewable sources?

Debit Card Swipe Fees

In the news recently there is talk about legislation to reduce the fees that retailers pay to banks for debit card transactions. The fees currently average 44 cents per transaction, and the proposal is to cap them at 12 cents per transaction. Here are my thoughts:

- Clearly, the socially optimal amount to charge for swipe fees is equal to the marginal cost. And the marginal cost is probably very small; I imagine most of the costs of running the transaction system are fixed costs that don't depend that much on number of transactions.

- Of course, that only really matters if debit card transactions are at least somewhat price-elastic; i.e. number of transactions is affected by how much they cost. If the number of transactions is unaffected by cost, then changing the fee just redistributes money; it doesn't affect overall efficiency. (Of course, people do care about how the money is distributed.) And I would imagine that the price elasticity is very low: consumers don't care about swipe fees when they use their debit card (since they don't pay them) and most retailers don't choose not to accept debit cards just because of the fees (except sometimes for small transactions).

- The discussion from both sides seems to be centered on whether it will help or hurt consumers, which is reasonable. The pro-regulation side says that businesses will pass the savings on to consumers, while the anti-regulation side says that will not necessarily occur and banks will be forced to increase other fees or reduce perks like free checking to make up for the lost revenue.

- From the retailer's perspective, the swipe fee is like a tax on the transaction, so whether it's the consumer or the producer that ends up paying it depends on the relative elasticity of supply and demand for the goods, as described here. Of course, almost none of the coverage that expresses opinions about this questions even mentions price elasticity. (You could do a similar analysis to answer the question about whether banks will increase other fees; think of the reduction in swipe fees as like a tax on the banks based on how often their customers use debit cards).

- Of course, I don't have any data on the questions above, so I don't know who is correct. But one thing I did notice is that pro-regulation advocates say it will "help small businesses" and take money away from the "big banks", while anti-regulation advocates say that it "helps giant retailers" at the expense of "small credit unions." My question is: How did the whole "big business equals bad, small business equals good" thing start? I mean, isn't the theory behind capitalism that the way businesses become bigger is by improving efficiency to lower costs and responding to the needs of their customers to increase revenue? Maybe Joe Kernen is right that we are being indoctrinated with anti-capitalist values.

Interesting Pictures: Politics

Here are pictures of Lyndon LaRouche supporters, from my previous post. Despite their kookery, they promote some sensible policies like increased investment in science and technology.

In order to do that, though, they'll first need to cut excessive spending. Unfortunately, nobody wants their own pet program cut.


Maybe the cause of the budget problems is that our children are being indoctrinated with anti-capitalist values in our schools. (He must have gone to a different school than I did, because I don't remember being indoctrinated with anything.)

Weird Stuff

Today in the airport I saw a group of people handing out literature for the LaRouche movement. I've heard that the LaRouche movement is a bunch of kooks, but I was interested in learning more. Part of what they said made some sense, like how we should spend less money on the bailouts and more money on technology and infrastructure. But a lot of their literature descended into conspiratorial kookery, such as claiming that JFK was assassinated by "British Empire bank-connected assassins" for wanting to get us out of Vietnam, claims that White House science adviser John Holdren supports forced population control (no, he doesn't). But their literature also taught me something about science that I didn't already know: it talked about using electromagnetic fields to predict earthquakes, and I thought that didn't make any sense but I looked it up and it turns out there is scientific evidence for that.

Another thing sort of related - in the mall today I found a stall selling "negative ion bracelets" for $25. It is an ordinary rubber bracelet that (according to the person selling it) had a small amount of volcanic ash embedded in it to emit "negative ions" that supposedly improve your strength and balance. I asked for a demo and he gave me a "balance test" with and without the bracelet, but the bracelet didn't make much of a difference, which makes sense because there's no scientific evidence that the bracelets do anything. Also, it seems that the people who wrote the brochure about it didn't know much science either, because it said something like "negative ions are natural ... when water mist falls to earth, it loses an electron, which turns it into a negative ion." (Of course, electrons have a negative charge, so if the water "lost" an electron it would gain a positive charge.)

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And also, something that might be interesting on the Internet - the web site I linked to above is part of a network of "Stack Exchange" web sites which allow you to ask questions and get and look up answers on a variety of topics - it started off with computer programming but on expanded into lots of other fields like math and statistics. It works a lot like Wikipedia in that it is entirely community driven where people post answers to and edit each others' questions.

Breaking News: Solution To Illinois Budget Crisis!

As you may know, the State of Illinois has been facing a severe budget shortfall and has recently been forced into massive tax hikes. Also, in the 2008 election, then-candidate Mitt Romney accused then-candidate Rudy Giuliani of turning New York City into a "sanctuary city" for illegal immigrants in order to get more workers and tax revenue. Recently, it appears that Illinois is following this plan, becoming a "sanctuary state" for Democratic politicians who want to avoid voting on bills. Lawmakers have referred to themselves as "refugees", and have been stimulating the Illinois economy by purchasing essential items. There has been speculation about whether police would be able to arrest the rogue legislators and extradite them back to their home states to stand trial. As for me, I am just waiting to see what the Capitol Steps song about it will be like.

Origins, Part 1: The Political Intrigue

Probably the most unique, fun, and exciting game I played at Origins was something called the National Security Decision Making Game, or NSDM. This game is a political/military simulation based on real-world politics, and is designed to be similar to actual "wargame" exercises used by the military in real life. The way the game works is that each game (which lasts 4 hours for "fast play" or 8 hours for a "mega-scenario") is set in a different country, or sometimes multiple countries depending on the number of players. At the start of the game, the people running the game (known as the "controllers") give a brief presentation on the basic idea of the game, and then an overview of the situation in whatever country we are running. Then, each player is given a card indicating what person or group of people they are going to play - this could be a particular person (like the President), a political party, or a particular ethnic or interest group. These cards give players a brief overview of their objectives, goals, and capabilities. Then, players break out into their individual "cells" (each country is a "cell") and start making deals and doing stuff in order to achieve their goals. Players can attempt to take actions and pass policies by writing them down on slips of paper and getting the appropriate groups to sign off on them, then turning them in to the controllers. There are no dice rolls and few hard-and-fast rules in this game: mostly, the controllers (many of whom have real-life military experience) decide the results of any actions. However, the meat of the game is not in the military conflicts themselves, but rather in the negotiation and buildup. Also, sometimes the controllers will interject events in the form of "news broadcasts," but players can also instigate things on their own. At the end of the game, there is a debriefing, which is divided into three phases: the "Excuse Generation" phase, the "Mutual Recrimination" phase, and the "What The Hell Were You Thinking?" phase. In the debriefing, the controllers reveal the whole story, ask players about why they made the decisions they did, and give out rewards for the most successful players.

The first game I participated in was set in Indonesia. The controllers gave a brief overview of Indonesia, showing us a map and pointing out the various groups, including the natives of Borneo, who are under threat of being forced off their lands, and the Aceh party, a group who lives in the northwest part of Indonesia (which has lots of reserves of natural gas) and dreams of becoming independent. Another important issue is that the Indonesian military is responsible for a lot of the administrative work (like road work, health inspections, etc.) that is normally performed by the civilian government, and many in Indonesia want more civilian control over these functions. Role cards were distributed, and I was given the President card. The card stated that my goal was to keep power, gain credit for improvements in the country's condition, and assert more civilian control over the military.

As the scenario opened, all the groups started working on their domestic priorities, making deals to advance their groups' interests. The Chinese ethnic group, which consists largely of businessmen and entrepreneurs, went around to other countries (played by the controllers) to solicit foreign investment. Other initiatives included a bill for natural disaster preparation, which led to a player being designated as the "Indonesian FEMA person." The Muslims tried to integrate the goals of promoting their religion and other groups' aims for economic development by proposing the construction of a Muslim-themed amusement park called "Allah World." I focused on the goal of gaining civilian control of the military. I convinced the groups with economic interests to go along with the plan by arguing that more civilian control would reduce the appearance of and possibility of corruption, which would make Indonesia a more attractive place to do business. However, I wasn't able to convince the military to go along with the plan, and although I made several attempts at compromise I couldn't get military support. Then the controllers announced an upcoming election, sending all the political parties into campaign mode. While there were about 15 minutes left until the election and I had spent almost the previous hour unsuccessfully trying to pass my initiative, I started going around to all the interest groups and signing whatever bills they wanted me to sign in order to gain support. During the election, each of the candidates gave brief speeches, then all the groups voted. The non-military groups (except for the opposing political parties) all supported me, and the three military players weren't paying attention during the voting process and forgot to vote, so I won with about 80% of the vote. The military and the opposition parties then began making plans to unseat me.

Soon afterwards, we were faced with our first foreign crisis: a Malaysian vessel caught an Indonesian pirate ship engaged in piracy, chased it all the way back to Indonesian territorial waters, and captured it. As I was trying to negotiate a peaceful resolution, the commander of the Indonesian air force (who was a player who had just walked in and asked to join the game, and was given that role) launched an unauthorized airstrike on the Malaysian vessel. This gave the three other political parties just the excuse they needed to impeach me for "improper military response" to the situation. Seeing the writing on the wall, I resigned without a fight. (Later on, they revealed that their original plan was a military coup, but decided on impeachment instead because part of their goal was to uphold the "trappings of democracy.") In the confusion, however, the Aceh party put its plan into action - it declared independence and stopped all natural gas shipments to the rest of Indonesia. The rest of Indonesia tried a measured response, trying to negotiate a peaceful resolution while preparing for an invasion if necessary. But when Malaysia started sending over troops and military aid to help the rebels, the rest of Indonesia realized they were in for more than they bargained for. As the situation rapidly escalated into full-scale civil war, time was up and the controllers ended the scenario.

At the end of the scenario, the controllers gave out rewards for the two best players. In second place was the Chinese player, who stayed under the radar during all the conflict and gun-running and successfully focused on their economic goals. But the first place reward was for the Aceh player, who spent the entire first half of the game expertly manipulating all of us - convincing the military to pull their troops out of the Aceh region, making secret deals with various parties to buy weapons, and convincing Malaysia to help them in exchange for the Aceh region's vital natural gas resources - and none of us even realized what was going on until it was too late. (In this whole scenario, the only controller-initiated event was the pirate ship thing - everything else was the players' idea.)

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I liked this game so much that a couple days later I participated in another session. This time, I got there early enough that I was able to see a montage of player quotes that happened during previous games. They've been doing this for 20 years, so there are lots of them, such as:

"I need to flee the country to avoid prosecution. Is the Dungeons + Dragons room out of their jurisdiction?"

"When I want your opinion, I'll subpoena you."

"When will the show trial start?"
"It's not a show trial, it's a legitimate legal proceeding."
"Okay, but when will it start?"
"Just as soon as we can manufacture enough evidence."

(After being blown up by a suitcase nuke in a previous game, and later seeing someone not involved with the game wander into the room carrying a suitcase) "Oh no, not another suitcase!"

Anyway, this one had more people, so they split us up into two "cells": South Korea and Japan. I was assigned to the South Korea cell, and my role card said that I represented the farmers' association. At the beginning of the game, our first major issue was how to deal with the threat posed by North Korea. There were a few major options on the table - increase spending on the military and mobilize more troops up to the border, try a more open solution using the carrot rather than the stick, or ask China for help. I suggested that we capitalize on the North Koreans' dependence on food aid from South Korea to use it as leverage, and we eventually decided on a compromise plan that included elements of all three of the plans people had proposed. The first ew minutes of the game were relatively calm, with the exception of Kim Jong Il's player taunting us from the sidelines. But the situation soon escalated, when it was discovered that North Korea was smuggling drugs and counterfeit money through tunnels under the DMZ into South Korea in order to drain money from and destabilize South Korea's economy. As we scrambled to figure out how we would respond, we were hit with yet another crisis - a few days after a radiation leak was discovered in a nuclear sub, a South Korean vessel was attacked by a giant sea monster! This extra crisis turned out to be a false alarm - it was just a publicity stunt by a movie company to promote their new monster movie. (The nuclear accident wasn't part of the stunt; they just capitalized on it to manufacture the "sea monster attack" story.) At this point, I was mostly on the sidelines as my group's main interests were domestic, but it was still exciting to see how the situation would unfold. North Korea got more and more aggressive, sending artillery corps down to the border to get within range to fire on Seoul. We also learned that the internal situation in North Korea was getting more and more unstable, with Kim Jong Il assassinated, his son taking his place as leader, and all contact cut off between the North Korean and South Korean governments. The last straw was when Seoul was hit with a biological attack: a terrorist had contaminated the water supply with botulism, leaving over 1000 citizens dead. We interpreted this as an act of war, and invaded. We had the help of China and Russia, so we thought it would be an easy fight. But as soon as we started to invade, North Korea threatened nuclear retaliation. We thought that China had told us that they had "dealt with" the nukes, so we pressed on. But unfortunately that information was based on faulty intelligence. We called North Korea's bluff - but it wasn't a bluff.

During the debriefing, however, the true identity of the player responsible for the bioterrorism was revealed: it was a rogue general in the Japanese cell! Apparently he had his own ulterior motives, such as increasing his own power, and thought that a biological attack would be the perfect instigating event. We had all just assumed that the North Koreans were responsible because earlier in the scenario, they had kidnapped five Japanese doctors including a virologist, so we thought they were using them to develop the biological weapon. They also gave out rewards for the most successful players (there were going to be six awards this game, due to the larger number of players), but unfortunately I had another game to get to and was not able to stay and see who won. But since the end result was nuclear annihilation of the entire region, it's hard to say that anyone really achieved their goals. And as for the cause of North Korea's belligerence in the first place? We never found out, but the controllers did say that everything North Korea did (remember, there was no North Korea cell in this game except if you count the Kim Jong Il player, so most of this was controller-initiated) was based on what North Korea players "did to themselves" in a previous game.

Breaking News: More Evidence of Cylon Activity in Illinois Government

"I need your sage advice: Should I spend money I don't have?"

- Overheard at GameStop

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Unlike my last blog post about Illinois government, this time I won't make any accusations about who is the Cylon: I'll just lay out the facts and let you be the judge.

A few days ago, Governor Quinn unveiled his new "budget plan" - which involves borrowing $4.7 billion, leaving $6 billion worth of bills unpaid, including cuts to education funding, but no tax increase. The Chicago Tribune reported that the reason he did this was to encourage state senators to vote for a tax increase, because nobody would like the alternative. And Quinn's "Illinois Budget web site" now states that he supports a tax increase (see the bottom under "Increased State Revenues.")

And budgetary problems aren't the only "crisis card" that's shown up recently: pretty soon, restaurants and retail business across the state may be the host to yet another round of exciting combat action. That's right, a new bill is going to be passed to allow concealed carry of handguns in Illinois. There are just two interesting amendments that supporters of the bill added: one said that any state legislator who voted against the measure will not be allowed to get a concealed carry permit for himself, and the other says that any retail business that bans handguns inside the business will be civilly liable if a concealed carry permit holder get injured or killed in a violent crime at that business - the theory being that if the business "disarms" the permit holder, who then "can't defend himself" and gets hurt, the business should be liable..

Questions for discussion:

1. The point of the first amendment discussed above is that politicians shouldn't be "hypocrites" by voting against concealed carry but then getting a permit themselves. Should this principle be extended to apply to other laws too? For example, if Legislator X votes against a tax cut that passes, should Legislator X still have to pay the higher tax rate?

2. As for the other amendment, does it work both ways? If the business DOES allow concealed guns, a concealed carry permit holder legally brings a gun in, and the gun is discharged (either accidentally or on purpose) and injures someone, is the business liable for allowing the gun on?

3. If the purpose of concealed carry is to deter crime, then why make it "concealed"? It seems to me like if I was carrying a gun to deter crime, I would want criminals to know that I am armed so they will be deterred. (On the other hand maybe the idea is that if concealed carry is legal, then criminals won't know who is armed and who isn't, so would play it safe and not attack anyone.)

More politics as usual in Illinois

Recently, the primary elections were completed. Pat Quinn, the incumbent governor (he was Blagojevich's lieutenant governor) won the Democratic primary. His running mate in the general election was going to be Scott Lee Cohen, but he had to drop out once it was revealed that he had engaged in some less-than-savory action of his own.

Pat Quinn said that he didn't know anything about the incident with Cohen until after they had become running mates. Admittedly he did not choose Cohen to be his running mate; in Illinois there is a separate primary for governor and lieutenant governor, and the winners of each join forces in the general election. Perhaps Cohen was actually a Republican sleeper agent tasked with infiltrating the Democratic primary and winning so as to discredit the Democratic candidate. However, there were five other candidates in the Democratic race, so one would expect that they would have brought Cohen's incident to light in the primary, when they were competing against Cohen. So maybe they are the real sleeper agents. (As you can see, this is another instance of realism in board games. In the Battlestar Galactica board game, players are tasked with finding out which among their number is secretly a Cylon. In real-life politics, politicians have to find out who is really working for them and who is secretly plotting against them, and that is not always simple)

Breaking News: Dungeons & Dragons Evidence of Socialist Takeover Plot

Recently, many conservatives have accused President Barack Obama of trying to turn the United States into a socialist country. Although the "liberal-elite" mainstream media have so far refused to report on this shocking development, there's yet another area that has been infiltrated by socialist propaganda - Dungeons and Dragons.

Yesterday during my Dungeons and Dragons game my character got killed. Since the death panel decided that my character's "level of adventuring productivity" wasn't high enough to warrant spending scarce health care resources on resurrecting him*, I had to create a new character. The new character I am planning to create is an "artificer" - a healer class with an unusual healing ability, which requires some explanation. In D+D, each character has a limited number of "healing surges." Most healing powers require the recipient of the healing to spend a healing surge, and once a character runs out of healing surges he can no longer be healed (until he takes an "extended rest" which resets his healing surges)**. The Artificer's healing power works differently - his healing doesn't require the recipient to spend a healing surge, but at the end of the battle the healing power must be recharged, which requires a character (any character in the party) to spend a healing surge. This effectively allows the character to pool healing resources between his party members, similar to a socialized medicine system. (Just like in real life, this socialized medicine system actually works pretty well.)

Also, my college roleplaying club has a "club campaign" of D+D, and anyone who wants to can go to each adventure. But of course this would lead to a problem because people who go to more adventures would go up in level and gain treasure faster, and if you were to start in the middle then you would be at low level and have a hard time contributing to the group. The way they solve this problem is classic socialism. Everyone levels at the same rate regardless of how often they play - on the campaign web site it says what level the characters are so you create a character of that level. There is also an "audit value" that indicates how much treasure you are supposed to have, and if you fall below that amount then you can ask a DM to "audit" your character, which gives you an amount of treasure to get your total treasure value up to the audit level. A similar system is used on a larger scale in the RPGA, which is a set of "official" adventures published by Wizards of the Coast, the company that makes D+D. There are "official RPGA events" where you go to play, and sign in, and after signing in a certain number of times you can get "rewards cards" mailed to you that give you special bonuses in play (like being allowed to reroll a die roll.) Or at least that used to be the way they did it - they eventually changed it so the rewards cards are on a freely downloadable PDF, so you can just print them all out and bring them to the game (although you are only allowed to use a certain number of cards per game, depending on your character's level).

Also one more thing that may be interesting, although only tangentially related to socialism. In D+D there are six character attributes - Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Different character classes require different attributes to work well - for example fighters require Strength, wizards require Intelligence, etc. Additionally, there are different "races" like human, elf, etc. Each race has two attributes that it gets a +2 bonus to (except humans, who only have one +2 bonus but can apply it to any attribute). This means that races that don't have a bonus to a particular character class's attribute are weaker choices for that character class. One common goal of "house rules" discussed on D+D fan sites is aimed at eliminating this disparity by changing how racial stat bonuses are determined, like by allowing players to move one of their stat bonuses to a different stat. In other words, it's like an affirmative action system. And more than that, it's an affirmative action system based on a point system***.

*This isn't the actual reason. In reality the DM told me that I could have the character revived by our party's employer next session, or I could create a new character. I chose to create a new character because I wanted to try out the Artificer class. But I'll still try to use the explanation above as an "in-game" explanation for why my character couldn't get revived.

**This may seem unnecessarily complicated, but there's actually a good reason for it. In the 3rd edition of D+D, there were only two character classes that could do healing, and their healing spells took a "standard action" to cast. (Characters get one standard action per turn, and standard actions are used to do most things like spellcasting and attacking.) This basically meant that you had to have one of those characters in your party to provide healing, but that playing those characters was often uninteresting because in tough fights you would spend most of your actions just healing others rather than doing anything to the enemy - hence they were sometimes called "hit point vending machines." In 4th edition, which is what we are playing, they fixed these problems by giving more classes healing abilities, giving everyone the ability to heal themselves to full at the end of the fight, and making most healing spells a "minor action" which means that you can use a healing spell and attack in the same turn. But of course this created another problem - a party full of healers would be almost unstoppable because they could keep healing each other while still pumping out just as much damage on the enemy. Sot the healing surge system is designed to limit the amount of healing one character can get.

***Another instance of something similar was in Planetside, a massively multiplayer shooter. Players got rewarded with experience points when they participated in a successful assault on an enemy base, so if one side started losing, the players would realize they were unlikely to win and pull out, moving to another front looking for more experience point potential in other areas. This meant that once one side started to win, they would usually continue to win, and it was hard to find a battle in serious contention for very long. The solution? Give the side with fewer people in a particular area bonus health and experience points to encourage them to stay. This of course led to complaints that the game was "becoming most like the University of Michigan every day." (At the time, the University of Michigan was in the news due to its controversial affirmative action policy, later overturned by the courts, that rated applicants according to a point system gave members of underrepresented races bonus points during the admission process.)

Politics as usual in Illinois, part 2

According to the Associated Press, Rod Blagojevich has come out with a new book in which he claims he did not intend to take money in exchange for appointing someone to fill Obama's Senate seat.

Instead, he claims, his intention was to appoint Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan to the senate seat, in exchange for a deal where her father, Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, would push through public works and health care legislation that Blagojevich wanted.

In other words, according to him, it's okay to be corrupt as long as it's all done with taxpayer money.

More politics as usual in Illinois

The Illinois government has a program whereby state-level lawmakers can give scholarships to state schools to anyone they want to, subject only to the restriction that the recipient live in the lawmaker's district. Not surprisingly, said scholarships frequently go to relatives of lobbyists or campaign contributors.

In another article about this (not the one I liked, I couldn't find this one online) some of the lawmakers defended themselves by saying that they didn't have any role in choosing who got their scholarships - they delegated that decision to a committee. One lawmaker defended his decision to give a scholarship to the wife of "Mr. Williams," a lobbyist, by saying that "Mr. Williams is a decent man - I know him from his lobbying."

Possibly more surprisingly, most of the scholarships don't go to politically connected individuals. According to the article linked above, 83 scholarships over the past 6 years have gone to people with political connections, and 1,509 scholarships were awarded last year. Assuming no year-to-year change this means that less than 1% of scholarships went to people with political connections.

However, here's the question: What's the purpose of this program, if not to give politicians a way to reward their friends? I don't see why this system is a better way of distributing scholarships than a traditional way where everyone can apply and there are designated criteria for who gets the scholarship. The only thing I can think of is that a politician might know someone personally who would be a qualified recipient, but the qualifications don't look good "on paper" - but that goes back to politicians rewarding their friends.

Not everyone has a dirty mind

I was telling Tanya today about the Capitol Steps performance I went to. The conversation was something like this:

Me: One of the Capitol Steps skits had Barack Obama asking Hillary Clinton if she was happy with her "new position", meaning secretary of state. Then Bill Clinton walks in and says, "New position? Did somebody say something about a new position? Why wasn't I told about this?"

Tanya: I get that joke. It makes sense. I was watching Hillary Clinton on TV, accepting the position as secretary of state, and I could just picture Bill Clinton walking up there, wanting that job.

Me: No, I think the joke was that he thought it was "new position" as in sexual position.

Tanya: Yeah, I guess that works too.

Realism in Video Games #1

This will be the first in an upcoming series of blog postings about features of video games that model reality a little more closely than was probably intended.

For the first one, it's best to go to the primary source and look at this quest description from World of Warcraft:

The Art of Persuasion