A Hat, Piano, and Skyrim

This post contains exactly what it says on the tin.

To answer the obvious question: "Why are you wearing a crocheted Skyrim helmet? Were you burned by dragons or something like that?"

Oh no, it's just they're terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future.

Since I already had my camera set up, I recorded a few other songs as well.

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni - Dear You
Castlevania SotN: The Lost Painting
Legend of Grimrock: Main Theme

Fill in the Blanks!

My parents really did raise me better than this, but sometimes you just need to express yourself in crude terms, and to the tune of the Gilligan's Island theme song:

Now if I had a **** to give
and this I swear is true
I'd take that **** I had to give
and give that **** to you

But since I lack a **** to give
and can't give you your due
Why don't you just go **** yourself
and get a ****ing clue?

Macklemore in Iambic Pentameter, a Response in Kind

A friend sent me this, unsure if I was familiar with Macklemore but confident that I would appreciate the execution. I gave him the following reply:

This "Macklemore" is scarcely known to me,
and so it is for better or for worse;
that while I can not sing the song to thee,
I'll demonstrate my grasp of older verse.
For songs may come and go with passing days,
and people quote them often for a while
until the point where every music craze
is overdone and triggers rising bile.

So if a song is now a major hit
and every music station gives it play,
it won't be long until we're sick of it
from hearing it nonstop throughout the day.
But when you hear those songs after a while,
nostalgia says, http://tinyurl.com/lezn9fw

Every Time Someone Uses a CBO Forecast, a Dead Puppy Returns to Life

I can always tell at a glance when someone has made a projection based on Congressional Budget Office forecasts, since they always involve a picture of doom and gloom that suddenly explodes into prosperity a couple of years after the line between "historical" and "projected." Dead puppies are projected to come back to life and resume playing, based on historical trends for the amount of time those puppies spent playing before they died and subsequently became not much fun.

The CBO produces economic forecasts for Congress. There are two assumptions in CBO forecasts that make them useless for anyone else, one of which might make them useless for Congress itself.

The first of these assumptions is that the forecasts are made "under current law," which means that they do not account for any new laws and new spending that Congress might make in the meantime. That's not a problem for Congress since they use CBO forecasts to guess at how much money they might be able to spend, but for the rest of us, the CBO forecast provides us with a forecast for a world in which Congress meets to discuss new ways to spend money, but goes home after they can't think of any.

The second of these assumptions is that GDP will return to trend, in other words that we'll be back to potential GDP within a few years. Exactly what potential GDP is involves a whole lot of guessing and some extrapolating of historical GDP growth, but the basic idea is that if you have a crappy economy, it's not a permanent setback and it'll grow faster later to make up for it. The latest CBO forecast assumes that we'll be all caught up by 2017.

In 2008, they assumed better than average historical growth for the years after 2009. From 2010-2013 we averaged 1.95% GDP growth, well below the average historical growth of 3.4%. They also guessed in 2008 that GDP would grow by 2.8% in 2009, when it ended up shrinking by 2.6%.

In 2009, they assumed that we'd be back to trend by 2014. We're about a trillion dollars short and 2014 is three months away. Some of us might need to work a couple of extra weekends.

The point I'm making with all of this is that the CBO has an established record of being overly optimistic in its assumptions that GDP will return to trend. Potential GDP is a function of many things: physical and human capital, technology, institutions both private and public, regulation, and so on. Changes in regulation, such as mandating insurance for full time employees, can affect potential GDP in a permanent way. Low labor force participation means that human capital goes unused. Bad government can turn a crappy economy from a temporary setback into the new normal. While the CBO does try to account for losses in human capital due to people retiring or sitting idle for an extended period, it does not, to the best of my knowledge, account for costs of regulatory compliance or people getting priced out of the labor market to due minimum wage increases or insurance mandates.

Stop using CBO forecasts. The puppy is dead.

Time to Get Myself on a Watch List, I Guess

This is not a popular opinion, but I really don't care: I think we overreacted to 9/11.

The 9/11 attacks were terrible, but we've let them define us as a country too much for too long. People have a tendency to consider probabilities according to emotional impact rather than statistical likelihood, and we've been treating terrorism like a much bigger threat than it actually is for more than a decade. In 2001, more than five times as many Americans were murdered by other Americans than were killed in the 9/11 attacks. Americans were 186 times as likely to die from cancer in that year, and 235 times as likely to die from heart attacks. We are not allocating our time, money, and attention in anything close to a rational way when it comes to the threats that face us.

Worse, I think that the fear inspired by 9/11 has been exploited for political purposes, with opportunistic politicians expanding the power of the federal government using terrorism as an excuse. The surveillance state that we're seeing today would never have happened without it. The response of the American public to the 9/11 attacks, which was to throw away our liberty in a desperate bid for security, was absolutely shameful.

Individuals did some brave things during that crisis. I'm not downplaying the firefighters and police officers who lost their lives trying to save others, or the passengers who died trying to take back a plane before it could be used as a weapon for terrorists. Those people showed the best in us and reacted the way that I hope we all would. The rest of us largely reacted like panic-stricken children, desperate to give the government whatever it wanted as long as they said it was necessary to keep us safe. The TSA, Guantanamo Bay, domestic spying—all of this has been justified by appeals to 9/11.

I'm sick of it. If America is so strong and proud, we need to stop letting politicians use 9/11 as an excuse to trample the freedoms that define our country in the first place. We need to stop being a bunch of cowards in the face of terrorism and recognize that a society that is so locked down as to be invulnerable to terrorist attacks is a society that's not worth living in. They killed less than 1/100,000 of our population, and everybody just went nuts like it was the end of the world. That's just pathetic.

Buckets Were Serious Business in Medieval Italy

One of the constants of Medieval Europe was the tension between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, which was not holy, Roman, or an empire. Sometimes this tension manifested itself in the form of excommunications going both ways, and other times it manifested as Italian cities who supported one side or the other going to war over ridiculous things.

I will now summarize this historical event after the manner of the Internet.

Bologna: "I has a bucket."
Modena: "I'm in ur base, takin' ur buckets."
Bologna: "No! They be stealin' mah bucket!"
*Warfare ensues. Thousands die.*
Modena: "All your bucket are belong to us."

FREE CANDY!

There is a specific point in the human psyche where greed and gullibility intersect. Somebody found it and set up a sign there that says "We have [thing you want] that we can't sell because [contrived reason] and so we're giving them away to people who Like this post on Facebook!"

There is no free stuff. There never was. How did all of these people make it through childhood without finding their way into a van with "FREE CANDY" painted on the side? This is the exact same trick.

Remember, when you click "Like" on something because you were baited into it through greed or crass emotional manipulation, you are depriving an Indian of a job.