The Ambrosini Critique

John Robb just posted on gaming, too. How does he know gaming terminology?

WoW Anonymous. Hi, my name is Will and I’ve been playing World of Warcraft for 2.5 months. Step one… well, step one of any 12 step program requires me to admit that I have a problem. I don’t damn it! (Gawd, I wish that I’d hurry up and finish this post so I can get back to playing WoW and damnit what am I going to do next week when classes start up for the semester… less playing time!)

Gavin gives the cons for creating our own guild (which is just a group of people that like to play the game with each other*). My answer:

1. A small guild is good because it would be more intimate. The point of a guild is to have a social network to fall back on (and to bullshit with). Personally, I’m uncomfortable whenever I have to interact with our guild. I don’t know those people and I’m always worry that they’ll chide me for one reason or another (like they did Gavin’s wife, Fumiko).
2. We can mitigate the issues with having a small guild by being more organized with our game playing. For example, have set times to play certain missions. In this respect, the out of game interaction could be more intense (i.e. we’d all have each other in our buddy lists and someone might host a guild gaming calendar… “Let’s do SM on Thursday at 8.”) I know this screws with the serendipity of the game, but frankly, with 21 units next semester I won’t have time for letting the cards fall where they may (and be able to make any progress in the game) anyway.
3. I’ve never, ever, asked the guild about how to play my character. If I have questions about that, I go to the WoW discussion boards.
4. I’ve never, ever, taken “loot” from the guild. I’ve never given either. This is related to the intimacy aspect of #1 above.
5. Lastly, with just a handful of players we can be more specialized and we each would have a stronger sense on purpose [ed. do you know how goofy that sounds? you're talking about a game!]. Personally, I prefer small intimate groups to larger ones.
6. UPDATE: Also, we could maintain ’strategic relationships’ with other guilds… The last raid party I saw had at least 3 guilds involved.
   

That’s it. Now back to regularly scheduled posting… Anyone see the debate between Justice Scalia and Justice Breyer last night on CSPAN?

Gavin, my bestest friend in the world, has started (or is that restarted) his very own weblog.

I really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really want him to talk about digital media. He’s good at that crap (both the technology and the art) and I have a project in mind. More on that later.

Thom Hartmann and ilk would be advised to follow the Congressional Democrats and “keep their powder dry” on the issue of Alberto Gonzalez’ confirmation as Attorney General.

Mr. Hartmann compares Gonzalez’ memo and advice to the President about detaining enemy combatants to King Charles I’s per speciale Mandatum Domini Regis. Basically, he says that Bush believes, with Gonzalez’ advice, the President is above the law and he can suspend habeas corpus without an act of Congress. (Habeas corpus is the long tradition of due process, i.e. you can’t be held against your will without having your case seen by a court of law.)

The Gonzalez memo nowhere states that the President is above the law or that he has the right to suspend habeas corpus. The memo only talks about the pros and cons of treating enemy combatants, caught in Afghanistan, according to the Geneva Convention. Of note is the fact that it does not consider the nationality of the detained (American, Afghany or otherwise). After one reviews the definition of prisoner of war in the convention, it can be convincingly argued that members of al Qaeda and the Taliban do NOT fall under that definition. In other words, they are not prisoners of war. So what are they? President Bush decided that they were enemy combatants. What’s that mean? Well, Donald Rumsfeld issued this order as a result of the President’s decision. “The Combatant Commanders shall, in detaining Al Qaida and Taliban individuals under the control of the Department of Defense, treat them humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.”

Hartmann goes on to suggest that this issue is still at hand, that the President continues to suspend habeas corpus and that people are detained illegally.

However, the issue was decided when the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (in regards to American’s being held) and Shafiq v. Bush. Hartmann mentions the first case, but does not make explicit what it means. The court ruled:

“[A]lthough Congress authorized the detention of combatants in the narrow circumstances alleged in this case, due process demands that a citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant be given a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that detention before a neutral decision maker.”

So, citizens can not be held without due process. Case closed.

In Shafiq v. Bush, the court ruled further that Federal courts do have jurisdiction on Guantanimo and those non-citizens being held must have their day in court:

“United States courts have jurisdiction to consider challenges to the legality of the detention of foreign nationals captured abroad in connection with hostilities and incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay.

I want to point out that Justice Scalia dissented on both cases, but not because he was backing the President’s position. In the first case, he didn’t think the court went far enough; he felt that an American is entitled to be criminally prosecuted (rather than treated to some half-baked military tribunal). In the second case, his decent is more technical (and I think it has to do with his worries about federalism). In any case, its misleading to represent Scalia as a lone voice of decent in cases were Bush lost and Hartmann’s side won (Scalia was one of three dissenters in the Hamdi case).

There’s a lot of froth in Hartmann’s column but not much substance. The right things are happening in Guantanamo and from the looks of the Gonzalez memo, he’ll make a even handed and thoughtful Attorney General.

Steve Antler spots a straw man:

But those who insist that we face a Social Security crisis want to have it both ways. Having invoked the concept of a unified budget to reject the existence of a trust fund, they refuse to accept the implications of that unified budget going forward. Instead, having changed the rules to make the trust fund meaningless, they want to change the rules back around 15 years from now: today, when the payroll tax takes in more revenue than SS benefits, they say that’s meaningless, but when – in 2018 or later – benefits start to exceed the payroll tax, why, that’s a crisis. Huh?

Let me get this straight…

Alternative universe A: There is no demographic crunch and there won’t be fewer workers to support more pensioners. Thus Krugman is right, let’s not worry about social security.

Alternative universe B: There is an impending crunch but it doesn’t matter because social security isn’t a pay-as-you-go system. Thus Krugman is right, let’s not worry about social security.

According to Krugman, its ok to ignore problems when we can lump them in with a whole lot of other problems (i.e. treating SS as a line item in the general budget). Meaningless.

I was a typical, average kid. For the first year of my life, my family lived in a 15 foot by 15 foot cabin, without indoor plumbing, teetering on the bank of a creek that wound through pasture land. My grandfather, a second generation Swiss-Italian dairyman, owned the land; he, in his eight bedroom farmhouse, was our nearest neighbor. Soon after the birth of my brother, in my fourth year, the fighting began and my parents were divorced by the time I was seven. My father went on to finish school, to obtain his CPA license and to get a job in San Francisco at a Big Eight firm. “On” he likes to say, “the nineteenth story of Embarcadero 3… near the top!” As is typical, my mother was not as successful in the aftermath of the divorce. However, she heroically held down clerical jobs and kept our bellies full and a roof over our head. As such, during the school year, my brother and I lived in my mother’s single-wide trailer and when school got out for the summer, we lived in my father’s condo in posh Marine County. The contrast is striking only now. Then, it was all very normal. I guess if you average the extremes, the privilege would cancel the moments of slight degradation and mine was a typical experience growing up.

I’m sure that you’ve heard that the field of Economics is a perfect mix of science and the humanities. Sometimes I wonder if this is really just a marriage of convenience. I imagine psychologists, anthropologists and political scientists one day realizing that they are good at math and thus becoming economists. The study of decision making becomes game theory, prospect theory or intertemporal choice. Psychology becomes behavioral finance. Political philosophy becomes public choice theory and so on. These developments are not bad, of course, but sometimes economists are gratuitous in their use of math, as Deirdre McCloskey points out in The Secret Sins of Economics. She laments that economic theories where the assumptions of the theory, the axioms, are not grounded in reality, amount to mind games and parlor tricks. “[Such] pure thinking is unbounded.” Sure y follows from x, but are you justified in believing x describes the real world?

I was late in discovering math as a method to discover truths about the world, so I am deeply concerned about how it can be used in economics to best effect. For me, economics matches my intense interest in understanding human behavior with my inborn tendency toward abstractions and admiration for objective truth. Truth has always been about science for me and I’ve learned science via popularizers such as Carl Sagan, E. O. Wilson and Brian Greene. These authors relied on storytelling and engaging prose, versus mathematical proof, to be their tools of persuasion. As such, prose was the only tool I knew to explore truth. Now that math has been added to my truth-seeking toolbox, the next step is for me to learn how to use this tool.

Contradictions, variances, anomalies, exceptions to rules, but always, some how, there is convergence to the mean. This not only describes my life, it describes the subjects of economics and the subject of economics itself. For example, taking the mean, understanding typical behavior, is a model of that behavior. Famously, the average person does not exist (who among us has12.7 years of education, 1.8 children and is 12.7% black). More advanced math is used to give us more sophisticated models of human behavior, but by our very nature we elude such models, as well. Still, it is in the making of the model AND in understanding why the model fails in reality that knowledge is created. At the root of this creation of knowledge in economics will be a discovery of my self. I guess I am a self-centered economist… how typical!

Answer: What ever the people say it is.

Stephen B. Presser and Samuel Marcosson’s debate on Clarence Thomas’ potential as Chef Justice has transformed into a more interesting exchange on constitutional originalism and stare decisis.

Each want to avoid a situation were the Judicial is legislating. From the pov of the constitutional orginalist, any decision made by a court that does not fall directly from the constitution is in violation. The other side says that not following precedent (i.e. not adhering to stare decisis) is tantamount to treading on the ‘living constitution.’ They argue that stare decisis is a long held tradition and is a valid way to keep the constitution relevant in the always changing world.

No new amendment was necessary for the Court a century later [after the ratification of the 14th amendment... "equal protection"] to pronounce that they were, simply, wrong about that. Similarly, the framers—having no experience with a gay rights movement or even with the idea of homosexual identity—would not have understood their handiwork to encompass a right to equal legal treatment of gay peoples’ committed relationships.

But I take issue with this side’s argument when they say things like:

The Court is, and should be, entrusted with matching the framers’ ideals to our world— – with the People always having the final say if the Court gets it badly wrong.

(emphasis added) There are two alternatives for changing the Constitution. The people explicitly change it or it is changed implicitly and the people have to act explicitly to reverse the change. The later seems less democratic. Imagine if we elected presidents this way. Bush is appointed by the Supreme Court and We have to muster together a California-style recall if (this is a big if) we REALLY don’t like him. [ed. didn't this already happen? [wa. shhhhhh]]

I say that courts can be “entrusted with matching the framers’ ideals to our world” to a degree, but they should never get ahead of the voting public and they should be wary when they get close to crossing this line.

It’s not clear to me what mechanism would give feedback to the courts about when they are getting close to this line. Judges, for the most part, aren’t elected. They’re not accountable in that way. What makes them accountable to the people?

I suppose my sister deserves congratulations for running her first mile:

omg! member how i said me and sarah were gonna go runnin?! well we did and i ran a whole mile without stopping fer the first time… and i even sprinted the last lap (4 laps in a mile)! im so proud of me self! lol well yeah just had to tell ya’ll lol ttyl

If you’re wondering… yes, she is 14 years old. omg! lol ttyl.