Long Game

Everyone swore that the food in Beijing and Chengdu would be different from what I'd had in the US. "It's more real," they said, meaning, it turned out, that I could dislike it more authentically.

I saw wads of phlegm glistening like freshly shucked oysters on staircases and escalators. I saw them frozen into slicks on the sidewalk and oozing down the sides of walls. It often seemed that if people weren't spitting, they were coughing without covering their mouths, or shooting wads of snot out of their noses. This was done by plugging one nostril and using the other as a blowhole. "We Chinese think it's best just to get it out," a woman told me over dinner one night. She said that, in her opinion, it's disgusting that a westerner would use a handkerchief and then put it back into his pocket.

"Last month I saw a kid shit in the produce aisle of our Chengdu Walmart," a young woman named Bridget told me.

Zoom out a little. Think of this latest skirmish, that ended tonight, as part of an endgame to a thirty years' fiscal war in American politics. Reagan began it, by betting that slashing taxes would spur growth; he was right and wrong. Growth really did happen in the 1980s; but he bequeathed a debt that is with us today, and that he tried only fitfully to fix on his watch. The early 1990s saw the country draw down that deficit, by continuing Reagan's tax hikes under Bush I and then Clinton, and thanks to a peace dividend. Clinton's eventual surplus was, alas, more mirage than reality, for it hadn't solved the long-term entitlement problem or the healthcare cost problem, and was inflated by the tech bubble. Bush II comes in and wreaks havoc. He doubles down on Reagan on taxes and declares that deficits don't matter, while adding one major new entitlement, two massively expensive wars and throws in a financial collapse as a goodbye present. The result of all this was a recession that helped metastasize the debt even further. This was what Obama inherited.

What then? I think the Grand Bargain is the final step

The majority of your customization is done through the amazingly large skill trees.

Skills, also called certifications, are trained very similarly to EVE Online (over time, and continuing while you’re offline), but also go faster when you’re actively playing.

Skills “will affect everything” in PlanetSide 2.

After last night's vote on the debt ceiling compromise, the House adjourned for the summer but left nearly 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration employees, who have been furloughed because of a funding impasse, in limbo.

The ability to move more cargo along these routes will strengthen the United States’ position relative to Pakistan in their upcoming summit.

During the past year, Russia has been cooperating more with the United States on security issues in Afghanistan, particularly by expanding the use of supply routes to Afghanistan that go through Central Asia.

In 2009, as much as 90 percent of NATO supplies shipped via surface routes to Afghanistan were transported along supply lines through Pakistani territory.

Dark, finger-like features appear and extend down some Martian slopes during late spring through summer, fade in winter, and return during the next spring. Repeated observations have tracked the seasonal changes in these recurring features on several steep slopes in the middle latitudes of Mars' southern hemisphere.

When researchers checked flow-marked slopes with the orbiter's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), no sign of water appeared. The features may quickly dry on the surface or could be shallow subsurface flows.

Westen locates Obama's inexplicable failure to properly use his storytelling power in some deep-rooted aversion to conflict. He fails to explain why every president of the postwar era has compromised, reversed, or endured the total failure of his domestic agenda.

First, Roosevelt did not take office "in similar circumstances." He took office three years into the Great Depression, after the economy had bottom out, and immediately presided over rapid economic growth (unemployment plunged from a high of 24.9% in 1933 to 14.3% in 1937.)

Rather, bullshit is used to conceal, to impress or to coerce. Unlike liars, bullshitters have no use for the truth. All that matters to them is hiding their ignorance or bringing about their own benefit.

For the consultants and the startups, that means selling the same bullshit in book, workshop, platform, or API over and over again, at limited incremental cost. It ticks a box. Social media strategy? Check. Games strategy? Check.

The first strong hint that this might be the case was unconvered by Hume, who persuasively demonstrated that, logically speaking, it was invalid to derive an ought conclusion from two is premises.

in the absence of some desire, sentiment, or other natural and emotive need, no moral end could arise.

The second strong hint comes from George Santayana, who, in his demolishment of Moore's ethical philosophy (as limned by Russell) , noted that all arguments for morality committed the ad hominem fallacy

Failure to reach a deal threatened to bring on the economic equivalent of a nuclear winter. The leaders of the two parties, Barack Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio), appeared to grasp this, but a vocal band of “Tea Party hobbits,” as their fellow Republican, John McCain of Arizona, dubbed them, refused to go along.

for all the collective self-loathing that attended the debt ceiling talks, it’s important to remember that, like just about everything in human behavior, it was still reducible to a game. Looked at through the prism of game theory, it’s hard to see how the outcome could have turned out any other way.

The object of the game, as each leader described it, was about how best to divide the pain of closing the deficit, in the same way a family sits down to a pile of bills on the kitchen table.

You can find fault with the Tea Party’s prescription for balancing the budget—most economists do—but if they hadn’t come to Washington last year, Congress would have waited for a real bond crisis, five or 10 years from now, to create its super committee.

We will know, at the close of the next round of negotiations, which game the Tea Party has been playing: Balance the Budget or Kill the King.

That icon-strewn circle in the lower-left corner of the screen is a Rockstar perennial; one could even call it a defining feature of their games.

As an experiment, I tried loading up GTA IV and turning off the HUD and mini-map completely. I found that it made the game significantly more immersive, engaging, difficult, and fun. It didn't quite feel "optimal," and at times the shift was pretty extreme, but all the same I recommend that fans of GTA IV give it a shot.

It's called Theory of Knowledge, and it's offered at 2,307 schools worldwide as part of the IB Diploma Program.

For the record, I'm not convinced the IB Diploma Program is a good thing. It doesn't really solve any of the problems with public schools, it shares the frustrating focus on standardized testing and password-guessing instead of real learning, etc. But I think Theory of Knowledge is a huge opportunity to spread the ideas of rationality.

There isn't much in the way of standards for a curriculum, and in the entire last semester we covered less content than I learn from any given top-level LessWrong post.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich will visit Sochi, Russia, on Aug. 11 for a meeting with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. The main topic on the agenda will be the ongoing natural gas pricing negotiations between Kiev and Moscow, which have been a cause of bilateral tensions in the past.

The Ukrainian president is under increasing domestic pressure as a result of the trial and arrest of opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko for an alleged abuse of power during her time in office.