Tag: politics

Pierre Omidyar Insurgency

Even before the turmoil, Temple hinted that a strategic reconsideration was under way. “It will be more complex than an organization of iconoclasts.” Omidyar sees journalism as “the third phase of his professional life,” bringing together his technology experience and philanthropy, and is prepared to be patient, even if it perplexes outsiders. There is no incongruity between Omidyar’s communitarian ideals and his financing of an insurgency. “It’s not all about civility. It’s about having a healthy and open society.” There’s a tangible insight buried in that amorphous sentiment: Omidyar’s interest in journalism is mechanistic. He wants to aggregate to himself the power to declassify and to bring about the “greater good”.

Putin says Play-Time Is Over

this will be interesting to follow.

Putin abruptly changed the rules of the game. Previously, the game of international politics was played as follows: politicians made public pronouncements, for the sake of maintaining a pleasant fiction of national sovereignty, but they were strictly for show and had nothing to do with the substance of international politics; in the meantime, they engaged in secret back-room negotiations, in which the actual deals were hammered out. Previously, Putin tried to play this game, expecting only that Russia be treated as an equal. But these hopes have been dashed, and at this conference he declared the game to be over, explicitly violating Western taboo by speaking directly to the people over the heads of elite clans and political leaders.

EVE Online economics

EVE Online changes everything about capital-class ship travel

Possibly one of the largest game changes ever seen. Eve has started to suffer from stagnation in its null-security space operations and politics. After the large $300k+ battle of B-RVRB, many of the large alliances and coalitions settled in to rebuild their massive capital ships. Many of them brokered deals to not attack each other and this has been going on for quite some time. Without high-end targets to go after, those operating large capital fleets get bored and find ways to PvP on lesser well-equipped players with their Titans and supercarriers. This type of PvP has been around for a long time of course, but now it is to the extent that CCP Games has announced highly drastic changes to the way that capital ships and others travel via jump mechanics (teleportation), bridging structures and gate travel. All jump ranges by most capital ships, usually in the 11-15 light year range, will be reset to a 5 light year range in the upcoming Phoebe expansion in early November. This, along with the introduction of fatigue timers, will drastically alter the travel map for very large ships in that old routes between regions will no longer exist for most areas of the galaxy. The player base has been split between being overly-exhilarated and highly-wronged. But all agree, the in-game universe size has been re-writ enormously.

or see this article about the “democracy”

4 years earlier, CCP had commissioned a study into the political state of New Eden, hoping to understand how they could better manage this vast virtual society. The study’s authors argued that the game needed a player-run political body. Eve’s society had evolved past tribal structures into complex social hierarchies. In response, CCP established the Council of Stellar Management (CSM), an invention unique to Eve, the only example of a game-based democratic organisation designed to represent a virtual society. Each year scores of candidates stand for election in 1 of the 14 places on the council. In 2015 there were 75 candidates, drawn from across different areas of space. Just as in real life, candidates come with platforms, create propaganda and muster both in the game and out for votes. 2x a year, CCP flies the successful candidates to their headquarters in Reykjavik for a few days of intensive debate – an audience with the gods, if you will. During that time, the council meets with CCP’s staff and hears about the new features planned for the galaxy’s future. The meetings can be heated and, on more contentious issues, there can be in-fighting between council members. But the council performs a crucial role in bridging the gap between the game’s makers and players. Indeed, after the 2011 riots, CCP called an emergency summit in Iceland for the council. Pétursson admits that the CSM’s advice directly influenced his mea culpa.

Dismantling nonsense

This is amazing. So so awkward for the AGs from Indiana & Wisconsin. Posner is one of the most influential judges in the US. I always enjoy a good smackdown of dumb people. Especially dumb people in positions of power.

While lawyers for Wisconsin and Indiana attempted to defend their state’s marriage bans, Posner issued a series of withering bench slaps that unmasked anti-gay arguments as the silly nonsense that they are.

Hamas strategy?

When the Muslim Brotherhood government fell, the military leaders cracked down. They sentenced 100s of the Brotherhood’s leadership class to death. They also closed 95% of the tunnels that connected Egypt to Gaza, where the Brotherhood’s offshoot, Hamas, had gained power. The Egyptian move was economically devastating to Hamas. Hamas derived 40% of its tax revenue from tariffs on goods that flowed through those tunnels. Hamas needed to end that blockade, but it couldn’t strike Egypt, so it struck Israel. If Hamas could emerge as the heroic fighter in a death match against the Jewish state, if Arab TV screens were filled with dead Palestinian civilians, then public outrage would force Egypt to lift the blockade. Civilian casualties were part of the point. “Make no mistake, Hamas remains committed to the destruction of Israel. But Hamas is firing rockets at Tel Aviv and sending terrorists through tunnels into southern Israel while aiming, in essence, at Cairo.”

DEA shark-jumping

A good example of organizations fighting for their survival whether they have reason to exist or not:

Legalizing marijuana “insults our common values” and insisted that “every single parent out there” opposed legalization. What do you think, that people who are in favor of decriminalization or changing policy don’t procreate?

Anatomy of the Deep State

“During the time in 2011 when political warfare over the debt ceiling was beginning to paralyze the business of governance in Washington, the United States government somehow summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi’s regime in Libya, and, when the instability created by that coup spilled over into Mali, provide overt and covert assistance to French intervention there. At a time when there was heated debate about continuing meat inspections and civilian air traffic control because of the budget crisis, our government was somehow able to commit $115m to keeping a civil war going in Syria and to pay at least £100m to the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters to buy influence over and access to that country’s intelligence. Since 2007, 2 bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, 1 killing 13 people. During that same period of time, the government spent $1.7m constructing a building in Utah that is the size of 17 football fields.