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Sunday, May 30, 2010 - 01:10 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

One Week

"...I also respectfully disagree with MM Lee's remark that our leaders did not have to worry about neighbouring countries attacking Costa Rica because we had no wealth to talk about.

We have great wealth, it is everywhere, and Costa Ricans have been looking after it for the past 40 years. Our wealth is green, represented by 4.5 per cent of the biodiversity known to date; all in a territory which constitutes only 0.03 per cent of the world."

- the Ambassador of Costa Rica responds to our MM.
I would call it a draw - Costa Rica might indeed be rich, but it is also true that not many wars have been started over beetles, despite their standing with the Creator



Curse the infernal heat! (link credit edchong)... bearing with it...

In-Camp Training cancelled, freeing up two weeks.


Two Down, 32 to go


Table Ten


Sunday saw the bachelor count of 4O go down by one more, in an evening that saw smk (whose liver has probably levelled up after long bouts of entertaining Chinese visitors in an official capacity) plying csq with wine, which might have contributed to a S$38 cab fare home due to consequences that were not entirely improbable; there might be a few more in the pipeline, with one engagement announced right after the dinner.

The wedding was also notable for being graced by edsoon, a bona fide 如謎一般的男人. By the time we left, we were no closer to finding out what he was working as, much less other more intimate information. Come to think of it, he might even be married, for all I know.

N.B. It was also the first time I visited the Goodwood Park Hotel, many years after I first read about it in the Sultan of Brunei's biography. Mental image was completely unlike reality.


Saint Petersburg

Wednesday night was spent at Minds Cafe, and after a round of Container (which I had unfortunately forgotten the strategy for), we were introduced to a game called Saint Petersburg.

As board games go, it wasn't too complicated. There are four decks of cards - the Worker deck, the Building deck, the Aristocrat deck and the Upgrade deck. Each players starts with 25 roubles, and a marker corresponding to one of the decks (randomly picked). Each round then consists of four phases corresponding to each deck, and during each phase the player with the appropriate token goes first.

At the beginning of each phase, cards are drawn from the corresponding deck until there are eight cards on the table (therefore, eight workers are always drawn at the very first phase - note that these numbers are for a four-player game). Then, each player may take an action - which is usually to either buy a card outright (paying the cost in roubles), or to hoard a card for future use (which does not require roubles, but the card's production does not occur, and only up to three cards may be hoarded at any time).


A Worker, a Building, an Aristocrat and an Upgrade walk into a bar...


The phase ends when all players pass (this might be voluntary, but must eventually happen), and then the production of all the appropriate cards each player owns take effect. Generally:

  • Workers produce roubles, which allow players to buy more stuff, but by themselves do not count towards winning the game.
  • Buildings produce Victory Points (VPs), which are important since the player with the most VPs at the end, wins.
  • Aristocrats may produce either roubles, or VPs, or both. There is also a VP bonus at the very end, which depends on how many different types of Aristocrats a player has. Quite often, this determines the winner.
Finally, at the end of a round, all cards that were not chosen move to the bottom row, where they may be bought at a one rouble discount. The players' markers rotate clockwise, and the game continues until one or more of the decks run out of cards. The game then ends at the end of that round.

While the rules are simple to grasp, playing well is another matter altogether. While, unlike Container, it is not possible to go into debt, overextending early on can seriously cripple a player. A common beginners' mistake would be to buy the first huge building that comes along (hey, it produces 5 VPs a round, can't be bad, right?), and end up not having money to buy new workers in the second round, and then possibly the third, which would put him in a hopeless position.

A rather less intuitive component of strategy is the manipulation of the board - recall that there are at most eight cards available at any time. Therefore, if five cards remain after the last phase of the first round, just three workers will be drawn at the beginning of the second round, and guess who loses out? In such a situation, it behooves that player to hoard something, if only to get a vital third worker.

Happily, there is a freeware version of the game [about 2.2MB, including English language pack], which frankly is quite challenging - my win percentage is only beginning to inch towards 40%. Games certainly don't have to have explosions everywhere to command attention.


Discussion on Debt


The New American Trilogy


However painful debt may be in games, it's worse in real life. America in particular has an issue with it, and I.O.U.S.A, a critically acclaimed movie in book format, more or less beats one simple message into the reader's head: The USA has been spending more than it is producing for a long time, and something has to give.

How bad is it? As of today, U.S. public debt is around 70% of GDP (i.e. roughly what the country produces in a year), or in other words, the entire U.S. would have to give up all their output for eight months to repay it. From another perspective, that's US$30000 for every single person in the USA; the consolation is that the USA has recovered from a debt level of some 120% of GDP, but that was directly after the Second World War.

Debt by itself is not undesirable - borrowing to invest for future returns can be worthwhile, even necessary. The problem is that this does not appear to be the case with the USA, and the debt simply snowballs to future generations, i.e. people who are not yet born become liable for the debts of their forebears. If this continues, lenders will at some point doubt the ability of the country to repay its debts... and that's when the trouble starts.

Barring a miracle, what happens then is that the citizens will have to endure some combination of working harder and consuming less, as more taxes are collected to pay back the debts, while the country's assets fall into the hands of foreigners (this was a concern with the Japanese at the height of their prosperity in the Eighties).

That's playing nice; alternatively, citizens might decide they've had enough and emigrate, the government could just print more money, or even just default and refuse to honour the debts. This has in fact happened many times before without the sky falling, but those were small fishes compared to the USA.

But are things that hopeless? Buffett says no, since productivity is continually rising, and standards of living will improve despite the debt burden on future generations. Other like Ron Paul are not so optimistic, and blame the conversion of the U.S. dollar to a fiat currency (which freed it from being backed by gold, and essentially meant that the government could create money at will); this probably works with sufficient discipline, but several interviewees point out that politicians are too often tempted to take more than they give, if only to be re-elected.

William Bonner also points out that gold mining yields have tended to increase by about 2-3% a year, closely matching world aggregate GDP growth, which makes basing currencies on it very appropriate. It is also pointed out that Greenspan was on record as a fervent advocate of the gold standard in his youth, but did an about-turn once he was in control at the Federal Reserve. Dr. Greenspan has his say too, but his piece appears me to mostly be stating that people have the right to be fiscally irresponsible in a free society, and that there is not much the Fed can do to fix a low savings rate.


With apologies to English majors - it's just allegory!
(Source: zoitz.com)


The other two books may lend some insight into the low-savings problem. Strapped contends that young adults can't save because they are often deep in debt (US$20000 on graduation from college, US$45000 after graduate school, and a whopping US$100000 for newly-minted lawyers and doctors was cited). Oh, credit card debt after some freebies and drinks during promotions on campus play a part, but it's minor compared to the cost of higher education.

But, but - education is an investment, in fact perhaps the most exalted form of investment, right? True. But even so, going into debt to fund an education has an associated fallout. If a young adult wishes to buy a home and start a family, finances can get very tight, especially with a chunk of his paycheck being used to repay his loans. And any emergencies - baby falls sick, car broke down - might well require additional borrowing, and let's just say that credit card companies are not very nice, as far as leeching onto the desperate is concerned...

[N.B. See this and this and this]

All this might yet be alright, if young adults had job security - if one is assured of a salary that steadily increases throughout one's working life, then taking out loans for education to get that stable job is wise.

Unfortunately, there are two problems. The first is that, while a bachelor's degree is necessary for entering the middle class, it is far from sufficient; as the author puts it, a bachelor's degree is the new high school diploma, with graduate degrees the new bachelors. Therefore, most young adults without parental funding (or a cushy family business) have little alternative but to borrow to pay for college, if they desire to get anywhere in life.

The second is that jobs, or more specifically well-paying and stable jobs, are becoming harder to find. As The Disposable American puts it, not too long ago, laying off employees was seen as a sign of failure, and blue-collar workers could aspire to a standard of living similar to most white-collar workers. Well, it's the same old story - when the knockoffs from China become nearly indistinguishable from your products and sell for far less, something has to give, and it's often jobs.

Three cheers for the New Economy.

[N.B. One side bonus of library books is the loan slips (and sometimes namecards) that are used as bookmarks and then left within. Guessing at the motivations of past readers can be a refreshing diversion]


Personal Productivity


The Alternative Desktop


Felt that I needed a little something to jumpstart myself, and a trip down to Daiso at IMM yielded three corkboards, a hundred pins and a sturdy mesh basket, at S$2 each [N.B. Daiso is run on essentially the same idea as the now-defunct One.99 chain of stores] Some things are just better in hardcopy than on the computer screen, and with this my to-do list will never be off.

Made a trip down to the city area to collect some stuff, and got some mounting tape (not exactly cheap) to attach the boards. Took a short walk round Carrefour, and discovered that their house brand tennis rackets sold for just S$15. If only I had known.


Widescreen DotA

Today's tech tip is on how to play DotA (a Warcraft III mod) in its proper proportion on a widescreen monitor. Warcraft III is an ancient game by today's standards (being released in mid-2002), and as such does not have native widescreen support, unlike some newer games; being able to view more of the map at one go appears to be regarded as cheating.

My Samsung naturally stretches the image to cover the full display area, which I felt was less than pleasing, with everything looking squashed - this however is a matter of taste, and there are queries on how to do this, on monitors that display black vertical bars (which I wanted) instead.

In the end, i used the -window -opengl options to run WC3 in windowed mode, and the Sizer freeware to set the window size to the desired 1440 x 1080 in one click. Finally, to prevent the mouse pointer from moving out of the window, Windows Mouse Capture can be used.



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Next: Thou Shalt Pass


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2 comments

anonymous said...
"Games certainly don't have to have explosions everywhere to command attention"

I think u need to play some porn games


May 30, 2010 - 21:35 SGT     
gilbert said...
i think u need to play more mainstream games like God of War, GTA, etc etc, got various explosions for your choosing.


May 30, 2010 - 21:48 SGT     

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