…it doesn’t matter how much you have.
Case in point: Almost 80% of NFL players near bankruptcy two years after they retire.
Archive for the ‘win’ Category
When you don’t know how to handle money
Sunday, March 21st, 2010Is Andrew Breitbart coming to take us down?
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010Breitbart, editor for the Drudge Report and a media figure in his own right, confronted Max Blumenthal at CPAC over Blumenthal’s article on James O’Keefe (summary: the dude who spied on ACORN maybe is somewhat of a white nationalist).
Breitbart’s not done yet. He is having so much fun he now wants to take down the “institutional left,” and he believes this will happen “within the next three weeks”:
He might be referring to his appearance on former Congressman (and radio personality!) Ernest Istook’s Harvard Institute of Politics study group, “Propaganda in American Politics.” Breitbart is scheduled to be a guest speaker next week, which falls within the deadline he gave on a Fox News show that attracts more viewers at 3AM than CNN at 8PM.
This is a must-not-miss event. What better way to take down the institutional left than to corrupt influence the minds of young Harvard intellectuals who will lead the institutions? It worked for Peggy Noonan.
(EDIT: Didn’t happen. Some anti-global warming guy came instead. The institutional left survives.)
[Media Matters via Gawker]
The 2010 speakers
Thursday, February 18th, 2010Commencement: Former Justice David Souter.
Class Day: CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. (General feeling in our circles: “Several seniors expressed ambivalence about the choice—a sentiment that may stem from a lack of recognition of Amanpour’s name among some individuals.” Let’s hope her speech is a good one.)
The Harvard Center for Ethics presents…Eliot Spitzer
Monday, November 9th, 2009No, really:
The title of the lecture is “From Ayn Rand to Ken Feinberg — How Quickly the Paradigm Shifts. What Should Be the Rationale for Government Participation in the Market?” We guess he will talk about how different New York would be if he could take down Wall Street and whatnot. That and/or prostitutes. [Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard] [Office of the Arts at Harvard]
The Left 4 Dead 2 Vitruvian Man
Monday, November 9th, 2009
(Click to enlarge. Excuse me for the quality of the picture, as I was running the L4D2 demo from my college laptop.)
The background: Valve recently released the Left 4 Dead 2 demo. Although the only game play mode officially offered is the standard survival bout, it took only about a week for members of the online community to figure out how to modify the files to allow people to play as the infected (zombies). This semi-versus mode is not perfect, however, and as a result every time a player switches between human and infected the system creates an extra survivor clone. This process can be repeated over a dozen times. Since there are only four character models for the survivors, continuous switching ensures that there are multiple copies of the same character. Yes, it’s awesome. The only downside is that the game still caps the total number of human players at four, which means that most of the survivor characters will be AI.
The story behind the picture: Three other players and I decided to spawn the maximum number of survivors using the mod/glitch technique so that we could fight them as infected in expert difficulty. There is a point in the second level of the Parish campaign where all the survivors must enter a trailer, close the door, and open another door that leads to a tower with an alarm that must be switched off. Sometimes the AI was unresponsive and would just stay stuck inside the trailer (they would also not stop repeating the same lines). The only way to kill them was to enter the trailer. I took this picture late in the game when only a few survivors were still alive. It shows multiple dead “Ellis” models one after another, partly covered by one of the remaining “Nick” models. We won the game shortly after.
The Mundell-Fleming GTA Hypothesis
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009Grand Theft Auto IV achievement and trophy loyalists will remember the “Impossible Trinity” reward received after completing the “Museum Piece” mission. Speculation abounded over the nature of the name and its significance, and later it was more or less revealed to be a teaser for the next two playable characters in the GTA IV episodic installments [Kotaku, Giant Bomb]
For me this discussion went by the wayside until just recently, when Professor Jeffrey Frieden lectured about the “unholy/impossible trinity” in international economics (formally derived from the Mundell-Fleming model). Basically, a country can at any time only choose two of three goals: 1) a fixed or pegged exchange rate, 2) an independent monetary policy, and 3) free capital mobility. Given a world where there is free capital mobility or capital controls can be avoided, countries will have to choose between 1 and 2. Although this is a simplistic way of looking at the model, one could argue that the US, which lets its currency float, has chosen 2. More information about this here and here.
What does this mean? Probably nothing. Maybe the person in charge of achievements had studied economics and was just having fun with the idea. Or maybe “impossible trinity” is one of those blanket terms that can refer to many things that come in 3′s, not just economics. Heck, I could write the religious hypothesis after this. But that should not stop the mass speculation! If you can only have 2 out of 3 characters, what are the GTA-specific reasons why you can’t have the 3rd? Is Niko Bellic representative of fixed exchange rates or free capital mobility?
…
Ok, it was probably just a broad term or a reference to religion. Extending economic models and hypotheses to try to interpret video game lore will just lead to a cluster****.
Government on my mind
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009While checking my news feed, I came across this headline: “Azarenka Impresses on Doha Debut.” [BBC]
My instinctual reaction was to ask: Hey, is Azarenka some newly formed nation-state in the WTO? Are other countries praising its commitment to lower tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade at the Doha Round?
Well, the name actually refers to Belorussian tennis player Victoria Azarenka. The Doha debut is…a tennis match. Oy, this needs to be tagged under both “n00bs” and “win.”
You only have enough money for one
Saturday, October 10th, 2009Do you buy BioShock for $29.99? Or BioShock and Elder Scrolls IV for $29.99?
Choices, choices.
Found at a Best Buy in Cambridge, MA. Right next to each other.
Conspiracy theory speculation time!
Monday, September 28th, 2009Via Drudge:
A local TV station that reported on Chicagoans NOT wanting the Olympics has been told NOT to run the report again, insiders tell the DRUDGE REPORT! The Chicago Olympic Committee told FOX Chicago that its broadcast “would harm Chicago’s chances” to be awarded the games. The station’s news director ordered staff to hold fire after the report aired once last Thursday morning, claims a source.
There is just something odd about the group’s website. It looks too slick and polished to be from a source that does not have a vested interest in moving the Olympics to Rio (an interest other than saving Chicago money). My initial guess was that President Lula da Silva created an elite Brazilian PR task force to besmirch Chicago days before the official selection. After watching the Chicagoans in the video, Lula da Silva most likely hired a U.S.-based PR firm instead. Even better, maybe some people in Madrid or Tokyo wanted to kill two birds with one stone and tried to do so by making Brazil look like crap for making Chicago look like crap.
That, or 4chan is playing a big lolnoob on everyone.
Let the countdown to the 2016 LOLympics begin!
EDIT: FOX Chicago reports that the anti-Chicago website may be based in Rio. [FOX Chicago]
…it’s probably all just an inside job from the Chicago political machine.
The so-called nanny state is here. Just look.
Friday, September 18th, 2009
Ron Paul fans react to McMahon senate announcement
Thursday, September 17th, 2009
[Wonkette via Mother Jones]
The wrestler in the video is Glenn Jacobs (a.k.a. Kane), a hardcore Ron Paul/libertarian/Austrian economics fan. He even blogs about those things here and here. Given that Linda McMahon is running for the same seat that former Ron Paul adviser Peter Schiff wants, putting two and two together is easy. Kane saw the neo-con oozing out of McMahon years ago and tombstoned her. The “storyline” was just a cover.
Now McMahon is getting her revenge by becoming the anti-freedom establishment candidate, or so says diehard Austrian Lew Rockwell:
The powerbrokers who run the Republican party in the US and CT want to stop Peter Schiff’s run for the federal senate against Crook Dodd, so they are ginning up the campaign of the very wealthy Linda McMahon, head of the World Wrestling Federation, since the other Republicans are such losers.
Duh. After all, is it really a coincidence that McMahon’s announcement comes when the latest poll shows Peter Schiff getting a whooping 1% of the vote among Republican primary voters? [Capitol Watch] To be fair, Dodd is failing so miserably that another poll shows Schiff almost neck and neck with Dodd were Schiff to become the Republican candidate. [Rasmussen] This is a big if now that Linda McMahon is there to use all her wrestling monies to ensure the power elite maintain the Connecticut seat. Or maybe she is a zooprise Ron Pauls kandidates that will split the neo-con vote in half and give Schiff the victory or something. Let the internets debate begin. [Ron Paul Forums]
The real question is: who will be McMahon’s partner in her tag team match against Kane and Schiff at WrestleMania 26?
Kane and Ron Paul in happier times.
Joe Wilson, Time Traveler
Sunday, September 13th, 2009Here at Kitsch/Posh we imagined what it would be like if Joe Wilson were to confront some famous pronouncements throughout history (and fiction). Enjoy [YouTube]:
