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Laser Tag!

  • by Dave Churvis
  • March 23, 2012 – 10:10 pm
  • Posted in Atheism
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A couple of months ago, my friends and I played laser tag for my partner’s birthday. It was a tremendous amount of fun, and I got my ass handed to me in so many ways by SO MANY LITTLE KIDS.

The thing about playing laser tag as an adult is that you and your group are quite likely going to be the only adults playing. There were so many kids playing in the same game as us, and one of them was really good. His code name was TEBOW. This was back when Tebow-mania was in full swing, and this kid… man. He came in first place the first two games we played, and he dropped to one knee and Tebowed after each one. It was annoying, sure, but it’s whatever – he’s doing what he wants to do.

The third game came around, and it started as usual – except that this time, it wasn’t TEBOW that kept showing up on our guns whenever we got tagged. It was a new user – SUPERMAN. When the session was over, we looked up at the scoreboard, and SUPERMAN had blown everyone away. A total blowout. As for TEBOW? He was sixth. Everyone ganged up on him this time and it showed. As the game master came up and started calling people up to get their score sheets, you could tell everyone was waiting for SUPERMAN to go up there so we could see what they looked like. When the GM called SUPERMAN, it was a tough-looking Latina girl who came up and got her scorecard. She looked tough and confident, and I’m pretty sure she’s going to end up as an Army sniper.

We had all been beaten by a girl. TEBOW and his buddies seemed a bit put out, I think, but my friends and I were ecstatic. And it made me giggle a bit inside – all of TEBOW’s religious rituals and his previous wins meant absolutely nothing when faced with a girl who had a good head on her shoulders and a little confidence.

It’s silly, but that game gave me hope for the future :)

Although there was one slightly unsettling thing… I looked up at the Wall of Fame before we left. Every SINGLE entry on the Wall of Fame was a church of some kind. I really hope they’re not using Laser Tag as some kind of weird God Warrior training or something.

On second thought, I hope they are. Because then we can bring in a squad of girls and put the church groups in their place!

While The Lorax Gently Weeps

  • by Dave Churvis
  • March 22, 2012 – 7:45 am
  • Posted in Politics
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This post is a little late in coming, but I’ve been mulling it over. I have some real problems with The Lorax. No, not the wonderful and amazing book by Dr. Seuss that should be required reading for every member of an industrialized society. I’m talking about the 3D-animated travesty released a few weeks back. I saw a trailer for it and thought “wow… they’ve destroyed another piece of my childhood. Oh well.”

But then I read Natalie Reed’s take on the trailer and started to realize the depths of the problem. Here was a character, supposedly representing wisdom and caring for the environment and such, wisecracking and generally making a zany comedy out of what is supposed to be a serious lesson.

But then I noticed the media saturation. The Lorax was all over the xfinity on-demand system with its constant rejoinders to find out more about the movie and go see the movie and read about the actors and on and on and on. Everywhere was a marketing push for this film that was based on a book about the destructive potential of unchecked marketing and consumerism.

But the straw that broke the camel’s back for me was when they used The Lorax in a commercial for a fucking SUV.

No. Just. No. The Lorax does not promote SUVs. No car is “Truffula Tree Certified”. I don’t care if it runs on moondust and unicorn flowers and gets 500,000 mpg… it is not “environmental”. It’s a damned car that uses resources and you can’t get around that. But no… the producers have whored The Lorax out to anyone and everyone, and in the long run, no one’s going to care.

It’s not fair, but then what is? If you need me, I’ll be over in the corner, shivering in fear that one day they’ll make a live-action version of The Giving Tree directed by Michael Bay.

Supply and Demand? You keep using those words… I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

  • by Dave Churvis
  • March 21, 2012 – 10:12 pm
  • Posted in Economics
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Over at Econlog, David Henderson opened up a can of worms by pointing out a flaw in something a reporter said:

If the Department of Energy is to be believed, weekly gasoline demand has fallen 7% on averagefrom a year ago, to its lowest level since 2001…. The U.S. economy is gaining steam, they argue–nonfarm payrolls rose 1.6% in February–and while high gas prices probably are eroding demand, it wouldn’t be by that much.

…

The news story is not about demand at all, but about something else. And by making it look as if it’s about demand, the reporter confuses an issue. It’s an issue that someone who really paid attention in an introductory microeconomics class would see clearly.

From an economic perspective, David is absolutely correct here. The reporter is talking about consumption, not demand, the first time she refers to it, and about quantity demanded, not demand, the last time she refers to it. To an economist, both of the reporter’s statements make absolutely zero sense – demand is a curve which cannot “fall” by 7 percent, and prices by definition cannot affect demand, only quantity demanded.

Of course, to the “outside world” that is, after all, the reporter’s target audience, all they know is a general concept called “supply and demand”. Through some vague process of osmosis that probably happened during a cursory sixth-grade social studies unit, they got the impression that if there’s more of something, the price goes down and people buy more.

Not really sure what my point here is, other than my continual annoyance at people who use economic terms without an understanding of what they actually mean. On the same Econlog post, Karl Smith (of the wonderful Modeled Behavior blog) weighed in on the situation:

To be far [sic] to the reporter, the second usage is not that off from the way people in the industry use the term “demand” and its not clear that there is an obvious basic economic term.

Which is why I would honestly prefer that journalists not even use the terms unless they are actually familiar with them. And I would say the same should hold up for anyone else. “Demand” and “Supply” are very specific things, and misusing the terms only serves to continue to spread economic ignorance, which is frankly something there is far too much of in the current political climate.

Random Thoughts On A Tragedy

  • by Dave Churvis
  • March 10, 2012 – 1:41 am
  • Posted in Meta
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Someone jumped to their death earlier tonight from a high floor in a building a couple of blocks from where I live. Matt heard about it from a tweet while we were driving home from the store. We passed by where it happened. There were cleanup crews. I didn’t see much of it since I was driving, but the whole thing is of course very sad.

It would not ordinarily have been particularly remarkable (what an odd thing to say about someone taking their own life, especially in such a dramatic way). However, Matt and I are familiar with the building where it happened. It’s a development called 1010 Midtown, and we are currently saving up to buy a condo there in a few years. It’s a rather upscale building, and I’m having a hard time understanding why anyone who lives (lived?) there would want to end it all. I’ve been suicidal before, so I know it doesn’t necessarily have to make sense to an outside observer. But it’s just so strange to me that someone who lived in the place I see as my key to ultimate happiness was so unhappy that he had to end it all.

It just makes me sad.

I Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself

  • by Dave Churvis
  • March 4, 2012 – 2:53 pm
  • Posted in Society
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According to many of my friends, I have become something of a neo-Luddite recently, and this is a topic to which I will be returning a lot. I just came across an interview with Jessie Klein, author of a new book called “The Bully Society”. She discusses a number of things in her book, mostly related to bullying, but she makes an excellent point about the way that technology is transforming our social world, and not always for the better:

Technology isn’t necessarily evil — it can be used towards very constructive ends by people who are very isolated. There are ways technology can be used to help connect people and hopefully you have face-to-face connections following that. But I think because so much of our social relationships have become commodified, about getting ahead and having status and having popularity. Many relationships are almost entirely implemented on the Internet and people have few face-to-face relationships. Studies have shown that kids today don’t even necessarily know how to have face-to-face relationships anymore. People see people in cafes and they’re sitting right with each other, texting with other people. Friendship has decreased. In the ’80s, the average person had three confidantes. It’s down to two. At the same time we’re finding out that for mammals it’s actually organic to develop friendships and to care about other living beings. Our social and economic environment is undermining us.

Go read the whole thing.