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Job Killers

About a week ago, the Washington Post printed a list of existing and proposed regulations businesses identified as having a negative impact on job growth. The identifications were solicited by a Republican congressman from California, who will no doubt use them as a target list. I cannot imagine that he will invite close scrutiny of this list, which includes such (cough) burdensome regulations as a limit to the toxic chemical discharges of Appalachian mining and government inspection of working conditions along with building inspection. No, Rep. Issa will grandstand about how government interference is costing jobs, and only mutter quietly behind closed doors that mines could afford to employ more miners if only we let them poison the water table, or that businesses could hire a few new workers every so often if only they were allowed to establish working conditions in which a few existing workers died every so often.

But as contemptible as the requested license to poison and similar “job-creating legislation” might be, it at least has the virtue of plausibility. (I say “plausibility” because there’s no guarantee of more jobs with a license to poison, merely the suggestion that we might see some. We’ve seen an awful lot of large corporations pocketing the profits from such incentives, or even cutting staff for short-term gains, to reflect the general monetizing and deregulation of industry generally since the Reagan revolution. But I digress.) Some of the (cough) job-killing regulations cited are not even plausible as job-killers.

Take, for example, a requirement to post notices informing workers of their rights under federal labor law. Really? Really?? How does that boardroom conversation go?

“Well, profits were steady this quarter, and we would like to expand in the widget market to supplement our whatzit manufacture. The process would allow us to employ another two hundred workers. Unfortunately, printing those damned notices—fully six 8-1/2 by 11 sheets of paper—cut too deeply into our budget to allow us to expand our worker base. The money just isn’t there.”

Or maybe it went more like…

“Gee, Bob, you’re just the kind of hot young turk this business needs, and we’d love to bring you into our office at $70k a year. But those damned worker rights notices take up the space where we’d put your cubicle. Sorry. Federal regulation. Our hands are tied.”

Or maybe…

“I don’t understand! The Fitzweiler account looked like it was in the bag. They flipped over the Power Point presentation. They loved our product samples. They were smiling all the way through the plant, right up to the moment…oh my god. The worker rights notices! Fitzweiler saw those, and simply decided not to give anyone a contract. Now I know why none of our competitors got the contract either: they had to live by the federal regulations, too. Damn those pesky federal regulations!”

Yeah, I don’t think so either. But I can easily imagine—and call me a cynical bastard, but I can—some variation on a complaint that “Once the workers started exercising their rights, our profits dropped. Why can’t we just make sure none of them knows what their rights are?” If you could imagine that, maybe you qualify as a cynical bastard, too. Test yourself by trying to figure out the conversation that lay behind a different “job-killing” regulation. What discussion precedes:

“Requiring us to publish how much the chief executive is paid relative to the typical worker will prevent us from hiring.”

2011 02 14 mdlake Politics Comments (0) Permalink

Root (a+b)

[Note: unsure whether a square root symbol (√) will appear properly in any given browser, I will use an older typographic convention in its place. sqrt (x) here indicates the square root of x, presumed to be the positive square root unless otherwise stated. It’s a bit cumbersome, and definitely ugly, but not as ugly as an error message.]

My students persist in taking sqrt (x+y) to be equal to sqrt (x) + sqrt (y). For those of you a little rusty on your advanced arithmetic/elementary algebra, this is incorrect; the square root of a sum is not the sum of the respective square roots. To give a concrete example, sqrt (100) = 10; sqrt (100) = sqrt (36 + 64), which emphatically does not equal sqrt (36) + sqrt (64), which equals 6 + 8, or 14. To take this to a ridiculous extreme, sqrt (n), where n is some arbitrary large integer, does not equal sqrt (1) + sqrt (1) + sqrt (1) + … + sqrt (1), for n iterations; if that were so, sqrt (n) would always equal n.

Kinda silly, right? But my kids keep doing it.

The confusion arises from the fact that the square root of a product is the product of the individual square roots. Kids who aren’t paying attention to the difference between addition and multiplication get confused. I can’t tell whether the problem is ignorance, apathy, or fear. Maybe they don’t know the difference, which suggests a failure of earlier schooling that I can either address at the expense of the students who have learned the lesson. Maybe they know the difference but get so tangled up in a phobia towards math that they can’t make the connection between what they know and what they do. Intimidated by the very idea of doing math, some students grab the first idea that comes to hand, write it down, and shove the homework aside as quickly as possible, without pausing to check their work or even to consider whether the methods they’re using are reasonable. Again, this problem I can address, but only at the expense of taking time away from what I’m supposed to be teaching in order to get everyone caught up, which carries some ugly ramifications for a school on the verge of getting its funding cut, or even shut down entirely. Or maybe the students who keep getting it wrong just don’t care, and heaven knows what I can do about that.

I’ve told the class plainly a few times that sqrt (x+y) isn’t sqrt (x) + sqrt (y). When that wasn’t enough, I illustrated the concept with concrete examples and actual numbers. I’ve given them more elaborate examples with variables, in order to demonstrate that variables are numbers, and follow the same rules, even if you don’t know which number they are. I’ve given them the silly case of Simple Simon thinking sqrt (n) = n, described above. I’ve forced them to “help me out” at the dry erase board, drilling them in not making that mistake. I’ve given them supplementary problems—literally one- or two-line calculations, no more than five minutes’ work—in their homework. The kids are starting to roll their eyes, especially the ones who have it right. And yet the class nods and agrees that sqrt (x+y) isn’t sqrt (x) + sqrt (y) and that they all understand, and then go and tell me that sqrt (a + 9) equals sqrt (a) + 3. ‘Cause a isn’t x, I guess.

It reminds me of Bill Cosby’s routine about how all children must suffer brain damage, because they are unable to connect simple commands like “don’t touch that” with action, and, asked why they touched it anyway, respond “I don’t know!” (“My parents never smiled. Because I, too, had brain damage!”) It would be funny if it weren’t so frustrating.

Or, more depressing still, possibly true. How many of these kids suffered malnutrition as kids? How many were raised in lead-painted apartments? How many simply didn’t get enough brain-developing attention? And how should a teacher handle that?

2011 02 11 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

Two-Fisted Boredom

Also in my quest for inspirational pulp adventure, I checked out Lost Horizon, not realizing until it was in the DVD player that it was a Frank Capra movie. Yerk. Couldn’t even sit through the whole thing.

This was not two-fisted adventure; it was one-fisted, and that for about half a second, in a performance that rates somewhere below the Three Stooges for realistic brawling. Promises that this was a darker turn from Capra’s usual work are only true in comparison to Capra’s usual work, not to any absolute scale, which is to say the movie doesn’t end with everyone wildly celebrating small-town American values. There’s still plenty of heavy-handed preaching; it’s just that this morality play ends by showing us what happens to greedy little boys and girls, rather than rewarding the good ones who live by simple faith.

There’s bits and pieces of pulp adventure here: a lost world, a natural aristocracy of whites over the darkies, airplanes still treated as something exotic. But you can’t call it “pulp adventure” when there’s no adventure. I can’t build an RPG campaign around this. The gravest danger the PCs would face is the possibility of the High Lama (a transplanted European, naturally) talking my players to death.

2011 02 10 mdlake Games
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Hidden Expenses

I lead a parsimonious life. Never liked spending money, and rarely find myself wanting consumer goods. Living too long as a struggling college student, and later without income as a homemaker only served to intensify my miserliness, but it’s been part of me for as long as I can remember.

Now I’m bound for a job as a teacher. As a student teacher, I still have no income, and tuition loans to pay, but presumably that will turn around soon.

In the meantime, I’ve found my expenses jumping dramatically. Gas for the daily commute—Eileene usually fills the tank, but sometimes it falls to me—and small food purchases when I haven’t time or handy groceries for a proper brown-bag lunch, and most oddly of all, candy.

School fund-raisers are nearly perpetual, but pre-spring, when student organizations are looking to fund the trips and tournaments and whatnot that cluster in May and early June, is the peak fund-raising season; often, two or three clubs will be competing for money. The most common way to raise cash is to sell candy at inflated prices, because it works and is relatively painless. Car washes are cold and only draw from the adult market; nobody cares about walk-a-thons; but you can get your fellow students to cough up $2 for a box of M&M’s day after day. Teachers get pestered to buy, too—a lot. And sometimes I do. Not from ever young entrepreneur, nor even every day, but enough to show willing.

That a couple of dollars every couple of days actually shows as a blip in my budget says a lot about my spending habits.

2011 02 09 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

Sepia Sky

Seeking inspiration as a GM, I settled for Sky Captain and the City of Tomorrow. While not exactly two-fisted pulp adventure from the serials, it seeks to imitate them, and it’s readily available. “Settled for” is the appropriate term: I could recall little of the movie besides not liking it, but thinking it looked pretty cool.

Now I remember why. Stiff dialogue, passionless acting, and a plot that manages to drag despite the air duels and robot invaders. Those robot invaders do look pretty cool, as does some of the computer-generated scenery, with one reservation: was it really necessary to shoot everything in sepia? Amazing historical fact: colors other than sepia existed before 1940, just not affordable color film.

Shooting in black and white I could respect, either as a challenge to recreate the feel of the old serials or as a homage, or a little of both. Black and white film could have contributed to a sense that we were watching historical events, or at least watching some treasure of film history. Shooting in sepia just makes Sky Captain feel pretentious. Playing a segment of The Wizard of Oz in the background was particularly irritating. It’s ostensibly supposed to frame Gwynneth Paltrow in a clandestine meeting with a super-scientist, and to set a timeframe for Sky Captain and his cohorts as well, but really it is just an unsubtle message to the audience: “Hey, look at our use of monochrome, but only mostly. Pretty damn cool how we captured the look of the ’40s with sepia, huh? This is just how really good directors of the era envisioned the world. We’re real art aficionados, here.”

The devices and designs of cinematography are generally supposed to be subtle, that they might do their job of adding to a movie without destroying the fragile state of immersion in the events the movie depicts. When the cinematography intrudes upon the scene—presuming the film isn’t an art flick that’s about the cinematography—the movie is weaker for it. When the director deliberately thrusts the camera work into the audience’s face, just to make sure they’re all participating in his self-conscious act of art, rather than enjoying the art itself, he’s doing it wrong.

2011 02 08 mdlake Games
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Clean Up that Mess

Just saw a web page for an RPG titled Maid at maidrpg.com. Player characters are all maids in the service of a single master, who by default is a lonely and socially underdeveloped young man teenage boy, though an old lech or a marble patriarch may be easily substituted. In addition PCs are also exotic combatants: humanoid cyborgs, witches, super-ninjas, aliens with ray-guns…whatever floats your boat, as long as it’s deadly, young, female, and, of course, babe-a-licious. The maids must deal with a range of threats—giant robots, rival ninja clans, lawyers with claims against the estate, a shortage of clean sheets—all while keeping the master both safe and comfortable.

Maid simulates a minor but distinct genre of Japanese animation, and crosses it with the major “chicks with guns” genre. It is meant as a tongue-in-cheek game in the grand tradition of Toon or Teenagers From Outer Space, including tables to produce extreme and/or amusing results and an immunity from death intended to encourage irresponsible, over-the-top behavior. But I’m not thinking “silly like Toon.” I”m thinking “Eww.”

See, the whole “maids in service of a young master” trope, more often than not, is just what it sounds like: the premise for animated pornography, often with a rape/submission theme. It doesn’t have to be porn. It could be innocent fun, if your tastes run to silly, or a bouncy satire of anime and its many idiosyncrasies. It could even be serious with a few rules tweaks, or at least mock-serious if delivered with a straight face. Yet even if the GM never raises the slightest hint of pornography in his campaign, the subtext will be pervasive. Like furries, everyone with the slightest passing acquaintance with the “stable of maids” theme in anime knows it’s a popular subset of porn, and, also like furries, once seen, cannot be unseen. No matter how scrupulously G-rated the game remains, it will remain X-rated in every player’s mind.

And, of course, there’s always the risk that the GM won’t treat it innocently, but rather as his own vicarious wank-fest. We are talking about a hobby with more than its share of maladjusted geeks and fanboys, after all.

2011 02 07 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Civ Fail

I had Sulla’s commentary on what went wrong with Civilization V pointed out to me recently. He gets some important details wrong, especially in his gripes list—for example, you do continue to pay gold-per-turn agreements even after declaring war. I also don’t understand how he can insist at length that ICS is an easy—too easy—path to victory then complain at length about the penalties Civ5 imposes on ICS, considering it the “right” way to play.

But there’s a lot of good, red meat in the essay, too. Better still is the lengthy quotation of Luddite, who lays his finger on the crux of the problem: the way that Civ5 is an empire-building game that does everything it can to discourage you from building anything: low production rates, the reinstatement of building maintenance, massive maintenance costs for armies and roads. Luddite goes a step further than would have occurred to me, however, when he pins the blame for all this on a dogmatic commitment to a limit of one unit per tile (1UPT).

1UPT means large armies are unwieldy, so armies have to be small. Restraining players to small armies means cutting production rates, even at the expense of slashing the production of buildings as well. But low production rates means small cities take forever to get started, so the central “free” tile has to be beefed up. So ICS, the demon of Civ1-2, is back. So corruption has to come back in a desperate (and failed) attempt to get it under control, and building maintenance has to come back with corruption to give it teeth. Which makes buildings less appealing relative to armies, so armies need a punishing maintenance cost, too, to prevent the player from just building hordes and capturing buildings.

All the things I miss from my beloved Civ series—well, half of them, anyway—all the things Civ5 gets wrong, traced back to 1UPT, an idea that in itself looks good. I enjoy small armies and the 1UPT fights, and would never have thought to trace all Civ5’s ills back to that.

Because the other half the problem is that the Civ5 team never figured out how to get the AI to fight properly with 1UPT. Like Sulla, I recognize that AI is difficult, but don’t see why it shouldn’t be possible to get it to play adequately. The designers simply dropped the ball on an admittedly difficult assignment and couldn’t save themselves with fascinating building problems, because they’d stripped building from the game.

The whole article is neatly summed up: “Civ had to give up a lot to get One Unit Per Tile, and what did it get in return? An AI that can’t play its own game.” Just as building couldn’t rescue conquest because building was stripped out, muiltiplayer can’t rescue bad AI because multiplayer was grossly neglected. I hadn’t noticed because I don’t play Civ multiplayer, but I couldn’t help but notice the bad AI. And, as a devoted builder—probably too interested in building for my own good, when it comes to playing Civ—I sure as hell noticed that Civ5 seemed to be about not building an empire. A very informative critique, one that explains not only what’s wrong with Civ5, but how it got that way.

2011 02 04 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Lost Horizon

What happened to all those two-fisted pulp adventures?

I’m considering running a role-playing game in that vein, but I confess I don’t know the genre all that well. Roleplaying supplements are available for the curious: GURPS Cliffhangers and the FATE-powered Spirit of the Century, for example. But I also wanted to go to the source, so I went to my local library to check out a few books and/or vids to fit the bill. Research. The effort produced surprisingly small results. Admittedly, my search suffered in large part from this very ignorance, but…pulp adventures seem to be almost entirely absent from Montclair Public Library, and all the libraries in the area.

We all have a vague idea of what they were like: tales of daring-do from the inter-war period. They were either inheritors of the tradition of Victorian romances or the last gasp of that era, a time when the dark corners of the map were vanishingly small but writers could still pretend that faraway Tibet or the Sahara or the Amazon held lost cities and giant apes. Airplanes and zeppelins were thrilling, jazz a novelty. Whites still ruled the world, but WWI had tarnished the reputation of old Europe and its refined gentleman-adventurer, so into that gap stepped the American vision of the hero: talented, rugged, egalitarian, and ready to punch his way out of any danger, unconfined by class and misplaced propriety and the old nationalism. Pulp heroes were the model for Indiana Jones, and everyone knows Indiana Jones. Star Wars, too, paid tribute to the space opera of the era, the American frontier spirit translated to space. The pulp serials were what Sky Captain and the City of Tomorrow were supposed to imitate.

But who were the heroes that Indy and Skywalker imitated? Who were the actual two-fisted serial heroes?

Well, there’s Tarzan and John Carter. And Flash Gordon. But they’re kinda science-fictiony, not really what I’m after. And…uh…that guy who fought Ming the Merciless. No, Ming was Flash Gordon’s nemesis; I mean the guy who fought Fu Manchu. He must’ve had a name. And…um. Didn’t Valentino do some of that? Oh, oh! The Shadow! Okay, the Shadow. That’s one. And once I look up the guy who fought Fu Manchu, that’s two.

See my problem?

The pulp genre is loosely defined. On one border of the serials lie space opera and the early westerns, which share the spirit of the pulps but not the setting. On another border of the pulp genre lies the film-noir private detective, which shares the setting but not the spirit: one wallows in cynicism and sin, the other celebrates relentless optimism and purity of spirit. On another border lies the proto-superheroes, gadgeteers and mystery men like the very early Batman. Thanks to King Kong and his lost world origin, pulps share a short border with B monster movies. But the backbone of the genre, tales of two-fisted pilots dangling from airships, wrestling tigers, and taking on the whole Yellow Menace with nothing but two fists and righteous fury, have drifted from popular perception.

So I did some further research. Turns out that the pulp genre, and the serial movie genre, were never all that prominent in their pure state. The Saturday morning serials of which I’d heard so much existed largely as an intersection of things that adventure fiction of the era—space opera, hard-boiled detectives, westerns, mystery men—had mostly in common, rather than a single vision. To a large extent, I’m chasing something that never really was. Bummer.

2011 02 03 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Cheatin’ Dumb

Caught my kids cheating on their homework yesterday. Five kids got the same wrong answer. That’s only to be expected now and again when they work together, and I’m perfectly happy that they should work together, but this was a stupid wrong answer, the kind of wrong answer that kids working together and not merely copying answers would never produce. I am morally certain that someone accidentally pushed an extra button on his calculator, typing in “189” when he meant “18,” got the wrong answer, and all his study buddies copied the answer without a second thought.

So I had to give them The Lecture on Copying. I’m sure you’ve heard it once or twice yourself, so I won’t repeat it here. I bring it up because I was able to make a bit of educational hay out of it by observing that they’d learned about estimation the previous semester.

Remember estimation? Remember how you should develop a habit of working out roughly how big your answer should be? If you take a handful of groceries through the 10-items-or-less line, and the costs are $4.15 and $7.99 and $1.99 and $18.50, the total should be around…what? Four dollars? Ten dollars? Thirty? Five hundred? Go ahead, estimate it right now. Ben, what did you get? Well, work it out: $4.15 is about four, $7.99 is about…eight, good. Right. Right. So about thirty dollars. Not exactly thirty dollars, but something around that. More than twenty, because eight dollars and eighteen is more than twenty. But less than fifty, because this is less than ten, less than ten, less than ten, less than twenty. If you took some oranges and a tube of toothpaste and some ice cream and a frozen turkey through the checkout, you shouldn’t be spending over $200. Or if you do, maybe I should start up a grocery in your neighborhood, right? (Pause for laughter. Settle for a few grins.) And if the guy at the register says you owe $200, you should stop and make sure he hasn’t made a mistake.

Estimation is a valuable skill. It can save you money.

It can also spare you from getting caught copying answers on your homework, right? Okay. I knew this was a really wrong answer because I’d estimated. So can you. And the only way five kids get the same really wrong answer is if they’re just copying down numbers without thinking. I want you thinking. Working together is fine. Comparing answers is fine. Just copying answers is not fine, because then you’re not thinking. Okay.

I’m sure it didn’t come off that smoothly; this is the speech as it appeared in my mind, not as it came out of my mouth. But that was the basic line, and it might have worked to reinforce the idea that estimation is useful.

2011 02 02 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

God’s Gonna Cut You Down

Lots of friction in last night’s session. My character, Deacon, is a badass of the “judge, jury, and executioner” school, who views himself as the avenging hand of God. Last night, he decided somebody needed putting down, and saw to it in cold blood. My fellow players had known something like this was coming, and even looked forward to it; their characters, however, did not.

Half the party freaked out and fled. They had to be talked into rejoining the party—that is, agreeing to work alongside this apparent psychopath. Deacon isn’t a psychopath, but it can be hard to tell the difference in a world where a chosen few have supernatural powers. Are the voices in his head really the spirit of divine vengeance? Defusing what could only be a catastrophic party split took some work, especially since Deke has no room for compromise once he’s reached his grim verdict, and couldn’t guarantee it wouldn’t happen again.

It was an uncomfortable session for me. Depicting justice bordering on murder was fine. Thrusting my character concept into the game in a manner that could potentially break the campaign wasn’t. Breaking a campaign under the excuse of “staying true to my character” is rarely okay, and that only if you find a well-established character painted into a narrative corner. (It happens.) Breaking a campaign with a character concept guaranteed to create that kind of friction is never okay. I stuck with Deacon’s concept only with the reassurance that my fellow players wanted to see him in action, which caried an implied agreement to compromise their concepts if necessary.

And they did, though, as I say, it took some work. I was surprised by the strength of their characters’ reactions, and worried that I had so surprised them with my brutality that they might be unwilling or unable to jump the conceptual hurdle now that it had arrived. And I needed substantial reassurance after the session that my fellow players were okay with the scene.

I got it, but am not reassured. Dave believes strongly that the plot comes first, and politely framed he conflict as one in which his character could begin to come to terms with the nasty business which is surely due as the campaign unfolds, though I still fear he found the exercise of tacking back to common ground perilous and unpleasant. Jen believes strongly that characters come first, and cheerfully agreed that this kind of friction is what she comes to the table to see, so she’s okay with events as they played out, though I remain uneasy about the implications of another, similar scene. And Ella, our novice GM, isn’t yet experienced enough or confident enough in her needs as GM to tell me whether I was out of bounds, or even necessarily to know.

So far, it’s worked out. As long as it continues to work out, everything is cool. As Jen says, intra-party conflict is one of the most interesting facets of role-playing. But it may yet break down, and if it does, it’s ultimately my fault. Maybe only partly my fault, but my fault nevertheless. If staying true to your character concept continually disrupts the flow of the game, then you didn’t design that character properly in the first place.

2011 02 02 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink