The A-Team departed our factory, having established a system–several systems, really, all different–to reduce inventory by hiring more people to handle it. I am not sure they even managed to reduce the total inventory, or just where it was stored. Little matter either way; the next day, P.B. was told to start trimming his manpower. Click Here to continue reading.
For those who know Galactic Civilization II and Homeworld, this very corny clip will make you sit up and take notice.
For those that don’t know, Homeworld had one of the few innovative ideas ever to come out in the world of strategy gaming, but its execution was terrible. Galactic Civilization was great execution of the tired old 4x model with a much needed focus on the A.I.
Now the makers of Galactic Civilization have taken the idea behind Homeworld and tried to do it properly. By all accounts, they have succeed.
This from Gamespy…..
The difference between SoaSE and other “4X” titles is that all of a player’s decisions are carried out in the manner of a real-time strategy title. Click on the capital ship factory and it takes approximately 30 seconds for the ship to be produced. Put together a fleet of a dozen or so ships and send them on a three-jump trip to an enemy world and it’ll take them eight or so minutes to get there. Once in combat, battle is decided by spaceship strengths and weaknesses, proper positioning and the use of player-controlled special abilities in the manner of a classic RTS — all of it rendered in stunning graphical splendor.
The final result of this unlikely blending of styles is an elegant and stately ballet in which players use the mouse wheel to zoom from an overarching view of their empire down to the local level where they can tweak the placement of ship factories, defensive emplacements or direct individual spaceships in battle. Despite being in real time, the game’s pace is fairly sedate. This allows players plenty of leisure to concentrate on things like developing planetary infrastructure, conducting diplomatic relations with other players in multiplayer games, buying and selling resources on the black market and tweaking their trade networks to maximize revenue. As a “4X” title, Sins of a Solar Empire is filled with the sorts of global “guns or butter?” decision-making that make these titles so much fun.
When battles do occur, players have an impressive amount of control over the makeup, disposition and tactics of their space navies. Each race has a wide variety of purpose-built spacecraft ranging from six different types of mothership down to tiny missile launchers, fighter carriers, gunships, support vessels and much more. The game’s deep but easy-to-understand research tree has both a “civilian” and “military” wing that lets players further tweak both their imperial and close-combat strategies to their liking. These different varieties of spacecraft aren’t just for show, either. Players can and must put together purpose-designed task forces using a variety of spaceship classes in order to be competitive. They can even take direct control over their ships, though the excellent unit AI is perfectly capable of fighting a decent battle. The result is that the game requires as much strategizing at the unit level as running the whole empire does.
Most other reviews seem to say similar things. As the Wikipedia article on the game states….
Since its launch, Sins of a Solar Empire has received almost universally positive reviews. It was named Game Informer’s PC Game of the Month, and was awarded a 9/10 review.[7] The US edition of PC Gamer awarded the game a 91%, as well as an Editor’s Choice award, whilst the UK edition awarded it 84%.[8] GameSpot awarded the game a 9/10, as well as an Editor’s Choice award.[9] GameSpy awarded the game a 4.5/5, as well as an Editor’s Choice award.[10] IGN awarded the game an 8.9/10, as well as an Editor’s Choice award.[11] Maximum PC rated the game a 9/10, and bestowed upon it their KickAss award. In addition to these accolades, Sins of a Solar Empire has received Editor’s Choice awards from FiringSquad[12], Gamer 2.0[13], GameShark[14], GameTap[15], and Pelit. As of March 2008, Sins of a Solar Empire has a recorded aggregate score of 89% on Metacritic (based on 23 reviews).[16]
Common praise for the game has been directed towards the game’s clever blend of RTS and 4X gameplay (hence the RT4X moniker), the seamless zoom function, and the user-friendly Empire Tree and UI. That the game was designed to play efficiently on older as well as newer PCs has garnered considerable praise. Criticism has been focused on the lack of a single-player campaign, and the potentially lengthy game-play times.[17
Every one got scared today because it came out that Bear Stearns was in danger of going under. But the fed rode to the rescue. Felix Salmon tries to justify the bail out….
While I have a certain amount of sympathy for this tough-love approach to the banking system, in the end I’m quite glad that Ben Bernanke and Tim Geither, softies that they are, went down the route that they did. Not because I think Bear’s shareholders deserve their $30 per share or whatever they’re going to end up receiving, but rather because of the sheer amount of wealth that could have been wiped off the stock and bond markets as a result.
It turns out, you see, that every mom-and-pop stock-market investor is actually, and rather unwittingly, taking investment-bank default risk, then. Which is why it’s nice to have a Fed on the lookout for them. So far, retail stock-market investors haven’t panicked; let’s try and keep it that way, shall we?
But for my money, I think the Naked Capitalism has the right take….
Bear is a large prime broker, which means it lends to hedge funds. It is also a significant counterparty in enough different credit markets that its collapse would have at a minimum caused panic as to who might have been hurt. You’d have a further scramble for liquidity and reluctance to lend, which is precisely the condition the Fed has been trying to alleviate.
In particular, according to Bloomberg, Bear was the second largest underwriter of mortgage bonds, The lead manager (I’m assuming Bear was also a significant lead manager) is the only one who knows where the bonds went and is thus in the best position to trade them. So Bear’s role as an important market-maker may have played into the calculus.
But the answer to the question of whether Bear should have been allowed to tank depends on how long it would take the crisis to pass. Swap spreads were elevated a full year after the LTCM rescue, but here the relevant metric would be how long the acute phase might take. If it was two weeks or a month, and no one save maybe some middling sized hedge funds (or a lot of teeny ones) would fail, that would have been acceptable. But the Fed couldn’t assess this in a 24 hour period. (However, some parties believe that the Fed’s $200 million TLSF was in part to assist Bear; if so, they’ve had at least a week to evaluate this risk. But in that case, I’m not certain they asked the right questions).
I still think Bear should have been permitted to fail. Now every the same size or larger knows the Fed will ride into the rescue. This is a terrible precedent. It also increases the odds of the Fed running out of firepower long before the crisis is over.
Even with the rescue, markets still dropped today.
From the Economist….
Your correspondent, the only foreign journalist with official permission to be in Lhasa when the violence erupted, saw crowds hurling chunks of concrete at the numerous small shops run by ethnic Chinese lining the streets of the city’s old Tibetan quarter. They threw them too at those Chinese caught on the streets—a boy on a bicycle, taxis (whose drivers are often Chinese) and even a bus. Most Chinese fled the area as quickly as they could, leaving their shops shuttered.
The mobs, ranging from small groups of youths (some armed with traditional Tibetan swords) to crowds of many dozens, including women and children, rampaged through the narrow alleys of the Tibetan quarter. They battered the shutters of shops, broke in and seized whatever they could, from hunks of meat to gas canisters and clothing. Some goods they carried away—little children could be seen looting a toyshop—but most they heaped in the streets and set alight.
Within a couple of hours, fires were blazing in the streets across much of the city. Some buildings caught fire too. A pall of smoke blanketed Lhasa, obscuring the ancient Potala—the city’s most famous monument, which covers a hillside overlooking the city. It is the traditional winter palace of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, who fled into exile in India after an abortive uprising in 1959. Some of the demonstrators shouted slogans like “long live Tibet” and “long live the Dalai Lama”. One group trampled on a Chinese flag in the middle of a main road.
For the curious, this is what a traditional Tibetan sword looks like.
I don’t think swords will do much against an AK-47 myself, but this story does remind us that there are lots of ethnic groups in China that are just waiting for the power of the central government to wain.
Supposedly we had some good inflation data recently. Raise your hand if it reflects your personal experience.
Also read this from Naked Capitalism….
What did the Boskin Commission think was out of line? According to Wikipedia:
The report highlighted four sources of possible bias:
Substitution bias occurs because a fixed market basket fails to reflect the fact that consumers substitute relatively less for more expensive goods when relative prices change.
Outlet substitution bias occurs when shifts to lower price outlets are not properly handled.
Quality change bias occurs when improvements in the quality of products, such as greater energy efficiency or less need for repair, are measured inaccurately or not at all.
New product bias occurs when new products are not introduced in the market basket, or included only with a long lag.
So the Boskin report would have us believe that if I switch from steak to hamburger because beef prices are up, we should only capture the change in how I consume (ie, inflation is new hamburger/old steak price, not new steak/old steak). That is patently bogus. Similarly, the outlet substitution seems rife for abuse (“Ooh, the number is going to be really bad this month! Can we find anywhere selling X cheaper so we can put that in the model instead?”).
An EU regulation designed to stop the spread of BSE has had the unintended effect of starving scavengers, many of which are protected species. Around Europe, vultures, eagles and bears are going hungry due to a lack of carrion. Now animal activists are demanding action.
This is going all over the place so we might as well join the band wagon. But it seems that making fun of code pink is like shooting fish in a barrel.
Police in the northern German village of Güster had their hands full on Monday when they were called out to catch an escaped sheep. “They gave chase in their vehicle but the pursuit didn’t prove easy because the animal at times ran at speeds of up to 45 kilometers (28 miles) per hour,” police said in a statement.
They finally caught up with it when it briefly got its leg stuck in a fence. “An officer carefully lifted the uninjured animal from the fence and placed in the field. But the sheep evidently didn’t like its new home because it made a daring leap straight over the hood of the police car.”
If this did not come from a serious German News paper I would not believe it. I can see a goat doing something like this but a sheep? I wonder what breed it was.
Consider Tamara Campbell, who raided her 401(k) after her husband was laid off from his job as an occupational technician, and they fell behind on their mortgage for several months. “If I hadn’t done that, we would have been foreclosed on last year,” says Campbell, who lives in a Denver suburb.
Such hardship withdrawals began rising last year and, by January this year, had exceeded January 2007 levels. During the first month of the year, as the economic slowdown tightened pressure on mortgage holders, hardship withdrawals rose 23% at plans that Merrill Lynch (MER) administers, compared with the same period in 2007, says Kevin Crain, managing director of the Merrill Lynch Retirement Group.
The 401(k) withdrawals are rising mainly because people such as Campbell and her husband want to save their homes. Merrill Lynch found that the primary reason for the rise in hardship withdrawals was to prevent foreclosure or eviction, based on its sampling of applications filed in January.
Likewise, in the first month of the year, compared with January 2007, Great-West Retirement Services saw a 20% increase in hardship withdrawals to save a home. And Principal Financial (PFG) reports that in January it received 245 calls from participants who inquired about 401(k) withdrawals to prevent a foreclosure or eviction, up dramatically from 45 similar calls it received in January 2007.
For workers, the consequences can be severe. About 85% of employers bar employees from making 401(k) contributions for six months after taking a hardship withdrawal, says Pamela Hess, director of retirement research at Hewitt Associates. (HEW) Worse, employees who pull money out of tax-deferred 401(k) plans before age 591/2 generally must pay a 10% penalty on top of the taxes owed.
Poking around the internet I came across this: Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto
I was on some writer’s blog, and if I remember correctly they felt the book spoke for them. I consider myself something of a loner (not severely so, but leaning in that direction) and so the book piqued my curiosity. If I […]