Nifty! A meme that applies.

Your result for The Steampunk Archetype Test ...

The Crazy Clockwork Tinkerer

9 Swashbuckling Engineer, 69 Crazy Clockwork Tinkerer, 27 Charming Noble, 8 Roguish Pirate, 0 Mechanical Fian and 25 Aetherist Bodger!

What is life? If something simulates life so well that no one knows that it is simulated and treats it like it were alive, would that be just like life?  And if you were the one to create this simulated life, would that make you a god of some sort?  Quite possibly, and that may be one of the many motivations behind your projects.  Your clockwork mechanisms started off simple and cute, but as you attempted to replicate life in your machines, you created bigger mechanisms, golems of gears, that do your bidding.  You are a genius, but a crazy genius. 

Quickly! Before the monkeys come: Take The Steampunk Archetype Test

On Administrations, Economies, and Parenting.

Peter challenged me in my post about parties and economic outcomes: So what exactly is your theory to explain how any of these presidents deserve any credit OR blame for what happened to the economy during their terms in office?

I don't have one. I'm not sure I need one at this time.

Looking through the economics boards discussing the Dunne & Henwood paper, among the noise I see a large number of very talented trained economists wrestling with this very question. Some dismiss it, or invert the relationship, or point out that both are consequential on other factors emerging from the marketplace. Others embrace it and are trying to explain it. I'll wait and see.

Your question reminded me of another longitudinal study from another world: parenting. There have long been huge studies of what makes a successful parent, and what those parents do to have children reach adulthood healthy, whole, and ready to take on the world, as opposed to those parents whose children spiral down into poverty and self-destruction. Two classic outcomes were "Have a lot of books in the home," and "Have at least three sit-down dinners every week with your children." The problem with these outcomes is that, when they were introduced into families that previouly had not been doing them, there was little discernable change in their children's outcome. (No meaningful change at all for the books; a small uptick for meals, but nothing close to the outcomes for families that were already doing so naturally.)

The sad conclusion many social scientists have reached is that succesful parenting is not a matter of what you do, it is a matter of who you are. Sit-down meals and bookshelf-lined walls are merely indicators of other, nebulous values those parents have. Those values drive a parent's daily actions and reactions. They become thousands of little gestures, meaningful acts, and attentive moments that, over the child's formative years, add up to "being a successful parent." If you don't have those values then making the gross gestures isn't going to do a whole lot.

I suspect therefore that the answer lies in the "thousand small levers" theory of administration. It isn't a few grand things that the Dems do or the Reps fail to do that makes the Dems seemingly more successful at running our economy than the Reps. It's that the Democratic administrations have had values different from those of Republican administrations, and that the acts of the executive and his administration that flow from those values overall have contributed to more robust economies.

I do know this: looking at the objective data, and going on my own experiences, if I want to maximize my economic well-being, if I want to act in my own selfish best interests, I would not vote for a Republican for president.

About that Obama cover...

Brutality from David Horsey!



As Omaha said this morning, it's just like the Obama cover on the New Yorker! McCain isn't really old, he never really said, "Bomb bomb Iran," Cindy never had a pill problem. And McCain hasn't blithely gone along with the destruction of our first, fourth and sixth amendment rights, nor with Article 1, section 9, clause 2.

Oh, and McCain never said to Cindy, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt."

Camping, day 6

Spider's hammock, with dew

Breakfast was granola, and I boiled some eggs to prepare for lunch. Kouryou-chan tried to wear the same clothes she had worn the day before. She insisted that the pants were clean, so Omaha had me roll through the photographs to prove to Kouryou-chan that, yes indeed, she had worn those pants already. Darn photographic evidence. After the eggs had cooled in the river Omaha and the girls set up an assembly line to make the sandwiches while I washed the dishes.

We've got neighbors suddenly. Family of four, parents that have that muscled biker look to them. Rough trade.

Yamaraashi-chan insisted on wearing a tied-die bellyshirt that covered little more than a bikini top so Omaha made sure she was carrying a spare t-shirt in case it turned cool.

We drove up a narrow service forest road, the kind that really ought to be attempted only by jeeps and heavy trucks. We stopped at a vaguely wider spot in a heavily wooded area at an unmarked trail Omaha insisted was the one we wanted. I was dubious, but she insisted, and we headed off.

Flowers along the trail.

The hike was gorgeous. We saw all manners of flowers and madrona trees along the path. There were also these peculiar aluminum markers on trees all along the path with notes like "17+00" and "6+47". We couldn't figure out what they meant, but when they got to zero we were at an old bridge across the Elk River that had been smashed in last year's flooding and was now uncrossable. We walked on to Elk Lake, where we found two guys drinking beer fishing quietly. After we reached the west end of Elk Lake we concluded that there was no way down to the lake itself for swimming or anything like that, so we had lunch and then turned back around for home. The hike back was easy, mostly downhill, and the girls were strong troopers about it. Kouryou-chan's ankle was no longer bothering her.

We got back to the campsite and shared watermelon, then Omaha went for a nap. I sat back and finished Trial of Flowers, which was a lot slower reading than the popcorn of Hammer of Daemons. The girls ran around. Our neighbors... drank. And drank and drank and drank. The adults finished one case and started in on another. They had brought all the scrap wood from their workshop and were destroying it in a massive fire in the fire ring. It reached seven, eight feet high, which would have steamed a ranger if he'd seen it.

"Daddy, make a funny face!"

We made tacos for dinner, but Kouryou-chan wouldn't eat them and instead made a hot-dog. Afterward, we roasted marshmallows. Yamaraashi-chan did not set herself on fire this time. We played cards until it was too dark to tell the difference between blue and green. The neighbors played country music, but they at least turned it off promptly at ten.