Gaming Outpost Discussions

1. 

   Tadeusz
   Member

   ...and you'd better not drink it because it could be contaminated with sewage, or chemicals.

   We're fine except our water pump got washed away, and we had a number of leaks in the roof. Happily, we live on a somewhat higher ground, and on top of that we're part way up a ridge. Of course, as usual, with any serious storm, our basement flooded.

   Later today we'll head out to Wally World to get some more water and supplies.

   I took a walk with the boys yesteday and by myself this morning.

   Yesterday, the creek at the eastern border of my property was at least a foot higher than usual, and the four foot waterfall in it was doing some mild thundering. Today, it has dropped eight inches to a foot, and when I left the house a hundred feet uphill, I heard a steady 'shhhshshshhs' which is the waterfall. Ordinarily you can't hear it from my front porch.

   Going down to the end of the chert road, and turning right onto the asphalt, and heading down a couple hundred yards, I was surprised to see the right lane covered with water, and the left had about an inch covering it. One road off to the left, Newburg, which leads to a bridge over Lawson Creek had its asphalt ripped off and much of the riprap? (stones and stuff) dumped in the pasture. There was a fifty foot long rapids going from the higher pasture to the lower pasture with the poor dismantled road as the rapids barrier.

   Further on up past the Little Swan Church of Christ, is another larger bridge. A berm on the upstream side about six feet high above normal flow and five feet thick was chopped through so that the water had no doubt flowed into the pit by the road side where the CoC is. There was standing water in the lawn area across the parking lot in front of the church.

   I did not bother to go very far on the way back.

   The next day, the rapids were gone, and there is a substantial dip into the pasture land on the downrapid side where the water dropping had eaten a hole. The whole rise of the road was narrowed.

   Down by the bridge on Newburg, it is impassable. The concrete bridge is fine, but the road leading up to it on my side is missing at least several feet. I decided not to go look at it closer not wholly trusting the road.

   This day, I went down the left from the chert road to the third Lawson Creek bridge, the most easterly one and the one on the Frank Lawson Road. As expected there were signs that the curve had been covered by water. It is typical in any serious storm that this curve gets drowned.

   The bridge was several feet above the water today, and the creek at that point was several feet below the banks,and probably five feet above its normal level. On the upstream side, a middling sized tree was sitting in the current lightly resting on the bridge. On the downstream side of the railing, on the bridge, a twenty or thirty feet long mass of vegetable matter, dirt, tree branches, and two tree trunks (one was about seven inches through and its bottom rested on the railing and the top rested on the river bank below the bridge.) There was probably about 2 thousand or more pounds of junk on the bridge.

   The neighbours down the road had to repair their fence, and I think move it, to keep their goats in.

   Like I said, we're fine.

   But Nashville got nuked.

   Mon May 3 2010 4:24 pm #
2. 

   JohnA1nut
   Member

   I just had a thought. Verse the player in on top of a bed which was floating in a flood. No land, no nothing as far as he can see. What happens then?

   Tue May 4 2010 5:55 am #
3. 

   M. J. Young
   Moderator

   I don't know. Why bother with the bed? That in itself tells the character that there was land somewhere sometime not too long ago.

   --M. J. Young

   Wed May 5 2010 1:52 am #
4. 

   JohnA1nut
   Member

   OK, so they land on a bed in the aftermath of a flood. There's debris everywhere. It sounded different in my head. I still think it could be interesting.

   Wed May 5 2010 2:21 am #
5. 

   M. J. Young
   Moderator

   Glad to hear you are all right, Eric. Your post was actually the first I'd heard of the flooding; it's been a really pressurized week, and the first news I saw about it was late this afternoon when I finally got to the e-mail and saw the Yahoo! news.

   (MSN has changed its system so that when I log out of HotMail it blocks me from going to its MSN homepage if I won't allow third-party cookies. I'm not going to allow third-party cookies just because Microsoft thinks it would benefit them and they can force me to do it by offering me news I can get from Yahoo in a form more compatible with my non-Microsoft browser, and without those stupid BING rollover pop-ups. So MSN has lost a reader. That, though, is not relevant here. I'm just miffed enough about their arrogance that I'm posting it frequently in the hope that others will realize that MicroSoft is forcing third party tracking cookies onto their computers, and will stop patronizing Microsoft web sites until they correct this.)

   --M. J. Young

   Thu May 6 2010 2:25 am #
6. 

   Tadeusz
   Member

   They are talking of a billion dollars for the clean-up in Nashville.

   I almost never use Yahoo for news anyways. I use Instapundit, and Linkiest and MSNBC and O'Reilly Factor and of course, the local news. Pragmatic libertarian, populist conservative, strong left, traditionalist, and Tennessean pov's in that order.

   As to MSN...pigs get slaughgtered, hopefully.

   As to John's idea...I could see the verser arriving on a bed, and after a bit, finding a man drifting in the water. The man is delirious, but listening to his fevered rants you realize he is a really, really good guy. And the bed is sinking under the weight of two guys. Do you toss him off, and let him drown? Jump off yourself? Take the viewpoint you espoused in response to the 'Cold Equations' story, and say 'there is a way, I just have to figure it out.'?

   Thu May 6 2010 6:23 pm #
7. 

   M. J. Young
   Moderator

   Part of my reason for using Yahoo is I am never actually looking for news. I read what happens across my line of sight that looks interesting, and don't bother with the rest. I find that what most news editors think newsworthy neither affects me nor interests me, and whatever is important enough that I ought to know it will find its way to me. I have two Yahoo mailboxes I check thrice a week, and when I do I am given the headlines and can decide what's worth reading--which is frequently not more than the headlines.

   I suspect, too, that it's part of my inherent learning process. I "absorb" information. I've joked before that I have a mind like a sponge--that it soaks up all kinds of things and you never know what will come out if you squeeze it. My second-grade teacher worried about whether I was learning disabled--she harassed my mother about it all year. I was never attentive in class, never finished classwork, never did homework, rarely read assignments through, and she was convinced I was not learning anything. Then it happened that at the end of the year the state sent evaluators into the classroom, who gave us individual oral examinations, and I stood there and answered question after question. My teacher apologized to my mother.

   That same aspect influences my approach to news: I will hear anything that matters, and then I will know it, and I don't have to waste time looking for information unless something specifically interests me enough that I want to know more.

   I think it also bothers me that I can't respond to the news. My father sends me cuttings from a newspaper that doesn't circulate down here, and I read them when I have time, and sometimes I want to engage in discussion on the subject, which is just frustrating because I know I can't do so meaningfully and if I could it would soak up a lot of time I don't have.

   It probably also matters that I live not merely in New Jersey, but in the boondocks of New Jersey. If you live in New Jersey, most of the news you get is about New York if you're in the north, Philadelphia if you're in the south. When you do get "local" news, it's about Atlantic City or Trenton or Newark or Camden, the nearest of those over an hour away from me and a place I rarely get near enough to smell. The state's public television stations banded together to produce New Jersey Network News, but it's a joke, really, because New Jersey almost never has news that any two randomly selected people in the state will agree is newsworthy. Yahoo tries to feed me news of Cumberland County, but it's really news of the three big towns within the county most of the time, and I'm not in them and not much affected by them.

   I read what people send me, but it's always biased and I always know it, and I am always skeptical when I taste bias.

   All of which is to say that my exposure to news is entirely incidental, and that is adequate for my purposes.

   *****

   The Lifeboat clone is interesting, but that particular application wouldn't seem problematic to me. I'm a swimmer, and consider water to be a perfectly safe environment most of the time. I'll haul him onto the mattress and I'll get into the water and cling to the side, relying on my own buoyancy until we find something else suitable for a raft or manage to locate land. It would have to include water hazards before I would be worried--frigid cold, powerful currents, dangerous water creatures--and most of those would suggest that the guy I see in the water is already dead. If he can survive, I expect I can.

   --M. J. Young

   Thu May 6 2010 8:24 pm #
8. 

   JohnA1nut
   Member

   They are talking of a billion dollars for the clean-up in Nashville.

   And why should money be a concern? That's a statement about society as a whole. Just clean it up. I kind of long for money being irrelevant. We've got 2 sides of a scale. On one side is a pile of money. On the other side is ecological damage and destruction. Why is the money there at all? Why is that important to this decision? Just clean it up.

   What I mean is, why can't the community come together to fix the damage? Why do they have to worry about the money? Just do it to get it done. This is a commentary on society as a whole. Why can't everyone just come together, forget the money, and just fix the damage? Money shouldn't even be an issue.

   Thu May 6 2010 9:51 pm #
9. 

   JTM
   Member

   Because people doing dedicated, long-term clean up work need to eat too. It's not like money ever stops cleanup from happening.

   Thu May 6 2010 10:57 pm #
10. 

    JohnA1nut
    Member

    You don't understand. I kind of long for the days when people lived off the land and money didn't exist. The American Indians knew how to live. The world around them provided them with everything they needed. There was no money. If there was a hurricane or whatever which destroyed an area, they didn't quibble over who was going to get paid to fix it, they just got together and did it. Did it because it needed to be done. The hunter didn't complain that he wasn't getting paid, if he didn't hunt, no one would eat. Good reason to hunt. If he needed to make a deal with someone else, he didn't give them a worthless piece of paper in exchange, he gave them meat. Something they could actually use. I kind of long for that lifestyle.

    (Doing Therapy)

    Fri May 7 2010 3:06 am #
11. 

    M. J. Young
    Moderator

    Why is the money there at all? Why is that important to this decision? Just clean it up.

    I think that this demonstrates a confusion about what money is.

    I kind of long for the days when people lived off the land and money didn't exist. The American Indians knew how to live. The world around them provided them with everything they needed. There was no money. If there was a hurricane or whatever which destroyed an area, they didn't quibble over who was going to get paid to fix it, they just got together and did it. Did it because it needed to be done. The hunter didn't complain that he wasn't getting paid, if he didn't hunt, no one would eat. Good reason to hunt. If he needed to make a deal with someone else, he didn't give them a worthless piece of paper in exchange, he gave them meat. Something they could actually use. I kind of long for that lifestyle.

    Of course, if a hurricane destroyed everything the Indians had built, they took a day and built another. How much damage can be done to wigwams and teepees? People who were killed were dead; people who were injured either lived or died, but they didn't get medical assistance flown in from places where there was no flood.

    The tribe, such as it was, was a self-sufficient extended family, loyal within its own boundaries. There was nothing to buy, really--those who could hunt, hunted, and if they didn't want to hunt, they were ostracized. Those who hunted successfully brought the food home to the tribe, and everyone ate it--partly because you couldn't keep much of the meat beyond tonight, and partly because next week this hunter might not be so fortunate and another will bring home the food he will eat, but mostly because it was the place of the hunter in the family to bring home meat for everyone to eat.

    If you wanted something someone else in the tribe had, you asked whoever made it to make one for you, and hoped he had the time and materials to do so. If you wanted something someone in another tribe had, you either bargained for it by offering your own goods and services, or you made war and took it from them. You probably didn't offer them meat, because it wouldn't last long enough for them to use it and you probably couldn't spare it anyway.

    And people died in those hurricanes, but that was all right because if you had too many people, if the tribe got too big, you wouldn't have enough food for everyone. Most people died young, and that was necessary.

    If you have not yet read Game Ideas Unlimited: Cash, you need to do so. It explains a great deal about how money comes to be in its present form, and why we have it. If you have, I'll remind you of some of the basic principles. You have venison; I have bass. You want some of my bass, but I don't particularly want your venison. I want fur, but you don't have fur, but you know someone who has fur. He doesn't want venison, either, or bass; he wants eggs. I know someone who has eggs and wants venison, but it's of no interest to me because I don't want eggs and I don't have venison. So we all want what someone else has, but we don't have what that person wants.

    The solution is to create a kind of credit system, by which I will give you some of my bass for those credits that I know the guy with the furs will take in exchange for furs because he knows that he can use those to get the eggs he wants. You can trade your venison for those credits, and you've got your credits back.

    We call those credits money.

    Originally we used objects to which we attributed inherent value--gold and silver, mostly. That is, everyone was willing to trade whatever he had for gold and silver, because he knew that everyone else would give him whatever they had in exchange for gold and silver. But to those who think we ought to return to the gold standard for our money, the value of gold is exactly the same as the value of money, with only one difference: people want it, and it's limited. The difference is the quantity of gold is limited absolutely (there is only so much of it in the world) and the quantity of money is limited artificially (someone decides how much there should be).

    But gold and silver had value because they were "something you could actually use", and indeed you could "actually use it" to trade it for anything you wanted, and everyone wanted it, which gave it value. Not everyone wants your venison, but everyone wants your gold; and ultimately everyone wants your money precisely because everyone wants your money.

    But why does it cost money to respond to a disaster?

    People who live there are already in trouble. Raw materials are going to be in short supply--the local lumber yards probably were not adequately stocked to rebuild entire towns, and they were probably also damaged to the point that they have little to offer. Materials must come from somewhere else, from someone who has them. You want him to send those materials for free; but why should he suffer? What assurance does he have that once he has given all that he owns to you he will receive similar courtesy from others? If you want to take his materials, you'll have to recompense him--and those in the disaster area have nothing with which to do so. They can't afford to buy the wood and nails and brick and mortar they need precisely because everything they owned was destroyed. Nor can they afford the fuel necessary to deliver those materials from wherever they happen to be to where they are. Not all of them have the skills to rebuild houses, and is it fair to say that those with skills in construction work should rebuild all the houses and stores and roads for free, while those whose skills are in other areas can get back to making money?

    Money lets us level the playing field. It lets us put a value on a man's property and his labor, and to compensate him for it.

    You can bet that there are millions of dollars worth of free help moving into the area already, because Americans are like that even when they're not Christians. You can also bet that the costs of cleaning and rebuilding are going to exceed those millions, because rebuilding a house is a lot more costly than rebuilding a teepee, and because for the Indians if their lands were destroyed they moved and laid claim to other lands that didn't cost anything because people died in sufficient numbers that the land was never crowded and most of it didn't belong to anyone, but when our lands are destroyed we have to fix them, as we have no where else to go.

    --M. J. Young

    Fri May 7 2010 11:47 pm #

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