The Christmas season is starting to approach and with that in mind we've lowered the price of Galactic Civilizations II Collector's Edition to $39.95.  But be warned, we're running out of them. We have less than 5,000 of them left and that won't last very long. After that, only the standard edition is left.  The Collector's Edition comes with a technology tree poster, some extra ship parts, a nicer box, and more (along with a nicer box). And it has the same price as the regular version.

If you're shopping for a Christmas gift for a friend or relative that likes strategy games, pick up a copy of Galactic Civilizations II: Collector's Edition while supplies last. The top rated turn based strategy game of 2006 is available directly or at a store near you (Walmart also carries the Collector's Edition while supplies last).

Al Franken has apparently claimed that Republicans are the party of authoritarians and the Democrats now are the party of liberals and conservatives. Unbelieveable.

While the Republicans have been quite lackluster while in power these past 6 years, they've hardly been authoritarian. One could make the case that Bush himself acts a bit imperial, but no more imperial than many other Presidents have (a lot less than say FDR or LBJ -- any Democrats want to make the case that Bush has behaved more imperially than they did?).

People who are exceptionally into politics start to become a lot like people who are really into a MMO. Seriously. They start to lose perspective. This seems to happen, to varying degrees, to anyone regardless of their policital persuassion.

On the left, you have people frothing at the mouth about the Patriot act (which Democrats almost unanymously voted for incidentally), Guantanomo, wiretapping of foreign calls of suspected terrorists, etc.

On the right you have demonization of Nancy Pelosi, the assumption that upon having a slim majority that Democrats will pull us right out of Iraq, the UN, etc.

To those people I say: Take a deep breath. Re-adjust your perspective and ask how the government is interfering with your life or the life of anyone you know (or even take an extra degree of seperation).  Not theoretical interference but tangible, real world, intrusion.

Here are a few that come to mind and who is responsible for it:

1. As a home owner, I cannot build on my property wherever I want. There are zones on land that I own that I am not permitted to build on because of environment regulations that, if you saw the land in question (there may have been a swamp there a hundred years ago) it's ridiculous. I'm not saying I would build on that, but the government is definitely intruding on me in a very tangible way. (Authoritarian source: Democrats).
2. As a parent, I cannot just send my child to whatever public school I want. If my local school sucks, I can't just choose to send them somewhere else that has room for the child. (Authoritarian source: Democrats).
3. Even though I am in perfect health and can easily provide health care for my family, 2.9% of my income is forcibly taken from me no matter how much I earn.  (Authoritarian source: Democrats)
4. Similarly, 12.4% of my income is taken away for a forced retirement plan that I would be able to handle far better myself and so could most other people. (Authoritarian source: Democrats)
5. As an employer, OSHA can tell me how my office should be furnished -- from chairs to lighting. (Authoritarian source: Democrats)
6. As a student, I cannot be certain that I will be accepted at a major public university based on merit if my skin color is not favored by the government (Authoritarian source: Democrats).
7. If you have conservative views and speak at a major university, you can be expected to be assaulted verbally (or violently) by left-wing protesters. There are 0 documented incidents for the reverse -- Michael Moore, and other left wingers have never been physically assaulted or shouted down at a major university they've spoken at.
8. As an employer, I cannot hire or fire people as I please. Any form of discrimination (real or imagined) is strictly forbidden (Authoritarian source: Democrats).
9. When I go to the mall on a cold rainy day with my infant daughter, I have to park further back from the store because the store was required by the government to provide several handicap parking spaces (usually unused). (Authoritarian source: Democrats)
10. When I build an office, I am forced to build bathrooms of an extra large capacity in order to fit potentially handicap people even if my business is not a retail business (Authoritarian source: Democrats).
11. When I ride a motorcycle, I am required to wear a helmet in Michigan. (Authoritarian source: Democrats).
12. When I drive a car, I am required to wear a seat belt. (Authoritarian source: Democrats).

I could go on.  Now, you can read this list and say "Well these laws are good for us" or that they're good things. That's totally irrelevant.  Authoritarianism doesn't mean "evil horrible" control by the government, it just means government that dictates the "proper" way for people to live their lives.

I have seen a lot of angst about the potential abuse of the Patriot Act or military tribunals, but the things I listed aren't abstract. They are real, practical day to day ways in which our government forces us to behave in a certain way that one might argue is none of their damn business.  Sure, you can say Republicans would outlaw abortion if they could. Fine. But they are coming from the point of view that abortion is the murder of a child.

There are certainly examples of right-wing authoritarianism (the government telling us that what we can do to our own bodies in our own home. who can and can't get married to name two).

But in terms of things that affect you on a day to day basis, it's pretty overwhelming which party is the power of authoritarians. You may agree with those laws in the same way that one might agree with the laws of a benign dictator. But that doesn't make the dictator not a dictator.

We have put up the 1.4 release candidate on Stardock Central. There may be some issues with starting a campaign but we thought we'd give users a crack at trying it out before the official release this next week.

Note that no gameplay changes will be made, we just want to make sure it's compatible as there was a lot of code put into 1.4 to help with foreign language versions of the game that may have side effects that we haven't considered.

Pathetic Whining Mode: Activated

So as the week comes to an end I've had a lot of people contact me saying "Hey, you're famous, Rush Limbaugh talked about you on the air today". And when he didn't mention me by name, he quoted my article or referred to me as an "unknown blogger" or "rank amateur" or "some nobody" whatever.

I can't say it was a fun experience.  While at work, I'll regularly listen to talk radio which includes Rush Limbaugh on occasion. It's definitely not fun to have someone totally mischaracterize ones position and then demonize you. And then repeatedly say "Some nobody" or "Some amateur" over and over. Wounded pride aside (I mean, I am worth 8 figures, have a top 100 podcast, run a website that is more popular than Rush Limbaugh's, have been on MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, PBS, in Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report, wrote the most popular political game of all time, etc.) at being characterized as a "nobody", the hard part is just sitting back and having to take the "high road". I can't reach 30 million people a day like Rush so I pretty much just have to "take it".

So great, I helped inspire a new term for the political lexicon: Cut and Run conservative. Nice. How insulting. The most obnoxious thing he did was imply that I was doing this to "have influence" and "power" which is so incorrect that it makes me think he's projecting his own motivations.

The thing is, one of my favorite things to do when coding -- listen to talk radio which means Rush from noon to 3, is something I dread. I'll probably never look at Rush the same way. I wouldn't call myself a fan, but I enjoyed his show.  It would be like Bill O'Reilly or Chris Mathews trashing me on their shows without me being able to defend myself on equal terms. Think how you'd react. You'd never look at those shows the same way.

If blogging were my job, I'd be the first to say "hey, this is what the big leagues are, if you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen." But it's not. It's a blog. Rush and his ditto-heads (along with catass bloggers who confuse blogging with a life) confuse the two. Rush treats blogs as if they're quasi-columns. It's his basic misunderstanding of the nature of blogging (aka "Web logging"). We're just people posting our opinions as a hobby.  I had one ass complain that I spelled a word wrong on one of my blogs. 

For 99.9% of bloggers, blogging is the digital equivalent of hanging out in a pub and shooting the shit. 

I don't object to Rush or someone else linking to one of my blogs as part of their PROFESSIONAL performance on their show. But it would be nice if he, since he's being PAID to do his show, would have spent say the 5 minutes to look at what I write before completely misrepresenting what I wrote (i.e. Did I say I wasn't going to vote? No. I have the nerve to think that Republicans themselves are at fault for their problems, not the drive by media and not the Democrats and if they do lose that the world won't end).

Anyway, it's been a long week. Lots of work got done. Windows Vista is about to be released to manufacturing and we have been working hard to get Microsoft to get some last minute bug fixes in. Working on getting Multiplicity into more call centers (some 911 call centers use it). Trying to decide whether to push it towards MMO gamers as well. Lots of action on the GUI Championships. And of course the game stuff has been very busy this week.

I can't wait for the elections to be over.  If the Republicans are able to maintain control of congress (which I hope they do) Rush and his semi-sentient ditto heads will claim "Aha, we were able to thwart those no good cut and run conservatives" and other strawman arguments -- as if we're somehow out to get them.  If they lose, then we'll get the blame. 

Pathetic Whining Mode: DE-activated

Helen Valois has an excellent article about what "Cut and Run Conservatism" is.

Now that Rush Limbaugh has chosen to demonize conservatives acting as conservatives instead as as Republican sheep, he may discover that outside his ditto-head bubble that there are many out there unimpressed with his rhetoric.

Valois writes:

And just what is a "cut-and-run conservative"? From what I can tell, this label applies to anyone who holds the (to Rush) illogical opinion that Republicans ought to behave like Republicans, and that if they don't, there isn't much use in voting them into office again. There are evidently — gasp! — voters who want their elected representatives to represent them, and who refuse to declare the mere holding of an office on the part of someone whose use of that office is despicable a "victory" in and of itself. Even among those who chuckle at the EIB Network's clever parodies, there are apparently some people who don't consider the ideological suicide currently being committed by American culture to be a laughing matter after all. And despite being made the butt of that network's jokes myself, I am proud to declare myself one of them.

I vote for politicians who represent my views. In a representative democracy such as ours, that is the way I'd prefer to see things function. It would be interesting if Rush consideres conservatives who go to the poll but vote for a write-in candidate or a conservative third party candidate as being "cut and run" conservatives.

I also think Rush's choice to reuse the "cut and run" slogan to demonize conservatives is ultimately going to weaken the more serious issue of politicians and citizens that actually do want to "cut and run" from Iraq.

Luckily for Rush, he's on the wrong side of history. Just as the "Buy American or else" nonsense was going on in the 80s -- demanding we buy American cars no matter how crummy they were -- failed and we ended up with better cars, he should be thankful that principled conservatives will help, in the long run, to keep the party from disolving into the next Whig party.

Rush may be a great broadcaster, but he's no historian.

Read Valois's excellent article bottom of this blog.

Update: David Bernstein of Volokh Conspiracy is one too! (and gasp, also sees 1992 as a GOOD example)

The Governor..

Staying with local Michigan politics further, Jennifer Granholm has somehow managed to keep a 7%+ lead.  The reason this is shocking is that Michigan's economy is the worst in the nation. We're the only state that has kept losing jobs for the past four years.

I actually like Grandholm -- as a person. I think she carries herself well.  But I don't thnk she has the faintest idea on economics and business.

Here is the thing a lot of people ignore at the state level: Businesses create jobs. BUSINESSES. Not the government. I know people like to rail against "THE CORPORATIONS" but if you have a job, it's probably with a corporation right? Grandholm's policies have always struck me as somewhat anti-corporation. She wants to help the "little guy" but the best way to help the little guy is to help create an environment where companies want to be located in Michigan.

And Michigan totally sucks for business.  The only reason I'm here is because my wife doesn't want to move and now the company is too large to move it somewhere else.

What's wrong with Michigan?

• Single Business Taxes
• Asset taxes
• The roads are terrible and embarassing
• The largest city is basically a wasteland (Detroit)
• Unions rule the industrial segments
• Income taxes AND high sales tax
• The state AND local groups collect property taxes

You can read more about the tax situation here. One note on that page, it talks about how Michigan's income tax is relatively low compared to other states that have it. Sure. But other states don't usaully have both an income tax AND a sales tax -- and ours is higher than normal on that account.

Another thing about tis is that ironically, Michigan gets less back from the federal government than we pay in (especially compared to other states) which given the state of our roads, is another reason why it's baffling that Debbie Stabenow has such a lead for the senate race.

Governor Granholm is from Canada. So maybe to her, Michigan's climate is outright balmy. But compared to the other 49 states, Michigan's climate isn't that great. And that's the thing, we pay high taxes, get less back, and the weather isn't that great.  The governor can't control the weather but she can control the business climate here to a greater extent.

To be fair to the Governor, the Michigan constitution requires a balanced budget. This takes away a lot of flexibility for the government during weak economic times.

So where does Michigan's tax money go to?

• The prison system is 18% of the general fund.
• Colleges get 22% of the general fund.
• ..and 29% goes to community health (medicaid, mental health, programs for the aging) -- welfare programs.
• Another 13% goes to "family indepence agency" which is essentially another welfare program.
• And the rest goes to paying for the government itself.

So nearly half of the STATE's revenue goes to "services" to help other people (welfare programs). I am not totally adverse to some of these things, but when times are tough, the BEST thing the state government can do is create an environment for JOBS.

Granhold has been very resistant to cutting or eliminating taxes that would make the state more competitive becauase she doesn't want to cut the welfare programs. What she fails to understand is that if you get more jobs, you will get more tax revenue in the long run. 

What she should be doing is cutting significantly the money spent on the welfare programs in order to eliminate things like asset taxes (Taxes on equipment), double-taxation on property, and the single business tax.

Amazingly (as someone paying SBT) Granholm claims to have gotten rid of it in a recent debate.  That was news to me.

She did cut the single business tax.  But this tax should simply be eliminated. The SBT essentially is a tax in which employers cannot deduct the cost of their employees when calculating taxes. Let me repeat that: EMPLOYERS CANNOT DEDUCT THE COST OF EMPLOYEES when calculating taxes. I mean, who comes up with such a brain dead concept? It's been in Michigan for decades and the last governor was in the process of eliminating it entirely when Granholm came in and reversed the policy in the name of balancing the budget (as opposed to say cutting some of the spending).

Despite Michigan's rotten economy, Granholm still has a lead.  Michigan's economy has no affect on a technology company like ours. 

The 40 or so Michigan jobs we provide are no thanks to Granholm. In fact, if Granholm has been elected 4 years sooner, there'd be no company at all.  In the mid 1990s, we had to transition from OS/2 to Windows. As a technology company, we had a hard time securing credit lines. But the state had a program for small businesses that allowed them to borrow money from banks and the state would garauntee the loan. One of the first things Granholm did when elected was eliminate the program -- because (shockingly) many companies actually do go out of business and default on such loans.  But so what? The money spent there still went to create Michigan jobs that were taxed, that's a lot better than just handing out money to individuals who aren't producing anything in the form of welfare.

Granholm, while a nice person and I think is truly trying to do what she thinks is right, has no business being governor of a state -- any state. Her understanding of market economics is just too weak based on her actions.

If Devos does end up losing, I'll be sure to ask any of my friends or neighbors whose job just got eliminated (Ford just announced cutting 39,000 jobs a couple of weeks ago -- mostly from Michigan), who they voted for. If they say Granholm, it would certainly affect my sympathy level.  You get the government you want.

Here in Michigan, the senate race isn't as close as one might hope. It's Democrat Debbie Stabenow vs. Republican Mike Bouchard.

Bouchard claims that Stabenow has been cynically avoiding any sort of televised debates. But I have not seen any real evidence of this. Right now, she's got a 9 point lead over Bouchard.

As a business owner, I tend to vote for candidates who favor policies that help businesses. For instance, when my taxes are lowered, I have more capital to hire more people which creates jobs. Debbie Stabenow has often given me the impression that she doesn't understand or agree with the concept that businesses create jobs and when you tax them, you are taking capital away from them. And the federal government is particularly wasteful when it comes to using that confiscated capital.

Still, it's hard to get very excited about Bouchard.  I believe you can tell a lot about a person by their website.  At least in politics, it's hard to sen da message of competence if your website is bad or non functional.  Bouchard's website is far inferior to Stabenow's.

Here is Stabenow's page: http://www.stabenowforsenate.com/

Now here's Bouchard's page: http://www.bouchardforussenate.com/

The first thing you see on Bouchard's page is a blog item about his daughter. Okay, fine. But then you start to click on the top-most buttons and none of them work. You get blank pages. Such sloppiness sends a pretty negative message on competence.  Having such a poor page is certainly going to cost him votes.

I realize that you can't judge a politician by their website (and to be fair, I'm sure this will get fixed in a jiffy) but it makes me less inclined to vote for Bouchard and more inclined to vote for Stabenow (what can I say, I like her). 

Lest someone takes the above paragraph as meaning that I'm a "Cut and Run Conservative" (as Rush Limbaugh kindly labeled me on his show this past week) note the distinction: I am making a pretty obvious observation: Having a web page that looks amateurish is going to cost him votes. I am not saying that I wouldn't vote for him.  But that's only because I've kept closer track on the issues than the typical voter would.  A more casual voter who happens to go to his page and sees that his "Issues" tab is broken is going to not have a positive impression (I'm going to email the webmaster).

It is Day 4 of the Rush Limbaugh railings against frustrated conservatives who might sit out this election.  And once again, Rush has tried to assign motive and intent to me and people like me (given that it was this article  supporting Instapundit's premortem that helped set off this discussion).

My motive? Apparently it's about power. I want to wreck things for the Republicans so that if the Republicans lose in November I can say "See, look at my POOOWEERR!" If Rush bothered to do his research, he'd know that I am not going to any real effort to try to affect the election. I run sites that get over 3 million visitors per day and have over 6 million registered users and the only site I've even been writing about my frustration with Republicans -- and have been for over a year now -- is on my personal blog site on JoeUser.com which gets a trivial amount of traffic by comparison.  What Rush simply refuses to accept is that a lot of bloggers, like most people, may care about politics but they don't care care. We're not on any sort of Jihad. It's not negative energy from conservatives that are causing problems, it's voter apathy.

Given this week's events, I think that it would be easy to get the non-crackpot vote to feel decidedly anti-Republican given some of the rather nasty insinuations Rush has sent my way. I can see it now:

I wrote a blog agreeing with fellow blogger Glenn Reynolds that if the Republicans lose in November that they deserved it and Rush then spent 3 days ripping me a new one on his show demanding in no uncertain terms that we will vote for whoever has an (R) by their name no matter what.  In fact, he went so far today as to coin a new term for conservatives who dare not provide unconditional support to Republicans -- "Cut and run conservatives". 

I have my own term for people who mindlessly vote for a party: Sheep.

I seem to recall Rush and other Republicans ridiculing African Americans and the Unions for voting for Democrats time after time because the Democrats weren't doing much for them.  I guess it's only idiotic to behave like sheep if it's for a Democrat but if you're a conservative, it's your moral duty.

On today's show Rush referred to this article and in response:

By the way, I've got a new name for you conservatives who aren't going to vote out there: Cut-and-Run Conservatives. The Cut-and-Run Conservatives, one of their central themes is, "It's not going to be so bad if Democrats win. The world's not going to come to an end."

So let's define that: Cut-and-Run Conservatives are conservatives who choose not to vote this election cycle because of their frustration with the Republican candidate.  What if they vote for the Libertarian candidate? Are they still cut-and-run? What about conservatives who do vote for the Republican candidate but also don't think that the world is going to end if the Democrats win?

While we're at it, let's flip it around: A TRUE conservative, according to Rush Limbaugh, is a conservative who blindly votes for THE PARTY and believes that should the Democrats win that the world will end.

Wow.  I mean, wow.  When the Democrats say things like that on DemocraticUnderground about Republicans we call them kooks. 

Still testing but here are the changes:

+ Initial Colony buildings have less maintainence.

+ New colonies start out with a population cap of 6 instead of 5.

+ Farms provide less food.

+ Morale buildings have been increased in benefit but techs to get to them cost substantially more.

+ Stock market no longer gives morale bonus (wasn't supposed to in the first place)

+ Updated beam weapon model along with large hull models

+ Updated some of the planetary improvement icons to be prettier

+ Updated Achille's heel, Apocalypse, and Pathfinder missions in the campaign based on player feedback.

+ Tweaks to make money not too hard to get early on but not as easy to get ridiculous levels of money later on (though expert players will still be able to do this).

+ fixed bug where ships on auto-attack would try to attack ships they weren't at war with if the ship was in the way

+ fixed bug with auto attack where it was using the wrong function to check to see if a ship was hidden by the FOW.

+ fixed cheat key to force an AI player to surrender

+ added in code so that when using the CTRL+Z cheat to run the game in AI test mode, it will make the AI take over for the human player

+ fixed bug where ships that were being upgraded but were not selected tried to update the ShipContextWnd, resulting in a crash if the last ship to be selected was deleted

+ fixed a bug where a ship (under certain conditions) could fail to start moving even if it had a path calculated to its destination

+ added additional debug info for missing string in tradewnd, took precautions to avoid a crash

+ Tweaks to the AI code that handles planetary improvement so that they don't do stupid stuff by mistake

+ Fixed integer divide by zero crash

+ Fixed bug where if you upgrade a constructor and build a starbase while it is upgrading, the starbase will change into a ship when the upgrade is complete

+  If RAW file fails to load, a height field is generated randomly

+ Fixed crash in Quick Project Window

+ fixed a bug that could occur if you loaded a campaign save game and tried to continue after finishing that mission, instead of using the campaign screen.
 
 New:
+ added option to save ship design to disk.  If turned off, the ship design will not be saved to disk and will not show up the next time you start GalCiv2.  Ship designs will still remain in memory until the data is reloaded (from a save game, from starting a metaverse game after having played a normal game, etc).

In 1992, George Bush lost largely because many in his base either stayed at home or voted for Perot in protest of Bush's tax hike that went against his campaign promise.

This week, Rush complained that I was ignoring history -- that when conservatives stay home, the kooks take over and the result we saw in 1992.

But that's not the way I remember it.  I don't remember the world coming to an end.  Even with the Democrats controlling the house, the senate, and the executive, we didn't get nationalized health care (the closest we'd get to that would be a REPUBLICAN President, house, and senate), we didn't turn commune, in short the world did not come to an end.  Certainly Clinton wasn't a great President but as far as the life of the average American is concerned, the 90s were hardly a national nightmare.

After reading Joe's article and comment by deference. You don't have to be a genius to see that Joe and deference are dimowits posing as Conservitives/Republicians. Dimowits just can't be honest about who they are. Think in terms of a team sport. These two guys are on your team, the game is going badly, bad decisions were made (by the manager, coach, quarterback, pitcher, etc.) you go back to the huddle or dugout, and these two guys say " hey, we deserve to loose this game" and they lay down or quit. I for one am no quiter. To sit out this election is to quit. In closing let me just say to the 10 or 15 people who read this blog, get your butts to the polls and lets WIN this election.

The DIFFERENCE isn't with regards to your analogy (i.e. thinking that it's a sports team). The DIFFERENCE is the effect of losing. I don't think it would be the end of the world if Republicans lost.  The best Rush was able to give was 1992 and for me and others who feel as I do, 1992 is a case study of what happens when you ignore your base and the long-term benefits to conservatives when conservatives do make a principled stand.

I would never withold my vote arbitrarily. But if my senator, for example, was lobbying for a bridge to nowhere and other blatant pork, I wouldn't vote for him regardless of what party he was with unless his opponent was decidedly worse.

Rush's argument seems to rest on who has control of congress and I simply don't agree that a slim Democratic majority is as huge of a deal as he and apparently you do. And if it such a big deal, then shame on the Republicans for squandering their majority.