Often times I see people describe those who vocally support tax cuts as being "greedy". But it isn't "greed" that drives that generally IMO. It sure isn't for me. It's about labor. The average tax payer works 10 to 12 hours per week for the government. That's quite a bit of "community service". But here's a fact that most people don't realize: Most people who are "rich" work a lot more hours per week - hence work even more hours for the government.

A lot of people who are considered "wealthy" are that way because they work a lot of hours. Personally speaking, I typically work between 10 to 16 hours per day, 5 to 6 days per week.  I've time sheeted it before and the total hours comes out to being between 60 and 75 hours per week depending on how busy things are. Let's say it averages to around 65 hours per week.

To convert this this to a 5 day work week and you have 13 hours each day, 5 days per week. 

So a person like me, working a 13 hour, 5 days per week schedule is working for the government for the first 6 hours each day.  That's 30 hours per week that I spend working for the government. I am almost a full time employee for the government. My "payment" from the government comes in the form of living in a nation that has the infrastructure and created an environment where someone like me, who grew up very poor, could start his own business and become well off.  So I don't begrudge that -- except when people try to argue that I'm not doing enough.  Because I'm not just paying a lot more in raw dollars to the government, I am working a lot more hours for the government -- nearly 3 times as many each week!

Statistically, people who make over $200,000 per year work more than 40 hours per week -- a lot more than 40 hours per week. Contrary to what some people will tell you, ones income is largely tied (directly or indirectly) to how much wealth they create which is a function of their productivity and time. Those at the top end of the scale tend to be people who are both very productive in their wealth generation and work a lot of hours.

According to the department of labor, those making $200,000 per year or more have a mean work week of 59 hours (I wish I had the link handy as it had a lot of other very handy stats in the report). And if you shave off those who earn a substantial part of their money via investments that number would undoubtably go higher.

Needless to say, when you're working 20 to 30 hours per week for the government, you tend to look darkly on those who suggest that a cut of say 3 to 5 hours you spend working for the government as "welfare" or a "giveway".

That's also a reason why people like me get up in arms when someone starts comparing real welfare to things like "corporate welfare". 

Let me illustrate that point with an analogy:

3 neighbors are working 5 hours a day to build a community play ground. One person is sitting on a chair watching us working. They will be using the playground when it's done but they're not helping build it.  One day, they get a note saying that they only have to work 4 hours per day on the playground. At hearing this news, the person who's been sitting on a chair the whole time says "Aha! See, you're no different than I am. That hour you just got off is welfare!"

That sort of thinking rankles me.  When someone argues that a tax cut/tax incentive is really no different than welfare it ticks me off. Because at the end of the day, it's labor we're talking about. One person is doing labor for the community and the other isn't.

You can debate whether that person should be doing more or less labor for the community, but you cannot deny that they are doing labor for the community. By contrast, the welfare recipient (defined as someone who is not paying income taxes but receives financial aid) is not putting in that labor.  And if you want to quibble on that point, I think most people would agree it's absurd for someone who's either not working at all or at best is working an hour or two each week (for the community) to pick too much on the guy who's working 20 to 30 hours per week for the community -- or to try to equate the labor of the two. 

The average # of hours the "working poor" put in each week total is 15 hours. That's total hours. I'm doing 20 to 30 hours each week for the community and then the other 30 to 40 hours for my family. And so are millions and millions of other people.

I am not suggesting that we should eliminate such welfare programs. On the contrary, I strongly support safety nets. The United States is a wealthy nation and the opportunities it provides should make every citizen feel they have a duty to the community to ensure no one goes hungry or lives without shelter.  But at the same time, don't describe a cut in the number of hours I'm working for the government as "welfare".

So next time you see someone complain about "corporate welfare" or demonizing "the rich" or arguing for higher taxes for "the wealthy" remember this - they're not just paying more than others, they are, statistically, working more hours for the community as well.

I highly recommend reading the text of Rudy Giuliani's speech. Very thought provoking and demonstrating that the mainstream Republicans were for going into Iraq for the same reasons most of us in the blogsphere supported going into Iraq.  And it wasn't WMDs.

On a non-busy week, I will work 6 days each week.  About 8 hours at the office when I get in near noon and then another 2 to 8 hours at home depending on how busy I am.

This week is busy mainly because I'm involved in more projects than I would expect. We need more managers, more developers, more graphics designers, more business development people, more IT people. We just need more people in short. But interviewing takes time I don't have either. And when it comes to hiring management level people, it's hard to find people who are realy sharp on the tech market, can do things on a shoe string budget, and have a good business background. So our management team is all working pretty serious hours right now.

Here is a typical day this week as an example (yesterdayish).

If you want to see the reviews on The Political Machine, visit the site below to see a round-up. Very useful site btw for seeing people's views on movies, games, and more.

http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/politicalmachine/

This past week the 2003 report on the poverty rate for the United States came out.  The poverty rate grew slightly for the third straight year from its its all time low in 2000 (right when the stock bubble about about to burst).  It is now back to where it was during most of the 90s -- 12.5%.

In addition to the link below, you can also find out more on this from the US census bureau: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty.html

The problem with the poverty rate is that it seems politicized. I mean who exactly decides what poverty is?  In the United States, you are living in poverty if your household income is $9,573.  That seems pretty high as that would mean I spent quite a bit of my time in "poverty" in college.  Sure didn't seem like that.

But it gets better, you see, that amount only counts as cash income. If you receive help and aid that isn't actual cash (or on the books) then it doesn't get counted as part of this.  So someone receiving credits, scholarships, grants, etc. will not get counted here. And obviously unreported income (tips, gifts, etc.) won't be counted here either.

When I was in college, I lived with 4 women in a house.  The rent was roughly $500 per month so that left $100 per person per month.  Add $20 per person for utilities, $80 per month for food and you had the basics for $200 per month per person.  That's $2,400.  Still, you have insurance, gas, and other necesities but there's a big gulf between $2,400 and $9,573.

The problem people in the United States have is that we have ridiculous expectations on lifestyle.  On $9,573 you might have a tough time having your own apartment (even though roughly 40% of people who live in "poverty" own a home according to the bureau).  But you're not starving. You might (gasp) have to have roommates.

Getting back to the politicizinig of this issue, the problem is that this number grows each year and it's not merely adjusted for inflation. And the term "poverty" is thrown to represent something it's not.  I don't know about you, but when I think of poverty I think of people who are barely getting by. Can't afford food. Worried about having shelter. Can't get clothing (and remember, donated goods don't count as income so you can't affect the poverty rate by donating clothes and other goods).

Even compared to first world countries, what we consider poverty seems a bit absurd.  For instance, Australians, on average, make only 73% as much as the average American.  So if you're making $24k per year here in the US, the Australian equivalent of you is making only $17k.  Taking this to its logical conclusion, the Australian equivalent of someone working full time at $8 per hour would be essentially living in poverty by our standards. And that's ridiculous.

It's not that there aren't people who are really poor. It's just that becuase of politics, the tools for actually measuring and finding these people are woefully inadequate. 

What we need is for the government or some agency to sit down and figure out how much it costs to live in a given country. That is, how much food, rent, clothing, car insurance, heat, electricity cost. Then draw the line there and anyone below that is living in poverty.

Then we need to figure out why they're in poverty and see what we can do to help them -- if we can.

IconX is a new program that allows users to do really cool things with their Windows desktop icons. Amongst its features include:

• Have icons "zoom" when you put your mouse over them.
• Animated transitions based on their state (grow and shrink smoothly)
• Sound effects based on mouse events
• Special effects based on mouse events
• Any sized icons on the desktop
• Shadows, glows, tinting, and other effects to icons
• Replace any desktop icon with a new icon or PNG image
• Save your settings as "themes" to use later.

For users who like to have their desktops look nice, IconX is a must-have program. It is part of Object Desktop (Stardock's suite of desktop enhancements) but is available as a free download as well.

This is the first part in a series of DesktopX videos.  This one shows off the power of DesktopX themes.

DesktopX is a program that extends your Windows PC to support true objects. These objects can be used to do all kinds of cool things.

As a practical matter, these objects tend to be used for 3 things:

1. Create "super icons" that are animated or change based on system information.
2. Put together to make mini-applications that are then exported as widgets. Widgets have less overhead than a typical stand alone program and in DesktopX's case, widgets are .EXEs. You don't even have to have DesktopX running to use them.
3. Or put together to build an entire desktop.

This first part focuses on using DesktopX to customize your overall desktop (themes).

You can get DesktopX at www.desktopx.net. It is also part of Object Desktop (www.objectdesktop.com).

At long last the video demo of ObjectDock Plus.  Make sure you have Windows Media Player 9 installed.

As promised, here is the tutorial for the operative's kit.

This kit, sold seperately for $10 (unless you bought the game for us where it is factored into the purchase price) allows you to modify issues, create interview questions and really mold the game to your own vision.

Here it is: http://totalgaming.stardock.com/Forums.asp?MID=127&AID=26409

Have fun!

The Political Operative's Kit for The Political Machine provides, amongst other things, two editors. It doesn't come with the retail version of The Political Machine but can be purchased for $10 from Stardock (if you bought The Political Machine from Stardock at $29.95 it includes this kit).

The first editor is the issue editor. The second is the interview question editor.

The Issue Editor

In the game, candidates compete on the issues. There are essentially two types of issues in the game: Personal traits and Political issues.  In our editor, we use an underscore (_) to denote a personal issue.  For game play reasons, we decided to make it so that ads and speeches could not target these personal issues.  That's because they are powerful.

The first part of the issue editor is loading up the issues themselves. They are in the polmachine\data directory.

Let's start with the personal issues:

When you load up the personal traits file, you are provided with a list of issues.  Every issue has its display name (how it will look in the game) along with its unique ID.  If there's an underscore at the start, it is treated like a personal trait.  On each issue there are values for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents.  A positive value means that they favor this issue. A negative value means they are against it.  And the higher the value, either way, determines how much they care.

In the example above, Credibility, you see that we gave it a value of 20 for Republicans and Democrats but 50 for Independents. This was our judgment call -- we felt that independents are more concerned with credibility whereas partisans will tend to look the other way a bit for their guy.

We used this table to decide issues:

Now on many of these issues, we just educated guesses on. You may not agree with our choices but with this, you can edit it.  However, changing these issues will likely mean you won't be able to play in multiplayer games since you can imagine how this could be abused (you could make all the issues not make any sense except to you).

But all is not lost -- You can create your own issue files.  The game will load any .issue file. So if you create your own new issue files, the game will use them and you can probably use those in multiplayer. Just go to file-> new and start creating.  Just be sure to always hit file->new when switching betwee .issue files since by default the issue editor will try to merge your issues together.

Let's start modifying some traits for single player play:

In this example, we have drilling in ANWR.  Based on polling research, we concluded that Democrats were against it, Republicans for it and independents basically neutral on it.  You're free to disagree.  We also discovered that people in Alaska strongly favored it (no matter which party you belonged to).  But you can go further, you can add other states and decide for yourself on how they feel. In this example, we're making California, which is more strongly against drilling in ANWR having its position created.

You can create your own kinds of issues as much as you'd like.

The Interview Question Editor

The interview question editor is quite a bit more complex. It is actually this editor that we have great hopes of the community putting together interesting questions and other content to extend the single player experience.  The .questions files are in the polmachine\data directory.

In the game, there are several venues that you can appear on.  JoeUser, The O'Maley Scenario, Barry King, 50/50, etc.  You can bring up the questions available for each venue and add your own or edit them.

Questions are treated like trees. They can be as simple or complex as you'd like based on the answers. Let's take a look at this complex one (we want to show off how much work we put into these questions. )

If you're ever on the JoeUser show and get the nuclear terrorist question. Try answering "Well we had it coming" and you will get a lot of follow-up question. This is where a lot of the game's research really paid off. The answers you get to choose from have a lot of depth. They're not just "Yea, I support". They are nuanced and based on real world answers.

The first thing you'll want to do is load up the issue pool. You can hold down the Ctrl key when you get the file dialog to select multiple sets of issues. You'll want these so that the player's answers can affect their positions on the issue.

Adding a question is fairly straight forward. Go to the question item and choose "Add".

You then get this unintuitive dialog:

This is your question pool. It lets you put together questions and answers as "objects" that can then be put together later if you so choose. Click the "add" button to get started.

When you hit the add button, you get this dialog. Just type in the interview question and a summary. A tag will be auto generated. Then choose the forum (such as JoeUser).  And pick a general issue on it.  Sometimes you may want to go back to the issue editor and create new issues for your question to affect. On the respones, click Add:

You can then create your potential responses. And there can be many. On each answer you can put qualifiers. For instance, you can say that only a candidate with an intelligence greater than 4 will have the option for this question. Many questions in The Political Machine have qualifiers on them. So the player who decides that military service is useless may find that certain useful answers are denied them, for example.

The mood item is something we did not implement, we were going to have answers that would affect the mood of the commentator.

Once you have done that, you will want to add issue modifiers. This will determine what issues this response will affect and by how much.

In this example, it changes the player's position on that issue by 3 if they're a Democrat and 2 if they're a Republican.  In the game, if you try to play as a Democrat when you're a Republican or vice versa we use this to penalize the player to a certain degree. A Republican, no matter what, is not going to score as many points as a Democrat on say the environment just as a Democrat will never score quite as many points on a strong military as a Republican. But you can change all that if you disagree with this editor.

The second part you see is how it affects the voters themselves. This is powerful and you should be cautious about it. You can make some issues take on greater importance based on what you answer.

Let's give a different example to show this off:

Let's say we want to have an answer that persaudes people. What we can do is if the player has a very high charisma value then an answer like this comes up:

Then on the issue modifiers:

You can have the importance go way up on all of them.

But there's more you can do:

Have it also affect another issue. Negative values mean you are moving against that issue. So your high charisma convinces TV viewers that you are against campaign finance reform and that THEY should be against it as well.

Once you hit the okay button a couple of times you'll be back to that weird dialog. You'll have the beginnings of a tree.

Let's get really crazy and have a follow-up question:

You can then add additional follow-up answers. When done you'll have this:

Now go back to the question and find the answer you want to follow up and click on it:

And then have its counter question be that question's ID.

You've just made your first compound question.  And you can do that over and over.

Conclusions

Hopefully you will be able to greatly expand on the depth of the game and tweak it to your heart's desire.  With these two editors, you can truly mold the game to reflect your own ideal.

Political Operatives Kit [standalone order for use with retail CD] Order: $10.00 (Electronic Distribution).  Political Operative Kit includes editors to create your own issues, your own interview questions, and more!   * If you have already purchased a retail CD from a store and would like to create your own issues and events, use this order item. The $29.95 version above (for new orders direct from Stardock) includes the kit as part of your order.