Category: Current Events

Monopoly Is Still An Outdated Board Game

After fans voted, Monopoly has replaced the iron token with a cat token. Apparently Monopoly updates its tokens from time to time in an attempt to stay relevant, although I’m pretty sure cats have been around longer than irons. But shuffling the tokens on the Monopoly board is like shuffling the deck chairs on a two-dimensional Titanic. When it comes to turn-based board games, Monopoly is still woefully outdated.

Blasphemy, you say? You still have nostalgic memories of glorious Monopoly nights? I know, I scoffed too, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that innovation in the turn-based board game industry has left old fogies like Monopoly (1934) and Risk (1957) far behind.

Let’s look at a few of the elements that render the gameplay of Monopoly and Risk inferior to a newer game like Settlers of Catan (1995).

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Let’s Talk About Drones

Wow. Drone policy has been in the news for like three days now. As in, the News news. On NPR. In the top of my Google News feed. In this conservative emailing list I accidentally got on. The “mainstream media” has spent more effort on drone policy this week than they did in all of the months leading up to last year’s elections.

It seems that eleven senators (both Democrat and Republican) threatened to delay the confirmations of Hagel and/or Brennan if the Obama administration didn’t release the memo(s) about their justification(s) for killing American citizens with targeted drone strikes. Then a 16-page memo “leaked” to NBC.

Page one of the memo (here from NBC, or here from Reason with selective highlighting) says that lethal operations against a U.S. citizen require, among other things, a “high-level official of the U.S. government” to determine that “the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.”

Later, on page seven, the memo says that “an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack” does not require the United States to have “clear evidence that a specific attack… will take place in the immediate future.” Yes, the government literally says that imminent does not mean immediate. This is pretty blatant doublespeak that basically gives the executive branch permission to target anyone they decide needs targeting.

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So That’s Why the Socialist Scandinavians Are Doing So Well

The Economist brings some news from Scandinavia:

Sweden has reduced public spending as a proportion of GDP from 67% in 1993 to 49% today. It could soon have a smaller state than Britain. It has also cut the top marginal tax rate by 27 percentage points since 1983, to 57%, and scrapped a mare’s nest of taxes on property, gifts, wealth and inheritance. This year it is cutting the corporate-tax rate from 26.3% to 22%.

Sweden has also donned the golden straitjacket of fiscal orthodoxy with its pledge to produce a fiscal surplus over the economic cycle. Its public debt fell from 70% of GDP in 1993 to 37% in 2010, and its budget moved from an 11% deficit to a surplus of 0.3% over the same period. This allowed a country with a small, open economy to recover quickly from the financial storm of 2007-08. Sweden has also put its pension system on a sound foundation, replacing a defined-benefit system with a defined-contribution one and making automatic adjustments for longer life expectancy.

Most daringly, it has introduced a universal system of school vouchers and invited private schools to compete with public ones…

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The NRA As The Big Bad Boogieman

As the debates about gun laws unfolded after the Sandy Hook tragedy, a lot of people seemed to think there was one particular force standing in the way of real reform. News articles talked about how “The National Rifle Assn. and its allies have successfully kept” reform efforts “at bay for years.” Pundits talked about “the orthodoxy promulgated by the National Rifle Association.” Liberal economists tweeted tirades about the “pricks in the gun lobby who enable this madness.” Even President Obama accused lawmakers of caring more about getting “a A grade from the gun lobby that funds their campaigns.”

All of these people seem to imagine the NRA as this Terrible Necromancer that wields an unjust amount of power with its Magic Wand of Lobbying to prevent the common-sense changes that most people really support to make the world a better place. The accusations carry a vibe similar to the oil industry: If only it wasn’t for that powerful oil lobby, we could take real steps to prevent climate change. If only it wasn’t for that powerful gun lobby, we could take real steps to prevent mass shootings!

Unfortunately, I don’t think this characterization of the NRA as a big bad boogieman has much relation to reality.

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