I drink something alcoholic like once every 3 or 4 years. The next time I do, though, I’m going to be ready with these Pac Man shot glasses. Just $30 for the set at ClubNamco.
Day: October 21, 2008
Time Management for Anarchists Comic
Jim Munroe and Mark Ngui’s Time Management for Anarchists comic is now available for download as a PDF at Archive.Org. Its got a CC non-commercial license attached, so someone’s bound to put this in a proper CBR/CBZ format.
Guitar Hero Online Stats
I like statistics. I like video games. I love video games that give me not only statistics, but web-accessible statistics like Guitar Hero does. For example, check out my Guitar Hero 3 community page which tracks pretty much everything online that the game does locally on my XBOX.
To enable this all I had to do was give the Guitar Hero site my XBOX gamertag and a code generated by the local install of GH3 on my console. Now, everyone on the Internets can see how bad I suck at GH3!
I really wish every game would do this. Since there are so few big game companies to begin with, it should be possible to set it up so I could go to, say, EA.com and view stats on all of the EA games I own.
The one thing that I would do to improve the GH3 site is add an RSS feed. Update the feed everytime I do beat my previous high score on a song or achieve some new accomplishment.
The U.S. Doesn’t Make Anything?
A lot of people seem to be linking to Matt Haughey’s How to get my nerd vote which might better be entitled “How to get the left center vote” which I think Barack Obama already has wrapped up. But since he claims to be a nerd, Haughey might want to learn to use The Google so he avoids nonsense like this,
Broadband Everywhere. I want crazy South Korea/Japan style broadband I’ve heard about for years: 100Mbps (upload and download) fiber connections for less than $50/month with unlimited bandwidth and the ability to run your own servers. I know the US is a big spread out country and it makes this stuff somewhat difficult/costly, but it’s an ambitious goal with a ton of payoff. We don’t have manufacturing jobs in the US anymore: we don’t make things, we don’t build things, we don’t sew things here, but we do have lots of ideas and inventions.
We don’t make or build things anymore?
The United States is easily the single biggest producer of manufactured goods in the world. We’ve all heard from the media about the vaunted progress that China is making in manufacturing, and certainly those are real gains. But the reality is that in 2006 U.S. manufacturing output was 2.5 times that of China’s.
Moreover, although manufacturing continues to decline as a percentage of U.S. GDP, it has continued to steadily increase in absolute terms (or, to put it a bit differently, other parts of the U.S. economy have grown much faster than manufacturing even without “broadband everywhere”).
To say that we don’t make or build anything in America anymore is a bit like saying that we don’t grow anything anymore. Like the agricultural sector, the manufacturing sector has seen steady improvements in productivity which produce the counterintuitive result that as production has increased, employment in both of those industries has gradually declined.
For a more thorough analysis of the state of U.S. manufacturing see Daniel Ikenson’s Thriving in a Global Economy: The Truth about U.S. Manufacturing.