Archive for December, 2019

Minecraft makes gaming great again

Posted: December 28, 2019 by ng36b in Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , ,
Best economy ever, for villagers of all professions!

When I tell people that I play video games with my kids, I almost immediately get asked about what my Fortnite character looks like. If you watch TV at all, you’ve probably seen ads for Fortnight, Grand Theft Auto, and a variety of other video games. Almost all are first person shooters, featuring oversized weapons, gratuitous violence, and at least some partial nudity. Given the number of ads on TV, you might think these games are extremely popular.

I don’t play Fortnite, nor do I let my kids play it. While I like my violent video games (Skyrim belongs to the Nords!), my kids and I play Minecraft. You’ve probably seen it at some point. Blocky graphics. Diamond swords. Green and black monsters called creepers. You might think it looks dumb, but its the best selling video game of all time. Plus, rather than teaching your kids to brainlessly slaughter other people, it provides a lot of lessons about the real world.

Prepare to become compost, ISIS wannabe!

A quick Minecraft primer, in case you haven’t played it. It’s a sandbox game, meaning there isn’t really a story or quest to complete. You get dropped into a generated world where you gather blocks (dirt, stone, iron, etc.) and build…whatever you want. There are all sorts of enemies called mobs that can attack you. You can plant farms, cage off and breed animals for food and supplies, and even find villages, where computer controlled villagers will trade with you, using emeralds as the form of currency. There is sort of an end game in that you can find a place called “The End” and fight the Enderdragon, but even after that, the game has no real ending.

Maybe later this iron golem will write a tell-all book about being in the Minecraft special forces

The first thing you learn is that the world is a pretty cruel place. Not unlike our actual world, there are monsters that are content to watch the world burn. Homeless zombies poison you and turn friendly villagers into more zombies. Creepers act like ISIS suicide bombers, sneaking up and exploding, both hurting you and destroying whatever you happened to work on. Endermen, giant black creatures that teleport, will suddenly flip out when you look at them scream and attack you like a triggered college student protester. Especially at night, it feels like you might be safer walking down the streets of San Francisco…wait, never mind, its not quite THAT bad, but its still unnerving.

Minecraft cows chanting “Build the Wall!”

To combat this, you have to care and build defenses. That means you build walls. And you make Minecraft pay for it! You also build a military by creating iron golems, who roam your village and kill attacking bad guys. If you don’t, for some misguided peace loving reason, your villagers will be massacred by either zombies or pillagers, roving bands of characters that destroy any villagers they find. Those walls need gates though, to let in legal immigrants and let you go about your business. Despite threats to the contrary, most of your villagers don’t actually move to Terraria or Canada after you build walls.

Apples and carrots, the backbone of any Minecraft economy

Once your village is protected, spurring the economy is key. Farmers are key villagers that get little respect. Not unlike real America, farmers don’t get a lot of love until there is a shortage. Your villagers can’t breed and create new villagers unless they have enough food and beds, and your farmers will constantly hand food to them at various intervals, without you doing anything. My kids caught this once and it started a conversation about how important farming is overall to our country. Not bad for a game with 8 bit graphics!

The best economy ever, all through trade schools. Why aren’t we funding those instead of “free” college again?

Now you can go and harvest and build everything yourself. You can mine down and find diamonds, which make the best armor and weapons in the game. But its really time consuming, and as my kids are discovering, its far easier to pay an armorer for a diamond chestplate. But that villager doesn’t just start selling diamond armor from the outset. You have to build that villager’s business, buying and selling with him until he is leveled up sufficiently. Once your villagers are leveled up, it becomes quicker to rebuild after a setback. The first time my character died, it took me an hour to build back all the stuff I had lost. Now, it takes a mere ten minutes of trading to be ready to take on the world again.

Even Minecraft has Bernie supporters :(

There is one final, sad character I’ve discovered in Minecraft: the Nitwit. He wears a green shirt and roams around your village like every other villager. The Nitwit wakes up later than other villagers and stays out at night later than others. Most importantly, he doesn’t do anything. He can’t trade with you. He doesn’t work a field like a farmer. He doesn’t sell leather, or buy paper, or make maps, or build swords. Nope, he literally walks around, breeds, and takes up a bed. If you go to kill him though, you’ll make the other villagers mad, and your iron golems might attack you.

So you tolerate the nitwit. You hope that maybe someday that person will grow up, attend trade school and be a functioning member of society. Sadly, this is where Minecraft departs reality, because while you can stop supporting Bernie Sanders in real life, Minecraft coding prevents nitwits from changing into something useful. They do provide a convenient moniker whenever your kid’s liberal teacher talks about the “greatness” of liberal ideals. Who knew that Minecraft, created in 2011, could be so predictive of America’s future.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, Mojang, Microsoft Corporation, the Enderdragon, or any other government agency.

The Trump Pitch to Black America: NOW you’ve got something to lose!

Posted: December 28, 2019 by datechguy in Uncategorized

People are talking about Donald Trump getting as much as 30% of the Black Vote and a lot of media heads are exploding at the very thought but the Trump Campaign pitch can be explained fairly easily.

Three years ago Donald Trump made this pitch to the black community:

People were shocked:

“Look at how much African American communities have suffered under Democratic control,” Trump said to his supporters. “To those hurting, I say, ‘What do you have to lose by trying something new like Trump?’ You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?”

The businessman — who only 1 percent of black voters support nationally, according to an August 4 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll — continued, “I will produce for the African Americans. And the Democrats will not produce. All they’ve done is taken advantage of your vote. If you keep voting for the same people, you will keep getting exactly the same result.”

Not a lot of black voters took Donald Trump up on that challenge, not even voters whose lot didn’t improve during the Obama years and found themselves unemployed.

Now think of where such people are four years later

Imagine if you are a black American who was unemployed four years ago during the Obama administration who is now working and not only working but has the prospect of advancing in the Trump boom

Imagine if you are a black teenager or twenty something with a job who either couldn’t find a job or watched an older teenage brother or sister look in vain for work during the Obama years now employed under Trump.

Imagine if you are the mother or grandmother of one of those teenagers. Four years ago with no prospect for work you worried day and night about the gangs & dealers tempting your kid with the only prospect for income they might have now applying for legit jobs and having a prospect of getting them.

Imagine if you are were a con four years ago. Under Obama prison reform went nowhere and even if you managed to get out your legit prospects were slim and none. Now thanks to prison reform you have not only a legit shot at a 2nd chance at a new life but real job prospects as as well.

Imagine if you are the wife and more importantly the son of a black ex-con who was unemployable four years ago but now sees her husband or father working and setting an good example rather than a bad one or if you are the baby mother of such a man had no prospect of collecting child support four year ago when he wasn’t working and couldn’t pay, but now is working and can.

Four years ago, during the Obama years Donald Trump declare they had nothing to lose by voting Trump, but four years later they have a lot to lose by voting against him.

That is the real pitch to black america and it a pitch that every man, woman and child in the black community who has a better life now then they did four years ago will understand.

Be afraid Democrats, be VERY afraid.

I think this experiment in “Marks-ism” just might be worth a “shot”

Posted: December 27, 2019 by datechguy in News/opinion

I’m a great believer in logic, data and fact and going where such things take you. Which is why this piece about a prescription heroin program in England run by a Doctor John Marks from the 80’s was such an eye opener to me:

He told them to stop using, and they argued back, telling him they needed it. ‘I found this a bit of a headache,’ he says, ‘and I had bigger fish to fry.’ He decided to shut the programme down.

But as he prepared to do this, there was a directive from Margaret Thatcher’s government. Every part of Britain had to show it had an anti-drugs strategy, it said, and conduct a cost-benefit analysis to show what worked. So Marks commissioned the academic Dr Russell Newcombe to look into it. He assumed Newcombe would come back and say these patients were like heroin addicts everywhere, at least in the cliché — unemployed and unemployable, criminal, with high levels of HIV and a high death rate.

Except the research found something very different. Newcombe found that none of the addicts had the HIV virus, even though Liverpool was a port city where you would expect it to be rife. Indeed, none of them had the usual problems found among addicts: overdoses, abscesses, disease. They mostly had regular jobs and led normal lives.

this seems completely counterintutive but Doctors were not surprised:

He discovered that all doctors agree that medically pure heroin, injected using clean needles, does not produce these problems. That’s why when people are routinely given heroin in hospitals — to treat the pain of a hip operation, for example — none of these problems occur. But under drug prohibition, the criminals who control our drug trade cut their drugs with whatever similar-looking powders they can find, so they can sell the heroin in more batches and make more cash.

That’s just capitalism 101, but here was the real surprise

And something nobody predicted took place. The number of heroin addicts in the area actually fell. Research published by Dr Marks in the Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh compared Widnes, which had a heroin clinic, to the very similar Liverpool borough of Bootle, which didn’t — and found Widnes had 12 times fewer addicts.

This is another batch of totally counteractive data, but again to why these results too place was again Capitalism 101.

But why would prescribing heroin to addicts mean that fewer people became addicts? Dr Russell Newcombe, working out of John Marks’s clinic, told me what he believes is the explanation. Imagine you are a street heroin addict. You have to raise a large sum of money every day for your habit: £100 a day for heroin at that time in the Wirral. How are you going to get it? You can rob. You can prostitute. But there is another way, and it’s a lot less unpleasant. You can buy your drugs, take what you need, and then cut the rest with talcum powder and sell it on to other people. But to do that, you need to persuade somebody else to take the drugs too. You need to become a salesman, promoting the experience.

So heroin under prohibition becomes, in effect, a pyramid-selling scheme. ‘Insurance companies would love to have salesmen like drug addicts’ — i.e. with that level of motivation — Dr Marks explains. Prescription kills the scheme. You don’t have to sell smack to get smack.

Eventually the program was discontinued and the people on it went to street drugs and an early death.

I’m going to want more data and frankly I don’t like the concept of ceding a portion of the population to an addiction which is plenty destructive to health in it own right, but given the situation in cities like Chicago and Baltimore which have become war zones over the drug trade a pilot program of this nature would seem worth a shot.

If I was Donald Trump as soon as I was re-elected I would bring Dr. Marks out of his exile in New Zealand and give him a free hand to try something like this in Chicago or Baltimore or even San Francisco. Given the state of these cities are in there would seem to be little to lose and a lot to gain, unless you are the drug cartels.

The Virginia gun control proposals will result in violence

Posted: December 26, 2019 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
Tags: , , ,

Almost immediately upon gaining control of both houses of congress and the governorship of Virginia the Democrats announced rather extreme gun control proposals. The proposals are so extreme that a firestorm of dissent erupted from the people, sheriffs, and county officials.  There was so much dissent one representative threatened to sick the National Guard on sheriffs and county officials who refused to comply.  If the proposals are carried out I can see the whole mess resulting in violence.  I’m not the only who came to that conclusion, check out this Washington Times article Virginia Dem mulls National Guard to enforce upcoming gun laws, an idea likely to end in violence

Democrats in Virginia have already pre-filed bills to mandate universal background checks; to limit handgun purchases; to raise age limits on would-be firers; to redefine the term assault weapon and impose bans on buys of certain guns and magazines. And more.

And dozens upon dozens of county officials around the state have rushed to pass resolutions declaring their jurisdictions sanctuaries from the state’s gun control storm and announcing that their police chiefs have no intent of enforcing the Dems’ laws.

Democrat Representative McFachin kicked up the tension on the whole situation into high gear with this proposal.

“I’m not the governor,” said Rep. Donald McEachin, Virginia Democrat, according to a report in The Washington Examiner, “but the governor may have to nationalize the National Guard to enforce the [new gun control] law[s].”

If called by the governor to perform this odious duty the Virginia National Guard would be required to carry it out by law, however, the Virginia Bill of Rights protects the Right to Bear Arms for all citizens,

Granted, this act, signed in 1878 to prohibit federal troops from being used to enforce domestic laws, carves out exceptions for National Guard members operating under the authority of the states. But the spirit of the restrictions should still apply.

With his proposal,  McFachin proved that gun confiscation has always been the end result of Democrat’s plans.

But with one quick quip, McEachin took a situation that’s already boiling with tension and fear — namely, the realities of the new blue Virginia and the realization of Democratic-promised gun controls — and made it worse. He went there; he tapped the darkest worries of the gun rights’ crowd — the deep-seated belief that Democrats’ end game is to obliterate the Second Amendment and destroy citizens’ rights to own firearms. And in so doing, he actually let it slip that yes, Democrats will stop at nothing, even violence, to take the guns.

One Sheriff came up with a novel proposal, Virginia Sheriff Vows to ‘Deputize Thousands’ to Defend Gun Rights.

Every Sheriff and Commonwealth Attorney in Virginia will see the consequences if our General Assembly passes further unnecessary gun restrictions. “Red Flag” laws without due process will create enormous conflict as well.

America has more guns than citizens and murder has long been illegal. At best, the proposed gun restrictions will disarm or handicap our law-abiding in their defense and possibly cause a criminal to choose another tool for evil.

I remain very optimistic that our General Assembly will not pass the proposed bills. Obviously, if passed, there are many of us willing to challenge these laws through the courts. In addition, if necessary, I plan to properly screen and deputize thousands of our law-abiding citizens to protect their constitutional right to own firearms.

The resistance has spread across the state: Report: Over 90 Virginia Counties, Municipalities Declared 2A Sanctuaries.  This shows how seriously the people of this nation take their Right to Bear Arms.

A report from WDBJ7 shows that more than 90 Second Amendment sanctuary declarations have been made by counties and municipalities in Virginia.

WDBJ7 reports that Rockingham County was one of the most recent sanctuary declarations. Breitbart News reported that over 3,000 residents attended the Rockingham Board of Supervisors meeting to demand Second Amendment sanctuary status.

Hopefully the Virginia Democrats will take not of the heated opposition and back down.

Older Entries
Newer Entries