I Can't Leave You People Alone For Five Minutes

Let's see, what happened while I wasn't paying attention.

The Michigan budget crisis has come and gone, a deal being reached some time in the dead of the night after the government went into shutdown mode. Here's how it happened for me: I stayed up late enough to see the newscasts go into full on circling vulture mode, went to bed, dreamt that I was a hamburger in Elisha Cuthbert's refrigerator (Don't ask.), woke up, and found everything had been solved. Well, not solved, so much as kicked into the future by a last minute arrangement that will hike taxes and broaden the sales tax to all-new, all-annoying frontiers. Still, better than the Republican plan which was to shutter prisons and beggar schools and the like.

Of course, the important thing was that the casinos would have stayed open.

Actually, it is pretty important considering they pump something like $400k in revenue into the tax coffers every single day they're in operation. It's not the Michigan doesn't have money or tax revenues, it's that they have a balanced budget provision and a shortfall in revenue that was a small but appreciable fraction of their overall budget. The casinos, by the way, pay that much in taxes because they make an obscene amount of profit. I had a friend who worked for them in marketing around when they opened (The turnover in their staff is amazing, too.) and even then they were making one mil. A day. In profit. The problems, though are two fold. One is that those funds from the legalization of gambling are being siphoned from the populace of Michigan, especially the poor working folk in Detroit, as the casinos haven't drawn in people from outside the region much. The other is that people take the freeways to the casinos and then they take them home. They don't stay in the city and spend their money at shops and restaurants and stores as the economic benefit of the casinos spills over to the larger community. Instead, it's all kept inside the casino's box (Which are, of course, carefully designed to close out the outside world and anything else that might keep you from gambling.). The first problem, though, might be taken care of - some what - with this week's grand opening of the MGM's permanent casino. My mother works, literally, across the street so I've had first hand accounts of the massive edifice to probability and false hopes being raised next door for the past few years. But this new casino building features a hotel which might induce some travelers to come and stay and enjoy the town for more than an afternoon. New convention space, etc, etc, I'm not saying it will work just that, like so many other things, it could. And my hometown could do worse than pulling the lever and hoping things line up right, for once.

After the original, troublesome wording of the Kyl-Lieberman amendment that I was so concerned about was toned down, the net effect is something like this: 77 Senators voted to declare the Iranian Republic Guard, a branch of Iran's government, a terrorist organization. This flies in the face of logic, historical precedent, conflates the terrorist actions of a group of thugs, like Al-Qaeda, with the military operations of an actual government, legitimizing what are supposed to be our enemies while shredding our credibility, and roughly half the Democrats in Congress voted for it. Oh, and from what I understand it's also pt us on the short track to war with Iran. Bush has now given up on the WMD line with respect to Iran's nuclear ambitions they're going for the "messin' with Anbar" rationale, instead. Claim that Iranian interference in Iraq amounts to terrorism and let the bombers fly. If you don't think the Bush administration won't do it, then you haven't been paying attention for the past seven years. Just like the Democrats in Congress, apparently.

Like a lot of people I think, I've grown increasingly disgusted with the actions of the Democrats since they took that small amount of power in 2006. Amid talk of change and action, promises that they were going to at least try to fight. Hollow words that ring sad, empty tones now that we've seen the results. I've become increasingly bitter, increasingly disillusioned, that something, anything can make a difference. At the same time, I want to scream, want to grab them and shout, "What the hell are you doing? Haven't you been paying attention? Haven't you learned the lesson of the past few years? We need to do something. Anything. Fight, dammit! Stand up for what I believe in." Even as I've become increasingly certain that no one who actually wields power would listen. Still, I refuse to disengage. Refuse to cede my responsibility here, to return my attention to trivial pursuits that will only lull me into restful complacency. There is a solution, somewhere, somehow, and if I could but find it, I'd burn as much energy as it took to make it happen.

Guild Wars. Yes, I'm still playing. A mission, a quest, a trade at a time as I whittle away the hours of my freetime.

This weekend they held another bonus event. The dart-throwing monkeys in charge of such things picked out triple faction rewards in the Alliance Battles. Which, since I'm stuck on the treadmill trying to grind out some titles (And, boy, do I really have to rant about that one of these days), actually appealed to me. Unlike the previous week's increased drop rates on greens in the expansion I've still yet to buy. But, still, I didn't take part because a) No time. And b) No guild. Sure, I could have stood around in the Great Temple or something and begged for an invite from one of the many spammers or whatever, but to take part would have meant playing the AB game. I'd rather huff paint because it's easier on the brain cells.

Seriously for a moment, though, I've been ragging on the bonus event weekends for a while now, and the fact that they're apparently randomly selected by a bunch of rabid monkeys trained to throw darts at a board. That it's like the developers play madlibs. Mixing, matching amounts and locations and mechanics at will. Because there's really no rhyme or reason to how these things are decided on, as far as I can tell. No concerted effort to use them to drive players or get them exciting about different parts of the game again. Instead, it's "play during the weekend and we'll throw random crap at you and see if it sticks!!!"

I'm midned of a friend of mine who worked in retail. She once told me about a study she'd read about sales. Slashing prices might seem like a good way to pump up the receipts, to encourage more people to come to the store and to buy. Which makes the manager, the store, the executives, the profit margins, everything involved look good. But there's a balancing point there because people also become accustomed to sales if you hold them too often. They'll hold off coming to your store, waiting for things to go on sale and cost less, instead of coming in whenever. Or decide to skip heading to the store because of a big sale, figuring it will be packed - no one likes to go shopping on Christmas Eve, after all. That ends up costing you sales in the long run, even though you might still spike them in the short run. The danger here is that by holding these events week in and week out that players tune them out. They lose that special flair that makes them important because they've become routine.

And, lastly, the great machinery of the National Novel Writing Month has restarted once more. One month. Fifty thousand words. An incredible ride. I can't wait for that Merry-Go-Round to spin again. Haven't signed up yet since it wasn't up when I checked earlier in the day. But there's always tomorrow.