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To the tune of: Kate Bush – Pi
As a PR and journalist, I’ve been frustrated by the non-gamers and anti-gamers – the people who haven’t played or would never play games – and how they control the media. As the years have gone by, their hold on the mainstream has been eroded and the review sections of most national media are now games-friendly but the main news pages are still run with an ethos that is often anti-games. I’d argue this is because the people running these pages are either older people who’ve never seen the point in trying [more...]
To the tune of: Malcolm X – No Taxation Without Representation
Proportionally Delightful
Minority parties get more seats. Small parties don’t necessarily get a larger share of seats – some systems, like the “mixed member” system of Germany, put minimum limits on the share of the vote (as high as 5%), that exclude smaller parties. Parties will be weakened PR can give more power to parties. A purely proportional system normally allows parties to control the selection of candidates completely, leading to politicians with much stronger party loyalty. Some systems work against this, especially ones with constituencies, but there’s [more...]
Order! Order! Following the Parliamentary Education Services release of their edutainment flash-game ‘MP For A Week‘, I’ve written a bit of analysis over at Nicholas Lovell’s GamesBrief of the title, covering its accuracy, education value and entertainment value.
The axe that the commons authorities want to grind is razor sharp – this game makes the average stolid backbencher look amazingly active and busy, hurrying between constituency and parliament, justifying that great wodge of cash we give each MP every year (around £175,000 including expenses, each), and the huge number of MPs.
I’ll be sending Nicholas my expenses bill later.
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Alistair Darling has announced a new top tax rate of 50% for those earning more than £150,000 from next April.
Things we value; a stable society that produces the most happiness (freedom from suffering) for the largest number. Agreed? If not, no point talking. If so, read on.
Equality of opportunity offers the most likely route for the greatest number to achieve freedom from suffering. Concentration of resources in few hands allows them to manipulate systems that affect us easily, aggregating yet more resources in their hands, disincentivising others to challenge them and closing off opportunities for those [more...]
Clack-clack-clack, the dominoes fall, and not all of them are actually dominoes. Heath Robinson machines (Damn yanks, he predates your plagiarising Rube Goldberg) of this type can take any form and it’s always damn fun to trace the threads of seeming causality and see if you can spot an origin.
For example, look at Vietnam; the whole reason Kennedy popped all those yanks in there was the Domino Theory; that the collapse of one country and its turning to Communism, was an infection and that more countries would topple. As Eisenhower said in ’54 “You have [more...]
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