Why Trickle-Down Economics Don't Work

In lieu of any better writing material, I'm going to explain why the concept of Trickle-Down economics is flawed.

The theory behind Trickle-Down economics is this: if the rich have plenty of money their wealth will circulate in the form of their industry. In theory, this is a very propserous system for everyone. The simple reason this doesn't work is plain old greed.

Lets take a look at the elite who are supposedly circulating their wealth. They do literally everything to AVOID circulating wealth. They take their jobs to third world countries so they can exploit impoverished workers and pay them less than the minimum wage in the USA. They find every loophole they can to pay less taxes, they donate to charity for the sole reason of public image, and they make cheap but overpriced products that we only buy because of their advertising.

This of course does not describe every rich guy out there, philanthropists like Bill Gates exist, but they are a rarity.

Andrew Carnegie had the right idea back in the industrial revolution. He provided quality products at low prices, paid his workers well, and when he died, gave most of his wealth back to the government. When you reach the top, your question shouldn't be "How can I gain more money" but "how can I use this money to contribute to and better society". Money isn't meant to rot in a bank somewhere, it's meant to circulate. Money is the blood that keeps the economy alive. If the money doesn't flow, the economy starts to die.

The best way for the rich to contribute to society is to bring jobs to the USA, or if they're adamant about keeping jobs in third world countries, pay the workers the USA minimum wage. If they start paying taxes and actively donate to charities for legitimate reasons, not just for public image. Even if the rich people do this, they will stay rich, they own giant corperations that pump out more money a minute than some people make in a year. They have so much money in the bank, they could quit their jobs and live off their interest alone.

Trickle Down Economics don't work. The reason in pretty much inherent in the name. The rich choke down the stream to keep "their" money to themselves. All the reaches down is a trickle.

On Gun Control

The recent tragedy in Connecticut has brought the multifaceted, vague, and generally convoluted subject of gun control to my attention. I quickly took a stand on it, but soon realized that my stance wasn't perfect, and I fell into a huge argument about gun control. Today I'm going to try and make some sense of this issue and generally organize my thoughts.

Lets start with the two extremes and work from there.

Banning guns completely is generally a bad idea. While they may be awful tools of death, they are needed in war, law enforcement and general defense. Without guns, we as a nation would either be conquered or fall into anarchy pretty quickly. The problem is this: Outlawing guns will make outlaws the only ones with guns. The law does not reach the lawless, and since guns exist, they will exist on the black market, available to criminals, but not to anyone else. It's pretty easy to see why this wouldn't work for very long.

Legalizing all guns is pretty much just as bad. The theory behind gun legalization is that if everyone has a gun, no one will commit crimes at the risk of getting shot by anybody. This would generally create a lot of fear and paranoia for everyone. Furthermore, complete legalization of guns would limit free speech. People get into heated arguments over their opinions all the time, and occasionally physical fights over them. Now give everyone a gun. You no longer have to agree with everyone because if you REALLY don't like them, you have the option to shoot them. Martin Luther King and JFK would have been assassinated a LOT sooner if guns were easily available, and we would have seen a lot more assassinations through the years if this was the case. You may have a gun with you, but they can still draw and shoot you before you can react.

A good quote describing this situation goes like this
"Guns should be illegal because criminals exist, but guns should be legal because criminals exist."

Now lets take a look at the Connecticut massacre. If you don't know the details, I suggest you read up before reading this next part.

The only person anyone can blame is the shooter himself. The one who obtained the gun illegally, shot his way into an elementary school and started killing innocent children. The mother of the shooter is not at fault, she was acting within the law. She was a gun enthusiast, she obtained all of her weapons legally, and trusted her children enough to teach them to shoot them. The next step up is the blame the gun control legislation. My current question is, where should we draw the line? The current legislation is that civilians with no link the the military can own semi-automatic weapons, but not fully automatic weapons.

 I am unwilling to pull the line any further back than pistols. Everyone with no violent history should be able to own a pistol for a home-defense situation. When I have a wife and kids in my home, I want to have the ability to defend them against any intruder. You don't have to kill them, it's just as simple to incapacitate an intruder with a gun as it is to kill them, it's all a matter of where you aim.

Semi-automatic weapons I'm a bit torn on. While I do want to defend the rights of everyone who legitimately owns semi-automatic weapons, such as gun enthusiasts, I cannot think of a situation, short of an army invading, where in individual would realistically need a semi-automatic weapon. I think a reasonable compromise would be to allow the ownership of these guns, but ban the ownership of lethal ammunition for them. Only allow the sale of nonlethal ammunition, or blanks. While this would not keep it out of the hands of  criminals with access to the black market, it would have prevented the tragedy in Connecticut. The shooter may have had the gun, but he wouldn't actually be able to kill anyone with it.

I suppose my position on gun control isn't actually gun control, but ammunition control.

Anyway, food for thought, post a comment and tell me what you think on the issue.

Techie Joke

I'm not dead, just lazy and busy, but mostly lazy. I'll try to get back to writing regular posts this week, but no promises.

In the meantime enjoy some dumb shit I made in class.

Nvidia graphics cards are the actual cause for global warming.
WAKE UP SHEEPLE!

Spotlight on Games: Looming

Looming is a free flash game that can be found on most flash game sites like Kongregate and Newgrounds. It is a fairly simple game in terms of graphics and mechanics, but it goes deeper than most games in terms of philosophy, art, and story.

In Looming, you play as September, a man exploring the ruins of a place called Looming. You use the arrow keys to move around, X to interact with objects and C to open your inventory. You roam around, collecting artifacts to piece together the story of Looming. There are 9 endings to unlock, each varying on a set of items  or the time spent in Looming. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

In terms of story, this game has it all. It has a love story, a mystery, a tragic hero and opposing factions. The game starts off with September writing a letter to his lover; January, and every ending has a different letter written to January. This alone manages to give the world of Looming a melancholy feel, for whenever September leaves to investigate the ruins of Looming, he is away from his lover's embrace. The atmosphere of Looming itself is detached, mysterious, forlorn and despondent. As you wander through the wasteland of Looming, you discover the story of two peoples, and a beast called the OarBoar. The two peoples, the Lorem and the Seecha represent two different philosophies of engineering. The literal, focusing only on creating machines and the literal, observable aspect of the world, and the theoretical, focusing on subjects like mathematics, biology, psychology and physics, developing those theories, making calculations, but never actually building. Observing the interactions of these two factions is the OarBoar, possibly the only permanent resident of Looming, whose bones and messages are scattered across the land.

The art style of Looming is gorgeous. Huge gears, machines and temples left behind by the people litter the land, adding the the sense of insignificance and eeriness. The ambient sound effects are unnerving to say the least. They include gusting wind and strange voices chanting a forgotten language (which is actually the word "Looming" played backwards). The little birds that roam the landscape serve two purposes, to distract the player from the hard-to-see items required to find all the endings, and to add a sense of emptiness and barrenness to the world. I've never played a game where I felt so alone and desolate as this game. These stories, while simple on their own, are intertwined and complex together, they all effect each other. The poetic letters from September that mark each ending tie the endings together, and give the game a satisfying completeness. When you win, you don't want to stop playing, the beauty of the game is astounding.

Gregory Weir makes gorgeous games, I'm looking forward to reviewing more of them in the future.

Video Games are an Art

Yes. Video games are an art. Well why not? Cinema, originally just a means to entertain people is now an art. Writing, originally created to convey ideas, is now an art, and art itself originally fulfilled the same purpose writing did, communication.

Creating a true work of art takes an incredible amount of skill in all three of the aforementioned art forms. The ability to tell a story, but meld it with art, make it immersive and interactive, the ability to create an entire world is an incredible skill. I respect anyone with the ability to make a quality game. That's also why most video games are made by a whole team of people. The best games are made by several masters of story, art, design and music. All of these qualities come together to form a beautiful world for the appreciator to experience.

I hardly see making a video game as just making a product, it's much more than that.

When you make a quality game, you're creating an world, you're making people and environments that interact in unique and sometimes unpredictable ways. 

You know you've made a good game when it involves players emotionally, when they make an intimate connection with them and brings them to tears. Examples of games like that are Portal 2 or Bioshock. I'll be honest, I cried at the end of both of those games. Another excellent feature I love to see in games is dystopia. I'm a sucker for dystopias. I loved the books Anthem by Ayn Rand, Orwell's 1984 and Brave New World by Huxley. Dystopias fascinate me, and I would jump at any opportunity to experience one. Bioshock has definitively become my favorite games for these reasons.
Another excellent quality is atmosphere, the feel a game gives you. Whether it's tragic, rebellious or epic, the atmosphere is really what pulls a game together and makes it real.

This is why I'm going to start a weekly post, every Saturday (or Sunday, depending on my laziness), a spotlight on games. I'm going to choose a game that I've truly enjoyed, but with a few rules. To keep it interesting  I will NOT be doing mainstream games. Instead I'm going to look at flash games, obscure playstation games, indie games, retro games, mods, anything that hasn't received much spotlight. It's going to be a challenge, but it will give me an excuse to hunt around the places I've always wanted to go to find games I've never heard of, and hopefully ones I will enjoy. First Spotlight on Games will be this weekend, so stay tuned.

The Election Aftermath

Oh fuck guys, it's time for politics.

My girlfriend brought the following issue to my attention. It seems a few thousand people in some of the more republican parts of the US want to secede from the country. 

Yes, this is real. 

Jesus people, we're living in a democracy, that means majority rules. Just because the guy you wanted didn't get elected doesn't mean you have to try and start another Civil War. You had eight years of that moron Bush, the man who put us into trillions of dollars of debt, then you blame Obama for it and we can't have eight years of him? 

For fucks sake, he's not going to ruin the damn country (any more than it already is). The president doesn't have nearly as much power as people are led to believe, the only way he could possibly get us into a bigger mess is if he just started spending again like Bush, and he's not, he's trying to lower the debt with higher taxes. Sure, no one wants to pay taxes, but they're necessary, they have to be paid, especially by the rich. Those of you who try and argue that "trickle down politics" is the best course of action, it's not, because the top 1% have boatloads of money, and the economy is still a mess, we're still in debt. The problem is that the top 1% is trying to hold onto their money, trying to spend as little as possible instead of creating jobs and circulating it. If the rich are doing their best to hold onto their money, how do we get it from them and back into the system? That's right. Taxes.

Like I said, no one likes to pay taxes. But look at Europe. Most of Europe is doing fantastic because they have high taxes and tons of welfare programs including free education, free housing, public transportation and  free healthcare. I wouldn't mind paying 40% of my income if I get those things, I would probably be spending that 40% on all that anyway. 

Then we get the idiots calling socialism evil. Yes it's socialism, but guess what, it works, and it works damn well. France, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and Germany are some of the worlds countries that are doing the best. They have the highest standard of living, no major problems with education, poverty or economy, and they, as nations, are overall more technologically advanced than us (for example, Germany has QR codes all over major cities for public transportation, something we don't have.) Socialism isn't evil, that doesn't even make sense. It's a political stance, and the most successful one the world has yet to see. 

Now I feel like I have to apologize for going on this rambling political spiel. I have some less angry posts planned ahead, I'll have one or two up during the week. Keep checking back.

Tell Your Friends

I'm working on a couple posts, and I'm going to start a regular weekly postings. (Hint, hint, it relates to the original topic of this blog). This place is really getting off the ground now. Tell your friends, don't forget to share the page. In the meantime, enjoy this nonsensical iPod background I made in like 10 minutes on Photoshop.