Eight Years, in Dollars

I thought this was interesting: www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/01/08/damage/index.html
and you might have to deal with an ad, but you don't need to be registered to read it. Once again, I find the dollar values affixed to things to be interesting, even fascinating in their momentus nature. I can't lay this at the feet of G.W., but I can lay a large amount of it at the feet of the Bush administration and, to a fair degree, to the mindset that allowed this to happen. It was and remains a national mindset that we can blow these things off without really worrying, but many of the issues raised in the article are nuts-and-bolts issues.

Part of it is, I believe, the terrifying religious faction that is the dominant strain in the White House - an apocalytic brand of Christianity that really oughtant call itself by the religion it splintered from, in that they can't even get preperation for the end of the world right.

The other is, I suspect, a totally out of proportion look at cost-to-result ratios. The writer mentions 12 billion dollars a month in Iraq. I'll wait while you try to wrap your mind around 1 billion, then realize that 12 of those a month are falling down the hole that is our Iraq policy. (Meanwhile, our soldiers make a little over 100 bucks a day, while contrators make over 600 so I guess you can be the judge of if you approve of that.) The Admin proposed that we go to war with the assumption of 60 billion total, which is still considered a pretty high* price.

Now, New Orleans is still in bad, bad shape. It costs 1 billion to rebuild levies, and they haven't been raised yet. Not a priority, I guess. Costs too much?

Our administration was either stupid or corrupt (or both) and the rest of our government was complicit. This is going to take a long, long time to fix. History is just going to bury its head in its hands and ask how any group of people could be so dense, but I think we can do better.

*lawl, 60 billion is 'pretty high'.

FFXI Surprise

I've had an account in FFXI for about three years, and I still haven't hit max level on any one job - a goal that can be accomplished much sooner, I assure you. To be fair, I've always prioritized real life, work, school, available finances, quality time with a significant other, going out for coffee, basically whatever over playing this particular game. Probably the biggest holdback was a period without funds followed by a period of exhaustion, combined and followed with sporadic hardware failures* and I'd say that was the space of about 8 months straight.

Even so, 3 years to hit level 50.

Anyhow, I'd totally forgotten that at level 50, you start taking quests to level up in 5-level increments, which is a major pain. I had all my equipment laid out and ready to go when I hit the exp that was supposed to take me over the limit. Without any fanfare or announcement I just stopped progressing, hitting a brick wall 1 exp. short of 8 elemental staves and newfound respectability as an adventurer.

What a drag. It's lucky that FFXI is so exhaustively documented. I would love to experience the confusion of mysteriously stopping at level 50, everywhere Than turns for help to spout the same catch phrases except for one old man hidden in a garden in the back of a palace nobody has any reason to go to. On a logistical level, it boggles my mind that one old dude who enjoys punching people is responsible for everyone leveling past 50. Or maybe it's just me, canonically, and the universe just likes screwing with this particular would-be Red Mage.

That said, I enjoy this game and I actually enjoy it more, lately. I feel like I'm progressing faster, at the expense of not being able to really keep up fully on equipment. As fast as I bring in gil, I spend it, and I haven't had luck with crafting in kind of a while. I need to level alchemy so that I can make bullets. I initially started, long ago, to make bullets for Violet's gun Ranger character and continued long after her transition to White Mage. Never really moved over into crafts that were mage-friendly or produced large quantities of consumables, but it may be time to look in that direction.

*which mysteriously just stopped one day.