RANDOM THOUGHTS #24
Steve Cole muses: Just thinking to himself.
1. One thing I learned in six years as a construction engineer: you can get more done with A+ people and C+ equipment than you can with A+ equipment and C+ people.
2. At one point, the US more or less abandoned civil defense because Russian nuclear bombs were so big that the entire idea of surviving one was laughable. Now, with Islamic terrorists eventually going to get a "small" nuclear bomb, we need to look back into the idea of fallout shelters, evacuation plans, and survival situations.
3. According to Groucho Marx, only one man in a thousand is a leader of men. The other 999 are following women.
4. The constitution is NOT a "living document" that adapts to the whims of whatever judge got appointed. It is an eternal document that reflects the wisdom of the founding fathers, and most of what the government does these days is not covered by the constitutional authority that states gave the Federal government.
5. Even during the two or three "balanced budget years" of the 90s, the debt went up. Why? Because the budget wasn't really balanced. The government basically sold bonds to the Social Security trust fund, and counted the resulting money not as debt issued but as revenue received.
6. Ok, we know that socialism has failed (gone into bankruptcy) every time it's tried, but people still want to keep trying it, keep hoping to get it right. What's going on? Because socialism is just a smokescreen to get the votes to give more power to the Federal government, that's why.
7. In the US military, the rank insignia for 2nd Lieutenant and 1st Lieutenant (Navy ensign and junior lieutenant) are the same, except that one is silver and the other is gold. This is the same for major and lieutenant colonel (Navy commander and lieutenant commander.) Why does the silver one outrank the gold one? Because it symbolizes that in the USA, the silver of the self-made man outweighs the gold of the upper class's inherited wealth.
8. I never cease to be amazed by people who think that ADB will stay in business and keep updating the game rulebooks if we stop producing new products, don't charge for the updates for the old products, and just spend all of our time updating the old products and giving away the updates for free. Where is the revenue stream that pays for rent, utilities, salaries, and so forth?
9. Recently, a player wanted us to add a certain group of ships to the same (new types of freighters). We pointed out that they probably did exist in "reality" but that gamers would not want to pay for the pages, since they were (in the end) just targets consisting of more or less the same boxes as older freighters that had been rearranged. He suggested that (since that was the case) we should do the ships and then give them away for free, but could not understand that it would take some number of man-hours to create (and staff-hours to check) these ships and that if we were not going to get paid for doing them (either because we gave them away, or because nobody bought them) we would be working for no pay.
10. We get the presents. The cats get the empty boxes, the wadded-up wrapping paper, and the loose ribbon, and they think they won.
1. One thing I learned in six years as a construction engineer: you can get more done with A+ people and C+ equipment than you can with A+ equipment and C+ people.
2. At one point, the US more or less abandoned civil defense because Russian nuclear bombs were so big that the entire idea of surviving one was laughable. Now, with Islamic terrorists eventually going to get a "small" nuclear bomb, we need to look back into the idea of fallout shelters, evacuation plans, and survival situations.
3. According to Groucho Marx, only one man in a thousand is a leader of men. The other 999 are following women.
4. The constitution is NOT a "living document" that adapts to the whims of whatever judge got appointed. It is an eternal document that reflects the wisdom of the founding fathers, and most of what the government does these days is not covered by the constitutional authority that states gave the Federal government.
5. Even during the two or three "balanced budget years" of the 90s, the debt went up. Why? Because the budget wasn't really balanced. The government basically sold bonds to the Social Security trust fund, and counted the resulting money not as debt issued but as revenue received.
6. Ok, we know that socialism has failed (gone into bankruptcy) every time it's tried, but people still want to keep trying it, keep hoping to get it right. What's going on? Because socialism is just a smokescreen to get the votes to give more power to the Federal government, that's why.
7. In the US military, the rank insignia for 2nd Lieutenant and 1st Lieutenant (Navy ensign and junior lieutenant) are the same, except that one is silver and the other is gold. This is the same for major and lieutenant colonel (Navy commander and lieutenant commander.) Why does the silver one outrank the gold one? Because it symbolizes that in the USA, the silver of the self-made man outweighs the gold of the upper class's inherited wealth.
8. I never cease to be amazed by people who think that ADB will stay in business and keep updating the game rulebooks if we stop producing new products, don't charge for the updates for the old products, and just spend all of our time updating the old products and giving away the updates for free. Where is the revenue stream that pays for rent, utilities, salaries, and so forth?
9. Recently, a player wanted us to add a certain group of ships to the same (new types of freighters). We pointed out that they probably did exist in "reality" but that gamers would not want to pay for the pages, since they were (in the end) just targets consisting of more or less the same boxes as older freighters that had been rearranged. He suggested that (since that was the case) we should do the ships and then give them away for free, but could not understand that it would take some number of man-hours to create (and staff-hours to check) these ships and that if we were not going to get paid for doing them (either because we gave them away, or because nobody bought them) we would be working for no pay.
10. We get the presents. The cats get the empty boxes, the wadded-up wrapping paper, and the loose ribbon, and they think they won.
posted by Federation Commander at 7:57 AM
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