Today, Chilrden, we're going to learn to Account to 3

This post is for Walter. It’s for all those times he wrote posts with medical stuff in them. I had come to him for funny, and he made me read big words. What follows is a brief explanation of a few rudimentary accounting principles (Accounting 101 and 102), a fairly brief explanation of exactly what Enron did that was so bad, and what I want to do with all this fancy ehdumucation. Fair warning, this is like 5 pages long; you may just want to stop reading now, in fact.

You all remember Enron, right? Buncha no good crooks. Jerks, they were. What did they do again? It’s funny, but a lot of people just know that they did something wrong and cost a bunch of people money. I’m going to try and offer a very small glimpse here into some of the shenanigans that Enron pulled that was so bad.

But first, I actually have to delve into some very basic accounting. Don’t worry, I won’t go any farther than Accounting 101, and maybe a little 102.

First thing, for those who don’t know, Accounting is the practice of record the financial state of a company. You have to record what a company has, what a company owes, and who owns it. This is done, at its very core, through one equation. A firm’s assets are equal to the sum of its liabilities and its equity. Assets are anything the firm owns, from cash to equipment to stocks of other companies. Liabilities are things the company owes other people. Equity is the portion of the company that is owned by somebody else (stocks and retained earnings, mostly). The stock accounts represent the investment in the company by people who paid money to own part of the firm. Retained Earnings is the additional capital that stockholders did not pay in the past, but have claim to. Whenever a firm has net income at the end of a period, that net income is closed to increase the Retained Earnings account. So, as a company profits, its retained earnings go up, and therefore the implied value of the stock goes up. Of course, if the transactions and occurrences aren’t properly accounted for, then the retained earnings account is incorrect. Using some truly BS accounting tricks, Enron managed to post income when there was none, thus overstating its Retained Earnings account, and therefore making it appear to investors that the company was rising in value when in fact it was rapidly going out of business.

So you have that basic equation: A = L + E

These various totals are altered whenever a transaction occurs. We record these transactions with “journal entries”. For example, suppose you own a coffee shop, and you sell $500 worth of coffee in a day.

Cash . . . 500

. . . . . Sales . . . 500

The Cash account is part of Assets. The Sales is part “revenue” which is part of “net income” which is closed to retained earnings at the end of the period. So in this case, an asset increases, and Equity increases. At the end of every business period (standard is one year, but there’s flexibility in different industries) you have to release a financial statements of all of your asset, liability, and equity accounts. Assets must equal liabilities plus equity.

In EVERY journal entry, the debits (the number on the left) must be equal to credits (the number on the right). Normally, assets have a debit balance (debits make them go up, credits make them go down) and liability and equity accounts have a credit balance (vice versa). Therefore, expenses are debits and revenues are credits. In the above example, we have a debit to cash (an asset is increasing) and a credit to sales (a revenue account). On our income statement, “net income” will be the total of all our gains, losses, revenues, and expenses. Hopefully, the credit balances (revenues and gains) will be higher than the debit balances (expenses and losses). This will result in a credit balance on our income statement, also referred to as net income. That credit balance will be transferred to Retained Earnings. If the expenses and losses outweigh the gains and revenues, then we have a debit balance, which is a net loss. This also gets carried to Retained Earnings, and reduces that account.

To clarify, expenses occur when we spend money to make money. Paying our employees, buying inventory, paying rent, etc. Likewise, revenues occur as we do business, such as selling coffee. Gains and losses occur when we make money through unusual means. If we get sued and have to pay a settlement, that’s considered a loss. If our company invests in some stocks and then sells them back for more than we paid, that’s a gain (note that it’s only a gain because we’re a coffee shop, not an investment dealer. If we bought and sold stocks professionally as part of our business plan, it would be income).

When a company records expenses, it is required to record those expenses in the period that the related benefit occurred. For example, the electricity bill for 2008 must be expensed in 2008, no matter when it gets paid. The usual way of dealing with this is that there is a debit entry for the expense, and if we didn’t pay it yet, there is a credit entry for something like Utilities Payable. This is called the Recognition Principle, and it is required. In this example, the debits match the credits, and the increase in liabilities (Utilities Payable) is offset by the decrease in Owner’s Equity (the expense will reduce net income, which will reduce Retained Earnings, which is an equity account) so that the A = L + E equation is satisfied. The liability is increased just as the Equity is decreased.

This Recognition principle comes into play in a lot of ways, but the example I’ll focus on now is Fixed Assets, particularly equipment. Suppose our coffee shop buys a big industrial natural gas roaster. You do not get to record an expense for the cost of that roaster, because you haven’t earned the revenue yet. The roaster is going to be used for years, after all. So, that expense has to be spaced out over all of those years. You will first record a credit to cash or Accounts payable (depending on whether you bought it for cash or on credit) and you will record a debit to Equipment – Roaster. Equipment is an asset, so the A in the accounting equation is increased. This is offset either by a decrease in another asset (cash) or an increase in liabilities (A/P). If you bought in on credit, then when you pay the bill later (probably periodically) then you will credit cash and debit A/P (debit reduced A/P, since it’s a liability account, and credit reduces cash, since it’s an asset). You still don’t get to record the expense.

Now, you must record that expense over the life of the roaster. There are numerous ways to do it, and they can be very complicated in their own right, but let’s assume we use the really simple “straight line” method. Let’s assume we determine that our roaster will have a “useful life” of 5 years. Well then, each year, we record 1/5 of the cost of the roaster as an expense. However, the Equipment account must always show the roaster at its historic cost, until we sell or scrap it. Even though the asset has, presumably, decreased in value (depreciation), we must record it at its historic cost. So what we will do is create an account called Accumulated Depreciation – Roaster. We will credit this account and debit Depreciation Expense. Accumulated Depreciation is called a contra-asset account. It is an account that exists to offset the asset it is linked to (the roaster). Increases to a contra asset account are credits, and factoring a credit into our total assets will decrease the balance.

Now, let’s assume we sell that roaster to the coffee shop across the street. When we do that, we will debit our cash account (or accounts receivable, which is also an asset) for the selling price, and we will credit the equipment account for the original price of the equipment. We will also debit the Accumulated Depreciation – Roaster account. Now the balance in all of these accounts is zero, but the journal entry does not have equal debits and credits. The difference between debits and credits is going to be balanced by either a gain or a loss. The entry would look like this:

Cash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80,000
Accumulated Depreciation . . . 40,000
. . . . . Equipment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100,000
. . . . . Gain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20,000

So we have a $20,000 gain. Yay. Note that while it is ultimately closed to our Net Income, this gain is NOT income. Income must be part of our normal operations. It has to be called a gain, because it is irregular. We don’t sell roasters for a living, we sell coffee. When potential investors see our income statements, they will see that this 20,000 was an irregular activity; if it was called income, then an investor might reasonably expect such a gain to be recurring.

However, it does let us show on our income statement a nice 20,000 gain. But what if we OWN the coffee shop down the street? Did we really make any money? We sold the roaster to ourselves!

If you own enough of a company to exert significant influence over its financial decisions, there are rules about how you disclose intercompany transactions. Otherwise, if a company didn’t want to publish a net loss for the period, they could start a company, grant that company a line of credit and sell it a bunch of inventory. This would result in a debit to Accounts Payable and a credit to revenues, but the asset you’re recording (accounts payable) would be fake because the company you own isn’t going to pay it, and the revenues would therefore be fake as well, because you recorded those revenues to reflect an increase in assets.

This is what Enron did, but there was one very important difference: I have done everything I could in the above example to make it as simple as possible; Enron did everything they could to make it as complicated as possible. They wouldn’t just sell their products to a company they owned. In fact, they couldn’t because publicly traded companies are required to release special consolidated financial statements where they go back and reverse all the entries related to that sale, retroactively apply new depreciation entries, and a LOT more (to give you some reference, my Advanced Accounting Theory professor has spent almost a month on how to do consolidation entries for equipment sales alone).

So Enron started a company, which started a company which started a company. This continued about twenty times, until they only needed about $20,000 of non-company capital to start a company that Enron could sell things to and record income (in Enron’s case, it wasn’t selling equipment, but financial products). That $20,000 couldn’t come from any company employee or from the family thereof. No spouses, and the law is touchy about girlfriends that have been living with you for X amount of time. But gay marriage was illegal even in the very liberal state of New York, and so the gay lover of one of the company’s higher-ups (he couldn’t be considered family in any sense of the word, since the law abjectly denies the possibility of these two being family) ponied up that cash. Now, it turns out this was all still very, very illegal, but nobody could follow that money trail and prove it. This is how it went on for years with nobody catching on. Enron had to fall apart and all its investors had to lose every dime before anybody stepped in, and even in retrospect trying to follow the actual series of transactions that they used to put it all together is more complicated than trying to solve a Rubics cube with your feet.

Now, in response to the collapse Enron and WorldCom, a lovely little bill called Sarbanes-Oxley got passed. SOX did a couple of neat things, but perhaps the most useful was this: the management of a publicly traded company now must review the financial statements of the firm, and sign a statement saying that they have read and understood them. See, before this, any CEO could just shrug his shoulders and say “I’m a businessman, I never studied accounting. I had no idea this stuff was going on.” Up until this point, it was only required that every year, publicly traded companies hire professional auditors from outside the firm to review the financial statements and issue an opinion as to whether or not the financial statements are accurate and in accordance with all the rules. Now, those auditors have more responsibilities, and more authority. They are now also required to perform an audit of the internal controls a company uses to make sure that any fraud and errors that would materially impact the financial statements are either prevented or detected. Basically, auditors have a bigger job, and more authority. They’re anal. They’re picky. They work 70 hour weeks and they’re perpetually cranky. They don’t work for your company, and it’s not their job to make sure you company succeeds financially. Their only job is to decide whether or not you fucked up when you made all those complicated journal entries. And let me assure you, you fucked up. You always fucked up. Perfect financial statements are like perfect governments- they simply don’t happen, no matter how hard everyone works, how smart anyone is, or how much you all tried your very very best to do a good job. The only question is how many mistakes the auditors find, whether they’re big enough to be a real problem and whether you can correct them before the auditors issue their opinion. If you can’t get a passing grade from the auditor, banks won’t let you borrow their money. Investors won’t buy your stocks. Other companies make fun of you and throw rocks.

So yeah, I plan to become an auditor.

Sham-OW!!!!

The potential awesomeness and suckitude of the new OnLive console is summed up rather well by Tim Buckely of CtrlAltDel, and anything I can say on the subject would be redundant. My only comment is this: I TOTALLY had this idea ten years ago!

I signed up to be on the Beta tester list, so if I get picked, I may actually have a review for it this summer. I see great potential, but until I see it overcome its inevitable hurdles (lag, cultural resistance, server availability), it will remain just that, potential. All the same, I applaud Mr. Perlman and all the folks over there for, if nothing else, innovating and coming up with a new way to bring the industry to people. I wish them the best of luck in finding a new and creative way for me to nurse my addiction.

In other news, I'm back from St Louis, and trapped once again in dreary, rainy, bibley Kansas. I've got two days to myself before I go back to school, at which point I have a marketing test and a project due in my Auditing class. Next weekend I'll be away in Omaha for the BAP regionals. When I return, I will have tests in every class that isn't testing me this week.

Also, my computer died last night. I wasn't even touching it at the time, I was looking at the TV when the box just powered off. When I powered it back up, I couldn't get it off the loading screen. So I did what most people in this situation would do: I panicked, and tried random solutions hoping something would work. turns out the random solution that ultimately "worked" was three full system restores, so now my hard drive is completely wiped. I've lost all my school documents, 8 gigs or so of music, and my novel. I don't even own Microsoft Office anymore- I have a trial version of Office 2003, and that's it. So yeah, that sucks.

But speaking of things that aren't depressing at all, has everyone seen this? Turns out that Vince Shlomi, a.k.a. TV's the ShamWOW guy, got in a fight with a hooker. There are mug shots. It looks like the hooker won.

On perhaps an abrupt closing note, I recently realized that I can legitimately sign any of my blog posts as follows:

this has been...

-BS

Capitalism, isn't it grand?

Some of you may notice a little Gamefly logo over there to the right.  Yeah, that's right, now that a couple of people read my blog, I've let the power go to my head and I'm going all "commercial."

Don't worry, I plan to get drunk, wake up face down in the gutter, have an epiphany, and start getting back to my roots soon.

But no, it's like this.  Anybody ever wants to try that, do it through my blog and I get $20.  Adam is doing it already, so I figured "why not?"  For what it's worth, I've had them since December and they're actually a pretty decent product, if you play a lot of video games.  Apparently you have the choice here to try it for free or start paying $8.95 now.  Tough decision, but if I was gonna pick one or the other, I think I'd go with free.  Just a reccomendation.

And the opening about being all commercial and video games segways us nicely into another video game review.  Resident Evil 5.

Now, since I'm still playing it, this is more of a "first look" than a full-on review, but so far it gets a rating of at least 3.5 MegaFonzies.  The graphics are top-notch, and the bumpmapping on the zombies makes them look darn realistic.  The zombies from RE5 actually have limited brain functionality, allowing them to do things like speak, fire a crossbow and have emotions.  So far, the only emotion I've seen is a sort of gutteral hatred for me, but they evince that quite well.  There are also a lot of them.  The numbers you deal with are never quite along the lines of Left 4 Dead, but you also don't have the kind of mobility that you had in that game either.  Resident Evil has never been a run and gun type of game.  To shoot a zombie, you actually have to stop running, plant your feet, and take aim.  And there are no piles of infinite ammo lying around.  You will need to pick your shots very carefully, and I reccomend getting used to the machete early in the game, because proper application of a big sharp stick can save a lot of bullets.

Also, the game is apparently racist, because almost all the zombies are black.  Now, this was news to me.  I thought that the zombies were all black because the game takes place in Africa, where the zombie myth is supposed to have originated with voodoo witch doctors.  But nope, apparently the game's setting has nothing to do with it, the zombie are all black because Capcom just really hates black people.

To discourage this line of thinking, the game has introduced a black partner by the name of Sheva Alomar (fun fact:  the model and voice actress for the game is actually a mix of Jamaican, American, East Indian, and Irish blood named Karen Dyer.  She performs professional burlesque under the name Eva La Dare).  This actually worked out pretty well, believe it or not.  The game is no fully co-oppable, and in fact it's a lot more fun with a friend.  You can play it over Xbox Live or you can split-screen it with a pal.  If you're doing the latter, however, you had better have a big television.

The gameplay is good, but it takes some getting used to because of how much it fundamentally differs from the traditional run/gun style of a First Person Shooter.  The story is shaping up to be the typical hole-ridden Capcom fun-fest.  To give you a taste, let me just borrow a single sentence from one of the multiple 30-page exposition files you have the option of reading before playing.  "In today's world, medicine has become a part of almost all medical procedures."

If you like to run around item hunting, piles of gold and priceless gems are to be found in barrels, crates, and under stacks of tomatoes, which makes you wonder why the nation is so poor; the whole country is practically overflowing with barely-concealed riches.  An abundance of shiny objects notwithstanding, Africa looks very much like Africa.  They went to great lengths to get the atmosphere right, and it pays off.  The poverty-stricken cities look run-down, dirty and barely alive.  And that's before the zombies show up.

So in conclusion, I'm a corporate whore, RE 5 is a buy-worthy game, and I can't come up with a better closing joke.

Theo made me write this post

Now, I’m a Marvel man.  I mean, it’s just not a real debatable topic, in my mind.  DC has a couple of the most recognized names in comics, but then fact of the matter is that Batman and Superman are the only big league heavy hitters in DC’s pop culture arsenal.  Marvel has Wolverine, the X-Man, Captain America, Hulk, Spiderman, Iron Man, and the list goes on from there.

 

Now, I want that cleared up, because despite my firm position on the side of Marvel, this post is all about Lex Luthor.  See, I got drunk and went on a rant about him a couple nights ago, and Adam and Theo wrested from me a drunken oath to transpose that rant for all to see.  I tried to explain to them that all the points of this drivel were blatantly obvious and that it contained no special insight, but they insisted.  So, here we go.

 

Luthor was the superhero, not Superman.  Sure, Superman fought the bad guys, saved the damsels, and got all the love and respect.  And yes, he was the one spouting rhetoric of fighting for truth, justice, the American Way, and all that happy crappy.  And perhaps most damning of all, he was the one with the youthful good looks and the lush head of hair.

 

But Superman was the alien.  He was the interloper.  And what happened when he came to our world?  We became complacent.  Why would anyone bother even trying to be the best at anything anymore, when you know that you’ll never be as fast or as strong as Superman.  He could even think faster than anyone on the planet (I believe they called this superpower “high-speed calculations”).  And people became complacent, such to the point that the Guardians of the Universe actually had to pull him aside and tell him to tone it down.  Those guys never step in.

 

And then here was Luthor, the one man on Earth that dared to challenge this God who had descended from heaven to keep everyone in line.  One man that dared to say “you know what, I think I can take him.”  And what does he get?  We label him “villain.”

 

To really understand this, you have to understand where Luthor’s coming from.  This guy was born in a slum.  He was abused as a child, and his parents didn’t care about him at all.  From day one, Lex had nothing.  Now, some people in that situation just give up.  Some resort to selling their bodies on the streets so they can afford a new Linkin Park CD to lock themselves in their rooms with every day.  What does Luthor do?  He takes out a life insurance policy on his abusive parents and sabotages their breaks.  Boom, he’s got money to pay for MIT.  Since his parents weren’t going to help him grow up willingly, he found a way to use their existence to his benefit anyway.

 

He graduates from MIT (just like Gordon Freeman!) and founds Lexcorp, and he works their night and day.  His one goal is to reach the pinnacle of what a human being can aspire to.  He was never, ever satisfied.  He never, ever felt that he had “accomplished enough for one lifetime.”  Luthor devoted himself to his goal in a way almost no human being ever can.  He doesn’t take vacations, he doesn’t take weekends.  If he eats, sleeps, exercises, or relaxes, he is only doing so because it will make his body and mind function better and therefore allows him to be more productive during every other hour of the day.  He pours a superhuman amount of effort into making himself an accomplished man, and everything he accomplishes he works for and earns.  He never had a single thing handed to him, and more than a few things that most people take for granted are thinks that he had to fight for.  To get his parents to pay for his college education, he literally had to kill them.  He never hesitated to step on toes or slit throats to get his way.  After all, it’s a dog eat dog world- the person who has the strength to take something gets it.  If somebody else wasn’t strong or smart enough to outmaneuver Lex, then he deserves what he can take from them.  It’s not like people weren’t constantly trying to do the same to him.  He won out because he was smarter, faster, and more dedicated to his own personal victory than anyone who ever tried to stop him or got in his way.  Despite his amoral disposition, Lex Luthor is a shining example of the dominating power of the human spirit.

 

And all this hard work ultimately starts paying off.  His multinational empire is one of the largest in the world.  He turns the beat up city he grew up in into a sprawling Metropolis, where more than half of the citizens work for him, “whether they know it or not.”  It gets to the point that even when multiple super heroes know that he’s breaking the law, they hold their tongues because for Luthor to go to jail would mean his company would fail, which could literally cause a financial meltdown that would certainly destroy Metropolis and probably leave painful echoes throughout the US economy.  And whether you agree with his methods or not, he earned every bit of what he has.  Lex Luthor has worked harder for every dollar he’s earned than most Americans do in a lifetime.

 

And then here comes this Superman asshole.  Superman decides to oppose Lex Luthor not because Lex has attacked him, and not because Superman wants anything Lex has.  He simply judges Lex Luthor to be the sort of person that doesn’t deserve his freedom.  That’s it.  Superman, as if he was god himself, has hovered above Luthor’s great empire and simply proclaimed it to be unclean.  And what’s more, Superman has all this power, all this fame and respect.  And he didn’t have to do a damn thing to get any of it.  Luthor’s power and fame were the result of his blood, sweat, and tears.  A lifetime of dedication towards a single, ostensibly unattainable goal.  And now this child, appears from out of nowhere, and has simply been imbued with the power to challenge Luthor.  Luthor now faces the prospect of everything he’s worked for burning to the ground; and beyond the threat of losing everything, he doesn’t even get the satisfaction of losing it all to a legitimate rival.  What right does Superman have to undo this man’s entire life?  What has Superman sacrificed to earn his authority?  What is wrong with the world Luthor could dedicate his entire life to his work, and then see it all undone by someone who was simply handed his power with no strings attached?

 

Superman was born to parents that loved him.  To a father who worked tirelessly and suffered ridicule from his fellow scientists to provide his child with a way off his dying world.  Then, when those two loving parents were taken from him, the world quickly replaced them with another set of equally doting parents in the form of the Kents.  After enjoying a laid-back, idyllic small-town childhood, Superman comes of age and finds out that he’s the fastest, strongest man on the planet, and he’s freaking bulletproof.

 

And even then, when he finds himself standing toe to invincible toe with God himself, and is told to yield, Lex Luthor dares to tell God “no.”  Over my dead body will you take what I’ve worked for.  You weren’t there to save my ass when Dad was beating the shit out of me every night.  You didn’t cough up any of the money to get me through MIT.  But now that I’ve found my own way to rise above all those challenges, now you want to send me back down there?  Now you want to judge me?  Now you’re going to tell me that all that hard work and sacrifice meant nothing?  Now you want me to just… give it all back.  No.  Fuck you.  Eat some kryptonite, bitch.

 

He’s evil, he’s arrogant, and he’ll cut your throat if it suits him, but he knows more about fighting for every inch than anybody else he’s ever met.  He’s risen up through challenges that would crush most people.  And when all that is threatened by a power so great he cannot even comprehend it, he is a man who dares to defy even God.

FREE POT!! (as in liberation)

So what with my aspirations of becoming a successful CPA, I decided it was time for me to work harder at educating myself in financial matters. School’s great and all, but if I insist on knowledge being thrust upon me in a classroom, I’ll only go so far. I’ve come to realize that one must actively seek out knowledge every day, at every opportunity, to avoid slipping into ignorance and obsolescence of thought.

So, I’ve started reading the Journal of Accountancy and other “smart-guy” periodicals while I’m on the toilet. I figure that ought to do the trick.

I bring this up because of an article I read recently, which suggested a bold new approach to the war on drugs: stop it. Just legalize everything.

Now, every few years, a few people somewhere try to suggest the legalization of marijuana. California almost brought it to a popular vote at the election last November. And now, even mainstream political figures in California are beginning to talk seriously about the notion of legalizing marijuana and selling it like liquor or nicotine. And now, the cover of the March issue of The Economist is suggesting we just stop making drugs illegal.

Now, I like to think I’ve done more research than most about marijuana. I know, for example, that approximately four to seven percent of users (variations attributable depending largely on age and gender) will meet the clinical qualifications for a substance dependency after a few months of regular use. If they try to quit, the symptoms include cravings, mild irritability, headaches, and in some cases shakes; it’s about on par with coffee in this regard. Marijuana does kill brain cells, just as does drinking and many other daily activities. It will cause short-term memory impairment, but a few weeks of discontinued use will see most of this impairment disappear. In terms of physical damage to the body, the most significant issue arises from the fact that it is smoked- this damages the lungs more severely than cigarettes, and can cause a lot of the same types of cancer and circulatory damage. Inconclusive reports have suggested a possibility that it can cause kidney damage, but other than that, no long-term physical damages have been blamed on marijuana abuse; this statement should be taken with a grain of salt, however, because it is a black market substance and therefore proper long-term study is woefully insufficient. Basically, although it probably won’t kill you and won’t necessarily ruin your life, the stuff’s not good for you. When you hear people say that it’s really no worse than alcohol, well, that’s true, but it should be considered more of a comment on the dangers of alcohol than the safeness of marijuana.

However, there have been medical applications for it. As a painkiller, its side effects and addictive properties are often seen as less dangerous than morphine and other substitutes. Psychologists often prescribe it as an antidepressant, muscle relaxant, and mood stabilizer. It has been used with great success in some cases to counteract post-traumatic stress disorder, and considering that in the next few years we’re going to be bringing home a lot of war veterans, we are going to need some affordable treatments for that!). Also, in California alone, it is an estimated $1.4 billion dollar industry. Legalizing it is not terribly likely to decrease its revenues, which means that a marijuana industry will create huge amounts of jobs and tax revenues for a state facing record unemployment rates and cash shortages; it would also save a fortune in money and manhours that the DEA and other overburdened law enforcement agencies spend pursuing, arresting, holding, processing, defending, trying, judging, and imprisoning non-violent criminals. Also, through legalization, we would be taking that $1.4 billion out of the hands of drug cartels and back-alley dealers, and placing it in the hands of “legitimate” business men. The drugs that currently fund gangs, cartels, and terrorist organizations will now cease to aid those organizations and will, through taxes and regulation, begin to finance state institutions like schools, hospitals. Although this may be a blindingly optimistic speculation on how our government would spend this money, I am willing to bet that even a Republican president would spend it in a way that got fewer people killed per than the gangs and the cartels we’d be putting out of business.

So what I’m saying is, I’m genuinely on the fence about whether I’d vote for legalization of not, if it was up to me. The thought of legalization everything, as the Economist suggests, is rather gut-wrenching. However, I have to admit they make a very good argument, and one so simply even I can understand it: the drug war is failing. There is no evidence to suggest that drug sale or use has decreased, and there is some to suggest that it has increased. It’s a boondoggle that swallows countless time and resources that could be better spent elsewhere, and it gets a lot of good men and women killed every year. Studies have shown no relation between the severity of anti-drug laws and the willingness of the population to violate them. Making drugs illegal is simply not working, and while making them legal is going to cost a lot, it is the “least bad” solution.

I haven’t quite come around to their way of thinking, but I really won’t be surprised if America legalizes everything before my death. It’s bizarre, really; I see a major progressive play being made in the future by the liberals in our country, and I find myself disagreeing with it in spite of all the evidence that would support the decision. Furthermore, I find myself somewhat afraid of the fact that it will probably happen with or without my approval. I think… I think this is what it must have felt like to have been a Republican during the last election. I don’t think I like it- no wonder they’re all so grumpy all the time!

Jokes aside, though, what does everyone think? Has prohibition failed? Is it time to pack it in, and just make sure that we're making the money instead of the criminals? Or should we stick to our guns, even though in all likelihood we're more likely to shoot ourselves in the foot than whoever it is we're supposed to be shooting at?

ps:  bonus points if you can remember who I stole the title joke from.

The Saga Begins

So everybody in the whole wide world (all three of them) have been telling me that I should start a blog. I've always avoided the whole "blog" scene because, frankly, it always sounded so blasé`. But I've got a lot of work to avoid doing today, so I've finally decided to give it the benefit of the doubt, and assume that phonetic similarities aside, maybe it won't suck.

After about 8 failed attempts at correctly typing out my email, password, and that crazy word art thing they do to prove I'm not a robot (which seems very unfair to robots) I finally got to step 2 of the process, at which point I learned that some girl out in Texas had already taken the URL that I slaved for three whole minutes to come up with. What's more, this proactive idea thief perpetrated her preemptive plagiarism more than a year ago, and in that time has not made a single post.

OK, so I got through all that, and now here I am. Boo-yah. Time to do me some blogging.

If you’re reading this, I think it’s a given that you already know me, so I won’t bother introducing myself. Instead, I think I’m going to kick things off with something that will, in all likelihood, become a regular purpose on this forum. A video game review. Video games are something I’ve always enjoyed, so it’s easy to write about. So for you’re reading pleasure, I’m going to discuss a recent fascination of mine, Tom Clancy’s HAWX.

HAWX stands for High Altitude Warfare eXperimental Squadron. My best guess at the reason for that is that Tom Clancy does drugs, or at least was very drunk when he named decided on the name for this project. Now Ace Combat notwithstanding, flight sims are one genre of game that never seem to get a lot of love. How realizing the fantasy of blowing things up with a $5 million dollar flying car could be anything but lucrative evades me, airplane games just seem to rarely sell well, and the only really popular one out there has been Ace Combat, so I’ll be largely comparing it to that.

The storyline is your typical Tom Clancy near-futuristic cloak and dagger military conspiracy extrrrrrrrrrravaganza, in which your squadron, the titular HAWX, are disbanded within the first 10 minutes of the game, and so you flip Uncle Sam the finger, quit, and go work for a new security firm that’s only just opened its doors. Naturally, this prodigious startup company can pay you three times what you were getting when working for the wealthiest nation on earth, and your country does not seem to voice any objection to its best pilots quitting to join somebody else’s army. The end result of all this exposition is that you, Nameless Pilot, get to fly big metal willy-extinctions all over the globe, and blow the crap out their inhabitants. Good times are had by all, and don’t worry about the inherent horror of all that mass murder- it turns out that blowing up the world is the only way to save it.  

One particularly cool feature of this game is that all of its maps are constructed directly from real-life satellite images, so when you fly through Tokyo, LA, Chicago, Afghanistan, or any of the other game’s 20 exotic locales, you are blowing shit up in a photorealistic, 100% accurate picture of the real thing; every rock, building, mountain, tree, bridge, street, etc are exactly where they are meant to be. It’s pretty cool, really. Also, you get to choose from 50 real-life planes to fly.

Now for the feature that gets its very own paragraph. See, your planes all come outfitted with a safety lock that prevents you from turning or breaking too hard and stalling your plane. This makes it literally impossible to stall, but it also limits your movements somewhat. That’s fine, because you can still turn much faster than anybody traveling at Mach 2 has any business turning, but if it’s not enough, you can turn those safeties off. Mr. Clancy’s amazing aptitude for appellation rears its head again, as he has brilliantly dubbed this mechanic: “OFF mode.” If you engage OFF mode, in addition to being instantly fortified with deet and mosquito free, your camera cleverly shifts to about three or four miles outside of your cockpit, at an angle scientifically designed to leave you with no clue which direction your plane is pointing. At first, OFF mode feels like you’re driving a retorted circus bear wearing rocket skates. Your moves are ridiculously fast and could most definitely be called a spectacle, but you don’t really have a lot of control over where you’re going and you’re probably going to die. Once you get the hang of it, it feels… well, I can only describe it as if you’re riding a retarded circus bear wearing rocket skates, but you’ve somehow gotten good at doing so. It looks amazing, and if you can get used to it you’ll be able to pull a 180 turn in midair on a dime to line up a missile lock with the enemy plane that 2 seconds ago was right on your tail.

It’s amazing how well-done all of these things are, which makes it all the more sad when you realize that the game gave you all these awesome planes to fly and cities to fly them in, but they forgot to include a lot of stuff for you to actually do. For all the things that happen in the game’s story, you’ll find that the whole thing ends abruptly after a very short amount of time playing it. I finished it off in three short evenings, but if I was really bored I could have probably done it in a day. And after that, it’s over, and there’s not much joy to be had in replay. At this point, if you’re a fan of online gaming, it’s the multiplayer mode to the rescue with a really fun deathmatch mode. For the first time in the history of ever, I actually forked over the $40 for a year’s subscription to Xbox Live, if only so I could play this game online. Otherwise, I can only recommend it for a rental.