LUV, US Elections, Gaming, Socialising

[tcpip]

Last Tuesday night convened the monthly LUV meeting. A good turnout, and two excellent speakers which have spurred my hitherto laziness on the need to learn and use HTML5 more extensively. Have also made initial preparations for LinuxConf AU 2013 and, across The Ditch, Multicore World 2013.

This Sunday Dean Edwards, Vice-Chair of Democrats Abroad (Au) will be speaking at the Kooying ALP FEA on the US Presidential elections. Expected a good turnout and interest. Have followed the polling closely at RealClear Politics and FiveThirtyEight, both of which suggest an Obama victory.

Pendragon game last night introduced the mythic story of The Fisher King. Earlier this week my review of jiawen's Blade and Crown was published on rpg.net. Last Sunday Redmond finished a session of Dark Hesresy. Still working away way to complete the next issue of RPG Review with last minute articles coming in; hopefully will complete by early next week.

Last Saturday evening caseopaya and I enjoyed the company of Brendan E., where we enjoyed dinner, drinks, and several episodes of Archer. Also very much enjoying the Friday evening gatherings organised by Keith P., a multicultural mix primarily of local students with themed discussions which help both cultural communication and understanding (not to mention English skills). Tomorrow afternoon will have other visitors (work and ex-work) colleagues and their partners to tour the Willsmere estate.

Comments

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

I'd draw a distinction between stimulus and the bank bail-outs. You'll notice that the Irish did bank bail-outs too and those have not exactly been stimulating the economy...

The GM bailout worked pretty well though, so naturally while Romney was against it at the time (very much on the record) now he's trying to claim it as his own.

Another problem with tax-cuts as stimulus is that they're hard to wind back. When you don't extend them you get accused of raising taxes, so it's very difficult for a politician who wants to be re-elected. They wind up being built in to the system over the longer term -- so they're ineffective and contribute to a structural deficit.

Infrastructure as stimulus is tricky too though. The big-ticket stuff takes quite a long time to get to the point where you're actually employing lots of people and buying materials, so unless you just happened to have something big where all the preliminary work was already done, it's... useful, but not immediately so. So you need to do the school halls and the roof insulation too.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Yes, that distinction between stimulus and bail-outs is very accurate. I have written a couple of pieces myself on the GFC in general and the situation in Ireland in particular.

Likewise your remarks on infrastructure. That has to be carefully considered and part of overall planning developments. After all, if one doesn't take such a point of view the pyramids of Egypt could count as an infrastructure project!

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

Well, if you can start building your pyramids right away then they do count as stimulus. Keynes was being a bit facetious about burying money then letting people dig it up, but there's a core of truth to it.

Just not as infrastructure!