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Salon has a wonderful article about a 30something geek returning to D&D after a two decade hiatus.

I started playing D&D in 1979 and it's been nearly continuous for me since then. I say "nearly" because I had my lonely years in the wilderness without RPGs, too. From roughly 1997 (when I started law school) until 2004, I played few RPGs - a campaign one summer while I was out of school, a pick-up game here and there.

It's good to be an Original D&D gangster.

The question of how a minarchist or libertarian government ought to tax its citizens is often raised. These questions come from two sides; on the one hand, anarcho-capitalists who want to show that minarchist states ultimately rest on coercive taxation; on the other hand, social democrats who want to show that libertarian government cannot be adequately funded.

I believe that the challenges of libertarian taxation can be addressed by returning to the minarchist notions of what services government ought provide, and tying them to forms of taxation.

1. Contract taxation
The first role of the libertarian state is to uphold voluntary contracts. This necessitates a functional judicial system including an enforcement arm. In order to provide a source of government revenue for this purpose, citizens could be charged a percentage on the value of any contracts entered into in exchange for the right to have the government enforce the contract at law.

For sales contracts such as retail transactions, the contract tax would equate to a sales tax. But the tax could be applied to other contracts as well, such as a public relations contract between a company and an agency, or an employment contract between an employer and an employee. The tax could be paid by either party to the transaction, or shared between the two, at their preference (or as mandated by law).

Assume the tax is set at 10%. A purchase of $100 of groceries at Wal-Mart would then have a $10 tax. An employment contract for $100,000 per year would have a $10,000 contract tax.

Voluntary Nature: However, the contract tax would be voluntary. Contracting parties who felt secure in a handshake agreement would not have to pay the tax. For instance, if I agreed to mow your lawn in exchange for your collection of old books, and we simply wanted to make this a gentlemen's agreement, we needn't register it and pay the tax on it. But if the agreement went into default, neither of us would be entitled to the benefit of the court system for its enforcement. Of course, the vast majority of retail transactions with reputable businesses and business-to-business transactions would seek the assurance of legal enforcement, and fund the government with their taxation. But because it is voluntary, the system would not create a black market or impose an undue hardship on barter transactions, small claims, and so on.

Not Regressive: The contract tax can be made non-regressive by giving each individual a personal deduction against contract tax paid during the year. For instance, each citizen might have a $5,000 personal deduction, with the ability to file for a refund against contract tax paid.

2. Property Taxation
The second principal role of the minarchist state is to protect life and property from crimes and torts. This leads us to the idea of an annual property tax based on the total value of all property held by the citizen. Among property held should be the citizen's life, which can be assigned a dollar value. (For instance, the US Department of Transportation values each human life at $3,000,000.) For the system to be fair, the value of a human life must be assigned a relatively high number, with a relatively low tax rate.

For instance, consider the idea that each citizen must pay a 0.1% annual property tax based on property held, with a value for their life set at $3,000,000, or $3,000. Citizens within a broad range of middle class wealth (with a net worth fewer than one million dollars) will be paying within approximately the same range. The very affluent multimillionaires will pay more, but the marginal cost of gaining wealth will never be so large as to discourage capital accumulation. As those with more property have more at stake and risk losing more, it is equitable that they be asked to pay more.

Like the contract tax, the property tax can be voluntary. An individual who opts not to pay property tax would find his person and property outside the protection of the laws, what in the Middle Ages was literally called an "outlaw". If beaten or robbed, he has no recourse to government, having opted out of the protection of its laws.

The property tax would apply towards property held by Americans offshore and expatriates leaving abroad, if they wish to avail themselves of the protections of American law. Paying the property tax might also be required to be eligible to take advantage of the contract tax, as every contract would involve an issue of property or self.

Would it Work?
Assume a government budget of $2 Trillion dollars annually. While less than our current exorbitant budget, this is roughly on par with the start of the Bush Years, and certainly more than a minarchist state would need.

In a nation of 400 million, the US has 115 million households and 138 million taxpayers. The average household spends $3,409 per month, making monthly household consumer spending $392, 035, 000, 000 or $392 trillion or $4.7 trillion annually. The US GDP is $14.7 trillion. Let's assume that *all* consumer spending is exempted from the contract tax, i.e. only businesses opt in. This leaves $10 trillion.

A flat 20% contract tax would generate $2 trillion annually. If the tax rate is set at 15%, $1.5T is collected, leaving $0.5T to be collected from property taxes. If we assume that only current taxpayers pay taxes, this would mean a property tax burden of $3,623 per tax payer.

This simple math suggests that this approach is more than capable of sustaining government.

I recently read some very interesting books, specifically The Narcissism Epidemic and The Shallows.

The Narcissism Epidemic traces the skyrocketing rise of narcissism in US culture. While I won't detail them here, the statistics in the book are carefully detailed, well thought out, and supported by double blind studies. Among the more interesting sections of the book was showing the correlation between Web 2.0 (MySpace, Twitter, etc) and narcissism. Even more interesting were the new studies that show that narcissists actually have high self-esteem. The prevailing opinion (based on Freud) had been that narcissists had low self-esteem and that narcissism was a reaction to the underlying feelings of inferiority. Using implicit response tests, clinical studies are instead showing that narcissists have very high self-esteem combined with low empathy. Narcissists are selfish and mean to others not because they feel bad about themselves but because they genuinely think others are sheep and they are lions. So rather than combat narcissism, self-esteem therapy actually makes it worse. Other studies shared in the book find that having high self-esteem does not cause increased performance or success – instead it’s the other way around; successful people develop self-esteem. Self-esteem itself cannot cause success, and in fact causes the opposite – when students in double blind tests have their self-esteem improved with all other things controlled, their academic performance plummets. Meanwhile, Asian teens report the lowest self-esteem of any in their age group, while showing the highest overall success in academics and careers. So the overall theme of the book is that we are pursuing the wrong psychological goal (self-esteem) and that it actually leads to a highly destructive personality (narcissism), and that our technology (Web 2.0) is just making it worse.

The Shallows, meanwhile, discusses the impact of the Internet on how we think and learn. It begins with an exhaustive survey of the recent work in brain plasticity. Interestingly it also refers back to Freud, although in this case Freud got it right -- he claimed that the brain was plastic, but 150 years of neurologists after him claimed the adult human brain was fixed. Recent work using the latest in imaging tools has been able to demonstrate this is entirely false. Adult human brains are not just malleable, they are highly plastic, constantly changing. One of the biggest causes of brain change is what the book calls "intellectual technology," i.e. technology that interacts with how we think. The book argues that the Internet is an exceptionally problematic intellectual technology because it demands more of our working memory and less of our long-term memory. As explained in the book, our working memory is largely fixed in size, while our long-term memory grows the more we demand of it. Having our working memory eaten up by distractions of the net slows down our processing time, while our long-term memory stays empty. One might ask, why does that matter? The internet offers a better long-term memory than any of us will ever have! However, it turns out that long-term memory is integral to how the brain forms "schemas", what might be called the wisdom of experience that is used to solve problems, and that long-term memory is highly dynamic - each time the memory is called up, it is subtly altered in relation to its correlation with all other long-term memories. The more we "outsource" our long-term memory to computers, the fewer schemas we can develop in our minds, and the fewer correlations our thoughts have with each other. The notion that outsourcing our long-term memory needs to Wikipedia frees up cognitive space for deep thought is thus totally wrong; instead we become shallow thinkers capable of spouting facts we've just read, but not able to cross-reference these thoughts and form our own deeply held understanding.

It's hard to have an optimistic view of the world after reading the two books, and even harder to have an optimistic view of the Internet. It certainly changes my sense of what it means to be "engaged" with Web 2.0.

One of my favorite blogs, Classical Values, has an insightful blog post called "The Old Order is Breaking Down." Their summary for America is the following:

1. The lower education/union bubble
2. The higher education bubble
3. The real estate bubble
4. Not enough oil production
5. Drug Prohibition is being recognized as a failure
6. Insufficient food production to support the world system.
7. The Green bubble
8. Unsustainable Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.
9. The Democrat party

Read the whole thing here.

Here are my proposed rules for classic style Dungeons & Dragons using the 4th Edition rules:

1. All player character hit points are reduced by 50%.

2. All monster hit points are reduced by 75%.

3. An "elite" monster is a monster with a name. It has twice as many hit points as a standard monster. Within the context of the game world, this represents the luck and divine protection enjoyed by the monster. All player characters are the equivalent of "elite" monsters. "Solo" monsters are defined by their racial type, such as dragon. Solo monsters have twice the hit points of a standard monster. A creature which does not default to being a "solo" monster can never be a "solo" monster. An "elite solo" has four times the hit points of a standard monster.

4. A saving throw requires a roll of 15+ to succeed. For every 2 levels gained, characters add +1 to their saving throws.

5. Healing surges may only be used if the character has a power or item that permits the use of the healing surge. Once per Day, a character may use his Second Wind (Second Wind is effectively a daily power that all characters have). Characters regain their healing surges and daily powers after an extended rest, but do not regain any hit points from an extended rest.

For instance, Kindrok the Half-Giant Arena Fighter (Level 1) has 28 hit points in 4E. In 4E Classic, he has 14 hit points. His base attack, +8 vs. AC for 1d10+5 damage, does not change, nor does his AC 17. Once per day he can use a healing surge through Second Wind, rather than once per encounter. Note that a 1st level barbarian with 13 Con would have between 9 and 13 hit points at level 1 in older editions of D&D.

Assume Kindrok faces an Orc Raider (Level 3). The Orc Raider's 46 hit points are reduced down to 11 hit points. The Orc Raider's base attack is still +8 vs. AC for 1d12 +3, and its AC remains 17. Note that a 3HD humanoid would have about 12 to 14 hit points in older editions of D&D.

In standard 4E, Kindrok would hit 55% of the time, inflicting 10.5 damage per attack, so it would take 8 rounds to kill the Orc Raider. In 4E classic, Kindrok would take only 2 rounds to kill the Orc Raider. Conversely, during this time he would take an estimated 10.4 damage out of 14hp. In standard 4E, he would take 41.8hp out of 28. However, after the fight, in standard 4E, Kindrok could rest and recover all his hit points, whereas in 4E classic, Kindrok could recover just 3hp.

In other words, 4E Classic achieves the following results:
1. It greatly shortens fights
2. It decreases the "safety buffer" for characters against criticals and strong attacks, making each fight potentially more dangerous
3. It allows the PCs to face more numerous enemies, without the DM resorting to the use of Minions
4. It decreases the rate of healing, while increasing its rarity, making the decision to press on, or retreat, more strategic
5. It makes save-or-die effects more powerful against weak foes, and less powerful against strong foes, as they were in Classic D&D [but not, it should be noted, as in 3.5, where save-or-die effects actually got increasingly more powerful over time]
6. It overall fairly closely approximates Classic D&D combat.

The differences between Right and Left can seem arbitrary. What, exactly, is the correlation between, for instance, believing in the right to bear arms, and opposing affirmative action? In his book A Conflict of Visions, Thomas Sowell explains that the seemingly random alignment of issues actually reflects two different views of human nature. Steven Pinker, in The Blank Slate, cogently summarizes the conservative "Tragic Vision" and the liberal "Utopian Vision" as follows:

In the Tragic Vision, humans are inherently limited in knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, and all social arrangements must acknowledge those limits. "Mortal things suit mortals best," wrote Pindar; "from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made," wrote Kant. The Tragic Vision is associated with Hobbes, Burke, Smith, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, and the legal scholar Richard Posner.

In the Utopian Vision, psychological limitations are artifacts that come from our social arrangements, and we should not allow them to restrict our gaze from what is possible in a better world. Its creed might be "Some people see things as they are and ask 'why?'; I dream things that never were and ask, 'why not?'" The quote is often attributed to the icon of 1960s liberalism, Robert F. Kennedy, but it was originally penned by the Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw (who also wrote, "There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough"). ...

In the Tragic Vision, our moral sentiments, no matter how beneficent, overlie a deeper bedrock of selfishness. That selfishness is not the cruelty or aggression of the psychopath, but a concern for our well-being that is so much a part of our makeup that we seldom reflect on it and would waste our time lamenting it or trying to erase it.

From this fundamental difference in how humans are viewed arises the entire panoply of policy choices that separate liberals from conservatives. Conservatives are inherently distrustful of human nature, and so they seek to limit, check, and balance power. They believe that humans are self-interested, and therefore applaud systems like the free market that rely on self-interest to achieve a common good. They believe that humans are limited in their wisdom and rationality, so they avoid systems that rely on "philosopher kings", such as command economies. They see war as a fundamental part of human history, and prepare for it.

Liberals, believing in the possibility of human perfection, seek to put those in place who are most perfect. They believe that enlightened men and women can put aside self-interest to achieve the common good, and disdain as vulgar systems like the free market, favoring command economies built to promote the common good. They see war as a problem that can be fixed through enlightenment, and seek to fix the problem.

What Sowell fails to argue, and that Steven Pinker begins to make the case for, is that these philosophical points of view are not on equal footing. That is to say: Whether the Tragic or Utopian view is correct is not a question of ethics, but a question of fact. To what extent does human nature exist, and to what extent can it be altered by culture?

The evidence at both the macro and micro level seems increasingly to point to the Tragic view as being empirically correct. At the macro level, societies that have strongly embraced the Utopian vision, including Revolutionary France, Communist Russia, and Maoist China, have ultimately yielded exactly the results that a Tragic conservative would argue - i.e. the revolutions have been seized by evildoers, and man has inflicted terrible violence upon other men. The utopia proves to be a dystopia. On the other hand, societies that have embraced the Tragic vision, such as 18th - 19th century Great Britain and the United States, have largely enjoyed growth and prosperity.

At the micro level, there is a growing body of evidence, most convincingly presented by Pinker but now appearing in other books, that human nature is real - that we are not "blank slates" - and that the quest to "perfect" man by changing his nature is doomed to failure. This latter discussion is anathema to the Left because to the extent human nature is real and invariant, it destroys the underpinnings of progressive philosophy. We thus see a hero of the Left, like Larry Summers, destroyed by merely bringing up the issue of whether there may be innate differences between men and women in the area of variance of mathematical intelligence. Likewise, theories of human biodiversity, genetic variance in IQ, natural differences in gender roles, and similar topics are politically untouchable, again because they are incompatible with the Utopian vision.

For those who would like to embrace the Utopian vision, the Tragic vision is depressing - it is, after all, Tragic. It would surely be a better world if humans were better than we are... but we are not. Margaret Thatcher once said, "the facts of life are conservative." How right she was.

The NY Times discusses how the world's pre-eminent experts on bias discovered their own biases. The Society of Personality and Social Psychology was confronted with the fact that it is 80% liberal in a nation that is 40% conservative in a speech by Dr. Jon Haidt.

Among Dr. Haidt's points, I was pleased to see him point out the disgusting shunning of Larry Summers for wondering whether the preponderance of male math professors had to due with IQ variance rather than discrimination - a powerful hypothesis with substantial evidence to support it, but not one that was acceptable to the community.

Also notable was his reference to Thomas Sowell's book "A Conflict of Visions", which is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in understanding the never-ending conflict between liberal and conservative.

According to this article on Helium.com, magnetic polar shifts are the cause of the massive global superstorms that have gripped the Earth in the recent months.

The Koch Brothers, I mean.

My colleague Eadan forwarded me the new BestBuy Buy Back Program: "Introducing the Buy Back Program -- Buy any phone, laptop, tablet or TV and when you're ready to upgrade, we'll buy it back at a set price. Once you've purchased the Buy Back Program for your item, upgrading is easy. Just bring it back and get up to 50% of the original purchase price on a Best Buy® Gift Card to use toward the next big thing."

He thinks this is the beginning of "subscriptions" for electronics, as we transition away from an ownership society to a disposable rental society.