Rant 1019 / Too Much Being Too Little

With Fire and Sword is not as great as Warband. The early game is just terrible and the path to glory isn't exactly intuitive.

I can't just fight my way up; I can't even find fights. The random bandits and deserters are too fast for me and the battles between factions do not allow my involvement until I join a faction.

But I can't join a faction because I don't have enough experience and renown.

So I can't fight because I'm not in faction and I'm not in a faction because I can't fight.

In addition, my troops suck. I rarely get any combat so they have little experience for leveling up. With such poor troops, I can't siege towns nor pick fights with the enemy nobles of the faction I wish to join.

To hell with this. I'm going back to modded Warband. As I recall, the Prophesy of Pendor mod was pretty fun.

I have to admit the guns are fun, but they are OP anyway. If you have 80-90% of your army using guns you're practically invincible.



















So the guys at the top are finally admitting that the current macroeconomic theories are inaccurate.

What took them so long?

"The paradigm that the market corrects itself, on which all the traditional economists such as Blanchard and Mankiw base their theories, is on the rocks," said Gatti. "What the traditional theories do not consider is that the financial market must be regulated. A too-liberalized market creates monsters."

The US seems like a prime example.

Up to one in four people can't find work in parts of Europe, and the reality of people who are unemployed without choosing to be is one of the biggest holes in mainstream theory, for Bofinger and others. In orthodox teaching, supply and demand in the labor markets should fix unemployment leaving just those people who choose not to work in the dole queue.

Most undergrads would assume that such flaws are likely solved by theories they aren't going to be taught at their levels of education. Sometimes, those don't exist, and it's scary to know what we learnt is incomplete to this degree.

Simon Evenett, professor of international trade and economic development at St Gallen University, said macroeconomists had ignored the financial system in most of their models, and the finance guys missed economic linkages. "That intellectual separation has been the cause of a lot of misdiagnoses."

London School of Economics economics professor Charles Goodhart told a conference macroeconomists had been "totally and egregiously hopeless." Their assumption that everyone in an economy can borrow at the same risk-free rate "blows one's mind, the degree of intellectual error."

I wouldn't go as far as to say that the intellectual separation should take all the blame. Most of their employees and the younger people they work with were taught by the same intellectuals or their written works, so if after all these years they found nothing wrong with these students, you shouldn't use their teachers as the scapegoats for your problems.



For too long, economists have been trying to fit evidence into theory, instead of the reverse. Now, we may be looking at a new age of economic theories, one that is based on the lessons learnt since 2008 and those we are still learning today.























Being superstitious is not necessarily a bad thing. It is true that it could mean that they are willing to believe in anything without real evidence, but it could also indicate how far they are willing to go to achieve something.

For example, the newer generation of Chinese people who don't really believe in traditions but still have food offerings ready for the spirits during festivals even when nobody expects them to do it, it just shows how motivated they are to succeed in life.

They are willing to try anything.

Of course I'm not talking about those who are expected to follow traditions. It has to be completely voluntary to the point where nobody would even know whether it's done or not.






















If a man discovered that his grownup child was not his biological offspring, can he sue him/her for all the money he spent to bring him/her up?

Apparently, you can. And you can also do the same to his/her biological parents.

Worst of all, there are actually people who did either of these, and it's common enough that they aren't considered newsworthy.