Author: admin

Supply, meet demand

Several years ago, Gamespy’s Daily Victim column spun a colourful yarn about a company that did nothing but play online RPGs all day and then sold their loot on eBay. Apparently, a cottage industry has sprung up in Asia where peasants and university students are paid to do just that. And it’s a million dollar enterprise.

These “farmers” are paid peanuts, but they spend their days in chairs in air-conditioned comfort, so it’s not so bad. Macros control the actions of the ingame characters for the most part; the workers’ duties mostly consist of keeping an eye out for the fuzz, since bots are illegal.

For those of you who are scratching your heads and wondering who on earth would pay real money for a virtual sword or a digital suit of armour, consider this: _most of what you do in online RPGs is damn boring_. A casual gamer may spend days tromping around slewing rabbits or something before they can obtain that powerful new sword. So if you can buy that same sword for, say, $30, and go straight to the fun stuff, why not? Everything has its price, including time.

The existence of this industry does raise another issue – MMORPG economic systems may also be used to hide money in laundering schemes.

It’s a chinese situation

My good friend, Dezza, runs Mask of China site (which I am also the designer of) He recently left his teaching job in Dalian and before he heads off to Hong Kong, he came back to Canada. I had a chance to meet up with him this week at a Chinese greasy spoon near Toronto City Hall.

As any reader of his blog can probably tell, he was getting increasingly irritated by the politics in China in the past few months. Maybe it was their relentless persecution of the Falun Gong, an eccentric but mostly harmless cult. Or the fact the government kept blocking access to Blogger. Or the incessant anti-Japanese propaganda.

Oded Shenkar, author of “The Chinese Century”, is very bullish about the Chinese (Reason 1: They have a diaspora. Reason 2: They have a mind for business. Reason 3: They work pretty damn hard). But while we gobbled our $4.75 charsui rice, Dezza dismissed all of this.

He told me that the journalists fly to Shanghai, take taxis from their four-star hotels to the city, are suitable impressed with the massive amounts of construction they see, and write back that China will soon kick ass.

What they don’t see, Dezza claimed, was the fact that most of these buildings are empty. Planners get chummy with bankers, one hand washes the other, and they get risk-free loans to build useless buildings.

They also don’t see the rivers that are black with pollution, and the poverty that most Chinese live in. Socialism is conveniently forgotten when the peasantry need to pay to go to elementary school; people are left outside hospitals to die when they can’t pay their medical bills.

On the way back to my office, Dezza took a picture of some striking workers. He’s going to send it to his friends in Dalian. You can’t strike in China.

Chained bikes, set free.

codexlagman_037p.jpgI’ve always wondered why bikes get abandoned. My bike is very personal to me. Did their caregivers die, did they forget, or did they just become enamored with a shiny new distraction?

CBC Radio 3’s “Left Behind: When the Wheels Stop Turning” photo montage likens it to heartbreak.

But earlier this month in Toronto, a bunch of urban guerillas called the the City Beautification Ensemble took to the streets to give these abandoned wheels one last chance at glory. They are the Pedals and Paint, and these are their loving creations.

Just 3 million of my closest associates

Jordan Weisman, cofounder of 4orty-2wo, as interviewed in the East Bay Express’s
The Buzzmakers

“Our theory was if we posed the question in the right way, and inspired a group of people — a small group initially — to try to find the answers, they would organically start to enlist a larger and larger group. As that group grew, it would come to quickly represent every knowledge base, and every skill base you could imagine, plus a virtually unlimited amount of time, energy, and resources.”
“And we were right, but by an order of magnitude we were off…Damn, there is nothing they can’t solve; there is nothing they can’t solve instantly.”

Weisman is talking about the participants in their massive alternate reality roleplaying games/viral marketing campaigns. 4orty-2wo’s creations: the AI project and ILoveBees.com. But in my mind, he could have been talking about Wikipedia. Or discussion forums. Or open source software.

The designers, in fact, concluded they were no longer building games for individuals, but for a “hive mind” composed of millions of walking, talking neurotransmitters. Rather than diffusing across nerve synapses, these transmitters processed information via cell phones, chat rooms, and Web forums.

The Internet continues to shape and reshape global communications…

And don’t ask her “how much is this with tax”

Running a video store is a particularily heinous form of hell, as Silverlotus can attest to when she worked at EB Games. Even though it was a corporate chain store, profit margins were still razor thin. They made the managers pimp these $40 contraptions called Disc Doctors that supposedly removed scratches off compact discs.

So I can sympathize when I read Eric Grissom’s Untold Stories of the Indie Game Store:

If you wanted to order four PS2s you would have to buy eight copies of Killzone and a half a pound of Celebrity Deathmatch. The same was true for Xbox. Things got even worse by the time the PSP hit. The MSRP for the PSP is $249.99. Your price? $280 plus $150 worth of those same PS2 games they couldn

Critical Thinking: Did the man really bite the dog?

“If you really want to be a critical reader,” Paul Graham writes in The Submarine, “It turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but _why he’s writing about this subject at all_.”

Why? Because the news isn’t immune from fallacy or deception. For example, a good chunk of non-topical news (especially those describing buying trends) are not spontaneously generated by seasoned, pavement-pounding journalists, but are canned press releases generated by PR firms and fed to apathetic reporters to regurgitate:

If anyone is dishonest, it’s the reporters. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. But it’s so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them. After all, they know good PR firms won’t lie to them.

A good flatterer doesn’t lie, but tells his victim selective truths (what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients.

It is also important to always check your sources, even when it comes to topical news items, as George Monbiot as found out in Junk science. After David Bellamy, a typically reputable botanist, cites an arcane statistic stating global warming is codswallop, Monbiot decides to uncover the source of the figure.

It is a fun journey, where we discover that the statistic is a forgery passed off from a quack scientist to a convicted felon, which was then published by a conspiracy loving ex-architect on his website, which in turn was cited by Bellamy, who then threw in a typo to spice up the figures even further. Nicholas Wolverson calls this “a recurring theme of those using ‘science’ to justify the continued existence of their convenient world-views”:

It is hard to convey just how selective you have to be to dismiss the evidence for climate change. You must climb over a mountain of evidence to pick up a crumb: a crumb which then disintegrates in the palm of your hand. You must ignore an entire canon of science, the statements of the world’s most eminent scientific institutions, and thousands of papers published in the foremost scientific journals.

It appears even the scientists themselves need to remember to keep thinking critically. Bellamy has since retracted his statements, but not before two conservation organizations gave him the heave-ho.

Mutual funds

I have a tendency to exhaustively research anything I’m planning to buy – even theatrical movies.

My mom had created a mutual fund for me when I was a child, and recently it has come into my head that if I applied the same maniacal precision into investing that I do in picking computer parts, I can’t lose. So I’ve recently got into the game, and I must say, mutual funds are the most difficult purchases I have ever had to decide on.

For starters, there are over 5,000 mutual funds available to the Canadian investor. Plus, one’s portfolio (aka _asset allocation_) must be personally tailored because it depends on his/her current financial status, comfort level and future goals. Information on each fund (called a _prospectus_) can be vague and incomplete. And besides, all the info is historical data – yesterday’s star can easily be tomorrow’s dog.

Add rabid sales people and scammers to the mix and it’s no wonder the markets are so damn confusing.

Some tips I have learned, if you want to sign up with a discount brokerage and start making some money:

# Understand mutual funds are like the moonshot – you’re looking at cashing these babies in 3-5 years from now, or even decades from now.
# Diversify when building a portfolio. Stick some bonds, some equity, and some foreign equity in there. Adjust the percentage of each to taste.
# You gotta be tough. Don’t bail at the first dip in prices. Chances are, if you’re patient, things will come back up.
# Go for no-load funds, because they charge no commission. They are just as good if not better as the front-load/back-load/low-load stuff.
# Don’t just wait around for the lowest price of your chosen fund before buying it. You’ll be waiting forever. Just hold your breath and jump in. Buy in small increments over time – this process, called _dollar-cost averaging_, will even out the bumps and dips for you.

My Japanese Studies course got me a woman

When Apple and Pixar CEO Steve Jobs dropped out of college, he still snuck into some classes for kicks. One of them, Calligraphy, impressed him so much that he later used this serenditipious knowledge when developing the typeface rendering on the Macintosh.

Implausible? That’s what Jobs told the graduating class of 2005 at Stanford.

More from the Stanford Report.