Bedtime Routine (in the style of Tumblr)

WHEN IT GOES WELL:

I start to think that

and I get all

WHEN IT GOES BADLY:

I feel like

Why do I even bother to show up?

and I want to say

Comic book suggestions bleg

First, a confession: I don't buy comics. I know, there goes my street cred. By 'comics,' though, I mean regular monthly issues of ongoing series. I prefer stand-alone graphic novels, limited series, or trade paperbacks (the comics industry term for volumes collecting a single story arc, usually of 4 to 8 issues, from an ongoing series).

That started to change around this time last year. For the first time. I decided I really wanted to pick up a series as it comes out rather than waiting for the collected volume: Hellboy in Hell #1!

Hellboy is such a great character. As Anung Un Rama, he was born to be the harbinger of the world's destruction and leader of the armies of hell, a monstrous Dark Age villain. Instead, Hellboy prefers to be more like a Golden Age hero, simple and chaste and uncomplicated... if he can get away with it. It's a great dynamic.

I also love Mike Mignola's art. It's difficult for me to explain why; aesthetic preferences aren't something I understand very well, even in myself. But something about the sharp angles, the extremes of light and dark, and the moody scenery really draw me in.

I bought the first four issues, and am excited to pick up #5 tomorrow!

At first, I thought this was the only comic that could convince me to pick up the regular issues. Then I heard about Sandman: Overture. For those of you that don't know, The Sandman was a series written by Neil Gaiman from 1989 to 1996, and is one of the best ongoing comic series ever made. I read the entire collected volumes through the public library last year, and it blew me away. When I heard that Gaiman and artist J.H. Williams III were writing a new 6-issue bimonthly series starting in October, there was no way I wasn't going to pick it up.

I've picked up a few other stray issues here and there trying to find more regular comics to follow, but so far nothing I've wanted to spend $3 or $4 on every month. A tight budget and specific tastes will do that, I suppose. Aquaman has a new writer at the end of the month, and I already know I like the artists, so I'll be trying that out, but beyond that I'm not sure where to look next.

Most of my current collection of trade paperbacks are from the 1980s--Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Mike Grell--and a few others with deep writers like Mark Waid. I like Paul Dini and Bruce Timm's Batman animation (but who doesn't?). I like Darwyn Cooke. I'm more of a DC guy than Marvel, although I really liked Chris Claremont's and Joss Whedon's X-Men and J. Michael Straczynski's Thor. The Walking Dead is fantastic, at least in collected form.

The point of all this, my friends, is that I'm looking for another monthly to pick up in December. I'd like to hear from any of you who have tried out recent titles. What are your favorites, and why? Know of anything that sounds like it would be my style? I'd like to try it out. Help me catch up to the new century in comics!

Fear the (Baby) Boom and Bust

The people running this site, "The Can Kicks Back," suggests that economic inequality, government and student debt, and median income stagnation all have the same root cause: essentially, it blames the baby boomers.

Normally, when confronting broad, sweeping arguments like this one, my instinct is to discredit the over-the-top claims with actual data. In this case, though, it's actually kind of hard to argue with.

First of all, we have the fact that Baby Boomers did not have the same mentality of thrift as their parents; it's not all that surprising, given that their parents lived through the Great Depression and Second World War, and they didn't. Nevertheless, you can see the generational shift in the data:

The graph measures savings as a proportion of current-dollar per-person income, from 1929 to 2012. Not surprisingly, there's a huge drop during the Great Depression, suggesting that people were using most of their income to feed themselves. Then there's a big, huge jump during the Second World War. Partially that was enforced by government rationing, partially it was social pressure to support the war effort, and (I suspect, although I'd need more data to back this up) partially it was rebuilding savings that had been depleted during the previous decade.

But what's important for this argument comes after that. There's a gradual rise in the share of income saved after the war, but that rise flattens out beginning in the late 1960s--when the first Baby Boomers are entering the workforce. The last of the Baby Boomers started entering the workforce in the early 1980s, and we see a drop in the savings rate at that time, followed by a downward trend (perhaps related to the retirement of the Boomers' parents). The discrete jump up in 2008 is most likely related to current-dollar incomes falling faster than savings can respond.

In short, it is at least a plausible theory that Baby Boomers significantly consumed out of their parents stored wealth without replenishing it.

One possible response to depleting stores of wealth, especially when planning for retirement, would be to consume less; another would be to simply borrow against future earnings. The latter category is a better description of the Baby Boomer strategy.

Forbes makes the case that the current system of government entitlement spending (which the Baby Boomers are starting to draw as benefits) pays out far more than the recipients ever payed in:

Senator Tom Coburn (a physician in private life) has estimated that the average American couple contributes approximately $110,000 to Medicare over their working careers and receives over $330,000 of Medicare benefits. On Feb. 20, USA Today cited Urban Institute data pegging those same figures at $88,000 and $387,000, respectively. There are differing estimates of the size of the gap, but clearly Medicare suffers from an unsustainable funding deficit.

The conservative estimate is that Boomers will be drawing $3 for every dollar payed in. If this were a long-term investment that might not be bad; but Medicare isn't an investment, it's a pay-as-you-go system ultimately funded by taxes. It's a system in which Boomers give up a dollar in taxes during their working years, and receive $3 in new taxes (or borrowing against future taxes) later.

According to Thomas Firey, a commentator at Cato, it doesn't get better when we look at Social Security:

In contrast, the Boomers will get a bargain. When they entered the workforce in the late 1960s, they paid only 6.5 percent of their earnings to Social Security and nothing to Medicare. For about half of their working years, the Boomers paid 10 percent or less to Social Security and less than 1.25 percent to Medicare. Only from 1990 on, when the Boomers had earned paychecks for a quarter-century, did they start paying 12.4 percent to Social Security and 2.9 percent to Medicare — the same percentage we Gen-X/Yers have paid our whole lives.

That’s the Boomers’ bargain: They’ve paid less of their earnings into Social Security than we Gen-X/Yers, yet they’ll receive more in benefits than we will and we’ll pick up the tab.

So when Baby Boomers complain to me about how they've paid a lot of taxes and have earned their government payouts, I have trouble keeping my cool. To be fair, Boomers have accomplished some major gains for America during their time in charge. Boomers presided over the rise of civil rights and feminism, essentially extending the benefits of their position to many who had previously been cut off from the wealth created by their parents.

But it doesn't help that the Boomers complaining about how high their taxes (and, tellingly, the extension of rights to those they consider undeserving or immoral) have been are consistently living in states that, on net, are heavily subsidized by others:

New York transferred over $950 billion to the rest of America's fiscal union from 1990 to 2009. But relative to the size of its economy, Delaware made the biggest contribution, equivalent to more than twice its 2009 GDP.

So if you are a Baby Boomer in Oklahoma or South Carolina complaining about your taxes, you could always do the ethical thing: First, refuse two-thirds of your medicare dollars and (a bit under) half of your Social Security dollars; then, call your representatives and tell them to give Texas, California, and Minnesota back their tax dollars. I won't be as upset as the "The Can Kicks Back" people if you don't, but until you're willing to do, don't expect any sympathy from me.

(The title of this post comes from the legendary Keynes/Hayek rap battle.)

All our Heroes are Pyrrhus

That crunching sound is the new meta-narrative
crushing your nostalgia.

A while back I blogged about the summer blockbuster, Man of Steel. Jessie asked for a follow-up:

I want a post about people's oddly consistent reaction to how many extras died in this movie.

To really address this topic, I think we need to look more broadly at action and adventure movies. [I should mention at this will be a spoiler-filled post for any movies that come up, and that I will be talking about some movies I haven't seen.] Two movies this past summer have been particularly  criticized for their portrayal of successful attacks of mass destruction: Man of Steel and Star Trek Into Darkness. Tor.com has a recent post discussing the new perspective on warfare portrayed in these films:

The most disturbing thing to me about both Star Trek: Into Darkness and Man of Steel was the collateral damage in both films and the rather blasé treatment that it received. [...]

We’re not reminded often enough that thousands have died in drone strikes in Pakistan over the past 9 years. It’s not stressed that over a hundred of those deaths were children. They are not important to the narrative.

That narrative tells us that these things happen, that sometimes mistakes are made. That in order to protect our security and get the bad guys, sometimes innocent lives are lost. They’re unfortunate accidents. Incidental. It’s the cost of our freedom.

The whole post is worth reading, and I agree that these films highlight a major difference in the way we tell action stories now compared to previous decades. But I think it misses a critical detail of the destruction in these movies, and therefore a critical part of the narrative they create.

The incredible levels of destruction don't happen to civilians in the enemies country / planet. They happen here. When San Francisco and Metropolis are decimated, the movies are not making a reference to deaths overseas. Not to be completely cliché, but it really is all about 9/11.

Now, action movies have always required a certain degree of collateral damage, both to prove the situation is serious and to motivate the heroes to fight back. Often a close friend of the hero has to die in order to justify the heroes being callous about slaughtering the enemy; as Mark Millar would say, "It’s just a horrible act to show that somebody’s a bad guy."

What, a fiendish mustache isn't enough?

But mass destruction was typically been restricted to disaster movies or has taken place before the heroes get a chance to fight back. In both cases, a fair amount of attention was paid to the fallout, and the heartache of massive losses of life and property were kind of the point.

I think that changed after 9/11. Consider the first X-Men movie, which came out in 2000 and featured the villains almost killing all of the world's leaders. In the end we had one dead senator and a broken torch on the Statue of Liberty. In contrast, the third X-Men movie came out in 2006, and resulted in dozens or hundreds of death, and the complete destruction of an equally iconic national landmark, the Golden Gate Bridge. Some of this is a matter of sequels escalating, but I think there's something different here than what we see going from Die Hard in 1988 to Die Hard with a Vengeance in 1995. The process has continued over time, with city-wide destruction the heroes are powerless to prevent in 2012 in The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises.

What people have been commenting on the most, though, is not just the level of destruction, but the fact that the heroes don't even make it a priority to try. These days, movie action heroes have accepted their inability to save large numbers of people, and the filmmakers want the audience to play along. We almost don't notice until we are looking at long-standing franchises like Star Trek and Superman, where we've seen the heroes fight and overcome these sorts of world-destroying dangers before with far less collateral damage.

So what does this say about us? Again, I don't think it's about our drones killing civilians. It's about the fact that our real-life heroes--the soldiers, political leaders, police officers, firefighters, etc--couldn't do much except get out of the way while the iconic monument of the World Trade Center towers collapsed. They helped after the fact, but they were powerless to prevent the tragedy. That's the new narrative I see: not just that heroes don't always prevent collateral damage, but that heroes can't prevent it, and we shouldn't expect them to.

Gone are the days where Superman can conveniently discover the power to turn back time if the villain succeeds in sinking the West Coast and killing Lois Lane. This time, the best we can hope is that Superman uses whatever is at his disposal to stop Zod from making it worse, even if it requires him to kill. Even the most powerful on-screen hero must accept that they are sometimes powerless, because the audience needs to accept that our off-screen heroes are sometimes powerless.

this is what victory looks like in the 21st century

The backlash this year might mean this is changing. As the narrative has escalated what our heroes can't do, we've also gotten further removed from 9/11. We might finally be reaching the stage where it's not enough to see the side of good win only by sacrificing much of what the hero protects (Man of Steel & Star Trek Into Darkness). Or it could be that the new narrative has run against our nostalgia for these franchises and the narrative won. Only time will tell.

Friday Links

Actually, this is a pretty good idea.

The new Archbishop of Canterbury wants to help not-for-profit credit unions put payday lenders out of business:

I said to him quite bluntly, ‘We’re not in the business of trying to legislate you out of existence, we’re trying to compete you out of existence’.

He’s a businessman, he took that well.

Test scores are bad at predicting performance at Google... but probably not for the reason you think:

Google likely doesn’t have much variability among those hired with respect to test scores and grades. And when there is no variability, there is no correlation with anything. [Furthermore,...] If someone is hired despite their lower test scores, it usually means some compelling compensating characteristics made that person look like a good bet. That is why the correlation between a valid selection instrument and job performance can be dramatically depressed when only looking at the hired sample.

Finally, here's a pinterest page that blurs the line between pop culture and fine art.

In Post-Soviet Russia,

photo captions you!

Stephen Fry thinks the UK should boycott the Sochi Olympics:

At all costs Putin cannot be seen to have the approval of the civilised world.
He is making scapegoats of gay people, just as Hitler did Jews. He cannot be allowed to get away with it. I know whereof I speak. I have visited Russia, stood up to the political deputy who introduced the first of these laws, in his city of St Petersburg. I looked into the face of the man and, on camera, tried to reason with him, counter him, make him understand what he was doing. All I saw reflected back at me was what Hannah Arendt called, so memorably, “the banality of evil.” A stupid man, but like so many tyrants, one with an instinct of how to exploit a disaffected people by finding scapegoats. Putin may not be quite as oafish and stupid as Deputy Milonov but his instincts are the same.
- See more at: http://www.stephenfry.com/2013/08/07/an-open-letter-to-david-cameron-and-the-ioc/single-page/#sthash.dkpUsBXV.dpuf

At all costs Putin cannot be seen to have the approval of the civilised world.
He is making scapegoats of gay people, just as Hitler did Jews. He cannot be allowed to get away with it. I know whereof I speak. I have visited Russia, stood up to the political deputy who introduced the first of these laws, in his city of St Petersburg. I looked into the face of the man and, on camera, tried to reason with him, counter him, make him understand what he was doing. All I saw reflected back at me was what Hannah Arendt called, so memorably, “the banality of evil.” A stupid man, but like so many tyrants, one with an instinct of how to exploit a disaffected people by finding scapegoats. Putin may not be quite as oafish and stupid as Deputy Milonov but his instincts are the same.
- See more at: http://www.stephenfry.com/2013/08/07/an-open-letter-to-david-cameron-and-the-ioc/single-page/#sthash.dkpUsBXV.dpuf

 At all costs Putin cannot be seen to have the approval of the civilised world.

He is making scapegoats of gay people, just as Hitler did Jews. He cannot be allowed to get away with it. I know whereof I speak. I have visited Russia, stood up to the political deputy who introduced the first of these laws, in his city of St Petersburg. I looked into the face of the man and, on camera, tried to reason with him, counter him, make him understand what he was doing. All I saw reflected back at me was what Hannah Arendt called, so memorably, “the banality of evil.” A stupid man, but like so many tyrants, one with an instinct of how to exploit a disaffected people by finding scapegoats. Putin may not be quite as oafish and stupid as Deputy Milonov but his instincts are the same. 

Read the whole thing. He makes an interesting case. George Takei has made a similar call.

On the opposite side is many Olympic athletes. Not too surprisingly, people who have worked for years and may only make it into the Olympics once don't want them to be cancelled or boycotted. "The Olympics are not a political statement," said openly-gay figure skater Johnny Weir.

I can see both arguments here. I lean towards favoring the relocation idea. What do you think?

At all costs Putin cannot be seen to have the approval of the civilised world. - See more at: http://www.stephenfry.com/2013/08/07/an-open-letter-to-david-cameron-and-the-ioc/single-page/#sthash.dkpUsBXV.dpuf

At all costs Putin cannot be seen to have the approval of the civilised world. - See more at: http://www.stephenfry.com/2013/08/07/an-open-letter-to-david-cameron-and-the-ioc/single-page/#sthash.dkpUsBXV.dpuf

At all costs Putin cannot be seen to have the approval of the civilised world.
He is making scapegoats of gay people, just as Hitler did Jews. He cannot be allowed to get away with it. I know whereof I speak. I have visited Russia, stood up to the political deputy who introduced the first of these laws, in his city of St Petersburg. I looked into the face of the man and, on camera, tried to reason with him, counter him, make him understand what he was doing. All I saw reflected back at me was what Hannah Arendt called, so memorably, “the banality of evil.” A stupid man, but like so many tyrants, one with an instinct of how to exploit a disaffected people by finding scapegoats. Putin may not be quite as oafish and stupid as Deputy Milonov but his instincts are the same.
- See more at: http://www.stephenfry.com/2013/08/07/an-open-letter-to-david-cameron-and-the-ioc/single-page/#sthash.dkpUsBXV.dpuf

At all costs Putin cannot be seen to have the approval of the civilised world.
He is making scapegoats of gay people, just as Hitler did Jews. He cannot be allowed to get away with it. I know whereof I speak. I have visited Russia, stood up to the political deputy who introduced the first of these laws, in his city of St Petersburg. I looked into the face of the man and, on camera, tried to reason with him, counter him, make him understand what he was doing. All I saw reflected back at me was what Hannah Arendt called, so memorably, “the banality of evil.” A stupid man, but like so many tyrants, one with an instinct of how to exploit a disaffected people by finding scapegoats. Putin may not be quite as oafish and stupid as Deputy Milonov but his instincts are the same.
- See more at: http://www.stephenfry.com/2013/08/07/an-open-letter-to-david-cameron-and-the-ioc/single-page/#sthash.dkpUsBXV.dpuf

At all costs Putin cannot be seen to have the approval of the civilised world.
He is making scapegoats of gay people, just as Hitler did Jews. He cannot be allowed to get away with it. I know whereof I speak. I have visited Russia, stood up to the political deputy who introduced the first of these laws, in his city of St Petersburg. I looked into the face of the man and, on camera, tried to reason with him, counter him, make him understand what he was doing. All I saw reflected back at me was what Hannah Arendt called, so memorably, “the banality of evil.” A stupid man, but like so many tyrants, one with an instinct of how to exploit a disaffected people by finding scapegoats. Putin may not be quite as oafish and stupid as Deputy Milonov but his instincts are the same.
- See more at: http://www.stephenfry.com/2013/08/07/an-open-letter-to-david-cameron-and-the-ioc/single-page/#sthash.dkpUsBXV.dpuf