Prisoner’s Dilemma, continued

So last time I talked about the Prisoner’s Dilemma, I brought up an example regarding gaming consoles: how Microsoft and Sony would save a ton of money if they cooperated and built one single console instead of having one each. My primary reasons for why this would be logical is that they would only need one development team and budget, one marketing campaign, one support structure, and developers would only need to learn one console architecture.

Who wants Christmas ham in November?

Christmas is obviously an event that knows no boundaries. Not even time itself can stop if from popping up whenever it sees fit. Or rather, when the ad makers see fit. I took this picture with my cell phone November 1st. The Lidl store in question is perhaps a kilometer away from where I live. Its text says “We have everything for Christmas!” and displays a wide variety of foods normally associated with Christmas.

Now, one thing that Christians, at least in Sweden, seem to want to emphasize is that they provide a counter-weight to commercialism. While I personally don’t see why we need religion to do that, as we have political ideologies that provide even better counter-weights, Christianity does provide at least something positive in this regard.

Go WGA!

I just wanted to express my deepest sympathies for the members of the Writer’s Guild of America right now. Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski (which I respect and admire, B5 is one of the best science fiction series I have seen) posted a message with his view on the situation, which can be read here (through JMSNews). In Sweden, unions have a comparatively strong position, and collective bargaining is a fundamental part of how wages are set. The parliament doesn’t have to decide minimum wages through legislation, and can focus on other things instead. In any case, the conditions for WGA members have been abysmal. It’s great to see them demand more money for their work – they deserve it (and it’s not like they’re asking for a fortune).

Read more about the strike on Wikipedia and in JMS’s post.

Update: there’s also an excellent podcast by two people who recently moved to Hollywood to pursue writing as a career. In episode 35, they discuss the strike in more detail. Highly recommended.

And Arman Shrugged

Michael Moore FTW

While in Cannes promoting his film Sicko, Michael Moore criticized the current Swedish centre-right wing government for allowing privatization of the health care system. From the The Local article:

Prisoner’s Dilemma

You’ve probably heard of the Prisoner’s Dilemma before. Wikipedia describes it as follows:

Thank you, SÄPO

Russia’s president Vladimir Putin recently criticized the US quite heavily, among other things implying that US aggressive behavior and imperialism is making smaller states try to build nuclear weapons. The criticism in general was quite good, and Putin had several important points to make. In addition, the US response was quite vague and didn’t address the issues that Putin had brought up at all (which was to be expected).

VOTE on September 17, 2006

On September 17, 2006, Swedish elections for the riksdag are held. Sweden has seven parties in the parliament, a party has to get at least 4% of the votes in the election to be able to get in. The biggest party, the social democrats, had 39,85% of the votes in the last election.

No single party has gotten 50% of votes or more for quite some time, which means that several parties have to cooperate to form a coalition government. There are two main blocks in the parliament: the left and the right (although the left are actually the left party, the social democrats, and the green party. The latter do not want to call themselves left but have generally cooperated with the left block. They are also quite small, which means they use their situation in a way that makes them have more influence than what their modest size would normally allow).

The right block consists of four conservative and liberal parties who have recently gathered under what they call “the alliance”. One of these parties wants Sweden to join NATO, another doesn’t want gay people to marry, the third wants to impose a special tax for the retired (which means they have to pay more tax than if they would have been workers earning the same amount) as well as making it more expensive to buy medicine, and the fourth wants… actually I’m not so sure, but they have all been forced to change their political agendas in one way or another to unite in this… “alliance”.

The left block wants Sweden to focus a great deal on research, making us competitive in the future not by trying to compete with workers with lower wages in eastern countries (the right block’s solution to the unemployment rate tends to be more low-wage jobs), but with knowledge. They also want to make it free for people who are 24 years and younger to go to the dentist, and heavily subdisize costs after that. Unlike the right block, they want to phase out nuclear power, instead focusing on environment-friendly alternatives (which we can export to other countries). In a world that is extremely dependent on oil, they want Sweden to get rid of its addiction by 2020, and not replace it with a new one that would make us blind to researching alternatives such as wind, water and solar energy. They stand for the Swedish welfare state and how it should look like in the future, with collective agreements for workers, and continued job employment security.

If you’re not a Swedish citizen, I hope I have given you my (probably very biased) view on the political situation right now. If you are a Swedish citizen, I hope you will vote on September 17.

Edit (September 18 in seven minutes): The right wing block won the election. Tomorrow I shall mourn.

The Day Swedish Democracy Died

Or: The day I lost faith in our justice system.

So Swedish police has, in a raid with 50 involved officers, taken a bunch of servers into custody that they should already have known contained no material with a copyright. It seems the primary target was the torrent-site ThePirateBay.org, but several other servers have beeen affected as well. For example, istheshit.net currently no longer works because of this. In any case, ThePirateBay server doesn’t contain any copyrighted info, only links to it, which is not a violation of Swedish law.

In addition, a source says that it was because of US pressure directly from the white house this happened. And that it seems our justice department broke the law and ordered this raid when the police commented they legally had no grounds to do so.

The thing I still like about Sweden is that people are going to be held accountable for this (unlike, say, in the US where these sorts of things could happen daily and no one would object). I’ll follow this as it develops. For now, I see it as an insult, a grave stab at our justice system, when something like this should never have happened, because it was so obvious the targeted server wouldn’t contain any copyrighted information.

Read more: http://viborginternational.blogspot.com/

The legal advisor of ThePirateBay speaks in the above link about how things went down from his POV (the police spoke to him too, even though he has nothing to do with the day-to-day runnings of TPB). Hopefully, Leif Silbersky (famous Swedish lawyer) will defend those charged, as he indicates.

First draft of ‘The Mutani War’ finished!

In all its glory, at just above 19600 words, I’ve finished the first draft of my short story ‘Tales from the History of Homak: The Mutani War’, as the title would be if translated, and it feels really good. Especially as I have now found a definite way of tieing it in with ‘The Threat to Uncertainty’ in a way that enhances both stories, actually.

The feedback from those in writing class who had read some of the story was good. I think they all liked it, considering the circumstances, I don’t think they expected to get such a long story. It was hard to get much out of them, though, mainly because they didn’t have a finished draft in their hands (and they hadn’t even read the entire unfinished draft that they were given, again, not entirely unexpected). A good thing about the story is that it might seem like a pretty straight-forward actioner in the beginning, but with a mystery that is introduced and then that is later revealed towards the end.

What a reader might not expect, however, is that this mystery gets gradually more and more important, and that this main question that at first merely boggels the mind of the main character in time may or may not be the reason several people under his command die, and later on even worse things. Again, the theme here is uncertainty to some extent, to be sure. It’s a gritty, realistic story where people die, because that’s what happens in war, and solutions to problems don’t come easy.

It’s not a story where the hero saves the day and everyone ends up happy, it isn’t even a story where the hero saves the day after losing some of some of his friends but those who survive end up happy.

It’s rather a story where the main character makes mistakes, and gets confused as to if it was his fault or someone else’s that his friends died, and later ends up not saving the day at all. It’s a story that poses the question, what is the punishment for state versus state espionage? All-out war? How about the occupation (with military force if necessary) of an area that had to do with the espionage and that the victim finds reasonable? Think that is a tad too hefty a response? Well, what if the victim doesn’t think so? What if it considers its integrity to be above everyting else, and attacks. Is the perpretrator’s army following illegal orders if it decides to defend?

We’re so used to lies, deception, state terrorism, wars funded by states across the globe and espionage that we no longer care enough to respond to it accordingly. And by accordingly I mean strongly. Bush lied to the world about the invasion of a country, and he’s still in power. This is the world’s self-proclaimed greatest democracy we’re talking about. Those are big words, too bad they’re all pretend. Throughout history, the same thing has happened again and again.

But the real problem is that nobody seems to care. Or, at least, enough people that could make a difference keep quiet so that nothing happens, and so that the crimes commited by states all over the world, not just by the US, continue indefinately.