Author Archives: theusernamewhichismine

If I Ruled Britannia: economic reforms

Sir Keir Starmer, the newly elected King of England, 2024 pencil sketch

Last time on Streams of Consciousness, I was talking about the economy of Great Britain and what they needed to change to improve things. They’ve tried raising taxes, they’ve tried cutting spending, but their fiscal deficit is only rising and new loans to cover the deficit are getting ever more expensive. My previous recommendation was spicy and probably unpopular, so I quarantined it in its own post and am putting the rest of my recommendations here.

But first: what should Great Britain *not* do? Well first of all I agree with Tony Blair: they shouldn’t put retaliatory tariffs on America. And this isn’t because I’m biased and don’t want them to hurt America, it’s because *I want what’s best for Britain and don’t want them to hurt themselves*.

It may sting to allow Donald Trump a “win.” He’s jacked up tariffs and demanded that no one else retaliates with their own. If you do what he’s asking, aren’t you letting him win? Well if you think retaliatory tariffs are a smart move, you must think that because you believe they will hurt America with only a modest affect on your own country. But that’s wrong, tariffs are a huge blow to your own country, with only a modest affect on the one you’re tariffing. Doing what Donald Trump wants just means letting him win the foot-shooting competition.

Tariffs are inflation in action: everything gets more expensive for absolutely no reason. Because everything is more expensive, everyone is poorer (since their money doesn’t go as far). And tariffs don’t “protect” domestic industries, they destroy them. They destroy competitiveness because there is no market force pushing companies to improve their products. With tariffs, it’s always more viable to increase your profits by rent seeking (demanding the tariffs rise yet further) rather than by self-improvement. Thus the companies stagnate and rust out. Less goods are produced at a much higher cost, everyone is poorer.

This is true even when your tariffs are “targeted.” It’s just that “targeted” tariffs destroy only a few industries instead of all of them. Donald Trump tariffed you, but if you retaliate with tariffs on on American fuel and aircraft (major American exports), you’ll harm your own airline industry by raising their costs. Needless to say your airlines will have to raise their own costs, harming your tourism/travel industries, and thereby harming your citizens who can no longer afford airfares. America will feel some harm, yes, but not as much as your own people.

“We’ll substitute American goods by buying goods from Europe!” Trump wants to substitute foreign goods with American goods, do you think that will work for him? It won’t work for you either.

Tariffs also destroy industries by raising the cost of all their inputs, since again tariffs are just inflation. The steel company can raise its prices since it’s no longer competing with Chinese steel, and has no incentive to innovate because it plans to ask for more tariffs next year. So if you’re a manufacturing company making anything with steel, all your steel just got very expensive and will only get more expensive from here. Might as well cut wages, it’s the only cost you can control.

Many manufacturers will go bankrupt, they can’t afford the higher prices. A few dozen steel jobs will be “saved” at the cost of thousands of higher-paying manfacturing jobs. Those steel workers will then be laid off because with all the manufacturers going bankrupt, no one needs so much steel. And besides, the cost of iron has gone up with the tariffs on iron (and the iron mine is soon to go bankrupt as they can’t afford the machines needed to keep mining).

Think of it this way: if you think retaliatory tariffs are a good idea, then you think Trump’s tariffs in general are a good idea. You agree with him that the tariffs hurt the target countries more than they hurt the country placing them. You think Trump is doing smart economic policy, and are just mad that he’s doing it to *you*.

So again, don’t complain about giving Trump a *win*, reject the cognitive dissonance on tariffs and accept the one and only truth: tariffs are bad for growth, bad for prices, and bad for workers. Biden knew this in 2019, but I fear the cognitive decline hit him fast since he forgot it by 2021. (example, example, example)

Anyway that’s what Britain *shouldn’t* do, so what *should* it do?

How about reducing the need for occupational licensing? “Licensing” sounds good in theory, the Government is going to step in and demand minimum qualifications for certain professions. But everything sounds good when you ignore the costs and handwave the benefits.

Licensing sounds nice because you immediately think of doctors and nurses. But many many jobs have mandatory licenses that simply do not need them. Does a horse trainer really need a license? A piano tuner? A wig-maker? Adding a license does nothing except make it harder for people to get jobs. It’s part of what’s killed “entry-level” positions, there is no such thing as “entry-level” in an industry where any work at all requires a specific license.

20% of UK jobs need a specific license, which ossifies the labor marker and prevents workers from job-hopping to find better wages. You may have veterinary training, a fondness for horses, and see well-paying jobs opening up in the horse-racing industry. But without a long and arduous licensing process, you’re cut out from that part of the labor market, forced to keep working at Tesco for almost nothing.

You may ask “but without a license, how can we ensure these workers are competent?” You interview them, you look at their CV, you contact prior employers. An incompetent employee can do damage yes, for instance an incompetent Tesco stocker can leave heavy merchandise off-balance to crush unwary shoppers, so do shelf stockers need a license? Be honest, exactly how much is saved by having entry-level jobs be licensed? Quantify all the harms, both physical and monetary, then weigh them up against the costs.

Because licensing *does* have a cost. It lowers social mobility since the lower class can’t afford to spend years getting licensed before getting their first job. It hampers growth by preventing industries from growing to meet demand. And it drastically raises costs for licensed labor, without really raising wages.

How can that be? Aren’t licensed jobs paid more than unlicensed? Yes but look at the cost of getting that license, with its years of training and bureaucracy. Look at the cost of *keeping* that license, with mandatory retraining, continuing education, and the like. Time is money, and all the time it takes getting and keeping a license usually drains any additional pay that the license brings.

And look at how that license locks you into a single career, unable to switch things up to chase a higher wage. I’m sorry, you’re a *horse* trainer, *dog* training is a different license.

And study after study shows that very few licenses improve outcomes. Doctor, nurse, these require years of training and understudy, a license here may be warranted. But this kind of thinking is needlessly applied to far too many jobs, most of which show no difference in quality between licensed professionals (in countries where a license is needed), and unlicensed professionals (in countries where it isn’t). License medical and legal practitioners, let everyone else be.

So that’s occupational licensing. My next suggestion for Keir: end planning permission and build housing on the green belt. I wrote about the Green Belt before, but for those of you who missed it: the Green Belt isn’t green, and Britain should build on it.

“The Green belt” of is a bunch of land surrounding many of Britain’s largest cities. The name conjures to mind beautiful forests and fields, untouched by Man since the days of yore. But it’s actually car parks and monoculture farms, forbidden from being built on so that landowners can prevent their neighbor’s property from being bought up by the urban bourgeoisie. It’s a NIMBY version of feudalism.

And the Green Belt does have houses by the way. NIMBY houses for people who don’t want anyone to live near them, but also don’t want to pay for that privilege. Instead of buying the land surrounding their house (and thus paying tax on it), they simply demand no one *else* be allowed to build anything there.

So build on the Green Belt, put apartments on the car parks. Housing is unaffordable in Britain, build more houses and prices will come down. Build more apartments and rent will come down. And with housing and rent getting cheaper, people can afford to spend more on buying goods and services, pumping more money into the economy and creating more jobs.

Importantly, *the Government does not need to do this building*. Too many people think that if the Government is not actively building things, either with its own taxpayer-funded corporation or through special subsidies, then things just won’t get built. But that is not at all true. A plethora of private companies would love to build and sell houses, but Government laws prevent them. So just repeal the laws and the companies will build, no special subsidies or taxpayer-funded company necessary.

And while we’re at it, do away with local planning permission. People complain about developers “banking” land, holding it without building for years. That’s only done because it takes on average a *decade* to get permission to build anything. If someone wants to build and sell houses, buying the land is step 1, steps 2-90 are all planning permission. Cut out those steps and the houses will be built faster and cheaper.

Local councils hold far too much power to block housing, get rid of that power. Instead of a situation where council have to give “permission,” create a national “by-right” system of planning. Developers submit a proposal to build a dwelling at a location, a national organization makes sure it’s up to code, and once they OK it development starts. No more veto-ocracy by local NIMBYs.

Great Britain is no longer a feudal society, you shouldn’t require the permission of the local landlords to build on your own land. Local landlords don’t want you to build a nice apartment that competes with their crack house? Tough. End local planning permission and kick the landlords to the curb.

And now here’s my final suggestion for Keir Starmer, get rid of bank ring-fencing.

Actually that’s not my suggestion, but it was raised as a possibility by British politicians. And the suggestion isn’t that outlandish, Germany ended its ring-fencing over a decade ago

But wait, what is/was ring-fencing? In 2008, the Financial Crisis/Great Recession happened when banks made risky loans, those loans defaulted, and the banks went bust. This cause a knock-on effect throughout the economy.

The risky loans often came from the “investment” side of the banking business, but when the bank went bust even the the “core” side (which held consumer’s money) was hit. Ring-fencing meant keeping investment banking separate from consumer banking, so any bad investment bets would have no effect on consumer savings.

But banks are banks, and economies of scale mean one bank doing two things is usually more efficient than two separate banks. That’s why some want to get rid of ring-fencing and let banks make more money. Germany already did so, why shouldn’t Great Britain? Let the good times roll again.

I don’t know if ending ring-fencing is good or not because honestly I don’t actually know much about its effect. What efficiency is gained by combining consumer banking and investment banking? What is lost by ring-fencing? But I don’t reflexively hate this idea the way I probably would have hated it 10 years ago, less than a decade after the Financial Crisis. I don’t know, I’ll need to do more reading.

So anyway those are my proposals the economy of Great Britain. Keir, if you’re reading: work on this for me, would you?

Deregulation is a dirty word on the left mostly because it’s a clean word on the right. But this reflexive partisanship isn’t helpful, regulations are not always good. Removing bad ones is necessary for an economy to grow. And if Labour wants growth, if they want to stop having to come out with more taxes and less spending every six months, then they need deregulation.

Post Script: Talking about the banking deregulation, I was reminded of Thatcher’s “Financial Big Bang.” No time to discuss it today, but I hope I remember to do so soon, because it’s a fascinating topic that explains a lot about today’s Great Britain.

“No more austerity! The Government needs to invest!”

“Government” is capitalized here because we’re talking about the UK today. I meant to write about it earlier, but Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have been announcing that benefits cuts will hit the UK this year. On top of last year’s tax hikes, this has raised the specter of Austerity, and fears of another Lost Decade in the UK, only this time with Labour at the helm.

Critics of the cuts abound, bringing complains and counsel:

“What happened to the tax rises from last year?!?”

“Austerity failed already! We can’t keep cutting!”

“Tax the rich! Don’t cut off the poor!”

And finally: “We should invest, not cut!”

Let me address these one by one. First, as much as the left-of-center despises the Laffer Curve, it is still an accurate reflection of reality. Raising taxes increases prices and reduces demand. This nearly always leads to a tax rise bringing in less money than the government predicts. They may claim to be modelling the demand reduction, but governments that raise taxes are heavily incentivized to make broad claims about bringing in lots of money to balance the books. Accurate modeling plays second fiddle.

And this has been the case in the UK, the 40 billion pound tax rise announced last year isn’t expected to bring in quite that much. For instance, a tax on private school education was expected to raise money while affecting a minimal number of pupils. But the government underestimated how many families would be unable to afford the tax, pushing those kids back into the public schools, where they aren’t paying the tax and the government will have to pay for their education.

So the government’s tax rise didn’t bring in near enough, and they even raised spending on top of it. The UK now faces a yawning deficit, nearly 5% of GDP. With Debt to GDP already over 100%, the government is finding borrowing unaffordable. The cost of financing all that debt is soaring, it’s 25% higher than it was a year ago at more than 100 billion pounds a year. Remember, that 100 billion pounds is *just the cost of the interest payments*, assuming no money is spent actually paying down the debt. Labour is then adding that 5% deficit on top of that, which will need even more borrowing.

So borrowing is going to cost way more than Labour expected. If they don’t want to enter a debt spiral, they need to manage that deficit.

“But Austerity failed already!” When did the UK ever implement austerity? It was the word of the decade under the coalition government, but despite the tough talk and tax rises, total spending increased every single year of the coalition, and never went down. And this wasn’t “cuts in real terms either,” *real spending* ie inflation adjusted spending, never went down during the Coalition government. It grew more slowly than under Blair/Brown, but it never went down. Boris Johnson has the (dis)honor of overseeing the only year on year reduction in real Government expenses, thanks to the massive pandemic spending that then petered out.

The UK hasn’t done austerity, and it isn’t doing austerity now. The announced cuts aren’t actual reductions in spending, they are really just slowing the rate of spending *increase*. Labour promised massive spending increases last year, and a few of those are being paired back into a smaller increase. This is still an increase in real spending, just less of one than what was promised. This isn’t austerity.

And what of taxing the rich? They’re already pay all the tax. The top 10% of UK earners pay 60% of all taxes, the top 1% pay half of that (ie 30% of the total). The bottom 50% of earners pay 17% of tax. About a third of working age Britons pay no tax at all.

And that is significantly more progressive than on the Continent, the German 10% pay a little over half of their country’s taxes, the German 1% pay a little under a quarter. By and large, the UK taxes the rich more and taxes the poor less than in the rest of Europe.

Of course, the real definition of “rich” is “1 standard deviation above my personal income.” Everyone agrees that someone *else* must pay more, but will the British economy really be improved by chasing off its last remaining high earners to America? Europeans have boasted that Trump will set off a “brain drain” of wealthy Americans, but the difference in after-tax earnings means historically that brain drain has only happened in the America-ward direction. Further tax hikes will only enforce that paradigm.

Finally, shouldn’t the Government *invest* rather than *cut*? The private sector does it all the time! They take out eye-watering amounts of debt and yet somehow come out on top, the public sector should too!

But the Government doesn’t really invest. It spends money, and it uses the language of the private sector to claim that the money is spent well. But the Government doesn’t have the profit incentive that the private sector does, it’s overwhelming incentive is for optics and votes. So as Biden showed us, Government “investment” never really generates a return.

Labour is right to cut spending. They’ve already hiked taxes, and they need to get borrowing costs under control somehow. Besides, Government spending as a proportion of GDP is already nearly 50% in the UK, about 17,000 pounds per person. Just over 10% of the population (people making more than 50,000 pounds) are putting in more money than they’re getting out. The Government already spends a lot of money, and not well. More money in the fire won’t necessarily help.

But like Nigeria’s president Tinubu, Keir Starmer has talked a big game on growth without having the stomach to follow through with it. So again, here’s my unsolicited policy advice:

Keir Starmer should liberalize (liberalise?) the UK’s labor (labour?) laws. UK companies are significantly constrained in their abilities to fire, and this generates a reluctance to hire. The UK has stiff requirements on minimum notice before firing, minimum compensation when you get fired, and if you work there for 2 years a company needs to jump through significant regulatory hoops to be allowed to fire you. These laws should be liberalized to make it easier to fire, and therefore incentive companies to hire.

I know this proposal doesn’t sit well with any of my readers. We’re all workers, I doubt any of us is an owner. But here’s the rule of labor markets: easy go, easy come. The easier it is to fire a worker, the more willing a company will be to hire, and the more nimble a company will be at navigating a changing market.

If a UK company wants to expand, they have to do so very slowly and carefully because any new hire becomes a big liability after 2 years. UK Companies can’t downsize to adjust to market conditions, and so they are hesitant to upsize even during the good times. That makes them grow more slowly, and believe it or not it reduces wages.

Let’s look at Meta as an example: they laid off tens of thousands of employees when the “metaverse” was proven to be a bust. They were able to lay off quickly and adjust their company focus because those metaverse employees weren’t guaranteed a silver parachute. If firing was harder, they might have held on to their losing bet on the metaverse for much longer, because the cost of firing mitigated the upside potential in changing tactics. Then again if firing was harder, Meta might have never made a big expensive bet on the metaverse to begin with.

See the metaverse was a big, expensive failure, but US companies have to expect that most of their bets will fail. But some bets will succeed and wipe out all the loses from the failures, and so US companies are very quick to hire when they’re chasing a big bet.

The ballooning wages in Tech are a symptom of this. Companies like Google and Amazon have made big bet after big bet in the last 20 years, and to when those bets pay off the company starts offering higher and higher wages to expand the company on the success of their big bet. Sometimes those bets go bad and you get layoffs like at Meta. But many of those bets go good and you find that starting salaries in America become higher than mid-tier salaries in most of Europe.

And while Tech is the most famous example, this is endemic in every American industry from energy to pharma and beyond. Liberalized labor markets mean companies are willing to make big bets, meaning some of those bets pay off and the workers get chased by higher salaries. The workers are ultimately the ones who benefit here, that’s why America is such a magnet for high-skilled immigration (on top of its attractiveness for all immigration). Even with Trump in power, tens of thousands of highly skilled immigrants will continue to come to America every year he’s in office, the salaries are just too good to pass up.

That was a lot more than I expected to write on labor markets, but I’ve got more if you’re interested. Stay tuned for the next exciting installment of “if I ruled the world.”

The need for data, the need for good data

Another stream of consciousness, this one will be a story that will make some people go “no shit sherlock,” but it’s a lesson I had to learn on my own, so here goes:

My work wants me to make plans for “professional development,” every year I should be gaining skills or insights that I didn’t have the year before.  Professional development is a whole topic on its own, but for now let’s just know that I pledged to try to integrate machine learning into some of my workflows for reasons.

Machine learning is what we used to call AI.  It’s not necessarily *generative* AI (like ChatGPT), I mean it can be, but it’s not necessarily so.

So for me, integrating machine learning wasn’t about asking ChatGPT to do all my work, rather it was about trying to write some code to take in Big Data and give me a testable hypothesis.  My data was the genetic sequences of many different viruses, and the hypotheses were: “can we predict which animal viruses might spill over and become human viruses?” and “can we predict traits of understudied viruses using the traits of their more well-studied cousins?”.

My problem was data.  

There is actually a LOT of genetic data out there in the internet.  You can search a number of repositories, NCBI is my favorite, and find a seemingly infinite number of genomes for different viruses.  Then you can download them, play around with them, and make machine learning algorithms with them.

But lots of data isn’t useful by itself.  Sure I know the sequences of a billion viruses, what does that get me?  It gets me the sequences of a billion viruses, nothing more nothing less.

What I really need is real-world data *about* those sequences.  For instance: which of these viruses are purely human viruses, purely animal viruses, or infect both humans AND animals?  What cell types does this virus infect?  How high is the untreated mortality rate if you catch it?  How does it enter the cell?

The real world data is “labels” in the language of machine learning, and while I had a ton of data I didn’t have much *labelled* data.  I can’t predict whether an animal virus might become a human virus if I don’t even know which viruses are human-only or animal-only.  I can’t predict traits about viruses if I don’t have any information about those traits.  I can do a lot of fancy math to categorize viruses based on their sequences, but without good labels for those viruses, my categories are meaningless.  I might as well be categorizing the viruses by their taste, for all the good it does me.

Data labels tell you everything that the data can’t, and without them the data can seem useless.  I can say 2 viruses are 99% identical, but what does that even mean?  Is it just two viruses that give you the sniffles and not much else?  Or does one cause hemorrhagic fever and the other causes encephalitis?  

I don’t know if that 1% difference is even important, if these viruses infect 2 different species of animals it’s probably very important.  But if these viruses infect the same animals using identical pathways and are totally identical in every way except for a tiny stretch of DNA, then that 1% is probably unimportant.

Your model is only as good as your data and your data is only as good as your labels.  The real work of machine learning isn’t finding data, it’s finding labelled data.  A lot of machine learning can be about finding tricks to get the data labelled, for instance ChatGPT was trained on things like Wikipedia and Reddit posts because we can be mostly sure those are written by humans.  Similarly if you find some database of viral genomes, and a *different* database of other viral traits (what they infect, their pathway, their mortality rate), then you can get good data and maybe an entire publication just by matching the genomes to their labels.

But the low-hanging fruit was picked a long time ago.  I’m trying to use public repositories, and if there was anything new to mine there then other data miners would have gotten to it first. I still want to somehow integrate machine learning just because I find coding so enjoyable, and it gives me something to do when I don’t want to put on gloves.  But clearly if I want to find anything useful, I have to either learn how to write code that will scrape other databases for their labels, create *my own data*, or maybe get interns to label the data for me as a summer project.  

Stay tuned to find out if I get any interns.

Cheating cheaters

I haven’t written in far too long, so here’s the streams of my consciousness.

I recently learned an acquaintance of mine cheated a fair bit in college. They took classes during COVID, and have confessed to cheating on the at-home exams for difficult classes during the time when distance learning was new and Universities were lax.

I wish I could say otherwise, but it does lower my opinion of this person.

I don’t like cheating at all. A recent bugbear of mine has been the increase in “cheating” I’m seeing on the roads. This may sound like a topic change, but hear me out:

We all have a duty to drive safely. That means obeying posted speed limits, obeying lights, no unsafe behavior. Any car breaking this duty makes the roads less safe for all of us. But we all know why so many cars speed, run red lights, or make right turns from the far left lane: it gets them home faster.

They want to get to where they’re going ASAP and they don’t care how unsafe they make the road. Not just for themselves, but for all the cars around them who now have to swerve out of the way of their dangerous driving and maybe cause secondary wrecks in the process.

Dangerous drivers cheat the system that keeps us safe for very minor gains. And I really despise it. Deaths on the roads have continued to increase year after year since the pandemic, and it seems no city or police force is willing to tackle this. An increase in death is just what the city government wants I guess, revealed preference and all that.

They could halt the dangerous drivers by enforcing traffic laws. Have cops patrol the street, give tickets to any speeder, anyone running a red. Automate the ticketing process if need be, revoke people’s license for dangerous driving, and jail them for years if they drive without a license. Time and time again, research has shown that vigilant enforcement is the only mechanism to reduce lawlessness. If less than 1% of the lawbreakers are ever punished, why wouldn’t everyone break the law?

In times like this you can only fall back on your own morality. Your own willingness to obey the social contract and not endanger your neighbors, even if it would benefit you to get home a few minutes earlier. But many people can’t do that, and so they drive like maniacs.

Going back to my acquaintance, they told their cheating story to me in a moment of weakness. They are struggling a lot with their current work, and I wonder if they revealed this in part as a way to say-without-saying “I’m so stupid, I only succeeded by cheating.” I think this person is smart, but doesn’t know how to apply their effort properly. They feel like they’re grinding themselves into dust to succeed yet still failing. I feel like they’ve completely misplaced their efforts, and they need to step back and analyze the situation instead of just grinding harder and harder for no gain.

But while I hate to admit it, this revelation does color my opinion of them just a bit. I can’t say I’ve been unmoved by the desire to cheat. I can’t say there weren’t times when I wished I could just crack open a book during the test, or ask someone to write a paper for me.

I tell a story that maybe the real reason I never cheated was I was too unimaginative or even lazy to do so. I resisted getting a smart phone until almost the end of college. I never wanted to write notes in tiny writing that I could look at during the test.

Once, in high school, I remember having to write a paper and wishing someone else could do it for me. I did a bit of googling and sure enough there was a website I could find that seemed to have a pre-written paper on exactly my topic. But clicking the link, I could only read the first 2 sentences before a pop-up demanded payment. And as a high schooler without a credit card to my name, I closed the link and went back to procrastinating until I FINALLY wrote the paper myself.

But while I’ve toyed with the idea of cheating, I never fell into it. My acquaintance clearly did.

Everyone justifies their actions of course. “It wasn’t even in my major, so I would never have to know this stuff again, why not cheat” (blatant lie, it was a pre-req for further classes, and I don’t know why they’d even lie about it this).

“I liked the first half of the course, but the second half was just all memorization and it was so boring” (I know the course myself, you shouldn’t be memorizing, you should be studying patterns. You should have studied smarter instead of studied harder, learn the patterns and you don’t need to memorize).

But while it reduces my opinion of them a little, I still think (know?) this person is bright and CAN succeed if they just learn how to properly place their effort. Then again, maybe this cheating story shows a pattern. They didn’t know how to spend their effort to find patterns instead of memorizing, so in the end their only recourse was cheating. They don’t know how to spend their effort now… there won’t be any recourse if they can’t figure it out.

I don’t like Factorio: Space Age

I started, stopped, and started this post several times. I just want to get it out the door so I’m posting it now regardless of that it’s not the greatest. I’ll have more to post on Factorio after this, but my thesis remains: I loved Factorio on it’s own, I don’t like Factorio: Space Age. I don’t think it’s a good expansion pack and I don’t think you should buy it.

Let me ramble about science in the base version of Factorio.

Red science was so simple you could craft it in your inventory. But the long time it took encouraged you to figure out automation to make that unnecessary. Green science was a step up, but it not only tested your automation skills, but also encouraged *and* rewarded you for successfully doing it. To explain: green science needs inserters and belts, which are two things you’ll make a *lot* of in Factorio. If you want to succeed, you’ll need to automate them so might as well do so since they’re also needed for green science. Conversely once you do get over the difficulty hill of automating them, you can split off the inserters and belts you’ll need for your factory, because you probably are building more than what your green science needs. So green science encourages you to automate the things you’ll need to automate anyway, but also rewards you since automating those things is a necessary step in growing the factory.

From there, blue science tests a whole new subject: fluid mechanics. Blue science needs plastics, which needs petroleum gas, which needs oil. If you’ve never dealt with factorio fluids before, blue science demands you learn how. But you’re also rewarded with bots, because blue science unlocks the construction and logistics robots that make the second half of the game so much easier.

Purple science doesn’t feel much different than blue science, but I think the name “production science” is fitting because it’s a real step up in total materials if not complexity. For the most part purple science uses all the same inputs as blue science, but no matter how much I feel I overbuild, I *always* seems to run out of steel for it! Purple science tests your ability to scale, and scale big, because you always need more steel than you think you need.

Finally, yellow science really feels like a final exam. Like purple science you’ll need to have an overwelming volume of inputs, this time copper instead of iron/steel. Blue Circuits and Batteries both require you to have completely mastered the game’s liquid input systems, with multiple steps where chemical plants feed into assemblers and vice versa.

When you finally master yellow, white science is strangely underwelming. It’s mostly “the same but more,” if requires blue circuits and low density structures just like yellow science (plus extra green and red circuits before Space Age came out), but then adds rocket fuel on top of that and a huge space launcher that needs to be built. Not exact a great leap in difficulty, but by then you’re probably just ready for it to end, so it’s in a good place overall.

The thing is, Space Age doesn’t feel like it follows this kind of progression, or any progression. Each planet feels mostly like redoing red and green science. The science pack only demands that you master the basics of automation on this new planet with these new resources. And once you do that, you can leave and never need to return.

It feels… not great. I don’t feel any sense of adventure and progression landing on planet after planet and doing the equivalent of “super simple red/green science, only now with 1 new ingredient no other planet has.”

The space mechanics are like Dyson Sphere Program, in that they aren’t realistic at all and I wish they were. I know making Kerbal Space Program *in* Factorio would have been hard, but at the very least I don’t see why a rocket that runs out of fuel starts slowly sinking back to the planet it launched from, but also doesn’t ever fall into the atmosphere and hit the ground. A rocket that loses fuel just continues to drift on its current trajectory. If you want it to fall back to the planet it launched from, then that trajectory should eventually make it hit the ground. But instead Factorio: Space Age has this worst-of-every-single-world middle ground where things are unituitive *and* unphysical *and* waste your time. My first every space ship didn’t have enough fuel to reach its destination planet, so I had no choice but to wait for it to *sloooooooooooooooowly* drift backwards back to the first planet before I could give it more fuel to try the journey again. I had no way to speed this up, and I had no reason to think it *would even work that way* since that’s not how space travel actually works.

Another thing I dislike, I feel like this game had room for having the planets interact with each other more. The space ships are build off the old system for railroads, but the spaceships aren’t useful as railroads. The game is clear that you should simply be producing your science on each planet and then shipping it all to Nauvis for research. But why does that have to be the *only* option? Why not make it so that we can juggle items and send them all over to each planet? Because the devs decided every challenge in this expansion pack must have *a single specific solution*, rather than letting the player come up with their own solution. That’s bad game design and makes this game less fun.

When I played with rails, yes I would make a starter base for red/green/black science. Then another for blue, another for purple, another for yellow+white. And I’d run a single train line to each of these bases to ship all the science to a single location. But you don’t have to be that lame. You can have train likes running in all directions to ship all raw resources to a centralized location. This can simplify say your green chip production if it all happens in one place and you just siphon those chips to each research that needs them.

Or you can have satellite bases that build intermediate products, say putting all chips in one place and shipping them around. Or a mishmash of both where sometimes you produce everything onsite and only ship the science back and sometimes you’re importing everything just to make science. You can do a lot of things.

You can’t do that in space age because of the seemingly arbitrary restrictions on how much stuff can fit in a rocket. 2,000 green chips can fit in a single rocket, but only 300 blue chips. Blue chips stack a lot more efficiently than that, the only reason for this is the feeling that it would be “too easy” if you could ship blue chips around from Fulgora. But would it be easy, or would it be interesting? They clearly wanted you to engage with space shipping, the entire planet Aquilo punishes you if you don’t, but they didn’t want you to do *enough* space shipping to actually make planet-to-planet production lines like you could with trains in the base game.

And I think that’s a huge missed opportunity, because I’d *love* it if I could be rewarded for interplanetary shipping like this. I’d love to heavily focus Vulcanus on the “low tier” items and Fulgora on the “high tier.” Gleba could specialize in the various oil derivatives with all its bioproducts. Then I could ship whatever I need whereever I need and have an engaging reason to produce a lot of different space ships with different needs.

It feels like the game quite clearly has exactly one way you have to play and doesn’t want you to experiment, rather it wants you to find and accept the “right” way. The most clear version of this is in the asteroids that will hit your space ships. Fighting the biters in the base game gave a huge latitude for experimentation, did you turret creep them? Mass produce grenades and use grenade spam? Drive all around them in a car with autocannons? Go for the defender capsules? There’s a lot of different ways to do things and none of them are wrong. You can use a tank or ignore it completely. You can focus on personal laser defense to kill biters up close, or rush artillery to kill them from afar. Do you even care to try uranium ammo? Or nuclear bombs? Or do you just want to plop down a long line of laser turrets and call it a day? The game lets you play how you want, rewards you for experimenting, and never punishes you for trying something “wrong.”

Space Age punishes you for not playing its way. You need to use turrets in space to protect from asteroids. And you need to build ammo in space to feed the turrets. You can’t use lasers like you could on the ground, because then you’d only need to focus on power, so asteroids have 99% damage reduction against the same lasers that can kill a behemoth biter twice their size. And you can’t ship ammo up to the space ship either, that would be too easy. Instead ammo has been heavily curtailed with how much of it can be shipped to and fro. 25 uranium-coated bullets weigh as much as 1,000 solid iron plates. Check the periodic table and do the math, I assure you it doesn’t add up. Even more crazy is that 25 uranium bullets weigh as much as 50 uranium fuel cells, U-238 really isn’t *that* much heavier than U-235 guys.

And then once you get ammo working, they introduce new asteroids that are 99% resistant to physical damage. All so that you are forced to build rocket turrets instead, which are the new asteroids one weakness. Then finally rocket turrets need to be upgraded to tesla turrets.

There’s no variety here, there’s no experimentation, there’s no reward for trying things your way. You don’t get to try other options like shipping all your ammo up and trying to make it that way. Or focusing on laser turrets instead of gun turrets. Or using walls to ram the asteroids instead of using guns at all. There’s a lot of alternative routes that are just fine to experiment with against biters, but are shot down when you go against asteroids because the devs had a very specific vision in mind for how they wanted space ships to work, and stepping outside of their vision is not allowed.

The game just isn’t fun. The newest planets are hit and miss. Fulgora is nice because it’s a backwards planet, all the most expensive materials are easy to get and all the cheapest materials are harder to get. Vulcanus is my favorite because it actually does something cool: your normal solid products are turned into liquids instead. Gleba is terrible game design and should be deleted entirely. Aquila is unfinished and boring.

And overall even the new planets aren’t fun when I’m just landing, doing 3 things, and then leaving that planet never to return. I don’t feel like these bases are part of “my” base the way I felt when I made an area for purple science and an area for yellow science. I don’t feel like they connect to each other in any way because they don’t.

And I don’t feel like any of the challenges the game presents are worthwhile in their own right, because they’ve all been made with the mindset of “there is only 1 way to properly complete this challenge, find the way the game devs wanted or else.” They’ve specifically put down guard-rails to prevent you from ever having an original thought that wasn’t the solution they themselves wanted, and it just feels lame. Space ship design should be the greatest avenue for player freedom and creativity, but instead everyone’s space ship is *identical* because the devs needed to make the challenges solvable in only 1 precise way. So no one ships ammo to space, no one tries to smash into the asteroids with walls and build up faster than they take damage. No one tries to do anything except the exact solution the devs wanted, and that it such a shame for a game that until now was so focused on player freedom and expression.

Factorio: Space Age is not a good expansion pack. I thought it would rekindle my love for Factorio, but now I never want to play Factorio again. I had been playing for absolute ages, and had recommended the game to friends. But I can’t recommend this expansion pack to anyone I know, it just isn’t what made Factorio so fun to begin with.

Victoria 3: I hope you like GDPmaxxing

You may have thought this blog was abandoned.  Nope, I’m just lazy.  So I didn’t want to write about Factorio (which I have a lot of thoughts about), instead I asked my friend from the Victoria post if he’d talk to me about Victoria and I could type it and clean it up to use as a blog post.  As this was from a conversation, it’s very much in stream of consciousness.  But then isn’t that what this is all about?

I asked him to describe what drew him to playing Victoria 3, and he answered:

The Victoria series is a peculiar one.  A mix of economics, politics, and war that this time is much heavier on the economics than anything else.  The real strategy of Victoria is Soviet Planning meets Laisse-Faire capitalism: the state invests heavily into construction and heavy industry, while letting the capitalists build the consumer goods factories for the masses.

I start every game, no matter the country, by building a bunch of construction sectors. Then I build lumbar yards for wood and iron mines for iron.  Construction sectors are what actually build things, they’re kind of like building companies, and the capitalists can contract them out the same as you.  You get a couple to start but you want a lot more to get off the ground quickly.  Wood and iron are the base construction materials at the start of the game.  If you’re an industrialized nation, you can also add tool factories into the mix, as you’ll be building with tools too.  

I want as much wood, iron, tools, as possible, because the larger surplus you have the cheaper it is to construct things.  Building a port costs the same amount of materials no matter what, but if I can buy those for 30,000 dollars instead of 100,000, that’s a better deal.  Oh yeah Victoria has a sort of supply and demand to model prices, if there’s more of a good available than what is being used, it’s price is cheaper.  So when you have a surplus it’s cheap, when you have a shortage it’s expensive.  A surplus of construction materials makes construction cheap.

I also want a lot of construction sectors so building goes faster.  Construction can only happen at a certain rate, so even if I have infinite money and materials, I’d be waiting for years to build all the factories I wanted if I don’t have enough construction sectors.  

So while I’m building out the construction economy, I’m hoping the capitalists and aristocrats of my country privatize the mines and lumbar yards I’m building.  When they privatize, they give me cash and get themselves an asset in return.  That asset will make money (since I’m building so much stuff), and they can reinvest that money into building more buildings later.  Remember that.

But I’m spending money like water trying to build out my construction economy.  I can jack up taxes but that hurts government legitimacy and makes everyone rebellious (insert American Revolution joke).  And even with sky high taxes, I’ll still run a deficit while building up.  So eventually my national debt will become a problem and I have to stop building before I go bankrupt.  This is when I hope the rich people of my country are ready to reinvest, and give back for the good of the nation.

When rich people in Victoria own a farm or factory, they get dividends based on how profitable it is.  They then use those profits to reinvest back into the economy by building more farms and more factories.  Once I’ve built out the construction industry, it should be very cheap for them to start building things themselves, things like wheat farms and clothing factories.  These soft goods are what my people actually want, you can’t eat iron or wear wood.  So if the peasants actually want to their lives to improve, more wheat farms and clothing factories need to be built by the capitalists, which creates a food and clothing surplus letting the peasants buy things cheaper, meaning the peasants can afford to buy *more things* as well.  

This is industrialization in action.  The rich people who built the factories and farms reinvest their profits into building more things, like wine farms and furniture factories and eventually telephone lines. This makes all those things cheaper and now everyone can afford to live much more comfortably than when we were all living as dirt farmers.  Also the rich Job Creators™ will gracious pay a wage to the factory workers and farmhands, and this wage pays better than what you can get as a subsistence farmer.  So this puts extra money in my peoples’ pockets and is another way that their standard of living can increase.  And since people have more money, they can demand even more stuff, which is why my capitalists have to always be building.  No one is ever satisfied, we always want more, so we need to make more factories to make more goods to bring prices down, hire more people into higher and higher paying jobs so they can buy things, and reinvest all that profit we make so we can keep the cycle going.  Forever.

This is economics, and it’s why I like Victoria.  It takes a real stab at simulating an economy.  And like a real economy, industrializing creates a virtuous cycle that spurs on more industrialization and economic expansion.

EDITOR’S NOTE: this is also why I, the editor not the talker, enjoyed Victoria 2.  Vicky 2 and Vicky 3 both have their strengths, *severe* drawbacks, and plenty of edge-cases where things go crazy.  But they both try in earnest to develop a real, working economics simulator that models both why industrialization was so beneficial, and why it was so hard.

Anyway, as the economy expands, it is hopefully my capitalists doing most of the building, spending their hard-earned dividends on new clothing factories and lowering the price of clothes for my people.  Because as my people can afford more stuff, their Standard of Living (SOL) increases.  The Vicky 3 typeface infuriatingly makes SOL look like SOI, but forget that.  When the people’s SOL increases, they become more loyal to my magnanimous government that made it all happen.  Should their SOL decrease, they become more rebellious (imagine that!).

So we want capitalists to build more factories so people can afford more goods so their SOL increases so my regime becomes stronger and more resilient to all the violent revolutionaries/liberals who would overthrow my absolute monarchy.

See Chapel Comics to understand the joke about liberals https://www.chapelcomic.com/64/

Now I made it sound complicated-yet-manageable up there, but trust me like any good economic simulation there are a ton of moving parts.  In addition to micromanaging what your country builds, you can micromanage its trade, setting up each and every trade route with foreign nations.  It’s *kind* of OK.  Trade routes cost convoys (which you build at ports) and bureaucracy (which you build at government institutions).  So there is still the Victoria 2 problem of there being no travel cost for goods, (a sheaf of wheat costs the same whether you bought it from the next town over or from China).  But by having trade require limited resources the player is at least fenced as to how much trade they can easily do.

And while the game does sort of try to model different economic systems, you’re still playing God even in the Laisse-Faire capitalistic system, you’re still an all-knowing god building the construction sectors and various heavy industry.  

So that’s the stuff I like about Victoria 3, so why couldn’t I convince my friend to play it?

EDITOR’S NOTE: really I didn’t want to buy another paradox game and sign up to a lifetime of DLC

Well I love Victoria 3 as an industrialization simulator, but it doesn’t do much besides that.  

So let’s say you’ve built all the heavy industry and now construction is cheap in your country.  Let’s say you keep on top of things as your economy grows, expanding the construction sector to meet new demands, upgrading your factories with newer technology, and so on.  What else can you do once you have a strong, powerful empire?

Not much really.

In fact, upgrading your factories is sort of a frustrating minigame in and of itself.  In older games, researching a new technology would just apply a flat boost to all your factories that used it, researching a better plow made your farms better.  Now however, you have to actually tell all your farms to use that newer and better tech, and that tech will have some cost (of iron, or tools say) that your farms will have to pay in order to use it.  If you upgrade your farms without having enough iron or tools for them to use, you can actually cause them to lose money as the grain they sell doesn’t cover the cost of the tools they use.

But why am I an omniscient god telling everyone how to run their farms?  Who cares.

OK not sidetracked now: what can you do besides economy?

Well war sucks, so don’t do that.  I mean in the game by the way, it is never fun in real life but games should be fun and in this game war isn’t.  They decided moving every individual army was boring an unrealistic, so instead you vaguely tell all your units to go fight along a “front” and they’re supposed to do all the action for you.  A few problems with this:

First, a “front,” is very very vague and yet each army can only and exactly cover one front.  The whole border between Russia and China could be a front.  Or two neighboring towns in Germany could be two different fronts.  It all depends on how the AI decides to split up the map and sometimes it chooses poorly.  But regardless of how the fronts are split up, a single 60 division army can cover exactly one front, and it will always be able to reach every battle along a ridiculously long front, but will never be able to fight a battle happening on a different front even if it’s within spitting distance.

But then, how exactly do the armies even fight on these fronts?  It’s pure diceroll and I don’t know if any skill is involved.  I click to tell my armies to go to a frontline and fight the enemy, then war vaguely happens offscreen, and I can neither influence it nor does it influence me.

See, wars in Vicky 3 are strangely bloodless affairs.  Soldiers are supposedly dying, territory is blasted with artillery, but it doesn’t seem to affect anything besides a vague “war weariness” number that ticks up until you’re forced to surrender or you win.  If your territory is conquered, you still get all the money from it, your people are still working their jobs, and all the factories are still sending ammo and artillery to your frontline (even though the factories themselves are behind enemy lines).  If your army is annihilated, they flee back to your territory to rest and recuperate, but you never see units wiped out that you have to replace, or see the effects of all the dead soldiers on your populace.  It’s weird, bloodless is the only way I can really describe it.  It’s like they *had* to have wars, because you can’t simulate the 19th century without them, but they didn’t want war to interrupt the economics lesson so they just put it to the side.

EDITOR’S note (long one this time): This is a complete change to how war was in Victoria 2.  Not only on a higher level, in that Vicky2 let you move around every individual division, but on a lower level in how war effected the rest of the game.

Occupied provinces in Vicky2 didn’t send you taxes or resources.  Their factories were blasted to rubble, their farms were torn to pieces.  The people living there would slowly run out of supplies, which not only lowered their life expectancy but made them militant and angry, angry enough to start a revolution.  More than once I would be fighting a war only to see enemy rebels pop up in the lands I had occupied, the occupied people deciding now was the time for a revolution to overthrow both invaders and oppressors.  Wars could turn into an interesting 3-way dance in this way, or even a 4-way dance if multiple different groups rebelled simultaneously.  

And beyond the front lines, the soldier pops themselves were important.  Soldiers staffed their regiments, and as they died in battle new soldiers needed to replace them.  That meant that during war you’d have to use your national focus points to encourage other people to become soldiers and fill the ranks, essentially you put on a huge recruiting drive, and that took away from your abilities to raise literacy or factory output or anything else.  The soldiers themselves all had an identity too, and a home they were from.  

There might be a regiment of say Hungarian soldiers in Vienna.  They might have come from Hungarian people migrating to the Big City for work, and then being encouraged to become soldiers and join the army by your recruitment drive.  You can form them into a division, and as they take loses those Hungarian soldiers in Vienna will shrink more and more and more.  Eventually their division will take so many loses that it will completely disappear, along with the soldiers it was connected to.  

There may be other Hungarians, other Viennese divisions, but the *Hungarian Soldiers From Vienna* could come to an end, all because of a single bloody war where their division took the brunt of the fighting.

You could see these effects happening in real time.  If you recruited soldiers mostly from your nations ethnic minorities, then they’d be the ones to take most of the loses in your wars.  And if your nation discriminated against ethnic minorities, you could find that your own soldiers would rise up and join the rebels when the time came.

None of this seems to happen in Victoria 3 wars.  Farms, factories, and soldiers aren’t all that troubled by the killing, dying, and destruction.  It’s one of the biggest misses in a game full of misses, war doesn’t seem like war.

But unfortunately war is the major way you can interact with an affect the game world.  The AI knows it too, and can be a lot more trigger happy in this game than previous one.  Victoria 2 had a habit of AIs being fairly passive unless you screwed with them.  The “crisis” system was supposed to satisfy a player’s warlust by forcing all the great powers to have a showdown every decade or so, but if you weren’t in Europe you could ignore the crises and everyone else would ignore you (mostly).

Now though a strong AI is happy to march their army to war anywhere, anytime, for any reason.  Russia will send everything it has to Spain in order to support the independence of the Phillipines.  Britain will march on America because they want to change the rulership of Liberia (America’s protectorate).  Italy will send everything it has to Guatemala just because they didn’t want to join Italy’s alliance.  These are all wars that are possible, but somewhat fantastical because in the real world nations didn’t send large armies halfway across the world just for kicks.  Wars happen either with large armies close to home or with very small armies very far away, you don’t send out everything you have because what if your neighbors want to try something while your whole army is away?  You could be conquered in a day by someone far smaller than you.

EDITOR’S NOTE: fun fact, this was kind of the case in WW1.  I was watching a show that pointed out that Germany delayed the implementation of unrestricted warfare submarine warfare until it could bring units back from the Eastern front to station on the border with Denmark.  Submarine warfare didn’t just piss off the Americans and bring them into the war, it pissed off all Germany’s neighbors and could have brought any one of them into war.  There was a real fear that with literally the entire army in France and Russia, a nation as small as Denmark could pull a surprise invasion and be in Berlin before anyone could react, and they would definitely have a reason to if German subs started sinking a lot of Danish ships

So war feels very very gamey, AIs are way too willing to throw down for the slightest cause, but then again war is so painless that they might as well do so yeah?

On and politics?  It’s ok I guess.  Very confusing, very deep, very much something that you dream about and think “oh I wonder what cool things I can do!”  Then you actually play the politics and it’s not much.  

It’s not the worst when it interacts with economics I’ll say that much.  See the powerful people in your country are split up into interest groups (IGs) that have their own ideals and their own desires.  And in a non-industrialized nation, most of the power is held by the large landowning families.  And surprise surprise they don’t like changing the laws in any way that would negatively affect them.  So maybe you want to rationalize the economy to allow for private investment, open up trade to allow for importing of valuable goods, or ending serfdom to allow peasants to take factory jobs.  Any one of those is a threat to their power, so the landowners will forbid it.  And if you try to force the issue, they’ll rise in rebellion and overthrow you, reverting all your hard-fought laws to back to how they were before your reforms.

Reforming an economy in the politic sense is thus an uneasy balance of placating the powerful landowners, undermining their influence where possible, and desperately trying to enact laws before they can rise up against you.

But once you’re past that, the politics is just timers and dicerolls.  There really isn’t much you can do to direct the fate or your nation.  You can sometimes invite foreign agitators to try to start a movement for some cause or another.  You can suppress or support some interest groups to get them to be powerful enough to pass laws.  But it is really all down to chance and factors outside your control.  And there isn’t any real novelty to the politics either, there is pretty much always a “best” law that you want to be aiming for at any one time.  So no matter your nation no matter your starting position, you’ll be trying to pass the same laws the same way everywhere using the same dicerolls and timers.

Not exactly fun.

I’ll end on a final note about Power Blocs, or rather what they should be called which is the EU-lite.  Power Blocs aren’t what they seemed to be named after, where multiple countries join together for a common cause.  Instead they’re modelled almost exclusively after the British and Russian empires, where one nation (Britain, Russia) is *really* in charge but let’s other nations (Canada, Finland) have a tiny bit of sovereignty as a treat.  Those nations can set some of their own policies, but their ultimate fate is to either be swallowed up and annexed by their overlord, or fight a war and escape.  Or I guess wait for their overlord to fight a big war and then ask to leave, that works too.  

Anyway why would anyone join a power bloc, when it all leads to annexation?  Well the key is the EU part of it.  Nations in a power bloc all share a single market.  You should read an economist for a good deep dive as to how common markets are more efficient, but the game does do a damn good job at modeling that too.  You the player don’t have to make sure your own nation produces one of everything, instead other nations can produce some stuff and sell to you in exchange for your stuff.  This lets everyone specialize in their comparative advantage, and unlike the normal trade system this doesn’t cost bureaucracy or convoys, the trade is automatic.  

What this means is that as soon as Britain start building factories to make tools, the rest of its Empire benefits from lower priced tools.  Britain also benefits from having a captive market for its finished goods, sure it’s a lot harder to overproduce tools and cause a surplus that makes your construction cheaper, but you can also let your factories go wild on producing the most high value finished products, because you’ve always got a captive market to sell to.  In turn you can buy up their low value products to keep your population satisfied and keep their standard of living (SOL) rising.

It all makes a certain kind of sense.  I formed a power bloc as America that was a kind of Trade League, which seems to be the only type of Power Bloc that doesn’t end in Annexation.  I invited all of Central and South America into my EU-style trade league, and my population’s SOL shot through the roof.  Overproduction of a good isn’t always useful, because if the cost goes down too much then the people working in the factory don’t get paid (because there is no profit).  This can end with a depression cycle, where their income goes down so their SOL goes down so they buy less meaning the factories sell less meaning their income goes down more, etc.  But all of the Americas was my captive market, any time I build a factory there was someone somewhere to buy the surplus.

And since I had all the best tech, it was always better for the factories to be built in America rather than anywhere else, so it was always my people who got the high paying factory jobs.  The rest of the Americas usually only worked the jobs that were cut off by geography instead of economics.  Large scale coffee and rubber farming for instance.  My capitalists opened rubber farms anywhere they could in South America, and since my factories needed the rubber those rubber farms paid a lot better than any of the less efficient factories opening in those South American countries.

This created a sort of anti-capitalist’s nightmare, capitalism was working by way of a permanent underclass.  The workers in America were getting ever richer because they were producing finished goods to export to South America.  The workers in South America couldn’t compete with the American factories because their nations didn’t have the tech that America did.  They were instead relegated to rubber, coffee, and any other jobs that just couldn’t be done in America or couldn’t be done efficiently.  But they were still benefiting from a rising standard of living (SOL) because the cost of rubber/coffee/etc was rising thanks to American factories and American demand for goods.  This lead to South America also having a rising SOL, just one that was never as high as America, and was capped well below America’s.

The one problem is that that isn’t how it really works in real economics.

The technology of a factory isn’t determine by what country it’s built in, but by the technology available to the investor.  When Apple started building factories in China, they didn’t use Chinese technology (which at the time was well behind America’s).  They brought over all the innovations and insights from Silicon Valley and set up all the tech there.  The factories of China used all the same high tech you’d find anywhere else, just with a lower cost of labor.  

That should be the case in Victoria 3 as well.  It doesn’t make sense that South American factories can never keep up with American ones, if an American capitalist built both then the assembly lines, automatic sewing machines and so on can be brought and shipped to a factory whether it’s in Columbus or Colombia.  You’d expect outsourcing to happen in this scenario, same as happened with China in the 90s and 2000s, but since the technology of a factory is determined by where it’s built and not who builds it, we instead get the anti-capitalist’s nightmare described above.

One final fun fact to end this one: Hawaii was also in my Power Bloc.  I checked the rankings at one point and it was the damnest thing: Hawaii’s standard of living (SOL) was head and shoulders above anywhere else on earth, even my own SOL in America.  

Most nations start the game at SOL of 9 or so.  Industrialized may start at 10, lower tech nations may start at 8.  It’s long and hard to improve your SOL but I’d done a respectable job of bringing America’s SOL up to a baseline of about 20, double what it was at the start and bringing my nation from its starting point of “impoverished,” up through “middling” and into the giddy heights of “secure.”

Hawaii by contrast had an SOL of *35*, way past “secure” and “prosperous,” all the way to “affluent.”  I was shocked, how had this happened?

Well the EU is how, and in a funny way.  See since all the best paying jobs were in America, the people migrated to where the jobs were.  America starts the game with roughly open borders, and if you keep it that way the tired, poor, and huddled masses will be very happy to leave their rubber/coffee jobs and come live in America to work in car factories and get paid 3x as much.

Hawaii starts the game with a miniscule population, and it seemed almost every dang one of them had left and gone to America.  So who was even left to live it large in Hawaii with the SOL of 35?  The capitalists, of course.  

Capitalists can invest in factories remember, and at some point the Hawaiian capitalists had taken advantage of my EU power block to invest in an American factory.  Naturally it was doing gangbusters, and they in turn were swimming in dividends.  So of course they could live the high life, buying lots of stuff since my factories had made everything so cheap.  They could have lots of clothes, porcelain, furniture, even a car or two.  And since all the working classes had gone off to be Americans, the wealthy capitalists were the only ones left on the islands.  This defaulted Hawaii’s SOL to the SOL of the poorest capitalists, an affluent 35 or so.

But wait, if all the working classes left, who sold the capitalists their food?  Who brought over the cars from America, who built their homes and fixed them after the storm?  

No one, like a lot of things Victoria 3 abstracts that all away.  If goods aren’t moved by rail they move by magic, so everything can come off the factory floor in America and teleport magically to the rich capitalist in Hawaii, who never needs to hire a poor handyman to fix his windows or garage either.  

EDITOR’S NOTE: Anyway that’s Vicky 3 in a very long nutshell.  As my friend describes it, you’re here for the economy and *nothing else*.  If economics doesn’t interest you, I hope you don’t mind my blogging.  But if it does, I hope war doesn’t interest you because Vicky 3 doesn’t do it well.  I’d like to say this will be the last time I make a post this scattered and unusual, I wanted to write but didn’t want to so I had someone else write for me essentially.  Hopefully next week we’ll be back to Factorio, I swear I still have much to say about it.

Victoria 3 has the worst UI I’ve ever seen

Short post because I didn’t actually get to *play* this game, I watched a friend play it and he complained to me about this every step of the way.

I used to play Victoria 2, I blogged about it on this blog. But now Victoria 3 has come out and I’m still not into buying Paradox games. Anyway, my friend knew I loved Vicky 2 and wanted to get me into Vicky3. He failed, mostly by his own doing.

He showed me how he was learning the game as Sweden, and asked for my expert Vicky 2 advice (nevermind that Vicky 2 advice is useless in Vicky 3, I think he was humoring me). I wasn’t much help, but then neither was he.

At one point the game told him he had a shortage of lead. He immediately opened up the trade menu to find out both if he could buy lead, and what exactly was using lead because he didn’t know what that resource was used for. The trade menu helpfully said that Sweden was using 1.88 units of lead a day, but also that *no buildings in Sweden use lead*. What?

After clicking around for minutes wondering what the hell was going on, he finally figured it out. He had Norway as a puppet, and *Norway* was using lead. So the tooltip was technically true, BUT IN THE WORST POSSIBLE WAY. You go into these menus to find information, not to be more confused!

Speaking of Norway, at one point a big tooltip popped up that he could reduce their independence to “puppet.” Wanting to eventually annex them, he took the opportunity, then also used that interface to give them knowledge sharing and support their regime. Later on he wanted to revoke these costly privileges, only to find that he couldn’t find the original tooltip he used to enact them.

The diplomacy menu? Nope. Diplomacy lens? Still no. Going into diplomacy then clicking on Norway itself? That just tells you about them. Interactions menu with Norway? Nadda.

After minutes of frustration he just left them be. But this begs the question of why there have to be a dozen different flavors of “diplomacy menu,” with only one of them having the ability to use the support regime/knowledge sharing tools. At one point he could hover over a tooltip helpfully telling him he was knowledge sharing, but no tooltip telling him *how to stop doing so*. It’s like the worse online service you could ever give your credit card too, thousands of menus about how much you’re paying, but no way to *stop* paying. Sounds like Paradox alright.

This is just the tip of the iceberg but the whole game is like this. There’s a lot of tooltips telling you what something *is* without giving you the opportunity to interact with it. Those interactions are hidden in a *separate* menu, but we won’t tell you which one. And don’t think it will be as simple as “Diplomacy is done through the Diplomacy menu,” we made sure to split everything into dozens and dozens of separate menus just to keep you guessing.

He did eventually find what he was looking for, under a separate menu of course. But I think any menu that will tell you *about* something should also include a link letting you *get there and change it*. With such a menu-heavy game like this, little things like that are almost mandatory.

I’m sure the people who have been playing for thousands of hours think this is all fine and understandable. Ignore them, they have Oslo Syndrome from playing nothing but Paradox games and thinking this kind of UI is acceptable. Everything from Political Parties to Trade to Diplomacy being split between dozens and dozens of disconnected screens is not good gameplay design, and Paradox really needs to learn how to hyperlink so if they *are* going to demand so many screens, at least you can navigate to them from anywhere else instead of following the one and only trail of breadcrumbs that they themselves have laid.

Anyway I’ll try to have another few posts on Factorio up sometime. I have a lot to say about it.

If the government doesn’t do this, no one will

I’m not exactly happy about the recent NIH news. For reference the NIH has decided to change how it pays for the indirect costs of research. When the NIH gives a 1 million dollar grant, the University which receives the grant is allowed to demand a number of “indirect costs” to support the research.

These add up to a certain percentage tacked onto the price of the grant. For a Harvard grant, this was about 65%, for a smaller college it could be 40%. What it meant was that a 1 million grant to Harvard was actually 1.65 million, while a smaller college got 1.4 million, 1 million was always for the research, but 0.65 or 0.4 was for the “indirect costs” that made the research possible.

The NIH has just slashed those costs to the bone, saying it will pay no more than 15% in indirect costs. A 1 million dollar grant will now give no more than 1.15 million.

There’s a lot going on here so let me try to take it step by step. First, some indirect costs are absolutely necessary. The “direct costs” of a grant *may not* pay for certain things like building maintenance, legal aid (to comply with research regulations), and certain research services. Those services are still needed to run the research though, and have to be paid for somehow, thus indirect costs were the way to pay them.

Also some research costs are hard to itemize. Exactly how much should each lab pay for the HVAC that heats and cools their building? Hard to calculate, but the building must be at a livable temperature or no researcher will ever work in it, and any biological experiment will fail as well. Indirect costs were a way to pay for all the building expenses that researchers didn’t want to itemize.

So indirect costs were necessary, but were also abused.

See, unlike what I wrote above, a *university* almost never receives a government grant, a *primary investigator* (called a PI) does instead. The PI gets the direct grant money (the 1 million dollars), but the University gets the indirect costs (the 0.4 to 0.65 million). The PI gets no say over how the University spends the 0.5 million, and many have complained that far from supporting research, the University is using indirect costs to subsidize their own largess, beautifying buildings, building statues, creating ever more useless administrative positions, all without actually using that money how it’s supposed to be used: supporting research.

So it’s clear something had to be done about indirect costs. They were definitely necessary, if there were no indirect costs most researchers would not be able to research as Universities won’t allow you to use their space for free, and direct costs don’t always allow you to rent out lab space. But they were abused in that Universities used them for a whole host of non-research purposes.

There was also what I feel is a moral hazard in indirect costs. More prestigious universities, like Harvard, were able to demand the highest indirect costs, while less prestigious universities were not. Why? It’s not like research costs more just because you have a Harvard name tag. It’s just because Harvard has the power to demand more money, so demand they shall. Of course Harvard would use that extra money they demanded on whatever extravagance they wanted.

The only defense of Harvard’s higher costs is that it’s doing research in a higher cost of living environment. Boston is one of the most expensive cities in America, maybe the world. But Social Security doesn’t pay you more if you live in Boston or in Kalamazoo. Other government programs hand you a set amount of cash and demand you make ends meet with it. So too could Harvard. They could have used their size and prestige to find economies of scale that would give them *less* proportional indirect costs than could a smaller university. But they didn’t, they demanded more.

So indirect costs have been slashed. If this announcement holds (and that’s never certain with this administration, whether they walk it back or are sued to undo it are both equally likely), it will lead to some major changes.

Some universities will demand researcher pay a surcharge for using facilities, and that charge will be paid for by direct costs instead. The end result will be the university still gets money, but we can hope that the money will have a bit more oversight. If a researcher balks at a surcharge, they can always threaten to leave and move their lab.

Researchers as a whole can likely unionize in some states. And researchers, being closer to the university than the government, can more easily demand that this surcharge *actually* support research instead of going to the University’s slush fund.

Or perhaps it will just mean more paperwork for researchers with no benefit.

At the same time some universities might stop offering certain services for research in general, since they can no longer finance that through indirect costs. Again we can hope that direct costs can at least pay for those, so that the services which were useful stay solvent and the services which were useless go away. This could be a net gain. Or perhaps none will stay solvent and this will be a net loss.

And importantly, for now, the NIH budget has not changed. They have a certain amount of money they can spend, and will still spend all of it. If they used to give out grants that were 1.65 million and now give out grants that are 1.15 million, that just means more individual grants, not less money. Or perhaps this is the first step toward slashing the NIH budget. That would be terrible, but no evidence of it yet.

What I want to push back on though, is this idea I’ve seen floating around that this will be the death of research, the end of PhDs, or the end of American tech dominance. Arguments like this are rooted in a fallacy I named in the title: “if the government doesn’t do this, no one will.”

These grants fund PhDs who then work in industry. Some have tried to claim that this change will mean there won’t be bright PhDs to go to industry and work on the future of American tech. But to be honest, this was always privatizing profit and socializing cost. All Americans pay taxes that support these PhDs, but overwelmingly the benefits are gained by the PhD holder and the company they work for, neither of whom had to pay for it.

“Yes but we all benefit from their technology!” We benefit from a lot of things. We benefit from Microsoft’s suite of software and cloud services. We benefit from Amazon’s logistics network. We benefit form Tesla’s EV charging infrastructure. *But should we tax every citizen to directly subsidize Microsoft, Amazon, and Tesla?* Most would say. no. The marginal benefits to society are not worth the direct costs to the taxpayer. So why subsidize the companies hiring PhDs?

Because people will still do things even if the government doesn’t pay them. Tesla built a nation-wide network of EV chargers, while the American government couldn’t even build 10 of them. Even federal money was not necessary for Tesla to build EV chargers, they built them of their own free will. And before you falsely claim how much Tesla is government subsidized, an EV tax credit benefits the *EV buyer* not the EV seller. And besides, if EV tax credits are such a boon to Tesla, then why not own the fascists by having the Feds and California cut them completely? Take the EV tax credits to 0, that will really show Tesla. But of course no one will because we all really know who the tax credits support, they support the buyers and we want to keep them to make sure people switch from ICE cars to EVs

Diatribe aside, Tesla, Amazon, and Microsoft have all built critical American infrastructure without a dime of government investment. If PhDs are so necessary (and they probably are), then I don’t doubt the market will rise to meet the need. I suspect more companies will be willing to sponsor PhDs and University research. I suspect more professors will become knowledgeable about IP and will attempt to take their research into the market. I suspect more companies will offer scholarships where after achieving a PhD, you promise to work for the company on X project for Y amount of years. Companies won’t just shrug and go out of business if they can’t find workers, they will in fact work to make them.

I do suspect there will be *less* money for PhDs in this case however. As I said before, the PhD pipeline in America has been to privatize profits and subsidize costs. All American taxpayers pay billions towards the Universities and Researchers that produce PhD candidates, but only the candidates and the companies they work for really see the gain. But perhaps this can realign the PhD pipeline with what the market wants and needs. Less PhDs of dubious quality and job prospect, more with necessary and marketable skills.

I just want to push back on the idea that the end of government money is a deathknell for industry. If an industry is profitable, and if it sees an avenue for growth, it will reinvest profits in pursuit of growth. If the government subsidizes the training needed for that industry to grow, then instead it will invest in infrastructure, marketing, IP and everything else. If training is no longer subsidized, then industry will subsidize it themselves. If PhDs are really needed for American tech dominance, then I absolutely assure you that even the complete end of the NIH will not end the PhD pipeline, it will simply shift it towards company-sponsored or (for the rich) self-sponsored research.

Besides, the funding for research provided by the NIH is still absolutely *dwarfed* by what a *single* pharma company can spend, and there are hundreds of pharma companies *and many many other types of health companies* out there doing research. The end of government-funded research is *not* the end of research.

Now just to end on this note: I want to be clear that I do not support the end of the NIH. I want the NIH to continue, I’d be happier if its budget increased. I think indirect costs were a problem but I think this slash-down-to-15% was a mistake. But I think too many people are locked into a “government-only” mindset and cannot see what’s really out there.

If the worst comes to pass, and if you cannot find NIH funding, go to the private sector, go to the non-profits. They already provided less than the NIH in indirect costs but they still funded a lot of research, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Open your mind, expand your horizons, try to find out how you can get non-governmental funding, because if the worst happens that may be your only option.

But don’t lie and whine that if the government doesn’t do something, then nobody will. That wasn’t true with EV chargers, it isn’t true with biomedical research, and it is a lesson we all must learn if the worst does start to happen.

Quick update on games that play themselves

A while ago I wrote about games that play themselves and why they’re a genre I really enjoy. The gist of that post is that there’s a type of game (Victoria 2 and Factorio were my examples) where the start of the game is an impossible grind against endless problems, but by the end you’ve automated most of your problems away and have created a self-sustaining system. The game eventually plays itself, without much needed for input.

Of course you can still have input, old challenges being automated away just means you can create new challenges for yourself. In Victoria, educating and industrializing your populace eventually meant they’d build factories and run the economy for your, but that meant you were now free to go map painting or play border police. Factorio’s late game gives you an army of bots who will upkeep and rebuilt the factory for you, but that means you can now focus on building the biggest base possible and researching the infinite techs.

I watched a video from youtuber tehsnakerer about Evil Genius and one of his complaints about the game seemed to be something I’d like, that by the end it plays itself. You start out trying to finagle minions and ensure your base is running smoothly, and once it is you can be a lot more hands off with the thing. He didn’t seem to like that and treated it as a negative, but I wonder if I’d enjoy it. I never played Evil Genius, but maybe I should give it a go.

Stardew Valley: Nitpicks and Wishes for more

To round out my series on Stardew Valley, I’d like to talk about where I *wished* the story had gone. I already spoiled the whole story in a prior post: the spoiler is that there isn’t really a story to spoil. Now I’ll talk more about the story I *wish* I could have spoiled.

I want to start by acknowledging that Stardew Valley was made by just 1 guy. All by himself. I know that he didn’t have the time or the resources to write a national epic. So I only want to talk about story beats which I feel could have been added in easily using the simple dialogue and cutscenes the game already uses.

To start: I wish the Jumino, Jojo Mart (aka Evil Walmart), and Mine plotlines were more interconnected. I wish Jojo Mart was more overtly corrupting the town, and the Juminos were fighting back. And I wish the monsters in the mine were set loose by the Jojo Mart mining operation.

To start, I think that Jojo Mart corrupting the town could have been gotten across in the few few dialogues with the townsfolk. On the first day you get a quest to introduce yourself around town, but while this is a great way to meet the neighbors they all have very generic greeting dialogue. Some might say “oh you’re that new farmer!” to let you know they’re friendly, and I think one says “why are you talking to me” to let you know he’s unfriendly, but more could be done with this.

Pam is the town bus driver, but her bus is broken down. I wish she’d complain about that when you first meet her: “I drive the bus to Pelican town, or I used to”. Shane works at Jojo Mart and seems to hate his job, I wish he said something about that: “do I like my job? Of course not, but what other choices do I have around here?” And a few people could complain about how you’re the first new face they’ve seen in ages, mostly people just move *away*. They could even connect that by saying that when Jojo Mart came they thought it would breathe life into the town, but instead the decline accelerated.

Not every character needs to say something like that, I’d say no more than 5 pieces of dialogue need to be written. But when you’re introducing yourself, this would at least give more of a hint that the town isn’t entirely happy-go-lucky, and that the conflict with the Evil Walmart is something the townsfolk take seriously. As it stands, only Pierre seems to care, and that’s only because he runs the General Store, which is the single solitary store that actually competes with Jojo Mart.

The conflict can still be generic and maybe not even outright stated. I’ve love if Jojo Mart were some secretive evil corp that knew about and was working against the Juminos. But it could be the simple hippy complaint of “ever since Walmart came to town, the jobs and happiness left,” which is a fine premise for conflict even if I disagree with its economics.

So once it’s better established that the Evil Walmart *is* Evil, then I think a lot of the game does a fine job with background storytelling about how the town is decaying and the Juminos want to fix it. The bus is broken, the Juminos fix it. The mine carts are broken, the Juminos fix it. The community center was once the life of the town, the Juminos can bring it back. And it would mean so much more to be able to kick out the Evil Walmart if they were actually established as a degrading influence in the first place.

From there, I wish the game actually did something with the mines. You get a quest early on to reach the bottom of the mines, and I assumed there’d be mystery and revalations down there. Instead all there is is some combat items and a key which unlocks a post-game infinite dungeon where you can fight in the mines forever. It’s fine as a gameplay reward, but really underwhelming overall.

I’d like it if every 30 floors of the mine, instead of just getting a combat item you got a diary page from the Jojo Mart expedition which caved in the mines in the first place (as seen at the start of the game). Chasing diary pages is hardly groundbreaking storytelling, but I would have appreciated it and it would have given a chance to let us Know Our Enemy, if indeed the game’s only plotline is working against Jojo Mart.

The diary could be generically evil, talking about strip mining for minerals and Digging Too Deep/Too Greedily. But it could also give some weight to the Juminos. Does Jojo Know about them? Are they working against them? Do the Juminos specifically hate Jojo Mart as a commercialization entity that’s destroying good old fashioned farming values? Or are they just sad that the town has lost touch with nature?

Finally, the diary could explain that it was Jojo that awakened the monsters in the mine, and that’s why its suddenly so dangerous. Now maybe this isn’t what the creator had in mind, I mean there’s an adventurer’s guild, maybe in his mind the mine has always been dangerous. But personally I thought it was a little weird that there’s these deadly creatures right outside town and no one seems to care. I’d be more willing to accept it if they only started being there recently.

Finally, I like that the Juminos don’t really say much, and mostly just emote happily at you. But I’d like to know just a bit more about *why* they were there, and I think the wizard from the beginning can be a good character for this.

I said earlier how I thought it was strange that in this otherwise modernish farming sim, you have to speak to a wizard who helps you translate the Jumino’s message. He becomes a character you can befriend after this, but otherwise I don’t think he has any story relevance, he’s just some guy. A nice guy, but just a guy.

I wish his friendship arc had him taking on more of a mentor role, telling you about the Juminos, about forest spirits, about how they protect the town and how the town lost its way. Again nothing groundbreaking, but it would at least satisfy my curiosity that there *is* an answer, because in the actual game I spent the whole game hoping to find an answer and getting nothing.

In fact, with regards to the wizard, the adventurers guild, and the Juminos, it feels overall weird that this game is set in present day. The Mayor has a car, you arrive to town on a bus, there’s TVs and electricity all over. And yet there’s a wizard, an adventurer’s guild, friendly forest spirits, and evil monsters in the mine. This could have been an attempt at modern fantasy, or magical realism, but a straight-up robes and wizard hat wizard still felt jarring to me when I first played. I wish the wizard had more to do with the story, because that jarring feeling could have meant something, I could have recalled that feeling as I reflected on how much I’d learned from the wizard over the course of the game. But instead it’s just a moment of “ok, this game is weird” before he starts acting like any other character.

Anyway that’s what I wish the story of the game was like. I wish there was more of a conflict with Jojo Mart, I wish the mines gave you nuggets of story, and I wish someone, preferably the wizard, told you more about the Juminos. The game is still incredibly, I’ve played through it multiple times, but I still wish the story was a little more than nothing at all.