Intellectual Dandyism

Donna Summer died today. As a result of being big during the age of disco, most of her discography hasn't really been listened to by most people who weren't alive for disco - I think only ABBA, the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and a very small selection managed to really avoid the whole "disco sucks" blowback that hit in the 1980's and never really left. And this is not to say I'm any different, because there is only one Donna Summer song that I know.

But here's the thing: "Hot Stuff" is my go-to karaoke song.

Those of you who've seen me do karaoke know that I go for broke with it. I know I can't sing worth a damn, but I know I can still be a balls-out, leave it all out on the field entertainer during karaoke. It's like the time I won a dance contest - nobody expects me to act like that,¹ so when I do, it gets the laughs. And nothing quite gets the laughs like busting out "Hot Stuff" while doing a fairly cruddy Paul Robeson impresson.²

So, thank you Donna Summer. And wherever you are, I hope you find that hot stuff. Tonight.



Harold

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¹ I really don't understand why. I'm a very silly person, when you get right down to it. I might have a bit too much pride, but when it comes to trying to get a laugh, I have no shame.

² This is a lie. Many things get those kinds of laughs. But people generally remember the Donna Summer bit.

Allegations have been leveled at Mitt Romney that he was a pretty vicious bully back in boarding school. According to one account, he snipped off quite a bit of hair of one student while his cronies held that student down, and other stories are no better.

Some people believe this is a troubling sign and that he shouldn't be president in view of these allegations, which have gone wholly undenied. I disagree. There are plenty of people out there who are pretty damn awful back in high school. I was one of them - as my friends from back then can attest, I actually started my own cult at one point in high school. This isn't the sort of thing I do anymore, and I'd like to think that I've become a better person since high school. Hell, I'd like to think that most people did, and if my high school reunion was any indication, I don't think it's an irrational belief.

What I do find to be a troubling sign is that Romney claims to not remember doing any of it but that he is sorry if he hurt anyone. If Romney does not remember having bullied anyone at boarding school, he by definition cannot regret having done so. Regret, repentance and atonement can only come if you know what you did and that you know it was wrong. So rather than say something along the lines of "I was a creep then, and I deeply regret my behavior," all Romney has said is "well, I'm sorry you were offended by my behavior" - the classic non-apology. And if all you can say about having been that much of a bully is "I'm sorry you were offended," then you're really not a very good person.

Also, I find it rather difficult to believe that Romney doesn't remember doing this sort of thing. If he doesn't remember it, it implies there was something routine about the hair-cutting incident and he found nothing remarkable about it. While I'm sure I've done crappy things that I can't remember having done now, I'd like to think if I did something like rounding up a posse to physically assault someone, it would haunt me for some time. I'd rather think that Romney does remember this and is so ashamed of his behavior that he'd rather pretend he doesn't remember it. Of course, that's not really all that much better - an inability to meaningfully accept responsibility for actions committed and to admit wrongdoing isn't much to recommend a person, either.

Most of our presidents have not been paragons of virtue. So that Mitt Romney bullied kids in high school and doesn't regret having done so - only having gotten caught years later - doesn't disqualify him from consideration as a candidate¹ but there is something decidedly disquieting about it.

It's also not a great sign that while Romney can't remember the incident, he can remember that the person he bullied later came out of the closet. It makes it look like the incident was motivated by homophobia, at least in part. And whereas hateful worldviews such as homophobia and racism certainly have existed within some of our greatest presidents,² it should be something to give a voter pause.

Harold

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¹ There's plenty of other things that do that.

² I really can only cite examples of racism - homophobia in the White House is less well-documented. That said, Washington owned slaves, Lincoln did believe in the racial inferiority of those of African descent and Theodore Roosevelt used the word "Chinese" as a synonym for "stupid" and "weak." Might have been a different time, but still pretty nasty stuff.

As I suspected, PASOK was not capable of putting together a coalition. There's going to be a last-ditch attempt to put together a coalition, but it's probably going to fail - PASOK and New Democracy could probably govern in coalition if they had a majority together, but they only have 149 out of 300 seats. SYRIZA won't come to the table - polling has them winning a second round of elections, and the other parties can only benefit from being a coalition led by SYRIZA as opposed to being the most junior partner in a PASOK-New Democracy coalition.¹

So, when we see SYRIZA as the senior partner in a coalition government, what then?

Everybody knows Greece is too big to fail. If it does not receive aid packages, it will default on its debt. If it does not maintain its austerity measures, the aid packages from fellow EU countries will dry up because the aid packages will be too unpopular to pass. If SYRIZA is the primary coalition partner in a Greek government, the austerity measures will not be maintained.

There are two conditionals in the above chain that are not certainties. First, it's possible that SYRIZA will go back on its campaign promises - but this is beyond unlikely as the party couldn't survive that. It is also possible that the other EU countries will renegotiate the aid packages to not be entirely dependent on the continuation of austerity measures.

This is also unlikely. The big donor here is Germany, but the German population doesn't want to keep going with the spending. There's a general feeling in Germany that they really shouldn't have to keep paying reparations for the Second World War sixty-five years after it ended,² and that the EU subsidies effectively are reparations. Whether or not this is true is debatable, but it sure gets harder to argue it isn't when countries such as Greece start rumbling about Nazi gold theft. So while the German leadership almost certainly understands that letting Greece fail is a fundamentally bad idea, justifying the expense to an angry population³ would be spectacularly difficult. "We'll be screwed later" doesn't really resonate with voters.

Which, of course, means that there's really only one place from whence the aid will come. The Federal Reserve is pretty good about handing over money quietly - earlier this year, it surfaced that the Federal Reserve had lent banks literally trillions of dollars for a few fractions of a basis point in interest. The banks had subsequently used the money to buy Treasuries and net a fast, completely safe profit. So it'll probably be the US that bails out Greece, with a smaller over-the-table aid package and larger under-the-table one from the Fed specifically.

So yes, our tax dollars will probably go to bail out Greece, which really means "paying off banks who hold Greek debt." I could be angry about this, but given the alternative, I'm happy just paying my taxes.

Harold

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¹ Well, Golden Dawn isn't really going to benefit from it, but Golden Dawn isn't going to be a coalition partner either way - the allegations of neo-Nazism are probably deserved.

To discuss some of Golden Dawn's more controversial actions, members and positions:
- The party is associated with the Greek Volunteer Guard, which was certainly at and possibly engaged in the Srebrenica genocide.
- It is in favor of mining the Greek border.
- Its leadership has spoken favorably about Hitler.
- It believes in banning trade unions.

² This opinion is, to put it simply, justified. People who were 18 in 1945 are now 85 - anybody who had any real legal authority in Germany is very likely dead right now. At the very least, they are far away the minority, and soon to be an extinct one. The country underwent extensive de-Nazification and has paid reparations, including DM 3.45 billion in Holocaust reparations (an idea initially proposed by the West German government).

³ Not irrationally angry, mind you: I can understand being fairly pissed about having to bail out a profligate spender who's determined to spend more. I can also understand the Greek government's desire to engage in Keynesian spending.

British bookmakers have stopped taking bets that the Greeks will leave the Euro. In other words, I'm not the only guy bearish on both Greece and the Euro at large.

And the situation in Greece is only getting worse. SYRIZA, the Coalition of the Radical Left, could not actually assemble a coalition - contrary to my expectations, they couldn't even get the KKE (the communists) on board, but right in line with my expectations, they did not even bother with the ultra-nationalists - and so, it has now fallen to PASOK.

PASOK is a socialist party - the Panhellenic Socialist Movement - but was in charge for the austerity measures and thus went from being one of the two largest parties to being a rather unpopular third. The chances that PASOK will pick up seats from in a second election are fairly small, which means that if you're any other party (with the possible exception of pro-austerity New Democracy), you have little incentive to make the deal. It's going to come down to another round of elections.¹

As I mentioned in my last post on this topic, it's difficult to imagine a scenario in which Greece doesn't get bailed out - the effects of not doing so would be utterly catastrophic, making 2008 like a slight hiccup. Greece is too big to fail, and if it goes, the rest of the PIIGS² will be next.

It's true that Greece's history of devaluing the drachma did not lead to good rates of growth, and that its growth rate has been better under the Euro. However, it's also important to note that Greece was politically unstable during most of the twentieth century, and only after the Cold War did things come close to settling down. Which is to say that while Greece devaluing its currency in the past hasn't really worked that well, it's entirely possible that this was due to other factors. And at the very least, it's clear that Greece needs every tool in the box to get its economy above water again.

But if Greece leaves, it'll spike volatility in the currency markets at the very least. Some level of volatility is to be expected and appreciated - volatility is how traders make money in markets. It's also how they lose it, however, and when the market gets too difficult to predict - the exact results of a volatility spike - people start fleeing to more stable ground. The way to do this is to dump your less predictable assets for more predictable ones,³ which pretty much means wrecking the prices of stocks and higher risk bonds and sending the prices of Gilts and Treasuries soaring.

Thus we come to the main question: knowing that leaving the Euro may well trigger a global economic meltdown, would Greece still do it? A lot of people are betting "yes." I'm praying "no."

Harold

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¹ Greece isn't anywhere close to being a record-holder for "longest time without a government." That honor goes to Belgium, which went 541 days without a government in 2010 and 2011. It isn't entirely surprising that Belgium had such trouble forming a government - while the presence of Belgium as a buffer state made some sense back in the nineteenth century (and utterly failed to work in the first half of the twentieth), there's very little reason these days for Belgium to exist as one country.

² I've also seen it as PIGSI and PIGSE: Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain and Ireland (Eire). In short, the Mediterranean and Ireland.

³ This happens frequently, but it's easy to forget - even if you're a Nobel Prize winner. Long Term Capital Management managed to forget this in 1998 with the South Asian and Russian financial crises, and that hedge fund had two Nobel Prize winners on staff. Robert Merton and Myron Scholes, along with Fischer Black, created the Black-Scholes Model, which is still largely the standard model of options pricing.

It also happens to be a very familiar-looking equation to a guy trained as an aerospace engineer - it's a partial differential equation in much the same style as those that describe heat transfer.

North Carolina passed Amendment 1 yesterday. This amendment to the North Carolina constitution formally defines marriage as existing between a man and a woman. Obviously, this is a bad thing - the creation of legislation designed to deny one group of people rights is about as heinous an abuse of law as there gets. So, yes, I think it's utterly disgusting, bordering on nauseating, that the amendment passed.

However, I don't find my disgust and/or desire for emesis particularly interesting. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, it's like saying you're against apartheid or Jim Crow.¹ Human decency is important, but I generally can't be arsed to talk about it.

I think it's fairly clear, however, that while this is a setback in the fight for gay rights, it's only a temporary one. In fact, the people who pushed it through knew it was a temporary measure, which is why they made it as difficult as possible to reverse. The younger generation in this country supports gay rights rather strongly, so that while gay marriage may still be controversial in twenty years, its legality will not be. Except, of course, in states where there are constitutional amendments against it, because those things are not easy to get rid of. Tack on another ten years there.

Which, just to be clear, is thirty years longer than these sorts of laws should be on the books, and will be another black mark in the history of our nation. At the same time, I'd like to think that our society is getting marginally better at the civil rights thing - the political movement to extend civil rights to gays is rather newer than the movements to extend them to women and to African Americans were when they started achieving success. We're still not good at this - compared to most of the world's countries, we are better, but then again, most of the world's countries aren't democracies - but I think we're making progress. Maybe it's just wishful thinking, though. Heaven knows it would be no consolation for me whatsoever were I gay.

However, there is one group for which it is not a temporary setback, and that is evangelical Christians. It would be a lie to say that all evangelical Christians have been behind the push for anti-gay rights legislation, but it would be fairly accurate to say that the loudest voices have come from that group.² As has been previously mentioned, being a proponent of anti-gay rights legislation is a losing position in the long-term.

It's no great loss if the anti-gay rights people can't get more people in with them. To be completely honest, it's a net gain for society. But as for those people who aren't pushing this sort of tripe into law and who proudly attribute their decency to their Christianity, well, it is a bit of a loss that they're going to get tarred with this same brush. It's nothing remotely so heinous as the legislative bigotry enacted in North Carolina earlier this week, but it is a bit of a pity all the same.

The evangelicals in North Carolina who pushed this through are probably of the opinion that this was a great victory. It doesn't get more Pyrrhic than this.

Also, for whatever reason, people have been posting to Facebook relentlessly about Obama's support for the legality of gay marriage. I don't find this position admirable or courageous so much as I do "in keeping with basic human decency." Considering the President's past record on this - by which I mean his record of ordering the assassination of sixteen-year-old US citizens - perhaps the attaboys are a good idea, but considering that his announcement of support came out after it was too late to do anything in the North Carolina vote, I think a slightly more muted response would probably be more appropriate. Perhaps a "Well, it's nice you're saying something now, but where were you a week ago?" would do nicely.

Harold

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¹ And both of those institutions were defended on religious grounds as well.

² At least in the case of North Carolina. You might recall that California's Proposition 8 was largely driven by the LDS Church.

If you look back in the blog archives, you'll notice that there's a set of posts about my experience in the Case chapter of the AEPi fraternity, an experience that was thoroughly enjoyable and positive at the beginning and then ended up devolving into an unending maelstrom of anger, hate and bitterness where each party acted purely in self-interest and blamed everyone else for the ultimate failure of the organization.

This sort of organization should sound instantly familiar to anyone following the news these days, because it pretty much sums up the European Union perfectly.

The Greek parliamentary election results have come in and the New Democracy and PASOK parties, the ones that presided over the austerity measures, ended up being the big losers. New Democracy is still the largest party in parliament, but the second largest party, and more to the point, the one trying to put together a coalition government is now SYRIZA - whose name in English is "the Coalition of the Radical Left." SYRIZA can pick up the Communist party in coalition, and likely the Democratic Left as well. However, in order to pick up a majority government, SYRIZA also needs the support of either PASOK or New Democracy.¹ In other words, there's likely going to be a second round of voting and the aid from the European Union could quite possibly get suspended in the meantime.

It will almost certainly get suspended if the Greeks go off the austerity measures. It's not in the best interests of the world economy, but the governments of those European countries subsidizing the write-down are barely capable of selling the aid package to their constituents as is.

And it's not as though anyone could really blame the Greeks for not wanting to keep going with austerity measures. The Greek economy, which wasn't good to begin with, has thoroughly crapped the bed since the implementation of the measures. An economy in the crapper means less tax revenue, which means even more draconian austerity measures. Even if you believe that cutting tax rates automatically improves an economy,² that takes time.

And it's not as though the Greeks are alone in tossing out governments that pushed through austerity. The French presidential elections saw Nicolas Sarkozy come in second place to Socialist Francois Hollande. A fifth of the vote went to the far right candidate Marine Le Pen. The Dutch government collapsed after the withdrawal of the far-right PVV's withdrawal from the coalition over budgetary concerns. I don't see the new elections bringing in a pro-austerity measures government, either.³

The EU will not survive a Greek default, but right now, there is no way that the EU can prevent a Greek default. Hell, even if the Greeks go into a second round of voting and put in place a pro-austerity measures government, there'll still need to be more debt write-downs. If the EU is going to stay afloat, someone else is going to need to get involved.

(And yes, "someone else" means the US. You might think this is unlikely given the unpopularity of the 2008 bailouts. However, I would like to point out that one US firm has already suffered an extremely high profile bankruptcy due to the Greek sovereign debt crisis⁴ - and there hasn't been a default yet. The question is not if the Fed will step in, but rather, when.)

Here's where I'm supposed to give a eulogy and say that the European Union was a noble experiment. But really, it wasn't. It started off as a decent idea motivated principally by self-interest, but then it just became a bunch of people spouting high ideals while lying like rugs in order to be part of the cool kids' club. Chances are, it'll survive in some form or another, but really, it has lost all credibility in the eyes of its member countries. And honestly, if your organization can't survive its first major crisis, then it probably doesn't deserve to survive anyway.

Harold

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¹ Theoretically, the Independent Greeks and Golden Dawn also have just enough seats that if they join in a coalition with the other parties, that's enough. However, Golden Dawn has been accused of neo-Nazism and its symbol looks remarkably like a swastika. There's no way such a party joins in an alliance with communists.

² If you actually hold this belief, you are a moron. It is possible to stimulate economic activity by lowering taxes - for example, in the cases where marginal tax rates are over 100% - but it's like taking antibiotics: it solves problems that fall into a specific set of criteria.

³ As I've mentioned before, it's instructive to compare the US and the UK. The US responded to the 2008 economic crisis with Keynesian spending. The UK responded with austerity measures. The US economy is now doing rather better. Even if you believe this is coincidence - which I don't agree with - you still have to deal with the fact that many people won't perceive it as such.

⁴ Corzine's firm.

Earlier today, I went to see The Avengers in theaters. You want a review? It was ridiculously entertaining. If you like superhero movies, you will like this movie. If you don't generally go for superhero movies, I cannot see this one converting you. So yes, I liked this movie and the probability I'll end up seeing it again at some point is probably 100% or something rather close to it. It doesn't really lend itself to any deeper analysis on its own, but it doesn't really need to, either. Sometimes, you just want some fun and The Avengers provides this without being stupid about it.

Oh, and they finally made the Hulk interesting in a Marvel movie. I didn't think they'd ever pull that one off, but they did and thank goodness for it.¹

To put it in shorter terms, if you're thinking about going to see The Avengers, go see it. If you're not, don't. There are superhero flicks I'd recommend to people not usually into the genre (Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight to name the ones that come immeidately to mind), but this ain't one.²

I generally try for slightly better analysis in my reviews, but honestly, I can't pull that off here. So instead, I'm going to talk about how The Avengers ended up making me think about Thomas Kuhn, a guy I learned about back in either freshman or sophomore year of college. Kuhn's basic concept was that scientific knowledge is effectively a framework. This framework persists for several decades, but as people add to it, discrepancies and weaknesses in the framework show up. Eventually, someone realizes that the framework is crap and comes up with a new framework - the famous "paradigm shift." So, for example, physics famously underwent a paradigm shift from Aristotlean physics to Newtonian physics.

Kuhn did not apply the "paradigm shift" idea to other fields besides scientific progress, but the phenomenon is observable elsewhere. Blockbuster films are one of those fields.

The idea of the blockbuster was really invented in 1975 with the release of Jaws but was codified in 1977 with the release of Star Wars. Without these two films, most of the films on the non-inflation adjusted list of highest grossing films would not have been made, the first clear exception being Toy Story 3.³ However, Hollywood traditional does go through phases of using different formulas for films - the cheese of Arnold in the 1980's gave way to the slightly different (and marginally more realistic) cheese of "Die Hard on an X" in the '90's, for example.

Thus, most films exist within a certain paradigm of filmmaking, and The Avengers is no exception. The paradigm it follows is a movie I really didn't care for at all, Transformers.

Prior to Transformers, Michael Bay had directed six films: Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, Bad Boys II and The Island. Everyone knew the guy was all about special effects and that his movies tended to follow the formula of "not much happens for the first half hour, and then after that, there's a lot of largely incoherent mass destruction." The thing was that while Michael Bay's movies made money, they weren't what anyone would call important.

With Transformers, people really started taking note. This isn't because he did anything particularly different with Transformers, but rather, because of nostalgia for the old television show and the toys said television show existed to sell, more people than usual paid for tickets. But rather than studio execs saying "gee, we should make another stab at a live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles flick" - which Michael Bay actually is going to be doing - or being even more shamelessly derivative with a live-action Voltron flick, the general consensus was that it was Michael Bay's style that got people to the theater.

The result is that we're now living in what could be best described as the Transformers age of blockbusters. The Avengers is very much a product of this age. It is a far better movie than the progenitor of the age, but the whole time I was watching, all I could think was "this movie would be completely different if Transformers had never existed."

Which, considering what The Avengers is likely to do at the box office, means that if you wanted to call Transformers the Star Wars of the new millennium, you'd have a decent case.

Reading it over, this post came out a bit more disjointed than I would have liked, but I think there's enough of merit here to be worth posting.

Harold

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¹ All things considered, the Hulk, a scientist who transforms into a green monster when sufficiently angry, is one of those characters that should resonate with me, a nerdy guy who has had to deal with rage issues (which are now largely under control, but still frightening as all get out to me). The movies about the Hulk, however, have never gotten at the rage in a way that's felt real to me, though.

² I would like to take this time to call out Slate's film reviewer, Dana Stevens, as a hack. After reading her review of the film, I had no idea whatsoever what she thought of it, only that she thinks that there are too many superhero movies out there.

When your job is to tell me what the hell you thought of a specific entry in a genre and all you can tell me is that you don't much care for the genre, however, you have failed in your job. Miserably. And you haven't even tried to succeed. Making you a hack.

And yes, I realize that my review of the film was actually a low-quality review in and of itself. However, I've found that most of my readership tends to prefer it when I use a review as a springboard to another topic, which is not something one can really say about the readership of a film critic.

³ That said, without Star Wars, Pixar never would have been able to pick up the capital from CG work in blockbusters to ultimately create Toy Story. In other words, really, you have to get to #15, The Lion King. Which is to say that if not for Walt Disney, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, the top-grossing films list would look 100% different.

(If you start adjusting for inflation, then Gone With the Wind is still the top grosser.)

Yesterday at work, I had another day of Scrum instruction. Mercifully, I also managed to get a chance to tap out some code, so the day was bearable.

Mr. Biermeister: If you get all the rules configured by tomorrow lunchtime, we'll buy you lunch.
Harold: I'm on it!
Mr. Ramanujan: You know we're joking, right?
Harold: I'm still gonna try!

I'm definitely at my happiest at work when I'm coding.

Also, we decided that it would likely be necessary to reorganize the Scrum teams at work. The first go-round yielded me being traded to the other Scrum team for two other people. This didn't really strike me as much of a reorg, and considering that I've spent the past month falling into a good rhythm with my current team, I wasn't too fond of the plan.

As it turned out, nobody else seemed all that pleased with it either, and by the end of two hours, I was back on my original team. It's not that I dislike anyone on the other team, but I thoroughly enjoy working with my current team and I don't know how easily I'd be able to get that kind of rapport going again.

So, seven hours of meetings, one hour of coding while listening to the Battlestar Galactica Season 4 soundtrack, which by the way, is great music to code to.¹ I call it a win.

Harold

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¹ Everybody always talks about great music to run to or great music to party to. They never talk about great music to code to, but not all music was created equal in this regard. The Steve Miller Band, Michael Giacchino and Bear McCreary are all great for coding.

Also, I'm putting "Space Cowboy" by the Steve Miller Band in the pantheon of cool music, up there with "Green Onions."

(Edit: in my original analysis, I thought my second move was a colossal blunder. As it turns out, it's not a blunder at all. Huh.)

Today, I thought I'd go over a chess game I recently played against a friend, and not particularly well at that. I played black. Not a great game here by any stretch of the imagination, but that's what happens when you're playing at midnight after being up for eighteen hours.¹

1) d4 Nf6
This is a standard opening. I don't play against d4 very much. The obvious play against is d5, but I'm not much for the closed game, so I played the knight in a system of openings known as "the Indian systems."

2) Bg5 e6
The usual response to 1) ... Nf6 is c5. Bg5 is playable, though - the idea is to trade off the bishop for a knight. Normally, this is a trade down, but in this case also comes out to black having a doubled pawn structure fairly early in the game. My response of ... e6, however, might not be my best move. Suddenly, my knight is pinned against my queen, meaning white can play e4, and aggressively play for the center. While playing an Indian system means letting white take the center with pawns, it also means contesting it from a distance with pieces - and the pin makes that very difficult to do. It's possible and playable, but this isn't a line I think I'd rather go into in the future.

3) e3 Nc6
e3 is a mistake as it's not e4, but it's not a lethal one. It does, however, kill white's momentum, particularly with Nc6 keeping white's pawn center from making a mad dash.

4) Nc3 h6
Nf3 would have been better here, as it would have allowed e4 on the next turn. Nc3 is a passive move. If black's knight on f6 weren't pinned, it would be useful for the push to e4 - but if my bubbe wore tzistzis, she'd be my zeyde.

5) Qh5?? g6?
This just a terrible move for white. What white is hoping is that black will use the h-pawn to take off the bishop on g5, letting the queen take black's kingside rook. Of course, if black looks at the board for more than five seconds, he'll see it and come up with a good response. This response will attempt to force white to trade queens and allow black to come out ahead a bishop.

g6 is not that response. If white responds with Qh3, the pin on the pawn is maintained and it's that much longer until black can nail the bishop - which means that black won't nail the bishop. The correct move is Nxh5. The white bishop takes off black's queen, and black recaptures to come out up a bishop.

6) Qf3?? xBg5
And now white loses the bishop.

7) h3 b6
With h3, white is trying to prevent g4, a fairly obvious pawn attack on the queen. The problem is that said attack is obvious and one-note, so prophylaxis against it is pointless and loses what little initiative white has left. Black's response of b6 looks to fianchetto the light-squared bishop. It's a developing move, and it looks to threaten white's queen as well. Not bad.

8) Bb5 Bb7
Both sides develop their light-squared bishops. Black's is looking to attack the white queen. And it's not going to go better.

9) Bxc6 Bxc6
White correctly realizes that a bad move leads to ... Nb4. White takes off black's light-squared bishop (xb7), and black forks the white king and rook (... Nxc2+). This needs to be prevented. The obvious choices are 0-0-O (castling queenside) or a3. Since white's down the bishop, trading off the other is a bad idea.

10) e4 Bb4
e4 does block the the bishop's assault, but Bb4 keeps white from using his knight on c4 from protecting the e4 pawn by pinning the knight against the king.

11) d5 xd5
Pointless. White tosses away his pawn center for no tangible gain.

12) xd5 Bxd5
The attack on the queen finally comes.

13) Qe3 Qe7
One of white's few active pieces is its queen. Black has yet to move his. Trading off an active piece for a passive one of equal value when you're down the exchange is a terrible idea.

14) Nf3 Qxe3
White doesn't want to lose his queen, but black has no reason to keep his.

15) xe3 0-0-O
Black decides to bring his rooks into the game.

16) 0-0-O? BxNc3
The reason black wasn't previously trading his bishop for the white knight was because the knight was valuable pinned to the king. White castling mad this no longer the case, and tearing up the position white castled into makes the trade far more attractive than not.

17) xc3 g4
Black now attacks the knight. White shouldn't take the g4 pawn, as doing so leads to a trade of rooks. Since white is down the exchange and would gain no great positional advantage from the trade, he should avoid such an exchange.

18) xg4 Rxh1
Not that he's going to do so...

19) Rxh1 Nxg4
White comes out of the exchange up another pawn.

20) Rd1 Nxe3
White tries to menace black's bishop. Black defends the bishop and attacks the threatening rook.

21) g4 Nxd1
g4 is idiocy - the knight now threatens the pawn and the bishop can take off the knight with impunity after white recaptures on d1.

22) Kxd1 Bxf3+
The game did continue for another three moves after this, but they're utterly pointless to look at.

I should have had a sharp from my second move, and even from my fifth move, this game was not obviously in the bag for me.

So, some takeaways from this game:

1) Never underestimate the importance of pins. White could have gotten a decent position through exploitation of one and ended up getting screwed through a couple used against him.

2) Don't be afraid of a small positional disadvantage. This is what prompted my idiotic second move.

3) If you have momentum, don't give it away. White's third move lost him some momentum, but it was really his fourth that shifted the initiative to black.

I have every confidence that there is maybe one person out there who might actually have gotten this far in the post. If you are that person, congratulations. There will be more of these.

Harold

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¹ If I play chess this badly under these conditions, it is astounding that anyone could ever practice medicine with less sleep. My sister's ability to not kill people at work now strikes me as god-like.

In general, the best days of work are those when I get to punch deck.¹ I can usually get a good high off of punching deck, even when what I'm doing boils down to writing simple text configuration files. That said, I don't have to punch deck to be happy at work. I've got no problems sitting through the lengthy meetings we have every two weeks to plan out what we'll do over the next two week interval. It's less fun, obviously, but it's not painful.

Unfortunately, I've gotten none of that this week. Instead, I've been at a seminar officially learning Scrum. If you don't know what Scrum is, and if you're not an aspiring computer programmer, you will never need to know and you really do not care. The tagline: it's an approach to managing software development that's designed to be based less on gut feeling and more on empiricism.

It should be noted at this point that I have been immersed in a Scrum development environment for the past month. This doesn't make me an expert on Scrum - far from it. However, it does mean that I know how my team uses it and the basic principles. Anything else is detail that I simply do not need. But hey, boring lectures aren't the worst thing ever and sometimes, you do get an interesting tidbit here and there.

You know what is the worst? When the management consultant leading the seminar tells you all "And now, we'll be implementing Scrum to create a media project to teach people about Scrum." To which I barely kept myself from replying "You're kidding me."²

It did not help that his presentation had involved several Dilbert strips, which dredged up in my memory that part of The Joy of Work where Scott Adams (the author of Dilbert) went into Logitech as a management consultant and then convinced a group of senior executives to create a meaningless vision statement and then put it to music.

Now, I'm not going to come down hard on Scrum. It seems to work for what it's designed to do. However, what it's not designed to do is slam out a media project in twelve minutes of actual work (as opposed to something like forty minutes of planning and two hours of interruptions regarding background of the process). Not that we got to to that "work." The whole point of Scrum is to minimize the time spent not being productive,³ but this demonstration wasn't doing a great job of showing this to be the case.

I love my job, but when I can't be productive, my mood gets foul. The result is that my mood was way down in the hole by the time I got out of work today, to the point where I was substituting words in my head for the lyrics in the songs playing on my iPod. For example:

"Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the song of angry men?
It is the music of a people who will waste their time again!
When the heartburn in your chest has you reaching for the Tums
There's a sick day up ahead when tomorrow comes!"⁴

Not my best work, obviously.

But what really, truly angers me about all this is that I was already learning the process. I wasn't certified in it, obviously, but everyone in the seminar was told at the beginning that the certification we received from sitting through this drek would be utterly meaningless. So really, the only thing that comes of this is that I get separated from my group for another three days.

When writing a setter method in Java whose sole deviation from default is that it includes a String.trim() method is cause for ecstasy, you know that you're not the happiest guy on the planet.

Harold

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¹ This is a term lifted from William Gibson's Neuromancer. There, it means accessing cyberspace. I've co-opted it to mean "programming." It simply feels right to me.

² Well, not "kidding" so much as something else, but you get the idea.

³ Technically, the point is to make the company more "agile," so that it can pivot more rapidly from one project to the next or change the specs on a project more easily. These still mostly come down to "let's minimize the time we spend not adding value."

⁴ I really doubt I need to specify what the tune for this one is, what with not having changed the first two lines of the song. However, yes, it is to be sung to the tune of "Do You Hear the People Sing" from Les Misérables.