A Week Being A White Guy

I spent this week doing stuff white people like:
Writing a report to clarify accuracy at extracting names from land records documents. It's quite satisfying to be able to quantify just how much a specific issue contributes to the craptasticy of your high-level numbers.

D&D Saturday and Tuesday. I calculated that my barbarian's minimum damage on a charge is 15... sick and wrong.

Feng Shui RPG Wednesday. Finally got a critical mass of people to play, but I was a little underprepared and the pacing was slower than I wanted. (While this is a game set in Asia, I think most of the people who roll dice while pretending to be in a Hong Kong action movie are white.)

Cuddle party Sunday. I went to a great cuddle party a month ago in Boulder, but only four people made it to the Denver one... and two of them live there.

Hot box frisbee in high winds Thursday. As Tim said, "This style is fun; we should play sometime when the weather isn't crappy."

ΤΒΠ engineering honor society dinner Friday. Some good conversations with middle-aged and retired engineers.

Installed Adblock Plus and NoScript on my mom's computer and explained how to selectively enable JavaScript.

Watching 17 hours of U.S. olympic curling trials. It's a game with a lot of precision, communication, grace, intensity, odd terminology, and lots of white people.

In a feeble attempt to establish white balance, I had lunch at a Pho Duy and bought a bunch of ginger candy and one can each of six brands of coconut milk/cream from Pacific Ocean Market and made curry when I got home.

Did any of you have a more white week?

Shower Thought: Too Big To Fail

The phrase "too big to fail" was bandied about a lot last fall as people with a fair understanding of how the national and world economy works (worked?) worried about the collapse of major banks. I got to thinking: "Who else is too big to fail?" and the first example to come to mind is public utility companies. I'm sure the government would step in if the phone or power company was in precipitous danger of running out of money to provide service.

Free marketers typically oppose strong regulation, even in the face of catastrophic failure, on the grounds that it may hamper innovation and evolution, and I see their point to an extent. Other folks point out that if taxpayers are going to keep your company afloat, the taxpayers should be assured you act in the public interest. So how about this compromise:

If you want to claim you're too big to fail, you need to play by public utility rules and accept regulations that guard against you failing. If you don't like the regulations, split yourself up until the pieces are small enough that they can fail.