So Long, Folks!

For various reasons I have decided to close Economics of Plenty. Thank you for your attention. I am going to leave this site as is, it will not disappear. What is more, an anonymous blogger asked me for help in developing his new blog and I gladly agreed to do so. It is called The Rust Belt (what a cool name it is!) and right now it is functional on a minimal level. More development is coming shortly and the owner is so eager to publish anything that he has already started doing so, even if the template is still barely usable.

Thank you!

Privacy According to Facebook

Two brief quotes from the Privacy Policy of Facebook:

(…) Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available, and therefore do not have privacy settings. (…)

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I Could Kill You But It Would Shred My Reputation To Pieces

Sonia Fizek writes:[1]

[When playing video games] we do not think about moral consequences of killing a fictional character, only about the score and weapons we get from eliminating the enemy.

This is disputable, especially when taken in the context of video games that make moral choices part of their core mechanics. In classic titles like “Fallout” or more recent ones like “Mass Effect”, options offered to the player bring different sets of consequences. If you shoot somebody you can take the loot with you but obviously you will not be able to get any assistance or to obtain more well paying tasks from this person. Your reputation will also suffer, at least with characters that happened to like the poor bastard you have just killed. In “Fallout” players can basically try to eliminate everyone in sight or just talk their way out of trouble. In “Mass Effect” the freedom to act is much more restricted but there are situations in which it is upon the player to pick between survival or extinction of an entire alien race or life and death of an important member of the team.

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The Perils of Police Retirement

A reader over at Marginal Revolution asks a serious question:

Why do cop movies and TV shows so often begin with an older (and often jaded) officer that is just about to retire? It is quite astounding how often this unrealistic plot trick is employed, and the psychological grounding seems weak at best.

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