For most players, getting killed immediately after entering a new area in Fallout 4 is enough to reconsider playing that level at all. FischiPiSti is not like most players.

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The New York Times reports on how some of the US's richest men are dodging taxes. Compare this to the response of Irving Berlin when his lawyer offered him a tax shelter:

I want to pay taxes. I love this country.

He even wrote a song expressing this sentiment.

He said: “I owe all my success to my adopted country.” Had he stayed in Russia, he might well have died in a pogrom or the civil war. And even if he had lived, he certainly wouldn't have heard the jazz and ragtime music in his youth that inspired him to become a songwriter.

He embodied - knowingly so - a point made by Herbert Simon, that we westerners owe our fortunes not so much to our own efforts but to the good luck of living in societies which enable us to prosper - which have peace, the rule of law and material and intellectual resources:

When we compare average incomes in rich nations with those in Third World countries, we find enormous differences that are surely not due simply to differences in motivations to earn. Laziness is not a principal cause of poverty. A more plausible explanation for the differences, in fact the explanation that is universally put forward, is that much greater resources per capita are available to some countries than to others. These differences are not simply a matter of acres of land or tons of coal or iron ore, but, more important, differences in social capital that takes primarily the form of stored knowledge...
When we compare the poorest with the richest nations, it is hard to conclude that social capital can produce less than about 90 percent of income in wealthy societies...On moral grounds, then, we could argue for a flat income tax of 90 percent to return that wealth to its real owners.

Now, songwriting is pretty much as individualistic an activity as one can find; But even songwriters require a conducive environment such as musical traditions on which to draw and a marketplace for their work. Berlin knew this: 1930s Siberia had no equivalent of Tin Pan Alley or Hollywood.

If even songwriters owe their wealth to social capital, how much more true is this of hedge fund managers.They would be nothing without wealthy investors or large liquid financial markets: how many billionaire fund managers are there in Burkina Faso?

Which poses the question: why, then, don't hedge fund managers have the same attitude to paying tax as Irving Berlin? It could be that they are more motivated than he was by personal greed. But there might be another reason - unlike him, they believe their wealth is the product of their own "talent" and so they are entitled to it. Some might call this neoliberal ideology - the idea that we are the architects of our own fate. Others of us prefer to call it an example of one of the disfiguring diseases of our time - narcissism.

Perhaps there's another explanation, though. Maybe hedge fund billionaires are greater geniuses than Irving Berlin who have contributed more to human happiness. But how likely is this?

If you don't want to do the whole cruise or road trip thing, you need a train.

The post The 7 Best Train Trips in the World appeared first on WIRED.

So here was Ted Cruz' calm and reflective observations about the first Democratic presidential debate, as conveyed to an Iowa audience (per the Dallas Morning News' Todd Gillman):

“It was more socialism, more pacifism, more weakness & less Constitution,” he told about 100 people crammed into a motel lobby in Kalona, a small town in southeastern Iowa. “It was a recipe to destroy a country.”

Speaking after the campaign event with reporters outside the Dutch Country Inn, Cruz acknowledged that he hadn’t actually watched the debate. During much of it, he was stumping at a Pizza Hut a half-hour away.

But he had firm views on what viewers saw.

“We’re seeing our freedoms taken away every day and last night was an audition for who would wear the jackboot most vigorously. Last night was an audition for who would embrace government power for who would strip your and my individual liberties,” he said.

I'm guessing a lot of observers hear this sort of thing and just shrug, since "fiery rhetoric" is central to Cruz' whole act. My friend Greg Sargent scoffed at it as another indication Cruz is a fraud who is fooling the folks into thinking he's willing and able to bend Congress to his and their will.

But I'm sorry, I think this sort of rhetoric is a serious matter. Why? Because Cruz is one of those presidential candidates (along with Ben Carson and Mike Huckabee for sure; the exact position of several others is unclear) who claim the Second Amendment gives Americans the right to revolutionary violence against their own government if it engages in "tyranny" or doesn't respect our rights. Here's what Cruz said earlier this year in a fundraising letter:

"The 2nd Amendment to the Constitution isn't for just protecting hunting rights, and it's not only to safeguard your right to target practice. It is a Constitutional right to protect your children, your family, your home, our lives, and to serve as the ultimate check against governmental tyranny -- for the protection of liberty," Cruz wrote to supporters in a fundraising email on Thursday, under the subject line "2nd Amendment against tyranny."

So when a guy like Cruz starts tossing around words like "tyrant" and "jackboot" and "destroy the country" and "strip your and my individual liberties," isn't it possible, perhaps even likely, that at least a few of his supporters might think he's signaling that the time is near to get out the shooting irons and start executing the Tyrant's agents? I really think Cruz, Carson and Huckabee need to be asked very specifically on the campaign trail and in debates exactly which circumstances would justify the armed insurrection they defend, and make it clear that Obamacare or a potential repeal of the gunshow loophole or an executive action on immigration don't qualify.

This isn't, by the way, just about incitement to violence. All this talk about liberal "tyranny" also illustrates the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of "constitutional conservatism." Most liberals, even if they really, really hate conservatives, would concede that everybody has the right to contend for their point of view in the arena of elective politics. The central conceit of constitutional conservatism is to deny the equivalence of policy preferences, and to assert that favored conservative policies are permanently enshrined by the Founders--who in turn were inspired by divine and natural law--immune from popular majorities, no matter how large. It helps to understand that when someone like Ted Cruz talks about "liberties," he's not just talking about freedom of expression or even of religion, but the right to use your private property however you damn well please free from taxation or regulation or unions.

If you feel your own POV is the only legitimate set of ideas consistent with the Constitution or even the structure of the universe and the Will of God, then you are not going to be interested in compromise or limits on your exercise of power or civility towards the opposition, are you? I'm afraid that is more responsible for what Tom Mann calls "our current distemper" than is usually recognized.

In any event, in the short term progressives, responsible conservatives, and most of all the MSM need to challenge Second Amendment ultras either to repudiate the right to armed insurrection or stop using rhetoric that suggests one of our two major parties is promoting "tyranny" or trying to "destroy the country."