Back of the Envelope

Sluggy Freelance — Now, that was unexpected. So that cocoon Aylee's been in for the last year... it wasn't her whole body in there, just the horn on the top of her head. Meanwhile she's been growing beneath the ground, becoming huge. And when she wakes up, she destroys the house. Dang, it's going to be hard to hide the alien now.

Day by Day — Chris is back! After the usual: Jan's old-time liberalism, microchip outsourcing, et cetera, it looks like Sam's having mood swings. Is she entering menopause? And meanwhile, Jan talks Damon into going to an Obama fundraiser, mainly because it hurts Hillary.

Scary Go Round — After the painful breakup after The Boy discovers that Esther's obsessed with Bob, things get weirder when he finds that Erin's engaged to Bob. In the midst of that, Moon, the scientist and former assistant to supervillains, comes to examine the fishman, and someone kidnaps Monty.

Dominic Deegan — It looks like all Dominic's students have decided to stick with the course. Afterwards, Runcible Spoon and Cassafin are getting ready to interview for the Headmaster position, but Neilen decides to mess with their spellbooks. Dominic helps to reverse the damage, and Neilen tries to laugh it off as a practical joke, going out of his way to protect Luna, who let the news slip. But something tells me that Neilen is up to no good. That something being his internal monologue.

College Roomies from Hell!!! — So with Dave out of the way, and Roger a little burnt out by his attempt to distract Diana, Mike gets a visit from Stanny, who cops to using his ten minutes to ruin his life.

Schlock Mercenary — Kevyn reads off the ransom demand for Shufgar, and now that Pronto's been captured, the mercenary hostages are about to be moved by teraport cage. Everyone wants to know what Tagon's going to do. I want to know where Schlock's gone.

I'll be hosting the next Storyblogging Carnival, the sixty-fifth for those who've lost count, here at Back of the Envelope. If you use your blog to share your fiction, then the Storyblogging Carnival is your opportunity to share. Here we host any and all forms of storytelling in blog format. If you're curious about what this looks like, have a look at some examples of previous storyblogging carnivals. It will be going up March 5th.

If you'd like to participate, please e-mail your story submissions to me at dscrank-at-alum-dot-mit-dot-edu (or post in my comments), including the following information:

• Name of your blog
• URL of your blog
• Title of the story
• URL for the blog entry where the story is posted
• (OPTIONAL) Author's name
• (OPTIONAL) A suggested rating for adult content (G, PG, PG-13, R)
• A word count
• A short blurb describing the story

The post may be of any age, from a week old to years old. The submission deadline is 11:59 PM Eastern time on Saturday, March 3rd. More detailed information follows (same as always):

1. The story or excerpt submitted must be posted on-line as a blog entry, and while fiction is preferred, non-fiction storytelling is acceptable.
2. The story can be any length, but the Carnival will list them in order of length, from shortest to longest, and include a word count for each one.
3. You may either send a complete story, a story in progress, or a lengthy excerpt. You should indicate the word count for both the excerpt and the complete story in the submission, and you should say how the reader can find more of the story in the post itself.
4. If the story spans multiple posts, each post should contain a link to the beginning of the story, and a link to the next post. You may submit the whole story, the first post, or, if you've previously submitted earlier posts to the Carnival, the next post which you have not submitted. Please indicate the length of the entire story, as well as the portion which you are submitting.
5. The host has sole discretion to decide whether the story will be included or not, or whether to indicate that the story has pornographic or graphically violent content. The ratings for the story will be decided by the host. I expect I'll be pretty lenient on that sort of thing, but I have some limits, and others may draw the line elsewhere. Aside from noting potentially offensive content, while I may say nice things about stories I like, I won't be panning anyone's work. I expect other hosts to be similarly polite.
6. The story may be the blogger's own or posted with permission, but if it is not his own work he should gain permission from the author before submitting to the Carnival.

If you'd like to be added to the e-mail list, please let me know. Finally, I appreciate folks promoting the carnival on their own blogs, and I'm always looking for bloggers willing to host future carnivals.

In an article at National Review, Thomas Sowell explains why price controls are a bad thing:

Prices force you to limit your claims on what other people have produced to the value of what you have produced for other people. Prices force you to limit how much of product A you buy because you need to keep some money to buy product B.

While prices convey these limitations, they do not cause them. No economy — capitalist, socialist, feudal or whatever — can keep consuming more than it produces. Producing more of product A means using up resources needed to produce product B.

Simple and obvious as all this may seem, politicians blithely ignore it when they promise to make the prices of housing or health care or other things “reasonable” or “affordable.”

Nothing is easier for any government than to impose price controls. Governments have been doing that for thousands of years. What governments cannot control are the underlying realities expressed through prices.

What does the history of thousands of years of price controls tell us?

The first thing undermined or destroyed is self-rationing. When you pay the full price of going to a doctor, you go there when you have a broken leg but not when you have the sniffles or a minor skin rash. When the government makes health care “affordable,” you go there for sniffles and a minor skin rash.

The underlying reality has not changed, however. The doctor’s time is still limited, and the time that you take up with your sniffles or skin rash is time that somebody else with a broken leg — or perhaps cancer — has to wait to get an appointment.

Government-run health-care systems in countries around the world have longer waits — sometimes months — to get medical attention. In other words, the rationing goes on, but more haphazardly, because prices do not force people to ration themselves according to the seriousness of their problem.

This often comes up in the area of pharmaceuticals. It is expensive to produce drugs. On average, it costs $800 million to produce a new drug, according to Sowell's article. Canada has price controls on drugs. It still costs the pharamaceutical company $800 million to produce the drug, but now it can only charge $10 per bottle, meaning that a lifetime supply for people who have the condition the drug treats runs around $1000. If only 50,000 people have the condition, that's a mere $50 million, well short of the cost to produce the drug. The only way the pharmaceutical company can make money is to sell its product to a country which doesn't have price controls for a much higher amount, say $800 a bottle. And thus, US residents pay a lot more than Canadian residents. What would happen if the US paid the same price, either by buying the drugs through Canada, or by instituting price controls here? Well, then, either Canada's drug prices would go up, or the company would go out of business, and the drug would no longer be available. Certainly, no other company would have the incentive to produce the next wonder drug which cures a disease which only a small percentage of the population suffers from.

The only way to lower prices and to keep producing the wonder drugs is to lower the cost of creating them, and that means taking an entirely different approach. Tort reform--limiting the amount lawsuits could take from drug companies which make good faith mistakes--would go a long way, as a lot of the production cost goes to paying the price when something inevitably goes wrong with another drug. Reducing FDA regulation would do the same. This approach carries its own risk, of course. But everything involves tradeoffs.

The latest Storyblogging Carnival is up at Dean's World. There are eight stories this time, from a variety of authors. Go have a look.

Sluggy Freelance — So, Schlock's in love with Gwynn, huh? She, on the other hand, is perpetually angry at him, but that doesn't mean she doesn't think he's cute. Gwynn's perpetually angry with most of the people she loves. Torg, though, isn't angry with anyone, but he decides that doing what's right means moving in with his old roommates, and leaving Zoe in the apartment. This is the last straw for Zoe, though, and she's considering leaving the radio show. She's been very successful making fun of her friends, except that now she doesn't have any. After a beating at Gwynn's hands, Schlock decides it's time to leave, but just as he packs up, he discovers a life sign in Aylee's cocoon.

Day by Day — Chris Muir's still in Iraq, so Day by Day is still in reruns. It's all pretty recent, though, focusing on the Democrats trying to bug out on Iraq. The direction of their "leadership" is highly disappointing, isn't it?

Scary Go Round — After Bob seduced her (with magic!), Esther's a little obsessed with him. Okay, a lot obsessed, which causes her and the Boy to break up. Bob's suicidally disappointed that his love interest isn't a virgin, but he quickly moves on to a new target: Erin.

Dominic Deegan — Luna and Melna spend some quality time together, with Luna comforting her orcish friend. Then they go back and tease the blinded Dominic. Dominic's beginning to regret what he put his students through. After that, we have filler for the rest of the week as mookie's away.

College Roomies from Hell!!! — So, did Mike and April just do it? It sure looks like it, although it wasn't exactly the most romantic get together. Once Mike comes back to himself, he doesn't look happy about what happened, which does a fairly decent job of crushing April. Of course, April shouldn't have been playing with that fire to begin with, but I guess she couldn't have known about Stanny's involvement. He was definitely controlling Mike for that. Did he have any influence on April, too? And to what end? Is April going to be the mother of the antichrist, now? Meanwhile, Mike's dad is knocking out Dave, apparently preparing him for the Maximum Fun Chamber. Uh oh.

Schlock Mercenary — Pronto disables the fire control for the enemy vessel by blowing something up... which seems to be his preferred method for everything. And while Kevyn and Elf have escaped from one tank, they run into another pair, and now Elf loses her clothes too. There's a lot of naked humans around now.

Today is the third anniversary of this blog. It's been better, I'll admit. I'm just barely managing the upkeep. Maybe someday I'll get along to revitalizing it, but for now you won't be seeing a whole lot here. Why? It's hard to say, really. Having a full-time job is part of it, certainly, as is the time I'm investing in non-blog writing. Mostly, though, it's because I go through things in phases. Sometimes I put a lot of effort into certain activities, and other times those activities fall by the wayside while I focus on other things. It tends to be cyclical, though, so I fully expect to come back to the blog at some point. We'll see.

The next Storyblogging Carnival will be hosted at Dean's World by Trudy Schuett on Monday, February 19th. Dean's World is a high traffic blog (about, oh, a thousand times as much traffic as this one), so any stories submitted to this carnival are likely to be read by a lot of people. It's enough to get me thinking that maybe I ought to submit something. If I can tear myself away from my other writing projects to put something submittable together. If you'd like to submit a story, please send it to TWSchuett-at-peoplepc-dot-com. Please include the following:

• Name of your blog
• URL of your blog
• Title of the story
• URL for the blog entry where the story is posted
• (OPTIONAL) Author's name
• (OPTIONAL) A suggested rating for adult content (G, PG, PG-13, R)
• A word count
• A short blurb describing the story

The post may be of any age, from a week old to years old. The submission deadline is 11:59 PM Eastern time on Saturday, February 17th.

Sluggy Freelance — Finally, we're back to Aylee! I'm still predicting she comes out human. Pete starts with a quick recap of everything that led up to her current condition, and then shows what happens when Schlock discovers that the faint energy readings from her years-long cocooned state have died out. Realizing that once the others discover what's happened, he'll be in big trouble (after all, they brought him there specifically to do what he could for Aylee), Schlock keeps it a secret while he plans his escape, with some unwitting help from Kiki. Meanwhile, Pete's started a countdown for some purpose he won't explain, likely Aylee's emergence from her cocoon. What? I don't for a second believe she's actually dead.

Day by Day — Chris Muir is embedded in Iraq. Sheesh, there are more bloggers embedded over there than reporters right now. In the meantime, he's running some old favorites. Democrats unable to decide who the enemy is, Jan and Damon clashing over politics, Sam and Zed flirting... it's all good.


Scary Go Round — In order to determine whether the serum that turned Dr. What's-his-name into a mindless monster will do the same to Erin, Amy and Shelley seduce a couple of scientists from his lab, getting a close look at what the good doctor has wrought, with a little advice from Ryan on what scientists are looking for. I wonder how he knows.

Dominic Deegan — Dominic spends some time going through applications to become the Headmaster at his mother's school. Most of them turn out to be pretty bad, but two of the applicants, already teachers there, are the best. So he'll be passing those on to his mother. Unfortunately, so much use of his second sight has given him Seer's Shroud--he's temporarily blinded. Which makes Luna's attempt to seduce him less fun. Of course, his sense of touch is working fine, but Melna quickly interrupts the exercise to explain to Luna what her problem is.

College Roomies from Hell!!! — Oh, no. This is bad! Well, not so much Dave's good-bye kiss to Margaret. That was nice, and kind of necessary for now, but I'm a firm believer that those two will get together in the end. I'm referring to Mike kissing April, except that it's not Mike anymore. It looks like Stanny is taking his ten minutes now. We really could use some divine intervention, or IFWA, or Roger or Dave, or even Chester. Roger's still bemoaning his loss of Diane, though, and Harry's plan to brainwash Mike seems to be running into trouble. Instead, he's going to go after Dave, even though the Dragon's goons don't want to touch him.

Schlock Mercenary — With the enemy seizing the ship, the mercenaries are in trouble. Kevyn uses one of his explosive epaulets to get rid of a tank, and a bunch of goons, and Elf's power armor, and almost himself, except that Elf gives him a heave at the last moment. Unfortunately, despite that powerful counterattack, there's no chance to get to the shuttle, and Elf has to send the shuttle crew on ahead.

I bought a new desktop computer recently. My last desktop was six years old. I had updated its memory, processor, and graphics card, but it had reached the point where it just couldn't keep up anymore, so I decided to do away with it and by a new one, a Dell XPS. I had thought I could buy a new desktop for about $2000. I was right, I could, but once I started tweaking the options and deciding to add more memory, a faster processor, a high-end graphics card, and a new printer, I was a little (okay, a lot) above the $2000 level. It was more than I had wanted to spend, but I could afford it, and it really was time to replace my old computer with something close to top of the line. So I ordered the thing the last weekend of last month, and it arrived on Friday a week ago. Since I couldn't stay home all day to receive it, it was delivered to my apartment community's office. I arrived there to find three boxes, one of them quite huge, waiting for me. The big one was, according to the shipping information, between 70-80 pounds. It felt heavier as I tried to cram it into my compact car so I could drive it to my apartment.

My apartment is on one of the courtyards, so I had to carry it a couple of hundred feet to get it to my apartment. When I unpacked it, I found a full-sized tower, something you don't see much anymore, made not of plastic, but of thick silvery metal. No wonder it was so heavy. So I unpack it, and the monitor in the second box, and set it up. The monitor is a superwide, 1680x1050, and it seems quite awkward at first, but I place it on my computer desk, connect all the cables, and fire it up, only to watch the computer fail to start up. It can't find the harddrive. Grumbling to myself, I take it apart and check to make sure there actually is a harddrive. It took me a bit to find it, but it's there, and I check its cabling to find that the data cable has come loose, so I reset it, and when I start the machine back up, the computer boots up fine. I guess the cable came loose due to all the manhandling it took to get it in the apartment.

Alright, new computer up running: check. Microsoft Windows setup software making annoying demands: check. I get through the setup software (having to recheck my ethernet connection when I remember that my router has a bad port), and then it asks for a name for my new computer. Hmm. Most of my electronics is named after mythical creatures. My laptop is Gryphon, my cell phone is Phoenix, and my old computer is Dragon. I was considering just giving that name to this new one, but I still have a lot of stuff I need to move from my old computer to this one, and I may want them both on the network to do that, so giving them the same name could be a problem. I look at its bright silver casing, and the answer is obvious: I dub thee Silver Dragon.

So finally the machine is up and running. Now all I have to do is move all the software, files, and games from the old computer to the new one. But first, let's install Neverwinter Nights 2. It's the game I'm currently obsessed with, and the one game that wouldn't run on my old desktop, which convinced me of my need to buy a new one. I had been playing it on my laptop with all the graphics turned down, and I wanted to see how it would do at highest resolution, with all the special effects, on that expensive graphics card. In a word, beautiful.

So that's been fun, until Monday when my Norton Antivirus updated itself and the game quit running. I tried turning off the antivirus and the million and one features that ran with it off (spam blocker, firewall, phishing indicator, parental controls, spyware assassin, you name it), but no go. I finally had to completely uninstall the antivirus before my game would run. Heh. I'll eventually install a simple anti-virus, which actually turns off when you tell it to turn off and doesn't include all sorts of extras designed to keep you from running anything aside from Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer (with no plug-ins).

Meanwhile, I need to decide what to do with Dragon, the old desktop. My sisters have indicated that they'd love to have the computer in their home (my two sisters and their daughters live together). Which would be good, but that'd mean I'd have to ship it, which means figuring out how to pack a computer I don't have styrofoam designed to fit. And if a cable comes loose on the way, I'm not sure they'll be able to fix it. I also have friends with desparate computer needs, and with the ability to hand deliver and set it up myself (so I know it's not going to just gather dust), that'd be somewhat easier... but friends shouldn't come before family, should they?

Well, for the moment, I really need to move all my data and software from Dragon to Silver Dragon, and I can't give away my computer until I do that and clean up the hard drive. I'll get right on that, as soon as my character levels up in Neverwinter Nights 2.

The latest Storyblogging Carnival is up at The Skwib, Mark Rayner's place. There were only three entries this time, but we decided to go ahead anyway. We've had a couple of really low ones recently, but that may be blamed on the holidays we're just coming out of. If it continues, though, we may have to turn the carnival into a monthly, rather than a fortnightly, event. Let me know what you think.

Hopefully this will go up on time this week.

Sluggy Freelance — Erica finishes up her two week guest artist stint with a fight between her and Pete, an "it was all a dream" photo-comic, some fanservice, and a quick Sluggy wishlist.

Day by Day — Paid websites, William Arkin, and Sam's gun calendar all come under scrutiny this week. Jan and Damon are debating global warming, and it looks like Jan's winning through clever marketing.

Scary Go Round — Shelley's worried about Erin, but meanwhile the high school principal is busy trying to find a virgin to marry. You'd think the place would be full of them, but it turns out that virgins are in somewhat short supply there. Esther's out at least. I'm thinking Erin will come in soon.

Dominic Deegan — Dominic reveals the "truth" to his students, and it's ugly. They don't like what they're seeing. Melna's dealing with her own truth, which isn't quite so ugly. So apparently, she's in love with Stonewater. Not a bad choice, actually.

College Roomies from Hell!!! — Dave and Margaret continue their talk, and when Margaret offers to move away, Dave says no, and they kiss. I sure hope this isn't going to mess up things with Blue. Meanwhile, April gets Mike alone. She seems quite startled when he kisses her. It might have something to do with the aphrodisiac's his Dad's been spiking his drink with.

Schlock Mercenary — The mercenaries find themselves in a trap, as the enemy starts teraporting back aboard the "abandoned" ship, trying to take Kevyn, Elf, and the others hostage. It looks like they already have control of the bridge, and their firing on Tagon.

This would be a reminder, but I forgot to post the first notice earlier this week. My apologies, as I had an out-of-town trip that kept me occupied at the beginning of the week. If you'd like to submit a story, you still have a day to do so. Please send your entries to author-at-markarayner-dot-com. Please include the following:

• Name of your blog
• URL of your blog
• Title of the story
• URL for the blog entry where the story is posted
• (OPTIONAL) Author's name
• (OPTIONAL) A suggested rating for adult content (G, PG, PG-13, R)
• A word count
• A short blurb describing the story

The post may be of any age, from a week old to years old. The submission deadline is 11:59 PM Eastern time on Saturday, February 3rd.

Sorry this is so late. I thought I had scheduled it to go up this Monday, but apparently I forgot.

Sluggy Freelance — Pete's on vacation this week, so Erica Henderson is the guest artist. Her comic is all about the difficulties of being a guest artist for Sluggy, starting with the effort to read through the archives, then dealing with fanatical Sluggites, then dealing with Pete himself.

Day by Day — This week, Jules Crittenden and Spain, the Congressional Black Caucus, musical chairs at the State of the Union, Al Gore's rotten luck, and PC speech suppression... all this week on Day by Day.

Scary Go Round — Shelley tries to have a discussion with the new mayor, but he's a mite crazy, and soon he's off to the mental ward. This brings up two issues: 1. Who's the mayor now?, and 2. Will the same thing happen to Erin?

Dominic Deegan — The bullies are dealt with quite effectively by Nimmel. I don't remember him, but I think he had a role during the Infernomancer's attack on the school. Meanwhile, Dominic's mom is announcing her retirement, and Melna is getting drunk and violent, with Dominic.

College Roomies from Hell!!! — April convinces Mike to dance, then convinces him to talk in private. This April is creeping me out. Dave, laser her already.

Schlock Mercenary — Tagon's sending Kevyn over to the captured ship to disable the hyper-nodes, and hopefully make the ship less of a booby trap. Kevyn quickly finds a teraport cage, however, which would allow the opposing force to quickly teraport to and from the ship.