Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in RavenBlack's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, April 29th, 2012
11:50 pm	Today I came up with the silliest idea for an income tax loophole. For it to make sense, you first have to know that gambling winnings are taxable as income, and gambling losses are only deductable as an offset against gambling winnings (except the stock market, where you can deduct all losses for years, because that's gambling for politicians and lobbyists, and those guys don't like to pay taxes, everyone else loves it.) Here's how you can exploit this as a tax loophole. Step 1: Have your employer pay you minimum wage plus a limited number of gambling opportunities at odds which average out to winning the rest of your wage. (eg. if you're paid $20 an hour and minimum wage is $10 an hour, your new wage is $10 an hour plus an option of 20 opportunities to gamble $1 against $2 with 50:50 odds.) So now half of your income is legitimately "gambling winnings" and can be declared as such. Step 2: Open shops at which you can 'gamble' for all the things you would normally buy. 10 cents for a one in twenty chance of winning a loaf of bread, a loaf which normally costs $2. Now your "gambling losses" are more than half your income, though your "gambling winnings" are also increased by the same amount when you win the bread since you also have to declare non-cash prizes, leading to... Step 3: The gambleshops also sell all prize items for ten percent of their normal-shop price, limit one item per customer (lifetime). Thus we establish that the tax-declared 'value' of your 'prize' loaf of bread is just 20 cents, since that's what you can buy it for. Bringing it all together, now you work for an hour and earn $10 regular income, gamble 20 times and now have $20 (on average, made up of your initial $10 plus $20 gambling winnings and $10 gambling expenses/losses). Now you gamble for bread 100 times, winning 5 loaves, costing you $10 ($10 gambling losses, and $1 in gambling winnings of 'prizes'). Your running totals for the taxes are now $10 regular income, $21 gambling winnings, and a deductible $20 of gambling losses, totaling $11 of taxable income, versus the normal-world $20 you'd be taxed on for that same practical result. Essentially, the idea is that through making everything "gambling" you can make everything you "win" instead of buying tax-deductible. Note that this only works if you're also paid in "gambling winnings", because the "losses" wouldn't be deductible otherwise, and also only works if you establish the "value" of what you "win" as lower than its normal cost, because otherwise your additional prize-winnings will be equal to your losses and cancel them out. I would love to see the court case that would result when the IRS cries "fraud" if someone actually set up a town that worked on this basis. Presumably the argument would be about the "value" of the prizes, but what is the true value of a loaf of bread prize? If that was the argument then, worst case, you could still end up tax-deducting the difference between what you pay for a loaf of bread and what a loaf of bread costs the store wholesale. I'd be really interested to find out what the true and proper value of intangible goods is in the eyes of a court too - if you were to win rental of a house that has never been rented for money, what was that prize's cash value according to the IRS? (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 25th, 2012
5:25 pm	I've just made a little one-week-game-jam game available on Kongregate. The Tell-Tale Heart. The jam theme was classic literature. The other part of this post is to help other people integrating Kongregate stuff into a Unity game, because all the documentation for doing that is completely terrible and lots of it is outdated. The best one I found does a bunch of stuff nobody wants to do (dealing with Kongregate payments and inventories) and didn't deal with stats or properly deal with late-login, but it was still the most helpful one. So here's my Unity C# code, helpfully documented, for dealing with Kongregate stats (for badges) and login properly and ignoring payments and inventories! Unity Kongregate API object. Hopefully this will get google-ranked above most of the unhelpful stuff after a while! (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 24th, 2011
4:11 am	delicious horrible-looking lentil mulch It's lazy recipe time! I call this one "delicious horrible-looking lentil mulch". It was created as a soy-free available-in-America analogue to one of my old convenient meals "beanfeast mince and tatties". Ingredients: One tin of black olives A couple of cups of mushrooms An onion Some olive oil A stock cube A half cup of red lentils Two tins of new potatoes Some spices. I used a serrano pepper, a teaspoon of paprika, a teaspoon of turmeric, and a sprinkle of dried cilantro A teaspoon of cornstarch. Directions: Finely chop the olives, mushrooms and onion. I used the food-processor slicing blade because this is a lazy recipe. A regular food-processor blade doesn't do it though, I tried that last time, mushrooms just bounce around wildly. Splash a little olive oil on the bottom of a saucepan, and heat it up. Dump all the sliced stuff in and stir it around for a few minutes. Add about a cup and a half of hot water, and the stock cube. Stir it around. (I guess you could use a cup and a half of cartoned stock here instead to be even lazier) Add the lentils and spices, stir it around again. Let it simmer for a couple of minutes. Add the tinned potatoes. Simmer for a couple more minutes. Mix the cornstarch with a small splash of cold water (just enough for it to become runny, it doesn't take much), then pour it in and quickly stir it. Simmer for about another 10-12 minutes, until the lentils are soft. Serve in a bowl with optional salt and/or delicious hot sauce. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 15th, 2011
11:16 pm	Kinect Since most Kinect games are fitness/rhythm games, where the 'gameplay' involves doing what the screen tells you to do, when it tells you to do it, perhaps instead of "you are the controller", Microsoft should have gone with the slogan "you are the controlled". (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 7th, 2011
8:19 pm	Science! I was having an argument about whether, if someone really had a working alternative medicine for something, they would be famous and we would all know about it - my position being "of course we wouldn't necessarily - how would they transition from being considered a crackpot with a crazy out-there theory to being taken seriously enough that it would undergo a clinical study?" As evidence for my position, I dug up some stuff about "black salve" (warning, link has gross pictures), an alternative treatment for skin cancer, combined with what cancer.org has to say about it. The information I was pointing at was "there have been no controlled clinical studies of cancer salves published in the medical literature". So basically, it's been around for ages and it hasn't been tested in a way that would satisfy a skeptic. Point proven. But then I noticed this phrasing: "There have been no controlled clinical studies of cancer salves published in the medical literature, and available scientific evidence does not support claims that cancer salves can cure cancer or any other disease." Now I realize that this is true (if you don't consider people's personal experience to be scientific evidence), but that phrasing is outrageous to me. Why? Because it carries a strong implication of "science says this doesn't work". But it would be equally true to say "available scientific evidence does not support claims that cancer salves can't cure cancer" or "available scientific evidence does not support claims that cancer salves can burn your skin" (they can, it's not in question, but there is no clinical study proving it). I'm reasonably sure that it's not their intent to imply that things don't work, they're just meaning it in a "cover your ass" sort of way, but, well, here's the power of that phrasing to be applied as a positive statement, over at quackwatch on another alt cancer treatment: "The American Cancer Society reviewed the "Grape Cure" in 1965, 1971, 1974, and 2000. and found no evidence of benefit against human cancer or any other disease." Oh well obviously it doesn't work then, right? But wait, that's not what it says. It doesn't say they performed a study. They didn't try it. They read the book, and determined that it didn't contain any clinical trials. Then they did the same thing again three other times. Here's a little analogy; the Raven Society Of Official Soundingness reviewed Grey's Anatomy, and found no evidence that removing an appendix can help with any illness. Debunked, motherfroggers! (Note: not endorsing either of these things, my point here is just two things. 1. "if alternative medicine worked it would be called medicine" is retarded, because a thing can evidently work or not work for a long long time without ever being tested (the grape cure is at least 90 years old and still scientifically untested) and 2. "available scientific evidence does not support (whatever)" is a horrible misleading phrase, because it implies that there is available scientific evidence, and that it fails to support something (which would be a synonym of disproving it in clinical trials), rather than just saying "we did not find any scientific evidence on this subject".) (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 30th, 2011
9:02 pm	A quite fun free PC game: Beret. It's a puzzle-platformer, more puzzle than platform. There are occasional moments of careful jumping, but the game's single keystroke "save this position" and "restore that position" mechanism removes the bulk of the horribleness of "timing puzzles". Also a backup "restore the saved position before that" option for if you accidentally save in a deathly precarious position, and always the option to just start a room again. Pleasingly, all these things also rewind the time, so you're allowed to rewind as much as you need to for the speed challenges, should you decide to do them. Also fun is that a level's speed challenge (running from start to finish) is frequently around 45 seconds, but doing all the other subtasks (kill all monsters, collect 100 small easy fragments, collect 4 medium difficult fragments, and collect 1 large extra-difficult medallion) is more like a ten minute task per level. Since you only need a subset of medallions to move on, you can mostly play in your preferred style - good design there. This was recommended by the Caravel Games Newsletter - it's not one of their games, but it is kind of like a platform game version of their DROD series (or this link includes the free, oldest one), which I also partially recommend (I don't recommend the RPG one). (Comment on this)
Saturday, October 29th, 2011
10:39 pm	I like the Professor Layton games, but they are always really annoying with the inconsistent puzzle logic. One puzzle will say "you must take two adjacent objects each turn" and mean that if you had four objects in a row, and took the middle two, the remaining two are now adjacent, and another will say "you must take the two books to the right" and mean the two books that were originally to the right, so if one of them has been removed you can't make that move, even if afterwards there are still two other books (further) to the right. It would be slightly annoying to have the ambiguity in the puzzle wording at all, but having it ambiguous and inconsistent is really not good. One puzzle goes "ha ha, tricked you, you didn't think of it that way!" and the next puzzle it goes "no your answer is wrong because we didn't think of it that way this time!" (Comment on this)
Monday, October 10th, 2011
12:04 am	I was thinking about this study, and a similar one from 30 years ago where Monsanto pretended Roundup didn't cause health problems; I was trying to figure out why such studies would exist. Specifically, studies where the numbers show one thing and then huge error bars and fudging "lead to" the conclusion that was paid for. I'm not questioning why bad conclusions exist, obviously that's money, but why would they perform an actual study and then fudge with error bars rather than, say, fudging the numbers so the things look actually how you want, or, even cleverer, fudging the experiment (perhaps even without the scientists' knowledge) so that the results look like what you want. (eg. for the HFCS experiment, to rig it simply provide HFCS as the sugar syrup, or sugar syrup as the HFCS, tada, genuine identical results!) I really doubt that the scientists think that fudged error bars and a false conclusion are significantly more ethical than fudged numbers for the same false conclusion, and I'm pretty sure fudging numbers or fudging the experiment would be easier than fudging error bars, as well as producing a more convincing study, so why would they do it the more difficult stupider seeming way? One possibility, of course, is "idiots", always a good answer to a "why do people do something" question. But I find it hard to imagine idiocy that endorses doing something more difficult for worse results that is also obviously more difficult and worse results. (Jokes about Microsoft Access notwithstanding.) Then another possibility struck me, and if this is the case it's fucking amazingly brilliant and Machiavellian: if you had a study in which the numbers falsely showed HFCS and sugar to behave identically, and someone else performed a 'verification' study whose numbers differed, it would be scandalous, terrible publicity. But if you have a study with real numbers and bullshit conclusion, then any scientist who might believe otherwise comes along, looks at the study, and goes "hey, that doesn't show what the conclusion says." There's no point in him performing a study to see if the numbers show otherwise, because the numbers already show otherwise. You know what makes news? "Hey, we did this study and it shows that other study to be completely fraudulent, and also this stuff that's in everything is terribly poisonous." You know what doesn't make news? "Hey, the conclusion of this study from 5 years ago doesn't match with its results." Genius. Evil, evil genius. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 7th, 2011
12:33 am	Perhaps you remember Olean/Olestra, the "diet oil" that was indigestible and reportedly had the side effect of skidmarked pants? I have an idea of marketing genius: re-release the product, but as a fantastic drunken prank rather than as a diet aid with horrible side-effects. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 30th, 2011
12:18 am	A post to help other people encountering the same programming annoyance I just had today. Here's some keywords I was searching for: Visual C++ resource compiler RCDATA dependencies. The problem: if you have data files in a resource file - eg. ID_BANANAPICTURE RCDATA "banana.jpg" ... then the resource compiler doesn't recognize "banana.jpg" as a dependency. If you update banana.jpg and rebuild, your program will continue to use the old banana.jpg until you manually rebuild the resources, or change the resource file. With a jpg this probably isn't too annoying, but if you have some sort of complicated binary data structure that's generated by another program that you expect to be loaded in a specific way, it can be a huge pain in the arse that takes you three hours to figure out at what stage it went wrong. Not that I'm bitter. The solution: swearing at the compiler! Add something like this: #ifdef FUCK_YOU_COMPILER_I_JUST_WANT_THESE_TO_BE_DEPENDENCIES #include "banana.jpg" #endif The part of the resource compiler that figures out dependencies will be fooled by this into thinking banana.jpg is a dependency (er, which it is, so it's not really fooled, but you could fool it into thinking other things are dependencies too), while the part that does the actual compiling will ignore it. Annoying problem that shouldn't exist solved in an annoying way that creates unnecessary work for you! Hooray! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 26th, 2011
9:33 pm	A new Humble Indie Bundle arrives, including Hammerfight (which I already bought and enjoyed and recommended long ago), Crayon Physics Deluxe which I think has been recommended to me but I haven't got, and, er, a few other things I've heard of but don't really know about; Cogs, And Yet It Moves and VVVVVV. "Whatever you choose to pay" is a pretty good deal even for just Hammerfight. (Comment on this)
Monday, June 20th, 2011
10:51 pm	I just bothered to pay attention to the details of both a Windows Update and an Ubuntu update, and it suddenly struck me as pretty funny - if software required this many updates of this size fifteen years ago they'd each be sending out about twenty new 3.5" floppy disks every week, to every user. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, May 27th, 2011
12:16 am	Today's ill-conceived sign, from a pet shop: Walk-ins welcome with proof of current rabies. (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 24th, 2011
11:33 am	We've been attempting to grow things we can eat with varying success for a while now, and recently I got an Earthbox since they seem well recommended - they're basically a planter with a reservoir in the bottom that wicks up through the soil, maintaining moist-but-not-wet topsoil and giving a sort of tiered effect, the deeper the wetter. So now, having experimented with it for a while, here's the results: Exhibit A: a zucchini plant in a regular pot, watered every day and also nominally kept moist with some sort of a watering cone/spike thing. Exhibit B: three zucchini plants close together, in an Earthbox. Note also the giant basil behind zucchinis B. I've never seen a basil so big before. Also in both containers is a tomato plant - they're approximately the same size, but the tomato plant in the round container has been there for about three months longer. There's actually a basil in that other container too, that's been there as long as the tomato - it's never been more than about 6 inches tall with weak little leaves. It's in shot but you pretty much can't see it. Conclusion: Earthboxes are pretty good. I've also made a makeshift mini-earthbox for herbs, using a window box - it came with a sub-floor water tray already, so I just drilled some bigger holes through to the tray to make dirt-wicks possible, and a hole for a refilling pipe (the Earthbox's refill pipe is hidden under zucchini leaves), cut a piece of pipe to length and a side-hole in it at the bottom. It appears to work well - we got some "dying herbs, 50 cents" and a week later they're twice as tall, and the oregano's even growing flowers. So making your own Earthbox is certainly feasible, but I would recommend buying one to use as a model. To be fair to the watering cone, which are also generally well recommended, the water our plants get hasn't gone through the filtering system and is full of iron - I think the cones get blocked pretty quickly with cruddy water. So it might not be their fault that the other zucchini plant is so pathetic. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 2nd, 2011
5:10 pm	A quick Google-search reveals that I'm not the only one who is irked every time by the ad for some washing product that says "if soap can dry itself, imagine what it could do to your skin!" Delightful, an appeal to a false premise followed by an imaginary conclusion! Here's a better one: If pigs can fly, imagine what a terrorist could do with pigs! That's right, so stop washing yourself with pigs, use cows. They're more than 50% moisturizer. (Water moisturizes things. It also "dries itself"!) (Comment on this)
Monday, March 14th, 2011
7:24 am	The Lorenzo Walker Technical Institute claims they do vehicle repairs at just a nominal cost plus the cost of parts. It turns out, three days after we got our truck towed there, that what they mean is a nominal cost plus massively overpriced parts, even though they're also getting paid by students to learn about how to repair things. The guy on the phone claimed "we don't buy wholesale so we can't do prices like you'd find in a discount auto store." Sure, you don't, but you can bloody buy the parts from a discount auto store for half what you're charging, so you're basically lying when you say "a nominal cost plus parts", because you're not charging the price of parts, even retail price. You're charging your own magical inflated retail price that nobody would knowingly pay. The guy on the phone also said, when it was suggested we could bring the parts, "you wouldn't go to a restaurant and bring your own meat and expect to eat for free." No, you wouldn't, but a restaurant also wouldn't say that they charge a nominal fee plus the price of ingredients, and then say the ingredients cost twice as much as they do, because that would be a big fat lying fraud. Especially if the restaurant claimed to be a school and was getting paid to teach people to cook, using your ingredients. They also generously offered to buy the truck as-is for $500 - approximately the resale value of the tires alone. To include some more words for searching, let's say "Lorenzo Walker Technical Institute is a scam." In the end they're being paid full mechanic rates while also charging the people who actually do the work for the "learning experience". I feel like maybe I should start a programming "technical institute", in which programming tasks are supplied by outside parties to whom I only charge a nominal fee plus the bandwidth costs to email your completed source code (bandwidth charged at $1 per byte, uncompressed). And I also charge the programmers $40 an hour for me to tell them how to go about solving the problem. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 11th, 2011
11:15 pm	An Arizona senator or something was on TV. She said something approximately like this: "Illegal immigration is costing us a billion dollars a year. That's how much it costs just to keep it at the level it is now." I'm pretty sure what she means by that is "Trying to stop illegal immigration is costing us a billion dollars a year." My question on this subject is this: would it, in fact, be more cost effective to simply stop spending that much? Maybe only spend ten million, so you can still keep out the low hanging fruit of illegal immigration. Would the illegal immigrants who would become able to slip in because of this lower expenditure really cost (or cause damage to the value of) 990 million dollars a year? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 4th, 2011
10:20 am	There was just an ad on TV for one of those evil gambly "auction" sites (the ones where you pay to bid rather than paying for the item), and one of their example things was a car that "sold" for about $500 on a $35000 car. And it struck me, when you buy a thing at a discount, the difference doesn't count as income for tax purposes (unless maybe you're a business). But when Oprah gave people cars, they got screwed with a huge tax bill and it caused all sorts of silly problems. Perhaps you've already spotted where I'm going with this - when a TV show is giving out prizes, perhaps instead of contestants winning a car, they should just win the option to purchase a car for 1 cent. Logically the buyer in this transaction can't be taxed without also attempting to tax every customer every time a supermarket has a discount on cereal, every time someone buys a new car without paying full sticker price (ie. every time someone buys a new car at all)... basically, any time anything is discounted from "full price" in any way. It would be ridiculous to try to enforce that. (I'm sure the US government is that ridiculous though.) (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 29th, 2010
11:49 am	A few very short movie reviews! Black Swan: Horrorier than a horror movie. Little Fockers: When the funniest thing of a comedy movie is, during the end credits, a youtube-style "remix" of a scene that wasn't actually present in the movie, that says something pretty bad about the movie. The Tourist: Johnny Depp looks a bit chubby and can no longer act (unless he was being directed to act like a chubby Jack Sparrow for a character that should be nothing like that). The ending is the most predictable ending ever, except that I was pretty sure I'd read a review that said it wasn't that ending so I was a bit surprised after all (and disappointed because I was expecting a better twist). Not bad, not memorable. (Comment on this)
Monday, December 27th, 2010
10:17 am	There's some really strange phrasing in the AP version of the "tourist unexpectedly dies kind of in the vicinity of a Disney bus" news story today; phrasing which also made its way into the television news. Okay, my version there is exaggerating the case, but the real version says "A tourist from Massachusetts was killed when he walked in front of a bus at a Walt Disney World resort." and "stepped in front of a Disney bus ... died at Orlando Regional Medical Center." The story sounds like he happened to be in front of a bus when an assassin or cholesterol got to him - how can they say the same thing in two distinct paragraphs without mentioning the bus hit him? The man was hit by a bus. To make up for this bizarrely distractingly over-gentle phrasing, I would like to present this balancing headline "Disney bus murders innocent tourist." (3 Comments |Comment on this)