Billionaire

The bombings in Paris: political football of the lowest order, on the part of the Republican candidates for President of the U.S.A.; possible repercussions to the absorption of Syrian refugees by the E.U. (the U.S.A. has never been about to take any significant numbers, so nothing really changes even if Trump whines about not taking any -- too expensive to bring them here, on strictly utilitarian grounds, obviously); what might someday look like the beginning of ISIS's endgame.  Urban terrorism in the West has always been really terrifying but not in any way an existential threat to our existence as a mass of nearly a billion relatively rich people.  Urban terrorism triggers technological and legal responses that ultimately reduce its effects and get the killers, at some sacrifice of liberty and decency -- but did I mention those aren't the values I bring to my analysis of our national interests?

Anyway, in the meantime I'm playing with increasing obsessiveness this marvelous little mobile game called "Billionaire," which requires the player to trade off risk, labor, and time for return in fairly intricate ways that fairly in my mind mimic real economic decision-making.  Time enables one to generate income from a variety of investments, but there is little compounding effect from any one investment: upgrades yield only marginal improvements to return, pretty much like real investments in mature industries.  Risk is represented as legal risk: the more criminal an investment option in the game, the higher its risk.  A high risk profile pretty much ensures that one will spend most of one's time in prison, not able to do anything to generate additional income (though it appears one's investments continue to accumulate in the meantime); and there is an upper limit to the amount of risk one can take on, in absolute terms, so ultimately investments have to be allocated.  Risk can be mitigated by contributing to philanthropic "social" investments with negative risk profiles.  Labor allows one to accelerate, by repeated finger taps that would resonate with any animal psychologist, the building of either money-making or philanthropic investments in order to maximize the value of one's portfolio.  The velocities of the game are two: the accumulation of cash, always slow relative to one's total wealth or ability to invest in new things; and one's personal attention to the game, making sure that not too many investments "max out" and stop accumulating, and rebalancing based on the aforementioned considerations.  It's a lot like managing real money, although there's absolutely nothing to spend it on but more investments...

Feast of All Saints (Saint Paul)

My noon Highlights tour last Sunday (November 1) had "Saints" as its theme in honor of the feast day.  I didn't mention my own atheism to the marvelous group of people who did the tour with me, certainly not wanting to influence their response to the art or my thoughts with what might be reasonably interpreted as a twist of the knife.

We started the tour with the work above, Lorenzo di Niccolo's fourteenth century image of Saint Paul holding sword and book.  The web image does no justice at all to the luminosity of the red, orange and gold of the painting, which could have been painted yesterday rather than six hundred years ago (and I don't know the extent of recent restoration, so some of that luminosity might be a result of that rather than sheer survival).  Both the coloring and the intensity of Saint Paul's face and gaze call the viewer with a kind of personal reach quite different from neighboring paintings of the Madonna or Christ.  I asked a question of the group, something to the effect of "What does this painting convey about sainthood?"  The answer of a young man matched mine: the saint is looking at me, reaching out to me, attesting to his humanity.  The paintings of saints in the collection, even in this semi-medieval period, are all portraits of a sort, meant to imagine human beings with certain capabilities or meanings, but to really imagine them, to identify them as real individuals at the same time that they are categories or types or characters.