Wow…  Seven years…  That seems almost impossible.

On the one hand, it feels like I’ve known Terri forever.  Seems like there’s never been a time when she wasn’t part of my life.

On the other hand, it feels like just yesterday we were getting married.

Weird.

The days just keep getting longer…

Not literally.  Literally, the days are getting shorter as we head into Winter.

But ever since those trips out to Syracuse last week, each day is feeling much longer than the last.

I think I’m coming down with something.  Or maybe I’m just depressed or sleep deprived or something.  I don’t know.  But I’m having one hell of a time waking up in the morning.  My eyes feel like lead weights.  It feels like I’m climbing my way out of some deep well just to get out of bed.

I can’t seem to warm up.  I’m sleeping with a couple blankets over me…  I’m turning the shower up as high as it will go…  I’m wearing long sleeved shirts…  I’m turning the heater in the car up as high as it will go…  And I still feel thoroughly chilled.

I’ve been feeling heavy and sluggish lately.  Like somebody turned the gravity up a couple notches when I wasn’t looking.  Everything seems to be moving too quickly.  I’m having a hard time keeping up with everything.  My brain feels like it’s operating underwater or something.

Of course, in that wonderful frame of mind, nothing is going right.  Simple tasks are requiring far more effort to complete, and I’m usually not doing them right.  Which means I then have to un-do the mistakes I made, and re-do the task correctly.

The end result of all this is that the days seem very, very long.

This morning, on Morning Joe, they were talking about some new taxes.  It wasn’t really the main point of the conversation…  Just kind of came up tangentially…  But it caught my ear anyway.

You’ve probably heard various people talking about taxing soda and fruit juices and other sugary crap.  And there’s been some push-back from the sugary crap industry.  There’s a commercial I see fairly often where some motherly looking lady talks about how just a few pennies adds up to a lot of money.  How it will hurt families to have to pay extra for their drinks.  You get the idea.

Now, personally, I really don’t have a problem with taxing soda – they tax cigarettes and alcohol after all, and soda has no more redeeming qualities than either of those do.

That ad tries to portray soda as some kind of staple.  It suggests that families would be hard-pressed to buy all the things they need.  But this just isn’t true.  It’s sugar water.  It is not required for the functioning of life.  We’re not talking about nutritious food here.

It does seem like a staple though…  If you go to the grocery store, take a look at the carts around you.  I can almost guarantee you’ll see a few of them loaded to the brim with soda.  I’ll routinely see a cart full of soda.  A good 10 cases or more.  Folks have become accustomed to drinking soda instead of water, or milk, or tea, or coffee, or whatever else.  That’s just what people drink.

And that’s kind of the point of this proposed tax.  Much like the cigarette taxes have made it cost-prohibitive to smoke absurd amounts…  The soda tax would, theoretically, make it cost-prohibitive to drink absurd amounts of soda.  And with obesity becoming the national norm, cutting down on soda intake can only be a good thing.

But then Mika mentioned that she also thought red meat should be taxed, because it isn’t healthy for you.

We’ve been taught that red meat is bad for you…  It’s got saturated fat, or whatever.  You’d be much better off eating chicken or pork or something…  And that may, technically, be true.  I’m no dietitian.  I can’t tell you which meat is better or worse for any given dietary needs.

But red meat really is pretty good for you.  Maybe pork would be better…  But if you compare a nice slab of beef to a pile of Keebler cookies, or some frozen pizza, or a bag of chips, or a bottle of soda, or one of those Kid Cuizine things…  Beef is, at least, real food.  There’s nutrients in there.

And meat in general (red, white, whatever) is already pretty expensive.  Go to the grocery store and compare the cost of feeding a family of four a meal of Kraft macaroni and cheese, to the cost of feeding those same four people some kind of meat and potatoes.

My point is that the problem in the US is not that people are eating too much red meat, it’s that people are eating too much processed crap.  Fresh fruits, vegetables, grains, breads, and meats are basically unavailable for large portions of the population.  Depending on where you live, they may literally be unavailable.  In many inner-city areas, fresh fruits and vegetables are simply not for sale.  Or, if you’re lucky enough to have such things for sale, they may cost more than you can afford.

So, people wind up eating canned and/or frozen meals…  Or they get McDonald’s or Burger King or whatever…  And we, as a nation, wind up malnourished and obese.

And, of course, if you were to actually tax red meat it wouldn’t help a thing.

You’d wind up with some sort of tax like $0.01 on every pound of red meat…  So you’d see industrial food processors start cutting their meat with more substitutes.  Folks would buy even more processed food, because it would be 50% soy, and therefor cheaper.  It’d be even more difficult to feed a family on real food like meat and potatoes.  You’d see even more families living off of macaroni and cheese.

And, of course, the big industrial food processing companies have money to spend on lobbying…  While the small, independent farmers do not…  So I’m sure we’d wind up with some kind of bizarre situation where properly packaged and labeled food is actually taxed less than raw foods.

Ultimately, what I think we’d see, is a nation become less healthy because of these taxes.

Tycho, over at Penny Arcade, has a post today that rambles through a few different subject before finally alighting on the topic of video game piracy on the PC.  I’ll quote the bit that I’m talking about:

It is not a mischaracterization to say that conversations with the hardcore PC community about software theft follow these tenets:

- There is no piracy.
- To the extent that piracy exists, which it doesn’t, it’s your fault.
- If you try to protect your game, we’ll steal it as a matter of principle.

It’s like, who wouldn’t want to bend over backward in their service? You need to know it, because nobody else is going to tell you: you guys sound like Goddamned subway vagrants.

I don’t know that I’m part of the “hardcore PC community” of which he speaks…  But I do have some opinions on the subject.

To be very blunt, pirates do not matter to the game development process.

Video game pirates basically come in two flavors.  First you’ve got the folks who will not buy your game – period.  Ever.  Doesn’t matter what kind of DRM you put into it, doesn’t matter how great the game is, doesn’t matter how cheap the game is, they will not buy it.

Maybe they’re cracking the DRM for bragging rights on their warez board.  Maybe they feel they’re somehow sticking it to the man.  Maybe they have absolutely no disposable income.  Whatever.

They aren’t going to buy your game.  The best you can hope for with some kind of uber-uncrackable DRM is just keeping them from playing it.  You aren’t going to get a sale out of them no matter how much DRM you cram into your product.

Then you’ve got the folks who might buy your video game, but for now they’re pirating it.  Maybe they want to test it out first, and there’s no demo available.  Maybe they can’t afford it at the moment.  Maybe they’re waiting for the price to come down.  Maybe they want to see if their friends pick it up as well.

These people can be convinced to buy your product.  If the game is good enough and the price is right, they will pay for it.  But DRM is not going to convince them.  They’re testing the game out with a pirated copy, with no DRM.  If they go buy the game and it’s got annoying DRM on it, they’ll remove that too.  If removing the DRM cripples the game, they probably won’t buy it.

So you can’t convince the first group to buy your game no matter what.  And the second group is going to be convinced by the same stuff that would convince anyone else – a good product.  So, for the purposes of developing a game, the pirates just don’t matter.