This is a growing problem, this illegal immigration thing. Rather, it’s a problem that’s been big for quite some time, but the scale seems more apparent lately. There are some big questions out there, and some pretty creative solutions, but if you know me, I don’t think they’ll work, or if they do work, it sacrifices too much liberty.

The crux of the problem is there is only so much money to pay for a certain amount of people. If a budget is done properly, then every dollar has a place to go. Assuming an air-tight budget (and this is a massive assumption!), but with more people receiving services than there ought be, this causes some problems.

The first draft of my solution is a state-issued I.D. must be shown when receiving state services. This doesn’t really work, because all it does is show there are X number of people receiving Y services that should not. While valuable information, it’s simply information for its own sake.

I wanted to come up with a something that hits home rather than fear of The Man. Also important is I didn’t want to provide a recipe for a totalitarian presence setting up checkpoints and asking for my “papers.” It’d be comical in a sardonic way, and certainly not funny especially if it were to happen to you, yourself.

And then it hit me: Economics. Don’t give the state or federal government any more power (they have more than enough as it is), and have the states simply adjust what they already have authority over.  Increase the state sales tax by 20% and have retailers provide a 20% sales-tax discount if a state-issued I.D. can be shown. This means citizens can buy what they’ve always bought for the same exact prices they always have, but those without I.D. have to pay for the markup.

This one solution attacks on more than one front:

1. It provides the much-needed extra coin to the state treasury to pay for the services that illegal immigrants use.
2. If goods are too expensive to buy, those without I.D.s will simply leave and go somewhere else – preferably back to their country of origin or, less optimally, another state in which this is not place. 

Of course there no plan is perfect, but the flaws present are not inherent to the plan itself. The extra money raised will likely not be used properly by those in power. This is a corruption issue that I can’t begin to think about solving. Another question to ask is “how do the retailers prove the I.D. is legitimate?” Add another step to the checkout process and, in states with magnetic stripes on their drivers licenses, swipe the card in the credit card reader to qualify for the discount. Again, if corrupt people decide to keep recordsof these transactions and attach them to some profile, that’s not the plan’s fault unless naiveté is a flaw.

You know what really grinds my gears? The widely accepted Game-ism of the “hitpoint.” The hitpoint was designed as a simple mechanism for how much damage a character could take before dying. In simple terms, if you have 10 hitpoints, and take 10 points of damage – leaving 0 hitpoints left – you die. Another example is, in the original Super Mario Bros., Mario starts with one hitpoint, but if he gets a super mushroom, he now has two hitpoints. Maybe Mario is not the best example as I’m shoe-horning a new-ish game into a an old concept.

Dungeons & Dragons has been around for more than 30 years and is the source, if not the primary inspiration, for much of modern computer and video game design. As Uncle Ben would say, “With great power comes great responsibility.” With D&D, comes the hitpoint. Fighter type characters have more of them than spellcasters. This makes sense that someone trained in combat is better at taking a hit than an old man in a robe who reads all day. As characters level up – tiers or plateaus of skill and ability – they gain hitpoints, meaning that as their experience broadens, deepens, et cetera, they become even better at taking hits. Of course, over time, my warrior is going to have 100 hitpoints while your wizard will still have 25. This might be fine if your typical monster only hit for 5 damage, but in reality, as your characters advance, so do the type of monster you face. No longer do these characters face rats and little goblins, but huge dragons and even the gods themselves. The hitpoints become relatively meaningless to lower-level creatures, and really, it becomes a question of economics. Let’s shift gears.

Let’s say a loaf of bread costs $10. “That’s expensive bread,” you say, but who cares? It’s an arbitrary number for an arbitrary item. Let’s say you take home $10 for every hour of work you do. This means it takes you one hour to pay for a loaf of bread. The bread may seem expensive to you now, but how much did bread cost 50 years ago? For the sake of argument, $2. That seems cheaper, but how much did you make in an hour? One dollar, so in reality, that bread costs 2 hours 50 years ago versus the 1 hour it takes you today. The dollar may have inflated, but your hour earns you more dollars, so the bread is actually cheaper than it was 50 years ago.

So why not do away with dollars and just use units of time? This very quickly degrades into dollars again, but let’s break it down. For your eight-hour day, you get 8 chips. If we were a communist society, everybody would get 8 chips regardless of they were a janitor or a surgeon, but we’re not. For their work day, surgeons actually end up getting 80 chips, with gradations across the board from fluffer to CEO. We’re right back to where we started with different types of work being valued differently.

Now why did I tell you all that and what does it have to do with the hitpoint? Warriors (surgeons) are much better at taking damage (buying things) than other adventures (professions). Hitpoints are simply another resource, like money, except if you go broke, you die. The problems with scale apply in both scenarios too. At low levels, the 7-11 store clerk and the pre-law student have trouble buying bread at $10 at 1 chip. At higher levels, the 7-11 shift manager is better at buying bread because he now gets 20 chips in a day, but the legal aide gets 40 chips a day, so he’s still more able to buy that bread.

The exact same goes for hitpoints. This inflation is like providing adequate subdivisions so we can still keep track of rat bites, but if we have enough of them we can survive dragons’ breath. From an economics perspective we can’t really get rid of the hitpoint. Economics is the lesbian step-sister of sociology though, what can we do with reality thrown in?

“Strongest man in world do push-ups – one finger! One bullet, all over!”

My friends in High school worked in a Chinese restaurant for a Chinese immigrant and they asked him why he didn’t learn martial arts, and that was his response. In a world of one-hit kills, what good do hitpoints serve? You can’t give that bullet a damage value other than 100%. It doesn’t matter if you have 10 hitpoints or 1000, you will be dead. One thing that hitpoints don’t keep track of is vital areas. It isn’t specified where a hit takes place, just simply that you got hit. Think of Street Fighter when Ryu’s life-bar – hitpoint meter – is at 1%. He is perfectly capable of performing every move in his repertoire, but as soon as he so much as stubs his toe, he screams bloody murder and falls unconscious.

There is a solution for all this though. We can model every aspect of the body, and make sure we keep track of healing rates, and if a hit will cause a bruise, if this cut or that cut will cause blood-loss faster, and make sure we have a completely realistic experience, but to what end? Counterstrike players may like it, but it only serves to make a game more complex, and thus potentially un-fun. For now, let’s stick with the hitpoint as some sort of life-force in a jar; it’s simpler that way. I’ll keep thinking about this though, maybe I can come up with a partial solution. I know game systems like Fallout and 4th Edition of D&D are trying, and that’s admirable.

I likes me some roast beef sandwiches from Arby’s, but my last visit there irked me a little bit. You know how they have that promotional deal where you can buy 5 items for a low, affordable, price? You might remember it didn’t always used to be like that. For a long time, it was only a limited time offer, and then only at individual stores. Asking if the “5 for 5 deal” was in effect awaited an answer with bated breath. The sweet part of the deal though was you could get 5 Beef and Cheddars, big F’n roast beef sandwiches, for $5.00.

Then there was a change. Instead of Beef and Cheddars, they became Arby’s Melts. Just as delicious as before, but smaller. At $5 for 5 sandwiches it was still a hell of a deal, and still only at participating locations. Then they changed it again. The deal was now “5 for $5.95.” I understand that time passes, the dollar inflates, so really… a good deal.

Then there were two changes, pretty recently, and for the better I believe. First you could choose from 7 other items to mix and match your way to “5 for $5.95.” Second, the deal was in full force at all Arby’s locations all the time. A glorious moment. No longer did I have to ask if the deal was in effect. I could safely assume I could get tons of beef, and even curly fries included, without asking.

Then there was a change. This was my most recent trip to Arby’s, and this one snuck in under the radar just as the others had, but took me by surprise. I pulled up to the window to pay and the total was more than I expected! $6.95. We’re now in a dangerous territory friends. If this trend continues, and I’m almost certain it will, the 5 Arby’s Melts (to be accurate 3 sandwiches, a drink, and curly fries) will cost me $7.95 and no longer be worth my money compared to any other combo item on the menu.

Surely I can’t be the first one to note that software piracy isn’t completely cost-free, can I? I won’t go too in-depth here, but computers don’t run on fairy dust, they run on electricity. Delicious electricity. As for myself, my computer has a 650 Watt power supply and I pay 14 cents per Kilowatt-hour of electricity. This means that if I run my computer for one hour, I pay the electric company:

(650 Watts / 1000 [1 Kilowatt]) * $0.14 = 9.1 cents

Another way to conceptualize this with easier math, is if I have a 1000 Watt (1 Kilowatt) computer, and I run it for 1 hour, it costs me 14 cents. So, if I were to download a 5 GB file through unscrupulous means – which, for the most part have abysmal transfer rates unless you pay for other, faster, services (another can of worms to this line of reasoning) – for 500 hours, it would cost me about $45 versus, the $30-$35 cost of going to the store and picking it up legitimately. Piracy is more expensive than acquiring software through legitimate means to the end-user (pirate). The money just goes to a different place. I’d prefer actors or musicians getting a fraction of a penny for my purchase than the power company getting my dime.

Now, this whole argument goes out the window if you download in the background casually, and only when you would be using the computer anyway. At which point, the extra cost of piracy to you, the pirate, is zero. Understand though, that you are still using your computer to do… whatever it is you use it for, and you still pay the electric company.

You dirty pirate.