Who's for a game of Moron Poker?
I have just decided that Friday recreational posts are not subject to the "Africa Only" constraint - this is not Dogme 95 or something. So, who's for a game of Moron Poker?
(For new readers to the blog, the rules of Moron Poker are simple. I start off by linking to this, by Alice Miles, for example. Anyone who fancies their chances now has to attempt to top me by posting, on their own blog or in comments here, a link to something stupider[1]. The only two conditions are that for each new link you have to follow suit and bid up. "Following suit" means that each new card must be linked to the previous one either by topic or author[2]. So the next player in this game has to find either something else by Alice Miles, or something else about house prices. "Bidding up" just means that every card has to be monotonically more stupid than the last (this rule encourages people to play their cards rather than sitting on them, as there is always a danger that someone will trump you by linking to, say, Melanie Phillips saying that Scotland is under the sway of the Muslim Brotherhood and your precious link will be wasted).
The game is open to all and is scored in "King of the Hill" style; at any point, the poster of the last valid card is "King of the Hill". The winner is the person who is king of the hill at the point when we all get bored and stop playing.
So anyway; Alice Miles says that "most people" would welcome a 30% fall in house prices
[1] Stupider than the Miles piece that is; if I were to include the comments on the Times website, then the game will never get off the ground, although I reserve the right to play the comments as a separate card at a later point in the game when the stakes are higher.
[2] For any website, "the Comments section" counts as a single author under the relaxed rules we are playing here (this rule helps to get the game moving as it lets you change topic more easily), although if you find a journalist or blogger commenting under his own name, you can use that comment as an individual card too.
http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2008/04/06/story31821.asp
ReplyDeleteOn house prices, so it follows suit. A completely out-of-the-blue depiction of a new demographic, "breakfast roll man", without a single sentence to explain it. Later on, the suggestion that Ireland can simply "diversify" out of housing into education, health and high-tech startups if the state decides...
"Take Finland, where the banking system collapsed following a housing slump in the early 1990s.The Finns reacted by changing the focus of the economy. Through their largest company, Nokia they bet on high-tech and, in Nokia’s case, mobile telephony. They also enacted a root and branch reform of the education system, giving priority to maths and sciences.
Finally, reacting to 1970s and 1980s evidence that Finns - of all Europeans - were most likely to die of heart disease, the state engineered a change to the national diet, beginning with school dinners.
The result has been that, today, Finland has the biggest mobile phone company in the world, the highest educational rating in the OECD for maths and science, and the lowest rate of heart disease in the EU!"
Ah - am I missing something, or is this something of a "one diamond" bid to start off with? There'sa couple of things I'd quarrel with in the piece but it's not exactly crazed, is it?
ReplyDelete(Sorry to interrupt the game. Take it as a contribution in the tournament's online chatroom.)
Yes, it was more of a "get the ball rolling" thing. Last time I did lead off with Melanie on "Scotland = Kosovo = Muslimonazistan!" and it killed the game. You're right in the implicit point that "Moron Bridge" would be a better name, but "Liar's Poker" was a really good book.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, I only know it as a dice game. Is it played with cards as well?
ReplyDeleteAre there trumps? Anything by Andrew Ian Dodge? Or something from the National Review?
ReplyDeleteI'm going to follow suit and go for this - I thought it was completely moronic - a man who has made hundreds of thousands of pounds in housing demand a house price crash so he can make hundreds of thousands more. But does it beat John's - I agree 'breakfast roll' is remarkably moronic.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/03/18/do1805.xml
I don't know that it's "remarkably" moronic. Inventing a category of Something Man on the basis of some-minor-trend-you've-just-decided-is-the-secret-to-something isn't so much remarkable as absolutely standard "will this do?" column-writing. Though I grant you that the Breakfast Roll is particularly poor even by those standards. (Still, by the standards of Barney Ronay it's practically Zola.)
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, is McWilliams particularly ubiquitous in Ireland? I ask because he's singled out in the list here...
Are Daily Mail comments allowed?
ReplyDelete"So, council tax will drop then as houses are effectively going to be worth a lot less? If not, why not?"
Yes they are, and that opens up the field considerably because "Daily Mail Comments" can be taken as a single author - it's a wild card, in every sense of the term.
ReplyDeleteI think that Amanda Platell's identification of a new demographic called 'Arppies' is more moronic than 'breakfast roll man':
ReplyDeletehttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/columnists/columnists.html?in_article_id=560179&in_page_id=1772&in_author_id=463
(It mentions the economic gloom and increased mortgage costs, so is hopefully still following suit if anyone has trumped John Angliss).
I don't know if technically it follows suit or card but this story from the Daily Mail should be allowed just on its sheer Mailness
ReplyDeletehttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=560495&in_page_id=1770&ct=5
I warn you, if you're going to stay on identification of silly made-up demographics then I can play David Brooks and it's on to US politics. (That's even kind of on-topic with housing prices, since he's singing the praises of "Sprinkler City" exurbs which are getting hit very hard by the housing crunch, and he has this clever thing to say about mortgages:
ReplyDeleteYou paid $356,000 for a 1962 four-bedroom split level with a drab kitchen, low ceilings, and walls that are chipped and peeling. Your mortgage--that $1,800 a month--is like a tapeworm that devours the family budget.... And those real estate prices! In, say, Henderson, Nevada, you wouldn't have to spend over $400,000 for a home and carry that murderous mortgage. You could get a home that's brand new, twice the size of your old one, with an attached garage (no flimsy carport), and three times as beautiful for $299,000. That's not exactly how it worked out.
Though I'm not sure the ARPPy card actually got played, since that link goes to an article on cosmetics. You meant this, right?
Anyway, I'm not sure if Matthew's French stink link changed suit -- I await the ruling of the court.
In fairness to McWilliams, he has been writing about Breakfast Roll Man for years, and had an Irish best-selling book and popular TV series called "The Pope's Children" in which BRM featured heavily. So the Irish readers of the article would need no further introduction to BRM. Not that McWilliams isn't a bit glib. A few of his new stereotypes together with BRM for old times' sake here - http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2007/09/16/story26657.asp
ReplyDeleteI nearly choked on my cornflakes reading Miles' turdfest this morning. Also in The Times was this a few weeks ago which was about the credit crunch and consumer spending - she mentions house prices in the article, so it links.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/jane_shilling/article3546896.ece
I almost put my computer through the window after reading it. Jesus, some stringy haired harpy in Greenwich can't afford a new wardrobe and it gets related back to the credit crunch.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/jane_shilling/article3546896.ece
ReplyDeleteGah, for some reason I cut the link off. See above.
http://dealbreaker.com/2008/04/moron_poker_challenge.php
ReplyDeleteOver at Harry's Place, they are playing a version of moron poker where each person who wants to leave a comment has to trump the original post and previous comments. The clever twist is that rather than linking to moronic arguments, they produce them themselves.
ReplyDeleteIs this an officially recognised variant? If so, Nick Cohen appears to be very, very good at it, though not as good as 'modernityblog', who just left a comment saying that Ken Livingstone used to support gay rights in the 1980s to help his political career, but doesn't any more because there aren't any votes in helping LGBT people.
Tom is currently King of the Hill, although the People's Choice is clearly Don Paskini for noticing that the McWilliams piece could be used to bring "Silly MadeUp Social Categories" ontopic as well as house prices.
ReplyDeleteTom's use of the Shilling column, though, widens the field considerably as it's a portmanteau column with lots of little filler bits at the bottom. Lower down the column, she does a bit on "Why can't female politicians dress up a bit better?", which means that, via "general political significance of womens' clothing", I can leap to this shocker from Polly Toynbee, complete with an awful lot of comments from women who claim to vomit at the sight of the colour pink, which would be a pretty debilitating condition if true.
Don - I was just thinking that next week we could play the "Harry's Place variant", which would be the same except a) all entries would have to come from the Harry's Place comments section and b) rather than requiring any coherence of topic or author, everyone would work under the twin constraints that each successive entry had to be both stupider and nastier than its predecessor.
ReplyDeleteAnd I will even then up the ante by going on to (and I realise that having a go at female newspaper columnists is a popular sport of total creeps and that I'm slightly nervous of identifying myself with the Guardian comments section on this one, but really, what can you do), Ruth Fowler's carefully reasoned argument that, all things considered, the characters in Sex and the City seem to have a better time of things than Kurdish 17-year old victims of horrific honour killings.
ReplyDelete(Ruth Fowler really is homing in like a pigeon with satnav on the Julie Burchill-shaped hole that has been achingly visible at the front end of the Saturday Guardian magazine for the last ten years, isn't she? Not that this is a particularly bad thing - I like Julie Burchill, by which I obviously mean that I enjoy getting cross about her - the Guardian editorial policy to appeal to the latent masochism of its readers is really quite shrewd).
I doubt that it's anything more shrewd that the awareness that controversy sells papers (and/or generates hits).
ReplyDeleteWasn't Ruth Fowler a Socottish depressive in EastEnders? That could be an amusing mistake to make repreatedly in the years to come.
Ruth 'NTEA' Fowler
ReplyDeletewow did anyone see the way I totally fucked up the blog for the last hour by fucking around with the template?
ReplyDeleteYeah, it sucked, man. Or was cool, man.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally if I were you I would amend "notable" such that it says "not able".
ReplyDeleteWhat pisses me off about the argumentum ad Nokia is this: not so long ago, there was a fearful row between a bunch of rich yank planespotters (and the US Air Force Museum) and the Finnish Air Force.
ReplyDeleteThe rich yank planespotters had found a Brewster Buffalo fighter - an early WW2 bird, quite rare, which the RAF rejected as shit but which the Finns found quite OK - in a lake, perfectly preserved since 1942. They fished it out, shipped it to the US, offered it to the museum.
The Finnish fliers freaked; turns out the dead guy at the controls was an ace, in the formal sense, the great ace of the Finnish air force, the hero of their air defence, missing for forty years. Enter left, lawyers.
Now, when they craned the plane out of the lake, they found the tyres were still inflated. Who made the tyres? (Remember, you couldn't import rubber in Finland in 1942, thanks to the Royal Navy.)
Nokia. Processing Fischer Tropsch feedstock from the woods into synthetic vulcanised material. You can't build that kind of a culture in 20 years; Nokia is a great company now because it's always been a fucking great company, like IBM and Rolls Royce and Timothy Taylor Ltd.
Further, his dates are all wrong; the standardisation of Norsk Mobil Telefon, the precursor to GSM, began with a meeting of Nordic state phone companies on Midsummers Night 1969 in Lofoten, and Ericsson delivered the first network in 1978. GSM was ready before the supposed Finnish turn, in 1989.
BTW, breakfast roll man does sum up quite a big constituency of people who superinvested in ever rising property joy. May be a silly phrase, but somebody must have voted Blair in 2005.
ReplyDeleteOn the theme of obvious statements, I'm going to propose the text that's presently on the TFL website front page:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.tfl.gov.uk/
"Walk to Work day is on 24 April. Walking isn't just a reliable way to cover short distances."
If we're on to obvious statements, I'd like to play (with thanks to Flying Rodent), an article on Samizdata called "A barrier to people accepting libertarianism is the notion that we'd let people starve in the streets."
ReplyDeletehttp://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2008/04/getting_over_th.html
http://www.libertarian.co.uk/news/nr059.htm
ReplyDeleteYou make it too easy, Don.
I used to know an old lag of European equity analysis who claimed to remember the days in which Nokia made a significant proportion of its profits from being the largest manufacturer of toilet paper in the Republic of Ireland.
ReplyDeletewell, yes; culture beats strategy. This was a moment of free management consulting.
ReplyDeletethis has nothing to do with moron poker, would have emailed but couldn't find an address. you may already have heard about this, but if not, I thought you'd be interested... from http://yaleeconomicreview.com/shiller.html
ReplyDeleteYER: I understand you are working on co-authoring a new book. Can you tell us anything about it?
Shiller: Yes, that is with George Akerlof. It is a book about human nature and the economy. It is really our synthesis of behavioral economics. It is not just behavioral finance; in fact, it is closer to behavioral macroeconomics, which for some reason has not seen much attention. We believe that psychology and anomalies of individual behavior are just as important for macroeconomics as they are for finance, and the two are interrelated.
YER: So you think that irrational idiosyncrasies at the personal level can result in broader macroeconomic effects, and you think that macroeconomic policies should reflect this?
Shiller: Yes. For example, it has always been known that the stock market is a leading indicator for the economy. Since psychology plays a role in those markets, then it has a role in the macroeconomy as well. This is not a mathematical theory that we are proposing; it is a view of the world that we are trying to synthesize.
I am interested in what you think. I can't think of a way to avoid being glib, which is unfortunate since I don't really know much about economics... but I suppose it's a good thing that mainstream economics is catching on to these ideas, even if it around 70 years late.
Sounds very interesting indeed, thanks, and of course Akerlof and Shiller are old enough and important enough to do useful work without worrying about the professional consequences.
ReplyDeleteIf I was doing a PhD in economics today, I'd try and do something to rescue behavioural finance by bringing the institutions back in; there are actually lots and lots reasons why people hold onto losing positions and the least important and least interesting ones are the psychological.
"For example, it has always been known that the stock market is a leading indicator for the economy."
ReplyDeleteIs this a late entry for liar's poker. Like many statements made by economists, a moments thought generates counter examples (the last US economic recession, Black Wednesday and quite possibly the current behavior of the US stock market which isn't leading anything).
But yeah, economics has a hell of a lot to learn from institutional/political sociology. Or indeed working in a middle management role in a typical corporation. Unfortunately the momentum seems to be the other way, with the Freakonomics guy apparently on a one man mission to reinvent "scientific" sociology. Ho hum.
moron poker I mean
ReplyDeleteStatistically, there is some information in stock prices; they do Granger-cause recessions and recoveries with (IIRC) a lead of about a quarter. But it's a very noisy forecast and they're nowhere near the most important input into a forecasting model. The bond market yield curve does much better.
ReplyDeletehttp://ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com/2008/04/21/talking-dog-ill-give-you-talking-dog/
ReplyDeleteI'm going to renegue here and nominate this comment from the metro:
"One day scientists will genetically create a DOG speaking like the one in Man in Black movie. They will be compared to mankind.
IT IS HELL ON EARTH, PEOPLE!!! WAKE UP, OPEN YOUR MIND, WOMEN ARE ALREADY EQUAL TO MEN, NEXT STOP IS ANIMALS EQUAL TO WOMEN, which means to MEN, WHAT A SHAME!!"
can you give examples of some of those reasons?
ReplyDeleteAre we still playing moron poker? If so, I want to play http://keeptonyblairforpm.wordpress.com/2008/04/16/local-elections-and-the-other-elephant-in-the-room/
ReplyDeleteIt starts off being about how we need to bring back Tony Blair, and then turns into a rant about the Muslims.
If we've finished this game of Moron Poker, it could help kick off the game of Moron Poker - Harry's Place version when we're playing that.
Off topic, but in the blog's subhead I believe there's a space missing from "I am notable to make media appearances talking about having sex in cars."
ReplyDeleteoh dear. that would explain the email I've been receiving.
ReplyDeleteAlso see my comment in this very box on 4/18/2008 at 10:13:00 AM...
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, has anybody else found that the word verifications on Blogger have suddenly become unspeakably difficult?
Ah, I completely zoomed by that because I hadn't read the subhead yet.
ReplyDelete