Blessed by the Potato

I very nearly bought a Honda Civic Hybrid to replace my Accord when it was stolen in 2006. The HCH was every bit as driveable as a regular Civic, got great gas mileage (on par with the 2nd gen Prius), and was cheap enough that it made financial sense even with sub-$1 gas prices (though that was due in large part to the federal and provincial rebates available at the time, and the small-ish markup over the Civic LX model). However, it was stricken from our list of possibilities due to the compromises in storage space: the battery in the trunk ate up about a third of the trunk space, so that sunk the deal right there.

The Prius, being a versatile hatchback and custom-designed around its hybrid system, outsold the pants off the HCH. There was speculation as to why this was, often with people saying that because the Prius was a unique, hybrid-only model, buyers were choosing it for the “statement” it made — it was recognizable as a hybrid. Myself, and others interested in the Prius thought that was hogwash. Indeed, not only do I not care about the “statement” my car makes about me, I’d prefer if it blended in and looked more like say a Matrix. It was simply a practical car that required very few sacrifices for the hybrid technology, unlike the other models. This was largely with respect to trunk space, helped by the hatchback design.

So Honda came out with the Insight-II, a car that at first glance looked like a mini-Prius. Unfortunately, there were some bizarre design decisions: the hybrid system looked to be more primitive than the one Honda had been running on the HCH for a few years: if you came to a stop and the engine turned off, so did the air conditioning. The fuel economy was worse than in the larger HCH. The interior “felt cheap”. The price tag, while lower than a HCH or Prius, was still too high for such a small car, with such a small improvement in rated fuel consumption over its smaller competition (e.g., the Fit). Plus, right around the time it was introduced, the federal government canned the EcoAuto rebates.

Oddly enough, Honda looks to have continued this trend of making their hybrids worse and cheaper with the new 2-seater CR-Z. They also went back to a manual transmission, and while there are some die-hard 2-seater gearheads that simply must have a manual, any failures in the early Insights and HCHs (gen I) were much more likely to occur in manual transmission cars. That decision may bite them in the butt further down the road. It scored so low in their testing that Consumer Reports can’t recommend it. (Though to nit-pick on CR’s post, many cars have absurdly low rated weight capacities, due to how those are calculated and the margins of safety that go into them).

I don’t understand why Honda is not getting this right — why each successive iteration of their hybrid system seems to be worse than what they had in 2006 with the HCH.

Someone made the grievous error of giving me Civ5 for Potatomas before my thesis is finished. Civilization games take hours to play through, even on the fairly fast settings, which is valuable time I should be spending thesising. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but play a game or two over the holidays here, and I have to say I was fairly disappointed in this entry to the long-running series.

For those unfamiliar with the games, Civilization takes you through the development of a civilization from the stone age (arbitrarily set at 4000 BC) to the modern day (the game ends when game time hits 2050 AD). You explore the planet, found cities, build armies, negotiate with other civilizations, ward off barbarians, and develop the land to become more productive. All along you research new technologies and advance your civilization, so that at the beginning you may send out archers and axe-wielding warriors, and by the end you’re commanding aircraft carriers and tanks (or new to Civ 5, Giant Death Robots). Your diplomatic options also evolve: you can’t share maps before you learn how to draw one, and resource-sharing treaties have to wait until your civilization develops writing abilities.

Anyhow, that’s the gist of it, and each entry in the Civ lineup has tweaked the formula in some way. There are a lot of changes to the formula in Civ 5:

The good: I particularly like the switch to a hex-grid. Sadly, that’s about all I can say was definitely an improvement to Civ 5.

The mixed bag: The game has reformulated the way armies and units work, so that units no longer stack: that is, you can’t have more than one unit on a single game space. This means that armies are generally a lot smaller than the massive forces that were sometimes built up in previous iterations, which saves a bit on the micro-management during war. Adding to the unit count reduction is the fact that cities can quite effectively defend themselves. The game now models a defensive force/militia/garrison of some sort so you don’t need to manually build units to defend your cities. Cities are tough, too: you can’t take one over with a single group of rampaging horsemen. Unfortunately, cities don’t build up that toughness over time very much (there is a bit of improved defense as a city grows), so if an enemy player sneaks in a settler to build a city where you wanted to build one, it’s immediately very tough to get rid of, and you’ll have to summon the whole army up instead of just picking it off with a spare unit or two.

The resource system has changed so that instead of just needing to find a source of a particular strategic resource, those resources are rationed: some iron mines only contain enough ore to outfit two legions of swordsmen, some have enough for eight, but just getting an iron mine is not enough to build strategic units willy-nilly. This isn’t too much of a restriction since I’ve found there are fewer units in play anyway, but one weird twist is that you also require continued access to that resource to keep your units working (if you lose your iron mine, your swordsmen fight at reduced strength).

The broken: Unfortunately, a lot is broken in this instalment of Civ, and it’s now uninstalled (also good for thesis willpower). If I ever get the hankering to play again, I’ll probably go back to Civ IV. Continuing with the changes to the formula first:

The empire happiness scoring has been changed: no longer is it on a city-by-city basis, but you must keep your empire as a whole happy, or the whole thing collapses into unproductive rioting. The collective scoring part isn’t so bad: it actually relieves some of the city micromanagement required to keep cities happy. However, the system is terribly, horribly broken when it comes to conquering cities: a conquered city provides a relatively huge amount of unhappiness to your empire (vs the old way of just the conquered city being unhappy and unproductive). If your empire racks up too many unhappy points, you slip into riots, rebellions, and civil war. The only way I’ve managed to do this so far has been by winning wars. Oddly enough, your citizens seem to be happier when you lose wars, or at least win slowly enough to integrate the new cities one-by-one. One time I was dominating another (AI) civ in battle: he had no army left. He offered peace, surrendering all but one of his cities in the process. Even though the cities were handed over as part of a peace talk process, there was just as much unhappiness as if my tanks had rolled in as conquerors. The collective hit from all those cities at once sent my empire into a civil war — this, the result of winning the war the other player started? So yeah, the happiness system is totally broken as of right now.

The purchase/hurry system from previous Civs is gone. It used to be that you could build stuff in your cities (military units, city improvements, etc) either turn-by-turn based on the productive output of the city, or you could spend gold from your empire’s treasury to have the project finished immediately. If you started building it normally, but wanted it done sooner, you could just pay a small bit of gold to hurry up the completion, depending on how much work had already been completed. No more: now, even if you’re 99% done, it still costs the same amount of gold to hurry production as if you had started from scratch. And, it doesn’t appear as though you get to carry-over production to the next item in your build queue if you do hurry (or cancel) the current project.

Rule changes aside, the game is broken in a number of other ways. For starters, it’s just plain buggy: though I’ve only had two all-out crashes, I’ve had a number of minor game bugs, most notably in the graphics department (ghost images being torn across the screen, etc.), but also a few game bugs (like harbours being blockaded by ghost ships). The game is inexcusably slow too. I have, IMHO, a reasonably bitching quad-core desktop gaming rig. Nonetheless, it takes forever to process a turn. I have all the graphics settings on low, and still sometimes when I scroll the map too fast, I get blank spots that then slowly paint in. That’s just ridiculous, especially since the graphics don’t look any better than they did in Civ IV. The AI has been screwy too: a few times now other civilizations I’ve been nothing but nice to, who are vastly weaker and less advanced than I am, will just up and declare war on me for no reason at all, and then I go out and trounce them. One time, a civ came to me and offered a diplomatic deal. I hit “accept”, without modifying the deal at all, and the AI refused, saying it couldn’t accept “my” terms. Huh?

In the end, I can’t recommend Civ 5 even to Civ fanatics who will probably play it anyway. The game came out a few months ago, and there have been a few patches to fix some of the previous issues… but the game still needs a lot of work before it’s ready.

Not too much to report from this year’s round of holiday shopping. I managed to do about half of my shopping online, which was fantastic given the amount of snow we had in London, and how sick I was for a week there, both leading to a state of not wanting to leave the house.

A quick hiss at Toys Toys Toys in Fairview Mall (Toronto): they wouldn’t accept a manufacturer’s coupon for a boardgame, and they have a no returns policy. I may be a spoiled, decadent consumer for feeling entitled to a decent return policy, but right before xmas at a toy store? Toys may not be as hard to buy for someone as clothes, but it’s so easy to get the wrong thing for kids (or for a kid to end up with two of something), and have to take it back that a no-returns policy is just mean. On top of that, there was no warning from the cashier, just a sign posted at the check-out. (And to top it off, we do indeed find ourselves with a surplus Scrabble set – anyone know of any toy drives still accepting donations?)

A much longer fuck you goes out to EB games. Wayfare bought me a copy of Fallout New Vegas for the Xbox, which, unbeknownst to her, I played months ago on the PC. So back it goes. While they do have a return policy, the reality was that it failed. We got quite the run-around, which I’ll try to detail below, but the end result is that a full refund was not provided — Wayfare lost $5.50 just for the privilege of shopping at EB Games, and they were skeevy to boot. Fuck ’em.

The longer version starts at purchase: the clerk offered Wayfare some variety of store membership card, which she declined. The clerk said it wouldn’t cost her anything, and she still declined, but the clerk put it on anyway. Then we go to return the game, and the new clerk mumbles and fumbles for a bit about having to manually alter the price — we assume because it’s now boxing week and the current price is lower than the price she paid before. But no, as he processes the credit card for the return, we see that it’s not for the full amount, and not for the new sale price, either. He starts to explain how the card was non-refundable, and we’re confused — what card? He explains the card, and how it was rung up originally so that the end price for buying the game was the same if we kept it, but for the return the game came out cheaper with an added charge for the membership, which is non-refundable. Wayfare explains how she said she didn’t want it, that she never goes for memberships you have to pay for, so there must be a mistake and why can’t we return that too? He’s adamant that there’s nothing he can do about returning the membership, and that we’re out $5.50.

He says one reason why it’s not refundable is that we could have bought it, then run out to another EB games and used it to save 10% on used games, then tried to return it… I’m like wait, the membership gives you 10% off used games? Yes, just used games. So why, I ask, was the discount applied to this purchase, of a new game? “Oh,” he says, “that was a used copy of Fallout New Vegas.”

This is where it goes from being a rip-off story to a major skeeve-out. He’s already put the returned game away behind the counter so we can’t double-check, but no, Wayfare is sure she bought a new game. I swear there was nothing on the packaging to indicate it was used when I opened it — it was even shrink-wrapped (usually the used games have open cases with just a sticker to seal them). Two sets of eyes saw this game and believed it to be new, and EB is saying that it was actually a used game they sold her. Plus, it was at the same price all the other stores were selling the new copy for.

To sum up: rip-off return policy with a bizarre mandatory membership fee, and passing off used merchandise as new. Avoid EB Games.

Looks like the credit tightening may be taken seriously, as Mark Carney’s warnings are being widely picked up now. There are several other articles with similar themes this week, indeed it seemed to be the Globe’s major story for the week.

In one Globe round-up, the “As one economist puts it, Mark Carney’s warning on consumer debt is akin to leaving the cookie jar in plain sight but telling you not to touch.” analogy was put out there. I don’t think that’s accurate — the metaphor there implies that Carney is being hypocritical or just downright negligent in his expectations. But the children and cookies framework would be better phrased as “Those are for guests, don’t touch!” Because there is a good reason for the cookies (low rates) to be out — to stimulate the economy, capital spending, etc. But they’re not for the kids (housing market) since they’re already hyper enough. The cookies aren’t arbitrarily out, and can’t be easily put away just because the kids are getting into them.

Ed Clark of TD explains why regulation is needed: even though they recognize the problem, the banks don’t want to move first to tighten lending because it would be a competitive disadvantage to the bank that moved first (plus, systematic risk is beyond their business plan, and these loans are essentially risk-free to them thanks to CMHC). A good lesson for deregulation in lots of other areas: competition alone doesn’t always lead to a good outcome.

Michael James had a few good posts this week. another on index investing. I’m not a people person, so I think it’s much easier to pick stocks than to pick advisors/managers…

John Hempton has a post up about some statistics on Chinese ethanol consumption (provided by a controversial producer). There’s a discrepancy between the statistics the company provides, and what the WHO (and educated guessing) suggests is the status of alcohol consumption in China. Either the stats are wrong, or there’s a massive over-capacity building up… I’m starting to worry about stories like these. Don’t know what to do about it yet, but it’s got me thinking…

Jenn sends along this article in the economist about why doing a PhD is usually a waste of time. Speaking of finishing a PhD though, Netbug sends this inspirational video with the helpful tip: “the way to finish something on time and on budget is to ship when you run out of time or money.” Just finishing something and sending it along is the problem I’m wrestling with right now – and I’m long past out of time for sending a first draft to my committee… time to just “ship” something! :)

Jeffery Simpson has a column on misinformed people. Perhaps not surprisingly, “The people who were the most misinformed – in terms of having opinions that varied the most from verifiable facts – were those who watched Fox News almost daily.” I love learning things (I should hope so, as I’ve been a student all my life), and I like being an educator: not even necessarily as a teacher/lecturer, but even just helping to correct misinformation here on the blog. I’m deeply disappointed by (deliberate?) misinformation in the media…

The snow here has been just insane. I wonder sometimes if it’s not real, and just a product of my prolonged illness. Sadly, I can’t wish it away as some kind of fever dream, since I’m not all that sick (just a stupid cough that won’t clear up now).

The city seems to have found some crazy new plows for the sidewalks that I don’t recall seeing in previous years. They cut through the drifts leaving a nearly vertical wall of snow on either side of the cleared path. Though by my reckoning we’ve had roughly 5 feet of snow fall in total over the last week and a half, the general snow accumulation isn’t nearly that high as it has been melting and compacting thanks to bright sunshine whenever it’s not an active snowsquall, plus a final dump of heavy, wet snow last week. Nonetheless, there is still a solid two foot wall of snow lining the sidewalks.

And as I discovered today, that is too much snow for a squirrel to bound over.

I was walking to work and saw a squirrel on the sidewalk playing in the snow. At first I thought he was just having fun, slipping and sliding and jumping around, the equivalent of pulling squirrel doughnuts. But soon I saw he was either very sick, drunk, or exhausted. He let me get very close as I was walking down the sidewalk, then tried to run away from me, but kept slipping over and falling into the wall of snow. I stood back to let him get some room, and then he tried to jump up and over the snowbank to get out of the sidewalk canyon. It took him something like 8 tries, some of which weren’t even close to getting up — he’d try one side, then turn around to go for the other but jump halfway across the sidewalk and land before even reaching the other snowbank, crash into it after sliding, turn around, and try again. I didn’t know whether to laugh hysterically, feel sad, or call animal control over his weird behaviour (I ended up splitting the difference on the first two). He did finally get up and over, and then basically swam through the snow drifts to a tree. Once on solid bark, he just hung there and wheezed.