Thursday Night Links
* Why did small business owner and gamer dad Mike Hoye spend the last few weeks hand-tweaking the text in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker so that the main character was referred to as a girl instead of a boy? As he put it, “I’m not having my daughter growing up thinking girls don’t get to be the hero.”
* Romney Adviser: Not a Single Person on the Campaign Thought He Would Lose.
* What You Can Get for $228,646,000. I could have lost them basically everything for half that.
* Nate Silver explains that malapportionment in the Electoral College may actually be flowing the Democrats’ way in the near-term:
The problem for Republicans is that in states like these, and others like Tennessee, Kentucky and Arkansas, they are now winning by such large margins there that their vote is distributed inefficiently in terms of the Electoral College.
By contrast, a large number of electorally critical states – both traditional swing states like Iowa and Pennsylvania and newer ones like Colorado and Nevada – have been Democratic-leaning in the past two elections. If Democrats lose the election in a blowout, they would probably lose these states as well. But in a close election, they are favored in them.
* I really don’t understand why Rolling Jubilee is worth doing. Why would we give the banks free money for bad debt they’ve already written off?
* The pros and cons of a Casablanca sequel. Spoiler alert: there is no possible pro.
Gerry Canavan 
More on the Rolling Jubilee thing: I’m seeing speculation that it would just hand people IRS debt. That’s not a remotely good trade.
gerrycanavan
November 9, 2012 at 7:31 am
explain more! explain more! about the rolling jubilee thing. the website for it is just basically pictures of celebrities…but i’m curious!
Lindsey
November 9, 2012 at 1:19 pm
I’m the only person on the left who seems to be cranky about this, but from what I’ve been reading it looks like the plan is to buy deeply discounted debt for cheap and then forgive it.
But it’s deeply discounted because it’s debt the banks have already written off; they already know they’re not getting paid back (and thus we’d just be propping up the price for this bad debt for no reason). And forgiven debt is taxable, so the beneficiaries would have to come up with something like a third of the money to hand over to the IRS (which would all come due that year, as opposed to over decades). It’s true that the IRS is better to negotiate with than bottom-feeding debt vultures, but (as I was ranting about on Twitter) I can’t imagine a less revolutionary plan than giving banks free money so their debtors can get a tax bill. It seems utterly counterproductive and pointless. What would be good is a Kickstarter devoted to avoidance, nonpayment, and bankruptcy — let’s train people how to fight debt, not prop up the debt regime.
gerrycanavan
November 9, 2012 at 1:26 pm