And so it was that Houstonians woke up to the news that the Metropolitan Transit Authority decided that, at the added cost of, well who knows how much money, that the agency is going to aggrandize itself via building 30 more miles of light rail. I will do some analysis sometime within the next few days.
Of course the boys at 801 Texas Avenue cheered at the news, noting that 60,000 jobs were going to be created at its peak. This is almost certainly tacking on a zero onto the number of jobs that might be temporarily created. If 60,000 jobs are to be created and, say for argument's sake that each job pays (with benefits) $50,000 per year, then the labor costs alone for the project would run $3 billion. The numbers can be massaged around, but you should get the picture. It is notable that the Hearst boys were very careful in their editorial not to make claims that the project would do anything to alleviate traffic congestion.
But analysis about that are to come later this week. Today we are going to talk about one person who already has found employment with Metro, courtesy of current Metro President Frank Wilson. That man's name is one, Mr. Frank Russo. Details about Mr. Russo's current employment can be downloaded here. This is a Power Point presentation that is 3.1 mb in size.
Addendum edit: It has been pointed out to me that several of the pages in the contract are missing. That is because there were several pages in the contract which involved dealing with issues such as the fact that Mr. Russo was to follow federal laws not discriminating against race, creed, sex, ethnicity, and so forth in hiring subcontractors, if any were needed. There were other - what I would call generic clauses in the contract, such as that Mr. Russo was supposed to comply with other laws which I did not see worth posting.
Also, it was pointed out to me that the contract does not exactly point out the scope of duties that Mr. Russo was supposed to be performing. Curiously, the contract is quite vague about that very question and I find that I cannot answer that question.
At point, Mr. Wilson stipulated in the contract he awarded to Mr. Russo that he would make $1 million over the first two years of his employment with Metro, at a rate of $300 per hour. The contract was amended this past April, where Mr. Wilson bumped up Russo's pay by $10 per hour and increased the contract ceiling to $1.1 million. Mr. Russo's employment can be extended beyond the inital period, but we will not know on what terms. Metro has an option to help pay for automobile expenses. but we will not speculate about any possible kickbacks between the two men.
So what have Mr. Wilson and Mr. Russo done to earn such pay? Mr. Wilson and Mr. Russo have been together for a very long time, indeed Mr. Russo has been following Mr. Wilson around even before the people up in New Jersey salted them up before sending them down to Houston, much as Mr. Wilson's predecessor Shirley Delibero was before him.
The Frank and Frank show has not been the cleaner of operations, but their history together represents iron triangularism at its finest. While in New Jersey, Mr. Wilson was involved with two rail projects, the South Jersey Rail line and the Hudson Bergen rail line. The Hudson Bergen line currently is 8 miles long and carries about 30,000 boardings per day. The Hudson Bergen project went three times over budget and is carrying about half of its originally projected ridership.
However, that matter was much overshadowed by the events surrounding the South Jersey Rail line. It's a bit hard for me in far away Houston to suss out the details, but it seems that the genesis of the South Jersey rail line was that it was a politically demanded project in the sense that since the folks up in northern New Jersey got a rail line, then gosh darnit, we folks in southern New Jersey better have one too. Based on such political calculus, one might consider looking at the Metro Rail map and drawing your own conclusions.
What resulted with South Jersey appears to have been was an absolute disaster. In fact the project is such a disaster that it is notable that the Wiki entry listing the light rail line riderships of various lines across America lists the South Jersey project at #22 in ridership. The South Jersey line's cost, originally thought to be $314 million, soared to $1 billion. The project was initially thought to have a miserly 9,000 boardings per day, but that figure was revised to a mere 5,900. Current ridership is claimed at 3,600 - 7,350 per day. A single, typical interstate freeway lane handles about 20,000 vehicles (including freight trucks) per day and more than 25,000+ passengers. Metro has 10 bus routes (cost per bus is about $300,000 - $400,000) which carry more passengers than that billion dollar line.
One week after Wilson pushed through approval of the South Jersey line, he resigned his post to take a job with Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall, where he eventually became company president and secured at least $72 million on contracts with the line. As for Russo, he worked in a job created by Wilson in New Jersey, then went to work for Raytheon which did work on the South Jersey line. The entire South Jersey rail line project was such a disaster that the New Jersey State Assembly decided to start calling people to the mat.
In the time honored way of politics, when disaster strikes the best way a political figure can make sure they can continue visiting disasters on the public is to make sure they get as far away as they can from the site of where their previous disaster took place. Hence Mr. Wilson, tarred and feathered, got lucky and found himself a job in Houston where he doesn't ride the HOV canyon buses from his suburban home into downtown where he works (because like for 95-99 percent of the population, it isn't worth his time to do so), though some of my upper middle class co-workers - who would otherwise not be bothering taking public transportation - do, if only to avoid traffic jams. We will not talk about Wilson's taking $250,000 of travel, courtesy of BART in 1992, or his E-Z Pass disasters. As for Russo, in addition to his big money payday in Houston, he is taking his public private partnership schtick back to his old stomping grounds in California.
Sigh. My analysis of Metro's plans for light rail come later this week.
Wizard
Over the past several months I've been steadily become addicted to watching The Mad Men, a television series about the going's on at a fictitious small to mid sized advertising agency called Sterling Cooper located in - where else - New York City.
Before going any further, I should say something. I am not someone who follows television shows. My preferences when it comes to watching television include (of course), the History Channel, watching football, basketball, and track and field events. I also enjoy watching the Discovery Channel, and a few others. I used to watch current events programs long ago, such as C Span and the Sunday morning talk shows, but long ago gave up doing that since I came to realize that my life was not going in that direction and there was little I could do to influence things. I'd rather read academic journals and magazines for political information, but my time in this world dwindles by the day and there are other things worth doing other than becoming a walking encyclopedia of knowledge which I can't make money off of being.
Getting back to shows I do watch, I did follow Dallas when I was a young teen but quit doing so when I entered high school. I also watched Twin Peaks at the beginning of the 1990's. For comedy, I enjoyed watching Dream On and Reel Wild Cinema.
So what is it about the Mad Men that I find so alluring? Well, I will be the first to admit that the program will not appeal to everyone. One could visit the blog page of the show and read bucket loads of comments from the show's watchers. Clearly this show might have a fairly small audience, but that audience has a wild passion for this program. Clearly AMCTV has listened and has picked up the program for a second season. YES!
My own favorite character (and I should say that I like all of them) is the primary character, the handsome, wildly complicated, but 1950's Organization Man looking Don Draper, played by Jon Hamm. My own favorite scenes involving Draper include his telling off the hippie boy friend of Midge, how he punched Roger into remembering his wife's name after he suffered a heart attack, and most memorably, when he displays his awesome creative genius (which pays the salaries for the entire boat of everyone working at Sterling Cooper) when, in a mind blowing late night piece of inspiration while talking to Rich, he dreams up the name and sales campaign for the Carousel which is presented to Kodak executives. Draper's presentation is so inspiring, it causes Rich to depart the sales pitch meeting in tears because he is having trouble with his own girl friend. It causes the entire rest of the company, including the fiercely ambitious Pete Campbell to tip their hats off to him.
The women have their own dramas, constrained by the roles that were allowed to them by the America of 1960. Don's wife, an independent former model named Betty, slowly wakes up to the realization that her world has shrunk to that of being a housewife. Meanwhile she also (correctly) intuits that she might not be enough of a woman for her husband. That is because Don has also fallen for the strongly independent Midge and Rachel. Meanwhile back in the office, his secretary Peggy has displayed her creative talents, but fell pregnant with a baby she didn't want (remember this was before 1973). She however, admires Don for giving her the chance to be the first woman to get out of the steno pool since before World War II and has allied herself with her unwittingly visionary mentor against the younger hound dogs who size her up and think she should be put in her place.
It's rather amazing. Don finds himself at the end of the first season struggling to keep the hound dog younger 20 something men at bay, while trying to keep his wife and family in their place in suburbia despite his own indiscretions. At the same time he is attracted to women who are not constrained by the conventions of the era. Meanwhile, he has run away from a boyhood which he hated (he is revealed to be the son of a prostitute) and which he seems to have been treated a bit poorly. But at the same time he has a younger step brother (whom he disowned and who subsequently hanged himself) who adored him. My goodness, that has to weigh on anyone's conscience.
There were complaints early on that the show almost tried too hard to display everyone smoking and that nothing really happened. I dismissed these criticisms right away. I realized quickly that this was a show that could incubate a horde of problems and issues. Mad Men was a program that had an immense potential to mine a bunch of rich issues, such as the fact that a pair of lowly staff cleaning people, who were black, were fired for the discretions of a late night office party.
It's almost as though this program is a modern version of All in the Family, but made 35 years later and recast as a serious drama instead of a comedy. Whereas Archie Bunker was a bigoted working class man stuck in his ways, Don Draper is an any man American who has managed, both by the whirls of fortune and dint of genius, to reinvent himself and work his way into a star struck position in American society. Still, Draper finds himself surfing the waves of a swirling and rapidly changing world, though he and everyone around him don't realize how it is changing right below their very feet.
So, the Wizard heartily recommends watching this absolute gem of a program. You can download episodes, but I can't wait for the second season of the Mad Men.
Wizard
Yesterday I spent a few hours watching the History Channel where they put on yet another great program, this time about the fourth voyage of Christopher Columbus. And yes gentle readers, that is yet another plug to get you hapless game masters who have run out of adventure ideas to watch the History Channel. At the urging of some people I know, and because it was Columbus Day this past week, I was inspired to write this edition of D&D adventure ideas.
One aspect of D&D that many players may feel a bit uncomfortable with is how to deal with issues of law and justice in a fantasy world. Some of this undoubtedly has to do with the fact that many game players are under the age of 21 and therefore have had little or no first hand knowledge of how legal systems actually work. The rule books offer little or no guidance on the matter, other than to say that game masters and players should assume that "normal common sense laws are in effect."
Legal systems are a must. The general idea behind laws and governments are that they are necessary for societies of more than a few hundred or few thousand people. In small groups, everyone knows each other. If there are disputes, then they usually can be worked out in one way,shape, or form. However, as the number of people in a society grows, then you run into issues where people have to interact with many people on a day to day basis whom they may not know. People know who their family members are, as they know their friends, their co-workers and colleages from their job, as well as acquaintences from the interests that they may share with others. If anything wrong happens within that circle of people, then chances are that one might be able to work something out reasonably amicably with them.
However, what happens when you are dealing with people outside that circle of people you know? We now live in societies with millions of people. So how does a society deal with positive and negative interactions of strangers? How does a society promote commercial transactions between relative strangers which help promote economic growth? How does a society resolve conflicts between people whom have no blood kindreds or where parties have no friendship ties? What large complex societies do is that they form governments and codes of law to deal with such matters.
Before going any further, I should state here that I am not an attorney. However, I did read some law and economics courses as an undergraduate student. I also have been involved in some legal cases because of my political activism. As such, I can give hapless game masters (especially younger game masters who have not reached adulthood) some insight as to how our own legal system operates. That in turn can give game masters some means of sketching out a legal system for their own fantasy worlds.
Another place where game masters can look for some insight is to study this wiki entry on comparative legal systems throughout the world. It should be noted that some places in our own world run the legal traditions based on religious law, such as the sharia, while others use Civil law. In France, the Napoleonic Legal Code as adopted during the rule of Napoleon, which in turn was partially based on old Roman codes.
In America, we use the common law system which we inherited from the United Kingdom. As is noted in the wiki entry, we set down and follow precedents from days gone by, which are not supposed to be nullified by acts of legislation.
More to the point, the common law is largely recognized to have three main aspects to it - those laws regarding the disposition of property (read here for property laws in other legal systems), laws governing the disposition of contracts, and those of tort (i.e. negligence, accidents, or libel). There are many other specialty areas of legal expertise, including constitutional law, Corporate Law, Admiralty Law (and also Laws of the Sea), and so forth. Game Masters can search for other aspects of law, but RPG players should understand that as part of their legal training, all lawyers have a general reading background in torts, contracts, and property regardless of what they end up doing with their legal careers.
It seems to me that when the D&D books refer to "common sense" laws, they are probably referring to issues like laws against burglary, tresspass, murder, rape, robbery, fraud, and so forth. These acts would fall under torts in the Anglo-American common law. In general, there is a distinction between civil law and criminal law.
One idea to consider is what may happen if a trial takes place. What more or less happens in the real world is that a suit will be drawn up and filed where charges are made and the wrong doing is stated. Procedures are followed, which may involve what is called discovery before arguments are made by prosecution and defendants. Parties may litigate, judges (or political bodies like our Congress) may subpeona persons who are of interest to the case. In a world where magic works, GM's may consider granting magistrates and judges the power to compel parties to appear in trials via magical means.
Another thing to consider is that we in America have a state sponsored prosecution service. In other words, the government hires prosecuting attorneys to go after wrong doers. However, not all societies have done this. In ancient Rome, private citizens could bring charges against another person or group if they felt that they could prove that the other person or group had in fact been the ones who wronged them. In general, one might consider the consequences of wrongful prosecution or outcomes. Usually in civil laws, one of the things prayed for in relief (page 278) by the parties is that the other side will be compelled to pay for the legal costs of their side.
Game masters and players may find contract laws to be of interest. In particular, whenever contracts are entered into by both parties, there are issues of completeness and of information to consider. A contract may be set aside or nullified by a judge if it does not cover all terms. Also, it is generally recognized that parties to a contract should have perfect information or nearly perfect information in order to enter a contract. If one of the parties to the contract does not have full grasp of all the information detailed therein, then a contract may be set aside. The reason why information is so important to contracts is that parties need to have a grasp of all of the known facts so that everyone's interest is aligned properly when considering the offering and accepting of the contracts in question.
One example of a contract whose outcome was under question can be seen if you watch director Ridley's Scott's film, The Gladiator, starring Russel Crowe and Joaquim Phoenix. In the film, a slave trader named Proximo, played by Oliver Reed, complains to a Roman Senator about the fact that he has a contract to deliver slaves for entertainment purposes and that is wasn't in his interest to see it broken.
As an example, say you are a Game Master and you have set up an adventure for your players where the Sovereign of a nation state has commissioned the players to go and discover a mysterious island thousands of miles away. The King or Queen is sponsoring the expedition, but the players have been contracted so that (perhaps amongst other terms of the contract) they can can keep 25 percent of all treasures (gold, silver, precious metals, jewels or natural resources, etc) discovered and exploited in return for risking their lives.
Now then, let us consider this arrangement. Neither the Sovereign nor the players know what's out there, nor does either party fully understand what risks are to be faced. However, it is understood by both parties that there is a risk involved. The players can accept or refuse the offer of the contract - presuming that the Sovereign is not a tyrant, nor are the under some kind of magical compulsion such as a Geas spell.
And that idea brings me to the issue of magic use and legal issues. The whole point of D&D is that it is a game where magic works. This presents some very real problems when conducting a game. Just try considering conducting a murder trial where the either the defendant, the jury members, the prosecution, the defense, or the judge (or indeed all of the parties involved) could be magically influenced via charm spells or other methods to alter the outcome of the case! What about the idea that evidence for legal cases can be made to disappear via magical means? Clearly the presence of magic causes a conundrum which needs to be dealt with.
One idea would be to have law courts where there are powerful anti-magic spells in place which hinder the obstruction of justice via magical means. Another might be implementing laws where if parties are caught tampering with justice or legal matters, then they would be prosecuted by authorities. There are other ideas players out there might consider when devising forms of law for their fantasy worlds, but be aware that laws are, by their nature, a form of compulsion! Laws are meant to be enforced even though for various reasons they often are not - such as for reasons of not having enough manpower to enforce them or because the law breakers may know people of considerable wealth and power. Yes, laws are bent sometimes and GM's and players should be aware that societies never apply their laws to everyone equally.
Laws and their application can be used by creative Game Masters to come up with entirely new kinds of adventures for players to play, such as campaigns which emphasize adventuring in cities or which have a political flavor to them rather than have a boring hack and slash feel to them. As such, the Wizard encourages GM's to spend at least a few weeks of time reading and studying legal codes and forms of law, as their general outlines can now be found online. If imaginatively used, all kinds of interesting possibilities can pop up and may make your campaigns much more fun.
Enjoy!
Wizard