Just a quickie here to make sure I don't go another week without one. I've been finding it curious how the video game industry has become suddenly infatuated with Stephen Spielberg now that he's directing a game for EA. Me, I just can't stop thinking about the epic crapfest that was E.T.
     I really should give them the benefit of the doubt however since (a) current EA is still better than early 80's Atari, (b) Spielberg didn't actually have any involvement in the E.T. game, and (c) it actually looks pretty interesting. It looks more like Michael Bay than Stephen Spielberg, but it looks fun nonetheless.
     In serious news, Governor Corzine announced the proposed NJ budget today. It was pretty sobering to listen to. The NJ deficit is too large, and our debt is teetering on insurmountable. He's proposed (even though it will certainly hurt him politically) that we make drastic cuts in spending and personnel and use the annual surplus to pay down our debt. The idea is that it'll hurt right now, but it'll be worth it when we're no longer paying $2.4bn per year in interest. For a sense of scale, that's 7% of our entire budget ... and $1bn more than the state spends on higher education. And why such drastic measures now? Because we've reached a budget crisis. We've reached the point where if our revenues remain constant, the money available to pay off the debt will only cover the interest and we will be saddled with that debt ad infinitum. In order to solve the issue, you need to make up for (a) the deficit gap (the amount of money we're piling on to our debt every year funding stuff we're not collecting enough taxes to fund), and (b) make further cuts to spending so that we can pay off the capital on our debt. The economics are actually staggeringly simple for something of this magnitude, ... lets hope the legilature doesn't fuck it up by dragging their own interests into it.