Unreal Tournament 2004, the solution to world hunger

This weekend, I got the chance to play Unreal Tournament 2004 with my roommates. This was my first time playing the 2004 version. I'm familiar with the 1999 version, the original. But it seems that the 2004 version is roughly the same with updated physics and graphics. Still, I was lost for the first few hours.



I don't play online games much. In order to be competitive online, you have to devote your life to a game. That limits me to LAN games, wherein you play against your friends and family on a local network. Until I moved to New Hampshire, I didn't have many people around who were into playing video games. My dog likes to play games, but not so much the video game variety. She occasionally enjoys the tennis ball.

"Noob."

The interesting thing about computer games is that players get into a bit of a passive competition regarding frame rate and hardware specs. Within just a few minutes of installing the game, I wanted to go out and spend $5,000 on a computer with all the latest hardware just so I could brag to my roommates that I could get 60 frames per second with textures set on "High". Nyah! :P

But I didn't. That would have been fun, but I didn't. Interestingly, though, my $600 laptop ran the game just fine. The reason we have such powerful and cheap goods, like my laptop, is because of the emerging economies of China and India. There are more people in India's middle class than the population of America, and more popping in every day. That's a lot of human productivity. That's a lot of people creating wealth.

Sure, they have a huge tax burden over there, but who doesn't? And their government loves to go around breaking windows, but whose doesn't? The wealth pie is growing. They are taking resources and turning them into valuable products, like $12 lamps at Wal-Mart and $600 laptops.

In a free market, the person who is best able to utilize a resource will tend to acquire that resource. The big resource that India and China are using more and more is gas. Granted, oil is far from a free market, but it works in a similar manner. If China and India are better able to use the oil than America, they'll be able to bid more for it. And they use this gas to make low-priced laptops.

Source: CIA - The World Factbook -- India

Another benefit of increasing gas prices is the increased profitability of alternative fuels, like the air car, electric cars, and even solar powered cars that don't make you look like you need a good kick in the shins. First generations of any product are expensive, but enough bored rich people exist to make it profitable (e.g. Virgin Galactic plans to sell $200,000 [6-minute] rides [in space]), and the costs will come down, and soon everyone will be able to afford emission-free vehicles.

The demand for food is increasing at an alarming rate. World hunger is apparently becoming an issue in, I suppose, Africa. But fortunately, science and farmers are coming to the rescue. Farmers are growing food now on the sides of hills, on granite cliffs, on the surface of the sun. Everywhere they can. But it's not enough. What we need is more farmable land.

And thus, global warming to the rescue. Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in which he chronicled food prices, and then astronomer William Herschel noted the correlation between lower food prices and warmer years. I guess someone had to come along and point out the obvious stuff. During the Medieval Warm Period, farmers were able to grow food in Greenland (allegedly grapes, which may be the etiology of it's name, though "Seedless Purpleland" would have been cooler, no pun intended).

Graph not to scale

If global warming continues, then we might lose the coastal cities to flooding. But that's a price I'm willing to pay. Only twits live on the coast. (Not you, if you live on the coast; I'm talking about other twits.) But it will open up Greenland and Siberia and Canada to farming opportunities. Granted, I don't think Canadians know how to farm. But we can probably give them hoes and tell them it's "summer hockey".

This is only possible if global warming continues, which it may not if you buy an emission-free vehicle. But India and China can compensate by increasing their emissions. But they can only do that if you keep buying their cheap crap, like $600 laptops to play Unreal Tournament 2004 on.

And that's it. I played Unreal Tournament 2004 and thus did my part to solve world hunger. What did you do today?