Tony K's Blog

Some thoughts about war strategy in Clash of Clans Clan wars pit an equal number of players from two teams against each other over 24 hours. Each player may attack twice--once on two different players. For an attack, a player may be awarded 0, 1, 2, or 3 stars. 0. When the player neither beats the town hall nor achieves 50% damage. 1. When the attacker either beats the town hall or achieves 50% damage. 2. When the attacker destroys the town hall and achieves over 50% damage, but not total annihilation. 3. Total destruction of the defender. A team gets points only for the max stars achieved against each defender. So if one player gets two stars and the next attacker gets 1 star on the same player, the team is awarded 2 stars. For descriptive purposes, when I talk about player 1 it is the most powerful person on a team. Higher numbers are progressively weaker players. Strategy During War Given this structure, it is possible for only the top half of the players to attack ...

Ranked Choice (RC) vs Instant Runoff (IRV) vs Approval RC and IRV are technically different. RC is a way of expressing preference, IRV is a method of tabulating votes from RC ballots. This is an important distinction. IRV, which seems pretty good can solve one problem (e.g. Gore v Bush) but introduce others. Technically IRV is nonmonotonic. That is, a shift of public opinion toward a candidate can cause that candidate to lose, and a shift of public opinion away from a candidate can cause that candidate to win. A different and probably superior method is one called Condorcet. It eliminates most of the IRV issues but introduces a few other, but less likely, issues. IRV is to Condorcet as single elimination is to round robin. Superior to both of them is Approval voting, in which you select all candidates that would be acceptable to you. It’s simple to tabulate and does not have the issues of either IRV or Condorcet. There’s a  website that has wonderful graphics of how the...

I'm hopefully about four years away from retirement. I have a good salary and, looking out to 2023, I think I'm in good shape overall. There will be three main sources of funding for the retirement years. 1. Wife's and my 401ks and IRAs 2. A lump sum retirement contribution from my employer 3. Social Security 1 and 2 are about equal right now, 3 is a fixed future monthly payment. The stock market has been hot since the crash of 2008. The Dow is now around 25,000. How much higher will it go? Is it going to crash? Would it be wise to transfer some funds from stocks into cash or bonds? My first thought was Yes, of course! But, I did a little digging on this and one piece of advice was that people approaching retirement should have a couple years worth of cash in their accounts so they don't have to sell stocks in a down market. That makes a lot of sense, I have seen literature that shows how a stock market decline immediately following retirement can demolish ret...