Lego my City! A Great Idea for Co-Design

The planners used the toy bricks to help people figure out how to run their health facility more efficiently, before construction, with real bricks, begins.

 

Smart.  Lego is something accessible - you don't need to have a masters in engineering or city planning to see how blocks fit together to make a complex whole, and what that whole will look like.

 

As a citizen, you can more readily see how a given framework will impact you and offer comment based on that, not on dense reports full of jargon.

 

You can also test out more things in advance - is a space wheelchair accessible?  Is a layout too confusing for easy navigation, requiring additional signage?

 

Empower people to be part of the process and you get better results. 

 

Then everyone gets to say, we did build that.

 

 

Tim Hudak: The Angry Man with a Fanciful Plan

"I'm not going to be the leader that promises you more and more spending," said Hudak Friday.

No, he's promising to burn the whole thing down.

You know what promotes job creation?  Stability.  Reliable services.  Solid infrastructure.  That kind of thing.  

Hudak's planning to fire 100,000 Public Service employees.  Which ones?  When will the decision be made, and based on what?

The entire Ontario Public Service will be walking on eggshells, waiting to find out.  Unions will be gunning fro Hudak, trying to defend their members.

Picture strikes - lots of them.  Work-to-rule a-plenty.  With that, we'll see service disruption, delayed projects and countless important projects put on hold.  

This makes for a rather unstable environment.  What's worse, Hudak will be doing to Ontario's public service what Harper is doing to the Canadian Public Service - threatening them, bullying them and making it impossible for them to do their work in an evidence-based way.

Employers aren't going to rush in to embrace Hudak's slashed tax rates - it's in their best interest to plan long-term.  Smart companies will figure Hudak won't last four years and, if he does, the province might not.  They'll stay clear away.

Meanwhile, the covered health-care costs of the OPS sores even higher (count on a ton more anxiety and depression med prescriptions) what will Hudak do, start cutting back on health benefits?

That won't work.  Meanwhile, there's not just going to be two Parties and the Ontario Families Coalition gunning for him - every "special interest" that pays attention to facts that Hudak would rather ignore (including the Canadian Mental Health Commission) will be on his case.  That's before raising unions and regional communities that are going to get pretty mad pretty quickly, too.

What's Hudak going to do when he simply tossing insults across the aisle isn't enough to stop his mounting opposition?

Or when services grind to a halt, employers get even more skittish about hiring and people start getting more and more anxious about their future?

I don't think so, Tim.

Hudak's plan is, unfortunately, a reflection of how he thinks - in sound-bites, not strategy.  He delivers a great alliterative punch line, but that's not leadership.

It's a long campaign yet, but it's pretty clear Ontarians are going to see more of what they've seen before - anger, petulance and a refusal to listen.  

Having watched Toronto go through that with Rob Ford, Ontario will realize it'll only have itself to blame for a Hudak government.

It's about time someone else took the till of the PCs.

Lucky for Hudak, there's always talk radio.  

Depressed Leaders Think Ahead

If depression didn't exist - if we didn't react to stress and trauma with endless ruminations - then we would be less likely to solve our predicaments.  Wisdom isn't cheap, and we pay for it with pain.

Did Dean de Mastro think ahead, or learn from his mistakes?  No he didn't.

Did Julian Fantino or Rob Ford or Vic Toews ever truly admit to responsibility, mull over their weaknesses and try to do better?  The evidence isn't promising.

Did Mike Duffy recognize guilt and try to solve his problem, or did he deny blame and try to make the problem someone else's?  Has Stephen Harper or his inner circle every accepted responsibility for mistakes, or have they blamed others and tried ever harder to obscure their actions?

We can go on forever with this list, but it comes down to this - the majority of our genetic programming encourages us to trust the people who shoot first and ask questions later.  It's a decent method in a small-band, survival-of-the-fittest scenario, but not for a complex, interdependent society.

The people we need to turn to the most in complex social times are the ones we're least likely to pay attention to until it's too late - sometimes for them, far too often for the rest of us.

While the boss asks, "what's in it for me right now?" the leaders looks ahead to what can be gained - or avoided - and acts accordingly.

We don't have a lot of leadership these days.

Which, I would imagine, is why we are constantly dogged by past mistakes.

Strategic Depression: Something to Chew On

Their evolutionary perspective, however - they see the mind as a fine-tuned machine that is not prone to pointless programming bugs - led them to wonder if rumination had a purpose.  They started with the observation that rumination was often a response to a specific psychological blow, like the death of a loved one or the loss of a job.

Depression is on the rise, so it's worth taking a closer look at.  Maybe even a sustained look.

We've got this trend right now towards simplicity - we want bullet-point messaging, one-off solutions, so on and so forth.  Tough-minded leaders are taking hammers to social problems and when that fails to do anything constructive, they move on.

Of course, a focus on simplicity when dealing with complex systems is short-sighted; as a result, the middle-class is hollowing out, the economy is becoming untethered, the democratic deficit is growing and our integrated social fabric is unraveling.  Oh, yeah - and there's that persistent mental health crisis thing.

Additionally, we've seen some worsening of weather lately - ice storms, floods, so on and so forth.  It's becoming increasingly clear that the systems we have in place today aren't equipped to handle the challenges we are facing, natural, internal or systematic.

There's nothing sadder than watching tough-minded leaders stranded like starfish on the beach when reality crashes over the fire-wall of their simple plans.  "It was just good business," they'll tell us in hushed tones.

Canadians don't much trust their leaders right now; instead, they're looking inwards for direction and ruminating just a wee bit more on how to prepare for what comes next.  Maybe a few of them are even starting to wonder how we can proactively shore up our future in spite of the failings of our social bosses.  You know, like Churchill did.

Something to think about, is all.

The Cognitive Value of Planning Ahead

It takes the human brain (on average) 8 to 10 seconds to process new information; absorb it through the senses, run it through the limbic emotional response filter and figure out how to react.  The more new information you're faced with - a disaster situation, a crisis or a scandal - the longer that time frame gets.

This is why 70% of people freeze up like deer in headlights under duress.  They wait for someone to bring answers while they process, or they err on the side of "do nothing and this will blow over" as a confabulated rationale for their inactivity.  15% panic and do or say things that make no rational sense, like denying inflammatory comments that are already on the public record.

Public service providers try to reduce the amount of challenges people have in processing information (and therefore getting/doing what they need) by standardizing delivery mechanisms, symbols, etc.  Of course, taken to extremes this explains the colonial instinct and cultural stigma, but that's a post for another day.

The way to reduce the cognitive processing period and respond quickly and effectively to disasters, crises and scandals is through drills and pre-planning.  When you have already considered contingencies and planned/drilled accordingly, you've taken the processual (if not the emotional) cognitive function out the equation; instead of absorbing and responding to new data, you're pulling up old files and their related action plans.

"Remember your training, men!"  There's a reason that's a line soldiers hear often.

The lesson, therefore, is this - it pays to think ahead.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”

Proof Doug Ford Doesn't Believe in the Free Market

"There are some great tree removal companies for sure but I think some of these tree guys are gouging people," said Ford.  "After everything these people have already been through, it's just not right."

So there are some tree removal companies offering a square deal and some who aren't.  How is this "just not right?"  

Clearly, the people who offer the better deal are going to get business; the gougers won't, and therefore will either have to adjust their fees or go out of business (or spend more on misleading advertizing promoting themselves and demonizing their competition).

It's basic free market economics - if a service has value, then more people will want to pay for it, meaning more people will offer it, leading to competition.  As we all know, competition leads to better value-for-money.  

Which, naturally, is why Conservatives are all in favour of equitable competition, transparency of information, debate, so on and so forth.

Then there's this whole "after what people have been through, it's just not right" nonsense.  Look, we're talking about big boys and girls, right?  If they did what they should have, they planned ahead, got insurance, made sure not to have mature trees on their lawn that could drop branches on their roofs, so on and so forth.  Employers played smart and had work-from-home plans in place in case of storms.  

So what if the power went out?  Folks who were prepared had generators and knew better than to buy into the whole leftist, anti-independent functioning crowd and their carbon monoxide talk.  People need to learn to live within their means, spend their money wisely and in a forward-thinking manner; reliance on the State in times of hardship is childish.  Falling victim to gougers, con-artists and their ilk is just a sign of stupidity, and we've no need for this sort of person in the first place.

Because if you're against social housing, welfare, public healthcare, market regulation, organized labour and everything that Doug Ford proudly stands against, then it applies equally to city-wide emergencies as it does to individual ones.

This is the key thing that hard-right Conservatives constantly fail to recognize; there are always people in crisis out there, just as there will always be more broadly impacting crises down the road.  In fact, the more individuals are stuck scraping by day-to-day, the less able we all are to manage big challenges like floods and epidemics.
You can't help your neighbour when you're just getting by yourself.  It also doesn't matter how wealthy you are, if a bad flu bug hits, you're just as vulnerable as the poor person.  The more poverty there is, in fact, the more vulnerable everyone is.

All the public services they stand against exist to help everyone in crisis, whatever and whenever their crisis may come.  Without them, we lack flexibility to adapt and become easier pickings to the gougers and cons.

Yes, we need to do a better job of coordinating and evaluating these services, but the answer isn't cuts but integration.  That's what Open Government, in fits and spurts, is trying to do.

It's good that Doug Ford has recognized the fallacy of the Free Market in times a time of wide-spread crisis; the question is whether he'll internalize this lesson and carry it forward.  The next time social housing, youth programming or emergency funds hit the headlines, we'll have our answer.

Doing Nothing Is Not A Strategy

"Tragedy is when I cut my finger.  Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."

  - Mel Brooks

So what do you call it when Canada's Minister of Finance refuses to recognize that his fiscally conservative, "each man to himself" approach to financial sustainability simply can't and won't work?

The Conservative ideology is based on this basic premise - people are rational actors and, left to their own devises, will make the choices that are in their best financial interest.  It's when you have things like social programs, regulation and unequal tax breaks that people and businesses get all squirrely.

Therefore, he has no interest in expanding the Canadian Pension Plan.  He isn't a fan of welfare programs.  Like his family friend, Rob Ford, Flaherty thinks that a job is a job - people should just get one.  If the opportunity is driving taxis, like he did, then do that.  If it's moving to Alberta to work in the oil sector, do that.  

The pressure is on individuals to make themselves worthy of hire by companies, who should be taking a laissez-faire approach to hiring, and innovation, and corporate social responsibility.  After all, they have to spend their money wisely - investing in something that's not a sure thing isn't wise.  

Except, he also thinks it's the responsibility of the Private Sector to stimulate the economy.  Canada's already done it's party, he said: "We've done a lot through the tax system to encourage Canadian executives, business people, to start utilizing some of the capital they have on their balance sheets."

Yeah, and?  Just as Flaherty is telling Canadians its their job to plan for their individual economic futures, Canadian businesses are planning for their future.  More money in the bank and less expenditures means better individual long-term sustainability.  Winter has come and Canada is in economic hibernation.  They intend to carry on carrying on, looking for cost savings in cuts and hiring more people on contract so as not to have to invest in their individual well-being through pension and health plans.

There is no business culture of innovation in Canada.  There never has been a business culture of innovation in Canada.  Just like Flaherty and the rest of Team Harper, Canada's private sector has largely put all their eggs in the natural resources basket (oil, mining, lumber, so on and so forth) and because it's worked this far, they expect the trend to continue.  There's no incentive for them to look ahead when what's come before presents such an appealing picture.

So, you have individuals who are either stuck in positions that don't provide benefits/don't make enough to save or don't have work at all.  The unemployed would love to get work, but the fact is they aren't trained for existing positions or worse, are over-trained; employees aren't going to invest in people they don't think will stick around, even though they'd only put them on contract anyway.

What happens when you have a risk-adverse government that's not interested in investing, a business culture that is anti-risk and anti-investment and individuals who are struggling to keep roofs over their head today and therefore unable to plan for their long-term sustainability?

When nobody is investing in long-term sustainability, you end up with long-term societal rot.  This takes the form of broken infrastructure, poverty, crime and more self-interested thinking that reduces charitable giving and leads to frayed nerves and antagonistic behaviours - not something you want in densely populated communities.

As federal administration and planning fails, provinces are looking to seize political wins and also invest in solutions; as they're closer to ground-level, they will wear the brunt of the feds failures more than the feds themselves will.  This is exactly what Team Harper want, of course - a breakdown of social systems and an increasingly feudal approach to problem solving.  For all their fiscal focus, the CPC seems not to understand economies of scale.

So Ontario is jumping in with plans to do its own pension plan, which is s starfish solution if ever there was one.  But then again, they haven't been left much choice.  Someone has to lead and when the feds ignore national problems, someone has to step up.

There's no way Ontario can afford to do this properly and besides, they've got other issues on their burner.  The Opposition Parties are going to focus on every fault and scandal they can tie to the governing Liberals and for their own interests, are stirring up resentment and hostility between their core constituencies.  Whoever wins, there will be a lot of unhappy people agitating for change.  Like Flaherty, they're looking for their own wins and aren't going to be interested in spending their own money to invest in someone else's benefit - be it unions, welfare programs or tax dollars that seem to fund corporation-friendly policies over social justice.

Fortunately, there's a small foundation of forward-thinking people and institutions starting to emerge on the social/political landscape.  Police are looking into social media and creating community relationships.  Social entrepreneurs are structural solution development ahead of personal fortune. Even some private-sector organizations are recognizing that the world is changing and are working to adapt.  Open Government is trendy, though its implementation is far from certain.

Some people are looking ahead and realizing that the road we're on leads to a dead end, so they're branching out, changing direction, looking for bridges.

But not Flaherty.  He's got his one last chance to build a positive legacy for all time, to validate all the losses of his career - if he can balance the budget by 2015, then his time in office will have meaning.  

In his defence, Flaherty is in need of something positive to cling to right now.  He's tired, his health isn't great and he has various political albatrosses, some of which are named Ford, constantly circling him. Like anyone under stress, he is becoming functionally fixed on what he's defined as a win and is less and less prepared to spare a thought on anything that doesn't get him there.

Which means he's making a choice not to look at the big picture, not to take a look at emerging trends and pointedly ignoring the consequences of his inaction.

Doing nothing theoretically creates opportunities for everyone to step up, but it doesn't guarantee it happens - nor does it guarantee coordinated efforts.  Ragging the puck doesn't get you further ahead, it simply eats up the time you have available for action.  Inaction is not a strategy and playing "wait and see" is not leadership.  We sorely need leadership right now.

We might think if funny if Flaherty falls into a career sewer because he refused to look ahead - it won't be so funny if he brings Canada's economy and our own fortunes with him.

You Can't Take the Risk Out of War

It never ceases to amaze me how entitlement so often leads to ethical atrophy.  Whenever you offload both repercussions and consequences to others - whenever you take your skin out of the game - you stop thinking about the impact of your choices.  It's easy to employ drones when you never have to see the whites of your opponents' eyes.

This is why I'm not fond of any weapon that creates the illusion of distance - guns, missiles, drones, etc.  Not being present dulls your senses, erodes your situational awareness and mitigates your ability to size up your opponents directly.

The least you can do is make sure you understand who your opponent is.  When you don't, you'll find that your worst enemy tends to be yourself.



You Can’t Take the Risk Out of War
by Craig Carter Edwards – September 29, 2012

    

  

CFN - Unmanned, remotely operated drones are the new craze in military toys.  They are excellent for both intelligence gathering and combat; they also remove any direct human risk for their operators.  Unlike the bomber planes used in World War II, drone pilots never have to put themselves in the line of fire.  In fact, they can operate their drones from computers a continent away, moving their weapon-system avatars around like characters in a video game.

I like video games. My son and I will occasionally play the WII Lego games where you get to run around exotic digital landscapes gathering clues to solve puzzles and killing bad guys. There’s something inherently appealing about smashing neutral environments and getting points for doing so.  It’s funny watching how these games shape my boy’s imaginary play, too – when he makes up adventures with his toys, he now tells me how many “hearts” his different characters have.

I also like swords. This I blame on my own youthful influences, including the Star Wars merchandising phenomenon and an ongoing fascination with historical knights and samurai. My boy has picked up this interest in all things involving pointy weapons; he’ll run around the yard waving sticks and describing in detail the epic battles he’s fighting.

One of our “fitness” WII games is a sword-fight simulator that let’s us combine these passions.  Players use their controllers as swords and wave them at the screen, trying to knock the other player down. It’s all fun and games with no chance of anyone losing an eye. Except for the bad guys, but then they aren’t real people anyway.

Of course, in real one-on-one combat, there’s a definite risk for competitors of losing more than just an eye.  Unlike Hollywood depictions, true sword-fights don’t last very long, nor are they glamorous. When you’re staring down the sharp edge of a blade, your sole objective becomes cutting or killing your opponent before they do the same to you.  Duelists can’t afford to waste an ounce of energy on looking cool or verbalizing a lot of clashing sounds. Not when their life is on the line.

In this way, swordplay is like any martial art; there is an immediacy and intimacy to every move and countermove.  This reality encourages the development of discipline, vigilance and an understanding of consequence.  The first time my son and I squared off with toy swords, he was focused on the show; wild swings and dramatic sound effects.  He told me to stand still so that he could hit me, like in a game or a movie.  The moment he moved, I got my own blade (foam, so don’t call CAS quite yet) in and caught him on the arm.  

“You hit me!” said he in shocked surprise.  Yup!  That’s the way combat works.  His takeaway was that if you’re going to fight, you have to accept the risk of getting hit - to be mindful so that you don't.

War isn’t a game, video or otherwise. When a person gets shot, stabbed or blown up, it’s not “hearts” they risk losing – it’s their limbs, lives and ongoing quality of life.  Winning is no tonic against injury, either; soldiers who come home still bear the physical and psychological scars of combat.  

If the war happens on a soldier’s home turf, there’s every risk that they won’t have a physical home to return to, either.  I will never forget walking around a bombed-out downtown Sarajevo still littered in rubble and “beware of landmines” signs in 2001, six years after the Bosnian War was supposed to be over.  The spoils may go to the victor, but when the spoils are in ruins, what has really been won?  

This is why military strategists from Sun-Tzu on keep developing new ways to mitigate personnel and infrastructure risks at the same time as increasing chances of meaningful victory.  The evolution of warfare has seen the development of increasingly complex offensive and defensive technology and tactics, but it has also included the nurturing of warrior codes of conduct like bushido, chivalry or the Geneva conventions.  At its core, diplomacy is really a military strategy designed to mitigate the risk of destructive combat and avoid losses on both sides.

Of course, we wouldn’t fight in the first place if there weren’t rewards to be had.  Land and resources are of definitive value to expanding populations, which is why so many wars are fought over them.  A balance of power might encourage a military code of conduct, but when the balance shifts, we can always find wiggle room.  

Hawaiian Chief Kamehameha seized on the arrival of European weapons and tactics as an opportunity to tip the balance in his favour and conquer all the Hawaiian islands; Spanish conquistadors might have honestly thought they were doing God’s work in bringing Christianity to native heathens, but this noble quest didn’t stop them from slaughtering innocents and stealing their land and gold.   

The invasion of the New World provides a great example of how this process works.  European powers wanted to shift the balance of power in their favour; the Americas presented the opportunity for more land and resources to accomplish this.  Soldiers of fortune like Cortes and Pizarro could gain treasure and glory without any risk to their home turf.  With superior weapons, tactics and confabulated justifications, these conquerors were able to skirt their own ethics and rape, pillage and murder Native Americans with impunity.

Now, here’s the other side of that equation – people have a bad habit of not knowing when they’ve been conquered.  Realizing they couldn’t win a direct conflict with Spain, the Inca did what resistance fighters have always done – they changed the rules and took to the hills to wage a no-holds-barred guerilla campaign.  It’s no small irony that the Spanish cried foul when two of their diplomats were killed by Inca troops; as always, the rules only seem to apply when they work in an aggressor’s favour.  Of course, there has never been a balance of power in South America; despite the occasional uprising the descendants of the Inca remain a conquered people.

Of course, the Americas’ indigenous empires never had a chance; the odds of success against European guns, germs and steel were impossibly stacked against them.  Europeans themselves weren’t quite so badly handicapped when Moorish armies were using canons in their conquest of Iberia.  They used indirect military tactics to gain access to canon technology themselves and equal the playing field.  Looked at through the lens of history, Iran’s bid for nuclear weapons is simply a continuation of the Red Queen-like global arms race.

The progression of defensive and offensive technological development isn’t the only trend that has influenced military combat.  The evolution of communications technology has facilitated coordinated, large-scale warfare as well.  As it has become easier for generals to get situation reports in shorter time frames and from broader theatres of war, they have been able to create more all-encompassing strategies and run larger, more complex operations. 

As a sidebar, these generals and commanders-in-chief have been able to put greater distance between themselves and combat zones.  After all, it takes a bit of distance if you want to gauge the whole picture.  The further you are from harm, however, the less immediate becomes the risk of consequence.  What happens when the orchestrators of war throw new weapons onto the battlefield without having their own skin bared in the game?  World War I provides a good example.

The two World Wars were also accompanied by a terrible loss of civilian life and the devastation of social infrastructure, best exemplified by Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The Holocaust was equally revolting, taking the brutality leveled against Native Americans by European powers to new levels of systematic atrocity.  It was the Nazis’ attempted genocide of Jews that finally saw the establishment of the state of Israel, which brings us to a third major cause of warfare – security.

Israel has every right to fear attack by foreign parties.  There are thousands of years of precedent for violent anti-Semitism and regular expressions of hatred from their neighbours.  Israelis tend to pay a lot more attention to the news and foreign affairs than, say, the average Canadian or American, because they are constantly in the line of fire.  We, on the other hand, have no concept of what it’s like to live onstage in the theatre of war; we’re always the spectator, never the player.

Iran, for its part, has plenty of historical precedent for wanting to have nukes of their own.  They are also surrounded by weapons of mass destruction in the hands of hostile powers.  The people of Iran have access to the internet – whether they agree with every policy decision of Ahmadinejad or not, they can see the number of foreign headlines that present their nation as a global evil that needs to be stamped out.  Given the threat of conflict landing on your shores, you’d probably also feel safer knowing you had a big stick to fend off aggressors with.

Naturally, the US wants to defend itself and its interests, too.  9/11 was a real wake-up call to a nation unaccustomed to war on their own soil; it was the first time in a long time they could see the pointy end of their enemy’s sword up close and personal.  The War on Terror started by George W. and continued by Barrack Obama is the American response to this threat.  Although they took time, the deaths of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden have reinforced the message that in warfare, try as you might to avoid consequence, you eventually reap what you sow.

While the War on Terror has arguably had some success – there have, after all, been no successful attacks (unless you accept school shootings and such by white Americans as terrorist attacks) on North American soil since 2001 – it has still cost us a high price.  Both Canada and the US have lost troops in Afghanistan.  We have engaged in practices that bend our own proclaimed morality to the breaking point. Governments can have a hard time justifying the death of soldiers to populaces not directly touched by the horrors of war, but they equally have a responsibility to safeguard their people.  It’s the age-old challenge of risk reduction – how do you maximize offensive capacity and defensive capability, ideally through keeping conflict at a distance?

Which brings us back to the drones, that marvellous military invention that takes this stepping-back process to new distances.  Now, not only can generals orchestrate war from the comforts of home, but soldiers can fight them without having to leave the office, either.  In addition to reducing risk to domestic assets and human resources, this innovation of war does something else – it removes any direct risk from the operators controlling them.  There’s no tangible consequence of any kind; just like a videogame, you can kill the bad guys, smash exotic environments and then go grab a Timmy’s when you’re done.

Without personal risk, there’s no reason to develop shared rules of combat.  When you don’t need to focus every ounce of attention to defending yourself or your family against an enemy, there’s no incentive to employ precision strikes.  That’s on your end of the game.  In the places where drones are dropping bombs, however, the consequences of war are still very real.  The people being hit aren’t just militants, but civilians in the wrong place – their home – all the time.  Were you in the shoes of these non-combatants, who would you label as the bad guy?

The Geneva Conventions are designed with state actors in mind and are built around a simple notion; that in war, when one nation loses, they admit defeat and the war is over.  Al-Qaeda is a non-state actor engaged in a no-fail mission to remake the world in their image.  They have no nation to be beaten and, as such, can plop themselves down anywhere, even among non-combatants.  Every strike made by their opponents against innocents plays into their objective. 

In using old-school military rules but employing modern military weapons, national actors like the US are causing unnecessary deaths and inciting their opponents to use increasingly unconventional tactics to try and regain the security that comes from a balance of power.  We’ve seen suicide bombers, anthrax mailings, planes flown into buildings and cyber-attacks.  When one opponent already bears all the risk, there’s no limit to the horrendously unorthodox tactics they can develop to even the playing field. 

Which is a big part of the reason why I prefer swords; it’s much harder to get lost in the Fog of War when you are personally staring down the sharp edge of combat.