23rd anniversary getting aways...

Although we didn't get quite so exciting as last year, Omaha and I did manage to get out of the house for our 23rd anniversary. At last year's school auction, we won several gift cards for overnights at various hotels in and around Seattle, and booked a night in a vacation suite at a place called the Hotel 1000.

The hotel was gorgeous, but then it had better be for three c-notes a night. The bathtub was generous, and the staff seemed genuinely amazed that we'd been together that long. C'mon, people, only half of all marriages fail, the other half do okay. There was a bottle of champagne in our bedroom, as well as coupons for drinks at the bar, and breakfast in bed.

After checketing in, we went to the Central Cinema for dinner and a movie. Central is doing "bad 80s Movie Art," although why Labyrinth qualifies in that respect is beyond me. Still, it was fun to watch David Bowie prance about in his catsuit and look awesome, although now that I'm an adult I can really see some of the uncomfortable sexual analogies being made in the film: how Sara's lipstick betrays her, the decadance of the grand ball and its sordid adulthood symbolism, the whole kit and kaboodle of it. I drank a beer called "Odin's Gift" (who can refuse a beer like that?) which was tasty but not very strong.

Omaha and I went back to the hotel and spent some time in a bar, a street-level named Boka. I have no experience at that, but the bartender, a guy named Michael, made it easy, poured some awesome drinks and gave us a primer on the fine art of alcoholic infustions. We experimented with vodka infusions of cucumber, blueberry, and ginger, as well as hibiscus-infused rum. I continue to be amazed at how expensive good drinking is, but man, that was good drinking.

I woke the next morning with a hangover. You can tell how bad it was that, although I usually have a beer when we play our Sunday D&D game, this time I completely skipped it. We had breakfast in bed, a lot of water and ibprofen really helped, and Omaha and I checked out. We stopped by Fonte' Coffee for more wakeup (the coffee in the hotel room was the one bitter note), then Omaha wanted to get a massage at the hotel's spa. I read my book and took notes. We stopped at two bookstores on the way home. The hotel left cold waters in our hot car. Sure, it was pricey, but they really were excellent to us.

As a brief overnight mini-vacation, it was completely lovely.

A Tribalism Primer

John Quiggan makes an excellent point today, when he deals with a debate between a "locavore" and a pair of libertarians; the first defends "eating and buying locally," the latter attack it.

Quiggan's point is an interesting one: the libertarians make a wonkish argument based on efficiency that has nothing to do with market preference. They're attacking locavorism for its inefficiencies. Their point may be one to seduce locavores out of their caves by pointing out that "eating locally" will not save the planet; it's a convincing argument, but they go off the rails when they claim that eating locally is "a marketing fad that severely distorts the environmental impacts of agricultural production."

But so what? Isn't the point of a free market to give the customer what he wants, the rest of the planet's arbitrary will be damned?

The locavore, on the other hand, makes the market argument, arguing that locavores make and eat what they want, and the economists should keep their meddling noses out of the conversation.

Neither side actually makes a point consistent with the ideology they begin with: both end with talking up their favorite marketing gimmick, regardless of ideology. Quiggan calls this "tribalism," and rightly so.

Signal Boost: Pay Attention To The Contracts Behind The Curtain

One of the best things I've been reading this week is Chris Betram's Let It Bleed: Libertarianism and the Workplace, in which Bertram starts with the point that "power over a man's subsistence is power over his will." There are two kinds of Libertarians: The bleeding hearts who would double your taxes to make sure this illicit power didn't exist, and the black hearts who don't care that that power exists.

The latter currently control of our country.

Bertram points to a litany of the abuses of power in the workplace, the vagueness by which a job description may be abused, and how these abuses, many of them legal, amount to a curtailment of one's rights outside the workplace and often with consequences that muzzle free speech, association, and political activity. (Even the bleeding hearts, Bertram points out, have trouble saying exactly why "Fuck me or I'll fire you" is wrong under the Rand/Hayek/Friedman ideology.)

Bertram's catalog of ills is held up to a question: "Why is a union picket line worthy of handwringing over 'coerciveness' and 'bullying', but workplace abuse by owners and managers is simply Business AS Usual, Get Used To It?" The libertarian argument for freedom remains for a specific kind of freedom, allocated to a specific class by contingency and maintained by an oligarchic "pulling up of the ladder behind themselves."

Belle Waring then hits the roof with her own workplace experiences, illustrating in personal and professional ways how being a woman in the workplace can be different from being a man, and how "a workplace run by an evil boss is like nothing so much as a tiny Soviet satellite state."

Slate magazine fired off a salvo with a depiction of two workplaces: one where the "evil boss" kept costs down so workers got paid more, and one where a "lax boss" (interesting contrast that) didn't push so hard or invade employee's privacy so much, but consequently didn't have as high profits. The contrast there is pretty striking-- and contrary to actual business experience, but whatever. Brad Delong entertainingly fired back with a bearded Spock:

But if you're debating the question of whether it should be illegal to require workers to self-extract their left kidney with a razor blade in the bathtub and hand it to their employer to sell into the transplant market before they get to start work, it doesn't get anywhere to point to the fact that some people are better off in general than others.

Maybe there are two companies in town running roughly similar businesses that require the use of some unskilled labor. Both firms are concerned about the problem of employee theft, and both firms are also interested in paying their workers as little as possible. At one firm, they're offering the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, and they're losing some product. At another firm, they're offering $8.25 an hour and requiring kidney self-extraction. Sometimes people get so fed up with having to self-extract their kidneys that they quit and go across town to the lower-paid, less pleasant job. Other times people get fed up with trying to make ends meet on a minimum wage job, so they quit and go across town and extract and surrender their kidneys in exchange for more money.

Sad stories all around, but telling the higher-paying firm that its business model is illegal and it has to switch to the lower-paying one isn't going to make the stories any less sad.

Because in a truly free-market world, there's nothing in contractarianism to prevent companies from doing exactly that.

Meanwhile, John Holbo circles back around and looks at Hayek's claim that "vote yourself into tyranny" doesn't mean you're free after making that electoral choice. Hayek tried to use this to make the point that political participation by itself isn't enough to guarantee freedom; but since you can also "contract yourself into slavery," Hayek's argument is worthless: contractual power is also not sufficient to maximize freedom.

One impassioned libertarian in Bertram's opening essay, "Fuck Me Or Your Fired," tries to defend his point by writing:

Employers saying "Fuck me or you’re fired!" is a bad thing, but bringing out the government guns to stop them saying that is a worse one.

Hand over that kidney, kid.

Once you've absorbed all this, go back and re-read Bertram's essay I linked to up above. As dessert, consider When Libertarian Go To Work, where Julian Sanchez exults in being able to quit a job he doesn't like because he has nothing to tie him down: no mortage, no kids, no real stake in his community.

I suppose that's a life. Of sorts.

Mass Effect I, First Impressions

So, I've played about six hours of Mass Effect, the first game in the trilogy, and my initial impressions are very mixed. On the one hand, there's a mind-boggling amount of content in each story, and vast spaces in which to explore each narrative. There are also interesting character interactions that you can choose between, and the choices you make set you up for other interactions in the future. The art is pretty good, especially for a game engine that's seven years old.

On the other hand, it's very contrived: stories come at you at random. Your reasons for taking any given freelance assignment are very obtuse, the economy of Mass Effect is more or less broken, an attempt to fit an STL-style corporate universe on a post-scarcity FTL technology base. At one point, "The Council" vehemently rejects your pleas because you don't have enough evidence, yet when you come back hours later with some random audio recording from a self-confessedly nigh-impossible source, they immediately turn around and give you carte blanche to follow through on your mission! And sometimes getting from one adventure to another involves walking. A lot of walking. And while the worldbuilding is pretty good, this is no Bioshock. There's not so much art here.

I'll probably finish it. But I still don't see what the big hullaballoo is. Mass Effect may have a lot of aliens, but other than one or two, a lot of them are still humans with funny ridges on their foreheads.