"That's too expensive": a mini rant

 I've been too burned by The Discourse on twitter not to include the following disclaimer for something so incredibly obvious it shouldn't need to be stated: the following discussion does not refer to people on limited budgets.

So. There's this habit among Germans to look for the best Preis-Leistungsverhältnis, which literally translated is roughly the relationship between cost and what you get out of it. Price-performance ratio, maybe. Cost-benefit analysis isn't quite right, but you get the drift.

This isn't limited to the Germans, of course! I think everyone who buys something wants to get the best value for their money. But I've encountered the specific attitude I'm irritated about far more here in Germany than back in the US, and I grew up with a single mom who was a secretary. (i.e. we were working poor. A lot of things were out of our budget.)

I adopted a cat from Ukraine, so I've been looking for all the cat things I don't have anymore. I wanted to get a name tag for her collar (and a collar), and I ended up searching at Amazon, where I also looked for a couple other things that were useful for me. (I personally prefer to avoid Amazon if at all possible, but sometimes it's the easiest option because of the extreme siloing of German stores. Which is another mini-rant in itself.) I forget what specific item I was looking at, it might have been eyeglass cases because mine broke and I wanted to replace it, but there were always reviews for the items that were "It was 5 Euro too expensive" or "I wouldn't pay that much again for this."

Granted, on Amazon, a lot of what you'll get is cheap plastic crap, and sometimes the cheap plastic crap is overpriced for something that'll break in five minutes. And the reviews mentioned above also included phrases like "cheap plastic crap." But not everyone was so displeased with the same thing, so I ordered the glasses case that one guy complained had "lumps in the outside material already when it arrived" so it was basically shit. (There is indeed a bit of lumpiness around the hinge, but who cares? It's not structural.)

So some of the Preis-Leistungsverhältnis can be chalked up to different definitions of value for the money. Does it hold my glasses? Great. Does it keep them from getting smashed in my bag? Excellent. I got what I paid for.

I'm going to add a caveat here that it's not exactly true anymore that more expensive equals better quality, especially for clothing. My old roommate in Georgia is a fashion studies PhD student, so I've heard so much about the fashion and textile industries, especially the $$$$ brands. But it's still true often enough that I expect a $150 pair of shoes to last longer than a $15 pair of shoes. (Obligatory "Sam Vimes Boots theory of economics" reference here.)

The following situations are not made up. I either witnessed them first-hand or was a participant in them.

Last year, I got a little into hiking, and my regular gym shoes weren't cutting it anymore. I'm not a hardcore hiker or anything; I'm not going to the mountains on a regular basis and definitely not in the snow. So I wanted to get low-end, quality hiking shoes. There's a sporting goods chain here called Decathlon, which is sort of like Dick's, so I poked around their website for their options. They have their own store brands, which are inexpensive, but I wasn't sure about the quality. So when I saw that they stocked a Merrell hiking shoe, and it was only 78 Euro, I snapped it up. I've always had good experiences with Merrell, and their low-end hiking shoe was well suited to my needs ("hiking" in Berlin is actually "going on long walks in the forest," because it's very flat here.)

Then I brought them home and mentioned it to my then-roommate, who said that was really expensive and promptly showed me the Lidl-brand hiking boots she'd acquired for 35 Euro (and which lived in their box in her shoe cabinet). Sure, they were warm and insulated and supported the ankle by being boots, but they're cheap plastic crap.

Earlier this year, I went to o-hanami with a friend (there's a cherry tree avenue that was planted by NHK) and we went into a shoe store afterward because there was a particular pair she wanted to try. I really like shoes, and I ended up leaving with a pair of not-exactly-olive-green leather peep-toe sandals with an ankle strap and a slight heel for 100 Euro. (The brand is Think! and they follow sustainable practices to make their leather.) That's a pretty normal price IMO for a pair of slightly dressy sandals, and I think it's half what I paid for my Danskos ten fifteen years ago. I have a pair of Keen sandals I bought when I started my MA program in Georgia, and I wore them to death. They were my "dress" sandals, the ones I wore when I was teaching and a pair of Tevas wasn't appropriate. I think they were $90 in 2016. I still have them! They were in storage until recently, so I haven't worn them in a while, but they still work.

Then I wore the new sandals and left them on the shoe mat by the front door, and my then-roommate once again said, "Think! sandals! Weren't they really expensive?" I was just like "sure, I guess?" because I didn't want to have to deal with it or her.

(I have six pairs of Fluevog shoes. I bought them on sale, but they were still a lot of money. And one pair was preorder only, so I paid full price, which was about half a new smartphone. One pair of boots I wear so much I had to get them resoled. And I just spent 300 Euros on a pair of knee high winter boots. So that's my footwear baseline. I grew up on Payless shoes, okay, and those are absolute shit, kill your feet in five minutes, have to replace them every nine months. Shoes are my fashion vice, and I would rather pay more for shoes that don't hurt my feet. And Fluevog makes 2-3" heels that I can stand in for hours, so fuck yes, I'll pay $200 for them, thanks.)

My ex-roommate also said things like "I bought a frozen pizza at the store and it was 4 Euro and that's too expensive. I also think paying 10 Euro for a pizza in a restaurant is too expensive." (I am so glad to be out of her apartment, for so many reasons.)

Just last week I was at a winter market where people were selling their handmade goods, from art prints to ceramics to fiber arts. A friend from roller derby is a ceramic artist, and I wanted to get two more little tart ramekins for my tart ramekin army. (I have 4 now; I want to have a set of 6 eventually. They're really cute, little pastels with polka dots like some 50s retro cuteness. They're 10 Euro each.) A guy comes up and looks at her plates. He picks one up and asks the price. It's an 8" or so plate, handmade, with a hand-painted design on it. It's 25 Euro. He asks about a different plate, a dinner plate, and it's 45 Euro. He makes some comment about the bigger plate not being twice as big as the smaller plate, as if they ought to be priced by the square centimeter or something. Then he says it's too expensive and wanders off.

So now we reach the point of this entire post: "it's too expensive" means "I don't think you, the artist or person who created this item, deserve to be paid fairly for your work. I don't believe you deserve to eat or pay rent or buy your materials." It also means "I don't believe factory workers deserve a fair wage, and I definitely don't believe the price should include external costs like environmental costs. I believe that the cost to me should be as low as possible, no matter who gets fucked along the way." [Please see obligatory disclaimer at the top of the post. Thank you.]

Modern society (and capitalism) has got us so far separated from the source of our things that we don't truly understand that there are people on the other end of the equation. Our comfort is the only thing that matters, not that some factory somewhere is employing people for a dollar a day and dumping waste into the local river so we can get our 35 € hiking boots.

The only way to change this attitude is to change society, and I unfortunately don't see that happening any time soon, what with Amazon inventing a holiday for the sole purpose of getting people to buy things they don't need (Prime Day).

This is a problem.

There's someone out there who thinks my email address is theirs. Normally it's just a nuisance, like the eye doctor in Wilmington who used it to apply for a job, or the law student in Chicago who put it down as the contact info for a reference for the bar, or the person who used it to sign up for a textbook rental site, or the person who put it for their Verizon contact info, or the guy who used it on his jobs.gov account and wondered why he wasn't getting any confirmation emails.

More annoying is the Charles Covington who is using it for athene live, which appears to be some sort of video sharing site. What makes this exciting is that I can actually log in to his billing information, because the billing company sends me a link directly to his billing that doesn't even require me to enter a password. (Note to web developers: THIS IS A REALLY FUCKING BAD IDEA.)

Most recently, however, it's gone a bit disturbing. Here are three screenshots from my mail recently.

I am quite sure I haven't signed up for porn cams or hookup sites. The IP address in the first one maps to a mobile device on T-Mobile in Kansas.

If any of you are brave enough to log in to that site, let me know what happens.

Friday things and a grammar rant

I currently have two short stories out on submission, and I'm working on revising a third, which I'd like to get out by Thanksgiving, possibly. This is highly unusual, because I don't generally write short fiction. Also, it's distracting me from finishing my current novel in progress, so I want to get it out of the way.

People who don't understand the difference between forms of to be as linking verbs, as past continuous, and as passive voice need to learn their grammar again. "was" does not mean "OMG PASSIVE VOICE! DELETE! DELETE!" I've run into people pontificating about the perils of the passive and how "was" is a terrible verb recently who clearly have no idea what they're talking about, so here's a little help.

For example, "The sky was a beautiful, brilliant blue the morning the world ended" does not contain passive voice, despite the presence of "was." It connects the sky (subject) to a predicate adjective (blue). Not passive! Yay!

"I was sitting at the table, drinking coffee and reading the paper, when the world ended" also does not contain passive voice. This is an example of the past continuous (aka past progressive), which indicates two things that happen simultaneously or one that is interrupted by the other. Not passive! Yay!

"When the world was invaded, billions of people were killed" is passive voice! Twice! Yay! If you can follow the verb with "by zombies" or "by aliens" or "by a swarm of killer bees" and have it make sense, then you have passive voice. Otherwise, you have either a linking verb or past progressive.

The world was invaded by aliens == makes sense == passive voice.

The sky was a beautiful blue by aliens == wtf? == not passive voice.

I was sitting at the table by aliens == wtf? == not passive voice.

This has been your grammar rant of the day.

So you like male writers. So what?

A writing pal of mine recently wrote that he figured he ought to read more books/short fiction by men, because he realized his shelves were mostly full of books by women. Cool, whatever.

My shelves are mostly full of books by women. They're mostly full of books by two authors: Lois McMaster Bujold's entire bibliography (including The Spirit Ring) and a sizable fraction of CJ Cherryh's bibliography. My shelves are a good 4' wide, and her books take up two of them. The only other author whose books come close to the same amount of space? Terry Pratchett. Lynn Flewelling comes in fourth place, with seven books.

That doesn't count the random selection of Literatyoor from high school or college and assorted non-fiction, nor the extensive manga collection (mostly by women, except the large Naoki Urasawa section).

Apparently, it's brave for people to say they like male authors, or that they plan to read more male authors. I disagree with another writing pal that the drive to promote women in fiction has evolved into open season on men, as if a predominately male field of writers in the past means that men writing now must all be assholes.

I didn't talk up male writer TC McCarthy's debut novel Germline, because I hate male writers and think no one should talk about them. Oh wait, I blogged about it and wrote a really positive review of it for a magazine, and I've talked it up to everybody I know who enjoys military SF.

I didn't review books by Mark Van Name, David Drake, Eric Flint, Tom Standage, or Patrick O'Brian in the last three months, either. The feminist anti-male-writer conspiracy has me silenced!

But, apparently,

This is what we’ve done, readers. We’ve allowed ourselves – as a community of writers and readers – to think that talking about women (in a positive way, of course) is right and good, but liking men leads to shady behavior.

As they say on wikipedia, [citation needed].

It is good to expand one's reading horizons. It is good to find books written by people who come from different backgrounds than you, because they often have different perspectives than you do. If you are reading books by only one type of person, you are limiting yourself. If you say that only men can write SF, and women don't belong in the SF clubhouse, you may be sexist.

No one is saying that reading books by male writers makes you a bad person prone to "shady behavior." What people are saying, and this comes up more often than it should, frankly, is that readers should expand their horizons.

Isn't expanding horizons and exploring different perspectives what science fiction's supposed to be about? Why's there such a push-back, then?

Jesse McCartney: Total idiot?

Dear pathetic wanker:

You are not my Zuko. Your recent interview on the John & Jay show (more info here*) showed that you've clearly done a lot of research to learn about your character. You've even taught me a few things I didn't know about my favorite show.

For example, you taught me that Avatar is an anime that was huge in Asia, so they brought it over here for 3 seasons and showed it on Nickelodeon. Wow! I never knew that creators Mike DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko were from Japan!

Thanks to Paramount's idiotic casting decisions, and the sheer idiocy of the two actors who've given interviews this week regarding the property, I've gone from guardedly optimistic to pissed off and outraged. Good job, Paramount. This fan had been considering seeing the movie if the trailer looked like MNS hadn't fucked it up too badly, but now even if you gave out talking Emo!Zuko figures and gave me free admission, I wouldn't set foot in the door.

Great job!

No love,
Pissed-off Avatar fan.

*If you don't want to listen, the reactions in the comments sum it up. There's a straight mp3 version linked in comments, and the relevant part starts about halfway through.

More Avatar: the Whitewashed Airbender links and things

Roundups
Glockgal
Lemon Water

Some individual links you should read
Angry Asian Man: A break-up of Sorts What does this casting choice say to me, the angry Asian man? It says that every time somebody speaks more slowly and loudly to me because they assume that English isn't my first tongue, they're right to do so, because I'm not normal. [...] It says that even though Konietzko and DiMartino took pains to articulate themes of diversity and multiculturalism, all their work was for naught, because people don't really want to look at people who look like me. It says that every time somebody thinks of me as the other, they're right, because I am.

We'll let the show speak for itself - an extensive set of screencaps depicting the rich Asian feel of the show.

The Last Airbender Gets a Cast What’s irritating here is not that these kids are mostly unknowns or had bit parts in retarded movies, but that they’re all whiter than Mormon Jesus. “Avatar” self-consciously created a world and characters from non-Western cultures, they being the source of philosophy and metaphysics the show drew upon. Shyamalan and Co., in taking us to honky-town, have stripped one of the more original elements of the story.

Sad, Racist, or Firebendingly Hillarious? Okay, okay. So, the uproar isn't that they cast white people. We are upset because this is one of the few movies where they could have cast diverse actors--but didn't.

Who do I have to blow to get some representation around here? I'm not the irrationally Angry Asian (Wo)man, I really don't care about picky knee-jerk stuff like Kung Fu Panda characters being voiced by white people, or Zhang Ziyi (and Gong Li and Michelle Yeoh) playing Japanese women, because I know people were being super finicky about 'em. But this? Ah.. yeah, all this tells me is that Asian actors are too Asian for the most Asian show on TV, soon to be on the big screen. Fan-fucking-tastic.

what we talk about when we talk about During our early Christmas dinner this weekend, the oldest of the nephews, who is 13, brought up the subject of the incredibly white child actors that had been picked for the film version. The three of them were confused and disappointed but unable to articulate exactly why. Then the youngest, all of 7 years old, asked me whether this meant that he couldn't be Aang when he played Avatar with his friends from now on. [seriously, this last sentence makes me cry.]

White Cast of ATLA Besides, it's not like Asians are lacking opportunities in Hollywood. It's not like we want those leading roles, right? There will always be work playing Chinese delivery boys, liquor store clerks, nail salon workers and Asian gangster thugs number 1 through 6. Thanks again, Hollywood!

Racefail Bingo Dead Bro Walking is a community dedicated to exploring portrayals of race in the media.

This is America.

A country where hope and change can join with our better nature on a national level, but where hate prevails regionally. A country where civil rights are still allowed to be determined by popular vote.

Hateful amendments have passed in 3 states, and the 4th is looking grim. People in 1 state have voted to end affirmative action, and the 2nd state is still pending.

California... just isn't the super awesome libral mecca folks paint it to be. It's got its high points, but like every other state in the country, it's got just as many super conservative areas.

North Carolina is still undecided. They've counted all the regular and absentee votes, and Obama's up by about 12,000 votes. They've still got to do the provisional ballots before they can call the race officially. But Useless Senator Liddy Dole's atheism-scare attack ad on Kay Hagan backfired spectacularly, and Kay won handily, with 53% to Dole's 44%. The fact that she's the 93rd most effective Senator in the nation and has spent a total of a month (if that) in the state since she was elected on Hater Helms' coattails in 2002 didn't help, either. Bev Perdue is going to be our first female governor. Larry Kissell beat Robin Hayes, because the DCCC gave him money this time after his squeaking loss (by 300 votes) 2 years ago.

Perennial hater Skip Stam won his state house district over nice guy Ed Ridpath 54-46. He's one of the consistent sponsors of a proposed marriage amendment and opposes hate crime legislation that includes sexual orientation. Here in NC, only the legislature may propose constitutional amendments, but they must be ratified by the voters. Because the state house is controlled by Dems, the proposal never makes it out of committee.

Someday, this center-right country (face it, y'all) will realize that putting civil rights up to a popular vote is a bad idea, especially with a simple majority rather than a 2/3 supermajority. Someday, this country will remember the ideals of personal freedom on which the Founders based their Constitution. I hope that someday comes within my lifetime.

Portly Dyke on the election

Profit motive: leading cause of being uninsured.

From November 2007: One of the state's largest health insurers set goals and paid bonuses based in part on how many individual policyholders were dropped and how much money was saved.

Woodland Hills-based Health Net Inc. avoided paying $35.5 million in medical expenses by rescinding about 1,600 policies between 2000 and 2006. During that period, it paid its senior analyst in charge of cancellations more than $20,000 in bonuses based in part on her meeting or exceeding annual targets for revoking policies, documents disclosed Thursday showed.

This is the dream of free-market fundamentalists, y'all. Profit, profit, profit! Informed consumer choice! But in the reality-based community, informed consumers have no choice, when insurers won't cover them because the consumer will cost them money.

This all profit, all the time motivation has screwed up health care in this country so incredibly horribly. It's the reason state governments have had to mandate that insurers cover certain diagnoses, procedures, and medications. It's the reason the population of the uninsured is partly full of the uninsurable - people whose pre-existing conditions make premiums on the individual market impossibly expensive, if they can even find an insurer willing to give them a rate quote.

How many of you have time to read all the medical literature to be a fully-informed consumer of health care? How many of you can understand medical literature - the jargon, the stats, the pathophysiology? I work in health care, and I don't keep up with all the literature. It isn't possible.

Yet fans of consumer-driven health care (another product of the free market fantasy) believe that informed consumer choice is the ultimate in rational care. It's bullshit. It isn't. Patients rely on their physicians to be up to date on the best practices in their fields and to give them advice. It's not like buying a washing machine.

Is the insurance system in the US fundamentally fucked up? Hell yes. Would scrapping it and starting over be any better? Hell no. So we work with the shit we have to make it less shitty all around - for the patients. The consumers, if you will. I advocate single-payer plans like in France, Germany, and Taiwan. Getting there from the cobbled-together nonsense we have, let alone overcoming the modern American "fuck you, I got mine" ideal, is going to be really hard.

Some days I honestly think it would be easier to pack off to Berlin and be done with the heartless, selfish compatriots in this country.

Another work rant

No, you standing there tapping, sighing, and grumbling about how you have to make it to the bus does NOT make me work any faster. I still need to enter the information on your prescription into the computer, print out labels, and put the pills into little bottles.

You're lucky we don't bill insurance like retail pharmacies.

Do NOT lie to me.

Don't come up to my pharmacy with a prescription from the native Spanish-speaking provider and tell me she didn't explain to you how to use the cream. Don't tell me you can't speak English, and then argue with me fluently in English 10 minutes later when I confirmed with the provider that she told you how to use it.

Don't waste our interpreters' time. We only have 2 for all 4 clinics, pharmacy, patient accounts, and vital records.

Don't waste my time by lying to me.

Don't fucking lie to me.