Improvise, Adapt, Overcome, Unionize

In my D&D game a couple of days ago, the post-game chat turned to the economics courses that the GM was taking. The GM’s teacher is anti-minimum wage, anti-union and pro-Laffer Curve so the GM finds himself arguing a lot. This in turn became a discussion on the viability and necessity of unions.

It’s very nice to have friends who are willing to debate you in good faith on subjects of sincere disagreement – if nothing else, it makes you sharper when it comes to articulating your arguments, and it may even cause you to change your mind or come to a new realization about the issue. I’m still pro-union, but I think I’ve emerged from this discussion with a keener understanding of where anti-union sentiment comes from, in people who can stand to benefit the most from a union.

To my friend’s way of thinking, a union is actually harmful to a particular economy because it advocates for working standards that exceed what the company is willing to give, so the company moves its business elsewhere. His reasoning was that if the union hadn’t held the line the way it did, then the company would still be locally based. He’s right – but not in the way he thinks. He’s blaming the union for failing to adapt to a broadening of the theater of conflict between company and worker.

Let’s say you’re a business owner and you have enough power to base your operation just about anywhere in the world. You can either base your operation in Location X where there’s union protections and a long history thereof, or in Location Y where mercenaries are cheap to hire and willing to chop organizers up into dogmeat. I’m not saying that you, the person reading this, will pick Location Y – I’m just saying that you can probably know or have heard of someone who would. Furthermore, if picking Location Y makes the company more money than picking Location X, then the company that picked Y will eventually be able to outperform and undercut the company that picked X.

So the company goes with Location Y, and this was entirely their choice because this company has greater freedom of movement than a local union. The people over in Location X are unhappy, but you don’t live there so… eh. It doesn’t take too much effort to put some paid shills on the TV to dispense pearls of anti-wisdom and direct their anger at the unions, because there is a tiny, tiny grain of truth around which the pearls of anti-wisdom condense.

That grain is this: the unions aren’t thinking and working on the same scale as the side of the equation they are meant to counter-balance. The companies think globally now. They go anywhere that’ll improve the bottom line. For a union to compete, it has to be able to represent workers anywhere a company goes to get them, including the places halfway around the globe. A countrywide coalition of unions just isn’t big enough any more, in a world where no one country can contain a multinational corporation.

Unions have to adapt to the new theater of conflict, which is the whole world – if they don’t, then they will be flanked and outgunned and blamed for problems they are meant to solve, but aren’t large enough to. It’s a daunting task. Perhaps the most daunting is overcoming self-defeating thinking like “those foreigns are taking away our jobs” and “the union made the company leave.” These frames pit worker against worker, and the first, last, and only frame that matters to a union is “workers versus company.” They can get along – and the best of times for a union is when they do get along with the company – but they must always be prepared to oppose the company when doing so serves the interest of the workers. Most of all, they have to communicate, through word and thought and deed, that they, and not the company, are on the side of the working stiff.

My friend had belonged to a large, inefficient union and let the experience shape his perceptions. It’s inevitable that large organizations become cumbersome and build up systemic cruft. In this, unions are no different than companies. But with that out of the way, the union’s purpose is still to serve the interests of the worker when the company fails to do so. In other words, the unions might be sons of bitches but they are our sons of bitches. Their sons of bitches aren’t going to play fair and they’re all over the world. To survive, our sons of bitches have to fight on all fronts, because as the Japanese say, “business is war.”

Crossposted at Osborne Ink.

Pencils, Pens and Primaries

A confession:

I actually don't have a problem with the idea of primarying a sitting President on its own merits.

The POTUS is an elected official who belongs to a political party. The party's will, being democratic, is expressed via votes and caucusing, and the opportunity to vote and caucus for your candidate doesn't disappear just because someone from your party is sitting in office.

So I don't oppose a primary of the sitting POTUS for that reason. I am opposed for purely practical reasons, instead.

The fable of the American space pen versus the Russian space pencil is a myth. But as Snopes.com reminds us, the myth serves a greater truth – that pursuit of a complex, effort-heavy solution that preserves our existing paradigm is sometimes inferior to a simpler solution that steps slightly outside of our paradigm. A pencil still writes, and it is far cheaper to manufacture, let alone develop, than a pen that writes upside down.

There are formidable obstacles in the way of primarying a sitting POTUS. First is the fact that no one's done it in the past century's worth of elections. The only time a sitting POTUS has lost the nomination in the year of their re-election is when they have voluntarily given it up (Truman, and LBJ.) The latter was the closest that a Democratic POTUS has come to being primaried, and LBJ didn't lose – LBJ stepped down, a detail that often gets lost amid the discussions of the 1968 Democratic Convention.

Some may say that that's a barrier that can be broken, and in theory it can, just as barriers like "Catholic POTUS" and "black POTUS" and one day "woman POTUS" and "gay POTUS" will be broken. But those barriers are soft barriers, based around social acceptance that changes over time. Barriers like successfully primarying a POTUS are less soft barriers, encoded into rules about how we elect our officials.

An incumbent goes into a primary with a lot of advantages. A POTUS incumbent, moreso. The POTUS is the most well-known member of their respective party and has made friends with all the kingmakers and support groups to get this far. They won the last primary so in terms of experience, are usually one up on the challenger when it comes to "number of inter-party presidential races run" – and "number of presidential general elections won," too. They are in a position to offer carrots and wave sticks at any challenger from within their party. They have the experience argument, the support argument, and name recognition. These are formidable barriers present in any POTUS who came from a political party.

But let's assume that a hypothetical primary candidate overcomes those barriers. They get a win. This will almost certainly be a close-fought win, and the wounds and fissures left in the party will make the 1968 and 2008 contests look like a land of bunnies and butterflies. Without the support of the entire party, the new presidential candidate is not going to win. To gain that support, the quickest way is outreach – bringing the outgoing POTUS' supporters and people on board with your effort. So right away, you haven't been able to cut out the influence of the former POTUS, not entirely, and probably not even significantly.

But let's assume that all fences are mended. Now you have to convince the independent electorate to vote for the same party, but not the same person. Remember that line about name recognition? The POTUS who just went down was intertwined with the party their replacement is part of through four years of brand reinforcement that the new candidate has three months to undo. The ads write themselves. Dig up any good thing the new candidate said about the old and paint them as a hypocrite, or any good thing the POTUS said about the new candidate and portray the new candidate as a backstabber.

And if you win? Congratulations. You got rid of that POTUS a whole four years before they'd have to step down any ways.

Assuming that you find a candidate willing to run against the de facto head of the party, andthey pull out a literally unprecedented win, and they mend fences with the loyalists, and they convince the electorate that all that talk about fissures within the party is poppycock, honest, we'll all get shit done when in office, your long shot is rewarded by getting rid of a term-limited elected official who was halfway to the end of their term limit.

Slow. Clap.

The reason I'm opposed to a primary of a sitting POTUS is because it strikes me as a tremendous waste of resources that could be better spent on more deserving targets, such as the legislature. Congresspeople and Senators do not have term limits, at all – they can get reelected as long as their brains generate electricity. Primaries against them have been shown to work. Most importantly, though: Congress and the Senate and the governor’s mansions across the U.S. are the soil from which the next POTUS will emerge. Presidents come from their party. If you want a better President, it is a smarter allocation of resources to make the party they come from better. A President is the culmination of a process – the end of a fight, not its inception.

That's why I'm opposed to a primary against a POTUS. It's short-term thinking that requires a massive amount of invested resources for a gain of dubious merit – resources that could be better spent making sure the field of potential POTUSes who follow this one are more to your liking. In other words, it's building a space pen versus using a pencil.

Crossposted at Osborne Ink.

Magic Love Hose Vs. The Asus Transformer

Long story short, it's not a 10 - but a 9 is pretty respectable for a market that, a little over a year ago, virtually didn't exist.

The Asus Transformer, formally known as the Asus EeePad Transformer, is a tablet created by Asus and running Google's Android operating system. It is distinguished from other tablets by its price, and by its ability to dock with an external keyboard and battery. It competes with other non-iPad tablets such as the Motorola Xoom and the Blackberry Playbook; the demand for the Transformer is high despite a rather lackluster marketing campaign, proving that word of mouth really does matter.

Hardware

The Transformer is technically a tablet with an optional docking station, but both are sold seperately. Combined, the two fold up into a netbook about the size of an Acer AspireOne netbook (remember those?) with about the same thickness. The back of the dock and Transformer are ribbed slightly and have padded feet, which I prefer over the iPads I've played with. The tablet on its own is the thickness of the original iPad.

The screen itself is a nice big beautiful screen, very consistent. I noticed a little "light bleed" around the edges, but only when there is just about nothing but black on the screen. Otherwise it looks great.

There's a power button on the side that's easily recognized, and ditto for the volume controls. The microSD card slot on the other side, when loaded, is seamless - the bump that sticks out is just large enough to notice but otherwise unobtrusive. Well done there.

The keyboard is about half an inch narrower than, say, the standard aluminum Mac keyboard, with well-responding chiclet keys. Trackpad is smooth, and allows for multi-touch scrolling such as I am used to on my Mac and iPhone. It accepts taps as well as presses of the button underneath the pad. It locks in with a bit of wiggle room into the tablet - the slider will show you when it's clicked all the way in place, as it will slide all the way right. Slide left to unlock, and it pulls out fairly easily.

One key thing to mention is that the Transformer is slow to charge from USB - it will charge, but only when powered off. I'm told this is a common problem with tablets, but I still feel compelled to mention as I use the USB cable to sync files often and feel it's inconvenient to have to plug it in to get a quicker charge. If anyone out there knows a good way to get my tablet and my PC to talk to each other and send files back and forth, I'd appreciate it.

The speakers are a bit on the tinny side, but I hardly expect a tablet to match the subwoofer-equipped computer I have. Sounds just fine with headphones.

Camera takes nice pictures; the video could be frankly better. Haven't had much time to extensively test both.

Software

Used an iPhone or an Android? You're in luck. Slide to unlock, push app buttons, slide with finger, all that. Runs quite smoothly.

I appreciate that Android lets me view the contents of all interior folders on the tablet when I connect the cable. I don't like fussing with sync software, and this strikes me as the best way to get media onto and off the device. You can do it through Windows Media Player, I suppose, though I'd like to know why anyone would.

An important note: this does NOT come with sync software out of the box. I can't fathom a good reason why. I mean, yes, it gives me links to the website and all, but still, Asus, how much does it cost to stamp one CD?

Plays iTunes-purchased songs just fine. Movies, not so much - I've been able to play various non-copy-protected AVIs with a utility called RockPlayer, though. Picks up new songs the second they're brought in.

Dropbox works fine. Comixology is a revelation (comic books look FANTASTIC on this screen, with perfectly legible text, fast page loads and a lot of 'pop' to the colors.) The mail application is great, checking all accounts with regularity and letting you manage multiple accounts with ease. I am uncomfortable with the look and feel of Google Reader for RSS - anyone know of an Android RSS reader that essentially looks like NetNewsWire on the iPhone?

Sadly, Netflix does not work. I'm told that a rooted device can make it work, but frankly, I'm not quite up for rooting it yet.

Tethering with my iPhone over Bluetooth was a snap. Didn't need any extra utilities at all, though I did need tethering with my phone company turned on.

Finally, a nice touch: there is an 'active wallpaper' included that is ice floating in water, and the water level is supposedly tied to battery life. I'll have to test this out more when I get a chance.

Overall, I'm quite glad I bought it, and I couldn't beat the price. There are some "not QUITE there" hallmarks of a young market there, chief being no Netflix and a little trouble getting various video formats to talk to the Transformer without converting them. As I feel my way around the market and as the Transformer's popularity burgeons, I'm sure these issues will be licked. With that in mind, I would recommend the Transformer to anyone interested in a tablet and who's inclined to go with Android. It's not a 10 - a 10 would be a tablet with no disappointments and many "that's clever" moments. A 9 is still pretty all right, though, and the Transformer is probably the best competition the iPad 2's gotten yet.

EDIT: I would be remiss if I didn't also mention Anandtech's well-done reviews of the tablet, pre- and post-3.1 OS. Found here, and here, respectively.

Cana-DUH

One of the things about living in Canada is that you get nearly all US media and all Canadian media as well, so you can look at everything the US media culture puts out and compare it to your own. When it comes around, I take special joy in comparing the inevitable Canadian ripoff to its American counterpart. You get to watch 24 take off in the United States and when Canada gets around to doing its own politically charged thriller for TV we get... a series about border security guards. Tough security guards, though!

Thanks to laws about levels of Canadian content that can be shown on Canadian TV, the Canadian television and film industry will never truly die - but as long as America exports so much media and does it as well as it does, it will never truly take off and will have its parasitic side. America gets MTV, we get MuchMusic. America gets the X-Men, with its Canadian super-badass turning into Marvel's most popular superhero - and we get Alpha Flight, which starred a hairy midget with a porno moustache.

On May 26th, the Canadian version of the Huffington Post launched, bringing this fine ripoff tradition into the field of "news and blog aggregators."

What's the chief difference? Well, the URL is one letter shorter. Otherwise, you got me.

Just like the Huffington Post, there is a giant-as-all-fuck tabloid headline that exaggerates the importance of its story. As of this writing it's about one hockey team going at it with another in a few days. Same basic layout, same structure. Most infuriatingly, it has the same "eh, whatever" editorial policy, that allows the newly elected leader of Canada's Green Party to share the front page with a debate about Canada's role in Libya, tips on how to burn fat and why raising the minimum wage is bad bad bad.

And that is my real issue with the Huffington Post. It's not that it's ideologically conservative - it isn't. It's not that it's particularly progressive - it isn't. It's that it'sincoherent, but claims to be progressive - or at least, is still regarded as progressive, even though they no longer self-identify as such. I'll allow a lot under the umbrella of Team Lefty, but Karabegovic and Veldhuis up there are over my line.

But more of all, Huffington Post Canada isn't Canadian. It's an American website aimed at Canada like it's a target market. Its parent company is literally called "America Online." (I know it's technically AOL now, but we all know what that abbreviation means.) It's about as Canadian as any giant multinational media-gobbling corporation can be, which is to say it's as Canadian as we let it be - corporations are amorphous legal blobs of smoke that fill all available space. But it's originating out of country, so I give it even odds for survival. Canadians can smell the phonies - it's just that sometimes we don't mind, and only sometimes we do. I might want to deny the existence of Canadian Idol, but wishing doesn't make it so.

I can't wait for the Canadian version of Cracked.com, myself, and lists of six reasons why Canada is secretly horrifying or something.

Crossposted at Osborne Ink.

My One Regret About Osama Bin Laden's Death

... is that we'll never get to implement the Grant Morrison Playboy Solution.

Long since vanished from his website, but the Internet Archive sees all. Reprinted here, because this needs to be preserved for all time.

THE PLAYBOY PERSPECTIVE

Or...here's my favourite solution, which would actually be much more effective than any other but who's going to listen to a loony peacenik like me ?

We bring bin Laden back to the U.S. for trial and BEFORE locking him up, we keep him in house arrest.... IN THE PLAYBOY MANSION!

Can you imagine how rapidly and thoroughly bin Laden's fanatical following would collapse if they saw pictures of him sipping cocktails by the poolside, surrounded by bikini-clad airheads ?

Can you imagine him trying to espouse his fundamentalist doctrines to a gigling gaggle of sexy Playmates ?..

"You don't understand. This is jihad! Holy war against American imperialist hegemony."

Blank stares from six perfect pneumatic blondes.

"Wow! You're so cool! You're rilly, like, a famous terrorist ? That is sooo cool! Would you like a blow job ?"

"ALLAH AKBAR!!!!" screams Osama as all his dreams come true in a welter of flying cum and breast enhancements.

Subject the brutal bastard to the very best that the capitalist, hedonist western democracies have to offer. Give him endless offers of soapy tit fucks and baby-oiled five-in-a-bed romps and believe me, after enough time, he WILL succumb. He WILL embrace the glory that is western democracy.

And when he succumbs, the pictures can be shown worldwide. Islamic fundamentalists need sex and drugs to loosen them up; Dropping bombs on their friends only makes them angrier, harder, stronger and more determined. They won't kill George Bush or Tony Blair but they will kill more innocent people like you and me in the next big terrorist assault.

If we turn this into a war, only the innocent will suffer.

If we absorb bin Laden into our sexy, decadent culture we can ruin him as a figurehead and destroy the effectiveness of his cause.

For God's sake America! Let Hef take charge and SEND IN THE BIMBOS! Girls with big breasts are much better at changing men's inflexible minds than men with big guns are.

I¹m VERY serious about this.

Let us remember the words of the old Band of Hope hymn:

'Christ! Has eaten the Dehhh-vil!
He ate him like a plate of soup!
Christ! Has eaten the Dehhh-vil!
And now he'll do the same to you!'

And think about what they actually mean.

I endorse this man's product and/or service (and all of his comic books.)

Thoughts on The Finale to The Prisoner (1968)

SPOILERS, obviously.

The basic premise of The Prisoner is an intriguing one - a secret agent resigns his post, is abducted from his home, and wakes up in the Village, having been assigned a number instead of a name. The newly christened Number Six matches wits with the head of the Village, Number Two, who wants to know why Six resigned.

This premise, however, doesn't quite accurately describe the show, which descended into surreality with frightening regularity. Even a man as steeped in Grant Morrison comics as I am was taken aback at how surreal things got. Entire episodes have a dreamlike quality to them - oddly enough, it's the episodes most often dealing with hallucinations that seem the most lucid, with the more surreal episodes often offering no explanation whatsoever, leaving the viewer to sort things out for themselves.

The Prisoner's final episode, Fall Out, is perhaps the most surreal of all. This is my attempt to form some sense out of it.

Unlike the other more dreamlike episodes, this one has a fairly clear potential cause - the invasive psychological therapy used on Six in the previous episode "Once Upon A Time." The episode chronicles Degree Absolute, a special means of invasive psychotherapy that has regressed Number Six to childhood. He regains himself in the end, triumphing over Number Two, and in reward, he is taken to see Number One.

It's not a stretch to think that a straight week of brutal psychological warfare would leave after-effects on Six's perceptions of the world. I believe that he perceived the events that followed as a waking dream - that he faced the core of Village society, was complemented on his individualistic fortitude, and rejected leadership and fled the Village after cutting out its heart, rebels in tow, but how he perceived these things happening is different from how others did.

In dreams, everyone is an extension of the dreamer. All of the roles seen by the non-faceless people in the dream are roles Six has inhabited. The youthful rebel was once Six, as shown in "Once Upon a Time." The revived Number Two, a man of authority, steeped in the rules of the Gentleman's Game, was once Six. The judge, vested with legal authority by the system he represents, was once Six - a spy gathers information, so it's not a stretch to assume that Six has gathered information that has put people in jail.

Building on this theme, people finish each other's sentences, adopting each other's modes of speech and mannerisms. The judge and the youthful rebel talk like one man with two voices, at one point. The underlying theme is that everyone plays the role of rebel and establishment at different points in their lives; we are all prisoners of forces beyond our control - and to others, we are those forces they cannot control. The Village mixes wardens in with prisoners for more than one reason.

Moreover, images from our lives are repurposed in a dream. The missile set from "The Girl Who Was Death" is the silo control room where Six meets One. The actor who played the heavy from "Living in Harmony" shows up again as the youthful rebel. You could say that they were on a budget, but considering how elaborate the final set was I think the re-use of these images is deliberate.

And of course, One has Six's face.

Does this mean Six was One all along? Possible - but it's interesting that One's face is only revealed after Six has accepted the globe from him. The globe represents a transfer of power - so after accepting the globe, Six has become One. ("Six of One" indeed.) If Six actually was One all along, I'm not sure how that's possible in anything resembling a real world - rather, the scene is meant to show Six being offered to become that which he despised. He rejects the power, leads a revolt, and escapes the Village, while the missile that One lived in blasts off from this Earth.

One also hands a globe off to Six, that Six shatters. I'll get to that in a bit.

In dreams, the ocean represents a spiritual journey or place, and ascending and descending also represents a journey upwards or downwards in our psyches. The missile is the ultimate means of escape, capable of escaping Earth itself; its departure destroys Rover in the heat blast, and Rover was formed from water, emerging from bubbles in a spring or in the ocean. So the departure of the rocket and the destruction of Rover represent the end of the spiritual journey of Number Six.

When Six returns home, he drops off his fellow rebels wherever they please, but the Butler that came with the job of Number Two is dropped off at Six's own home, which has as its street number "1." But - Six doesn't go in, the butler does. Six has rejected power, and I believe that the Butler represents this power just as much as the globe that One handed to Six does. The globe has the iconic image of Six's face behind slamming steel bars that bookended each episode of the series up 'til now - because power is a prison all its own. The Butler, as a constant manservant, represents the system that grants and administers power. Without this system, power is meaningless - and the system knows it, and exploits it. The Butler goes into the door marked "1" at the end, because the system, larger than any human in it, and outliving them all, is the only enduring Number One.

And the Prisoner drives off. We never know why he resigned, because he kept that a secret even from us - since if everyone is prisoner and warden, then the only way to keep something truly personal is to tell no one.

* * *

So why did the Village do all of this? They must have had a reason.

Even in this age of "everything that ever was, available forever" - tracking down a copy of the comic book sequel to the series, The Prisoner: Shattered Visage, has proven difficult for me. But I've read its synopsis and I think that there is something to the notion that giving Six authority was the Village's last-ditch effort to keep Six under control.

In giving him authority within the system but keeping the system intact - because it's the system that is really in charge, formed of humans but only barely controlled by them - they would make Six want to stay. And if he wants to stay, he will eventually come to trust them. And when he trusts them, perhaps his guard will slip enough to let them know why he resigned - or maybe it won't matter any more, since his expertise as a spy would be employed for the Village in any event.

McGoohan has said that the penny farthing bicycle, a ubiquitous symbol in The Prisoner, represents technology not fully under control of the people who built it. Matt Osborne at Osborne Ink says it represents a government. I hew closer to Matt's interpretation than McGoohan's, but I would substitute "system" for "government," because it's more universal. Corporations are not governments, but they have the same characteristics in common with governments that the penny farthing bicycle represents; constructed by human hands, moving us forward, but taking a great deal of effort to stay atop of. We could, I suppose, build a better bicycle - I own a better bicycle myself - but to do that we'd have to stop riding the current one, and is the time we lose worth it? We only have so much, after all. So we amble on with great effort atop an imperfect conveyance that still has us moving forward.

The Village attempted to keep Six imprisoned atop the bicycle, and tried to convince him that he couldn't step off. But step off he did, bringing the whole thing crashing down.

* * *

That's the bulk of what I took away from it. There are other bits and pieces - the presense of Beatles music is one of them. "All You Need Is Love" has the lyrics "nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you", and "nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game" that tie into the events of the episode and the themes of the series, and it's interesting to note that in the 60's the Beatles were the counterculture, wheras today nearly all pop music traces its lineage back to John, Paul, George and Ringo.

There is also the "Dem Bones" song - a curious choice, since it's about interconnectivity and is an explicitly religious song, and going to church is about the least rebellious thing you can do in Western society. But thinking on it, I don't recall a church anywhere in the Village, or at least, no church used for worship - so perhaps the theme is that rebellion is all about context - what you are rebelling against matters most of all.

My goofy side wants to say that the imagery of a giant phallic object flying into the sky, and in so doing, killing a rounded white blob, has obvious sexual undertones. My cynical side wants to say that Patrick McGoohan inhaled the contents of a pharmacy to get through a tight deadline and he filmed the result.

But these are minor complaints. Initially I thought that leaving so much to interpretation was a cop-out, making the television equivalent of a Jackson Pollack painting and leaving the hard work of "making it make sense" up to me. But on reflection, it makes perfect sense of the series. The Prisoner was always about the right of the individual to be individual, to rebel, to be your own person instead of an easily swapped number - and forming your own conclusion, from your own experience, out of the collective experience of a television show seen by millions? That's about as individualistic as mass media gets. Even when the medium fought him, McGoohan got his point across.

I don't know that I'd call The Prisoner the best television series ever filmed - for me, that honor goes to Stephen Moffat's "Jekyll" - but I can see the side of people who say it's the best. I never did this much analysis of The Avengers, that's for sure.

Found When Out Walking.

Usually I buy someone a drink before an "@ss massage."