Needy Game Disorder

The first is a bit of fallout from the free to play fad that is currently sweeping through the gaming industry. The idea is that developers release the game for free, theoretically gaining a much larger audience than they would at just about any price. In the game they offer “micro transactions” to players to gain some advantage in the game. Sometimes it speeds up realtime processes, sometimes it’s gear, it varies from game to game. This is how they make money from the game, and when done well it pays out big time. Most devs who share numbers on such things are reporting higher net revenues and smoother income streams. Both of those are very nice to have. I’m currently playing Tiny Tower and Miracle City on my phone, and they do this fairly well. The games are fun without having to spend extra, making it easy to get drawn in, but I can see how the things you can buy would add value to people who get really into it. Another I played recently, Gaslight,  didn’t do it so well. In Gaslight, one’s progress was so stunted without spending real money, it just wasn’t any fun. I never got drawn in enough to even consider making a purchase. Which is a shame, the game really has promise conceptually. There are numerous problems that devs face when figuring out how to make a free-to-play profitable, and some devs resort to some pretty heavy handed tricks to get people to pay up. A lot of gamers jokingly call these games “pay-to-win” because of the disproportionate advantages often given to players who pony up real cash. Perhaps the worst offender in the current free-to-play goldrush though is Glu Mobile, but not for the reason you probably think. They are managing to think outside the box, in a particularly annoying way.

Their games are high quality, and generally pretty fun. They manage to balance the free-to-play equation pretty well. BUT (and this is a big BUT) once you play the game once, if you don’t come back regularly, they put persistent reminders to come play in the notification bar on your phone, complete with whatever chimey noise you have your phone setup to make when something needs your attention. This is REALLY annoying. I find this kind of intrusion from a game to be totally unacceptable, especially since I haven’t been able to find a way to turn it off short of removing the game. Every game I’ve played from them has this “feature” and it’s actually moved me to remove a couple of games of theirs that I genuinely enjoyed just to make them go away. I actually liked Blood & Glory and Eternity Warriors, and intended to keep playing them, maybe even spend some money on them. Alas, I apparently wasn’t playing enough though, and they peppered me with alerts begging me to go play. My phone draws my attention enough with legitimate alerts that actually need my attention, I don’t need it bugging me about games I’m not playing enough. Not while I’m in meetings, or trying to sleep, or trying to work, or…. you get the picture. At this point, I don’t even bother with Glu games. They’ve completely lost me as a customer, before they managed to get any of my money!

Mother Knows Best

My second peeve is also related to gaming on Android. And that is the current trend for apps (usually games) to require me to use wifi to download them if they are over a certain size. This is insulting and inconvenient. I’m a grown up. I pay for my unlimited data plan myself, with money I actually go out and earn. It should be up to me how I use that plan, shouldn’t it? It used to be that most apps would show a warning to the effect of, “You seem to be using a cellular data connection, you sure you want to get all these bits right now?”. That is totally reasonable, polite even. The devs are seeing a potentially expensive situation for their users, and making sure they want to do what they are asking them to do, thereby protecting them from a potentially costly mistake. However, going all over-protective-mother and taking the option away is a bad thing. You earn zero points from me for that.

Here’s an important data point for any devs who do this or are thinking about doing this: If I can’t try out your game the moment I want to try it out, odds are good I never will. There are hundreds of games out there, and a lot of them are probably a lot like yours. If I have to wait until I’m somewhere with a wifi connection I can use to play your game, I will probably forget about it entirely or move on to one of your many competitors. I (and many people like me) have more money than leisure time. You have one shot to get my money, and putting a wall between you and my money is a bad move on your part.

This “helpfulness” is even creeping into the distribution channels. Amazon’s Android store also enforces the “only download on Wifi” rule for larger apps. Their threshold for “large” seems to be awful small though. I seem to recall a wifi-only app I installed recently that was about 30MB. I think it was Plants Vs. Zombies. I pull over 4GB of data onto my phone every month. Usually 1.5-2.5GB of that is over 3G. 30MB is nothing!! How did that earn a wifi-only tag? I don’t even think about switching to wifi unless I’m downloading something over 100MB, and I don’t usually actually bother to do it until it gets over 200MB!

I suspect that at least some of this is coming due to pressure from the carriers, in a misguided attempt to curtail “exploding” data usage on their networks. If that’s the case, then double-shame on everyone who is bending to this pressure. You are hurting your business to help prop up someone else’s. The carriers are unwilling (or even worse, unable) to meet the demand for wireless data that they have helped create, and you are cutting your own throat to help put an ineffective bandaid on that? How is that a good move?

I’m such a curmudgeon anymore I’m sure I’ll find more things to complain about in the near future. In the meantime, what mobile “features” are on your current least-favorite list?

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

Cory exists on an ephemeral list that I call “Smart People Who Do Smart Things That I Respect”. It’s a list I keep meaning to actually write down. He’s on it primarily because of his activities in the Free Software and Free Culture realms. He also seems to have fairly sane political views, which is a cherry on top for eligibility for The List. I’ve read a lot of his non-fiction stuff and it’s all smart, concise, and accessible. In short, I like him. After I finished Burn, I dove back into Aldiko’s Creative Commons section, and came up with this. Like movies, I tend to stay pretty ignorant about books until I’m actually looking for something to read, usually just gravitating to genres and authors I know I like and picking something up on the spur of the moment. That is how I found Someone.

The book bounces around in time, back and forth from Alan’s childhood and the “present day” of his adulthood. Present Alan has just moved into a new house, filled it with shelves that he’s filled with books and other curios, and intends to sit down to write a book. He never gets to the book though, derailed by the abuses of nefarious neighbor Krishna, infatuation with the classic girl-next-door Mimi (who has wings), the techno pipe-dreams of anarchist friend Kurt, and the arrival of his Matryoska doll brothers Edward, and Frederick. They show up on his doorstep early on in the story to report that Gregory (the smallest of the set) is missing, and they fear that their psychotic brother Davey has returned from the dead to seek revenge. This is particularly distressing for E and F, because without G, they cannot eat.

From there, the story runs away with Alan as he tries to solve the mystery of Gregory’s disappearance and deal with the repercussions of Davey’s return. It’s well crafted, entertaining, and the weirdness soon falls away and you come to accept the realities of this world. The flashbacks to Alan’s youth where he meets his first love are particularly endearing and heartbreaking. As are his interactions with his brothers.

The one major complaint I have about the book has to do with the parts involving the creation of the wireless mesh network with his cyberpunk buddy Kurt. The project serves as a means to bring the two together and to move their relationship forward, but the technical explanations of things feel heavy-handed and out of place. It could be that they are talking about things I understand already, so the information covered didn’t add anything for me, but it really felt like a kludgy delivery. It was almost as if Doctorow finished the story and then said to himself, “But wait! I’m known for all my techy and free culture stuff! I have to stick that in there somewhere!”, and then proceeded to bolt on those pieces after the fact. If I were king, I would have kept the concept of the mesh network project since it was genuinely interesting and served as a good engine for moving the story forward in a number of ways, but ditched the overbearing technobabble exposition. It just didn’t add the to story. In fact, the first instance of this happens relatively early, before I was used to the weirdness of it all, and the two together were almost enough to drive me away. I’m glad I didn’t stop as I really enjoyed the rest of the book. I fear though that many people will get to that point, their eyes will glaze over, and they will miss out on a really great tale because they put it aside prematurely.

Bottom line, go read it, and try not to get too hung up on the oddly placed techy details. 4/5

The movie follows Kristen, who is captured by police and sent to The Ward early on, after an unexplained and intriguing chase through the forest that ends with her burning down an isolated farmhouse. Once captured, we follow her and her far-too-pretty to be believable ward-mates as she tries to unravel the mystery of what happened to Alice, a ghost that is haunting the ward. Her “friends” seem to know something about what is going on, but are reluctant to help.

Most of the horror stuff that Carpenter is known for (as either a writer or director) tends towards the slasher-flick. The obvious example of course is Halloween and its many descendants. The Ward, on the other hand, is much more psychological thriller than slasher, at least until the very end. Up until the last fifteen minutes or so, there’s the constant sense of wrongness and building dread, but not much in the way of big scares or gore. The story is interesting, the characters easy to get involved with, and the pacing is good for the most part. I found the final confrontations with the ghost of Alice to be a little formulaic though, almost boring. Luckily, the denouement of the story and final scenes more than make up for any mis-steps that lead up to them.

I’d give The Ward a strong recommend for fans of horror or psychological thrillers. I gave it 4/5 for my Netflix rating.

Mint: A Thinking Man’s (green) Ubuntu

That heading pretty much sums it up. The version of Mint I tested (11, AKA Katya) is essentially a re-skinned Ubuntu, with a few custom apps thrown on top for flavor. I rather liked it. I found their “super menu” particularly nice to use. It’s like a bizarro-universe Ubuntu, where design choices were made that much more closely match the ones I would have made. I only ever used it in a VM, so I can’t speak to questions of performance and whatnot on bare metal, but I doubt there will be any surprises. Rather than repeat what has been said before, and very likely better than I would have said it, I would direct you over to Dedoimedo’s review of Katya. His opinion and conclusions closely mirror my own.

Fedora is still Redhat

Perhaps some perspective on where I’m coming from vis-à-vis Fedora is in order. I’ve never liked Redhat. RPMs just seem like a really poor packaging system. I know a lot of people use it, and some even claim to like it, but I’ve never seen the appeal. All the various tools that have been created to make dealing with them easier always just end up coming across as attempts at polishing a turd. So, after abandoning Redhat 7.3 (which I used despite my RPM aversion) for Gentoo, I pretty much ignored everything Redhat/Fedora until now. I went into this experiment hoping that things would be better, and you know what? They aren’t. Yum is still slow, still moves tons of data over the wire needlessly every time you do something rather than relying on local caching, still gets caught in weird lock states, and generally just sucks a lot more than APT. I somehow managed to get the system into some sort of a deadlock just by going into their update manager to see what updates were available after the initial installation. I managed to get it unwedged relatively easily, but it still required a few prayers to Google, stopping and restarting some Fedora-specific service I’m not familiar with (I assume it’s part of the update management system, but I didn’t check. I was looking a solution, not nuts and bolts!), and some ministrations with obscure Yum switches on the command line.

That said, the Gnome 3 desktop on Fedora 15 is awful pretty, and things generally have a nice fit and finish. If they could just make their package manager better, they’d have a contender. I also have to say I have a lot of respect for people in the Fedora community. They are really doing a lot of good work that is pushing the state of the art in Linux forward in meaningful ways. One of my favorites is Máirín Duffy. She is doing great stuff in the realm of design and usability that is far too often ignored in OSS. I really want to like Fedora, but every time I have to touch an RPM, I break out in hives. It’s not pretty.

Seems Obvious

So after those mini-reviews it should seem obvious, I’m going with Mint, right? Well, no. Not yet, anyway. While doing this research, I also kept futzing with Ubuntu, and I managed to fix the stability problems I was having. The two things that seemed to help the most was enabling the Gnome 3 Team PPA to get newer versions of Gnome 3 packages, and using the patched Upstart package available from the PPA listed in this comment on Launchpad. Those changes fixed the “showstopper” problems I had, and I’ve started to get used to Gnome 3. It’s not perfect, I still feel somewhat hamstrung, but unless I switch to KDE it seems Gnome 3 is the official Way Forward for the Linux desktop aside from Unity. It definitely has potential though, and historically speaking, the Gnome folks have done a good job of making decisions that meshed well with my computing priorities.

So, for now, I’m sticking with the Onerous Ocelot. I’m not real happy about it, but there you have it. Should something come up that would prompt me to do a bare-metal reload of this machine I’m totally putting Mint on instead, but barring that, I’m sticking where I am. Maybe 12.04 will start turning things around. I feel like I’m rationalizing the behavior of my abuser, but it’s not bad enough right this second to justify the amount of effort it would take to make the switch.

I just finished reading “Burn” by James Patrick Kelly. He’s apparently a fairly well known Sci-Fi author, but I’m not familiar with his work. It’s a quick read since it’s fairly short, a novella really rather than a novel. It follows Spur, a firefighter living on the idyllic planet Walden.

Walden was founded with the intent of following simple lives modeled after Transcendentalist philosophy. Unfortunately, a sort of war was broken out between the Transcendentalist State and the previous settlers, called Puk Puks. The Puk Puks don’t seem to attack people, but rather they fight by setting fires in the unnaturally quickly growing forests that now spread over Walden.

I was skeptical at first, the premise seemed so contrived, but the writing really drew me in. The characters are interesting, their interactions and motivations believable. Kelly creates a rich and believable world without overdoing descriptive exposition and I really began care about the characters.

I just wish there were more of it. The story ends abruptly, leaving me wanting more. There is so much more story to be told here, but Kelly leaves it to us to imagine. I really enjoyed it, and would recommend it to anyone who wants an enjoyable quick read, not just Sci-Fi fans. I’ll give it 4/5 stars, losing a star for ending right when I was really thoroughly sucked in. I will definitely be seeking out Kelly’s other work though, maybe he’s written more about the Thousand Worlds, and I can get a pseudo-fix that way.

You can buy the book from Amazon, or get the eBook for free from Kelly’s website. I read it on my phone (also for free) after discovering it in the Creative Commons section of the store in the Aldiko Reader.

I actually agree more than you might think with the local food movement, although for different reasons: I am more excited about people knowing the people they do business with, because it tends to spark unusual benefits in the happiness of a community.

As more of an economics and capitalism-minded person, I still believe that the highest efficiency is attained with international trade, which overall leads to the highest level of material wealth. If continued material expansion were our goal, and we had the political will to fix the current environmental and labor exploitation side effects, this would be the “richest” situation even after we made it 100% sustainable.

BUT – we passed the level of having enough wealth long ago. So we can afford to make some trade-offs for happiness, which means hanging around and telling jokes with people who live near you. This leads me directly into your camp of going to a simpler and more local lifestyle, including food.

But I have a challenge for you. To make your argument and even convince your capitalism-and-trade-minded adversaries, you need to understand things from their perspective. That means you must understand why “market price” is indeed a good estimate of the social cost of something as long as the environmental and labor rules are fair. And since they are not currently fair, you need to use your imagination to see the good that is mixed in with the bad.

For example: my old high-tech company moved some of its manufacturing to Mexico because their labor costs were 75% lower than what they were paying in Texas. Is this exploitation? I had the chance to go and visit the actual factory and work with my compadres for a week in the new manufacturing plant. They were universally excited about their new jobs, they were earning more than they ever had before in Guadalajara, and using the money to get their kids off to a good start in life, live in a safe place, eat healthier food, etc. These manufacturing plants were a transforming force for Guadalajara and they fed new skills into the city and led to Mexican engineers starting their own companies nearby both partner with and compete with the US-based firms.

That’s is what international trade feels like to MOST of its participants. As I said, your assignment is to read more about it and learn why the argument about “But American jobs are then LOST in the long run!!” is false.

You bring up a few points that I would like to address separately. Broadly speaking though, my belief in a local food system has nothing to do with a desire for protectionism for American jobs. Either I accidentally implied something I did not mean to, or you are incorrectly attributing the arguments that others have to me. I fully understand the concept that “losing” manufacturing and other middle- to low- skilled jobs to markets overseas frees resources here to allow people to move into more highly-skilled occupations. I also believe that system sees diminishing returns at the extreme end of it and we should not go there, but we aren’t there yet. There’s also a somewhat cynical argument that allowing one person to fall out of the middle class here allows half a dozen to be lifted out of poverty overseas, but let’s not go there for now.

The first thing I want to discuss in depth is more about the “price as a measure of social cost” concept. I have done a bit of study on economics, and I’ve never seen this assertion made outside of the article that the previous commenter pointed out. I think there is one or two things going on here that may have led to that assertion.

One might be a problem of perspective. A lot of the economics writing I’ve read talks about the “price” of bringing things to market. In those cases, they seem to me to be talking about the price to the producer, not the price to the consumer. In that context, what they call “price” most people would call “cost”, and the “price” to the consumer is some percentage above the “cost”. By using “price” and “cost” nearly interchangeably without explicit perspectives, the concept of the “cost of production” (which many models equate to the social cost of the object) and that of the “price the consumer pays” are being confused.

The second possibility is that of a logical fallacy. If we accept no confusion between the terms “cost” and “price”, and we accept that price is a function of the marginal cost of an item, the seemingly logical conclusion is that the social cost (which is a function of the marginal cost) would also be closely tied to the price. This is not a safe assumption. At this point we introduce the externalities of pollution and resource depletion, subsidies, and labor force exploitation which makes that relationship even more loose.

To speak in terms meaningful to the vast majority of people, and the terms the apparent originator of the “price = social cost” argument intended we have to look at the price that the consumer pays for an item. That price has at best a tenuous relation to the cost of production. You only have to look so far as loss leaders at the grocery store to see concrete examples of this. It also exists in the consumer electronics world. It has been estimated that Sony was spending $800 to produce Playstation 3 consoles at launch, yet they were being sold at $500. More recently, the Kindle Fire is estimated to cost Amazon about $210 to produce, and yet it is being sold at $199. Both of these are cases where the producer has decided to sell the eco-system forming product at a loss on the expectation that the loss will be recouped in the form of future media sales. Even without attempting to consider externalities, this illustrates concretely that the price of an object is not necessarily even a good estimator of its’ marginal cost, much less the social cost.

In fact, in my research on this subject, I’ve only been able to find two pieces of work that attempt to address the issue of social cost in economics, and both of them come to the conclusion that our current economic models do not adequately account for externalities and are wholly inadequate for measuring social cost! In his conclusion to “Shadow Pricing in Economics”, David A. Starrett (http://www.jstor.org/stable/3658662?seq=1) states, “At this point, we are very far from the capacity to construct such a model, much less analyze it. Many elements in the system interaction are unknown, and the state of the art in computation limits the number of stocks to a handful at best. The challenge now is to construct meaningful models that capture important components of interaction. I hope and believe that ecologists’ experience in modeling the natural world can be a valuable input to this endeavor.”. In “Pollution Externalities: Social Cost and Strict Liability” Peter Lewin (http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj2n1/cj2n1-6.pdf ) opens with, “This paper critically considers the neoclassical social-cost approach to problems of pollution. This traditional approach, when subjected to close scrutiny, is found to be seriously wanting in applicability and consistency.”. He then goes on to propose a model of “strict liability” to account for this.

Even this basic microeconomics site (http://tutor2u.net/economics/revision-notes/as-marketfailure-economic-efficiency.html) makes no attempt to tie price to marginal cost, much less social cost, beyond the assertion that if price equals marginal cost, total economic welfare is maximized. They do, however, acknowledge towards the end that social cost and marginal cost are different things, and that “A private producer who opts to ignore the negative production externalities might choose to maximise their own profits…”.

All of this confirms my belief that consumer price has no direct bearing on social cost, we lack the models to even conceptualize what that relationship could look like because the systems are too complex, and that it’s perfectly realistic for a producer to ignore externalities they don’t care about.

Next, you provide as a counter-example your experience with high-tech manufacturing in Mexico. Although there are exceptions (the recent suicides at Foxconn’s plants in China are an example of this) I would grant that high tech manufacturing endeavors are generally economically and socially fair to all the participants. Generally, people who will be interacting with that system are well educated and economically independent enough to avoid exploitation. Again, the Chinese model of self-contained manufacturing “cities” where people work and live within the confines of the company complex are likely exceptions to this rule. But that aside, I will grant that in this case everything I’ve learned about this system leads me to believe that we are doing it fairly well. The cost transference (via externalities) I talk about is minimized in the common case. Because your example only deals with the externality of labor cost, I will constrain my point to that area as well.

As you descend from the heights of high-tech manufacturing, down to less skilled occupations, the picture changes substantially. The people involved are less educated, less mobile, and generally more vulnerable to exploitation. The east-asian sweatshop producing clothing is the classical example. Once you get to food production (ie -harvesting) you have even more examples to choose from:

Tomatoes (in America, no less) – http://www.npr.org/2011/06/28/137371975/how-industrial-farming-destroyed-the-tasty-tomato
Chocolate – http://www1.american.edu/ted/chocolate-slave.htm
Bananas – http://www.netnomad.com/slave.html

In the absence of forces to prevent it, the trend for large scale capitalistic enterprises is towards exploitation. Food production is an enterprise that is particularly amenable to this exploitation thanks to the low educational requirements of the participants, and the generally regulation-free (or even despotic) environments of third world countries which are ideal locales for year-round corporate agriculture. This represents a significant external cost to centralized corporately produced food that is not reflected in the price. Even ignoring the environmental costs and other social costs (notably government subsidies), that cost is sufficient in my mind to avoid food produced in that manner whenever possible.

Finally, I’d like to pose a question to you on efficiency. It’s generally accepted that efficiency is good, and maximizing efficiency also maximizes wealth. This relationship could even be said to drive most economic decisions and models at a high level. However, what other attribute do highly efficient systems have in common? By and large, they are fragile. By maximizing the efficiency of food production, what fragility have we introduced? Can we afford to have a system that is that fragile? One where a single producer can accidentally (or heaven forbid, willfully) contaminate the food supply for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of people? You don’t have to look far for examples of this happening. How can we even begin to account for this in an economic model? At what point does the risk posed by this fragility trump the benefits made possible by ever improving efficiency?

Can something be awful and awesome at the same time? I felt mildly ill through most of the movie, but I still loved it. It’s a nice tidy indictment of both ultra-conservatives and out of control government, all tied up in one tidy, blood-stained bow. I think what surprised me the most is how often it switched from being shockingly graphic one moment, and subtly human the next. Though well crafted overall, it’s not perfect. Like so much of Smith’s work though, the flaws almost make it more enjoyable.

If you have a problem with graphic violence, this is not a movie for you. I generally don’t have a problem with it, but even I had a hard time stomaching some scenes. I think it was the plausibility of it all that really got to me.

In the end though, I’m glad I watched it and gave it 4/5 stars.

We also recently started working on reforming our financial habits, inspired largely by Mr. Money Mustache. I talked about the value of local food in a comment on a post over there recently, and got a response from another reader that I thought deserved a more well structured reply than what would have been convenient to write there. So, I’ll write my response here. He made a number of good points that I’d like to look at one by one.

…local food often takes even more gas and involves more pollution that centrally grown, corporate organized food.

First, I don’t want to discuss this in terms of “pollution”. That is only one aspect of the total cost of producing a food item. For the sake of this point, let’s substitute “energy” for any of those other possible measures of cost, since energy inputs are usually derived from some non-renewable source, and that will encompass the majority of the financial cost of the item and imply most of the pollution cost of it as well. The truth of his statement will depend a lot upon how you define “local”. I failed in my comment to specify “local sustainably produced” food which is a pretty big oversight. It’s true that beef produced at a CAFO consumes about the same amount of energy almost no matter where it is consumed. Accounting for all the inputs required for the feeding and cleaning up after of those poor animals, by the time that steak is a steak, the energy used by making it is enough that the energy used by transporting it around the world is insignificant assuming you amortize that fuel out per unit of food (more on that later). If you are comparing two pieces of grass-fed, pasture raised beef that becomes a more complex question. Those pieces of meat, if produced properly on a sustainable grazing operation, will have consumed essentially no cost-bearing energy during their production because all of their energy input comes from the sun via the grass. As a result, the amount of energy required by their transport becomes a much larger part of the equation. How much more? I don’t know exactly, but I would wager it’s enough to make the grass-fed beef I get from a ranch less than 20 miles from my house pretty hard to beat. A similar calculus applies to produce.

Further, one of the worse things you can do for the good of humanity is ignore the market clearing prices of goods. As Steven Landsburg points out (http://www.thebigquestions.com/2010/08/23/loco-vores/), no unit of information better encapsulates the benefits and costs to society of a good than price. Just because something is local does not mean it is better for the environment.

I don’t know what market clearing prices have to do with the good of humanity. I don’t think my grasp of economics is strong enough to analyze that statement. For now, I’ll just leave you with a bewildered look and beg anyone who has it for more information to back that assertion.

The link he points to is interesting, I suggest you read it. The article at that site is attempting to point out the folly of another author’s attempt to account for all the energy required to grow a tomato by extending his “crabbed accounting” to account for all of the incalculable social costs that may be implied by producing that tomato. For the TL;DR crowd, the author’s thesis is that the price of an item is a near-perfect approximation for the social cost of acquiring that object and that any sort of further analysis is silly.

That assertion just felt so utterly wrong to me on an instinctive level, that I actually physically recoiled when I read it. I was so overwhelmed with reasons why that was wrong I had to take a minute to step back and really boil it down. My head was spinning. What I came to is this: The price of something has almost no inherent link to the cost of that item, particularly if you decide to leave the relatively simple world of economics and start examining the cost of something in social terms. The price is simply what the current seller hopes someone will be willing to pay for it. Usually, the financial cost of producing the item is a substantial part of it, but that can be skewed greatly. Even in the simplest terms, price as a function of social cost will only be taking into account the costs that the seller cares about.

This is where we start venturing into the system of cost transference that I mentioned in my original comment. Our current industrial agricultural system, as I understand it, is built upon a foundation of cost transference. For discussions sake, let’s use the classic example of the tomato. Let’s say that your favorite farmer decides that it costs them $1 to get a beautiful tomato from their local biodynamic farm onto your plate. Seeing as how that  farmer needs to make a bit for themselves, they decide to price it at $1.10. A ten percent markup seems fairly reasonable. So, how does industrial agriculture undercut that price? Well, it reduces production costs of course! How? Well, first it uses all variety of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides to ensure they get as many market-ready tomatoes as possible during a growing season. Even though all those chemicals cost money, this reduces their loss rate to the point that each tomato only costs $.80. Where did that $.20 go? Did it just disappear? Well, no, that portion of cost is transferred to future generations in the form of environmental or health problems caused by the production and application of all those chemicals. Another $.10 can get shaved off by transferring some of the cost to taxpayers via government subsidies and tax breaks on transportation. Another $.20 can be shaved off by making sure the operation is in a place where they can pay nothing or next to nothing for labor to harvest, wash, and package those tomatoes. This is simply transferring cost to people the seller don’t care about. So now, this $1 tomato only cost the big agribusiness$.50 to produce. Now they have wiggle room to get twenty, fifty, even 100% profit if they want and still appear to “cost less” to the consumer than the local option. Big “organic” operations can reap similar rewards by adhering only to letter of the regulations rather than the spirit of the movement and get down a $.70 tomato, which they can price at $1.20, and be “close enough” to the local equivalent that many consumers simply won’t care. They’re perfectly happy to have their tomato at the grocery store right now, rather than wait until they are available at the farmer’s market.

In the end though, we have the local $1.10 tomato, and the $.60 (assuming agribusiness decides to go for the healthy 20% markup) agribusiness tomato. With the local tomato we have a happy farmer and a happy consumer. With the agribusiness tomato we have a very happy consumer who just got a killer deal, an agribusiness organization with enough margin to start really pushing out competition, incalculable environmental damage, higher (or at least misplaced) taxes, and a group of impoverished and exploited people. Sooo… tell me again how price accurately reflects the social cost of goods? Of course my numbers here are just made up to illustrate a point, perhaps the agribusiness model isn’t able to undercut sustainable production practices by this amount. Maybe it’s less, maybe it’s more, but it is the mechanism which allows for food to appear as inexpensive as it does. I also assume that this is a zero-sum game, which it is not. That $.20 saved by the chemicals, or the $.20 saved by slave labor? You bet those transferred costs will have a much larger number assigned to them by the people who have to deal with the consequences of them.

 But if you truly care about humanity, you shouldn’t be spending your time and energy on only buying bananas that were harvested using a “fair” wage, since such efforts generally mean that you’re wasting valuable money on a company that knows you’ll pay more than you need to for goods and services (i.e. they’ll capture more profit from you than really benefits the worker).

This is absolutely true. It is why I don’t buy bananas. Bananas don’t grow in Oregon, and I don’t know of any organization which deals directly enough with the growers that I believe that enough of the premium they charge actually makes it all the way to the producers that it makes a real difference in their lives. With the information available to me though, I’ve found ways to get coffee, chocolate, and coconut products from sellers who I believe are making responsible decisions and are genuinely using a business relationship to improve the lives of everyone involved. Could I be wrong? Absolutely. Not having personal access to the production facilities, I have to rely on the imperfect information that I have available to me. But I would rather hope that the information I have found is accurate and that I can continue to enjoy these foreign luxuries with a clear conscious, and because of their high cost, continue treating them as the luxuries they are. I think that is the most profound distortion caused by this transference of cost. Americans, and indeed virtually all members of industrialized societies, have begun to view items that by all rights should be luxuries as virtually staple food items. If I find out that the information I’m basing my decisions on is wrong, I’ll change my behavior appropriately to ensure that my food choices are driven by ethics first.

I’ll go one further and say that buying locally is kind of a form of geographical racism. You’re saying that you’d rather pay a local farmer at local standards of living wages rather than the poor guy in Ecuador starving, happy to have a banana harvesting job at the market clearing price. Why are the people that happen to be within an arbitrary distance of you more deserving than those located further away?

I almost don’t know where to go with this. I feel like we’re starting to edge into Godwin’s Law territory. Racism? Really? You’re playing the racism card? Ok… Since you mentioned it though, yes, I would rather pay a local farmer at local standards of living wages than pay someone who I have no direct contact with some indeterminable fraction of the price I pay for an item. I recognize that I simply don’t know what the conditions the people that produced the food I have available to me live in, and I have no idea how much of my money reaches them. What I do know though that the trend for corporate agribusinesses (and indeed virtually every large enterprise that could be characterized as “extractive”) is towards exploitation. All of my research on the matter has led me to the belief that fair trade practices in international agribusiness are the exception, not the rule. With that in mind I choose to err on the side of caution and choose locally produced products for the bulk of my diet, and only indulge in foreign luxuries when I have evidence to support a reasonable belief that I am not funding servitude. I know what my money funds, because I’ve been to the farms. I’ve met the people that work there. I’ve gotten hugs from the woman who raises my poultry. In a more economical vein, the health of the economy most near me will have the most direct influence on my quality of life. By spending locally, I help ensure that the economy here stays healthy. More than enough of my money is spread around world via things that are not food. I can’t choose to buy a locally produced laptop, they simply aren’t made here. I can, however, choose hazelnuts over almonds (or peanuts, or macadamias, or whatever other tree nut you like) and ensure that my dollars spend more time close to home.

So, this is too long already, so I’ll not go into the myriad other issues encompassed in local food. Quality, safety, and resiliency are three more among dozens that deserve essays of their own. There is one more issue I’d like to address though. My hope behind my original comment was that I could point out to MMM himself that the amount of money we pay for food does not accurately reflect the cost of that food in a broader sense and hopefully prod him towards examining the question of the real cost of food. I’d wager if he turned his mind towards it he could come up with some interesting insights. He did respond, somewhat indirectly with:

…when I go to the farmer’s market, I see farmers who drove in 30 miles from the country in a F-350 Dualie just to sell a few hundred pounds of peaches at 2 bucks a pound. At 10MPG for 300 pounds, these peaches are burning more fuel than the large organic peach farm in California that loaded several hundred tons of them into a railcar that took them to Colorado, even after accounting for the tractor trailer (20+ ton capacity, 5MPG) to make the local delivery.

This statement is, again, only looking at the transport costs, which as I’m sure you can guess by now I believe loses sight of the bigger picture. That aside, I’d like to see the numbers on this to see what the MPG per peach really is comparatively, so we can start seeing at what distance the returns of railcar efficiencies diminish to the point that the 30 mile F-350 trip actually beats the train on a per-peach basis. Is it 500 miles? 1000 miles? 2000? I don’t know, it would be interesting to discover. It would be even more interesting with the large international cargo ships. Particularly if you started to modify for emissions since those ships burn disgusting bunker fuel for the majority of their travels. However, I believe the fuel-per-unit-of-food metric is an intellectually dishonest way to approach the local food question. From an economics standpoint it makes perfect sense as a way to amortize cost, but by measuring cost this way you risk missing the point of the local food movement entirely. What the local food movement is pushing for ultimately, is not cheaper food per unit, but more efficient food from an entire global system perspective. What if that traincar didn’t have to be loaded with peaches at all? What if those hundreds (maybe thousands? I have no idea what kind of MPG a train gets) of gallons of fuel weren’t burned for the sake of food at all. If everyone ate from the sources immediately around them, the total energy requirements to meet our nutritional needs would be decreased dramatically. In the end, what we really need to be worried about is the actual gross amount of fuel being consumed, not the fuel per peach. Sure, this is counter to homogeneity that corporations crave and the idea of “regional foods” is almost completely foreign to most Americans, but it’s something that was just a fact of life for virtually all humanity until about 100 years ago. It didn’t become common for food travel more than tens of miles until the 1950′s.

There is going to come a time where this party that has been sponsored by cheap energy will come to an end. So far, we’ve found no viable way to extend it at the scale that it’s rocking along at now. There’s going to come a time where the food system as we know it is going to collapse because the oil that feeds it is going to become expensive enough that the cost transference trickery it enables isn’t going to work anymore, and the price of food will rise dramatically. If we don’t have a robust local food system in place when that happens, we are going to have a real crisis on our hands. I’m doing my part to make sure that system is in place. Maybe it’s foolish from an economic standpoint, I don’t know enough about the true cost of food to know if my local food really is a good deal or not when it’s priced higher than long travelling competition. I do know though that the price the farmer is asking hasn’t been tweaked by tricks of cost transference, and so from an ethical and global systems perspective, it seems like the best choice to me.

The title of this post comes courtesy of my friend Larry. He said it in response to my tweet that I was fed up with Ubuntu’s flaky releases and had begun examining alternatives. A couple people also responded wanting to know more about what was prompting the change and what I’ve been considering moving to. I’m currently looking at Fedora and Linux Mint. I was going to look at Debian too, but it mysteriously failed during a test install in a VM, and that’s exactly the kind of baseline crap I’m trying to get away from. So for now, it’s off the list.

What prompted this change is a more complex story.

I’ve been a faithful Ubuntu user since the very beginning. I first installed Warty in November of 2004, not long after it had been released, and I’ve looked forward to every release since. I’ve often described it as “Debian with all the nastier bits filed off.”, and until recently that description held up pretty well. My computing priorities are that I have freedom with pragmatism, and modernity with stability. Ubuntu has given me that. Ubuntu felt like coming home. Ubuntu “got” me.

I think things started getting shaky with the 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” release. I remember noticing at the time that there was an awful lot of upgrade breakage and install issues, especially for an LTS release. But, I worked through them in fairly short order, and things quickly got back to normal. I continued working, happily ignoring the half-baked add-ons they included. Every following release seemed to subtly continue that trend of playing things just a bit fast and loose with quality control and consistency for the sake of getting the internal Ubuntu projects out there, and seemingly, to satisfy the whims of their developers. I won’t list them all here, for anyone who has followed Ubuntu, it will be familiar territory. For anyone else, it won’t be meaningful. For everyone, it will be boring. Suffice it to say that this was a “death of a thousand cuts” situation. Any one, or even a handful, of these things would have been innocuous. All together though, they gave me the distinct sense that all was not well with Ubuntu.

The first real crisis of faith though hit with 11.04, Natty Narwhal. That was the first release that shipped with Unity as the default interface. On my dear God, what a trainwreck that was for me. It was pretty, but utterly useless on a multi-monitor setup. Luckily, it was easy enough to revert to a “classic Gnome” desktop, and things went back to normal. “Ok…”, I said to myself, “They had to push this out at some point to make the transition. They did the smart thing and left it fairly easy to revert, so no real harm done.”. And now, we have Oneric Ocelot.

First, my upgrade mysteriously fails. I got bit by this known bug, which has the solution nicely laid out here. This is the first time I’ve had an upgrade fail with Ubuntu due to something that wasn’t my fault. Finally I can login, and I see the Unity again. Ugh. Still no better with multi-monitor. It seems that in the six months since 11.04, 100% of the dev time on this has been spent on sparkles and woosh. None of the usability improvements I would have expected are there. Ok, so back to Gnome classic for me. Oh wait, there is no Gnome classic. Oh sure, you can install gnome-panel, and get a sketchy approximation of the Gnome you know and love, but it’s badly crippled. So, Gnome 3 for me I guess…

Well, it’s not too bad actually. The default multi-monitor setup actually meshes fairly well with how I work.  And, I also get the joy of dealing with this bug in Nautilus. The bug has apparently been fixed though, so I guess that’s something. But I still have a dbus daemon that consumes 100% of my CPU unless I kill it. AND gnome-shell will randomly spike the CPU and have to be killed. AND about 50% of the time the lockscreen won’t come back so I can unlock my desktop. AND I apparently don’t have a screensaver anymore. AND everything takes more clicks than it used to. AND… I could go on. For the first time since they made the questionable choice of disabling ctrl-alt-backspace, I re-enabled it because things have become so crappy and unstable I actually need it to avoid forcibly powering down my machine to recover from some weird glitch.

Looking back, I think that Ubuntu and I have just been growing apart. I like that Ubuntu is keeping up with new stuff, but when that means taking away stability and features I count on, that just doesn’t work for me. I had thought about doing a clean install to see if enough of my gripes could be a result of a dodgy upgrade to make it worth staying. You know, sort of talk it out. But that’s really just a bandaid for a bigger problem. In looking for how to make Ubuntu work the way it used to behave, the way I want it to behave, I’m having flashbacks to my experiences in trying to force OSX to do what I want. Sure, I could spend a bunch of time and customize it to work in a way that makes sense to me, or I could learn a different way to work. But both of those things take an awful lot of time and effort I’d rather spend on other things.

It just feels like you don’t get me anymore Ubuntu, I think it’s time for us to start seeing other people.