Grammar thing of the day: The Interrobang?!

The Interrobang is a thing that should really be used more often.

Word of the day: Effluvium.

ef·flu·vi·um (-flv-m)
n. pl. ef·flu·vi·a (-v-) or ef·flu·vi·ums
1. A usually invisible emanation or exhalation, as of vapor or gas.
2.
a. A byproduct or residue; waste.
b. The odorous fumes given off by waste or decaying matter.
3. An impalpable emanation; an aura.
[Latin, from effluere, to flow out; see effluent.]

From http://www.thefreedictionary.com/effluvium

Example: Herman Cain talked about "used food" at the Republican debate. I thought that "used food" was a euphemism for the effluvium that tends to emanate from Republican candidates' mouths most of the time.

Something to lighten up your Monday.

Thoughts on the Occupy movement

When Occupy Wall Street started, I knew it would be ignored by the media, and I was sure it would fizzle immediately. It would be like the Shut Down the Pentagon action that the War Resisters League did when I was in college a decade ago. About a hundred people tried to encircle the Pentagon and prevent people entering it. The media did a "look at how deluded these people are" story, and that was the end of it.

At the start, I thought I was right. Occupy Wall Street was largely ignored by the media – the same media who were all too happy to scream coverage of every single tiny corporate-sponsored Tea Party rally that ever happened. It was a small group of people camping in a park in New York City for some reason, and nobody could quite figure out what to make of it.

Then something different happened. I don't want to go through the whole history, because while I am one of the 99%, I'm mostly an outsider to the movement, watching it happen. I haven't done any occupying myself, but I've watched and read and followed the movement's development from a comfortable, safe place on the sidelines. My skepticism about what the movement can actually accomplish remains, but I'm buoyed by the notion of people actually fighting the correct target.

So who are the 99%, and what do they want?

The Marxian analysis is simple: the 99% is the working class, and this is a new front in the ongoing class war that is a fixed and inevitable component of global capitalism. Slap that sticker on the movement and be done with it, right?

Yet, while that simplistic statement is correct, it doesn't get at the heart of what's actually happening. Never before has the working class had this much access to the tools of communication – the ability to self-organize outside of traditional power centers – to speak their minds without fear of reprisal from the bosses. It seems almost cliché to point to the Internet as being the "great democratizer," the thing that finally gives power to the powerless. Yet it's absolutely true that the 99% movement, along with everything that happened during the "Arab Spring" – were made possible because of instantaneous social media and the viral spread of information.

So what do the 99% want? That's a common complaint among the media class, many of whom seem incapable of covering any news story that can't be reduced to a quick headline or an easily deconstructed ideology. The Occupy movement is messy, it's unfocused, it's dangerous, it's scary, it's full of anarchists in black masks throwing gasoline cans at cops, it's hippies with bongoes, it's communists, it's…it's…

It's frustration. It's millions of people around the world who are sick and tired of feeling isolated. It's a direct reaction to the extremist individualism and austerity and "me first" ideology that has been so dominant in our discourse of late – the "if you don't have a job it's your fault" that seems to be on the lips of every Tea Partier and Republican presidential candidate – the notion of "I'm rich, so you should be able to get rich, and if you can't, well I shouldn't pay for it." People who have been unemployed for 2 years even though they thought they were doing everything right, following the rules, being good citizens – they're sick of that kind of rhetoric. People losing their houses because they were scammed into an unsustainable mortgage by predatory lenders don't want to hear that they shouldn't have signed that contract, and they should bail themselves out.

People also don't want to hear that kind of rhetoric because the people spouting it only point the judgment finger one way. A single mother struggling to pay bills and hold down two jobs who gets laid off and ends up living on the street with her kids shouldn't rely on the State to help her back on her feet. Yet a bank that bets on shady mortgages and ends up on the brink of collapse – that bank is deserving of billions of dollars in tax money. The notion of "shared sacrifice" always seems to be spouted by rich people who don't want to pay higher taxes on their foie gras and corporate jets, but think cutting Medicaid spending is just fine.

And that single mother, and the man who has been unemployed for two years, and spends every waking hour sending out thousands of resumes, and who works his tail off trying to get a job – they don't want to hear about shared sacrifice. The college graduate drowning in student loans who can't find a job – she doesn't want to hear about shared sacrifice. The veteran living on the street doesn't want to hear about shared sacrifice. Especially not now, at a time when corporate profits are at their highest level – and wages at their lowest – in decades. And when Congress is at its lowest approval rating ever because the majority party in the House would prefer to let the economy tank in order to defeat a President in an election a year from now than do anything about jobs, and the other party is the picture of impotence.

Thus, the grievances are many, but the impulse to organize has commonalities. Neither the government nor the "free market" seems to be capable of fixing anything, and what's more, they seem to be in bed together, with a shared goal of making the rich and powerful more rich and more powerful at the expense of everyone else. The 99% are being screwed on so many levels that it's a wonder it took this long to get everyone out onto the streets.

But now that they're out there, the goal should be simple. Communication. The consensus model of decision-making that has developed from this movement is messy and time-consuming, but it should serve as a model for building a new spirit of community and social consciousness. This is a leaderless movement that spontaneously organized, and its participants are as diverse as their grievances. And yet, they're able to come together, sit down, talk, and make decisions. Because at the heart of this movement is a recognition that the only way to win is to work together, and that any socially conscious, humane, truly democratic society is one in which each person recognizes the humanity in every other person, and recognizes the need for mutual cooperation and respect.

I went down to the Occupy Portland site the other day to see what the protesters had built. What I found was a picture of controlled chaos – a budding movement trying to define itself. It was the same impression I've been getting from following the movement on Facebook and the live video feed of the marches and General Assemblies. A spontaneous tent city had sprouted there, and its residents had begun to build the rudiments of social order. In the middle of the tent city was an area of tarps and tables offering volunteer-coordinated services – information, medicine, learning opportunities, food, Yoga, a children's activity zone. The tent city is dirty and a little unruly, and it's certainly not without its flaws – alcohol and drug use, concerns about people urinating into a sewer that empties directly into the river, lack of sanitation and hygiene, etc – but the community being built there is, in my opinion, quite positive and a little bit beautiful. And the consensus model itself is not without its flaws – my understanding is that General Assembly meetings can take several hours to reach only a few decisions – but it's not really the General Assemblies that matter so much as the idea of consensus and community being created there.

Thus, the lasting legacy of the Occupy movement, even if it doesn't succeed in changing any major laws, may be this notion of communal responsibility - this notion that we have to talk to one another in order to create a functioning society. If we can't depend on the powers that be, then we have to be able to depend on one another. Perhaps, then, the best bit of truth that comes out of the Occupy movement is simply this: that the tired argument over government vs. the "free market" is actually a false choice, and only by working together can the 99% create a new, more humane, more democratic system within the shell of the old. If we can reach that kind of collective realization, then we'll have really made significant progress.

An interactive guide to NPR's 100 best sci fi/fantasy novels

Link in post title. Great interactive flowchart for figuring out which book in NPR's list you might want to read next. I did notice one error on it - it lists Ursula K. LeGuin's book The Dispossessed as being about "communism." It's not - it's a book exploring the notion of an anarchist utopia.

Still, not a bad tool for finding new stuff to read.

Arrrr

September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. So, get yer parrot & your peg leg and shiver the heck out of some timbers.

Here's some music you should listen to - combining the greatness of pirates with the funky awesomeness of Steampunk.

http://www.abneypark.com

Abney Park used to be "goth," but their last three albums have been sweeping, imaginative, steampunk visions (with some occasionally cringe-worthy lyrics, but overall, they're quite fun to listen to). They're airship pirates - roaming the sky in a zeppelin, terrorizing the post-apocalyptic neo-Victorian landscape with goggles and clockwork stuff.

Speaking of Steampunk, I'm currently reading The Difference Engine by William Gibson (and someone else). It's pretty dense, technical, and not easy to get into, but I'm digging the alternate history stuff. Essentially, the premise of the book is that Babbage's "analytical engine" becomes the primary driver of the Industrial Revolution, and the computer age comes 100 years early. Intriguing stuff - conditionally recommended because I've only just started reading it.

Anyway, arrr and whatnot.

Why I don't want to buy a house

I've been thinking a lot about the notion of buying a house. Yet, the more I think about exactly what's involved in buying a house, the sheer amount of money, the pitfalls, the nightmare of paperwork, the more I wonder whether it's really worth it.

Now, I don't know everything about what it takes to buy a house. I probably know very little, and so a lot of what I'm going to be pointing out may be easily refutable or just plain incorrect. However, what I want to convey is an impression – an impression gleaned from the news, from discussions with people, from my general absorption of what information is "out there" about buying a house. And I wonder how many other Americans in my position have a similar impression about buying a house, and who are holding back for similar reasons- and whether the housing market isn't bouncing back because of those fears. And finally, I want to know whether it's possible, and how, to convince me and those who think like me, that buying a house isn't as horrid as all that.

Or maybe I'm absolutely right about all of this.

The money


The biggest thing keeping me away from buying a house is money. First, there's the money that has to be spent up front for a down payment and closing costs. That's tens of thousands of dollars, and it's a lot more money in today's environment than it was during the heyday of the housing bubble, when everyone bought more house than they could afford. These days, you have to have a massive down payment and tons of money in the bank as a reserve, and that's just what you need to get a bank to look at you.

Additionally, before one can even start saving the money for a down payment, one has to pay off all one's debts, and get one's credit score in tip top shape. And in an America where consumer debt, student loans, and medical bills are a huge part of everyone's life, that's not an easy prospect. So there's another huge chunk of money gone before you can even think about buying a house.

Then, after you've finally bought the house, and signed the massive piles of paperwork, and gotten locked into a 30-year mortgage, you start making payments. Over the life of that 30-year mortgage, you end up paying more than the house is worth just in interest payments. A $200,000 house ends up costing you $400,000 or more. Back in the day when real estate prices were skyrocketing, that might not have been a big deal, because the value of the house was guaranteed to increase over the life of the loan, thus ensuring that you could build equity. These days – who knows? Beyond which, in any other circumstance, paying that much interest over and above the cost of the thing you're buying would be considered usurious, or at least, a very bad investment. Imagine if you bought a car for $10,000, and over the life of the loan, you ended up paying $25,000 for it because of the interest rate. That's a horrible deal – and one that I'm sure someone with bad credit is paying somewhere. But that's the point – it sounds like a bad deal. If someone could explain to me how throwing $200,000 or more away on interest payments is preferable to throwing $1,200 per month away on rent (when that rent generally comes with free maintenance and other perks), please – be my guest.

So that's the money end of it. Save every penny, scrub your credit clean, pay half the average American annual salary in down payments and closing costs, and then flush $200,000 or more down the toilet in interest charges over the life of your loan. How is that a good thing to do?

The paperwork

Buying a house involves reams of paperwork, much of it written in obscure legal language that the average American cannot begin to understand. And the banks don't make things easy. I've heard so many stories of people dealing with a six-month or longer process where they have to send things to the bank multiple times, and go through all kinds of hassle, just to get to the point of figuring out whether they can actually buy a house. Then, just when everything seems to be going well, something snags, and the sale falls through. Meanwhile, you have to live somewhere. Seriously- when you're planning to move into a house and everything's lined up, only to have the sale fall through at the last minute – what the heck do you do? Presumably you've given your move-out notice to your landlord, and you don't have another place to live lined up, so…then what? You scramble to find another apartment, move into it, and then start the process again?

And even if the paperwork goes smoothly, and you buy the house, you can't tell me that you've read every page of what you signed. What legal pitfalls have you willingly signed yourself over to? Do you know the precise details of what happens if you miss a payment? What else don't you know about the tome of a contract you've just signed?



The pitfalls

Every day brings a new story of a bank that screwed something up and foreclosed on someone by mistake. There you are, having gone through every bit of hassle, and shelled out all that money, and you're paying your payments just as you should – but someone on the other end screws up and suddenly you're teetering on the brink of homelessness. Sure, you can hire a lawyer to fight for you, but there's no guarantee that you won't lose your home, along with all the time, money, and hassle that went into buying it in the first place. Plus you're now out thousands of dollars in legal fees.

And what if something does go wrong, and you suddenly find you can't afford the house anymore, or the house value decreases and you find yourself underwater? What do you do then? Walk away? How can you walk away from all of the time and money you already spent trying to get into that house? Sure, that's a "sunk cost" fallacy, but that's been proven to be a powerful motivator.

There are other pitfalls as well. You buy the house, do the inspections, and everything looks fine. Then, suddenly, after everything's final and you're locked into the mortgage, you discover toxic mold hiding in your attic. That's on you now. You've got to spend thousands of dollars to remedy that. Or anything that goes wrong with the house. A water main blows and soaks your living room. That's on you. Sure, you have property insurance to take care of some things, but you've still got to keep a reserve of thousands of dollars in savings just in case disaster strikes.

Taking all of that into account, why isn't renting a smarter move?

When you rent an apartment or a house, it's easy. You pay a deposit, sign a lease, and move in. Boom, done. Total outlay: A couple of thousand dollars. Signing a lease usually takes just a few minutes. If something goes wrong with the apartment – if the dishwasher breaks, or the toilet clogs, or there is toxic mold, it's the landlord's responsibility to fix it – and if they don't, then (under certain circumstances) you have the right to move out and break the lease.

So there you are – paying $1,200/month in rent (for example), enjoying free maintenance and hassle-free living. Maybe you live in a building with nice perks like a gym or a hot tub, or a really nice roof deck with a gas grill. There's no fear that someone will screw something up and leave you homeless, there's no worry about what the apartment will be worth in 30 years, and if you end up hating the place after a year, you can move out.

I don't know about you, but that sounds like a smarter move to me.

Tell me, then, homeowners – where am I wrong?