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This blog contains effusive rhetoric and profligate diatribes. Read at your own risk.

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Budgeting for Mezzotopia

It's been a damn long time since I was up to blogging; having finally been moved to return to a project I thought might have been abandoned forever, yet another casualty of my ever-shifting life circumstances, I'd like to begin by coining a new word.  We've all heard of Utopia; the inventor of the term took it from the Greek for "nowhere", believing that a perfect society was impossible and that any which claimed to be so was inevitably a lie.  What he proposed to demonstrate this thesis was something more nearly akin to what we have since come to refer to as "dystopia" - a word that would never exist if we were not trying to contrast it with the first.  And I propose to continue this trend by coining a term for an intermediate sort of constructed civilization - neither perfect nor horrific, but simply engineered to be functional, depending for that functionality upon a firm conceptual framework.  This contrasts it with the organically-evolved society we live in, where everybody has their own idea how to run things, and all of them struggle to put their ideas into effect over the objections of those who disagree, resulting in an awkward compromise that satisfies nobody, and generally just looks incredibly sloppy and inefficient.  This, then, is what a mezzotopia contrasts with - by the definition which I am constructing for it, the term necessitates that it have a single ironclad and airtight theory informing its choices, whose purpose is something a little more noble than just granting more wealth and power to the people in charge, but which is firmly enough founded in the undesirable realities of actual life that it avoids the kinds of naive missteps that seem to inevitably ruin all utopias.

Anyway, that was just a notion I wanted to jot down while I was thinking of it; my point in blogging today is something else.  If I was constructed as a roleplaying game character, I would doubtlessly have a severely crippling disadvantage entitled "Caustic personality", given that my blunt and brash style of interpersonal communication seems to piss everyone off.  And one of my many infuriating-to-almost-everyone habits is constantly evaluating the quality of things, believing as I do that nothing matters other than the objective facts, and that everything ought to have its price fixed according to exactly what it is actually, unarguably worth.  My mother has learned to both dread and rely upon this characteristic of mine - when she cooks up some new culinary experiment, she knows she can count on me to offer an unflinchingly unbiased assessment of how well it did (or didn't) turn out, but sometimes she evidently gets tired of me critiquing her food even when she was only cooking to provide for her family, doing the best she felt up to and not really wanting detailed, let alone rude, feedback about every little detail.

That TMI about my domestic situation aside, the point I'm getting at is that I've been trying to asses goddamn everything I experience in life, in much the same manner that Gordon Ramsay assesses the talent of the cooks he employs.  And I've recently come up with a more formal idea about how I could codify these analyses of mine, which I think is more useful than a straight-up "star system" of rankings.  Having somewhat the heart of an economist at times, I believe that quality cannot be evaluated in a vacuum; nobody seriously expects a Burger King hamburger to taste as good as a beef patty cooked at a $50-a-plate restaurant (although whether any burger, no matter how delicious, can possibly deserve a price tag like that is another argument, and one where my opinion currently stands at a very firm and unsympathetic "no").  But you can compare Burger King to McDonalds to Wendys to Hardees to Sonic, and decide which of these loosely analogous burger joints is best in its price bracket - and now, I have a notion of how to get a little more precise than even that.

Here's the concept:  start by assuming that your lifestyle is in a static-state, where your rent and food and so forth are all paid for, and then give yourself a budget for those luxuries your regard as necessary, in order to be living and not just surviving.  The exact amount is for you to decide, because we're thinking in terms of percentages; whether you can spare $10 a pay period or $10M a year, either way you can comparison-shop to avoid getting ripped off (although again, I'm inclined to think persons in the latter category deserve a little soaking, in order to fund the lifestyles of several dozen other people apiece).  Once you've determined the amount you're going to use as your hypothetical "budget" (it could in theory become an actual one, but for now this is just a thought experiment to use when deciding how much you like stuff), you then have to decide, for every item you might like to purchase, how much you'd be willing to pay for that thing.  The result helps you decide how much things are actually worth to you, and when you see an item with a price tag that's close to your current budget's version of that value, you can buy it with a fair degree of confidence that you've made a wise investment.

By way of example, let's look at movies.  With an already-immense collection of owned DVDs, including such stinkers as "The Covenant" that would have been overpriced if I'd been given a dollar to own them, and movies that are halfway decent but nowhere near the $20 I paid for their purchase back when I was richer and more foolish, I have now had to take an extremely critical eye toward the possibility of ever buying a movie again, no matter how good or how cheap.  This system could help me make such decisions.  We will consider three of the recent movies which I most wish to see, and have some confidence I might possibly wish to own:  Luc Besson's "Lucy", Marvel's "The Avengers", and the obscure Hugh Jackman vehicle "The Fountain".  Not having seen any of them outside of trailers (and, in the case of "Avengers", an Inter-netfull of plot synopses and spoilers aplenty), I feel fairly certain that I would consider Lucy entertainingly mindless fun despite its absurd premise, enjoying it special effects much as I did those of "Green Lantern" and "Sucker Punch" despite those movies having similarly flawed intellectual profiles.  "The Avengers" is rumored to be a good movie, but it somewhat fails to speak to me; I'd be sure to enjoy it on some levels, but it doesn't thrill my inner fanboy as much as most superhero movies do, since I've never cared for most of these characters (the only core Avenger I especially like is Hulk, and I prefer to see him standing alone so that the story can focus entirely on his themes), and find it hard to believe that a movie featuring all of them can overcome that barrier as well as "Iron Man" and "Thor" did in their excellent solo films.  I find it a pet peeve that Loki played the villain role in "Avengers" despite having just been in "Thor", and the knowledge that Thanos might be lurking behind a curtain somewhere doesn't up the ante for me, since I consider him a deeply uninteresting villain.  So no matter how much faith I have in Joss Wheedon, "Avengers" is a movie that I plan on seeing in spite of my fanboy opinion, not because of it; the Ultron movie would probably appeal to me more, but is still sufficiently limited in interest that I can easily hold other priorities higher.  Finally, "The Fountain" is an artsy auteur work of the kind that impresses critics but not mass-market audiences, and it's entirely possible that I'll fidget in boredom as I sit through it the first time, then find myself reluctant to see it again thereafter (given that the money you spend buying some physical object, such as a DVD, never comes back -- a fact that I was far too slow to fully internalize -- I now evaluate every durable-goods purchase in terms of whether I expect literally decades of reliable value to return from it).  But in spite of that, its status as a highly philosophical "idea movie", whose premise I can never fully understand other than by experiencing the work in its entirety (summarizing a worldview-changing experience of a film, such as "The Matrix" or "Cloud Atlas", is one thing; actually immersing yourself in it and letting it subtly changing your life is something else entirely, and I feel confident that "Fountain" is another member of this category), renders it functionally irresistable to me.  Though I still have concerns as to whether it's worth buying, or else I'd probably already have bought it, this film overcomes my reluctance much more than "The Avengers" does, and thus I would happily choose it over the other, if they were both on sale for the same price and I could afford precisely one of them.

The question, then, becomes what happens if the movie I want more costs more; situations like this are the entire reason why I have not entirely passed judgment on capitalism, since it is sometimes possible for a modest price to add value sufficient that a less appealing product gains worthiness.  (It is also possible, and probably a good bit more common, for an artificially-lowered price to convince you to buy something which isn't worth even that much, and I've fallen into that trap often enough to be extremely skeptical of any such situation, but not to entirely swing the pendulum in the other direction either.)  That is the purpose of this "budgeting analysis" exercise - to calculate the exact price point, relative to my own resources, at which a better product is worth paying extra for, versus simply costing too much in excess of the competitor for its superior quality to be the most relevant factor anymore.  Thus, I will examine three possible budgets, and place these three movies at the price point which I believe would make them optimally purchaseable for me.  The result in and of itself will only ever be useful to me, but I hope that perhaps some future reader may find the process worthy of the time s/he has spent reading it, and is moved to analyze their own resources and acquisition-wishes in a similar fashion.

* Budget 1:  My own real-life situation at the moment, with no permanent job and only the faintest trickle of incoming funds, barely capable of keeping me supplied with what I regard as adequate quantities and qualities of food.  I have made precisely two payments toward my family's rent and bills in the last three months, a couple more at most during a month-long contract in May and June, none in the preceding spring or winter, and not many of them last year when I worked for the entire summer and not otherwise.  Given all this, $1 per month is an extremely generous purchasing limit for things like DVDs, which I absolutely do not need, but continue to want.  So if I take that as my allotment, then buying a movie for $10 would represent almost an entire year's investment, and I'm not even mentally capable of processing such a long span of time as a unit, so purchases that costly are absolutely impossible.  Even $5 is an insane amount to pay, and only the items I want most severely could command an investment like that.
So on this budget, I would buy "The Fountain" for $5, and probably be unable to bring myself to regret the loss of such serious funds (assuming the movie turns out as well as I expect it to; there is of course always the possibility that, like "The Covenant" and "Ultraviolet", it will turn out to be an absolute stink-bomb whose carefully cut trailer disguised its awfulness completely).  But I would be reluctant to pay as much as $2 for "The Avengers", despite having more confidence that I'd consider the investment worthwhile.  And "Lucy" is so far from winning my confidence that, even if I found it on sale for just 50 cents, I probably wouldn't buy it at all; my aversion to even the slightest nonessential purchase is just too great when I have this few total dollars to work with, and little ability to look forward to acquiring any more.

* Budget 2:  Assuming I got a job that was as good as I can reasonably expect to have at this stage in my life - full-time work at $15/hr, perhaps with occasional overtime, and easy enough work that I can stomach the thought of putting in that many hours each week, to say nothing of desiring and being able to stay indefinitely...well, even that fantasy only begins to address the problems I'm currently having.  I have a lot of back rent to make up, and earning in the neighborhood of $2000 a month will only stop the bleeding, not heal the scars of my long-term financial hardship.  So even in this situation, my monthly budget for entertainment purchases is not likely to top $20.  By that standard, I still could not buy "Lucy" for $5, but for $2.50 I very likely might, though that price must cover both the value of satisfying my curiosity as to the film's contents once, as well as owning the film and being free to watch it again as many times as I please, for the rest of my life.  Thusly, to rent the movie from a video store (if such things still existed), I could justify paying no more than $1.25 or so, as I'm gaining only the first half of the purchase equation (the burden of owning the film and not being willing to throw it away, while it factors into matters, has only a fractional effect, and thus I do not alter the ratio between the view-once and own-forever prices beyond 1:2).  By way of comparison, however, "The Fountain" is of such intense interest to me, and creates such confidence that it would be worth owning long-term, that I would willingly rent it for $5 or even $10, in order to determine whether it's paying a similar amount again (out of the next month's allotment) to make it mine permanently.  In between those extremes, Avengers would be a movie that I would be willing to treat the way I used to treat all movies - buying it if the price is right, passing on it otherwise, and possibly not watching it until years after I scooped it out of a bargain-bin to ensure that the price did not go up again in future (a strategy that I've learned can backfire horridly, as I'm pretty sure I paid more for all three Dark Knight movies than the $5 they all now wear as a price-tag on Target shelves).  It is to my substantial sorrow that it took me so much time and hardship before I could break that habit, but even today I can conceive of the possibility that it is sometimes worth snapping up temporary-sale items that I might reasonably expect to want later...just that I need to do it far, far less readily than I previously did.

* Budget 3:  There's no point in imagining myself a multi-billionaire in this exercise; at that point I would no longer need to have any budgetary concerns at all, and would start needing to put my money where my mouth is about the responsibility that a plutocrat has toward the economy, how he should be compelled to spend as lavishly as he possibly can without bankrupting himself entirely, in order to provide entire local industries with the fiscal support they require to survive.  So, for the top-tier version of this, I'm imagining myself making $40,000 a year; how exactly that could possibly happen I cannot imagine, given my checkered employment history and lack of a college degree, to say nothing of that degree not being "prestigious" enough to impress fickle corporate networkers that hang their reputation upon every single action of one of their subordinates, politicking fiercely in the high-pressure world of multinational conglomerates, and entirely willing to ruin a person's life because they spoke a single ill-chosen word in front of the wrong witness.  (But as usual, I'm ranting and getting off the subject.)  With that extraordinary excess of wealth to work with, I'd be personally responsible for ensuring that my family never misses a payment on our mortgage or utility bills; I could pay twice as much rent as I used to do, thus rapidly making headway upon the debt I've accumulated over three years of unemployment, and I'd still have about $400 a week of money for myself, an embarassment of riches which I could never consume solely through lavish dining and regular purchases of the useful staples I've been living without for far too long.  In this circumstance, despite not having quite doubled my income compared to Budget 2, I can more than double my "mad money" - $50 a month is still quite conservative in contrast to the lifestyle I used to live, when I first started making good money and couldn't believe I'd ever have to stop again...but from where I now sit, in the ruins of those past financial mistakes, it's extraordinarily lavish.
On that end of the scale, paying $5 just to SEE "Lucy" once, before committing to buy it, is entirely acceptable, and I would pretty definitely be willing to sign up for a Netflix or Redbox membership, in order to conveniently obtain access to the film without being burdened by ownership of a physical copy.  (My spell-checker recognizes the first of those two brand names as a real word, and not the second; the latter company's marketing department isn't working hard enough, I guess.)  Conversely, though, I'd buy "The Fountain" sight-unseen for $20 or more, absolutely confident that the director of such a highly-acclaimed work deserves an "upvote" on the global-capitalism version of Facebook that we call "the economy".  (I'd of course only be a drop in the bucket, and not actually have an individually meaningful effect on the tastemakers and dealbrokers of Hollywood - only millionaires can do that, but I'd still make my contribution, just as I still vote in elections, despite knowing that my fraction-of-a-fraction-of-a-percent-of-a-percent effect on the outcome is essentially meaningless.  Why do I "know" that?  I wish I knew.)  Now, at this level of indulgent permissiveness, things are no longer about a single continuum; "Avengers" isn't just a midpoint anymore, but is now the apex of a triangle which leans off into an entire other dimension of evaluation.  So the rules are completely different here, and I'm honestly not sure what I would do.  Maybe I'd buy a copy of "Avengers" sight-unseen, though probably not for full price; maybe I'd pay an exorbitant price just to stream it.  Maybe I'd even do one or both of those things, and then go even further, buying a Blue-Ray player and a features-loaded Special Edition of the movie, despite it being objectively worse than the Fountain (if this indeed proves to be the case), just because it has more extra stuff around and beyond it which can be delved into.  You have those kinds of extra options when your cash flow is this robust, compared to what you're used to.

And that, ultimately, is the entire point I'm getting at with this pretentious exercise in slightly-less-white-privilege-than-the-even-whiter-people-get.  If you're reading this and you're some single mother of three kids who's struggling to make ends meet, you probably consider me the worst of subhuman slime by now, for having spent this much time thinking about how to squander money that you need to get a week's worth of diapers for a baby that's just getting over a bout of colic or whatever.  (But then, you probably don't have time to sit around reading blogs on the Internet, do you?  And if you have eight kids instead, my sympathy for you is entirely gone, but that's a different rant.)  However, I can only speak from the position that I'm at currently; my misery may be minor compared to that of other people, but it is still misery by my own standards, and no amount of fairy magic could exchange this negligible unhappiness for the humble joys experienced by other strata of society, who condemn the upper crust for ruining their lives, yet manage to go about with a smile on their lips and speak honestly about how blessed they feel.  I cannot tell those people how to live; I can only speak to others that are in something vaguely analogous to my own situation.  And in that reality, I am prone to expounding about how to analyze the quality of your entertainment media, to make sure that you aren't paying more than it's worth.  I could go on at even greater length, talking about a lot of other movies I wanted to mention; I could do another analysis on films I have seen but do not own, determining whether to buy them and for how much, since it's a very different question of quality when you know the product and have confidence in it...and then I could do yet another on the movies I already known (whose prices I do not recollect, sadly), to decide whether I should have bought them and what would have been a fair price, based on my current understanding of their contents.  But this entry is way too long already, so I'm going to put off any further work on this notion for another post.  For now, just take this single, nine-point chart (with a question mark in one of the entries) as demonstrating how the system is to be applied, and then decide whether it's worth attempting such application yourself.

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