Fever Takes

With quarantine stretching out into the foreseeable future, it's given lots of people time to reflect on things as they did whatever ways they can to cope. For others, though, it's been a prime opportunity to show everyone the complete asses they've always been.

 We'll start with Marc Thiessen in the Washington Post arguing that pandemic makes the case weaker, not better, for socialized medicine. As you know, few things make me happier than pointing out how terrible other people's arguments are, especially when those arguments are coached in self-righteous condescending tones.

Thiessen gets the ball rolling by making rapid fire brags about the American healthcare system that range from irrelevant to clueless. He makes a really big deal out of how many more ICU beds per capita the U.S. has compared to other countries like the U.K. and touts this has some kind of brilliant innovation of the free market system. He goes on to say that we're actually much better at providing critical care than other countries and then gets what he thinks is a really harsh dig in on other countries by saying they ration ICU care to the elderly and people rated with low chances of survival.

These are all interrelated, but, to start, of course other countries ration their ICU beds to those who need it the most. That's the whole point of critical care and it's exactly why we do the same thing here. Also, pointing out that we have a higher ICU bed per capita rate or that we're so experienced in delivering critical care isn't quite the achievement Thiessen is claiming.

Thiessen presents critical care like it's a luxury upgrade that European or other socialized medicine countries deprive their citizens of in the pure, socialist pursuit of mediocrity. He glosses over that the reason we need so many beds is because we're a much sicker country than our European counterparts. Because we delay going to the doctor for so long, by the time we drag ourselves in for treatment we're in much worse shape than we otherwise would be if we could just, you know, go to doctor without worrying about walking out with a $2,000 bill hanging over your head. 

It's a neat rhetorical trick, honestly. If you make it seem like our abundance of ICU beds is an innovation of our market system while ignoring the implications of why we need a supply that large in the first place then you don't have to deal with the layers of failure required to get there. 

There's so much more here. Thiessen complains at length about how the FDA refused to use the WHO test at first, then failed to make its own and had to wait for a private alternative. Or how since Medicare pays a lower rate to hospitals and doctors we would be facing a shortage of hospitals and doctors since they wouldn't make as much. He closes with saying that we're now relying on the same pharmaceutical industry Bernie Sanders has for so long decried as greedy to find a vaccine for the virus to protect us from future outbreaks.

You have to ignore a lot to come to these conclusions. The FDA refused the test on Trump's orders because he didn't want anybody to have the capability of testing. He thinks, rightly, that the economic shutdown brought on by the coronavirus is a threat to his reelection campaign, so, if we couldn't test for the virus, there'd be no panic- no virus, no thereat, no panic. The refusal wasn't the result of the government being incompetent because that's all government can be, it was the deliberate result of a president who only cares about his public perception intentionally sabotaging our response.

And if Theissen wants to talk about hospital staffing and availability, sure, lets talk about that. All over the country, hospitals are laying off or furloughing staff and cutting the wages of whoever's left because they aren't making any money. Anyone who speaks out about these issues, gets fired. In New York alone, the state lost 20,000 hospital beds from budget cuts and other profitability issues. So that's nice. 

And the pharmaceutical industry? Any vaccine they develop for the coronavirus will be heavily subsidized by public funds, as are most of their products. After they develop this largely tax-payer funded medicine, they will then obtain a patent over it then charge people exorbitant amounts of money to get it.

 Granted, they may not do it at first for PR reasons but, sooner rather than later, they'll double or triple the price whenever they want to so that only the most well off will be able to afford it just like the companies who make insulin and inhalers do. If tying people's ability to live to their ability to pay your profit margin isn't greed, then what is?

This isn't even touching the fact that the private sector can't perform the mass testing required to track the rate of infections accurately. The can't do that because they don't have the resources to test at the level we need. So even though we're  at 987,000 confirmed cases as of this writing, we still don't know how many we're missing. We had 38,000 new cases between April 23rd and 24th, the highest one-day increase we've had yet. Do you really believe we're anywhere near our peak?

Granted, fun as it is to do all this, it is admittedly somewhat pointless. It doesn't matter if Theissen believes what he writes, all that matters is that he continues to be a vessel that champions a system that makes a lot of people money off the misery of everyone else. All he needs to do for his piece to work is reinforce someone's idea that the government just sucks at everything to accept that they, too, should be one crisis away from losing their job and insurance in the name of freedom and profit.

Sadly, there's always going to be plenty of those idiots around, so, congrats Marc, you got 'em.

Moving on, this piece about landlords and how they feel unfairly maligned over the fact that they're still demanding rent from their tenants during this crisis in The Guardian still has me wondering if it's a stealth parody or earnestly tone deaf.

Things start out as sympathetically as they can. We're introduced to Ricardo Reis, owner of sixteen properties in Michigan, a classic, salt-of-earth American heartland kind of guy we've all been trained to think of as inherently sympathetic and trustworthy. But holy shit these quotes and the attempt at context are gold:

"Everyone has an impression of us as being rich and greedy. A lot of tenants will be thinking, how can they ask [us to pay] during this time? But in reality, there are costs involved,” says Reis.

Those costs include property taxes, insurance, maintenance and mortgage payments. Although homeowners will be provided with mortgage relief during the pandemic, many renters are wondering why they should still pay rent. But plenty aren’t aware that commercial property owners – landlords, in other words – are not entitled to this benefit. Furthermore, forbearance programs only defer mortgage payments, rather than completely forgiving the cost."

The idea that renters are too stupid to realize that there are costs involved in owning or maintaining a house is hysterical to me. I'm pretty sure every renter understands that property taxes, mortgages, insurance, and maintenance costs exist- that's what they're fucking paying rent to cover, right? Reis goes on to say that most landlords in Michigan only make between $200-$300 in profit once expenses are accounted for, so it's not like they're rolling in money. Which, yeah, if you go by those rates, that nets between $38,400- $57,600 a year which, even at the top end, just barely pushes you over the median income line in Michigan.

So, you're not Uncle Pennybags, cool. Also, yeah, I do think landlords and commercial property should get relief from their mortgages just like everyone else but if they're not, it's almost like there are people who exist that make laws or something that could change the rules, if you made enough of a fuss about it. And maybe, I dunno, they should focus their energy there instead of trying to hound their unemployed tenants out of every last dollar they can squeeze from them.

But where this story goes off the rails for me is the introduction of its next subject, Greg Marguiles.

This dude is everything you could possibly want in your stereotypical landlord; I mean, look at the shit he lets come out of his mouth:

"They’ll only band together for a very short time – until the first eviction paper comes [through]. Then I think it will hit home"

"It’s unfortunate you’re not working, but that should have nothing to do with paying for what you used. "

I love this guy so, so much. His entire attitude boils down to "But think of how your problems create more important problems for meeeeeeee."

On some level, I get it. Owning property is your main if not sole source of income and if your tenants aren't working your income dries up just as much as theirs. It's the central tenet of capitalism that all spending is someone else's income so everything grinds to a halt when nobody can spend anything beyond absolute necessities. 

Now, there are plenty of people who argue that rent qualifies as an absolute necessity. Which, in one sense is true. Having a house or a safe place that shelters you from the world is an essential part of psychological development and contentment. But what makes people fucking hate landlords is that they take this literally essential aspect and hold it hostage to dole out to those they deem can make them a profit. 

When Margulies says "What could be more greedy than withholding rent that you have the ability to pay?" what he's saying is that your rent is his rightful income. Because he owns the capital in the form of a house, it is his right to demand that you sacrifice money you could use to feed yourself and your family to put food on his table so he doesn't have to sacrifice anything. Reis talks a big game about since they take the risk, they're entitled to the reward. But what Reis and Margulies are asking for is that they only be reap the benefits of their risk and not be subject to any potential failure- if that protection comes at the financial ruin of their tenants then that is a sacrifice they are willing to make. 

What's hilarious to me is that none of this registers. Reis talks about how they'll have to screen people differently once this is all over because if the government can stop evictions, then he'll need an extra layer of security on his investment. He doesn't go into specifics of course, but I imagine looking into the social media profiles of future tenants to gage their political beliefs to see if they'd engage in a rent strike will play a part, which will then determine whether the applicants get a lease or how much rent they'll pay based on this newly defined "risk" factor.

Honestly, they're free to do this if they want. Political beliefs aren't a protected class under federal law nor should they be. But thinking you should charge tenants more for what you think are dangerous political beliefs is a good idea while bemoaning how unfair it is that you can't leverage the threat of eviction over their heads during a pandemic goes a long way towards explaining why people feel the need to put landlords and property owners against the wall when revolutions break out. 

Luckily, there's a solution. As Reis says, the government "should instead bolster social housing if they believe that people should live rent-free”.

Indeed. 

Lastly, I want to talk about those stupid protests. That they're largely fake, paid for and organized by lobbyists or members of Trump's administration is no surprise. The Tea Party had the same astroturf origins and the media is failing in its coverage of these groups all over again. 

By presenting these protests has genuine outgrowths of discontent, the media obscures the real motivations behind these protests which robs of a chance to properly put them in context. It also guarantees that by treating them as legitimate, the wider they'll spread. 

This is, naturally, incredibly bad. It's nice that 80% of the country believes the lockdown measures are appropriate and should continue as they are. I don't want to dismiss how good that is or how far it'll go in keeping things from the worst case scenario. 

Still, the important part isn't necessarily the numbers of the protests- which are still comparetively small- but the fanaticism behind it. The displays will, hopefully, finally dispel the foolish notion that die-hard Trump supporters have a limit to their devotion, and thus can be pulled back from the brink when the man himself goes too far. 

Lurking underneath all of this is the question of when will we go back to normal, which is a question I doubt many people like the answer to. We might, possibly, if we're incredibly lucky, see a slowdown in the summer. Granted, if the protests keep going, we probably won't, but still.

Anyway, the second Trump has his fig leaf he'll declare the virus beaten and insist everyone go about their lives as before. He'll go back to having in-person rallies thumping his chest and crying that he gets no credit for the response, yadda yadda we've seen this movie before. 

While he's doing that, the states should continue to form cross regional alliances to better prepare their responses to the disease once flu-season kicks in. Trump and the federal government will of course be caught with their pants down, again, but there's no reason we shouldn't. 

My hope is that the majority of people, even if the green light is given, still follow as much of their quarantine routine as possible. So far, we don't have evidence of antibodies preventing getting the disease a second time, which puts serious dampners on a vaccine making this all go away. We should be prepared for this to become something we live with until we remake our society into one that can better handle the task of combating the spread of infection. 

Things have been rough, and are likely to stay that way for the rest of the year. Do what you can, keep yourself safe and sane, and, one way or another, make sure you and yours all see the other side of this. 

Ah, Mass Effect

As the quarantine goes on, I find myself playing more and more video games. For one, they're a natural time sink- nothing really makes the day go by like spending a breezy eight-to-ten hours plugging away in a digital world. For two, I've been playing video games since I was five-years-old, so they have a lot of emotional value to me, too. As a result, I find myself thinking on games I have a love/hate relationship with which, inevitably, gets me thinking of Mass Effect.

The Mass Effect series is a trilogy of games about you, Commander Shepard, as you jet around the galaxy trying to save it from the invasion of an ancient machine race called the Reapers. It's a space opera of the highest sort and, overall, I really love the series as a whole and how it evolved over the years.


Now, the first game, I wouldn't change at all. Your character has powers called biotics they can deploy to affect gravity and create mini-black holes, you can overload enemy shields, or shoot massive fireball shots from your shotgun just to name a few. The game has multiple character classes with their own specialties that you choose at the beginning of the game with each class getting 5-6 active powers you can use all with their own independent cooldowns- meaning, you can use as many as you want at the same time. On top of that, you have two companions with you for each mission and they have their own set of 5-6 powers with independent cooldowns. So, by the end of the game with everyone's powers fully leveled up, the combat in the game can very easily have you lifting enemies into the air, trapping them in the gravity of a mini-black hole, then throwing them against the walls of whatever building you're in or shooting them like floating fish in a barrel. Or, alternatively, you can overload their weapons so they can't shoot back as you walk up to them blasting them in the face with a shotgun.

In the last level of the game, you're forced to climb up the outside of this massive space station to get to the final boss fight, right? Part of the this climb involves you getting bull rushed by seven-foot tall robots or ridiculously tough mini-boss creatures called Krogan in tight, narrow walk ways where the only out is through. Since the game operates on Newtonian physics, if you lift them up into the air they'll just float up and up and up until they're off the readable part of the map and the game just declares them dead. It's a chaotic, horrifically unbalanced mess of a game. I love it and would change absolutely nothing.

For Mass Effect 2, Bioware decided to scale back the systems in the first installment to balance out the game play and put some sense into the combat. Mostly, I think this approach worked. Every class still has a wide variety of powers at their disposal, but you can only use one at a time. This brought a new edge of tactical thinking to the combat encounters as it became a matter of picking and choosing what powers to use in what combination at just the right time for maximum impact.

 It also cut down the laborious and repetitive inventory management in Mass Effect 1. While it was nice having a wide range of ammo-types to adapt to the enemy you were facing for maximum damage, in the first Mass Effect it would regularly get to a point where you had to open your inventory and just delete things for ten minutes at a time. In 2, Bioware made it so ammo-types were a power you could invest in just like any other and once you equipped it, that was that.

Mass Effect 2 also brought with it what is probably my favorite story of the trilogy. As far as the main quest goes, it's actually pretty short. You find who your enemies are, what they're trying to accomplish, where their base is and how to get to it over the course of five main missions not including the final assault. The meat of the game comes in the preparation, of upgrading your ship to top fighting condition and, more importantly, getting your team ready to go off on a suicide mission as you deal with all their unfinished business.

Luckily, save for one person, all the characters have rich backstories that are fascinating to dive into. One is among the last members of a wandering alien warrior class on a mission to kill her daughter. Another is an assassin suffering from a terminal illness trying to do one good thing before he passes. Two are genetically engineered to be the "perfect" example of their species who both struggle to understand what that means both in the context of their creation and how they can define themselves outside of the fact that they were literally molded to be the pinnacle of existence. Jumping around the galaxy, talking to all these people as your relationships go from stand-offish, slightly hostile, and impersonal to deeply felt bonds of people who will risk their lives for you and each other is fantastic and just thinking about it makes me want to give the game another spin.

Except, I won't. Because the parts of this game I hate, I deeply, truly, profoundly, hate. 

Partly, what drives me up a wall is how limited the options are in this game. There are five main weapon types in the game- pistol, SMG, assault rifle, shotgun, sniper rifle- which, without DLC, have two options each. Some classes get a bonus weapon in one category, but, even then, having the choice of three weapons in just one category unless you shill out extra cash for more is just... limiting, shall we say. Also, the upgrade options suck. Well, they would suck, but they're largely nonexistent. The only things you get are increases in overall damage or bonuses to damage done to a specific type of protection like shields or armor, but those are universal. If you want to modify how accurate they are or how give a little bonus to their head-shot damage or literally anything customizable, well, there are plenty of other games you can do that in so you may as well play those instead.

But what gets me, what really, really gets under my skin and gets to my teeth to grinding, is how the game makes you replay it on higher difficulties. Part of the experience is that you level up as you play, and, if you load up to play through on a higher difficulty, you get the benefit of already having all those skill points once you get the characters so you can level them up to their most powerful states from the jump. Well, you'd think that's what would happen, buuuuut, no. See, when you start a new play through, only you and two other characters get the full amount of experience points to fully max out their abilities. Everyone else gets a reduced amount which forces you to pigeon-hole your companions into being really good at just one thing or sort of shitty at everything. 

Playing through the upper difficulties feels like you're doing so with a hand tied behind your back, which doesn't feel like I'm overcoming a unique challenge laid out by the game as much as I'm powering my way through unnecessary hamstringing.

What sucks even more is that the game renders almost all if its cast practically useless as the difficulty progresses. Out of twelve potential companions, on Insanity- the highest difficulty- you have a viable option range of three, maybe. Four, if you stretch the definition out a bit. And when you can only take one of those viable companions out on everyone else's loyalty quest, which renders a full third of your party as dead weight, it turns what should be compelling difficulty to conquer into an arbitrary chore to get through.

 It takes a game that should be about finding unique combinations and synergy among a wide cast of characters and just throws them all out the window for a boring, twenty-two hour grind. Every time I think about trying to do the play through on Insanity again just for completionists sake, the fact that it won't be any fun at all stops me dead cold and seething for a good twenty minutes.

Game-play wise, these problems were fixed for me in Mass Effect 3. The amount of guns, armor, and upgrades were greatly expanded to really make Shepard feel like your own creation. The issue with powers was removed- you couldn't fully upgrade everything on everyone, but you got enough to make your companions flexible and adaptable for any situation you came across. This also means that any combination of companions will work on any difficulty- you're no longer shackled to just using the same people over and over and over again. The way the various biotic and tech powers interact was also expanded, giving rise to some pretty devastating combos you could trigger to lay waste to everything in sight.

Where this game screws up is the narrative. A big selling factor of the Mass Effect series during its run was choice; you as the player made the all-important story decisions that shaped the world around you and determined how the story would ultimately resolve. Or at least that's what you were told, anyway. For this game, the decision was made that certain player decisions would be overridden to bring the game into the more uniform continuity of the expanded universe of the tie-in novels and comic books.

On its own, this isn't necessarily an awful thing. But it was a sign on things to come that would ultimately cause everyone to violently turn on the game once they got to the end.

Over the course of the series, you make some monumental decisions. In the first game, you determine whether a species called the Rachni will live on or you can wipe them out of existence, forever. Multiple people comment on this over the course of the series and what it, potentially, means for the galaxy as a whole. Also in the first game, you make the decision of who will represent the human race on the galaxy overseeing Council with the other three prime alien races. Pretty much everyone picks Admiral Anderson over the other option of Ambassador Udina because Udina is a slimy little shit you wouldn't trust to run a lemonade stand.

A third major choice comes from the second game, were you decide whether or not you're going to blow up the secret base the Reapers have been using to construct another one of their own made out of the liquefied remains of the entire human race. If you blow it up, the head of the terrorist organization you've been working with all game gets very upset with you for ruining his plans of getting humans a leg-up when it comes to galactic domination.

As you probably guess, all these choices are undone or cancelled out in this game. Anderson retires for reasons, the Reapers jury-rig the Rachni back into existence so they can have living artillery weapons to shoot at you, and Cerberus has all the tech they needed, including parts of the baby Reaper that you blew up, at its base anyway. All your decisions meant nothing, aren't you proud?

What's especially galling is that none of these changes were really necessary. Anderson has a special interest in you, so it makes sense he would be on Earth to lend you his support after you pulled some truly heinous and necessary shit at the end of the second game. He could have easily appointed Udina to act as an acting Councilor until he returned but that gets thrown off due to the invasion and once he's on Earth, he can't leave it or the resistance movement behind so he stays. 

This lets him be in danger on Earth, which the plot wants, while also making Udina's second act coup against Cerberus all the more palatable because his power isn't really his. So it makes sense that he'd be vulnerable to an offer of overthrowing the other Councilors to take all the power for himself in what is surely a devil's bargain that will bite him in the ass if it ever worked. Instead, what we have is the game throwing off a player decision for no real reason and having a major plot point not make any sense because the guy already has everything he'd be supposedly getting.

The Rachni issue could also be avoided if the game wanted to. There's another species in the game called the Elcor who are basically these elephant looking things who speak in hilarious monotone voices. You're told by one of the members of this species that they go into battle with cannons strapped to their back which they use to lob artillery at whatever they're fighting. This essentially fills the same role as the Rachni and as the added bonus of giving a new enemy type out of a species you don't see much of in the series.

Even the Reaper tech of Cerberus can be explained by the Reapers reaching out and manipulating the organization for their own ends. Doing things this way reinforces the later theme of the game that what's happening is part of a cycle, that what's happening has happened countless times before to innumerable species, all part of a twisted ideology of the preservation of life in Reaper form. Cerberus is just the latest of many, many distractions the Reapers have perfected in the billions of years they've been doing so its easier to harvest the species they've come for. Instead, we get a massive plot hole that's never explained in game and only briefly touched on in a comic a majority of the players never read because, why would they?

These little insults made the ending- where you're initially forced into a binary choice of controlling or destroying the Reapers- feel even more like Bioware crafted this final chapter with no care or regard for what their players did in the lead up. Maybe they felt overwhelmed; the head writer of the first two games left Bioware before the third game started, so it's possible that given all the possible ways for the game to finish, the new writer and the staff looked to find the most uniform canon they could work from, deeming the changes to player decisions as unfortunate but necessary sacrifice in the name of fuller, more complete narrative closure. To me, it's an example of a company trying to play it safe only to have it backfire in every way they were trying to avoid. 

All that said, Mass Effect is still one of my favorite pieces of media, ever. When it's firing on all cylinders, it's a great action game in a huge space opera with the best bunch of misfits to keep you company. Does it get maddeningly, hair tearing out frustrating at times? Of course. Is it still worth all the trouble? For now, yeah. If there does come a time where I just don't want to put up with all the hassles of the game, it'll still have been nice to be in its world for so long.