Monday, December 31, 2018

Books read in December 2018

New:

1. The Legend of Lightning & Thunder by Paula Ikuutaq Rumbolt
2. Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent by Liz Howard
3. Slash by Jeannette Armstrong
4. Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing by and about Indigenous Peoples by Gregory Younging

Reread:

1. Secrets in Death

Thursday, December 27, 2018

Metropasses

May 2002 Metropass (source: Colnect)
I got my first Metropass in May 2002, when I was doing my internship.  I felt so glamorously adult, going into an office each morning and swiping my pass like a proper grownup who does this all the time!

I went back to tokens when I was back in school, but once again turned to Metropasses once I graduated and started working full-time. I'm not sure if they ended up being cheaper than tokens every single month, but I loved the convenience - hopping on and off the TTC whenever I wanted, swiping my way into turnstiles.  It made me feel like a real urbanite, a true part of my city.
March 2013 Metropass (source: Woodsworth College Students Association)

I stopped using Metropasses when I started working from home in 2013.  But even though I haven't needed them in over five years, I'm still sad that they're being discontinued in favour of the Presto card. My Metropasses have been symbols of and tools of adulthood, independence, urbanity...all the things I never dreamed I was even allowed to aspire to. And so I mourn their loss.  My Presto card, while it has the same functions, doesn't have the same emotional weight.

Sunday, December 23, 2018

System reboot status: December 2018

As part of my resolution to reboot my system, I'm posting each month the top three things in my system that don't serve me well.

This is for personal accountability only, it's not a request for help or feedback.  (There isn't enough information to provide help or feedback. If you're thinking "There totally is!", that's because you don't have all the information.)

So, for December 2018, the top three things that aren't serving me well:

1. My system for getting myself out the door on time and unrushed just...doesn't.  I can't pinpoint the problem and have no ideas for how to improve it.
2. The time/pattern allocated in my system for recreational internet use doesn't meet my needs, and I end up "wasting time" with additional recreational internet use. I have some ideas for how to adjust this, and I'm going to try them and see what happens.
3. My system disincentivizes going to bed as soon as I'm tired if I get tired before finishing my evening routine.  I also keep staying up later if I finish my evening routine well early of my bedtime, even though I should probably be going to bed.  I have some ideas for how to adjust this and I'm going to try them, but I think there's more that I haven't figured out yet.

Let's see what happens...

Saturday, December 22, 2018

Horoscopes

Last year was the first year when my birthday horoscopes couldn't be interpreted as reflecting reality, possibly because the head injury came and disrupted everything. (Is that statement going to be true for the rest of my life???)

But here's this year's, just to see what happens:

Toronto Star:
This year you will learn to handle your temper. You might be feistier than others realize. You also can be spontaneous at times. Try to curb unexpected actions or words. You might find that you often see both sides of a problem. If you are single, you could attract a strong group of admirers. Your temper and volatile style could be a problem when dating, though. If you are attached, the two of you experience more closeness than in the recent past. Perhaps you will pursue a mutually enjoyed hobby together. CANCER can be quite nurturing.
My mother's sign is Cancer and she's always quite nurturing, so nothing new there.

They say the same sort of thing about "if you're single/if you're attached" every year, and it never comes to pass.  Someone more ambitious than I could look into whether they say that for every birthday.

Globe and Mail:
A full moon on your birthday suggests you will need to make a decision that not everyone will be happy with. What really matters, of course, is that you are happy with it. It’s time to let go of the past and to embrace your glorious future.
I've never in my life made a decision that absolutely everyone was happy with, so that's basic reality.  However, I have already decided to throw away my system and start over, so hopefully that will give me a glorious future.

Friday, December 21, 2018

The first swimming

I wonder which came first: humans learning they can swim, or humans learning they can't swim?

By which I mean: did some random prehistoric human boldly go charging into the water (to what end? to catch a fish? to escape from something? to get to the other side?), never suspecting anything could go wrong, and end up dying?  Or did some random prehistoric human end up in the water (how? by accident? murder attempt?) fully expecting that this would be the death of them, and survive?

I'm told that you put a human baby in the water they'll swim intuitively, but older kids still need swimming lessons.

Some land animals seem to swim intuitively.  Did humans originally have that intuition?  Or did they figure it out from copying the water?

Is the fact that we can't breathe underwater instinctive, or hard-earned knowledge passed down through generations since time immemorial?

If it isn't instinctive, did it take several drownings to figure out that the reason people keep dying in the water is because they try to breathe underwater, and they should hold their breath to survive?

(Did humans ever hold their breath for any other reason before they started swimming?)

At some point, humanity (or, at least, the precursors the predominant culture in which I grew up) must have internalized and normalized the idea that humans can't swim naturally, because swimming lessons became a thing. 

Also, someone at some point came up with the idea of standardizing and naming different swimming strokes, some of which are weird. (Butterfly? WTF?)

And some other swimming strokes may well have existed but are lost to history. (And still others probably exist within other cultures and haven't reached me.)

You could also follow this same line of thought for diving.  Why did someone first think they even could do it?  Or did people never think they couldn't do it, until several people broke their necks.

Do other land animals dive?

Is figuring out how high you can safely dive from (and how deep the water needs to be) instinctive or learned? (I dove off a three metre board once - into an Olympic-sized pool, properly supervised - and it felt unsafe. It felt like a fluke that I didn't die, not like a safely reproducible thrill.)

And, again, enough people dove enough times that it became a normal thing to be able to do, a normal thing to learn in swimming lessons, normal enough that nobody even thought I was weird or reckless for wanting to try the three metre board.

I wonder if there are other, similar things related to swimming that were once (or are elsewhere) considered culturally standard, but are now lost to history (or haven't reached me).

I'm sure that sometime, somewhere, within the full scope of human history, there have been people who never once thought swimming was a possibility.

And I'm sure that some other time, somewhere else, within the full scope of human history, there have been people who never once thought that swimming was difficult.

But I do wonder which came first.

Monday, December 17, 2018

Default couple genders in sketch comedy

I'm late to the game on this, but I just started watching the Baroness Von Sketch show this season, and I'm really enjoying it.

One little thing I appreciate is when a sketch involves a couple but the gender of the couple is irrelevant to the sketch, they most often make it a same-sex couple played by two of the (all-female) leads.

Here's an example:



That sketch is entirely gender-irrelevant. It would have worked out the same way regardless of the genders of the characters.  So they simply cast two of the leads as characters who are the same demographic as the actors - two women played by two women.

If you think back to older sketch comedies like Monty Python or Kids in the Hall, they wouldn't do that.  If the genders of the couple were irrelevant to the sketch, they'd make it an opposite-sex couple.  They'd only use same-sex couples if there was a specific reason why a same-sex couple was needed.

But another thing that Monty Python and Kids in the Hall often did was have female characters portrayed by the all-male leads rather than using a female supporting actress to play a female character.  They did use female supporting actresses as well (just as Baroness Von Sketch uses male supporting actors), but the default seemed to be a male lead dressed as a woman.

If you think about it, it's kind of bizarre that in a sketch comedy environment that couldn't perceive a same-sex couple neutrally, a sketch comedy couple consisting of one male actor dressed as a man and one male actor dressed as a woman was seen as neutral and unmarked (in the linguistic sense).

Someday in the future, probably sooner than we expect, people are going to watch those sketches and think all the Monty Python pepperpots are meant to be trans or genderqueer, and they'll need a historical explainer to understand what the Pythons are doing. And they're going to think this post, noticing that gender-irrelevant couples are portrayed as same-sex couples by the all-female cast, is going to come across as having homophobic undertones, like how someone's grandmother who gratuitously mentions the race of everyone she brings up in conversation comes across as having racist undertones.

Tuesday, December 04, 2018

New Rules: Natural Consequences Edition XIII

18. Some people have trouble coping with certain distressing possibilities, so, to get through the day, they delude themselves into thinking that the distressing possibilities can't possibly happen to them, because of their circumstances or because they're sufficiently diligent.

Examples: "I won't get sick because I eat all the right superfoods and do all the right asanas!"  "I won't be raped because I dress modestly!" "I won't ever be a refugee because I'm a regular person living in a developed country!"

This part I don't take issue with.  Life is hard and the world sucks, do what you have to do to get through the day as long as it doesn't do any harm

The problem is when it starts doing harm.  Some people feel the need to reinforce their self-delusion by inflicting it on others assholicly, and sometimes even by advocating for assholic policy.

Examples: "Your mother died? She should have eaten more superfoods!" Which later escalates to "My taxes shouldn't have to pay for health care because people wouldn't need health care if they were responsible enough to just eat the right foods!"  Or "Those people say they're refugees but they have smartphones! They must be frauds - deport them!"

So I propose a natural consequence: if the self-delusion you resort to because you can't cope with distressing possibilities leads you to behave assholicly, you are sentenced to the very distressing possibility you fear.

I do realize this is a very severe sentence, so it's a three strikes rule.  The first two times you do it, you get a very stern warning that makes the offending actions and the future consequences quite clear to you.  (Q: How? A: Through the same omnipotent magic that enforces all of my natural consequences, of course!)  Then, the third time, you're sentenced to the very horror you dread.

Saturday, December 01, 2018

People who are reluctant to call landlines

As I've blogged about before, I prefer having a landline to using a cell phone for everything.

However, in recent years, I've noticed that people (including business relationships) are reluctant to call my landline, even when I explicitly tell them to.

For example, I will say "Please put in my file that my landline is the preferred number. I work from home so I'm at that number 23 hours a day, and I live alone so it is a private number. If I'm not at home, I'm not equipped to check my calendar or schedule an appointment or anything, so if you call my cell phone I'll just have to call you back anyway." 

And they still call the cellphone.

I do try to disincentivize calling the cellphone.  I don't answer the cellphone when I'm at home, sometimes even turning it off when I'm home (depending on whether I'm open to receiving texts at that moment). I don't answer it when I'm out and about for calls that aren't going to be immediately relevant (for example, I'll answer if it's the person I'm meeting or someone who might be trying to get in touch with me for emergency reasons, but I won't answer a call confirming a dentist appointment or wanting to discuss renewing my mortgage.)  If I do answer and it's something that would better go to the landline, I'll say "I'm not at home right now and not able to address this at the moment.  I'll call you back when I'm at home."  (And then, when I do call back, I tell them to call my landline next time.)  If they leave a message, I don't call them back until I'm at home.  (If they call the cellphone while I'm at home and leave a message, but don't subsequently try the landline, I don't even check the messages until I've gone out and returned back home.)

And I do try to incentivize calling the landline by always answering immediately when the call display shows a number that does have business calling me, and always returning calls immediately.

But people still call the cellphone.

I've even stopped giving out my cellphone number unless strictly relevant, but some people still have it in their records from back when I would blithely fill out every field of a contact form without regard for consequences, and some people do have a reason to be able to contact me by cell in emergencies. (For example, work needs to be able to reach me in case I disappear off the face of the earth, sometimes I give people my phone number if we have an appointment in an place I'm not familiar with, in case I get lost or delayed or something.) And when I do give it out, I tell them "You can use this if I don't show up at my appointment, but normally it's the worst possible way to reach me."

And they still call the cellphone.

I totally understand why some individuals might find not having a landline more convenient for their own purposes, but I'm rather baffled by the fact that they avoid calling someone else's landline even when explicitly instructed to do so.

Somehow, their baggage about calling a landline seems to outweigh my explicitly stated instructions about which number to call, plus all the cumulative empirical evidence about which number I'll answer first and which voicemail I'll respond to most quickly.

And what makes it especially weird is I get the vibe that people who are reluctant to call landlines seem to feel that doing so is rude.  Even though calling my cell increases the likelihood of interrupting me at a bad time. If I'm not at home, I am almost certainly in the middle of something and almost certainly do not have privacy.  If I am at home, I may or may not be in the middle of doing something and almost certainly do have privacy.

Again, I understand why some individuals might feel that calling in general might be rude - society as a whole certain seems to have moved towards texting or emailing to confirm it's a good time to call rather than calling cold - but this isn't what's happening here.  What's happening here is I'm getting a call without warning that requires thought or action or decision-making or scheduling on my part, and callers are deliberately choosing the number that's most likely to reach me at a bad time, despite my clear instructions to use the other number.

Baffling.

Friday, November 30, 2018

Books read in November 2018

New:

1. Badger by Daniel Heath Justice
2. Amun - Nouvelles ed. Michel Jean
3. As Long as the Rivers Flow by James Bartleman 
4. Fire Song by Adam Garnet Jones

Reread:

1. Echoes in death
 

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine braindump (full spoilers)

Nearly a year after I started watching, and 25 years after it first started airing, I finally finished watching DS9! My immediate thoughts:

- I didn't watch the series when it first came out because it was too dark my preteen self.  But I was pleasantly surprised about how light a touch they had on some of the darker storylines. For example, there's one plot line where Chief O'Brien is implanted with the memories of spending 20 years in prison.  I'd heard of this episode before I went in, so I was expecting to see an hour of O'Brien going through hell and then in the last act we learn it's all a dream.  But instead they start with him being released, and the memories come out in counselling sessions. The episode is much more tolerable knowing from the outset that he's okay! Other things I thought would be awkward, like the O'Briens' baby being implanted in Kira's uterus and the Dax symbiont being  implanted in Ezri (I sense a theme here?) were presented as a fait accompli rather than as the angst I was expecting,

- I blogged before about how I found the technobabble from Discovery and The Orville unconvincing.  It turns out I find the technobabble from DS9 perfectly convincing - and sometimes even informative! For example, someone on screen mentions tachyons, and my brain instantly goes "There must be a cloaked ship!" Moments later, a ship decloaks.

- Compared with other Star Treks, I can see the scaffolding of the writing, by which I mean I recognize things like "They showed Odo shape-shifting in the cold open so people who are just tuning in would know he's a shape-shifter" or "The away team is composed of humans only because having multiple alien species on the away team would complicate the intended plot." I can't tell if this reflects the writing, or if it reflects my own sophistication. The last time I watched new-to-me Star Trek was Voyager, which I watched 10 years ago, and I didn't see the scaffolding of the writing.  At first I was thinking this must reflect how my literary analysis skills have improved (despite the fact that DS9 takes place in a visual medium, recognizing the scaffolding of the writing is a literary analysis skill), but upon further reflection I think it's because I read TVTropes (warning: rabbithole). I now recognize things like lampshading and handwaving and MacGuffins and Applied Phlebotinum.

- Weirdly, I can't see the scaffolding of the writing nearly as much on Star Trek: Discovery. Again, I don't know if that's because of the quality of the writing, or just because of what I'm accustomed to.  I don't watch that much drama, so the more modern style of television writing we see on Discovery and the serial season-long arc structure are less familiar to me. I've probably watched less than 50 episodes of comparably-written television in my life.  In contrast, I have now watched over 500 episodes of 90s-era Star Trek, so I have a far better sense of how the story needs to work.

- I was surprised by how often they did time travel and mirror universe episodes. I was watching at a rate of 5 episodes a week so I can't tell how well they would have fit into the original broadcast pacing, but to me they felt really frequent.  My visceral reaction was that the writers were "cheating" - which of course is a ridiculous reaction (especially since mirror universe/time travel doesn't necessarily produce a better episode), but nevertheless that is my visceral reaction.

- Another thing that surprised me watching 20-25 years after it was written is how gratuitously cis-heterocentric it appeared.  For example, if the Jem'Hadar don't procreate naturally, why would they all be male as opposed to being genderless? Why should the female changeling be female (or have any gender)?  I can see Odo opting to present as a gender because he grew up among solids, but the female changeling is from the link. Why should Odo only be sexually attracted to women? (Why should Odo be sexually attracted to anybody?)

- Since Odo is established as having a sex life, are his genitals sexually sensitive?  Can he make them sexually sensitive (or not) as he morphs?  Can he make other parts of his body sexually sensitive and, like, get off on shaking hands with someone?

- I appreciate how DS9 shows that the various alien cultures (Klingons, Ferengi, etc.) have complexity and nuance, and also suggests that we're only seeing a slice of their complexity and nuance.   Previous Star Treks made the aliens more one-dimensional, so that was a welcome and refreshing improvement.

- Speaking of only seeing a slice, another thing I wasn't expecting but appreciated was that I felt like we were only seeing anecdotes from the Dominion War.  Previous Star Treks (and Discovery, now that I think about it), I've felt like we're seeing everything that happens to the crew during the time period in question.  The argument could easily be made that we're not seeing everything, but I did come away with the impression that we were seeing everything in the other serieses.  However, by having the overarching Dominion War arc interspersed with smaller, lighter episodes that don't advance the Dominion War plot, I came away from DS9 feeling like we're not seeing everything, which leaves room for other things to happen in between. (Novels! Fanfic! Webisodes!)

- And speaking of leaving room for other things to happen, I appreciate that the writers obeyed the campsite rule as they ended the series, and left the Star Trek universe nice and tidy for future writers.  The Dominion War is over, so we have the option of picking up in a peaceful, optimistic future.  Many different alien species are more fleshed out, so we can have them as interesting allies in our peaceful optimistic future, but underlying tensions aren't completely gone so almost any old antagonism could be picked up.  And, if we need a mysterious enemy, the Breen are there.  Or they could just fade back into the background since they're so very mysterious. The Pah-wraiths are vanquished, so the Star Trek universe can go back to being aspiritual if needed, but they did exist (as did the Prophets) so that can be explored if needed.  I don't believe any protagonist character's return has been ruled out, and any given character can easily be written around.  Basically, the Alpha Quadrant is left nice and tidy so the next writers who come along can make full use of it however they need to.  I appreciate the planning and effort that went into doing that (and am vaguely amused that I can see it.)

Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Things They Should Invent: early releases in palliative care

In the world of publishing, there's something called an Advance Reader Copy (ARC), which is a very limited edition of a book that comes out before the official publication dates.  Sometimes they have contests where you can win one, although I suspect they also have some other function.

For movies and TV shows, there are advance screeners that sometimes get sent to critics and people who vote on awards, so the production can get good publicity.

These things should be made available to palliative care patients.

Some titles are highly anticipated, including beloved series where people want to know how they end.  And, when the patient's death is imminent, there's a high likelihood that they may never find out how it ends.

Which is especially tragic if the work is complete, or close enough to finalized for the reader/viewer to get the story!

I know it can be done - it has been done in the past for young Harry Potter fans with terminal illnesses.

We just need a system to make all stories in all media available to everyone who is terminally ill as soon as humanly possible.

Friday, November 16, 2018

Outdoors ≠ simple

From a recent Carolyn Hax chat:
Dear Carolyn, My fiancé and I want a small, backyard wedding with about 75 guests. My grandmother has a huge yard that would be perfect for our wedding next spring. I asked her if we could get married there and she said yes, so I was very excited to start planning. Then last weekend I had lunch with my sister. She told me that our grandmother is too old and isn’t well enough physically to get her house ready to host an event like this so our mother will be doing most of the work. I told her it was an outdoor wedding, all we have to do is get some chairs and everything will work out. My sister started telling me I have to plan for parking, bathrooms, permits, chairs, a tent for bad weather, alerting the neighbors, hiring a lawn company to fix up our grandmothers lawn and I’m sure I am forgetting stuff. I just wanted a simple backyard wedding and my grandma agreed to it, now it feels really complicated. I am upset with my mother and sister for inserting themselves into something that ought to be between me and my grandma. How can I get them to back off?

I think this letter-writer is falling into a common cultural trap: the notion that outdoors = simple.

People tend to think this because conventional wisdom is that life was simpler in the past, and in the distant past people spent more time outdoors simply because their homes were less adequate.

But now we live in a world where our homes and other buildings meet our basic needs significantly better than the outdoors does, which makes spending time outdoors more complex.

For example, in our homes we have clean, private places where we can urinate and defecate, equipped to clean our genitals and our hands to a socially-acceptable and hygienically-necessary level afterwards.  So when we go outdoors, finding a place to urinate or defecate and a way to clean up afterwards adds complexity. We either have to figure out where there's a public washroom, or take equipment with us and find a place with suitable privacy. (And, for those of us who aren't used to going to the bathroom outdoors, there's the question of logistics and choreography - personally, I haven't a clue what angle anything is going to come out at, and I'm not sure how long I can stay in the necessary squatting position.)

In our homes, we have facilities to store food at a safe temperature, and equipment to serve and consume food and drink in accordance with social norms.   So when we go outdoors, we have to think about food safety. (How can we keep the food cold?  Or what food doesn't need to be refrigerated?)  We also need to think about how we're going to store the food, so we can carry it with us, so it doesn't spill and so ants and raccoons and cartoon bears don't eat it.

In our homes, we are sheltered from the elements. So when we go outdoors, we have to think about the elements. Do we need clothing and/or equipment to protect us from the heat/cold/sun/rain/snow?

Because of all that, the simplest way to have a wedding is at a place already designed to host weddings (or perhaps other events), which is most likely to be indoors or have an indoor component. Being in an existing, operating building, a wedding venue would have bathrooms and shelter from the weather and provisions for parking. Because its whole job is hosting weddings/events, it would already be prepared with chairs, wouldn't have to inform the neighbours because they'd already know it's an event venue, and wouldn't have to fix the lawn because they'd already have landscaping etc. that could stand up to a wedding being held there. You could practically go in and say "One wedding please, whatever's cheapest and simplest."

If outdoors is important to you for whatever reason, go ahead and plan something outdoors. If the real issue is that you don't want to pay for a venue, go ahead and try to impose on your loved ones for a space. But if what you want really is simplicity, that's going to be far more difficult to achieve outdoors.

Sunday, November 11, 2018

Polite conversation and consent

Reading this Ask A Manager discussion about conversation topics that are totally off-limits in the workplace, I developed a theory:

The rules of polite conversation are essentially there to keep conversation consensual.

For example, religion is off-limits because not everyone consents to being converted or to being told their beliefs are Bad and Wrong or to being interrogated about and asked to defend their beliefs.

Politics are off-limit because not everyone consents to being converted or being debated or being told their core values are Bad and Wrong or being told Those People are Bad and Wrong.

Family planning is off-limits because not everyone consents to disclosing or being pressured to disclose the personal details of their medical history and their sex life and finances and interpersonal dynamics in their home.

And consent is all the more important in places like the workplace (and, I'd like people to start believing, the family) where there are power dynamics, and you can't just walk away and never speak to the people again.

Now, sometimes people do discuss these topics consensually.  But, as with everything in life, it is important to make sure you truly do have consent first, and that the person is giving consent of their own free will rather than feeling pressured into it.

Some people will argue "There's no need for all these rules! If they don't want to talk about something, they should just say so!" 

But enough people who don't feel they can say no have gathered enough empirical evidence that they'll suffer negative consequences ("Not a team player" "C'mon, lighten up!") that they don't feel safe saying no.

So if you want to live in a world where no topics are off-limits because people can just say no, start by influencing your corner of the world in a direction where people aren't shamed or spoken of negatively for not wanting to talk about something.

Just as more advanced sex acts, (e.g. BDSM), require a more robust consent environment, (e.g. safe words), so do more advanced conversation topics.

Things I Don't Understand: objecting to assisted dying when you don't mind if people die

This post was inspired by, but is not directly related to, this op-ed outlining how the new provincial government's policies could kill people.

Policy can kill people.  Politicians who enact such policies and other proponents of these policies either don't care if people die, or see people's deaths as acceptable collateral damage.

What's weird is the intersection between not caring if one's policies kill people, but being opposed to medically-assisted death. If you don't care if people die, why would you object to people dying?

Some people hold the idea that people should contribute to society rather than being a burden to society.  Others refute argue against this idea, saying that your value comes from who you are as a person rather than what you can contribute.  (I actually don't hold either of these ideas - I don't feel it's my - or anyone's - jurisdiction to go around insisting others contribute to my satisfaction or accusing others of being a burden, but I also don't feel that every human being has intrinsic value for the simple reason that I can't perceive any intrinsic value in my own essential humanity.)

So I also find it weird when people who hold the "contribute to society or you're a burden" idea are opposed to assisted death. In a paradigm where it is possible for a person to be a burden, why would you be opposed to someone saying "I'm too much of a burden, so I'm going to get out of the way now.

One reason I have heard for objecting to medically-assisted death while not objecting to death itself is that if you can do it yourself, you don't need medical assistance.

But the benefit of medically-assisted death rather than suicide is it doesn't leave a mess for other people to clean up.  Currently, we don't have any non-medical method of suicide that doesn't leave a carcass in a place where it's inconvenient to others for there to be a carcass.

In contrast, in medical settings where people die, they're fully trained and prepared to move a dead body and hygienically clean up afterwards. (In my grandmother's long-term care home, they have whole procedures in place for this eventuality!) Until we have Suicide Place, medical contexts are our only option for people to die without being an undue burden upon others.

So it's really strange to me that people who don't mind that their policies might kill people are opposed to people choosing to die.

A real-life example of how spending more money can result in better value

I blogged recently that, when looking into how to get best value for money in public services, they should study ways to add value, not just ways to save money.

Real-life has just given me an excellent example of how this can work.

As I've blogged about before, I'm truly terrible at washing my windows. I've been considering hiring someone to do it, but I have no idea how to go about hiring someone who is good.

It turns out, this year my condo decided to do a pilot project: the professional window-washers the building hires to wash our inaccessible windows would also do our balcony windows.

It was a resounding success!

It took two window-washers with just 10 minutes to wash all my balcony windows as well as the inside and outside of the glass under the balcony railing, and I can't see any streaks! 

In contrast, it takes me an hour to clean the same windows, and I always leave streaks behind.

They did have to come through my apartment to get at the balcony, but they were accompanied by a building security guard who is known to me.

In contrast, if I hired someone myself, I'd have to be alone in my home with this unvetted stranger, or impose upon someone to come sit around my apartment so I wouldn't have to be alone in my home with this unvetted stranger.

These window-washers were professionals, with professional-calibre equipment that I've never even seen available for sale in the kind of retailers where someone like me might plausibly buy cleaning equipment.  And they were hired by my building's professional property managers, who have experience in hiring workers for building maintenance tasks.

In contrast, I am a very amateur window-washer with amateur equipment, and anyone a private individual like myself can hire for a one-off job is also likely to be pretty amateur with amateur equipment - an odd-job sort of person rather than someone who washes windows 40 hours a week.  And I have no experience whatsoever hiring anyone to do anything, and haven't a clue how to tell if someone is good and trustworthy until after the fact (and sometimes not even then).

And the marginal cost to me? Zero!  It was so easily absorbed into the building's overall maintenance budget that my condo fees aren't even going up for next year!

The rental apartments I've lived in would never have done this, because they were businesses with a profit motive. Hiring window-washers to wash windows they could reasonably ask tenants to do themselves would take away from their profit.

But a condo doesn't have profit motive - the purpose of the condo's budget is to meet residents' needs.  So we were at liberty to spend more money to pay skilled professionals to do the job, which got better results far more quickly and easily than if they'd left the task up to us to do individually.

Definitely better value! And definitely the sort of value we'd want to add to our public services.

My 2019 New Year's resolution

So I've been feeling that turning 38 is the beginning of a new chapter in my life, and trying to figure out what it's going to be.

Then, in the past few weeks, things keep happening where being perfectly diligent results in bad outcomes, but being less than perfectly diligent results in good outcomes.

And I realized this needs to be my next new year's resolution: be less diligent.

The need for less diligence isn't just a result of the bad luck I've been having the past couple of weeks.  It's also a result of the fact that my system hasn't been serving me well.

My system was originally designed when I was 22 and unemployed.  Social media didn't exist then, and my personal care required far less diligence.

Since then, whenever something comes up that I need or want to be part of my routine, I've been adding it to my system.  But I never took anything out, because everything in there seemed just as necessary as it has always been.  I did notice problems with this approach, but I still continued it.

However, since my head injury, this has all been snowballing.  What with the massive amounts of rest I needed in the aftermath of my head injury, and the general need to scale back on everything, and the addition of vision therapy to my routine, I'm essentially 6 months behind. Parts of the system were designed to be cumulative, so if I don't finish the task today I have to do it tomorrow, but since the head injury it has gotten ridiculous.  I feel hopelessly behind, which is a stupid feeling to be living with every single moment of every single day when you're meeting all your work deadlines and paying all your bills on time and getting ahead on your mortgage.

So my project for the next year is to destroy and rebuild my system.

I will continue following the current system until my birthday, but for the purpose of gathering data. I will note what aspects aren't serving me and reflect upon how to fix those problems.

Then, on my birthday, I will erase my backlog so I'm no longer "behind", introduce any fixes I think of between now and then, and continue following the system for the purpose of gathering data.

The next year will be spent pinpointing which aspects of the system don't serve me, and figuring out ways to fix them so they do serve me. Then I will reboot the system again on my 39th birthday, to reflect everything I've learned in the interim.

And, hopefully, I will enter the second half of my life with a system that serves me well and reflects my actual needs, rather than punishing me for not meeting some completely arbitrary standard of diligence.

*8

When I turned 8, I had the sudden feeling that I had stopped being a Little Kid and started being a Big Kid.

When I turned 18, I became a legal adult and endeavoured to start living as such rather than as my parents' child (which was difficult given that I was still in high school and living in my parents' house - both normal for an 18-year-old at the time, because this was back when high school was still five years long).

Turning 28 also felt significant, in that I suddenly didn't feel like I was cool enough for my age. I made myself a series of three anti-resolutions, that ultimately led to my Entitlement journey, which would ultimately give me the tools I would ultimately need to adult properly.

In December I turn 38, and that also feels significant because it's the halfway mark in many respects:

- My statistical life expectancy at birth is 76, and 38 is half of 76.
- I moved out of my parents' house at 19, and 19 x 2 = 38. So, starting this coming year, the majority of my life will have been spent living independently rather than as my parents' dependent.
-  At the age of 38, I will mark my 16th anniversary as a professional translator.  This is significant because I was 16 when I came to the realization that translation is the right career for me, so, starting this year, I will have spent more of my life a translator than not a translator. (The six years between realizing I should be a translator and starting to work as a professional translator were spent completing high school and going to university for my translation degree.)

38 feels like it's going to be meaningful, and I think I'm just starting to figure out how. That's for my next post.

Good morning!

Here's what I'm doing today and why.

Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Books read in October 2018

New:

1. Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese
2. Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City by Tanya Talaga
3. Kuessipan by Naomi Fontaine

Reread:

1. Brotherhood in Death
2. Apprentice in Death

Monday, October 22, 2018

Voted

The polling place was in my building, so no doggies.


The physical environment was distressing because of halloween decorations that trigger my panic attacks. I find myself wondering if that's allowed. But the decorations were put up by fellow residents (as opposed to by property management) and I has already politely asked property management to remove the ones that distress me (when I thought property management had put them up), so I don't want to pursue this too aggressively when the resident committee who put them up now know where I live and know my greatest weakness.

This year, I got one flyer from each incumbent councillor candidate, and one from one of the challenger trustee candidates.  I got multiple emails from the incumbent candidate of my old ward because I was subscribed to his newsletter in my capacity as a constituent. Weirdly, I also got one email from the other incumbent candidate, even though I don't think I've ever emailed him.

I saw signs for the incumbent councillor candidates, the incumbent school board trustee candidate and both frontrunner mayoral candidates.

Despite the fact that my head injury still hinders my reading, I feel like I was able to make an informed decision. I do have some ideas about how the media could have helped me do that better, which will be the subject of future blog posts.

Saturday, October 20, 2018

Another tool to figure out how to vote: anti-endorsements

One strategy if you're struggling to figure out how to vote for is to see if any organizations that align with your values are endorsing candidates in your ward, and why they are endorsing the candidates they choose.

I recently figured out another strategy: see who organizations that don't align with your values are endorsing.

While googling some candidates in my ward, I discovered a website I find politically abhorrent was rating various municipal candidates.

It included ratings and comments on some candidates about whom I had, until that point, been unable to find enough useful information.  And I found that knowing what politically abhorrent people think of these candidates and why is a useful information to have.

So if you're not finding enough information about particular candidates or about a particular race in your ward and can tolerate some exposure to abhorrent politics, check out who the politically abhorrent are endorsing and why. After all, just because they call it "endorsements"  doesn't mean you have to do what they say - you can systematically do the opposite, or otherwise use the reasoning behind their opinions to inform your own.

Sunday, October 14, 2018

The only requirement for assisted death should be wanting to die

I've always been thinking about medically-assisted dying from the point of view of not having access to it. I fear reaching the point where I can no longer have a quality of life that meets my minimum standards, but not being eligible to be put out of my misery.  I fear decades of being tube-fed against my will, or never being able to have privacy because I'm too far into my decline to be unsupervised but not permitted to die.

And I've been writing about assisted dying from this perspective. Recent attempts at assisted-dying legislation set out very specific medical prerequisites for qualifying for assisted death.  I see gaps in these criteria, so I'm trying to come up with policy ideas that would fill in the gaps while being sufficiently palatable to pass into law.

It recently came to my attention that some people think about it from the opposite perspective: they're concerned that the existence very specific medical criteria will create a situation where people who meet those criteria but want to continue living will be pressured or coerced to die.  I've noticed that, in particular, people with disabilities who have been through some shit are concerned about being seen as less worthy of living if they meet the assisted dying criteria.

As a proponent of assisted dying, this is not my intention!  My wanting death to be available to me and not wanting to have life inflicted upon me against my will doesn't mean that I don't want life to be available to others and want death to be inflicted upon others!

Fortunately, there is a simple solution to meet the needs of both sides.  One, and only one, medical prerequisite for assisted death: the patient wants to die.

If the patient wants to die, they meet the legal requirements for assisted death.  If the patient doesn't want to die, they don't meet the legal requirements for assisted death. Period.

The only problem is, I don't think they'll go for it.  Too many people are uncomfortable with the idea of death on demand that they feel it's morally imperative to put obstacles in the way. I don't like it, but right at this exact moment I think our options are assisted dying with obstacles, or no assisted dying whatsoever.

But those obstacles shouldn't be medical prerequisites for assisted death.  Instead, they should be part of the protocol that medical professionals follow.

For example, when a patient requests assisted death, protocol could dictate that medical professionals first conduct a quality of life analysis, and try to resolve the quality of life issues through less drastic means. Perhaps even a minimum amount of time would have to pass between the patient first requesting assisted death and assisted death being administered, during which time other, less drastic interventions are tried to resolve the patient's quality of life issues.  (There would have to be an exception in cases where this minimum amount of time is longer than the patient's life expectancy prognosis, or when the patient and their medical team have already tried everything.)

But ultimately, in order to meet the needs of vulnerable people who want death to be available to them and vulnerable people who don't want death inflicted upon them, the only legal requirement,  the only official medical criterion, and the sine qua non for assisted death must be wanting to die. Everything else is merely procedural.

In other words, the only requirement for whether to provide assisted dying is that the patient wants to die.  Everything else is about how.

Sunday, October 07, 2018

How to un-spoil a surprise party

From a recent Miss Conduct:
I wanted to throw a surprise party for my mom, and had kept it a secret. But she found out about it by looking at my messages. What do I do?
Get mad at your mother.  Get really really mad at her, yell and scream and say you'll never talk to her again, giving every impression of a permanent breach in the relationship.

The throw the surprise party just as planned.

She'll never expect it!

Saturday, October 06, 2018

How to compare the voting records of incumbent Toronto city councillor candidates

The sudden reorganization of Toronto City Council from 47 wards into only 25 creates a situation where there are multiple incumbents running in some wards.

We are accustomed to the situation of one incumbent running in a ward. We keep an eye on the world of our incumbent councillor over their term and get a sense of their work and their voting patterns, especially on issues that are important to us.  We keep in mind what works and where there's room for improvement and compare all this with the platforms of the challengers running in our ward, as well as using it to evaluate the incumbent's re-election platform.

Having two incumbent candidates in a ward complicates things. Now two of the candidates have a voting patterns and a record of constituency work, but one of them we haven't been paying nearly as much attention to, since, up until now, they were irrelevant to our everyday issues and our voting decisions.

It would be foolish to disregard the record of the incumbent with whom we're less familiar, but it also takes a lot of work to familiarize ourselves with their years and years of council votes.

However, a more efficient way to do so is to compare the voting records of the two incumbent candidates and see where they differ. After all,  there's no point in focusing your time and energy on areas where they're in agreement - your existing assessment of whether your incumbent should be voted for or against will do the job there.

Here's a quick and easy way to make this comparison*:

Go to Matt Elliott's City Council Scorecard. This spreadsheet has one row for each councillor, and as your scroll rightwards you can see how they've voted on every vote, colour-coded for your convenience.

When you find a column where your two incumbents voted differently, simply look at the top row to see what the issue was.

This way you can quickly and easily scroll through years of votes to see where there are areas of difference requiring further examination.

(Here is a link to primary source data about councillor's voting records, which is far less user-friendly, but can be downloaded in .csv format if you prefer to do your own data manipulations.)

*Credit for this idea goes to the author of this comparison of Ward 12 candidates Josh Matlow and Joe Mihevic, which reached me via a tweet from Adam Chaleff. I'm under the impression that the author of this comparison wishes to remain anonymous, but if you are the author and you want credit, let me know in the comments.  And, of course, Matt Elliott gets credit for the mindblowingly helpful scorecard spreadsheet.

Sunday, September 30, 2018

Books read in September 2018

New:

1. Defined by Design: The Surprising Power of Hidden Gender, Age, and Body Bias in Everyday Products and Places by Kathryn H. Anthony
2. Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson 
3. Ask a Manager: How to Navigate Clueless Colleagues, Lunch-Stealing Bosses, and the Rest of Your Life at Work by Alison Green
4. The Stone Collection by Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm


Reread:

1. Devoted in Death
2. Wonderment in Death

Dear Miss Manners: what if you're bereaved and have poor acting skills?

From a recent Miss Manners:
Dear Miss Manners: At the funeral of a very dear person who was a founding member of the church I attend, I approached the deceased's sister outside the church before the service. I attempted to hug her and express my condolences. The sister all but recoiled, stating that she was not accepting any displays of condolence because it was "too upsetting" to her. Another family member, who was standing nearby at the time, just looked at me with a kind of "what-can-you-do?" expression on her face.
I was stunned and somewhat embarrassed because other people standing near enough heard her say this. I have not seen this person since the funeral about one month ago, and I am still a little rubbed about her behavior.
Should I be? She even made a remark to the effect that she knew her niece — the deceased's daughter — would probably hear about it and be upset with her, but that she didn't care.
Miss Manners replies:
Thus both admitting and defending being rude to you.
Although we try to make allowances for the emotional state of those in fresh mourning, that does not include hurting other mourners by repulsing condolences. On the contrary, the immediately bereaved should be representing the deceased to those who also feel their loss.
So yes, Miss Manners agrees that you should be a little rubbed about this behavior. And that for the sake of your late friend, you will now let it go.
Miss Manners did address the letter-writer's question, and did address the letter-writer's hidden question about whether it was appropriate for the family member in question to behave that way.

But, as the kind of socially-inept person who reads an etiquette advice column to better myself, I have another question: what if you are bereaved but, for whatever reason, don't have the acting skills to represent the deceased to the other mourners?

Is Miss Manners saying you shouldn't attend the funeral in that case?  Is there an etiquette-sanctioned way to attend the funeral but avoid people?

The family member whose behaviour so appalled the letter-writer and Miss Manners is the deceased's daughter's aunt, which, by my math, makes her either the deceased's sister or sister-in-law.

If we were to make a hierarchy about such things, the general consensus would be that the deceased's sister attending the funeral is more important than the members of the deceased's church getting their emotional needs attended to.  If we were to analyze the situation under Ring Theory, the sister would be the one who gets to do the dumping, and the letter-writer would be the one who has to do the comforting.

So would Miss Manners advise a person on an inner ring to skip a funeral if they can't attend to the emotional needs of a person on an outer ring?  Or does etiquette have something else in mind for people who, in their grief, just can't hold it together enough to fulfill the requirements of etiqutte?

Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Demontage

As I was struggling through yet another tedious round of vision therapy, I found myself thinking that if this were a movie, it would be portrayed as a heroic training montage, jumping between Brock string beads to the beat of Eye of the Tiger.

It occurs to me that it could be creatively interesting to do the opposite - show a character going through the slow, tedious practice of practicing or building up their skills over time, until, at a crucial plot juncture, they turn out to ultimately be highly competent at the skill they're seen practicing.

This would probably be more suited to a TV series than to a movie.  The character would be seen training/practicing in the background, or as the slice of life activity they're doing when they get interrupted by the episode's main plot. (Is there a word for that concept?)  Perhaps their training/practice equipment is seen in a corner of their room.  It could be fun to show but not tell - the character is frequently seen training or practicing in the background, but there's never an expositiony "So how's your training going?" conversation.

It might even work to have the character experience the failure or setback that leads to the training early in the season - as nothing more than a subplot, perhaps even as a background event or a passing joke or the slice of life activity that gets interrupted by the episode's main plot - then they work hard at their training in the background all season with the main plot taking centre stage, and the fruits of their hard work become a crucial plot point in the season finale.

Just as all of us who are slogging through something in real life, without the ability to save time by doing it by montage, hope that it will eventually pay off at a crucial plot point.

Friday, September 21, 2018

Telling your relatives about DNA test results

A common theme in advice columns recently has been whether to disclose information from genealogy DNA tests to one's relatives.

Examples from a recent Ethicist:

I’m 45, living in the United States. My brother is two years older and lives in Australia. Neither of us gets on with our 86-year-old mother, who lives in London. Our father, whom we were both really close to, died in 1985 after a long illness. I was 13, my brother 15, and it affected us very badly with little help from our mother.

I recently took a DNA test out of curiosity for the health information and couldn’t understand the result that I was 52 percent Ashkenazi Jewish. As far as I was aware, both my parents were from Jewish families going back as far as we knew. The following day, having not spoken to my mother for a year, I asked if she wouldn’t mind taking the test. She responded that it was a route that I might not want to go down. Of course, I asked why, and she just came out with the news that my father was infertile and that both myself and my brother were from artificial insemination. She told me not to tell my brother and said that she never wanted to talk about it again. 

I have been absolutely devastated by this news. Before speaking to my mother, I had mentioned to my brother that my DNA results appeared strange. He didn’t show too much interest. I genuinely do not know how my brother would react, as he is generally far less emotional than I. However, I am feeling a lot of guilt because I think it is everyone’s right to know such an important fact. As devastating as this news was to me, I am grateful to know the truth. 

Doesn’t everyone deserve to know the truth? Should I tell my brother outright, or should I inquire if he wants more details about his heritage or simply not bring it up? Should I give my mother the opportunity to tell him before I do? My concern for my mother’s request not to tell him is of secondary consideration.

and:

I recently did 23andMe to learn about my genetic health and ancestry. A week after getting my results, I received a marketing email asking if I wanted to connect to the 1,000-plus other customers to whom I was related. I thought, Why not, as I might meet a distant cousin back overseas. To my surprise, I learned I had a first cousin born the day before my older sister and given up for adoption by my now-married-for-50-years aunt and uncle. No one in my immediate family was aware that they had given up a child before marrying and subsequently having four more children — cousins with whom I grew up and spent summer vacations. I waited for my adopted cousin to reach out to me, which she did after a few weeks, and we had a nice phone conversation. She informed me that her biological parents and four siblings responded to a letter she wrote to them 12 years ago that they want no contact with her or her daughters whatsoever. 

Do I let my cousins know that I am now aware of what they have spent over a decade trying to conceal? I know of at least two other second cousins who also took a genetic test and learned of this genetic cousin through 23andMe. To me this seems like a ticking time bomb for my cousins and aunt and uncle. Between these mass-market genetic tests and social media, it is just a matter of time before folks learn of this secret my aunt and uncle have tried to conceal for 52 years. My new cousin seems perfectly lovely and looks exactly like her genetic younger sisters. I’m surprised they don’t want to meet her and her daughters but respect that is their choice. 


Is it better to let my cousins with whom I have had a lifelong relationship know that I know this? Or do I wait until it all comes out via other channels and let them know then that I have known since 2018 and wanted to respect their desire for privacy with regards to this matter?

And one from Miss Manners:

Dear Miss Manners: My sibling and I were raised as white. I know we're not. I'm being genetically tested to prove it officially.

This is not news my sibling will want, especially medically confirmed. He is wealthy and a somewhat public figure. We are not close. If I email or phone him, he will probably just ignore it, per usual.
It feels weird to tell someone who will not feel the relief I do — that now, things make sense — but who will just ignore it or still deny it. Is it best to just not contact him anymore? We do not see each other for holidays, etc. For me, this is like a brand-new start on life.

I think people should err on the side of not telling relatives DNA test results they don't want to hear, for the simple reason that those relatives could choose to take a DNA test themselves if they wanted to. Sometimes people say their relatives have "the right to know", but a right isn't an obligation. I think people also have the right to choose not to find out, especially when it's non-actionable and knowing would cause them distress.

The ideal approach would be to mention to relatives before you take the test "I'm thinking of having a DNA test done.  Are you interested in hearing the results?"  And if they aren't interested in hearing the results, think about how you'd feel about keeping the results secret from them - especially if the results are emotionally fraught.

Also, I think before taking DNA tests, people should think about what's the worst thing they could find out.  A lot of people seem to go in expecting something like "Cool, my third cousin once removed is a duchess!" or "Oh, THAT's why I have Mediterranean-calibre body hair despite my Northern European heritage!"  But I've heard stories of people finding that they have the wrong number of siblings, or not enough great-grandparents.

Then think about how you'd feel if you found out the worst possible thing you could find out. Find out or figure out if your family members would also want to know the worst possible thing, and, if they wouldn't, think about what it would be like to have to keep the worst possible thing secret from them.

Then think about how these negatives weigh against the positives of finding out whathever it is you hope to find out from the DNA test.

Sunday, September 16, 2018

Things They Should UNinvent: italics as default blockquote style

Many advice columns put reader letters in italics. This is a problem, since advice column letters are often multiple paragraphs long, and italics are more difficult to read than regular text.

Since my head injury, I've been finding paragraphs of italics so difficult that I need to switch Firefox into Reader View or turn on OpenDyslexic. (Or I just go "Ugh, blah blah whatever" and skip that column.)

Most often, the letters are in italics because that's what the style sheet does with blockquote.  Unfortunately, that makes the quoted matter difficult to read when there are multiple paragraphs of it.

I would recommend that style sheet designers instead have blockquote differentiate quoted matter with some combination of indentation, design elements adjacent to the quoted matter (I've seen large quotation marks or vertical bars used to good effect), or different font colour (while taking care to choose a colour that is also easy to read).

If there are special circumstances where certain devices can't render these effects, then those devices can come up with their own suitable way to render the blockquote tag.  But the default should be easily readable, and style sheet designers should be mindful of the fact that italics are not easily readable for all, especially when there are multiple long paragraphs.

Saturday, September 15, 2018

Things They Should Invent: notwithstanding clause penalty box

The notwithstanding clause enables provincial and territorial legislatures to override Canadians' Charter rights and freedoms.

This is a big deal, so there should be some kind of dissuasive measure to counterbalance it. Improper use of the notwithstanding clause can be an abuse of power - placing the rights and freedoms of Canadians at the mercy of the whims of those in power - so the dissuasive measure should require those who invoke the clause to place their power at the mercy of the whims of the people whose rights and freedoms they are overriding.

A couple of preliminary ideas, to inspire further brainstorming:

- When the notwithstanding clause is used, an election must be called within a fairly brief period of time.  (Three months? Six months? One year?)
-MPPs who vote to use the notwithstanding clause are not permitted to run in the next election (at any level of government). They can run in the one after that.

The flaw of both these ideas is they suggest rights are subject to majority rule - they only incentivize politicians to make sure the majority agrees with them, which could still create a situation where the majority cheers for infringing upon the rights of the minority.

So feel free to use this as a starting point and improve upon this, to come up with something that disincentivizes use of the notwithstanding clause when it's not in the people's best interest, while incentivizing its use when it is in the people's best interest.

Thursday, September 06, 2018

The first cloth

Think about how you make woolen or cotton cloth.*

You get wool off a woolly animal or cotton out of a cotton plant. You card it, spin the result into thread/yarn, and then weave it into cloth.

Isn't it amazing that humanity came up with cloth at all!

Each of these steps requires specialized tools, and I can't really picture how you'd arrive at a rudimentary version before the tools exist.  Even just the idea of turning fluff into string is mindblowing, to say nothing of inventing a tool that makes it happen!  (While writing this, I've been watching youtube videos of how spinning wheels work, and I still don't understand how they work.)

The only thing that exists in nature that's remotely cloth-like is animal pelts. So someone had to come up with the idea of turning fluff into something that resembled animal pelts (as opposed to seeing them as two completely disparate things), and then they had to figure out a mechanism by which to do it!  Because they didn't have tools for as-yet-nonexistent processes just sitting around, they probably came up with rudimentary versions of carding, spinning, weaving and sewing that did not require any specialized tools!  And the results of these processes would have been useful and satisfactory enough that people kept using and refining the processes over generations until we got the old-fashioned processes and tools that are part of recorded history.

Based on what I can google, the details of how people figured this out, and all the intermediary processes and tools that were once used and subsequently obsoleted, are lost to history.  Which is a tragedy, because it's fascinating and mindblowing - possibly the most complex invention that we take completely for granted!

*Linen and silk are also types of cloth that predate recorded history.  They have comparably complex, multi-step processes, but I don't understand them as well and you can google them just as well as I can.  There are likely also other types of cloth I haven't heard of in other cultures whose histories I'm not up on.  And there may well be yet more that were tried and obsoleted prior to recorded history.


Monday, September 03, 2018

Things They Should Study: what would it actually cost to improve public services?

As I sat in the ER waiting room for six hours, I found myself thinking "What would it take to completely eliminate the wait times?"

And the thing is, we don't know.  Because, as I blogged about at the time of the Drummond report, governments are reluctant to do anything that could even remotely be interpreted as even thinking about giving the slightest consideration to something that could possibly lead to taxes being raised.

But, for all we know, optimal cost-effectiveness could be right there on the other side of an expenditure increase. And we'll never know if we don't study it.

They should study the cost of all kinds of different service increases, ranging from tiny incremental increases to levels of service beyond our wildest dreams.

To use the emergency room example, what would it cost to decrease wait times by 10%? 20%? 50%? 80%?  What would it cost to get the median wait time down to an hour? What would it cost to get every patient's wait time under an hour?  What would it cost to get the median wait time down to zero?  What would it cost to have hospitals so well-staffed that employees spend an average of 20% of their time with literally nothing to do, so there's extra leeway in case they get an unanticipated rush of patients?

That last example would make some people think "That would be a ridiculous waste of money - to deliberately plan for staff to be doing nothing!" And that's why it's included in the range of scenarios being studied - we need to study everything ranging from incremental improvements to drastic improvements to the point where the improvements are clearly no longer going to be adding value, to make sure we don't miss the point of optimal value.

Sometimes the optimal value for money involves spending money.  For example, adding data plan to your cell phone account costs money, and a data plan adds value. To make the decision about whether to get one, you have to look at the information about how much value it adds and how much money it costs - which includes looking at the cost of an unlimited plan, even if cheaper plans do exist.


Sometimes the optimal value for money involves deficit financing.  For example, there are situations where buying a home is better value in the long run than renting, even though you have to go into debt to do it.  To make the decision about which is best value, you have to look at all the data and run numbers for various scenarios - which includes looking at the cost of your dream house, even if cheaper housing options do exist.

Politicians like to talk about value for money, but they only ever seem to look at ways to save money.  They should also systematically study ways to add value, in order to find the point of optimal value for money.

Friday, August 31, 2018

Books read in August 2018

New:

1. The Hard Way Out: My Life with the Hells Angels and Why I Turned Against Them by Dave Atwell with Jerry Langton
2. Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness by Melissa Dahl
3. Why the Monster by Sean and Rachel Qitsualik-Tinsley 

Reread:

1. Festive in Death
2. Obsession in Death

Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Things They Should Invent: clothing characteristic search engine

Clothing geeks have a lot of nuanced opinions about which design features you should look for in clothing.  They'll mention things like woven vs. knit fabrics, bias cut, darts, and other fabric, pattern and construction features that I don't even understand.

The problem is it's difficult to look for clothing with these features. Even if you understand them, you can't reliably search an online clothing store for bias cut dresses, or efficiently look through a bricks-and-mortar store for bias cut apart from scrutinizing the fabric of every single garment.

Even those of us who aren't clothing geeks develop an idea over time about which design features work best on our bodies.  For example, I have learned from experience that I love modal sundresses. But typing modal into a website search bar is hit and miss (does zero results mean they have nothing in modal, or that you can't reliably search by fabric?  Or does it mean the modal sundress is labelled under the broader category of "rayon"?)  And to search for it in a real-life store, I'd have to read every single label.

Solution: a single, comprehensive search engine that does a fine, granular search of every single clothing store by clothing characteristic.

You can search for red and v-neck.  You can search for princess seams. You can search for Irish linen.  You can search by measurement, to screen out all the pants that you can't even pull up over your hips.  And it will give you the results for all the stores, or for all the stores with physical locations in your city, or all the online stores that ship to your city, or all the online stores that ship to your city with free returns.

Clothing stores' incentive to participate (and stores' and manufacturers' incentive to provide detailed information) is that this will tell potential customers that the store has the thing the customer is looking for. There are hundreds (thousands?) of clothing stores - dozens in my neighbourhood alone - and the very red v-neck or modal sundress I'm looking for could be right there in one of them, hanging in a place where passers-by can't see it.

Google Shopping could do it, I'm sure.  Currently it only seems to cover some stores, all of which appear to be major chains.  But if they could use their power and influence as the search engine of record to tell literally every store "Give us your clothing specs in granular detail, and the customers looking for what you're selling will find you".  (I'd also be thrilled to see someone non-Google do it, but Google more likely has the influence to get all the stores to participate.)

Sunday, August 19, 2018

The first shapes

Circle, square, triangle, rectangle. Shapes are an extremely basic thing taught to toddlers, alongside letters and numbers and colours and animals.

But they're also rather an artificial human construct.

I mean, some shapes do exist in nature, but most of nature is irregular in shape. Prehistoric humans could have gone a lifetime without ever seeing a triangle, so they probably didn't feel the need to name it. And if they did name it, they wouldn't feel the need to teach it to children as a basic core concept.

Shapes would probably become more common as humans started making things, and standardizing the thing they're making. Then they would need to communicate what the things should look like, so they'd need names for shapes.

Would some time have elapsed between the naming of shapes and teaching them to children as a basic concept?  On one hand, if they were a fairly new human invention, people might not feel they're a basic concept that small children need to know. On the other hand, in the past children have been closer to their parents' livelihoods, so they would likely learn the vocabulary of their parents' trades and/or the tasks of everyday living early on simply as a matter of course.

It's also interesting to think about the time between when people started making things but hadn't yet named shapes.  If you don't have a word for a shape, you're less likely to be thinking in terms of shapes. Therefore, people probably didn't see it as necessary for things to be a particular shape in the way we do today.  For example, you probably aren't going to think that the rocks around the fire need to be in a circle if you don't have a word for a circle. You probably aren't going to think your room needs to be rectangular if you don't have a word for a rectangle. Why should flatbread be round? Why should a tent be triangular? Things might have been all kinds of funny shapes simply because people didn't have the vocabulary for standard shapes!

Also, what constitutes a "standard" shape may well have varied depending on what kinds of things a particular society made. If you live in a teepee, you might have a word for triangle or cone, but not a word for rectangle or cube. If you live in an igloo, you might have a word for circle or dome, but not triangle.  The internet tells me that igloos are made of blocks of ice, but perfectly cubic blocks won't make a perfectly hemispherical dome, so maybe your concept of what constitutes a "block" or a "dome" is affected by this fact.

And then, after millennia of no shapes, and millennia of shapes being the result of what people made, we somehow transitioned into theoretical shapes - perfect circles, squares, triangles and rectangles.  Which affected the shapes of things people made, and eventually became so commonplace that they were no longer just for mathematicians and architects and engineers, but instead taught to preschoolers.

Saturday, August 18, 2018

In which my brain writes antagonist-POV advice column fanfiction


I have a good friend who lives in my town. I’m not sure why, but we became estranged. She just stopped talking to me. After that, I decided I didn’t want her friendship anymore. But it’s uncomfortable to run into her at the pizzeria or the supermarket. I smile, say hello and move on. How do I stop feeling bad about this?
ANONYMOUS
If you’ve read Social Q’s before, you know that I often make a pitch for trying to sort out the misunderstanding. “What happened between us? Why did you stop speaking to me?”
I think the part of you that feels bad wants to do that, too. But if you are committed to estrangement, you’ll have to live with the discomfort. How could you not flash on the good times and the hurtful ending — mixed feelings incarnate! — every time you bump into her?

My brain wrote a story where Friend didn't actually stop talking to LW, Friend just got caught up in whatever was going on in her life and hasn't been proactive about reaching out. (Much like I have with my real-life friends since my head injury. I see you guys and I love you even though I'm quieter than usual!) And when LW decided she didn't want Friend's friendship any more, Friend just assumed that the same sort of thing had happened to LW.

So whenever they run into each other at the pizzeria or supermarket and say hi, Friend thinks "Isn't it awesome how our friendship still persists even though we've both gotten caught up in our own stuff!"

Thursday, August 16, 2018

The Dyslexie font helps me read with convergence and accommodative insufficiency resulting from head trauma

The biggest problem with the visual issues that came with my head injury (for the googlers: my diagnosis was convergence insufficiency and accommodative insufficiency) is that I can no longer effortlessly skim large, dense pages of text, especially on screen.

Instead of "YAY, a new article/blog post/fanfic!", my visceral reaction is "AAAAH! Wall of text!"  It takes work to read things that would previously need no work, and all too often I'd just skip interesting articles or stories that I would otherwise enjoy, because I don't have it in me to put in the work. (Especially after a full day of translating, where I have to put in the work).

When I was researching vision therapy, I stumbled upon the fact that many child vision therapy patients are initially diagnosed as dyslexic. Apparently the difficulties with reading look the same to external observers, and, since the children have never been able to read, they can't tell the difference between "pulling the letters into focus and keeping them there is hard" and "reading is hard".

I remembered seeing something about a font designed for people with dyslexia. Even though I'm not dyslexic, maybe it could also help me?

It turns out there's a browser extension called OpenDyslexic that lets you toggle the Dyslexie font on and off.  So I gave it a try, my eyes instantly relaxed, and I could once again effortlessly skim and absorb everything.

When I hit a wall of text, I just toggle it on, and suddenly it's back to being effortless to read!  It doesn't change the formatting like Firefox's reader mode does, it's the same layout and design as the regular webpage - just with this funny-looking font instead.  It even works with dynamic, constantly-updating pages like Twitter!

Because Dyslexie is funny-looking, I don't like to use it all the time. When the combination of font, layout, spacing and colours is such that I don't struggle to read, I actually find Dyslexie intrusive. Fortunately, the OpenDyslexia browser extension makes it effortless to toggle on and off, so I don't have to choose.

I don't know if the improvements I experience with OpenDyslexia are specific to my post head trauma convergence insufficiency and accommodative insufficiency, or if the design of the Dyslexie font can make dense text more skimmable to anyone. But if you struggle with walls of text for any reason, it might be worth giving OpenDyslexia a try. It's free, it takes seconds to install, and you can switch if off instantly if it doesn't help.

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

Young Sheldon

The interesting thing about Young Sheldon is it hardly ever makes me laugh, but is still very effective.

Each episode is a gentle, heartwarming, effective piece of storytelling, and every story told is a story worth telling. But I very rarely end up laughing. Is there even anything else like that on TV?

I don't think it would have gotten made if it weren't a spin-off about a break-out character from a hit sitcom. I don't see how they could have marketed it in a vacuum. I don't see how the idea of watching it would have occurred to me in a vacuum.

But because it is about a character I enjoy, I did start watching it. And I am enjoying it, even though I would never have thought I'd enjoy gentle, heartwarming storytelling that only rarely makes me laugh.

Saturday, August 11, 2018

Unwanted "healing"

A couple of years ago, my brain started doing that old-lady thing of accidentally calling people by the wrong name.

One of the most unexpected after-effects of my head injury was that my brain stopped doing this.  I can't explain why, it just...didn't happen. For months and months and months.

I'm sad to report that that's over.  In the past few weeks, the wrong name has been coming out of my mouth with pre-head-injury frequency.

I really could have done without that bit of "recovery"! Why couldn't that part of my brain stay "injured", and my vision bounce back instead??

Monday, August 06, 2018

Civic Holiday should be Emancipation Day

I'm 37 years old, I've lived in Ontario my entire life, and it's only this year that I learned a) August 1 is Emancipation Day, b) Caribana is a celebration of emancipation, and c) John Graves Simcoe, after whom Simcoe Day is named (Civic Holiday technically being called Simcoe Day), was instrumental in abolishing slavery in Canada.

This information has always been available, it just never reached me.  In my life some people have been pedantic about calling Civic Holiday "Simcoe Day", but I was like "Yeah, yeah, yeah, another politician from history, whatever", and didn't bother to actually look at his legacy.  And with Caribana, I was like "Yeah, yeah, yeah, cultural tradition, whatever", without bothering to look into its origin and meaning because it isn't for or about me.  I never even realized that they're related and that the backstory is of interest!

This needs to be made more glaringly obvious.  Because the end of slavery is definitely worth celebrating and being celebrated by everyone, and not everyone knows that this is what is being celebrated.

Solution: rather than calling the Civic Holiday "Simcoe Day", we should name it "Emancipation Day".  It can either be celebrated in August 1 or on the first Monday of the month - people more knowledgeable of the nuances can make this decision.

But they should put Emancipation Day right out front, printed on our calendars on the day people get off work, so even clueless idiots like me will notice what it's marking!

Sunday, August 05, 2018

Things They Should Invent: legally binding #StealThisIdea

TV writers on Twitter keep telling people not to tweet show ideas at them.  Apparently if you tweet an idea at them, they're not allowed to use it for legal reasons, and that could mess things up if they already have an episode using that idea in the pipeline.

As a person who has a lot of ideas but isn't equipped to actually execute them, I find that disheartening. I would be thrilled and delighted to see any of my ideas (for television episodes or otherwise) actually brought to life.

They should invent some legally-binding way of marking ideas you post on the internet as being freely stealable, so the people who can make them happen can make them happen. (BTW, that is the intention behind my Things They Should Invent, Free Ideas, and Research Ideas blog categories. Take it, implement it, and I'll be thrilled)

And, of course, if you don't want people stealing your ideas, you can just not mark them as such.

The #StealThisIdea hashtag seems to exist, and would do the job nicely.

Unfortunately, like all my ideas, I have no idea who can actually make this happen. But if they do stumble upon this post, I hereby formally authorize them to steal this idea.

Saturday, August 04, 2018

Things They Should Study (or publicize, if they've already studied it): to what extent do social programs make life easier for employers?

I am truly terrible at washing my windows.  Every time I wash them, they end up covered in streaks - basically I'm just rearranging the streaks a couple of times a year.

I've considered on and off hiring someone to wash my windows, but I have no idea how to hire someone good. I'd be happy to pay well for completely streak-free windows, but if they're just going to rearrange the streaks, that isn't worth anything to me - I can do that myself.

The problem, of course, is that all window-washers and any number of random odd-job people are incentivized to say "Of course I can give you streak-free windows!"  They need money.  They need to hustle.  Conventional wisdom is that you should apply for jobs even if you aren't confident you can do them.

But this makes it much harder to find someone who actually is good - especially if, like me, you're unaccustomed to hiring people - so I end up hiring no one.

I have heard small business owners make similar complaints - they're often in the market for skilled, competent help before they're in a position to put resources into long-term development, but, because they don't have much experience with hiring, they have trouble finding/identifying people who actually are skilled and competent in and among all the gumption/desperation applicants, so they often end up not hiring at all.

In the shower the other day, it occurred to me that basic income might improve this situation.  An effective basic income program would eliminate the desperation factor, so employer and prospective employee could have a straightforward conversation about their needs and abilities.

So I could say "What I really want is completely streakless windows. A cleaning job that results in streaks has no value to me. Are you able to guarantee streaklessness?"

And my prospective window cleaner would have the leeway to say "You know, I don't think I can do a job that could make you happy." Or to quote me a ridiculously high price since I'm so needy and demanding, which I can then accept or reject depending on what it's worth to me.

And my prospective window cleaner would be far less likely to be a person who's bad at cleaning windows, because people who are bad at cleaning windows aren't going to be going around looking for window cleaning jobs.

I did one brief, cursory google and couldn't find much on how basic income interacts with the hiring experience from an employer's point of view.  So I started looking into the logistics of Ontario's basic income pilot, to see whether it could produce relevant results . . . and, that very day, the government cancelled the basic income pilot.

***

In recent discussions of introducing pharmacare, I was surprised to see the idea raised of pharmacare covering people who don't already have a drug plan through work.

That seems like an administrative nightmare. (How will the government know who does and doesn't have drug coverage through work?  Will pharmacare cover my the large co-pay in my workplace plan? Do we have to worry about coverage gaps if we lose our job?)

But it also seems like it would be a lot more convenient for employers if pharmacare were universal.  Employers wouldn't have to administer or pay for drug plans any more. Employers who don't provide drug plans wouldn't lose quality employees who can pick and choose to other employers with better benefits. And employers who already provide good benefits would immediately realize significant savings by not having to do so any more.

***

When they were talking about creating an Ontario pension plan, they were also talking about having it apply only to people who don't have pensions through work.

Again, it seems like it would be far more convenient for employers if the public pension plan covered everyone, for exactly the same reasons. It would save employers the trouble of administering a pension plan, employers who are unable to provide a pension plan wouldn't lose out on quality talent, and employers who already provide a pension plan would immediately realize significant savings by not having to do so any more.

***

Discourse about social programs tends to focus on what it can do for regular people, which is, of course, where the focus in planning and delivering social programs should be. 

However, I've noticed a strong correlation between people who are opposed to social programs and people whose roles involve hiring.  I also remember seeing things from time to time where organizations representing small businesses object to the fact that government employees receive benefits, presumably because their tax dollars are supporting providing benefits that they can't offer their own employees.

It would be useful to have the data to quantify how social programs can make life easier for employers, in addition to making life easier for ordinary people.