The cost of a child

The last time I had a beard was 13 years ago.  I had just gone on parental leave from work and I was excited about not having to look corporate, so I let my hair and beard grow out.  It worked for awhile, but eventually Pinkie Pie got enough coordination to seize on my beard and yank.  Having my tiny person pull herself up on my facial hair was extremely unpleasant, so the beard came off. 

While I was bearded back then, this is how I looked.

Just recently I grew a beard again, though this time the reasoning was different.  This time I was getting into a cycle where I didn't shave until it *really* itched, then finally got grumpy and took the facial hair off.  After a few cycles I started to get comments about how terrible the constantly disreputable thing looked, so I let the beard grow out again.

This is how I look today.

I have a lot less hair, that is for sure.  Both in the 'I cut it short' sense... but also in the 'male pattern baldness' sense.

But what stood out more is the grey in the beard.  What a difference in look.

This is what having a kid around for 13 years will do to you!

Pinkie Pie thinks it is funny that I blame my grey hair on her.

I don't know that I will keep the beard for long.  One of the big reasons to have one is to save myself the annoyance of shaving, but people seem to think that I need to shave under my jawline to make the beard look better.  Shaving a bit less area just isn't accomplishing the No More Shaving thing that I want.  If I am shaving at all, I would rather just have the goatee because I think that is what works for me best.

I do find it amusing though that now when I have a cat on my desk while I game it is me who is grey, and the cat who is pure black.  Before it was me having the pure dark colour, and a cat with lots of grey.

Evidently somebody around here always has to be grey, one way or another. 

False alarm

A short while ago I wrote a post about how Pinkie Pie is doing better.  School was going better, though not great, and she was really up from where she was in months past.  Things were really improving.  I got lots of people telling me how happy they were that her mental health situation had finally improved.  Yay!

And then everything fell apart.  It isn't surprising, as it was just this exact time of year two years ago that her challenges first arrived.  Darkness and cold are not good for her.  She has fallen back from school being a challenge, but basically working, to just lying in bed all day every day.

It tears me apart.  I have to be available, there to try to get her up for school, try to get her to school in the afternoon, try to keep her life going.  Despite being there, I just can't *do* anything to make it happen.  All I can do is watch.

There is some extra frustration in having so recently written that things were going well.  I don't want to be going back and forth, cataloguing every change, but after several months of improvement I felt like there was real reason for optimism, and it was worth telling people about.  Then, without warning, it all collapses in a heap.

Now I have to face a ton of conversations where people ask after her, expecting more good news, and I have to tell all of them how much of a catatrophe I am facing.

Giving out news about health is such a fraught, messy process.  I don't like it.

I know that doing it via blog posts isn't ideal, and has its issues.  This is more than a news source though, it is therapy for me, so I write here as much for myself as for informing the world.

I just want to tell all the doctors to stand aside, I am going to fix this shit myself.  No more waiting for their slow, ponderous processes to make decisions.  I also know they won't put up with that, because they have to protect kids from parents who don't know what they are doing.  I get that in general putting an administrative wall between parents and treatment options is a useful thing.  But I can see so clearly what needs to happen, and I can't make it happen.

All I can do is sit here, wait, and feel helpless before a thing I can't argue with, or fight, or fix.

Poly Queer Love Ballad

This past weekend I went to a show called Poly Queer Love Ballad.  It is a two person play about a monogamous lesbian musician, a bisexual, polyamorous female poet, and their attempt at a relationship.

The basic idea is these two characters have a powerful, immediate attraction and try to start a relationship.  The central conflict is the the struggle with exclusivity - the polyamorous woman will not be exclusive, so the monogamous woman tries to cope with an open relationship.

I liked the show a lot.  The actors absolutely sold it, and the writing was obviously done by someone familiar with the poetry, music, polyamorous, and lesbian subcultures.  All the bits fit.

I struggled some with the way the relationship went though.  The characters made lots of foolish, disastrous decisions that made poly relationships look pretty messy, if you are a person who isn't particularly familiar with them.

That shouldn't be taken as a criticism though.  In shows people make stupid decisions of all kinds.  That is fundamental to storytelling - people creating problems through poor choices, and then trying to cope with those problems.  It is tough to watch though when you consider yourself an advocate for the thing that is being screwed up so badly.  I try to educate people about the options available in nonmonogamy and watching people do all the normal things that people do wrong makes me shudder.

Fundamentally the characters had an incompatibility that they couldn't resolve - they wanted different relationship styles.  They tried a bunch of strategies and rules that were doomed to failure, and eventually failure arrived, as it was always going to do.

The story felt real.  The results were predictable, but not in a bad way.  It wasn't about 'will this relationship last forever?' but rather 'how exactly will this relationship go?' and I am on board with that.  I love that poly relationships are out there in media and this one was a fair representation.

I want more than fair!

But if you are making art you have to make the art, not just do some pure advocacy thing.  Just its existence needs to be advocacy enough.

But damn I sure went "Aaargh.  No, don't do it!  Not like this!" in my head a LOT during that show.

A big meeting

This Christmas The Flautist is going up to spend four days with my parents along with me, Wendy, and Pinkie Pie for the first time.  Having my girlfriend and wife both be part of family holidays is a thing I have wanted for a long time.  It is partly that I want that to be a normal and accepted thing to do, but this isn't just a move for the sake of advocacy; I actually think that everyone will have a good time together and get along well.

I know a number of people in nonstandard relationships who have tried this sort of thing and usually it has not gone well.  Mostly this was due simply to family members refusing to acknowledge or respect the relationships in question rather than any real incompatibility.  I don't think this is likely to be an issue for me though as my family ranges from wholly supportive to uncertain and concerned, but I expect everyone to conclude that the best thing to do is just grin and carry on.

After all, they all know that telling me not to do this is going to accomplish exactly nothing aside from making me grumpy, so might as well just accept it.  My parents have never made even the slightest attempt to control who I am involved with and I don't expect that to change now that I am on the latter side of 40!  This is something I really appreciate, as even though they noticed that Wendy was a great fit for me long before I did they said nothing and waited for me to figure it out.

I will never forget when I told them "So, yeah, Wendy, who I am renting a room from, and who just got divorced two months ago... she and I are dating now, while her ex husband, my buddy, is also living in the same house."  I figured I was going to get a lecture, and instead the reply was "What took you so long?" 

The funniest bit so far was when I mentioned this to a friend and she asked why I would do this at all.  I started explaining about poly dynamics and treating partners well and she cut me off with "No, no, I get that, but why would you inflict your family on someone you like?"

I actually like both my girlfriend *and* my family!  I enjoy family Christmas!  I guess this is not something everyone assumes is true.

Honestly I think the trickiest part is just going to be food.  The Flautist is a vegetarian with gluten intolerance, and that means that 90% of the meals at my parents' place won't work.  It is going to take a bit of adjustment, no doubt about that.

Really though, if the hardest part of the whole thing is that I have to cook a lot to make sure the meals all work for everyone, that is a pretty small challenge to overcome, all things considered.

Run, a teenager!

Pinkie Pie is 13 as of this week.  I know what this means - she will become withdrawn, sullen, and bitter, believing her parents to be insufferable idiots.  She will begin dressing in ways that offend my sensibilities, consorting with individuals I am suspicious of, and rebelling against the social order I work so hard to defend.

That is the usual story, at any rate.

I don't think that is going to happen, especially the social order part.  The consorting with individuals I am suspicious of is probably true, because I naturally have high standards for the people she hangs out with.  However, her friends are vastly more progressive and aware than my friends were at her age, so on many fronts she is doing far better than I did when I was young.

They are still a bunch of clueless teenagers, of course.

I am biased though, to be happy about these times.  Pinkie Pie was struggling mightily for a couple of years with serious mental health challenges, and things have gotten dramatically better in the last few months.  She is back at school, and although it isn't perfect, it is basically working.  She is learning things, has a variety of friends and activities, and her teachers say that she is improving rapidly.  There is still a long way to go yet, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel now.

This is in stark contrast to a year ago where things were a total disaster.  We were trying homeschooling, but she wasn't able to cope with it at all.  Pinkie Pie's life was a mess, and my life was a mess as a consequence.  There is still much work to do these days, but this year it feels like a lot of work to do whereas last year it felt like drowning with no hope of rescue.  That is a big improvement, no doubt at all about that.

I am not dancing in the streets quite yet.  There are still many years to go, many tragedies to cope with, many challenges to navigate.  But I can see that the dark times of recent past are receding, and better times are coming.  These experiences do make me laugh at other parents at times though, when they complain about their struggles with their children and the challenges they have had to navigate.  The contrast between various children's difficulties is so stark.

One parent I talked to recently was bemoaning parent teacher interview night, because his kid gets straight As and every interview is "Well, the kid is great, so I have nothing to say".  The parent was grumpy about having to attend interviews when they were so pointless.  I was tempted to say that I was so glad that my kid is still alive, and straight Ds would be a huge improvement over last year, so how about shut the hell up, but managed to keep that to myself.

But I try not to get too uptight about this, because when I visit Sick Kids Hospital, I am reminded that my kid being alive isn't a given, and others have more struggles than I do.  Plus Pinkie Pie is kind, generous, and hopeful.  I would rather parent her than a straight A student who is an asshole, and there are plenty of those.  I suppose by that measure I am doing pretty well... though that doesn't stop me from wishing I had it all.

The necessity of an end in sight

I read recently that rich people give less as a percentage of their income towards charity than poor people do.  We often hear stories of rich people giving huge sums or performing massive acts of philanthrophy, but in aggregate they are a lot more interested in yachts than in helping the poor. 

I think I know why.

The key reason is that people want to know that there is a clear end to their generosity.  It is easy for me to devote a day to helping a friend move, because I know they aren't going to demand I show up every day.  It is not a problem if someone in the same economic situation as me asks to borrow $20  for something, because I will not be expected to give them $20 every day.  My generosity has a clear end to it, so it is easy to be generous.  I believe that I have a moral imperative to help people with lifting things, or with sums that are relatively small for either of us.

Whereas if I look at a homeless person and think that I have a moral imperative to help them, where does it end?  Should I spend a day trying to help them build a home of boards and tarps?  Give them $20?  The next day they are still so much worse off than me that I should keep on helping, and I shouldn't stop at $20, I should give them $2000.  But why stop at $2000?  I would still have money in the bank, and they would still need it far more than me.  If I admit that there is a moral imperative to step in and assist, I don't see an end.

If I was a billionaire, that would be true of nearly everyone I pass by.  I should be giving them all $10,000 apiece.  They need it more than me.  But even after I do, they still need it.  The moral imperative doesn't have an obvious stopping point until I have given away 99.99% of my wealth, and maybe not even then.  I can't accept that... so I refuse to believe that I have a moral imperative to help, and I do nothing.

I am not saying this is the right way to behave.  It isn't.  But I do think it is the way people do behave.

People are far more generous when they can see a defined contribution that will have a significant outcome, and which doesn't force them to admit that they should be giving more and more without pause.  That sort of thing happens a lot among people in similar situations, and is extremely hard to achieve with massive wealth disparities. 

This is, to my mind, another good argument for policies that reduce wealth inequality.  I know it would be hard to manage, but a wealth tax aimed at eliminating wealth accumulation beyond, say, 100 years of work for the median wage earner, would be fine with me.  In Canada that would be something like 5 million dollars.  Now we don't have to take away every dollar over 5 million, of course.  But if we had a wealth tax starting on all amounts over 5 million, and it climbed substantially over 10 million, and went up to 20% yearly on all amounts over 25 million, that would really help with our problems.

When there are people that are absurdly wealthy, they will always look at the poor and see endless need, a need they cannot meet.  Some will do something, but most will do nothing.  Tax the hell out of their wealth and use it to help the poor, and they will definitely be doing something, albeit without their input or approval.

What we need is a system where everyone has their basic needs met, so that moral imperative doesn't feel so overwhelming.  We also need a system where nobody has the wealth to lift an entire city out of poverty because them simply having that wealth creates all kinds of extra problems.  I am sure we would find that in a world where people are all a lot closer together in terms of what they have, they would be far more generous in helping those that need a helping hand up at the moment.

Angry at the library

Toronto's public library system recently was in the middle of a conflict surrounding trans rights and freedom of speech.

People who read my stuff regularly can probably already imagine what I will be yelling, considering that freedom of speech came up, but I can't resist doing it all over again.

The basic situation is this:  Meghan Murphy is a feminist activist who has a lot of anti-trans opinions.  She has testified in front of multiple governments in this way, pushing to prevent trans rights.  She takes the view that trans women aren't real women, so they don't deserve any rights that women get, and they ought to be kept out of women's washrooms and other places that are reserved for women.

Murphy is a classic anti trans bigot.

Murphy was giving a speech about gender at a Toronto library, and a lot of people got pissed about this and demonstrated, demanding that the library refuse to host her.  The library said no, citing the fact that they have a policy to prevent people using the library who are going to promote hate speech, but saying that Murphy doesn't count as having done that.

Murphy did get to give her speech, and there was a lot of blowback and controversy about it.  But freedom of speech! was a commonly used rallying cry, as it so often is in these cases.

My take on it is simple:  Freedom of speech requires that you be able to speak without the government threatening or imprisoning you.  You have to be able to say a broad variety of things without fear of retribution.  Murphy has that.  In fact, she has had a drastically greater platform, at the government's expense, than the great majority of the population.  Telling her she can't spew her anti trans bigotry at the library isn't crushing her freedom of speech.  She can speak outside the library, she can write blog posts, or she can rent a hall.  Her freedom of speech wouldn't be threatened by being banned from the library.

The crux of the issue is the hate speech policy.  If Murphy was going to give a presentation on how Jews shouldn't be allowed in bathrooms, there is no doubt whatsoever that it would run afoul of hate speech laws and she would be banned.  But many people still don't see trans people as being fully entitled to rights, and they still think that debating their existence is a reasonable thing to do.  It is clear to me that her statements are hate speech, and her opinions on policy are reprehensible.  But much of society isn't on board with that yet, which is why so many people still think this is a debate we can have.

Those same people generally think that 'Do black people deserve to be enslaved?' is a question that cannot be debated publicly.  They haven't yet got around to seeing trans people's issues as so clearly decided.  I think over the next few decades we will make that transition, and I eagerly await it.  But until we do get there, we need to push back against Murphy and her ilk, and keep pushing their bigotry down until the masses of humanity start to do it reflexively.

Flappy flappy

Today I booked two airline trips.  One to visit family at Christmas, the other to play board games for nine days after Christmas.  Both of these are going to be good and happy times, though admittedly the second one has me more pumped.

I always feel a strong sense of guilt and shame around flying.  It is, environmentally speaking, not a thing I can easily justify.  I know that there are many things I do right in terms of environmental impact, but when I fly twice a year it is hard to think much of my convictions.  There are many things we can do to reduce the impact of our activies, like running our electric grid off of nuclear power and using electric vehicles.

Flying though?  That is going to be a mess for a damn long time as I don't know of anything that can effectively replace fossil fuels for that purpose, and public ground transit to get where I am going would be hideous.  My options just aren't there.

One of my great struggles with this sort of thing is when I have to examine tradeoffs.  Awhile ago I wanted to travel to Ottawa, and the train was going to be $350.  I could fly for far less than that, and I could borrow a car and travel for less than a quarter of the price.  Taking a vehicle for a trip that had a good mass transit option frustrated the hell out of me, but I couldn't justify paying hundreds of dollars to be more environmentally friendly.  It didn't help that the train normally costs $110, but I had only left 3 weeks ahead to book it, and they decided it was time to squeeze me.

This time it was different - direct flights, which are the least bad, were going to run me $700+.  However, I could take a series of flights through multiple airports and get the price down to $400.  It costs more fuel, takes more time, and saves me a couple hundred dollars, so I went for it.

Often, I think, when I fuss about flying people assume it is worries about crashing (not at all), or the cost (not really the thing).  I don't want to crash, and I will hunt for the best deal, but really I take the risk and pay the price without much fuss.  The pollution though, that is the thing that haunts me.

That, and the worry about missing my flight.  I don't worry about dying in a fiery crash, no, I worry about being the person who feels like an idiot because his plane left just minutes before he arrived.

My priorities may need work.

The best of what was left

Canada's election is over, and we got the best result I could have reasonably expected, given the way the polling was going right before the election.  The Liberals, Canada's resident centrist party that talks a good progressive game but who is dedicated to the status quo, won a minority government.  They will end up getting propped up by the NDP, most likely, which isn't so bad.  I can live with centrist policies that have a bunch of left wing concessions.  Not what I wished for, but it was the best I could expect.

That is especially true since the Conservatives actually won the election, by popular vote at least.  Another example of the stupidity of first past the post - win the most votes, end up completely powerless on the sidelines.  I happen to like that result because the Conservative platform angers me and their leader makes me sad, but it just shows how much we need electoral reform.

I suppose the chance at electoral reform became more remote though, after this result.  The Liberals got a win because of our archaic system so I suspect they will be even more leery of tinkering with any changes.  They like it just the way it is, because their priority is the Liberal party, not Canadians.

There is some cause for celebration though.  The far right xenophobe party got completely wiped out, and the Greens collected 3 seats, which I don't recall them ever doing before.  They are on the cusp of a breakout where a vote for them is no longer thrown into the void, and I approve of that.  They have a long way to go to get themselves organized and make sure they have better candidates but this is a step in the right direction.

I shouldn't criticize the Greens too hard though, since the racist outbursts that trouble me are things that I expect from the majority of Conservative candidates.  I want the Greens to avoid picking up candidates that are environmentalists who happen to be bigots too, but the Conservatives and People's Party candidates regularly manage to be hard bigots without the environmentalism.

None of the big parties is perfect in this regard, but there are degrees, and those matter.

It is unfortunate that an election ends with the centrist party winning and I breathe a sigh of relief.  We need so much disruption and innovation, and all I can think about is my happiness that we didn't get a party dedicated to regression.

Politics!

I want it all

Today is the Canadian federal election.  My riding is a total lock for the governing Liberals, but I voted for the NDP in my riding anyway.  Listening to election advertising and seeing the responses on social media has made me think a lot about how issues are framed, and how that framing is so one sided when the actual answers are complex.

Take climate change (or any environmental issue, really).  The right tends to either deny it outright because admitting it would lead to a moral imperative to do something about it or say that people can take personal responsibility for it.  They are fine with individuals driving less, consuming less, or otherwise making good environmental decisions, but they don't want to do anything to force companies to do the same.  The left tends to portray it as a problem with companies, and puts the blame squarely on the biggest multinationals.

The solution isn't to sit on either side.  Trying to find a villain, an easy place to lay all the blame, isn't actually leading us to good solutions.  People do need to consume less.  For example, we need to stop using disposable plastic straws.  I am not convinced that global bans on said straws are a good idea because certain disabilities make them a necessity, but people need to drink out of reusable containers, not disposable cups and straws.

But I can't do anything if, for example, a huge steel company decides to be a massive polluter.  I can't possibly figure out which things their steel is in and avoid those things.  I need the government to step in and regulate the hell out of that company to make sure that they aren't causing a mess.  No individual can possibly fix problems like that on their own.

We need solutions from all sides.  We need people to stop buying shit they don't need.  Is your thing broken beyond repair, or is it just a little old?  If it is just a little old, don't replace it, keep on using it until there are massive holes in the side.

But we also need the governments of the world to take a gigantic hammer to the ways big corporations operate, and put appropriate rules and incentives in place to keep them on the straight and narrow.

We can spend our time yelling about how Amazon is bad, or we can spend our time yelling about how it isn't Amazon's fault, it is the fault of their customers.

Or we can say that both things are a problem.  We need to order less junk from Amazon, and we need every country Amazon operates in to impose crushing regulations on them to reduce their environmental impact.  Both things need to happen.

The concern I have is that climate change is just so big a thing that people are simply unwilling to come to grips with what we have to give up to combat it.  We can talk about green jobs all we want, but the fact is that rich countries have to massively reduce our standard of living in a variety of ways if we want to stop climate change.  Full stop.  We can't just ask individuals to make better choices - that can't possibly be enough.  We also can't just sit back and relax, hoping the government will lay the smack down on big companies and fix everything.  We all have to be willing to pay an enormous price now for a huge payoff later.

I wish I could be more optimistic that humanity is willing to make that investment.

Specifically two

The Conservative political ads on the radio regularly piss me off.  Their pitch this time around is twofold:  First, Justin Trudeau is awful.  Really the worst.  Frankly they oversell the point, but I do have huge issues with JT.  I am mostly angry about his broken promise about electoral reform and grumpy about him being part of a political dynasty.  The Conservatives aren't critical of those things - they like dynasties and want to keep our archaic system that props up their party.

The second thing they have to say is that they are going to give everyone more money.  Also balance the budget.  They will spend lots of money on new things too!  It sure is great that Conservatives can produce money from nowhere, unlike other political parties.

Of course when they had to finally produce a platform it included enormous, crushing cuts to services.  Anyone who is surprised by this is delusional.  Money isn't free. 

The thing that really got to me about this new set of ads though is that they are pitching their giveaways by talking about how much money they are going to give *per couple*.  Not per person.  Not per adult.  Per couple.

That happens to work for me, but it is a crappy way to put it.  Many people aren't part of couples.  Many people's financial setup isn't a traditional one with two people married to each other.  This isn't a useful way to talk about how tax cuts will work.  It shouldn't be any surprise though that the Conservatives manage to erase people who aren't in standard couple type financial arrangements.  They want to make it clear that this is how they think, and that single people are doing it wrong.

I wonder if it is deliberate.  Did they have a strategy session where they hashed out their ad campaign and decided that they could say 'this tax cut will give the average adult X more dollars' but went with 'the average couple X more dollars' instead?  Did somebody decide that their base would be happier with some extra enforcement of norms on the side?  Or did they not even think about it at all and just wrote it that way because they didn't even consider what it meant?

Tricky to say.  They aren't stupid, so I am inclined to think that they are evil and did it deliberately.  On the other hand every intelligent person has huge blind spots, so maybe they did this without even realizing it because they can't see out of their own situations.

In any case it is business as usual for the Conservatives.  Hand money to the rich, strip away services from the poor, and, just for fun, take a steaming dump on anyone who doesn't follow the standard life plan.

A spirited debate

I don't care much for debates in politics.  I was on the debate team in high school, and I like debating as a hobby, but I think it doesn't do much for helping voters figure out what to do during elections.

The problem is that people who are thought to have won debates do so by having stage presence, clever comments, and raw attractiveness.  These are stupid metrics by which to select a leader.  You do get some information about the parties and their plans, but that information would be better gotten from official platforms, news articles, or paying attention to previous behaviour.  What a leader says in a debate has little educational value if you watch these other media.

I am not interested in a leader that has a nice suit, good looks, and charisma.  I don't see how that is relevant.  It might help in a few niche cases in international negotiations, but most of those are actually done by underlings over the course of many months - leaders show up to shake hands and get photographed but they don't do all the real work.  Pretty people 'win' debates, but that is a trivial thing when it comes to running a country.

There is some correlation between coming up with good quips on the fly and intelligence, but it is not a strong enough correlation for me to care.  Most of that is just practice and training, and it is utterly worthless for selecting a leader or designing policy.  I get that people want to see their favourite leaders trash talk others, but it is just entertainment.

It makes me grumpy that people watch political debates as if they are a critical window into the way a party will govern, and then end up voting for the handsome person with snappy comebacks.  Without the debates they would just end up voting based on tribalism, bigotry, and family tradition though, so I suppose the debates aren't really making things any worse.

You can suss out truth in a debate.  It is possible to figure things out by contesting ideas against one another, and carefully looking at each side's best arguments. 

I just don't think that political debates actually do that.

The older I get the more I pay attention to politics, the better I understand it, and the more likely I am to vote.  I also get more and more jaded and bitter about the entire process.

I know that the best progress for humankind comes from slow, incremental change.  Tiny bits here and there that slowly, falteringly, get us to a better place.  But the more I watch the farce that is our electoral process the more inclined I am towards simply burning it all down out of spite.

Angry Man

Yesterday the subway here in Toronto had some issues.  Someone decided to run on the tracks for awhile, and the transit employees had to chase them down and drag them out.  This happens from time to time, and it makes a real mess when it does.

I got caught halfway through my trip by the shutdown.  They got everyone off the train, and the announcer told us what was going on in a *extremely* annoyed tone.  We sat on the platform as train after train showed up at the station and disgorged its passengers so they could all wait for the idiot to get taken off the tracks.

Everyone was annoyed, but one man in particular was furious.  He was screaming at the announcements, ranting at the trains, and even kicked the train a couple of times.  The people all gave him a wide berth.  I wasn't sure if I should interfere - he wasn't hurting anyone, but sure was making people nervous.

I am torn on what to do in these situations.  Stepping in might help calm it down, but it might also cause an explosion.  It is a lot safer for me to try that than it is for most people - even if somebody is upset, they are unlikely to take a swing at me.  A combination of calm words, authoritative presence, and just being a large man see to that.  Privilege at work.

Finally I realized why the man was so enraged - he thought the trains were going north, without passengers, for no reason.  If they had been doing this I could understand his rage, but it makes no sense.  Why would the transit system kick everyone off and then run the trains anyhow?

I walked up to him and explained what was going on.  The trains were going out of the station north, using the crossover 100 meters away to switch tracks, then turning south again.  When he realized that the transit system wasn't actually just trolling him he calmed down a lot, and asked me how I knew this, and wondered if I worked for transit.

I knew it because it is bloody obvious if you think for five seconds.

However, I calmly lied to him and told him I had seen this exact thing before, and the transit operators told me how it works.  It turns out my years of sales experience have left me with the ability to lie effectively and easily.  I don't do so, except when some jackass forces my hand, but I am still good at it.

Finally the angry man wound down and wandered away.  Shortly afterwards the trains started up again and off we went.

I wish I knew when to step in when situations like this arise.  When it is just somebody drunk or high who is yelling foolishness I ignore it, but when actual violence erupts, even if it is just man on train violence that deals no real damage, I feel compelled to act.  I always end up sitting there, carefully not looking at the person being obnoxious, trying to figure out when it is time to carefully move between the angry person and other people, and when it is time to tell them to calm down, just hoping it won't come to me having to use force of any kind.

So tricky to know if I get that balance right, and especially so when Pinkie Pie is around because I want to set just the right example for her, but I also really do not want her to get involved.

Everybody knows

Everyone knows Rambo movies are a collection of shirtless Stallone shots where Rambo uses a machine gun to mow down endless waves of soldiers.  Also he probably kills a lot of people with knives and explosives too, just to keep it from getting monotonous.  This is certainly what I thought, though I have never actually seen a Rambo movie.  You don't have to see it when all the images are so constantly embedded in popular culture.  I know Rambo without knowing it.

Except apparently I don't know Rambo.

I watched a review for the newest Rambo installation and found out that the original Rambo has only a single death in it, and it was from a fall.  Rambo was largely responsible because he threw a rock that caused the fall, but it isn't at all clear he intended to cause a death.  The movie had violence, but it was a lot more of a character piece and not an orgy of carnage like I had assumed.

It turns out that things that everyone knows are apparently just things I assumed from soaking up cultural references.  Of course I was completely correct in my evaluation of all the other Rambo movies - here are there death counts.

Rambo 1 - 1
Rambo 2 - 115
Rambo 3 - 175
Rambo 4 - 254

These movies sure take a turn for the death right around Rambo 2!

But it makes me wonder what other cultural icons I know nothing about.  Is Nightmare on Elm Street actually a poignant look at regret over missing out on raising a child?  Is Rocky about a man who just wants to start a career as an actuary but boxes in his spare time to keep in shape?

What else do I know for sure, that everyone knows, but which just ain't true?

Party for the people

The People's Party of Canada is a new political party that has managed to acquire a whopping 3% of Canadian votes in recent polls.  They are changing the political landscape, drawing on a base of voters that other parties have been ignoring.  That base is pretty much the people who thought that the Conservatives weren't nearly racist enough, and who wanted a party that would work harder to screw over people of colour.

I wish the PPC much greater success.  Not *too* great, mind.  Right about 5% would do. 

We have had a problem here in Canada for quite some time that the official policies of the Liberals have been a bit left of centre socially but right down the middle economically.  The Greens and NDP were far left, and the Conservatives formed many governments because the lefties split the vote.

But the PPC might help end all that.  They have grabbed a bunch of the most bigoted people that used to be reliable Conservative voters and dragged them off to the hinterlands where their votes won't do anything.  If only they can continue doing that, right up to the point where they might actually win a seat, that would be convenient.

Reading the PPC website is hilarious.  They say that immigrants pay less taxes and make less money than other Canadians, so we should keep them out.  Is there any country in the world where this isn't the case?  Doesn't this mean that immigrants take the hardest jobs making the least money?  How in the world is that bad for those who already live here?  They even try to make immigrants sound bad by saying that they use almost as many resources from the government as a long time resident does.

Another way to put that would be:  Immigrants use LESS resources than long time residents.

They also have some nonsense about how previous immigrants were good ones.  You know, people who took on the values of those who were here before.  You can tell this because of all the white people who speak Native languages, you see.  But these new immigrants, they have brown skin, and we can't tolerate that, even though they actually do learn English and, largely speaking, adopt local value systems.

The Conservatives admit climate change is happening, they just think the way to handle it is to pump a lot of oil and hope it goes away.  The PPC though, they aren't having any of that weaksauce.  They are sure climate change is Big Environmentalism propaganda, and they are going to deal with it by pumping a lot of oil and pretending it doesn't exist.

In all seriousness, I can't decide if I like that the PPC exist or not.  They are a bucket of bullshit bigotry, but if they can drag a chunk of the most regressive Conservative voters away that would be super from a 'winning elections' perspective.  Of course it would mean having to hear from those politicans, which I don't like.

Not that the PPC are consulting me about whether or not they should exist.  Their supporters would no doubt have many nasty names to call me if they noticed me, but the party itself is so far from my social circle that I only know about them from looking at polls.

Dodging meteors

I have spent a lot of time laughing at Archer.  Stirling Archer, that is, and his band of bitter, maladjusted misfits.  The show Archer did the super spy / mad scientist thing really well, so long as you can tolerate the characters being a bunch of bigoted assholes.

But the latest season is sad.  It still has Archer's classic banter, but it is set in space in the far future, and the writers seemed determined to use this as an excuse for shoddy, half baked writing.

The latest episode I have watched is a perfect example.  The entire story is based around the crew getting eaten by a giant space monster and their attempts to escape.  Ten kilometer tall spacebound tentacled horrors are absurd, but if you really need one in order to get your story working, I am fine with that.

But don't give me bullshit lines like "We were dodging a meteor storm when we cut through this galaxy and got caught by the space monster."  Galaxies are BIG.  Meteors are FAR APART.  You aren't suddenly dodging a meteor storm in deep space.  You might blast by a single rock while travelling 10,000 km/s, but this is never going to run you into a vacuum loving squid's mouth.

The space monster was necessary, so I am happy to forgive the ridiculousness of it.  However, the sorry set of excuses the show used for getting people *into* the monster was not.  "We came to investigate a distress signal, and when we tried to cut the monster apart in order to get the other ship out, the monster caught us." is at least a vaguely plausible story.  I don't mind making stupid crap up if it is necessary for the plot, but I hate it when writers make stupid crap up because they can't be bothered to spend the 30 seconds required to think up something that holds together.

It almost seems like the people writing this mess actually don't know what the word galaxy even means, the way they toss it around.  It strikes me as plausible that if the entire writing team was asked what a galaxy is they would have nothing more accurate than "It is, like, an area of space?"

I don't mind it when the rules get bent for reasons.  I get that!  What irks me is when the only reason is "I was feeling super lazy."

Writing this episode, or indeed any of the episodes so far, without butchering science and sensicality would have been easy and wouldn't have required any extra time or effort.  Archer went and got sloppy with the writing, as so many science fiction shows do, and it feels like the end of its appeal.

I hate to say it, but I agree

Canada is in the middle of a federal election, and our photogenic, charismatic prime minister Justin Trudeau is hoping that his fading popularity hasn't faded so much that he loses power.

Right now it seems he is on the cusp, with the polls showing that the Liberals could quite easily hold onto their majority, but the Conservatives are not far behind and winning is plausible for them too.  The NDP is in a dire state and can only hope that the winning party has a minority government so they can form some sort of coalition.  This won't dissuade me from voting NDP - their policies are the ones I want, and I am comfortable with a Liberal / NDP governing bloc.  As usual, the only thing that I do not want at all is a Conservative victory.  I am angry at the Liberals for reneging on their promise to implement voting reform, but I sure don't want the Conservatives to take over; that would be even worse.

The Conservatives have been focusing on attack ads trying to make Trudeau look bad.  I keep hearing them on the radio and on the internet yelling about what a terrible person Trudeau is.  I agree with many of their criticisms, but we differ greatly on the conclusion.  The Conservatives want me to think that since Trudeau is a problem we should vote them in by default, but this position has some problems. 

Their biggest issue is that the Conservative leader has all the charisma and presence of a box of bolts.  Their ads have sold me on Trudeau's flaws, but they haven't given me the slightest reason to vote Conservative at all, and I suspect their strategists know this.  The Conservative platform is just wishful thinking with regards to environmentalism as they run their usual platform of 'Well, if we direct enough money to big companies surely that will save the environment.'  It amazes me that we still have a system that requires companies to try to maximize their earnings and does not force them to consider environmental consequences, and yet leaders get away with policies that effectively amount to hoping that companies will simply do it out of the goodness of their hearts.

Companies don't have hearts, or goodness.  It is the government's responsibility to design rules to force them to do good things.  Abdicating that responsibility creates disaster.

When your policies are ill defined or disastrous and your leader makes a decent rack to get an expensive suit around, you probably have to resort to attack ads to get anywhere and this is where the Conservatives have landed.  It isn't good for them, but they are making the best of a terrible situation.

I really wish they would discuss their policies in detail because 'we will fix things with the power of positive thinking' and 'more money for the rich' won't play well.  However, they have learned from the Ontario Conservatives that you can have an idiotic half complete plan and win anyway if your leader is beliggerent and angry enough.

The Conservatives actually made one absolutely terrible decision in their attack ads; they tried to bring the Ontario provincial governments up as a reason to vote for them federally.  The ad tried to make it out like Ontario is in a dire state because of the evil Liberals, but right now the Ontario Conservative leader is extremely unpopular and their massive cuts to schools have created enormous problems.  The Conservatives should be doing anything *but* asking people to look at Ontario before voting, particularly just after school started and things are going all awry there.

So yes, Conservative ad team, the Liberals are a problem and Trudeau is a mess.  I agree with you on those counts.  But the conclusions isn't to vote for the Conservatives which are similar but worse - Ontario tried that and it was a disaster.  We actually need to vote for something better, and in Canada right now the NDP is it.

Jerk those tears, hard

Wendy has been watching a lot of Queer Eye and got Pinkie Pie and I into it.  Queer Eye is a show about 5 gay dudes who find someone who is doing laudable public service but who needs help to get their own life together.  Typically the hero of an episode runs charities, works in non profits, or volunteers a ton of time towards community organizations.  However, they have a terrible wardrobe, messy house, ugly hair, and unresolved issues.  Also they can't cook.

Then the Fab 5 show up to make everything better.  Yay!  They do a makeover, renovate the person's house, buy them new clothes, teach them to cook, and help them figure out their life.  Then, with all problems solved, the Fab 5 move on... and presumably the makeover lasts a week, the clothes a couple years, and the reno ten years.  You can't fix everything, certainly not in a week.

And yet I end up crying most of the time watching these shows.  Something about watching a person who is dedicated to helping others but who is hopeless personally makes me desperately root for them.  Seeing their reaction to their messes being cleaned up, to their homes being repaired, and to a new vision of themselves as respectable, together adults gets me leaking all over the place.

I know the show is terribly formulaic and staged.  Not fradulent or anything like that... but obviously they choose the parts they show to generate maximum impact.  They are trying to jerk my tears, and the best way to do that is to have a real story and then tell only the parts that reinforce the main thesis.  I know this, but that doesn't seem to stop me having all the feelings.

Clearly it isn't just about 5 dudes with great intentions.  I could help people pretty easily too, if I had a $100,000 budget for a wild week of shopping.  I don't know shit about grooming or fashion but I can pay people to know that for me as well as anyone.  Much of Queer Eye is just a lesson in how transformative a giant pile of cash can be for people.

I will give them credit for being critical of people though.  The heroes all have big flaws, and those flaws are out there for everyone to see.  Sometimes those flaws get addressed in some satisfactory way, and sometimes not, but that is how helping people goes.  The show really does do a good job of portraying the heroes as people with good intentions and lots of issues.

The world is not made better by 5 random dudes showing up with a wad of cash and a pile of cameras to fix one person's hairstyle struggles.  It is made better mostly by silent, unacknowledged grinding by billions of people, day after day. 

One tiny piece, one nearly invisible change, over and over.  That is how things improve, not in a splashy, easy to film moment.

But Queer Eye does give us the sight of people being overwhelmed with gratitude for good deeds done.  Maybe knowing that this is possible, that we can be heroes ourselves, pushes people towards doing good things.  Certainly it is a better example than all the superhero vigilante shows I watch!

Not the real thing

I am an advocate for Universal Basic Income.  (UBI).  I like to read about it in the media to see what people are saying, and a friend passed along an article about UBI as it relates to Alaska in the US.  The article mostly showed how people misunderstand UBI, and how they fail to see what UBI aims to achieve.

In Alaska people used to get between 1000 and 2000 per year from the state.  This is sort of like UBI, except that the amount is simply too small to be a useful comparison.  It does reduce poverty, which is great, but the point of UBI is to allow people without jobs to be able to securely afford a place to live and food to eat.  2 grand doesn't do that, especially in a place where health care is expensive and privately run.  Even calling this UBI is misleading because of the difference of scale.

UBI aims to make it so people can leave jobs that are miserable, dangerous, or otherwise untenable.  They can stop working to try to start a business, have a kid, or take care of someone in need.  They can contribute to society without having to pull a salary.  2k doesn't allow that at all.  It is like studying the effects of long exposure to combat in a foreign country by quizzing people at a paintball competition.  It is kind of related, and perhaps better than nothing, but the information just isn't useful.

There are a lot of worries about UBI out there.  One of the primary ones is how it will be paid for.  This is a serious concern!  Clearly we can make it happen if we want to, as it is purely a resource allocation problem, not a resource creation problem.  However, we have to have a plan, and that plan is going to involve sacrifices.  Sacrifices like taking massive amounts of wealth from the upper classes, for example.  How exactly we take that wealth isn't obvious, but what UBI fundamentally needs to do is transfer wealth downwards, so there are many ways to do that.

In Alaska an incoming politician wanted to increase their payout to $6700 per person.  He had no plan for paying for this of course, so the idea was to massively slash services in order to make it work.  That is nonsense, because letting the roads fall to ruin and cutting back healthcare and other things even further isn't a sensible way to pay for this sort of thing.  This isn't a problem unique to UBI, of course.  Politicians will always promise massive quantities of money for one thing or another and ignore the costs that will be incurred - that is just how democracy goes.

Seeing this foolishness in print though gives me doubts about actually getting UBI implemented.  If people see articles like this and get the impression that UBI is a grand or two a year and think that it is unwieldy even at that, it seems like it will be extremely difficult to get them on board with ten times that much.

And all this from Vox, which is hardly a right wing news source!  I shudder to think about what they would be saying about UBI on Fox News.

We need UBI for many reasons.  Demographic changes make taking care of elderly relatives more necessary, automation eliminating whole industries in short time frames make jobs shifts more difficult, and improving worker bargaining power are all good reasons for implementing it.  But when I see it in print... the misunderstandings make me tear my hair out.

Awake once more

Pinkie Pie's return to school has been going well so far.  It isn't perfect and full of rainbows and unicorns, but it is working.  That is good enough, and after a year of struggling with homeschooling I will take what I can get.

It is an improvement in her life, no doubt, because staying home with me wasn't ideal.  I have the knowledge to teach her the things she needs but our dynamic was a mess and she wasn't learning all she needed to.  She is still having challenges though, and probably will continue to do so.

But for me, her return to school is a tremendous relief.  Yesterday I did something I haven't done in a year - I got back to designing games.  It wasn't much, but I spent time creating new cards for FMB, altering and balancing others, and printing them out.  A lot of my time ends up being about simple, concrete things like cutting up paper with scissors and putting those slips of paper into card backs so they can be easily used.

I felt something inside me that hasn't been there in a long time.  A powerful desire to build, to create, to continuously improve.  I have been a long time now just coasting, trying to get by.  I have been self medicating by watching too much Youtube and letting images of other people's game experiences be my way of spending time.  That isn't so bad as self medicating goes, but it isn't the joyous flow that I can get from creating my own things.  Youtube marathons will never get me in that zone where time vanishes and I wake up having made something new and wonderful for myself.

This makes me want even more to do whatever it takes to get the school experience to work for Pinkie Pie.  It will be good for her in the long run even if it is a struggle at times, and her being out there will give me the mental space to do things that bring me joy.  It will likely cost me on the sleep front because when I am playing or designing games intensely I find it hard to get the thoughts to stop, to convince my brain to finally shut down.

Given a choice though between the numbness of scrolling videos and the gritty eyed tiredness that comes with creation and flow, I will take the latter every damn time.

I might not be able to do it

I find encouragement a puzzling thing.  I recognize what I am 'supposed' to say in situations where people are feeling unsure of themselves, but I don't like doing the standard thing of saying "I am sure you will succeed!" in response.

There is a post by TheFerrett recently that echoes some of my sentiments.  He struggles with people telling him "you got this!" when he expresses doubt or worry about his ability to succeed.  For him, that response is terrifying because he suddenly feels like they assume he will succeed, which means that if he does fail they will see him as an irredeemable loser.  Telling him that you are sure he will overcome just adds to the pressure he is already feeling because he knows that he might not prevail.

What TheFerrett wants them to say is "I will love you even if you fail."  He wants reassurance that his life isn't over if he doesn't manage to get it done.

I don't feel that way.  I find people saying "I know you will succeed!" unpleasant, but not for the same reasons.  I end up being irritated because they are lying to me, or they are refusing to accept my evaluation of the situation.  Most of the time they know that I might fail but they are claiming to feel certain of my success anyway.  I don't want to be lied to.  I don't want to be patronized.  If instead they actually believe it is impossible for me to fail, then they are simply dismissing my assessment of the situation and telling me my doubts are unfounded.  I don't want to be gaslit either.

I know people aren't setting out with lying to me as a goal.  Nor do they plan on belittling me.  Their intent is to make me feel happier and more confident.  Unfortunately intent isn't magic, and those words make things worse for me, not better.

There is another sort of response that I get at times, which is for the listener to leap in and desperately try to solve the problem themselves.  I don't like this because their solution usually involves doing everything their way instead of my way.  Sometimes they have good input but usually I have thought and researched my strategy extensively and it is much better informed than they plan they suggest after a couple seconds of consideration.  I am not looking for rescue.  An offer of "Can I help somehow?" is appreciated, but "Here, this is how you must go about solving your problem." is not.

So what response do I want then?

TheFerrett wants people to tell him that he will still be loved even if he fails.  This isn't such a bad approach with me, because honest encouragement is a fine thing.  But saying "Don't worry, if you fail, I will still love you." isn't exactly the thing I am wanting either.

I am looking for "Oh, that sounds difficult.  What is your strategy to deal with this?"  If I am describing a struggle I am having and my doubts that it will go the way I want it to, I generally just like to have somebody to talk to about it.  Verbalizing my thoughts and plans can lead to greater understanding and refinement of those plans, and an extra brain occasionally comes up with angles I hadn't seen.  Going back and forth with "Okay, so if you are doing X, you must have already figured out how to cope with Y, right?" helps me with my ideas. 

This sort of discussion helps emotionally because I feel better when I have talked out my plans, and can sometimes help logistically by finding flaws in them.

When someone says to me "I don't know if I will succeed at X." my response is to say something like "You are capable of this.  But you might fail anyway.  I will care for you whether or not you fail.  The world is big and history is long, so if you fail, there will be more chances to succeed."  I like this sort of thing because it is encouraging, true, and accepts their doubts and worries as real.  It also correctly positions the consequences of failure as a setback, not a cataclysm.

Back to it

Today Pinkie Pie went back to school.  For the past year she has been home with me, attempting to do the homeschooling thing.  It hasn't gone great, largely because her struggles at school were not fixed by being at home.  But now we are testing out the being at school thing once again to find out if we can make it work.

I can't figure out how I feel.  I am oscillating rapidly back and forth between worry that this year will fall apart and we will end up right back where we were, and relief that she is out the door, doing the thing, and it might all work.  I can feel the tension in my shoulders tighten and loosen, wax and wane, and I don't know where it is all going to end up.

It isn't particularly important that she gets high grades in school.  Ideally, of course, she would find school easy and smash all expectations, but realistically I am just pinning my hopes on her staying there, passing her courses, and being mostly content.

Kind of funny how the things we hope for shift so radically from what we had thought they would be in times past.  My parents expected straight As from me, because they knew I could manage that if I bothered to try.  When Pinkie Pie was young I had figured I would end up in the same parenting situation; turns out that life doesn't much give a crap about where you expect to end up.

I so desperately want this to work.  Homeschooling has been one of the hardest things I have ever done, and it has worn me down in so many ways.  I am not suited to it in the best of cases, and this isn't the best of cases.  I want these hours where it is just me here without the constant sense that I should be forever pushing Pinkie Pie onward and nearly always failing.  I want the time to myself to play, to work, to think.

But there isn't a lot I can do to make it happen.

So I will wait and see.  Sit and hope.

Moving tragedy

Sit down all ye people and hear my tale of woe and tragedy.  Prepare for a tale of bureaucratic incompetence, terribly written code, and complaining to customer service.

As many of these tales do, my story involves uhaul.

The Flautist was moving from Waterloo to Toronto, roughly a 1.5 hour drive away.  She had recruited me to be the driver of her rented uhaul truck and we had a plan:  I would arrive in Waterloo on Thursday at suppertime, spend the evening helping her to pack, sleep, then get the truck Friday morning in Waterloo.  Simple enough, and since I had already moved someone earlier in the week in just 2 hours, I was sure this would be a piece of cake!

On Thursday The Flautist messaged me to say that uhaul had made mistakes.  Instead of collecting the truck in Waterloo, I would have to get it in London instead, which is a further 1.5 hour drive from me in Toronto.  I couldn't possibly get there before closing time so I arranged to catch a train to London and called uhaul to arrange a pickup after the uhaul store in London would close.  No problem, right?  Just get to London, arrive at the store, use their convenient app, and grab my vehicle.  Easy as anything.

First off the train was two hours late.  The train company was apologetic, but there was no way around it so I just waited.  Instead of arriving at uhaul at 8:30 I got there at 10:30 instead.  This meant I would get to The Flautist at 12:30, which is late but totally workable.

Upon arrival at uhaul, I booted up the app and it informed me that I could not have a truck.  Helpfully it told me I could wait until the store opened at 7AM!  Thanks app!

No problem.  Customer service can certainly fix this sort of issue, I had no doubt about this. (Lies.  I had many, many doubts.)

After 10 minutes on hold, the first customer service rep insisted that they could fix the issue and put me on hold again.  I waited, pacing the parking lot.  Uhaul's hold tape helpfully informed me that if I had a problem I could go online and tell them about it so later customers wouldn't have to deal with this problem.  They told me this every 30 seconds for 20 minutes straight.  Finally, a customer service rep picked up the line.  A new customer service rep, who had no idea about the previous person.  This one tried to help me, but could not manage to get me a truck.  They passed me over to another rep who apparently had actual abilities, who managed to take my call after merely a 5 minute hold.  This new person was eager to help, perhaps assisted by my extremely grumpy and terse description about my plight so far.

They told me I could have a truck.  However, I couldn't have a truck that could be dropped off in Toronto, no no.  I could have a smaller truck that wouldn't hold all of The Flautist's possessions or I could have a truck that I had to drop back in London at the end of the move on Friday.  No matter that this wasn't what The Flautist booked, no matter that the trip back to London it would cost me $100 and take 8 hours - take it or leave it.

I called The Flautist to have a fast, unpleasant conversation about our options, and she said we should just get the proper size truck and deal with the fallout the next day.  I told the customer service rep that we would take it.

Unfortunately, I *said* I would take it, but that is a far cry from actually taking it.  I spent 20 minutes trying to get the app to work. It had the amazing design choice of not registering clicks - if you clicked, it might be doing something in the background, but there was no indication whatsoever that a click had registered.  No way to tell the difference between 'working please wait' and 'you didn't click'.  Combine that with clicks sometimes taking 5 minutes to do anything, and you have a great time.  Finally it completely failed, and the rep on the phone told me the app didn't work, and I should try to just do it on a browser instead.  Lovely that their policy and website both desperately tried to get me to use an app that simply did not work.  I tried the browser, and happily it got me a truck!  It sent me to a lockbox on site to get my keys.

The lockbox was empty.

The rep sent me fresh passwords for every single lockbox on site, trying to get keys.  Every single lockbox was empty.

The rep sent me to my truck, which was unlocked, hoping that if I searched it I would find keys somewhere.

No keys.

Out of options, the rep put me on hold for 10 more minutes.  Then he came back and told me if I got to another uhaul that was about an hour's walk away I could try to get a truck there - if they happened to have keys in a lockbox.  I would *still* have to return to the wrong city after the move.

As it was already 12:30 I gave up, and asked what would happen if I just sat in the parking lot until 7AM and waited for the store to open.  The rep informed me that they had lots of trucks available, and I could definitely get what was originally promised if I did that.  I told them I would just sleep in the truck, and they offered me a whole $50 off to make up for the hassle.

Which had already cost me $50 just in train and taxi costs.  And also left me with $20 in long distance bills from calling customer service.  And left me sleeping on the front seat of a uhaul van all night.

I brushed my teeth, refrained from spitting the toothpaste all over uhaul property, and tried to sleep.  I am a large person, and the seats in a uhaul truck are ... not great, even if you aren't big.  It turns out that seatbelt buckles aren't the best sleep surface.  In late August the weather is kinda warm, but sleeping in an unheated place eventually gets cold.  The first half of the night wasn't so bad, but by the end I was trying to use my spare shirt as a blanket; sadly a tshirt doesn't provide much in the way of coverage or warmth.

After a few fitful hours of sleep, I got up at 7AM and wandered to the store.  There were already people ahead of me, so I had to sit and watch them get their stuff while I seethed.  Finally the manager was free to see me.  I laid out my sordid tale, and she read the email from the customer service person attempting to help me the previous night.  She informed me that she would only charge me $50 for the entire rental and got me my truck.

Just before I left, she had one other thing to say. 

"You know, I was here until 2AM last night doing paperwork.  If the customer service rep had just called me I could have gotten you your truck right away, no problem!"

I blearily stared at her, not at all sure what to say about this revelation.

What do you do?

You sigh, think thoughts of murder and mayhem, and drive your damn truck 1.5 hours to the place you were supposed to get it from in the first place.  Then you spend all day carrying heavy things and driving in hideous long weekend traffic.  Then you faceplant and sleep a lot.

At least, that is what *I* did.

The science of dungeons

I am currently filling out a survey about a game I play - Dungeons and Dragons.  Many of the questions on the survey were reasonable to my mind, as they asked about things like how well I fit with the group, what sort of player I am, etc.  I think the creator of the survey will be able to get interesting data out of it.

But some of the questions are badly written at best.  For example, there is a question asking about how often I get certain feelings.  Do I feel like 'humans are basically good' once / week, 2-3 times per week, or every day?  What?  I don't suddenly get struck with a 'humans are good!' feeling and note that down.  I certainly can't give you a rate per week of such things.  But the survey doesn't have a 'this doesn't apply to me' answer, so I have to click a rate in order to move on.

It also had a really silly question about how long it takes me to feel like I belong in a gaming group.  Is it 1-2 sessions?  3-4?  5-6?

How in the world are you getting any kind of real data out of this?  I don't join a new group every month and then count how many sessions is it until I get a 'belonging' feeling.  When I joined my last group I got along with the people fine.  We have had lots of sessions, but I certainly never got a 'I belong' feeling.  When joining my previous group I knew most of the players for a decade or more so clearly I wasn't going to suddenly feel like I belong after 4 sessions - that sense of being comfortable with those people was already there.  Really, do we actually expect that people who click 7-8 sessions are in any way different from those who click 5-6 sessions?  This is a complete guess, with people clicking randomly.  The players and the game style matter in this way, the number of sessions does not.

What I actually want is an answer that says '1 or infinity, depending on if the group is people I like or not'. 

It feels like answering a question 'Do you like jobs?' without any context.  Sure, you will get answers, but the information given is so vague that the answers will be totally random and worthless for digging out useful data.  I like some jobs, but I hate others, just like nearly everybody.

The design of scientific experiments and surveys is critical.  When you build surveys foolishly, or design experiments badly, you end up falling prey to Garbage In, Garbage Out.  All the fancy statistics in the world won't fix your conclusions when your data is rubbish at the outset.

I think this is something we need to train people on more effectively.  It isn't easy though, because you often have to look at things from somebody else's point of view, and you don't even know what somebody that might be.  There might well be people who feel 'humans are good' intensely 3 times per week, and that question works perfectly for them.  However, there are going to be a lot of people who just click randomly because the question is meaningless to them, and if you don't have a 'this doesn't apply' answer your data will be corrupted.  You also need to account for cultural differences and language proficiency when you write your questions.

Writing good questions and setting proper controls to make your experiment give you the information you actually want is hard, but it is critical if we don't want our knowledge corrupted and diluted by all kinds of studies that don't actually show what they claim to show.  We already have enough of that, thanks.

Not made of steel, apparently

10 days ago I was working out in the gym and I damaged myself.  Weight lifting is a pretty safe exercise regimen, assuming you don't do anything really foolish, but I managed to injure my body anyway.  The exercise that got me?  Leg raises.

I have done thousands of leg raises at this machine, but 10 days ago I got distracted or something and brought my feet up wrong, catching the left one on the little metal peg you see in the picture.  It hurt pretty bad at the time but I kept on with my routine and finished everything just fine.  That night I was moving around on crutches, it was swollen 3 cm above usual size, and I was in agony.  But over the next couple of days it seemed to get better so I figured on just waiting till it healed.  I could stand on the balls of my feet easily enough, so I was confident it was only a terrible bruise, not a bone break.

That discolouration you see is all bruising, no dirt or bad lighting.  This photo was taken a week after the damage, and I was still limping around really bad and feeling a lot of pain.  It was bad enough that I even skipped out on helping Naked Man move furniture - and it takes quite a bit of damage to keep me from honouring a commitment to move a heavy object.

I was on course to just ignore it but Wendy and The Flautist were not on board with that.  They both kept fussing at me to go to the doctor, and while I wasn't into that plan, eventually I succumbed to the pressure and went in.  I got an xray, and lo and behold I was right and it is purely meat damage.  The only cure is to take it easy and wait.

So now I am sitting around home all day waiting for my stupid foot to fix itself.  I have managed, so far at least, to avoid saying "I told you so!" directly to either Wendy or the Flautist, but I did decide to crow about it on the internet.

I have spent many years imagining what getting doubled teamed by my wife and my girlfriend on my birthday would be like.  Those dreams didn't include quite so much "Book a doctor's appointment you doorknob, you aren't actually made of steel." or "Sit down and let somebody else do that, or you are never going to get better."  and instead had .... other characteristics.  This, I think, is a great example of polyamory as it actually is, instead of how people think it is.  Outsiders mostly seem to think it is about nonstop orgies, when mostly it is just about coping with the random junk life throws in your way, just like it is for everybody else.

Trouble in paradise

My brother gave me the book Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman.  He asked me not to return it, but instead to pass it on.  It is the sort of book that will divide readers by political affiliation, and as I am a hardcore lefty I liked it.

Bergman talks about three main things in the book - the 15 hour workweek, open borders, and universal basic income.  He posits that all of these things are easy to do, would have huge benefits for society across the economic spectrum, and would improve quality of life around the world.

I am inclined to agree with him, in large part.  UBI is a thing I have been yelling about for years now, and I am sure that it would make the world better.  Bergman talks about it as a big part of the solution to increased automation, and while I think that might hold true, automation itself doesn't worry me.  Economic inequality does though, and although there is some correlation there, I do think that resistance to automation is not just futile but also destructive.  We want mindless jobs to be automated... we just need a structure in place to make sure the resulting wealth is more evenly distributed.

Open borders is something I have thought less about but I ended up agreeing with the book after considering it.  People often talk about 'buy local' as a thing to do, and while buying locally can have benefits in reducing transportation costs and emissions, it is usually pitched as a way to help the local economy.  In rich nations I don't see how that is a benefit - shouldn't we be happy to help people in other places just as much?  Why is it a moral imperative to help people near me be richer?  If we all do this around the world that protectionism ends up making things worse for everyone.  Opening borders is a more extreme version of this, letting people cross borders as easily as goods do.  It involves sharing, and trust, and it ends up with the entire world improving tremendously.

The workweek section of the book is something I agree with less.  Bergman is right when he says that a huge percentage of jobs are bullshit.  There is pure evil like telemarketing scams and protection rackets, but there are so many jobs that are just pure waste.  If all the marketing people in the world quit their jobs and instead taught in school or worked in hospitals or built things we would be so much better off!  Marketing just competes with other marketing but we actually don't need any marketing at all for our society to work just fine.  Those customers will buy from *somebody* if you ad campaign doesn't go through!

If we got rid of all the evil or bullshit jobs from hedge fund managers to social media consultants and put all that brainpower and time to use doing something useful for society we could easily maintain our standard of living and have a 15 hour workweek.  There is no practical thing to stop us, aside from our desperation to compete.  And that competition is a HUGE problem.  People who work more and earn more will have more stuff, even in a world with UBI.  Other people will want that stuff.  Keep in mind, stuff isn't just huge TVs or fancy cars, it is things like a home located closer to city centres, or enough land to have a garden.  Even if we made working more unnecessary, people would put in that work just to get ahead of other people.

As an example, take CEOs who make a bajillion dollars a year.  They don't need the money.  They could just retire.  But they continue working hideous hours, hardly getting to use their many houses and toys.  This is how people mostly are, defining themselves by their peers, not by any outside standard.  Unless we decouple work from money entirely I don't see our workweeks shrinking down to 15 hours.

The general idea of reducing bullshit jobs and flattening the distribution of wealth I really like, but I am pessimistic about how effective it will be at reducing workweeks.  Governments can step in to help with this in a heavy handed way - forcing companies to pay overtime for all time worked over 30 hours, for example, would help.  Improving social safety nets so that companies are more incentivized to hire multiple part time employees instead of working single employees to death in order to save on benefits payments would also be a thing we could try.

In any case if you want to read a quick book that outlines a lot of good research and information about economics and work in these areas I recommend Utopia for Realists.  It isn't perfect, but it is the sort of book that would improve society greatly if everyone read and implemented its suggestions.

Functional vanity

Earlier this summer I was having a talk with a friend about our different exercise regimens.  I am all about weight lifting, while he focuses on activities more like running and swimming.  One of the things he said about his regimen is that he likes to focus on functional strength.  He pointed out that weight lifters do curls, which is a silly exercise because nobody actually curls in real life.  Practising that motion is a waste of time.

He is right, mostly.

Certainly curls are not a way to make your body perform day to day physical tasks more effectively.  I am trying to recall a single place in my life where I curled weight aside from the gym and I can't come up with one.  Rows and pushups come slightly closer to real tasks, I guess, but even those aren't that much use most of the time.

My friend's regimen of running and swimming was *useful*, as far as he was concerned, and weight lifting was not.

I rolled this around in my brain awhile, and came to the conclusion that I was right all along, and he is wrong.

Whew.  For a while there I was worried I was going to have to grow and change or something.

He was right that I am not going to suddenly be called upon to do curls in regular life.  It won't matter if I can curl 30 kilos or 50 kilos.  But in his life he isn't likely to be called upon to run fast or swim far for some serious purpose either!  In nearly all cases the specific things he is practising are going to only be used to practise more, same as me.  I can run if I have to, I can swim if needed, and being a little better just won't matter, in much the same way that curling a little more weight isn't important.  Some people might well realize real gains in life by doing exercises of one type or other, but neither me nor my friend really expect that, given our baseline level of athleticism and ability.

But there are reasons to curl... big arms!  That is an actual function that matters to me.  Sure, it is easy to dismiss as cosmetic or frivolous, but looking hot is actually far more important to me than swimming further or running faster.  I can, without any doubt, say that some really fun times in my recent past came about because of having big arms instead of skinny ones.  I can also say that if I were significantly better (or worse!) at swimming it wouldn't have any of those benefits at all.  For me, big arms are a lot more functional than running ability.

You could definitely argue that swimming would be likely to get me more cut, though not as big, which could easily have the same sorts of benefits.  That is true enough.  Actual swimming ability though?  Irrelevant.

Any type of exercise is going to have health benefits in terms of reducing stress, increasing longevity, etc.  The only real choice is what kind of exercise, and for me weight lifting actually gives me exactly the sort of functional changes I want.  Plus, the weights are right in my building.  I don't even have to go outside to use them!  Convenience is as good an argument as any, in my book.

A Trojan Horse

Dan Simmons is an author I have a history with.  He wrote the Hyperion novels, which are a crazy far future set of books that are chock full of wild and fascinating ideas.  I have read the four book series several times, despite each book being a doorstopper.

Wendy has had another duology by him, Ilium / Olympos, on our bookshelf for years, and I figured I should try this series out.

It is a mess.

Much like the Hyperion series it has all kinds of cool ideas.  It also has a bizarre fascination with old english poets and playwrights, for some reason.  Unfortunately Ilium lacks one of the things that I most liked about Hyperion - the tech.  In the Hyperion series the tech is far beyond anything we have, indeed often far beyond what we imagine is possible.  However, it all fits together.  In Ilium though Simmons just has any random tech he wants for the story and justifies it by using the words quantum or nano.  Quantum teleporting.  Quantum energy.  Quantum field.  I quantum the quantum quantums!  And if that isn't enough, just call it nano quantum, and you are good to go.  If you thought Ant Man and The Wasp had stupid amounts of quantum nonsense, prepare to see it dialled up to 11.

I don't mind wild tech, even tech that violates the laws of physics as we know them.  What I can't stand is mindless, foolish explanations that toss around buzzwords and pretend like that makes it all work.

I am cool with establishing new rules in a fictional world.  What I can't stand is the author obviously wanting a character to go to a place for a scene, so they have somebody yell about quantuming the quantum nano field to make it happen instead of actually, you know, writing well.

The Ilium duology really made me remember some of my Dungeons and Dragons experiences from my teenage years.  Inexperienced Game Masters would come up with a plot and wouldn't know how to get the characters into the story they had written, so they would have a massively powerful character show up and order the characters to do the thing.  No good explanation or reason would be given, it would just be 'All of you have to do this thing.  No, I won't tell you why or how.  Just follow me, or I will punch you out and carry you.'

This often resulted in the entire party being beaten up, tied to horses, and dragged along while the powerful character (who clearly didn't need any of *us* to win the day) lectured us on our flaws.

Ilium has a ton of this, and for the same reasons.  Simmons obviously had scenes in his mind he wanted to do and couldn't come up with good reasons for those scenes to occur, so he would just have some nearly omnipotent, omniscient character show up and order the regular people to do some damn fool thing.  The demigod would refuse to provide any reasons or context, and if the regular person resisted, they were unceremoniously smacked down.  Even after they finally gave in and did what the demigod wanted, it was usually unclear why doing that even mattered in the first place!

It might sound like I think Simmons is a hack and has nothing to say.  That isn't true - Ilium has no end of cool scenes and original ideas.  The problem is that the plot makes no sense, the characters are inconsistent and unpredictable, and he doesn't tell the reader what the hell is going on because he is so busy getting to the next cool thing.  It reminds me a bit of Too Like The Lightning, which I read awhile ago and did not like.  Other people lauded it for its ideas, which is fair, but failed to add that the plot and characterization were a hot mess.

Simmons really needed to sit down with his ideas, cross out about two thirds of them, and then write these books.  Either that, or maybe add another 4 books to the series so he could actually have the room to make it all make sense.  In any case it desperately needs an editor to tear it down and make better use of the gems that are there.  For example:  There are posthumans who have been given tech to make them into immortal 'gods' who live on Mars and are presiding over an alternate universe siege of Troy on an Earth from another dimension.  They have resurrected a human from the 21st century to record the event, and then he is tasked by one god to murder another.  Wow, what a wild premise!  You could write so much with that!  This is about 5% of the premise for the actual story.  It is just too much, and Simmons tries to juggle all the things he has created and the reader gets to watch the balls all fall down.

I am sure lots of people liked these books.  Unfortunately they hit my personal pet peeves of having weak villains, terrible tech, weak and nonsensical plot, and flat characters.  I find that many science fiction books that get all kinds of awards totally fail on these fronts, so clearly some people are good with that.

Me?  Not so much.