Just a little plastic bag

The other day I was in the grocery store buying a bunch of things including a single hamburger bun.  I didn't put the single bun in a plastic bag because that seemed silly and wasteful - I don't want to use up extra plastic for no reason, and I don't want to create extra plastic trash.

The cashier was not amused.  She put the bun on the scanner to ring it in, and then went to get a plastic bag for it.  I asked her not to, and she got angry at me, telling me I had to take the bun off the scanner myself because she could not.  Her hands had touched money, and she wasn't willing to touch the bun again for fear of passing along germs.  I kinda figure that once you have touched an item once you aren't going to hurt anything by touching it again, but she wasn't having any of it.

This sort of thing happens all the time.  I constantly have to fight to get cashiers to stop putting extra plastic bags on stuff that I buy.  I purchase mushrooms, they try to put extra bags on them.  I refuse the bags and toss the mushrooms loose into my grocery bag, and they look at me like I am a demon sacrificing a baby on an altar made of blood and bones.

Behaviour of this sort is far beyond any reasonable set of precautions against illness and is straight up purity signalling.  You don't need all that plastic to separate everything from everything else - all those foods are going to end up being dissolved by acid in my stomach, after all - but we use packaging as a way to suggest purity and cleanliness even when there is no actual need for it.  When I say that I don't need a plastic bag it goes past logistics and straight into being unclean.

Plastic bags swirling around the world as trash in a dump, litter near a highway, or garbage in the ocean simply aren't the cashier's problem.  They can't be blamed for the Pacific Garbage Patch, but they *can* be blamed for not offering a bag when somebody wanted one, so all the bags get used, even when there is no reason to.  Negative externalities kick us all in the collective junk, as people fail to worry about the consequences of their actions when those consequences are borne jointly rather than individually.

I see this as a failure of regulation.  In my mind garbage should have a price, and it should be borne by the consumer.  Every extra layer of packaging should have a cost.  Every object that has to be recycled should require a fee be paid by the manufacturer, and everything that must be thrown out should have a much larger fee.  The government and society is going to have to pay to deal with that shit once it is done being used, so the company producing it should have to pay for that.  If we actually charged people for the cost of cleaning up the messes they create we would have far fewer messes, no doubt about that.

Want a flimsy clear plastic bag to put your mushrooms in?  Fork over a dollar, because that is what is costs to clean it up.  Want plastic bags to carry your groceries?  No problem, just $1.50 each.  It wouldn't prevent all waste, of course, but it would reduce it a great deal, and would finally break past that sanctity argument people constantly use to justify their polluting ways.

Monetary incentives won't solve all these problems, naturally.  But they can help, not least of which by getting people to see that while a thing might cost a penny to make, the real cost to all of us is much, much more.

A dragon or three

This post has all the spoilers for Game of Thrones season 8.

In the closing episodes of season 8, Daenerys murdered thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people.  Not because they were a threat, but just because she was pissed off.  There are all kinds of blog posts and articles and petitions that are angry about this because people wanted Dany to be good and pure!  She could be the saviour of Westeros!

Dany was never good or pure.  She was just white, as white as white can be.  The story of Dany as the great saviour is a pile of racism as far as I am concerned.  Dany is very much the embodiment of privilege, a person who wants the feeling of having helped people, the belief in herself as a benevolent person, but who has no interest whatsoever in considering what sort of help other people actually want.  She wants to *feel* good, not *do* good.

Throughout Game of Thrones Dany has been merciless, cruel, and hopelessly self centered.  She refuses to see anyone else's suffering as relevant, and regularly makes it clear that while she lays claim to titles like "The Breaker of Chains" she actually isn't interested in offering freedom.  She wants to be seen as a liberator, but she demands perfect subservience from everyone around her and total personal loyalty.  People should be free, she thinks, but what freedom means is simply "Have no other master other than Daenerys."

Dany 'saves' people occasionally, no doubt.  But she saves them without any idea of the consequences of her actions, and her expectation afterwards is perfect obedience and adulation.  Simply put, Dany sees herself as the natural and righteous ruler of the world.  When any power structure is destroyed she is happy because it means that more of the world is falling under her sway, and she is closer to the absolute power she thinks she deserves.  When she saves someone she thinks she is doing them a favour - the favour of being ruled by Dany instead of someone else.  Most people think of being saved as being given more freedom, more security, or a otherwise better life.  Dany doesn't think that, because they only thing that makes the world better, in her mind, is her controlling more of it.

Just look at how the whole thing with her rescuing Mirri Maz Duur from a rape goes down: Dany assumes that because she rescued Mirri Maz Duur that she is owed eternal loyalty and love.  Mirri Maz Duur, of course, remembers that the army that Dany showed up with raped and murdered her entire family, destroyed their homes, and enslaved them.  And then she was 'rescued' by being taken forcefully by her oppressors as a servant.  No wonder she strikes back when given the chance!

Daenerys is a delusional, murderous, megalomaniacal tyrant.  The fact that Varys and Tyrion, among others, could not see this is mostly a function of their own racism, and the fact that they really didn't see the suffering in foreign nations as important compared to the suffering of people in Westeros.  They saw her being a force for destruction and evil but hoped that she would suddenly stop when she arrived amongst white people... and she did not.  I wasn't surprised in the slightest, and they shouldn't have been either.

It was honestly funny to me that people complained about this turn of events as though it was impossible to predict.  Dany has been written and acted in such a way as to foreshadow this throughout the show.  Just watch how often Tyrion tries to convince her that she shouldn't use her dragons to burn King's Landing, and how she consistently ignores that line of reasoning.  She doesn't say "Of course burning a city with dragons is a heinous crime!  I would never do such a thing!"  She stares icily, and makes it clear that she would *love* to burn the city with her dragons, but just maybe if people beg and grovel enough she might forgo that pleasure.

Because she is the rightful ruler, and if she wants to burn a city, well, that is her perogative.  People only live because she allows it.

While Daenerys had a terrible time of it in many respects, she has always been a villain.  Many people were hoping that she was the one truly good person in a world of moral ambiguity, (again, way too strongly influenced by her whiteness) but that has never been borne out by her words or actions. 

Face it.  Daenerys is one of the great villains of Game of Thrones.  Just because she occasionally struck back at men for their sexist behaviour or ruthlessly murdered evil people doesn't change that.  Just because she is pretty and white doesn't make her pure.  Her suffering, appearance, and gender do not qualify her for Team Good status.

When Dany burned King's Landing I nodded to myself and thought "Yep, that sure was always going to happen."  You don't have to like it, but this was coming right from the beginning.

My place

I wonder what it would be like to have a place all my own.  It isn't really an experience I have had, to be honest, and the idea of it has been tickling my brain for awhile now.  I lived with my parents when I was young and they gave me reasonable latitude for organizing my own space.  On my ceiling they painted a giant bird modeled vaguely after thunderbirds I have seen in Native art just because I wanted it, for example.  In the end they were the ones calling the shots though, and I got to express preferences, but I didn't get to vote.

In university I lived with other people in many configurations.  I rented rooms from strangers, shared houses with friends, and lived in residence.  In none of those cases did I really have control over my space.  Residence came the closest, I guess, but I still just had a single room and there were a great many rules about what exactly I could do with it.

After university I moved in with Wendy, and have been living with her ever since.  Technically I have an equal vote in how we organize our space, but in practical terms she makes the great majority of those decisions.  She cares more than I do about each individual thing, so we just do her thing by default.

Lately I have been looking around our place thinking about what I would do if I didn't have to consult anybody at all.  How would I organize it?  What would I get rid of?  Some things wouldn't change, of course, in terms of organization, but I would throw out or give away most of our possessions.  The place would be empty, clean, and austere. 

It would be glorious.

This has me thinking about alternate arrangements for partnerships.  There are people, for example, that live in a different city than their spouse.  Not because of some temporary problem, but by design.  They like the long term partnership and they like their own space and quiet.

I sometimes consider how it would work to arrange such a thing.  It would ideally be a lot closer range than different cities though - that is farther than I want!  In theory you could have separate areas within a single dwelling, but I think that wouldn't work for Wendy and I.  Her stuff would encroach and she would want to fill all my wonderful empty space with her possessions.  Maybe if we just had adjacent condo, so we could spend all the time we wanted together but at the end of the day I retreat to my room, in my place, that doesn't have any stuff in it aside from the most bare bones requirements.

I also wonder what I would be like if I had had that single living experience.  Would I see the world differently if I had rented my own apartment for a year or two after university, and eventually moved in with her?  I imagine what it would be like, but maybe it is a silly fantasy, and I wouldn't actually end up with things the way I want them.  Perhaps I would end up with piles of takeout boxes stacked in the corner because there is no one else to want them cleaned up!  I haven't tried it, so I don't know for sure.

Maybe someday I will be rich and can just buy my own place so I can test this out.  Until then, financial pressure, if nothing else, will have to keep this an unknown.

You gotta waste money to get elected

Ontario is doing something really stupid right now.  The Conservative government has decided that we shouldn't take part in the carbon tax plan that the Canadian government is going with, so Ontario is being flooded with ads bashing the plan.  The ads basically talk about how the carbon tax is taking money away from families, and that Ontario has a better plan.  Spoiler:  Ontario does not have a better plan and the money is paid back to people anyway because the carbon plan is revenue neutral.

The TV ads have pictures of people doing normal things when out of nowhere money starts falling out of their pockets, showering the ground with coins.  The hapless people look on in dismay as their wealth rolls away, helpless before the power of taxation.  Naturally the ads don't show the money flowing back into their pockets later, even though that is what will happen.

It makes me so bitter to see this.  It should be absolutely illegal for the government to spend public funds to bash other political parties, but that is what is happening.  The Liberals are in charge federally, so the provincial Conservatives waste money advertising that the Liberal carbon tax plan is hurting families.  They don't *say* the word Liberal, or Conservative, but there is no doubt in anyone's mind that what is going on here, and even if there were doubt, the idea that it is appropriate for the provincial government to buy advertising time to complain about federal policy is ludicrous.

This is what we get for voting in a buffoon with no policy platform.  We get idiotic moves to 'save money' that are implemented foolishly and end up costing more money than they save.  We have a premier who simply does not understand anything that he is doing, but is so convinced of his right to rule that he thinks he doesn't *need* to understand.

Just do whatever dumbass thing you want, and ignore the consequences.  It is all about the show, after all, not about careful consideration of the results.  Like, for example, the gutting of public education and massive increases in classroom size - it saves a few bucks now, but results in a serious reduction in educational quality.  We know that long term good public education is an amazing investment that pays for itself many times over, but that isn't relevant to the current government - they need that money to give to big companies, you see. 

Wealthy investors need their payouts now, and the consequences of a less educated population are years away, and that is apparently all you need to know.

This is a classic example of a position I have held for years now about 'small government' and 'responsible budgeting' platforms.  They are all bullshit.  Every government will spend money, often foolishly.  You *cannot* choose responsible financial policy, no one offers that.

What you can choose is *how* they waste money.  And the Conservatives want to waste it by giving it to the rich and buying ads to talk about how we shouldn't try to prevent climate change.  Anything would be better.

Everyone is like me

The other day I was at a doctor's appointment with Pinkie Pie.  (Routine, everything is fine.)  The two doctors we were seeing were ones we had never talked to before, and they were trying to make small talk with Pinkie Pie.  Of course they asked the one thing everyone asks a kid - what grade are you in?  That she is being homeschooled came up, and they seized on that.  They started asking about university entrance exams for homeschooled kids (I don't know much about it, to be honest) and made it clear that the really important thing about homeschooling was getting good grades on said exams... even though none of us even knew if said exams existed.

They also talked about how wonderful homeschooling was because you can apply to university years early and get started on your career faster.  I tried to explain that going to university at age fifteen wasn't for everyone, but they were off, chatting to each other about how great it was that she was being homeschooled so she could skip tons of grades and get working sooner.

It doesn't surprise me that a couple of doctors would see it this way.  Their world mostly consists of overachievers who put an uncommon amount of time and energy into their careers.  For them, going to university early would have been fine, from a academic perspective at least.

But from my perspective people have forty years to do the career thing, and only a handful of years to do the teenager thing.  Rushing to the working world is fine if that is what the teenager in question really wants, but pushing it onto them, or assuming that this is obviously the thing you should do, is a destructive error.  They will have so long to grind away in a job - let them grow into it organically, no need to force the issue.

What is particularly frustrating though is how they projected their worldview and experiences onto my kid.  They didn't think "Well, there are a ton of reasons for homeschooling, maybe I should ask what the reason is."  They immediate leaped to the assumption that I am homeschooling with the purpose of giving my brilliant, overachieving child a head start on her career.  If they had asked I might have said that homeschooling is because I want to teach from the Bible, or because fuck the system man, or because school isn't working for her, and those are completely different situations than they are imagining.

Also my kid, while fairly clever, isn't by any means overachieving.

Doctors making all kinds of silly assumptions doesn't affect me directly.  These guys assumed that everyone is in the top 5% of humanity academically, and don't notice the fact that this isn't possible, but people assume plenty of things more ridiculous than that.

But it bothers me that they don't seem to notice how it will affect kids in their care.  12 year olds aren't stupid, and when you make it clear that your standard of normal far exceeds their capabilities they notice.  When you lead off with the assumption that this kid finds school trivial, that academics are effortless, and that marks on exams are the important thing, you leave kids who struggle in school, get low grades, and do poorly on exams feeling even worse than they already do.  Kids that have trouble in these ways are sent the message that they suck constantly and they don't need more of it from their physicians.

A lot of the world struggles mightily with the structures we have in place to measure, control, and evaluate each other.  Just because *you* fit nicely into those structures doesn't mean everyone does.  Those doctors surely would have agreed that some kids really have trouble in school, but they never bothered to think that the kid they are treating might well be one of those, and just assumed that she was just like them instead.

I want the world to be a place where a lot more people spend a lot more time thinking "What if this person in front of me is someone who finds this thing hard, even if *I* find it easy?" 

Fallen one

For years I was one of the bright ones, those people who are shining examples to the world.  When I looked about at the people around me and saw their phones I saw webbed cracks, shattered panes, screens divided by violence.  I was one of the good people though, one of those who could rightly claim to treat my phone properly.  I could look down on the seething masses of humanity with a sneer, knowing that I retired a phone after five years of constant use and it was *pristine*.

Yesterday my world came crashing down around me.  I walked out my door, put my earbuds in, and put my phone in my jacket pocket.  The street crossing countdown began and I ran for the intersection, heedless of the danger.  Then a ripping feeling, a burst of noise, and my earbuds flew out of my ears.  I spun round and saw my phone lying, still attached to my earbuds, submerged in a puddle.

Panicked, I yanked the phone out of the puddle and frantically tried to dry it off.  I must commend the engineers that designed it, no doubt, as somehow despite being quite underwater it is completely functional.  Relieved that I hadn't made a mistake of hundreds of dollars worth, I went inside.

And that is where everything broke.  I looked at the screen and saw cracks, and suddenly I was down to earth, wading through muck, one of the regular people.  I was one of those people whose phone is broken, one of those I had so easily dismissed in years past.

I am one of THEM.

Now I walk bent over, shaking a little, looking about me frightened that other people will see, that they will know.  Worried that they will judge me the way I judged others in my past life.  Glory replaced with drudgery and fear, paradise lost.

The cracks in the pane reflect the cracks in my soul.

My phone screen is broken, and I am fallen. 

Leverage, or a lack thereof

Wendy linked me to a great article talking about financial leverage and how it interacts with people in different financial situations.  The core of the concept is that people's lives are completely different based on the size of the largest financial shock they can absorb.  Whether it be through access to credit, family money, cash under the mattress, or any other method of surviving an unexpected money shortage, if you can survive a financial mishap your life is drastically easier.  Having to pay back the money later isn't actually that much of a problem so long as your life doesn't explode in the meanwhile.

Everyone ends up faced with small disasters like needing new tires for a car, having something stolen, or having to help a family member with a financial crunch.  If you have the wherewithal to deal with that without issue, no problem.  If you don't, you can end up in disaster mode - losing your transportation, losing your job, or being stuck with outrageous interest payments.  I think that many people who have a large degree of financial resilience underestimate how bad things get, and how fast that happens, when you don't have that backstop against disaster.

I have particularly large financial resilience compared to my household income.  Partly this is due to circumstance and luck - my family is stable and could help me if something terrible occurred, for example, but they don't shower me with expensive stuff either.  But a really significant part of it is the way I think about risk, resources, and debt.  I have a money demon that makes me dread the possibility of being in debt, so I hoard resources to make certain that I never have to worry about financial shocks.  I have spent my whole life deeply concerned about this, and even when I was earning a lot I sat on it, at least in part to be certain that when something bad happened I would never have to ask anyone for assistance.

Some people don't have the discipline and worries that I do, so they live closer to the edge, and disasters have a much easier time wreaking havoc in their lives.

Some people have a lot less luck than me in terms of money, so they are stuck closer to the edge regardless of their inclinations.

And of course some people have way more luck than me and so they avoid disaster by dint of being rich, or having rich people around them who can provide insurance against financial shocks.

The better a society protects vulnerable people from financial shocks the more equal it will be, and the better off it will be overall.  When rough times come, the rich ride it out, but the poor can lose everything, and the rich scoop up the leavings.  We can fix this stuff by having universal health care, so that a disease doesn't ruin your life because you have no resistance to financial shock.  We can do similar things with basic income or other social supports.  Even things like public education, public transportation, and libraries all help keep people who might otherwise collapse under the weight of a small problem survive and thrive.

Whether a person is easy to leverage via financial shock because they have squandered their money or because they had challenging circumstances doesn't change the way I feel about taking care of them.  We don't need to provide luxuries, but making sure that small challenges don't destroy people can improve the overall experience of our society enormously.