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?