I want to feel rich

When Wendy and I sold our condo and bought a house we got to see a lot of staging.  In Toronto over the past 20 years staging has gone from a thing a few people do to being the standard.  I have complaints about how staging works and what things it promotes (classism!  rabble rabble) but the tricky thing about staging is that it isn't easily defined and it gradually slides from completely reasonable to icky without a clear dividing line.

I will admit at the outset that we staged our condo to sell it, so while I will complain about staging and its effects, I couldn't turn it down personally.  I know that the staging process made me money, so despite how destructive it is, I wasn't willing to toss away tens of thousands of dollars on principle... especially when our real estate agent included staging for free.

At the beginning you just have cleanup.  You want to sell your house?  Clear that old junk off the porch, mop the floor, pick up the laundry.  I can't see any reason to complain about that.  You want someone looking through the place to be able to see what they are getting and feel comfortable.  The trouble is you keep on doing things that seem reasonable and eventually your place has been repainted neutral white, is filled with expensive furniture, decorated with fancy art, and completely unusable because all of your tools and gear have vanished.  It is sterile, boring... and looks like the place a rich person might live.  The kind of person who has taste in fine art, pays other people to do the work for them, and thinks garish colours are SO last year.

That is the part of the process that grinds my gears.  The stagers tried to tell us that we had to repaint everything so that the prospective buyers could see themselves living in our space, but I think that is nonsense.  We weren't trying to let them see themselves... we were trying to trick their brains into thinking of our condo as a rich person's residence.

The buyer wants to be rich, and they love the vision of themselves as a rich person, so we designed our place to facilitate that dream.  We put up ugly, shapeless modern art because that is how people in our economic bracket think a rich person's home looks.  I am sure that if you are selling a higher end home the staging process changes; you want to make the house look like a person that has twice that much money lives there.  The ideal staging makes the person who is looking to buy that place feel like it is better than the price would suggest, but not too much better, or it triggers cognitive dissonance.

Wastefulness bothers me.  I hate that we had beautiful colourful walls and we had to paint them all white.  I hate that we had to install laminate flooring because that is what is expected at this price point, even if plenty of buyers aren't particularly interested in laminate floors.  So much of staging is doing work that will immediately be undone just to shove money one direction or another.  I like doing things to improve a building - I hate doing them solely as a trick.

The trouble is we are all trapped in a destructive cycle of game theory.  We are playing prisoner's dilemma, except that we only play it with any given opponent once, so everybody defects all of the time.  Nobody has an incentive to cooperate, and the real estate people have every incentive to get people to spend more to raise the selling price because they are paid a percentage.

Even though I can see how this ends up screwing everybody over (except the real estate agents....) I don't see a good way out of it.  People are emotional and foolish and as long as they desperately want to increase their social status and houses are expensive then staging and other trickery will take place.  People want to be rich and powerful and a person's home displays that status clearly.  While these things hold, we are going to continue to try to make our homes look like an Important Person lives there, and we are going to continue to waste our collective resources to achieve that.

Fancy house

Shopping for a house was an enlightening experience.  My internal voice definitely yelled 

CLASSISM!!!

many, many times.  The most obvious culprit, I think, was the letter that we were asked to come up with the first time we put in a bid on a house.  We had only been actively looking for a week when an amazing house came on the market, priced way under its realistic value.  It had a ton of room, a basement I could stand up in with room to spare, and was right next to a subway.  We ended up in a bidding war with another potential buyer, and our agent asked us if we wanted to submit a letter to the owner to try to increase our chance of being accepted.

I have to give my agent credit here.  She made it clear that these letters have problems, and in some areas they are illegal, but she had an obligation to tell us our options.  She sent us some samples, and those samples made me angry and sad at the same time.

All the samples were staged photos with staged stories, all saying the same thing:  We are a conventional, attractive young couple, doing a conventional life, and we are so grateful for the opportunity to bid on your home.  The grovelling was the worst.

If I was being honest my letter would say "My spouse, child, and my girlfriend are moving in together.  We are making an unconventional sort of family that makes us really happy, and I think this house will give us a great place to do that."

Sending exactly the right letter can add significantly to the effective value of your bid.  Sending my honest letter could easily erase my bid entirely.  This is why these letters are not allowed some places, of course, because they often end up enabling bigotry.  White people who own houses preferentially sell to other white people.  Other privilege ends up working the same way, naturally, and since straight, conventional, etc. people own a disproportionate share of the houses, this puts another barrier in the way of people who aren't that.

In the end it didn't matter.  The seller and the buyer discovered that their mothers had the same name,  and that was enough to convince them it was fate, and we didn't get the house.  In the end, that was a good thing, as the house we did get was not as good (mostly because the basement is short), but the location is better and the price was far more manageable.  There was no second bidding war as we were the only bidders the second time around, so we didn't have to do face down the letter thing again.

I can see the angles.  I could have just made up the perfect letter, bought into the classist bullshit, and sold my ass off.  I know how to sell!  I know exactly what lies to tell, should I want to.  Instead, all I wanted to do was to write down "I am offering you a ton of money, take it or leave it, but don't expect me to grovel for your damnable charity, or pretend that your house is going to continue on being a bastion of your values."

When we sold the condo our agent told us that the bidder was a mathie of some sort or other.  My response was "I don't care in the slightest.  Show me the money."  It turns out that I am the sort of person that I want to deal with in real estate.  Who knew?

Moving on up

I recently finished the book Exodus - How Migration is Changing Our World.  It is about the movement of people from poor countries to rich ones, and examines what effects this movement has on all of the parties involved.  I didn't agree with it all the way, but I think it does a great job of asking hard questions and looking at the issue from the perspective of everyone affected.  Being as I live in Canada it is no surprise that most of my exposure to immigration discussion has been centered on whether or not it is good for current Canadians if new people move here.  Exodus examines the subject from that perspective, but it also spends a lot of time talking about the effects on the immigrants themselves and the people left behind in the poorer countries from which they come.

In political debate the subject of immigration often comes down to left vs. right shouting matches.  The left wants all the immigration and any opposition to that is racist, and the right wants no immigration and any opposition to that is destroying our culture.  Naturally both extremes are nonsense, and both have some kind of point if you tone the rhetoric down some.  A lot of opposition to immigration within rich countries is based on racism, but there are real concerns about how immigration levels change the culture of the countries people are moving to.

One key topic that is pivotal and controversial is the examination of why exactly poor countries are poor.  Is it just historical, based on past behaviour?  Luck?  Or is it culture, and poorer, worse functioning countries are that way because of the behaviour of their citizens?  Again, this discussion is a political minefield, but the explanation is a bit of all of each of these simple answers.  Colonialism left all kinds of troubles and issues in poorer countries, but some countries have pushed beyond a troubled past, marred by invasion and occupation.  Some countries are lucky to have valuable resources, but those resources do not explain much of the difference in standard of living.

Exodus explains that much of the difference between countries can be explained by mutual regard between citizens.  If you think of everyone else in your country as someone close to you, someone you should respect, and insist on the same behaviour from them, your country will prosper.  When nurses steal all the drugs from hospitals to sell on the black market, the country suffers.  When crime is so rampant that everyone must spend tons of money on security guards, the country suffers.  When bureaucrats demand bribes and squander money via corruption the country suffers.  Countries that are rich tend to have high trust among citizens and people do not overlook transgressions by others, even if those others are close to them.  Of course every country has some degree of corruption, but less corruption is hugely beneficial.

If a rich country wants to maintain its standard of living, then any new arrivals must take on its current culture.  They don't have to have all the same holidays, modes of dress, etc. but they need to buy into the basic ideals and customs with regards to law and corruption.  If they do not, the standard of living in the country will suffer.  It is reasonable to demand certain cultural standards, but it is easy to tip over and demand far too much, and of the wrong types.

I definitely think Canadians need to be concerned about racism, particularly against immigrants.  I also think that we have to carefully manage how many people we bring in to make sure we have the infrastructure to support them, and also make sure that we maintain the parts of our culture that give us the wealth and privilege that the immigrants are seeking.  We can't expect to have open borders and welcome anyone who wants in while maintaining our standard of living, so we need restrictions, and those restrictions are going to be complicated and difficult to decide on.

The simple fact is that immigration cannot be boiled down to Good or Bad.  It is a complicated thing that is governed by extremely complex systems, and how we approach it hugely affects our outcomes.

One thing in Exodus that I was especially interested in is the discussion of nationalism.  I have been wont to say that nationalism is poison, but Exodus does point out that nationalism does have some benefits.  It tends to reduce corruption and increase mutual regard, convincing citizens to do things for one another.  The basic argument is that nationalism is good for the economy.  The author carefully states that nationalism was, in the past, a huge source of wars and conflict, and this is an obvious downside.  He thinks though that this is a thing of the past, and we shouldn't worry much about that anymore.

I think he is delusional on this point.  Nationalism may well improve the economy, but wars are still happening and they aren't gone forever.  Nationalism is a danger to humanity at large, particularly since one of our greatest existential threats, nuclear war, is vastly more likely to occur between two states in the throes of nationalist ideas. I am totally willing to take a hit to my standard of living to push the possibility of war further to the wayside, and it isn't even close.

Anyone who thinks that nationalism isn't setting us on the warpath anymore should look carefully at the US and the wars it has been continuously involved in for the past several decades.  Would Russia have been involved in the military actions it has over the past few years if it weren't so tightly in the grasp of militant nationalism?  I think not.

While I disagree with some of Exodus, I do think it raises a great many useful points.  If you haven't thought a lot about immigration from a variety of viewpoints you will probably learn a few things, and the book is easy to read and clear.  One final caveat though - the author likes to use formulas and graphs to make points, and sometimes they are misleading.  You can't take an enormously complicated topic, boil it down to 2 numbers, and then pretend that putting those numbers in a formula gives you good data out the other side.  Economists are fond of simple math representing labyrinthine issues, and such behaviour should be given a generous helping of side eye.

The true war

I finished Pursuit of Power:  Europe 1815-1914.  This book was the first that I started reading in my Stuff People Recommended project, but it took me a long time to finish both because of length and density.  If you intend on reading it I suggest investing in steel toe boots - if you drop the book you will need them.

This book is the story of Europe from the Napoleonic Wars to WW1.  It covers a vast range of topics from political intrigue to wars and lines of control through to labour disputes, technology, and economics.  Pursuit of Power is incredibly well researched and the author clearly knows his stuff.  You will come out the other side with a dizzying array of facts, should you make it through.

The trick is making it through.  The book is not light reading.  Every mention of a person includes their birth and death date.  There are endless lists of things and odd tangents with highly specific details that don't fit well into a narrative.

Speaking of which, the book doesn't have a narrative.  That isn't necessarily a criticism or a form of praise, just a fact.  You do see trends of course as you go through all the data, but the author isn't trying to push a particular viewpoint or tell a story.  He is presenting well researched facts, that is all.  If you want an arc, or characters about which you know something, you will not find it here.  If what you want is a wild flurry of interesting tidbits of knowledge though, you will find exactly what you are looking for.

I did come away from reading this book with a few insights that I think are worth sharing.  First off it is clear from reading it that our current way of discussing and viewing history as a story of nation states battling one another is deeply flawed.  For example, many of the rebellions in Europe in this period ended when the rebels ousted their monarch and then another country invaded, destroyed the rebels, put a new monarch in place, and left.  The key battle wasn't country vs. country, but aristocrats vs. peasants.  The aristocrats in Germany wouldn't abide a rebellion in a nearby country because those uppity peasants can't be allowed to get ideas!  It was common to see other countries simply install a random noble as king in a newly minted country and then walk away, all to keep the lower classes under control.

The peasants were often tricked into thinking that the real war was them vs. some other country, when in fact they should have been seeing it as a war of all peasant vs. all the upper classes.  The writings of Marx make a lot more sense to me now that I see this more clearly.

I also acquired a new appreciation for the effects of economics and business on societies with much more primitive science.  Reading about how railways affected the price of wheat and thus dramatically changed farmers lives in nations far away was fascinating.  A railway in France that allows a French farmer to sell crops at a much lower cost because of lower shipping prices can destroy the life of a Russian peasant when their crops now aren't worth selling.

Additionally I have come around to a new way of thinking about why democracies with substantial freedom and rights for individuals have become so successful. The liberties of a modern democracy improve the efficiency of a country dramatically over a oppressive dictatorship.  I think the reason we see so many countries moving in that direction over time is simply because a country run like that gets rich.  We aren't living in a more democratic, free world because that is righteous... we are living that way because societies like that *win* on the battlefield of money.

Reading Pursuit of Power will teach you many things.  It will take a lot of time and it will sometimes feel like a slog, but you will come out the other end with a great deal of insight, and more than a few interesting facts you can spit out at parties.  

Throwing stuff away

There is a voice in my head that is desperately worried about wasting stuff.  It is the thing that causes me to always eat whatever food in the fridge is the oldest because I cannot stand the idea of tossing food out.  It is that same voice that gets me to use shoes until they have multiple huge holes in them and my feet start sliding out.  It also triggers when I see other people doing things that waste resources, even if the things they are doing are otherwise pretty neat.

For example, I recently have been watching some youtube videos about people making wacky inventions with their own equipment.  They use 3D printers, plasma cutters, and all kinds of high end tools to produce things like bullet powered baseball bats, automatic pool cues, and supersonic pitching machines.

It is neat to see a slow motion shot of a baseball moving at Mach 1.35 ripping through nine baseball gloves while hardly slowing down.

It bothers me to see all those gloves thrown out though.

It isn't a matter of cost at all.  I know the people making supersonic baseball cannons aren't worried about the couple hundred dollars they spent on baseball gloves.  It isn't much money in their budget, and it isn't my money, but I still *hate* watching all that perfectly good material be tossed away.  Bits of plastic, hunks of metal, and all the other detritus of construction pile up when these videos are made and it all just gets sent to a landfill.

These creators are doing neat things, entertaining people, and even educating them to some extent.  That part is all good.  No matter how much I recognize that though, I can't quite ignore the cost of what they are doing.

Making youtube videos about home construction projects is a miniscule part of the waste our society creates though.  It is just that it is easy to see the waste there when it is captured on a video.

By far worse than these creative types are extremely rich people.  If you have a big house, you are creating a lot of waste.  If you have five big houses, you are creating dramatically more waste, and doing so for far less return.  Four of those houses are sitting empty, and all the energy you use to maintain them and all the materials used to create them are wasted.  When I hear about rich people working in one city and then flying home to another far away place constantly it makes me frustrated and bitter.  Not at the money, because it isn't my money, but just at the ridiculous use of resources.

This sort of feeling is why when my vaccuum broke and I could no longer repair it myself I hunted down someone who fixes up old vaccuums and gave my vaccuum to him.  I did not do this for the money, certainly, since no money changed hands, but simply because I wanted the parts of my vaccuum to be used for something if possible.  Some of it is going to be junk, but I can't avoid that, so I tried to make sure as much of it as possible got used.

I wear shirts until they are big holes in them.  I don't do this because I am cheap, but rather because I cannot stomach creating more pointless waste when I have no need to do so.  The shirt still works, so I shall not toss it.  I don't mind spending money.  I do hate wasting resources.

When a cost is something that is solely borne by me, that makes decisions easy.  If the only cost of a thing is money, then I can make a simple decision of whether or not to acquire that thing.  The hard part is that the resources to create things are shared across all people, and the cost of throwing them away is much more difficult to calculate.

Breaking stuff

I was playing in my World of Warcraft raid last night and I was being terrible.  The boss would get ready to do his gigantic attack that we all had to dodge away from, and I would click to move.... and nothing would happen.  I would die, and let the team down.  This is an easy thing to deal with if it is 100% of the time - the mouse is broken, and you move on.  But when things work 98% of the time, you wonder if you are just bad and failed to click.  There is always that doubt in your mind.

You can't keep playing with a 2% failure rate.  The boss is going to make you 'React or die!' 50 times, and failing once means you die and your group loses.

Finally I concluded that I could not keep playing.  Thankfully Wendy and I are using the same mouse so we swapped hers in and I got to keep on going.  That feeling when you play properly and get confirmation that yes, it was the equipment failing, not yourself... priceless.

However, I now have a mouse that works most of the time.  Videos on the internet assured me that all I had to do was tear the mouse apart and clean the tiny metal piece that gets all gunked up over time.  I didn't have a lot to lose, so I tore the mouse apart.  The metal piece was immaculate though, so clearly the internet videos were wrong.  

Upon reassembling the mouse the left click didn't work at all.

In some ways this is better.  At least this way I don't have my money demon telling me I should keep on using the mouse until it is well and truly broken.  I can pretend to keep on using a mouse that works 98% of the time even though it makes me sad.  

I can't use a mouse that doesn't click at all though.

I tore the mouse apart and reassembled it a couple of times and finally concluded that all my attempts at fixing it have resulted in the tiny metal piece being ever so slightly bent.  Wendy and I attempted to get it back to its pre intervention state, but we failed.  It turns out that even a slightly bent metal piece is totally useless, and the mouse is junk.

After only 8 months of use!  Junk!

Admittedly that mouse has had some hard living.  My hands always make all of my peripherals gunky and gross, and I have been on the computer *hard* since the pandemic hit.  That mouse has not been treated lightly.

Still, it irks me that I couldn't fix it properly.  All the internet videos assured me it would be easy and foolproof, but apparently I am fool enough that I broke it anyway.

Little debts

Pinkie Pie was put in a difficult situation the other day.  She went out to find bits for a Hallowe'en costume for herself with a friend.  We gave her $40 to buy the bits, and told her this was half of her birthday present.  She was happy with this.  When she arrived at the costume place, they didn't have what she wanted.  They had something her friend wanted though, and her friend had no money.  Pinkie Pie wasn't too sure what to do about this, but eventually agreed to buy the thing for her friend.  This got extra complicated when they arrived at the register and the stuff ended up costing a lot more than she had thought, and used up almost all of her money.

These sorts of situations aren't easy to navigate.  How much do you loan to friends?  How hard do you lean on them to get the money back?  What do you do when you have the money... but it kind of isn't your money?  Are you able to say "Never mind, I am not buying that" once you get to the register in a store?"

Lessons like this aren't ones they teach in school.

Pinkie Pie ended up paying for the stuff.  She came home and talked to Wendy, and Wendy decided that this counted as Pinkie Pie's birthday present still, but if Pinkie Pie could manage to get the money from the other kid to repay us all that money that was loaned, we would buy her another birthday present.

This didn't sit well with me.  I didn't do anything for a while, but eventually decided I needed to speak up.  The other kid had paid back $8 by then, and we were recording the money owing on the fridge.  I did not like looking at that recording of the debt, and it made me uncomfortable.  Pinkie Pie has to learn how to deal with debt with her friends, especially friends who have different ideas about how to manage money than she does.  I can't fix that.  But Pinkie Pie's friends owing *me* money... that doesn't sit right.  The extreme imbalance in our power levels in the situation combined with me not actually signing on to this whole debt situation is a mess.

I don't want to put Pinkie Pie in the position of enforcing a debt between me and a kid.  That isn't fair to her, and I know how much being caught in other people's debts upsets me when I have no control over the situation.  I think if you are the one enforcing a debt you need to be the one who can forgive the debt if you choose to.

We talked about it and decided that we should give $8 back to Pinkie Pie and tell her that she doesn't have to pay us back.  She lent the money to the other kid, and she is welcome to collect it or not as she sees fit.  We are removing ourselves from the situation and that $40 is entirely Pinkie Pie's problem, not ours.  That doesn't make it easy for her necessarily, but at least she isn't caught between her friends and her parents now.  She can write it off, or try to get it back, or whatever, but it is only her that is involved in the situation.

Lending money to friends is messy.  We all have to learn that, one way or another.  If she ends up learning how to cope with this and it only costs her $32, then it was money well spent.  

Algorithms, smart and stupid

Facebook has been shoving a new ad at me.  I am full of ambivalence about it, because I both want to praise the targetting of the ad and also ridicule it.

The ad was for a jaw exercising device.   It looks like a donut shaped piece of silicone, and the idea is that you chew on it to give yourself a chiselled jawline.  The actor in the ad talked about being 48 and how he used the device to get back his youthful jaw.

I am 41, and into fitness, so that much they got right.

Unfortunately for them, they also assumed that I am ignorant and desperate.

You can't fix saggy skin with muscle exercises.  You also can't remove subcutaneous fat with targetted regimens.  You *can* generally remove subcutaneous fat from your body with exercise, but you sure as hell can't pick a spot and nuke the fat right there.  This jaw chiselling device is a ridiculous scam.  It is no different from the Ab Blasters I saw advertised on TV when I was young.  Exercise is good for you, sure, but you can't pick a spot and nuke it!  You can pick a spot and make it strong, but the body removes fat where it wants to.

Facebook is hit and miss with these things.  It does aim a lot of board game and video game ads at me, which is accurate, but it also really tries to sell me trucks, which is a total non starter.

But the truck ads are understandable.  I am in a age and income bracket where buying a vehicle is plausible.  The most outrageous miss I have ever seen is when FB started sending surrogate mother ads at me.  Much as I might like to help infertile people to have children, I lack some key things that are required for that endeavour.  Shouldn't FB have my sex sorted by now?

I can't quite sort out how much to respect algorithms.  Sending a gym rat like me ads for adjustable home dumbbells during a time when I can't go to a gym?  Great idea!  (I am not buying, but it is a well targetted ad.)  But singing lessons?  Not so much.

The algorithms are getting better, and sometimes they do make great decisions, but we are a long way away from Skynet.

Fancy boots

When I buy clothes I don't buy fancy things.  I buy something solid, sturdy, but cheap.  I always thought it absurd to pay a lot of money for clothes, because why spend cash just to put on a display?  Being dressed up and being around people who are wearing expensive things makes me feel out of place, so I would rather avoid situations where that is required.

A few years ago Wendy bought boots.  It was quite odd, because she brought me with her and got my opinion on the colour and fit, but then asked me to hang out outside the store while she paid for them.  I wasn't sure why, until she explained that she wanted to buy them before I looked at the price and had a heart attack over it.  Blundstones are excellent boots, she told me, but the $250 price tag would have made me weep.

I wouldn't try to talk her out of buying such a thing, but I definitely would have choked and sputtered when I first saw the tag, that much is certain.  Spending more than $70 on boots?  Madness!

But recently my inlaws told me they wanted to buy me boots for Christmas.  My old boots were perfectly fine still, as they only had a couple of 5cm holes in them, but other people have different standards than me, I guess.  I know they would prefer I buy something of high quality and damn the expense, so I went out and dropped a giant pile of money on boots.  It made me twitch a little, slapping down my credit card, but I did it.

For the first time ever I am wearing fashionable boots in winter.  Aside from dress shoes for work and formal events I have never actually worn footwear that I would consider stylish, but now it is happening on a daily basis.

Perhaps these things aren't stylish where you are, or maybe they aren't practical, but in Toronto in the winter these boots are where it is at.  You need a little bit of insulation for the 0 degree weather, and you need them to be waterproof for the slush, but you don't need gigantic boots that go up to the knee either, we don't have enough snow for that.  These boots are exactly it, good looking, trendy, and completely practical.

I have even gotten reactions to them from other people.  Those reactions have all been "Dude, you paid real money for clothes?  What has happened to the Sky I know that wears all cheap stuff all the time?"

It is bizarre to be walking down the street knowing that some people would look at the stuff I am wearing and think that I am the sort of person that buys things because they are a symbol.  It is like I am some sort of different person entirely.  Who is this man?

There is a Sam Vimes theory of boots that says that you need to buy expensive boots because they will cost four times as much but last ten times as long as the cheap ones.  So far Wendy's boots have stood up extremely well, so the theory is working for the moment.  Perhaps I have been foolish all these years, buying cheap stuff that only lasted me five years and these new boots will last me twenty years and be worth every penny.

Perhaps not.

In any case I am going to wear them until they are a pile of leather scraps, because I certainly don't want to buy a second quality pair of boots in my lifetime.  One should do!

A conflict of trains of thought

I am watching.

When I am on the streetcar here in Toronto I can't help but watch people board to see if they paid their fare.  Mostly they do, but there are a significant number who simply walk past the pad and don't tap a card.

Some are under 13 and are free anyway.

Some have already paid on another leg of their route and don't need to pay again.

Some are just refusing to pay and cheating the system.

It bothers me to see this, but I can't look away.  I haven't ever done anything about it, because obviously I can't distinguish between the people who are transferring from another route and those who are refusing to pay, but it irks me and I can't help but leaping to conclusions. 

Doubly frustrating is that I halfways agree with those who are skipping out on paying.  Public transit costing money is stupid.  We waste huge amounts of money just collecting that money.  Installing card readers, taking payments, having people standing around to explain how to pay, all of these things aren't free.  We should just tax more and make all public transit free!  Why did we start wasting so much time and effort collecting tiny fees for this anyway?  We don't do so for roads!

I know why.  The poor can't be allowed to just get things for free!  Roads are for those with more wealth, public transit is for the poor, and giving the poor a free ride is anathema.  Rich people already have it easy, might as well keep on with that. 

We have bus fares because of classism, pure and simple.

(If you have been around here a while, you will note that "Because classism, obviously!" is my answer to most things.)

I do think that while we are all generally paying for transit you should pay for transit.  Dumping costs onto other people is a shitty thing to do, especially if paying those costs isn't a serious burden for you.  But I can't help but hope that the new system is a step on the slow road to getting rid of paying for public transit altogether.

I will definitely continue hoping and advocating for free public transit.  Yes, it will cost me in taxes, and yes, I will happily pay those taxes to avoid the waste that comes with collecting tiny fees.  But in the meanwhile I will keep watching to see who pays and who doesn't.  Not because I should, but because I can't stop.

Maids and cooks and chauffeurs for all

The internet has been shovelling ads at me for food delivery.  Uber Eats and Skip the Dishes in particular have paid Google a small fortune to try to get me to buy food on the internet and have it delivered.

It is all a scam, a show, a grandoise lie.

These companies want me to believe that I can have servants.  I don't have to do the dishes, cook food, or drive.  Best of all, this is all extremely cheap!  It is almost too good to be true.

It is too good to be true.

I can have servants, yes.  I can get food delivered to me, I can have people show up to drive me places, and I can skip on the whole 'paying for it' bit.  But somebody always pays, and in this case it is the people doing those deliveries and driving those cars.

Notice how no company is offering food delivery services where employees that get a salary, benefits, and vacation do deliveries using company vehicles?  Know why that is?  Because no customers will pay the cost associated with such deliveries.

People doing these deliveries are doing so out of desperation or ignorance.  The amount they get paid isn't nearly enough to pay for the costs of car maintenance, gas, and a reasonable wage.  They get an hourly wage that works for now, and then they get hit with all the bills later, and the companies that hired them get rich off of the depreciation of the workers' assets.

If you think food delivery can profitably happen for $5, you are delusional.  Companies aren't offering that because they are efficient, they are offering that because they are ruining the lives of the gig workers who do the actual deliveries for them.  This isn't a company coming in to do things better, it is just another scam to siphon money off from those who are desperate and funnel it upwards.

What Uber and Skip the Dishes and Lyft are doing is simple.  They aren't employers paying people to deliver a service, they are banks offering loans to poor people at heinous rates.  They are doing the same thing as Cash Money and Money Mart and other similar payday loan businesses do - finding someone who is desperate for cash right now and leveraging them for profit.  They ruin people.  That is the *only* way their business model works.  If you had to pay the real cost of your Uber ride you wouldn't do it, and old style taxis would come back into vogue.  If you had to front the actual cost of your food delivery you wouldn't bother because it would cost as much for the delivery as it did for the food.

We can't all have servants.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to exploit you, or the servants.

You actually have to cook.  Or you have to drive.  Or you have to fucking *pay* for those things.  If the deal seems to good to be true, it is.

Bribing me with my own money

The Ontario government is trying to bribe me to hate teachers.  Recently the government decided to slash education funding in high school, aiming to increase class sizes up to 45 kids in some instances, and start a big trend towards mandatory online learning.  Right when Pinkie Pie is about to head off to high school... great.  When elementary teachers decided to strike in protest, the government offered to give money to parents to offset childcare costs.  They are all about not spending money on educating kids, but when it comes to tossing it around randomly at parents who vote, well, there is money for that!

I have seen arguments that these changes actually aren't so bad.  After all, in university courses often have more than 100 students, and much learning takes place online.

This is true, of course.  For people like me for whom school was easy neither of these things is all that bad.  I could have easily done high school by reading websites or in huge classrooms.  No problem.

But I am not the only student, nor am I the average student.  I am one of the top people out there in terms of finding school easy.  You could teach me that content in any pants-on-head stupid way and I would get it.  Other students will not.

Our focus should not be on whether the top students can survive, it should be on whether the struggling students can thrive.  This is the metric where the new changes are a disaster.  Kids who struggle with terrible home situations, learning disabilities, poverty, or other challenges need teachers who have the time to spare to help them.  They need educators who can see their difficulties and step in to help them.  "Here is a website" is a nightmare for those kids, and they will learn nothing. 

I have also seen arguments that online learning will be good because it can introduce competition into the school system.  This is foolishness incarnate.  Competition just means that we will find some way to score students and then we will pay companies to raise student scores.  There won't be measurements for emotional regulation, no allowances for outside challenges will be made, and the end result will be companies producing content designed explicitly to get higher grades on a standardized test.  The ability to get a high score on a specific high school test is worthless to employers and terrible for general education. 

For kids that are struggling we need teachers who can help them, and we need those teachers to be managing 20-25 kids, not 40+.  Trashing education is exactly the sort of thing that sends countries spiralling downward.

Right now my government has decided to torch the future, and their response to criticisms is to blame the teachers or tell people to go to private school.  They are trying to bribe parents to support their actions, and it is reprehensible.

I am glad that the teachers are taking a stand to push back against this awful nonsense.  Taking money from children's education to pump it into stock portfolios is foolish governance based on the Conservative philosophy of taking a dump on those who are poor or struggling to give to the rich.  It must not stand.

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.

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.

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.

Corporate Pride

It is Pride month, and in Toronto that is a pretty big deal.  I always ignore the big parade because the idea of travelling to a spot that will be jammed full of noisy people is more terrifying than exciting, but I certainly support the whole thing - from a safe distance.  Toronto has had some struggles in recent years with figuring out who gets to be in Pride, especially with the police.  The police seem to think that everyone should just forget their role in attacking queer people and sparking Pride in the first place, but faugh to that.

That part seems easy to me.  Keep out the people who actively assaulted and harassed you in years past.

It is trickier for me to know what to think about banks.  Banks love to be part of pride, using rainbow symbols, having floats, etc.  On one hand I am hesitant to embrace big corporations trying to redeem their images with temporary shows of progressive thought, but on the other hand their money and enthusiasm does amplify the Pride signal.  I have seen plenty of people giving opinions, and they don't seem to find much in the way of agreement.

Pride should be about queer people, goes one line of thought.  Scrubbing the reputation of staid businesses isn't what Pride is about.  Banks would have been just as happy condemning queer people if that was good for the bottom line, so why should they be allowed in? 

But during Pride month there are so many rainbows, and that has to matter to young queer kids trying to find acceptance.  Just seeing all those businesses desperately trying to show how much they support queer people is something in itself.  It also sends a message to the bigots who aren't going to change their minds - it says that bigotry isn't welcome in public, and you had best keep your gay bashing to yourself.  That helps in ways that are hard to measure.

It isn't totally clear cut either way, at least to my eyes.  Right now it feels like big companies trying to be part of Pride is a net positive, but that comes with the caveat that it will only persist as long as they see profit in it.  They are uneasy allies, right now, people who are helping out but who could backstab at any time, even if they probably won't.  I would probably have lots of extra feelings, maybe feelings on both sides of the issue, if I were queer myself and had a greater emotional stake in it.  Having lots of queer friends and partners doesn't grant that same lived experience, even if it does cement me firmly on one side.

The Pride organization seems to agree with me.  Take their money, let them spread the message, but keep an eye on them, just in case.

Burnout

The Fyre Festival is an example of legendary incompetence turning into spectacular failure.  It was a festival pitched as a luxury music experience in a remote, tropical location that was superbly marketed, but which completely failed in execution.  People who were promised villas on the beach got leaky tents, chefs serving sushi were replaced with cheese sandwiches, and all the bands pulled out and the festival collapsed after everyone had already arrived.

I just watched a documentary on Netflix called Fyre about the festival, cataloging its initial meteoric rise and subsequent implosion.  It was clear that this wasn't a series of unfortunate accidents, but rather calculated fraud layered on top of idiotic optimism and mismanagement.  I liked the show a lot, and I recommend it if you want to watch evil fools fail.

The thing about the documentary that I found most fascinating though is the way they marketed the festival.  They got social media influencers to post about it and make it a meme, and sold out all of their heinously expensive tickets in no time at all.  I know that social media influencers are a thing... but the idea of following them, much less buying shit they are shilling, boggles my mind.

Why would I care what any of those people say?  Aren't they just mostly spending their days composing photos to make you think their lives are better than yours, and then trying to sell you shit that in theory will give you the life they are pretending to have?

I think I have a weird relationship to my phone compared to most people.  Health professionals insist that you need to leave your phone away from your bed so your notifications don't keep you awake all night.  I can't fathom this.  Why the fuck would you have your phone near your bed?  If anything gives me notifications I uninstall it!  Stop bothering me!

I can look at an instagram model and appreciate the curves, or marvel at the gigantic biceps.  But following them to get more pictures?  Nonsensical, is what that is.  It isn't that I am claiming some perfect rationalism that makes me immune to sales pitches (though I am about as resistant as people get), rather I honestly can't fathom what it is that goes on in people's brains when they follow social media personalities so fervently.

Following celebrities?  I am barely interested in following people I actually know, and I curate my facebook feed to maximize 'people who link thoughtful and clever articles'.

But apparently just knowing how to get followers on instagram is a career option, so apparently it is me who is the freak.  Nobody is paying me gazillions of dollars or offering free stuff just for a mention on my blog, so by the logic of capitalism I am doing this *wrong*.

I guess I should start posting pictures of my fancy life, spending time oiling my arms and learning to use filters to put up muscle shots, and telling people they can have it all.

Or not.  Because the prospect of doing that regularly makes my skin crawl.

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.

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.

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.