Facts don't care about your feelings

I just finished reading the book Factfulness.  It is a book that constantly repeats things I have been yelling about for years to anyone who will listen, so it should be no surprise that I loved it.  The book leads off with 12 questions about the world, mostly relating to human wellbeing and trends.  All questions have 3 answers, A, B, C and the average person gets 2 correct.

You read that right.  Guessing at random would give you 4 correct, but the average person is significantly worse than random guessing.  The author of the book talks about how in all his years administering these questions to huge numbers of people one person ever got 11 correct, and nobody got 12.

I got 11 correct, and I definitely should have got 12, but I rushed through.  That isn't because I am smarter than everyone else, but because the author of the book was trying to make a point, showing how badly humans do on specific sorts of knowledge, and that is a specific sort of knowledge I focus on.

The idea behind the book is that we are terrible at interpreting certain sorts of data and the information we are exposed to predisposes us to come to incorrect conclusions.  The book clarifies a lot of important facts that we usually get wrong, and provides techniques for preventing yourself from reaching those incorrect conclusions in future.  It is a combination of science, sociology, and psychology.  Through reading it we learn about what scientific research and facts tell us about the human world, why we get it wrong, and how we can make our brains be better at this sort of thing.

The key takeaway is that a lot of things are getting better.  For example, I have gotten into a few heated discussions about pollution where people tried to convince me that pollution is getting worse everywhere.  I brought up air quality in Toronto, and these people stated that it is getting worse every year.  I pointed out that we can falsify this both anecdotally and scientifically - just think about the smog pouring out of car tailpipes in decades past, and look at car tailpipes today.  Or, you know, you can just look up the numbers and see that air quality in Toronto has been constantly improving ever since we were able to measure it.

Lots of things are like this.  People see disasters on the news or charities begging for help with images of catastrophe and fail to realize that while individual problems exist, the global trend for nearly all measures of human well being is constantly improving.  We miss the forest for the trees.

Of course that doesn't mean we should rest on our laurels!  Both the author and I are convinced that we should do more for environmental causes and assisting those less fortunate in the world, but we should do that while being aware of the successes we have had.  "We have a lot more to do" can go along with "Many things are improving rapidly" without contradiction.

Everyone should read this book.  If all you get from it is a new understanding of global trends it will be worth it, but you can get so much more.  It can give you tools to be a better activist, a better environmentalist, and a better thinker.

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.

Party for the people

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hate to say it, but I agree

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Folks hate trash

Earlier in July I went to my first music festival - the Hillside folk music festival near Guelph, Ontario, Canada.  I had heard stories from friends about the festival but they didn't give me a good sense of what it would be like because the stories all started with "Person X got SO HIGH" and then proceeded to detail the antics that followed.  Watching people who are way too high be ridiculous can be fun and all but I imagined that there must be more to the experience than that.

Other people really took the preparation thing way more seriously than I did.  They listened to all the bands ahead of time to figure out which ones they wanted to hear, made careful schedules with each act ranked in a priority system, and had playlists built of everything they would likely hear at the festival.

I just showed up figuring I would listen to stuff that sounded good and go find something else if it sounded bad.

My strategy worked fine!  I don't care that much about music so just wandering around listening to what seemed good to me was successful.  You might wonder why a person that doesn't much care about music would go to a music festival, and the answer is that I wanted to hang out with the people I went with and I wanted to try something new.  In the end my response was predictable - I thought the music was fine but no big deal, I quite enjoyed the company, and now I know what a music festival is like.

One thing that greatly surprised me was the amount of trash at the festival.  I worked a couple of rock concerts as cleanup crew when I was a teenager and the result of those concerts was disgusting.  I recall the floor of the concert hall being slick with goo composed of sweat, beer, piss, and who knows what else.  The entire place was filled with sharp, shattered bits of plastic stuck to the floor by that tacky goo and it was revolting, as well as hideously difficult to clean up properly.  That disaster was created in only a few hours so I expected a music festival that goes over three days to be much worse.  I had images in my head of wading through drifts of trash and dodging puddles of vomit.

It wasn't remotely like that.  Hillside is run by a bunch of people with serious environmentalist leanings so all the cutlery and plates were reusable and they had volunteers washing them.  Everyone got a mug to use to drink with, and no disposable cups were available.  At the end of the three day festival I looked under the tables as saw an average of one piece of trash per table, which is mind boggling coming from my experiences younger in life.  I was extremely impressed with the operation, and surprised at what they had accomplished.  It takes a lot of organization and will to make this sort of thing happen.

There certainly were people who were drunk and high but it wasn't a problem.  Going back to those rock concerts of my youth, I recall drunk men moshing and screaming and trashing everything.  It must have been terrifying for some people - I was big enough that it was bizarre but not frightening.  But Hillside people displayed their drunkenness by asking lots of questions about my tattoos and being overly friendly before wandering off... hardly a problem.

At one point the sky opened and the rain came thundering down, forcing all the people to huddle under tents to wait it out.

Well, not *all* the people.  I just walked out into the rain clad in just my kilt and stood there, arms outstretched, letting the fury of the storm slam into me.  I closed my eyes and just stood soaking up the rain, feeling it hammer onto my body.  When I opened my eyes I had acquired three disciples who were standing in a row with me matching my stance, enjoying the rain.  They told me that they were hiding from the rain and when they saw me revelling in it all they realized I had it right, everyone else had it wrong, and it was time to stand in the rain.

Glorious.

I went barefoot throughout most of the weekend and ended up with a splinter in my foot.  A quick trip to the first aid tent sorted that out, and I learned that the first aid tent was mostly a place for people with foot injuries to get help.  I guess there are a lot of barefoot hippies like me at this particular festival - no real surprise there.

Bag of bags

The Liberal government here in Canada just announced that they are going to be banning single use plastic by 2021.  Naturally this isn't going to be a *full* ban.  They will cave to all kinds business pressure in the name of 'being competitive' but hopefully a substantial amount of single use plastic will stop. 

The phrase competitive is constantly brought up in these sorts of debates as though it is some kind of magic bullet, when it so often is meaningless or silly.  Who cares if businesses are inconvenienced, if they are selling in the Canadian market against other businesses here who are equally inconvenienced?  If your unique business model requires generating loads of trash and plastic waste and your competitors do not, you *should* go out of business because you are depending on hurting society and government largesse in cleanup to maintain your bottom line, and the rest of us shouldn't put up with that.  If everyone in competition is doing it, then you all change your practices and prices together, no big deal.

Naturally the Conservatives are against this, because of the effects it might have on business.  This is something I always find hilarious, as though the important thing in the world is business.  Don't worry about humans - corporations are the crucial thing, goes their thinking.  Corporations should exist to serve humans, not the other way around.  If a decision is good for people and bad for corporations... then it is good for people!  Easy!

I personally try to work on not using single use plastic, but it is rough.  When you are a tiny slice of the market it isn't in most companies best interests to provide you with options, so we really need the government to bring the big club down and force it.  I prefer soft enforcement, like a $1 tax on every disposable plastic bag, for example, to hard enforcement, but I will take what I can get.

If only we could actually elect someone willing to put environmental issues like this as high on the agenda as their impact on people actually warrants... but for the moment that is a bit of a pipe dream.

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.

Wine, of the fancy pants variety

For years now Wendy and I have gotten our wine via bottle-it-yourself places.  If you bottle your wine yourself you don't pay the extremely large tax rate, which I assume was meant to apply to people making their own wine at home.  I feel strange using such a service because they are so obviously a ridiculous tax dodge that brings no value whatsoever.  They do all the work up until I show up at their door and use their machines to put wine into my bottles.  If I am bad at bottling, they will basically do it for me, removing even the paper thin excuse for tax avoidance.

I don't much like patronising businesses whose entire model is 'tax loophole!' but it does save me a lot on wine costs and I also hate paying full price.  Hatred and bitterness either way, I guess.

One thing that has come up over the years is the terrible ugliness of the wine bottles.  I put labels on them each time so we know what they are, but I have no desire to spend hours scrubbing and scraping to get the labels off, so the labels just stack up as I put new ones over top of the old ones.  This time round some of the labels were five deep on the bottles and they began to peel off, creating quite a mess.

This is what comes of years of labels of different sizes slapped onto bottles and eventually stripped off in a slapdash sort of fashion.  I put new labels on these of course but the new labels did not cover up the mess at all.  Every bottle still has lots of shredded paper and glue sticking out from under the new label, and naturally the labels aren't sticking perfectly so the new ones peel off some on their own.

I don't mind this in the least.

Hell, I like it.  I take a perverse pride in using things as long as possible.  If my shoes look a ruin but are functional I take it as a point of pride - I am not wasting materials by buying new shoes!  I like to reuse bottles and I don't care at all that it shows, rather I am happy to model the behaviour I want to see in the world - reusing of stuff.

Wendy is not on board with this.  In theory she loves the idea of conservation and reusing things, but in practice she cringes at the idea of serving wine to guests in a bottle covered in ripped paper and glue stains.  I am filled with glee at the idea of serving wine while saying "See this haggard old bottle?  The wine in here was CHEAP.  Woo, inexpensive inebriation!"

Other people don't seem to buy into that so much.  They usually like the idea of reuse, but they really seem to think I ought to put a little more effort into my presentation.

The trouble is it isn't a matter of laziness.  I don't eschew presentation because I can't be bothered.  I do it rough and ready because I actually prefer it that way.  If someone offered to make all my bottles of wine pretty and high class for free I would turn it down - that isn't what I want.

I am going to continue down this path, I think, peeling off huge masses of labels only once they become totally unworkable.  I would happily just stop using labels altogether but other people have strictly forbidden me to do this on the basis that they want to know what they are drinking.  I figure it is all red wine right, so who cares?  You aren't going to turn it away because it is Barolo instead of Cabarnet, are you?  So just drink it!  But others have this thing about wanting to have a name for the stuff they are about to pour down their throats.  Fancy pants attitude, that.

Hidden costs

The construction going on beside my place is bonkers.  There are a half dozen high rises going up within 2 blocks of me and a subway line being put it right past my building.  I knew there would be dust, noise, and inconvenience but there has been on particular side effect I didn't expect - cement splatters.

I am on the 15th floor of my building so you might think that I would be free of direct detritus but you would be wrong.  My balcony has little spatters of cement on it and so do my windows.  Being 15 floors up there is no way for me to try to clean them off, and I doubt the regular window cleaners are prepared to remove concrete!

It does make sense though.  The sixty storey monstrosities going up right beside me haul tons of concrete up to the top to build things and along the way bits of it get caught up in the breeze and wander down to my place.

This is a shot of a cement glob stuck to my window and the two buildings which is might have drifted off from.

I like building up, rather than building out.  Paving farmland is far worse than construction here.  What I wonder though is if anyone thought that they might have to do something for the people who have concrete bits rained down on them from these mighty glass edifices.  Probably not, and I will just have to accept that slight marring of my view from now on.  There are a great many environmental concerns that a develope must address when building but somehow I imagine that this isn't one of them.

We have air

The premise that humanity needs to go to another planet because Earth is too polluted is a common one in science fiction movies and it drives me bonkers.  Somehow writers don't seem to get that even if Earth gets nuked, climate change runs amok, and resources get used up, it is still about a billion times better than anywhere else.

You know what Earth, even a wrecked up Earth, has that Mars and Titan and Ganymede don't have?  AIR.  We have AIR here, air a human can safely breathe.  That alone makes Earth, even a sad, down on its luck Earth, better than anyplace else.

But you know what else Earth has?  Livable temperature ranges.  Even with climate change Earth has temperatures in the -50 to +50 range.  We can survive those.  Mars is -60C.  Titan is -179C.

Our water here is polluted.  Our resources are being used.  But you know what Mars and Titan and everywhere else doesn't have?  Pure water!  Fossil fuels!  Strong sunlight for growing things and generating power!  They don't have that stuff.

I mean, unless you go to Venus or Mercury.  They have lots of solar power available.  Also instant death, either by burning or disintegration, depending on which surface you land on.

It irks me even more when this sort of thing is used as a justification for colonization of other planets.  Other planets are useful for research, certainly, but we haven't colonized Antarctica, and it is about a billion times more hospitable than anywhere off planet, so until we bother with that, then we have no business whatever thinking that colonizing other planets is a useful endeavour.

Maybe we will try to colonize other planets because GET EM, THAT'S WHY but let us not pretend it is useful for anything.

I just watched the movie The Titan and it set me off.  The whole premise was standard nonsense - the Earth is in rough shape, so we will genetically engineer people to live on the surface of Titan, not requiring oxygen, and capable of hanging out in -179C temperatures.  If we can do that why the hell aren't we genetically engineering people to live on the parts of Earth that are wrecked?  It has be about a billion times easier and cheaper.  The Titan was also a complete piece of garbage from about fifteen other angles too, but the idiotic premise was the cherry on top of a poop cake.

I know, I know, I shouldn't get all worked up about sci fi movies having idiotic premises.  But the thing is, they don't have to be stupid.  You could have a premise like Seven Eves, which requires humanity to find a new home in a way that absolutely makes sense.  I don't mind people making up worlds with new cosmic phenomena or lightsabers or whatever but I do mind when the worlds they make up don't hold together at all and the characters' decisions make no sense.

In the zone

I just finished reading Zone One, a book about a zombie apocalypse written by Colson Whitehead.  It is written about a 3 day period after the rebuilding phase of the apocalypse has begun.  The government has begun to reform, people are organizing, and the protagonist of the book is part of an effort to clean out the last zombies from a section of New York which they refer to as Zone One.

When I was reading it the whole thing seemed kind of silly.  After all, with 99% of the human race wiped out what possible use could New York be?  Big cities would be useful for a portion of the zombie apocalypse scenario where survivors are scrounging for food and tools but after that it is completely worthless.

New York, like all large cities, requires a massive multinational supply chain to keep it functional.  It needs monstrous amounts of food, fuel, and other supplies trucked, floated, and flown in to maintain the lives of the people living there.  The most important of these is fuel because food can be grown in small, low tech chunks in parks, rooftops, and boulevards.  Fuel though, that requires a robust network to get it out of the ground, refine it, and transport it to its destination.  Cities require infrastructure to support them, and that infrastructure requires people.

In this kind of disaster scenario there are some things you never have to think about again, like mattresses.  They don't break down much, there are more of them than you can go through in 100 years, and they are everywhere.  With the population decimated you can safely ignore mattresses for the foreseeable future.  Cars would be in a similar sort of state - while they would run out faster than mattresses there are going to be usable cars that happen to be under shelter and work fine for decades at least.  The problem again is fuel.

Everything in our society runs on a steady supply of fossil fuel energy and that supply requires a huge number of people and lots of organization to be workable.  Even if you ignore the marauding bands of zombies that would make long distance shipping and manufacturing impossible you just don't have enough raw people to make it work.  Our system is designed around a certain scale and when that scale suddenly changes by a couple orders of magnitude nothing works.

When you think about an apocalypse like this you quickly realize just how dependent we are on this extremely fragile system for distributing fossil fuels.  Without that *nothing* works.  We can't get around, we can't build stuff, we can't make stuff.  Everything grinds to a halt immediately and then nearly everyone starves.  Decades from now we may be a lot more able to survive such a disaster, even if it is just an epidemic that kills people but doesn't reanimate them into flesh eating monsters.  If our society is much more dependent on solar power, for example, our ability to get the juice flowing again and make our stuff work would be much greater.  Disaster mitigation may not rank highly on our normal reasons for going solar but I think it is a real benefit, as it reduces our reliance on the global oil infrastructure.

At the end of the book the reason for the war to recapture New York from the zombies is revealed, and it does make a kind of sense.  The reasons may not be good ones, but they are the sorts of reasons that humans sometimes use for stupid things, and it does hold together.

I liked the book, generally speaking, as I mostly like zombie apocalypse fiction and this is a different sort of approach to the genre than is usual.  It doesn't have a happy ending though where attractive scientists find a miraculous cure and the world emerges from disaster stronger than ever... it leans more towards darkness and horror unending.  So if depressing is your thing, go for it.

Leftovers for me

Tonight was the first of Pinkie Pie's birthday celebrations.  Last year through a series of strange events she managed to have four birthday celebrations, and that was TOO MUCH BIRTHDAY.  Mostly for me, I think Pinkie Pie was fine with it all.  This year we have kept it down to two birthdays which is much more manageable.  We and the family went out for dinner and as usual I ended up vacuuming up extra food.

Wendy gave me a quarter of her tuna salad and Pinkie Pie gave me the dregs of her tomato meat sauce.  I had an entree and an extra side soup and was still hungry - this is the power of squats.  At the end of the meal after I had a whole stack of plates in front of me there was still a plate with half a fish dinner on it.

I started at the plate.

I wanted that fish.  Veggies too, but mostly the fish.

The person who ordered the fish dinner was going to leave and it wasn't clear what was being done with the fish.

I would be perfectly happy if they packed up the fish and took it home.  I would also be happy with me eating the fish.  What would make me sad is the fish being dumped in the garbage.

But it is really awkward asking about this.  I don't want to take people's food away from them, especially if they were looking forward to taking their leftovers home.  But if I ask them if they are packing it up there is a really awkward moment where they feel pressured to give me the food and I hate applying that kind of pressure.

Other people really don't seem to care about tossing out food.  Certainly not the way I do.  Oftentimes it seems like it is an afterthought, like it hardly matters if the food gets eaten or not.  It matters to me!  Partly because I want to eat the food, partly because I can't stand the thought of perfectly good food being thrown out for no reason.

I often seem to end up in the position of springing into action when the server is whisking the food away saying "wait, wait! I want that!" and grabbing food off of the plate that is currently being transported away from the table.

People look at me so strangely when this happens.  Normally everyone seems to think I am being gross because who wants food that someone else has touched?

Me!  I want it.  Pick me, pick me!

Hell, I have a hard time watching people I don't know at other tables send food back.  I want to flag down the server and get them to deliver a stranger's food to my table so I can fill up.

I ended up asking if the fish was going to be packed up or thrown out.  The person who ordered the fish didn't seem to figure out what I was asking at first, but eventually it came out that they were going to toss it so I ate all the fish and veggies and was well pleased.

I get why other people don't want to share food and would rather throw it out than have someone else eat it.  We have strong taboos about doing things that might share germs and there is some value in that.  I think though that most people go far beyond that and end up associating someone else's stuff with grossness in a way that has nothing to do with health and safety.  Moreover I think that this feeling that people have causes a terrible amount of waste, both in food and otherwise.  People want new, they don't want something someone else has had, and this combined with our worries about contamination causes us to waste so much food.

As we were about to leave the table I noticed that someone had left one third of a beer undrunk.  I couldn't stop myself, and I grabbed the beer and downed it.  It wasn't bad.  For beer.

You can't take me anywhere.

The big sacrifices

I found a chart the other day that really got me thinking about how we think about environmentalism.  It listed a bunch of the things you can do to help reduce your carbon emissions and their relative impact.  This is something we need more of, I think, because people do often focus on doing easy things that aren't especially useful.  For example, changing all your lightbulbs to more efficient ones reduces your output per year by 100kg.  Recycling reduces it by 210kg.

And declining one single return flight across the atlantic reduces it by 1600kg.

Yeah.  Just think about that.  Did all the things you tried to do for the environment for the entire year get dwarfed by that single long distance flight you took?

Mine didn't quite get zeroed out though, because I live car free, and that gives me a 2400kg bonus, so I am ahead on that count at least.

But the real killer is that a person in Canada emits roughly 20,000kg of carbon emissions per year.  If Wendy and I had decided to be childless then we could own a car and take five flights to Europe a year each and still be ahead of where we are now with our one kid.

And if we didn't have a child we would easily have the money for that car and those flights!

But people who have three kids?  There is *nothing* they can do that even approaches the scale of the emissions that their kids create.  They can go vegetarian, walk everywhere, completely refuse plane travel, recycle, hang their washing to dry, and it won't matter.  Their decision to have children means that the emissions from their family will dwarf the emissions from my family, period.

A really rich family could definitely push their emissions higher even with few or no children.  Buy a yacht and sail that thing around all day every day.  Own five houses and heat and cool the heck out of them.  Have a car for every day of the week, go nuts.

But by and large, it is the number of people that is the biggest factor once you take out the extreme high and low outliers in terms of wealth.

Not that any of this is news.  Overpopulation is the primary driver of basically all of our environmental concerns.  But sometimes you look at a chart and then it really hits you that population is the real thing, and the rest just follows from it.

I don't quite know what to make of it.  I made the decision to have a child without really thinking about it this way, and now it makes all of the decisions I make about environmentalism seem utterly absurd.  Penny wise, pound foolish, almost.

Too much sun

I am back from my trip to Hawaii.  It was a trip with many firsts involved.  My first time off of continental North America, Pinkie Pie's first time leaving Ontario, my first time doing proper snorkelling in fish filled waters, and even my first experience with jet lag.

It is funny sometimes to talk to people about travel, and have them assume that everyone is familiar with how jet lag feels.  Up till now the largest time difference I can recall being involved in a flight of mine is merely 1 hour, not enough to even notice.  Hawaii is six hours off though, so it should have had quite the impact.  That didn't end up being the case particularly, as I adjusted both ways quite easily.  I felt it though, a little at least, and now I know what that experience is like.  Before I felt a little out of place responding to some comment about jet lag with "no, in fact I don't know, because I have never experienced it" and having the whole room stare at me like I had grown horns.

There is an assumption about travel that a lot of people make, namely that if you don't travel immense distances you must hate travelling for some reason.  I am not the most wanderlust filled person around, that much is clear, but my reasons for not travelling have generally been financial and environmental, not so much a hatred of travelling itself.  I struggle with the cost of long trips and the environmental cost of travel really gets to me.  I find it hard to square my desire for a low impact life and the almost vulgar cost of flying a quarter of the way around the globe for entertainment.

Those things make for awkward conversations.  I find that people love to go on about how wonderful travel is, but they can rarely justify it from an environmental standpoint.  Certainly they can justify the monetary cost, and honestly the price often seems absurdly low... it is just my money demon that makes it hard for me and I know that is irrational.  But the cost in waste and carbon that comes with long distance travel people just ignore, and I find I have to do the same.  When I consider it I find I have to simply ignore it and accept the cognitive dissonance; my other choice is to never travel and I don't like that option either.

However, other people also seem to actually like the travelling part.  They talk about liking being on planes.  I find the concept quite ridiculous as to me planes are constantly uncomfortable leaving my legs in a perpetual state of pain and strain.  I can't rest, I can't sleep, I can't relax.  Being tall is generally a good thing, but not on a bloody plane.

Not in economy class, at any rate, and I can't see myself in the rich person seats.

All that aside the trip itself was great.  I took a snorkel tour to a partly submerged volcanic caldera, swam around with schools of fish, got to watch a group of three sea turtles eating off of a reef from a distance of just three meters, and spent a ton of time in the sun.

Too much time in the sun really since I got myself a savage sunburn, probably the worst I have ever had.  It wasn't as though I ignored the danger, as I applied sunscreen three times and wore a sunshirt for much of the day, but it turns out going from Toronto winter/spring to Hawaii and then spending six hours on a beach was too much for my skin to cope with.  Thankfully the pain was not enough to stop me doing all the things, and was merely extremely unpleasant.

I don't know that I will go back to Hawaii.  It was a fine place to have gone, and now I know the best way to spend your time on Maui, but I think I lean towards staying closer to home for a variety of reasons.  Bloody airplane seats being built for midgets being the big one, for sure.

Pears and pineapples

I like to think about what choices I should make in various situations.  For example, if I am buying fruit in the winter I know that bananas are a better environmental and monetary choice than nearly any other fruit since they are cheap because they can be shipped here slowly on a boat and that also makes them a good choice in terms of being low emissions.

Sometimes though I struggle to figure out how to compare two totally different scales.  For example, this year I have been working out a lot.  I like the results.  I look better, I feel better, I am healthier.  But I am eating a lot more protein, and that has a cost.  It seems to me that environmentally speaking bodybuilding is a ridiculous and damaging pursuit.  Being big at the cost of a couple thousand eggs seems bad.

But being healthy is good.

So how do I compare these things?  What can I do to even put those things on the same scale?

It baffles me.

It is further complicated by odd feelings about the very idea of looking good.  People grade each other on a scale based on what else they see around them.  Being the richest person in your social group is a huge bump in terms of happiness, no matter which strata of wealth your social group falls into.  Same goes for how you look.  10,000 years ago people didn't go about thinking that everyone's hair was awful, they just graded it on the curve.

Which means that if I get bigger (and, by most people's metrics, hotter) then I am making everyone else around me feel less hot.  So while that isn't exactly evil, it is definitely an argument against working out being a general good.  It is like some kind of bizarre mad scientist's machine - lifting weights transfers a slight amount of hotness from all the people I know to me.

All of which is saying that working out is good for me, but I have these weird feelings like it isn't actually good for the world.

Not that this is going to stop me from lifting, mind, but it is going to make me think about this stuff a lot while I do.

The cost of veggies

I was talking with the Flautist this weekend about being vegetarian.  She is one and always has been while I am an omnivore and always have been.  I have tried just eating veggies at times but it has never lasted long as I always felt my diet lacked something and I had serious meat cravings.  She told me about an argument against being vegetarian she had trouble with, which was essentially that growing crops kills plenty of animals so even vegetarians kill animals in order to eat.  This is of course true to an extent, but could easily be abused.

Let's be frank.  If you live in modern society your existence kills animals.  Your home is on land that could have housed animals.  Your food comes in trucks that run over animals.  The farms that make your food slaughter insects by the millions, dismember worms, groundhogs, and other underground critters, and wipe out forest habitat.  Your clothes and vehicles and everything else you have also comes from processes that wipe out animals.

Your very life is perched on a gigantic mountain of dead creatures.  Doesn't matter how environmentalist you are, how vegan you are, or how much it bothers you.  The only way to stop murdering other creatures for your own life to continue is to die.

Deal with it.

So given that we can't avoid being mass murderers of animals just by living in the society we live in, what are we to do?

We could decide that animal lives are clearly irrelevant and tuck into veal cutlets for every meal while throwing away as much waste as possible.

But we could also be thinking creatures and realize that we can't avoid the carnage we cause but we can minimize it.  Nobody can claim to be pure, causing no death and suffering by their passage, but we can work on ways to try to make the devastation we all leave behind a little less.

Being vegetarian is a fine way to do that.  A cow takes up far more cropland than veggies do, so vegetarians leave far less death behind them even if you ignore the death of the meat animal itself.  There are also strong arguments for vegetarianism from an environmentalist standpoint for basically the same reasons.

The two main reasons I see for people advocating vegetarianism are environmentalist and animal rights related.  Both have the same sort of structure though, for my purposes.  In our lives we destroy animals and do environmental damage whether we want to or not.  Also in both cases we can lessen that damage.

The trick is to not get caught up on any one thing, to my mind.  We don't have infinite energy, money, or attention.  We can't reduce the animal impact of our eating to zero, so absolutes like "It is wrong to kill animals for our food" aren't useful in the real world.  However, we certainly can take steps to try to make our impact less and each person is going to have different ways they try to do that.  Different people have different compromises that they can manage.

Some people can manage not eating meat.  Some can use no plastic.  Some can never fly in a plane.  The trick, I think, is to get away from absolutes.  It isn't that flying is right or wrong, it is that it has problems we should acknowledge.  Same goes for so many other things.  We should look at people with the expectation that they make real, serious attempts to make the world better in the ways that make sense for them, even if those ways aren't the ways we ourselves choose.

Evil, of the banal variety

Today I wandered into the recycling room in my building to drop off some boxes and other bits.  What I saw isn't really surprising, but it did make me rage inside.

A suitcase.  In the recycling bin.

Because suitcases are recycling, right?  And the garbage bin is a whole six meters away, so who could be expected to throw it in there, when it could be parked on the recycling bin instead?

I love how the diagrams down below show all the things that are *supposed* to be recycled, but the suitcase tosser couldn't even be bothered to look down for a minute to notice.

It is actually a double whammy, because when garbage like this gets tossed in the recycling there isn't enough room for the real recycling and then the real recycling gets tossed in the garbage!  Buildings like mine have a real problem with this because more and more things are recyclable but our recycling room is the same size, leading to overflowing bins and enormous mess.  I am sure a ton of recycling goes into the trash just because trying to find someplace to put it in the recycling room is such a problem.

My initial answer to the problem was that I would put on some shades, black clothes, a fake earbud / phone attachment in one ear, and stand there looking dangerous and like a dangerous government official.  Then when people put the wrong stuff in the bin I would yell at them and tell them to do it right.  I actually have done this before (without the costume...) at Elli's school when dealing with six year olds who had no idea what stuff was recycling and what was not.

It is a sad state of affairs that adults are too lazy to figure that stuff out for themselves.  They actually *do* need someone to stand around educating them because they apparently can't be assed to do it without some kind of threat.  Boo humans!

The good company

For her birthday Elli got an advent calendar.  It was 25 days of LEGO bits, all themed around outdoor winter activities.  The set came with 2 figurines and a variety of cold weather sports gear including hockey sticks and skates.  Elli was not in the least interested in actually doing the advent calendar thing and just ripped everything open immediately.  Unfortunately it brought as much sadness as happiness because she discovered that two of the baggies were the same and the baggie containing the hockey sticks was nowhere to be found.

I was fairly sure that she would forget about the hockey sticks completely in a day or so but it seemed like a good idea to teach the lesson that if a company does something wrong you can try to get it fixed rather than just sucking it up.  That in mind, I wrote LEGO and described the problem to them.  Two weeks later I got a reply apologizing for the error and giving me exact part descriptions of the pieces that were going to be shipped to me.

Yesterday the parts arrived containing all the bits that were supposed to be in the original baggie.  It even included an apologetic note explaining that they try really hard not to let this stuff happen and such.  The pieces were shipped all the way from Europe, so they actually went to an awful lot of effort to track down the set I described, the pieces I described, and then ship it halfway around the world.

I feel kind of weird and ambivalent about this.  Partly it is great because Elli was absolutely stoked about getting her bits finally and ran off to play with them.  I appreciate when companies fix problems effectively and promptly, and such behaviour really makes me want to buy their products again.

One the other hand, shipping plastic bits in a plastic baggie in a plastic contained halfway around the world seems *heinously* wasteful.  My brother is currently doing a 'no plastic' month to try to get a grip on the way plastic is used and how you can go about reducing its use, and that makes this LEGO shipment seem all the more absurd.

I guess if I am okay with Elli collecting LEGO for birthday presents I probably shouldn't worry about the extra little bits.  It the large view it is more of a general consumption issue rather than a problem with this particular grouping of ten little bits in a bag that is the issue.