Showing posts with label musings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label musings. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Wanted: a shared experience that makes it feel like life is getting better

When our library accounts finally came back online, I could feel a frisson pass through both Internet Toronto and Real-Life Toronto. The news ricocheted through the city, we all dropped everything and ran to be reunited with our holds lists...and promptly crashed the site!

Still, the spirits were high - "We hugged it to death!" squeed one redditor - and millions of Torontonians spread the news, rejoiced, and did a happy dance while they waited their turn for the 503 error to go away.

I hadn't felt that very specific emotion in quite some time, and, after some thought, I realized what it reminded me of: vaccine hunting.

When COVID vaccines first became available, everyone rushed to sign up and promptly crashed the site. But we spread the news enthusiastically, shared tips for finding an appointment, and squeed at each other as we got in.

It's a very specific emotion: a shared experience that makes you feel like life is getting better.

I haven't felt that in so long - not since I was queued up for a mass vaxx clinic at the community centre - and I didn't think I'd ever feel it again.

In the first year of the pandemic, I was confident I'd feel that feeling again. Everyone was working to make things better, we were all in this together, surely one day we'd delight in the shared experience of things being better again!

Except...they never got better again. Those in power just stopped addressing it, and in fact took away some of the tools we can use to address it individually.

So I wasn't expecting to experience this solidarity of life getting better ever again, which made it a particular delight to experience when the library came back online!

But...the only reason we got to experience this feeling of something getting better is because someone did harm by cyberattacking the library!

Is there any hope for things to get better for everyone without getting worse first??

***

Some people are able to experience this feeling of a shared experience of life getting better through activism, but that just doesn't work for me and hasn't for a long time. Activism seems more and more about desperately fighting to stop things from getting worse. It feels like victories aren't even improvements any more, just temporary respites.

When I try to think of examples of activism resulting in things actually getting better rather than just stopping them from getting worse, the most recent thing that comes to mind is the legalization of same-sex marriage, which was over 20 years ago.

Is stuff getting better for everyone without first getting worse even a possibility any more? Because I sure wouldn't mind experiencing that emotion again!

Monday, October 02, 2023

"And also" is the key to appreciating the little things in life

I blogged previously about the idea of "and also", which helps reconcile the fact that we live in a complex and imperfect world. 
 
I'm also finding lately that "and also" makes the idea of living in the moment/looking on the bright side/appreciating the little things in life more palatable.
 

For most of my life, the conventional wisdom I've received has been "Yeah, the world is on fire. But look on the bright side - we have delicious peaches!"

Which makes no sense whatsoever! The fact that it's peach season cannot possibly mitigate the fact that the world is on fire!

But consider: "The world is on fire. And also, we have delicious peaches."

Clearly, the sensible thing to do is eat and savour the peaches!

It doesn't claim to fix, mitigate, or outweigh the problem. It is simply another thing, separate from the problem, that comes with a logical course of action.
 
Some days, that makes it easier to get through the day.

Saturday, January 07, 2023

Romance novels vs. fanfiction

I recently saw someone on book twitter say that it's a convention of the genre that romance novels have to have a happy ending.

That surprised me, because when I do read romance, I'm usually metaphorically peeking between my fingers, feeling like this is all going to end in heartbreak.

Often it's not worry about whether the couple ends up together, but rather worrying that they're not right for each other. Especially in cishet romance, I'm fearing that the male lead is unsafe for the female lead. (After all, we all know that handsome and charming does not necessarily equal safe!)

Even in the In Death books, which I have been reading and enjoying for OMG 15 years now, I read the whole first book and didn't feel that Roarke was a safe partner for Eve. I only even started the second book because it had already arrived from the library and it eventually won me over. 

The problem with early In Death, which I think is also the problem with many romance novels, is the author is writing from the assumption that the couple belongs together. But as a reader, I just got here. I have no emotional attachment to the pairing, I have no reason to believe they belong together, and I'm not motivated to suspend disbelief. The author would have to win me over and actually demonstrate that they belong together, which authors don't always do.

Because of this, I don't read that much romance. 

However, I just realized this is why romantic fanfiction does work for me. In fanfiction, I already know the characters and I already agree that the couple belongs together - that's why I'm reading that pairing! So the author doesn't have to win me or the rest of the audience over. Everyone already agrees that the couple belongs together, and we can just enjoy the ride. For example, I recently read an AU where one main character (who was in a position of greater power) accidentally kidnapped the other (who was in a more vulnerable position). In original fiction, that would be appalling! But, because I already agree with the author that the couple belongs together, I'm like "Oh, that scamp, how's he going to get out of this mess?"

Writing this out, I realized that I more often start shipping characters from movies or TV shows rather than books. Something about seeing the relationship played out visually is more convincing to me. Other than In Death, I can't think of a pairing I've started shipping after reading them in a book. But nevertheless, once the shipping is established, text continued to be my preferred medium for fanfiction.

Monday, August 15, 2022

Defining the intersection of walkable and accessible

A Venn diagram of two circles. One is labled " walkable", the other is labled" accessible", the overlapping area is labeled with question marks
I keep running up against the problem of not being able to find a good word for the overlap between "walkable" and "accessible". So I'm writing it down in a whole lot of words here, so I can point to it next time I'm trying to articulate the concept.
 

Why won't the word "walkable" do?
 
Some people interpret "walkable" as "accessible only to people who can walk, and therefore inaccessible to people in wheelchairs etc." That is never what I mean, so I clearly need a better word.

Why won't the word "accessible" do?

Some people interpret "accessible" in a way that doesn't necessarily include walkable. For example, they might say the grocery store is accessible if you can drive up, park in the disabled parking spaces right in front of the door, and roll your wheelchair in the door unimpeded - even if the only way to get to the store is by driving on a highway that has no sidewalks.

What concepts does this word need to encompass?
 
- Proximity: Things need to be close enough that walking/wheeling/otherwise going without a vehicle is easy. Your destination is close enough to your point of origin that you don't need a vehicle. (Q: Close enough for whom? A: The end users, whoever they might be.)

- Safety: You aren't going to get hit by a car. You aren't going to slip and fall on the ice. You aren't going to get harassed by creeps on the street.

- Lack of obstacles: There are no cobblestones that would make it difficult to use a wheelchair. You don't have to go out of your way to find a crosswalk. There is a clear, suitable path to wherever you are going.

- The "no-brainer" factor: I walk to the grocery store because it's across the street - using any sort of vehicle (even a bike) would be ridiculous. If you're going to multiple stores in an indoor mall, you aren't going to go outside and get into your car and drive your car to the next store. If you're going to multiple destinations on the same city block, you aren't going to drive between them - even if you drove to the city block, you're going to park your car once and head to all your destinations on foot or in a wheelchair or otherwise without a vehicle.

Anyone know a word that does all this and is clear and common enough for me to use in translations?

Saturday, June 11, 2022

Cause and effect

In 2009, City of Toronto workers, including garbage collectors, went on strike because the employer was trying to take away their sick days and leave them with a much worse arrangement.
 
Media coverage at the time (including, bizarrely, the Toronto Star, whose stated principles explicitly include being pro-labour) villainized these workers, stoking public anger against them.

Rob Ford leveraged this anger to be elected as mayor.

Doug Ford leveraged Rob Ford's apparent popularity to be elected first as city councillor, then as MPP, and eventually as Premier of Ontario.

Where he took sick days away from workers in a pandemic, among many other disastrous policies.

Here in this third year of a pandemic that those in power have no desire to end, I wonder where we as a city and as a province would be if the City of Toronto hadn't tried to take away workers' sick days.

There wouldn't have been a strike. Rob Ford wouldn't have become mayor. Doug Ford would be running a label company (or would be city councillor at worst). Ontario would almost certainly have a government better suited to the task of getting us through a pandemic. (And also, Toronto municipal workers would have a better sick day regime and therefore be better able to avoid spreading COVID.) Toronto would likely have a different municipal government as well, since it was Rob Ford's mayorality that led to John Tory being considered even remotely palatable. (Remember in 2007 when Ontario rejected him for being too far right?)

***

On a personal note, there's one vital thing that would be different:

One change made under Rob Ford's mayorality was to contract out part of Toronto's garbage collection to Green For Life.

On February 17, 2018, at 2:30 in the morning, I was in bed fast asleep when I was frightened awake by a horrific noise.

I jumped out of bed, ran to the window to see what the noise was . . . and woke up on the floor with an enormous lump on the back of my head.

Every aspect of life has been more difficult since.

The source of the noise that frightened me awake? A Green For Life contractor seemed to think 2:30 in the morning is a good time to empty a dumpster into a dump truck.

Butterfly wings.

Sunday, January 02, 2022

Thoughts (without advice) on Captain Awkward #1359


Dear Captain Awkward,

I (she/her) have a Dad (he/him) and Mom (she her) who value their traditional culture and religion even though they did not raise my sister (she/her) and I to be very religious, i.e. we were allowed to go away to college, I was encouraged not to observe religious dress and they didn’t expect us to participate in daily religious activities (they didn’t either). You could say we were culturally faithful but not pious. They took a lot of crap from relatives who insisted they were making a huge mistake and would end up with kids who have no values or faith.

My sister married a guy who was of our background but even less connected to the culture and religion. My parents welcomed him though I suspect privately they were a bit uncomfortable because he drinks alcohol and has tattoos which are prohibited in the religion. Then my sister put up a Christmas tree (not Christians but her in-laws do Christmas). I happened to be there when they found out and it was like watching my parents take a fist to their face. My sister was their closest child, she could do no wrong in their eyes and they’ve always bent over backwards for her. After being so sure that they could raise us liberally while still upholding the culture and religion, they were devastated. No amount of me reminding them that she doesn’t consider it a religious act or framing it as a decoration has helped. They’ve decided they won’t go to her house until the tree is gone. My mom does daycare for my niece so BIL (he/him) drops the baby off at her house now.

I’ve tried to point out that they may regret this and harm their relationship with their only grandchild once she is old enough to figure out that her paternal grandparents happily celebrate Christmas and drink alcohol with her parents while her maternal grandparents make a stand every December, but they won’t budge. My sister is surprised they are upset and says a tree is no big deal which strains credulity in my opinion. I’m visiting and keep walking in on my mom just sitting silently with tears running down her face and my dad quietly counting the days until he can see niece again on daycare days (he is the only name/word she can say so far, total bff’s). I resent my sister for taking so much over the years (I was not similarly favored) and then so casually throwing us into this chaos. I am annoyed with my parents for not seeing something like this coming considering her husband’s background. Do I keep defending her, comforting them or should I just stay apart like normal?

Never thought I’d miss the days when they were a unit of three + me.

I absolutely agree with Captain Awkward's advice that LW's role is to stay out of this. 

But what baffles me is that the parents seem to see this as LW's sister's tree and seem to be having a falling-out with LW's sister over it, rather than seeing it as BIL's tree, since his family of origin is the one that does xmas. Even if the sister literally put it up, they somehow got to "The person who brought this family tradition into the marriage is utterly blameless!" 

If I were advising BIL, I'd recommend that he "take responsibility" for the tree - not in the sense of sitting down and having a serious conversation, but more in the sense of blithely chattering in LW's parents' presence about how lovely it is to be sharing his family's traditions with the daughter.
 
I'm also rather baffled that they're wondering about what to tell the child and thinking the different families' different behaviours will harm their relationship with their grandchild. All they'd have to tell the kid is different families do things differently - they could probably even point to benign examples, like how one set of grandparents uses the front door of their house and the other set uses the side door.

Sunday, November 28, 2021

Hard work

Conventional wisdom is that hard work is a virtue.  If you work hard, you will achieve success.


I think we need to question the notion that work needs to be hard to be adequate.


Some people, when they read that, will have the visceral reaction of "Oh, you just don't want to work!"

But that's not the argument I'm making here today.

For the purposes of today's blog post, I'm not questioning the "work" part, I'm just questioning the "hard" part.

(I know there are other people questioning the "work" part and I'm not going to get in their way, that's just not my topic here today.)


When I think of everything I've ever done well, I've never worked hard at any of it. I simply...did it. I carried out the necessary actions, did the thing, and it was done and done well.

So, you might be thinking, what would happen if I did work hard at it?

And the answer is that it would be impossible to work hard at it, because I finished it before the work got hard.


Analogy: you can't sprint one step. You simply take the step, and you've completed it before you can even get up to a sprinting level of effort. (Unless, of course, you can't take any steps.  But then you can't sprint one step either.)


There are also quite a few things in life that I've worked hard at.  And, despite my hard work, I never reached the point of doing them well. I basically knocked myself out to achieve mediocrity.


Before we even look at it from our own perspective as workers, if we look at it just from the perspective of having a functional economy and society, people knocking themselves out to achieve mediocrity is the last thing we want!

If you're in the market for a product or service, you want that product to be made or that service to be provided by someone who knows what they're doing.  The more important it is and the harder it is to do, the more you want someone who's certain they can do it well.  
 
You want a beautician who makes people way uglier than you look way hotter than you've ever aspired to, no one who isn't sure if they can make eyebrows like yours look good but they'll try their best. You want a renovator who thinks the work you have in mind is so easy they don't see why you don't do it yourself, not one who's unsure whether it's possible but is willing to give it the good old college try. You want a surgeon who could do your surgery in their sleep, not one who for whom it's a reach goal.
 
Essentially, if someone is working hard, it's a sign that something is wrong - insufficient training, too-tight timelines, not the right person for the job, etc.
 
Maybe, instead of valuing hard work, we as a society should be working on eliminating it.

Tuesday, October 26, 2021

What if we measured beauty standards in labour required to be unremarkable or credible?

When we talk about beauty standards - and, especially, when we talk about beauty standards for women (so much of the beauty standard discourse to which I've been exposed is so binary that I can't entirely get away from that in this post) - the discourse tends to get hijacked by people's personal opinions about beauty.

"But I think curvy women are hot!" "But men have to work hard to have a six-pack too!" "But beauty is frivolous anyway and you should just have good self-esteem!"

I think it would be far more useful if, instead of talking about beauty in and of itself, we talked about it in terms of labour. How much time/money/effort do people of various demographics need to spend to meet standards?

I also think it would be useful if, instead of talking about beauty standards, we talked about, for lack of a better word, "non-ugly" standards. How much labour is required to not be perceived negatively, to pass unremarked?
 
Example: 
 
Suppose you're watching the men's soccer world cup on TV, and you can see a player's leg hair.

Now, suppose you're watching the women's soccer world cup on TV, and you can see a player's leg hair.

Your immediate internal response to the men's scenario is probably "And...?" or "Only one?" Whereas, in the women's scenario, people would notice. They may well be too polite to comment, but if, in a safe and non-judgemental space, you asked friend who'd been watching the same game "Did you notice that one player had visible leg hair?" they almost certainly would have. Some people would speak positively of it ("Good for her, flouting social norms!") but it would be noticed.

In this context, the men's soccer players have to do no work whatsoever for their leg hair situation to be unremarkable, whereas the women's soccer players would have to remove any leg hair visible to the camera for their leg hair situation to be unremarkable.

I think this is a much more useful approach to this discourse.
 
It would also be useful to look at how much labour is required to be perceived as credible.

How much labour do people of various demographics need to do for their job interviewer to think they look professional? How much labour do people need to do to be taken seriously by the doctor/mortgage officer/prospective landlord? How much labour is involved in politicians of various demographics being perceived as camera-ready for their interview?
 
Being perceived as beautiful may be frivolous, but most people need to get business done at some point in their lives, and need to come across as credible to do so. For some people, that requires labour, and any demographic patterns to the amount of labour involved raise a genuine equity issue.

Wednesday, October 20, 2021

Money and connections

1. Conventional wisdom is that, even when abortion is illegal, rich people can always get abortions.
 
I have no doubt that money facilitates things, but it seems like this conventional wisdom disregards the fact that illegality is a barrier - not just because of the actual law, but because not everyone has the knowledge or connections to circumvent the law. 
 
As an analogy, I'm sure I can afford illegal drugs. However, I have no clue where to buy them. I have no clue how reliable the internet might be on this question. (Would I google my way to a honeypot or a scam or poisoned supply?)

I can think of no more than three people I know who might possibly have a lead on where to buy illegal drugs (and possibly zero of them actually do). I've heard that sneakers on wires might mean there's a drug dealer around, but I have no idea how to determine who they are. And if I found a drug dealer and walked up to them attempting to buy drugs, I have no idea what the script would sound like. I'm sure they'd think I'm a cop.

Now, abortion is much more important than illegal drugs, and involves much more desperation. So if it were an abortion I was after and legal means weren't available, I'd try every internet honeypot. I'd ask every promising person. I'd make it my full-time job to find the connection I need.

But that may or may not work, and it wouldn't be money that helps me find the connection. (In fact, money might even get in the way - the causes and effects of my money also make me come across as someone who'd call the cops.

And it's not just finding the connection that's a problem. If you live with controlling family members or otherwise don't have individual and private freedom of moment or freedom of communication, the people around you could be a barrier. Imagine the minor child of a reigning monarch wants to get an abortion - they'd need to have either their family or their security detail onside with, at a minimum, a private medical appointment, and (if their family isn't onside) would have to make sure the doctor and the security detail wouldn't report back to their family. 

On top of all this, think back to the olden days before the internet. How would you find an abortion then?

In Downton Abbey, Lady Edith found an abortionist from an ad in the back of a women's magazine. But what if you didn't read that particular magazine, or look at the ads on the basis that they (like many classified ads) wouldn't be relevant?

I've read (on the internet!) that, in the olden days, abortion products and services were advertised obliquely, with language about restoring menstrual regularity or something similar. But what if you didn't know the code? If abortion suddenly became illegal, my 40-year-old self would certainly have the savvy to obliquely inquire about things I should avoid so I don't inadvertently lose the pregnancy, but my 20-year-old self would never have thought of this.

In short, while money would, of course, smooth the way to an abortion - and lack of money could easily be a barrier to an abortion - it is still quite possible that, in a context where abortion is illegal, a rich person would be unable to get an abortion because they lack the ability to navigate the relevant segment of the underworld.

2. Conventional wisdom is that posh universities are for networking
 
There have been some stories in the news recently where parents have apparently donated or bribed their kids' way into big-name universities. My immediate response was "What do they expect to happen once they get admitted to the universities without being qualified?" to which people have replied that the intention is for them to network rather than to be academically successful.

Which makes me wonder how networking works among rich/fancy people.

If you aren't actually qualified to be admitted to your fancy university, and you start trying to network to people who are qualified, it seems to me that they'd see that you're unqualified. So any attempts at network, i.e. at making them aware of your existence, would only backfire - they'd become increasingly aware of your incompetence.

But, since conventional wisdom is that unqualified fancy university admission provides networking opportunities, does that mean that networking among rich/fancy people is simply a matter of being aware of each other's existence?

But, at the same time, some of the people at the rich/fancy universities must be qualified to be there. Are they not gaining the attention of the networking targets? Or are the networking targets in the market for so many networkees that the only prerequisite is "I am aware of your existence"?

Or maybe these people are particularly charming? And therefore mere proximity will be enough to build them connections? But, even then, it surprises me that bribing them into fancy universities would be the optimal approach. It seems to me that, surely, it would be more efficient to cut out the middleman and bribe them into some prestigious entry-level job or some sinecure, so they're already in a useful role rather than being dependent on their charms to get them there. And, if they are in fact so charming, surely they could do more with those charms in an established position rather than as an unqualified student in a university full of qualified students?

Sunday, October 17, 2021

Thoughts on Season 3 of Star Trek: Discovery

This post is a full spoiler zone for Star Trek: Discovery, although I'm not talking very much about specific plot points.

I just finished Season 3 of Star Trek: Discovery. I generally enjoyed it, as I do most Star Trek, but there were a couple of aspects that didn't fully work for me.

1. 930 years into the future

Star Trek: Discovery ended season 2 by jumping 930 years into the future, and season 3 covers their adventures there. 

However, I had trouble suspending disbelief that the crew of the Discovery could function in a way that's even remotely useful 930 years in the future, even taking into account that their ship has a spore drive in a universe where warp travel is severely limited.

Think about 930 years. 930 years ago was 1090. Think about the world in 1090. (I'm most immediately familiar with the history of England from that era, so most of my references here are English.) William the Conqueror had died just a few years earlier. The Domesday book had just been completed. Old English was still spoken - the Norman influence in England hadn't yet been around long enough for even Middle English to have evolved. In other words, the English language was completely devoid of French or Latin influences - such as the words "language" and "completely" and "devoid" and "French" and "Latin" and "influences"!

The internet tells me clocks hadn't yet been invented 930 years ago. Imagine a person who had never co-existed with clocks! It wouldn't just be a question of how to use a clock to tell time, but all the ways society is affected by the degree of time-telling precision they afford. The train leaves at 9:13. Your speech should be between 2 and 3 minutes long. Edit this video down to 30 seconds. It would be unfathomable!

Not to mention that their technology is sufficiently compatible. The charger for my eight-year-old ipod is no longer manufactured. There's a whole side market of CRT televisions because game consoles from my childhood won't work properly with modern TVs. The external hard drives I use for my computer backups occasionally just stop working. And I'm supposed to believe that they could just . . . update Discovery's computer database after nearly a thousand years??

There are fandom rumours that the creative team originally wanted to set Star Trek: Discovery in the distant future and were forced to set it 10 years pre-TOS for marketing reasons, so IRL this is likely the creative team shifting towards doing what they actually want to do now that they have the capital to do so. But I'm finding it hard to suspend disbelief, and that's a negative.

2. Adira and Gray and representation

Season 3 of Star Trek: Discovery included a milestone for the franchise: Star Trek's first transgender and non-binary characters!

However, I think the decision to make both Adira and Gray Trill was a strategic error. (Pedants will point out that Adira is human, but what's relevant here is that they are hosting a Trill symbiont.)

One audience who could have benefited particularly from Adira and Gray are people who are ignorant about or even completely unaware of transgender and/or non-binary - especially those who are or may one day become parents of trans or non-binary children. 

People who, like me, are old enough to be parents of trans or non-binary children didn't learn much about transgender or non-binary growing up. We only know what has reached us through general cultural in adulthood. This means that some parents of trans and non-binary kids aren't going to have heard of transgender and/or non-binary. Trans and non-binary Star Trek characters can help with this - a kid who has to say "Mom, I'm non-binary" can add the useful cultural reference of "Like Adira on Star Trek."

With Adira especially, I'm concerned that people who are unfamiliar with non-binary might think Adira's perception of themself as non-binary is the result of hosting a Trill symbiont (and therefore having memories and personality traits of all the symbiont's previous hosts), rather than being an actual real-life gender identity that occurs in actual real-life people.

I myself am familiar with they/them pronouns, knew from media coverage that Adira's pronouns are they/them, and knew from media coverage that after Adira was initially misgendered as "she", they'd be coming out as "they". But, even going in with this knowledge, when I heard Adira say "They, not she", my first thought was that they were about to say credit was due to their symbiont, or their symbiont's previous hosts.

I'm further concerned that some non-binary kid might see this, identify with Adira, explain it to their parents as "Like Adira on Star Trek!" and have their parents respond with "That's not a real thing, that's just Star Trek aliens!" Ignorant parents might even think their kid is delusional, like they would if their kid insisted they're a Vulcan.

I think having Adira and Gray being a couple exacerbates this. Not the romantic aspect specifically, but rather that they are positioned as a unit that includes the two of them and does not include anyone else. I'm thinking that framing might be othering towards trans and non-binary people, rather than positioning them as a regular everyday part of the population as a whole. 

I think a better strategic decision would have been to have our first trans character and our first non-binary character both be human, and be unaffiliated with each other. (For example, if one was Aurellio and the other was Aditya Sahil.) Also, include trans and non-binary actors as part of your diverse casting for minor roles, alien and human alike. So we have our key trans and non-binary characters, and also, like, a trans ensign in Vulcan ears operating the transporter and a non-binary Bajoran seated at the conference table.

Again, I am neither trans nor non-binary myself, so I could be delighted to hear that my concerns here are unfounded. But, until I hear that, I continue to be concerned that the decision to make Adira and Gray both Trills and a couple is detrimental to the good that our first trans and non-binary characters might do.

Sunday, September 05, 2021

Could an eBay-style bidding system help painlessly cool the real estate market?

EBay uses an automatic bidding system. Every bidder enters their maximum bid, and the system automatically places incremental bids on each bidder's behalf.
 
For example, bidding starts at $1. Alice is the first bidder, and she places a maximum bid of $5. The system displays a current bid of $1.
 
Then Bob comes along and places a maximum bid of $4. The system automatically places incremental bids on Alice's and Bob's behalf (as though they're sitting in an auction house shouting "$1.25!" "$1.50!" at each other) until it hits Bob's maximum of $4. Now it shows Alice in the lead with a bid of $4.25.
 
If there are no other bidders, Alice will pay $4.25 for the item.

This means that the winning bid is one increment higher than the second-highest bid, regardless of the winning bidder's highest bid. In other words, if Alice had set a maximum bid of $1,000 and Bob had set a maximum bid of $4, Alice would still pay $4.25 for the item.
 

I wonder if this kind of system could help cool the housing market?

During the pandemic, housing prices across the country skyrocketed. Conventional wisdom is that this is because city residents with city real estate money were buying exurban real estate and driving up the prices.

Why, I wondered, were they paying city prices for exurban properties? Even if you have city real estate money, why wouldn't you pay the exurban price for the exurban property?

The answer, I was told, is bidding wars.


So I wonder if the problem could be fixed by building a better bidding war?

My idea: inspired by eBay's system, every potential buyer enters their maximum bid, and an automatic system bids them against each other. The end result is that the highest bid is a dollar higher than the second-highest bid.

That way, if the prices are being driven up by outlier buyers, they won't be driven up to higher than the going rate.

The seller wouldn't suffer particularly from this. Any sensible seller would budget and plan for their home going at roughly the current going rate, and a dollar higher than the second-highest bid would fall within the going rate. Like on eBay, they could still have the option to set a reserve price, so if no one bids a high enough amount, they don't sell at all.

Perhaps this kind of system could also be adapted to let buyers bid on multiple homes and then retract their bid once they've bought a home, so you wouldn't have to wait for one bidding war to end before expressing interest in another possibility. One person withdraws, the next highest bid automatically wins, no big deal.


But would this actually help cool the housing market? I'm not sure! If there are multiple above-market bidders, it wouldn't change a thing. But if there's just one above-market bidder, this system would prevent them from driving up the price.

I guess the flip side to that question is: would this kind of bidding system cause any harm? Or would the worst case scenario result in the same housing prices as the current system, but perhaps with less stress, and perhaps sometimes letting buyers get a home without fully leveraging?

I don't know the answer to that question. It would be interesting if someone could study this.

Thursday, June 24, 2021

Health and labour: a mini-braindump

A weird thing about the way we talk about health in our society is that the notion of "being healthy" has an intrinsic element of labour to it, in that you aren't seen as "healthy" if you don't work at it.
 
Example: imagine someone who eats whatever they want without regard for nutrition, doesn't engage in any intentional physical activity beyond what occurs naturally in the course of their life, and doesn't see a doctor for preventive medical care.

They'd be seen as unhealthy.
 
Even if their body does whatever they need it to. Even if their numbers are good. People who like to opine on such things would look at their (lack of) regime and go on about how they're unhealthy and need to add weight training and kale smoothies to their routine.
 
We just don't have a paradigm for being considered healthy without working at it.
  
***

I just realized as I was writing this that this is what really bugs me about alternative medicine (or, at least, the subset of alternative medicine that reaches me) is that it always calls for more work. You're never done, it's never good enough. 

Even in contexts where I'm not seeking advice. If I mention in passing that, for example, every few years I get strep throat and have to take a course of antibiotics, the alternative medicine aficionados in my vicinity come swooping in recommending additional task (a food to eat, a supplement to take) that they want me to do every single day for the rest of my life to supposedly prevent this horrific fate of having to take a couple of pills a day for a week every few years.

While I don't have any theoretical objection to alternative medicine and do in fact incorporate aspects of it into my life, I simply have less and less room for a paradigm that demands such ceaseless work.

***
 
On a personal level, I'm finding more and more that the labour isn't worth the benefit. Putting in the work that it takes to get optimal health outcomes is like studying 6 hours a day to get an A when, if you didn't study at all, you'd get a B. 
 
It inches my numbers down to just inside the range of what's officially considered healthy, as opposed to their natural state of just outside the range of what's officially considered healthy, but doesn't change a thing about how I feel or function. 
 
Exercise makes me better at exercise, and doesn't change a thing about the activities of daily life. When I started doing yoga 20 years ago, a side plank was torture. Now, it's boring. And it hasn't changed a thing about how I feel or about my ability to do anything other than side planks. It hasn't even improved my physical appearance.

***
 
I've also noticed an awful lot of health labour is kind of . . . consumerist? Buy this, eat this, just a dollar a day to solve a problem you can't even perceive!

And there's also this sense that keeping yourself healthy is some kind of . . . responsibility to society, maybe? I'm not really sure how to articulate this part. But I get this vibe from the way some people talk, that if you aren't seen to be doing the labour, and if you aren't seen to be engaging in the "correct" consumption patterns, it's like you aren't doing your duty as a citizen.

I don't think that's, well, healthy.
 
***
 
It would also be interesting to study how the labour of health has evolved over time (and, probably, varied by society). I can't immediately point to any data, but I feel like the expected labour has increased as my life has gone on. 

In the time before nutrition labels, people couldn't possibly have been expected to monitor their nutrition in such minute detail. In the time before gyms, people couldn't possibly have been expected to engage in weight training.

There was a time when it was socially unacceptable for women to be seen engaging in athletic activities. There was a time when it would have been socially unacceptable for anyone, of any gender, to jog down the street.

(There have also been many other times when many other combinations of activities were socially acceptable or unacceptable in historical cultures I'm unfamiliar with.)

People for whom food is scarce eat what's available. If you've always lived in this kind of context, the idea of deliberately limiting your caloric intake would be laughable.

People for whom life requires constant physical labour would find the idea of doing additional exercise to meet a standard of fitness that never comes up in real life laughable. 

I wonder if there has ever been a time and place in history were people were expected to do more health-related labour (on top of the labour of simply staying alive) than they are now?