Showing posts with label things i don't understand. Show all posts
Showing posts with label things i don't understand. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 02, 2023

Things I Don't Understand: people who value health labour but don't value COVID protections

I blogged before about the labour of health.

Some people value health labour. They value doing it themselves, and/or they value being seen to do it, and/or they believe other people should do it.

A baffling phenomenon I've observed is people who value health labour, but don't value (and sometimes outright object to) COVID protections!

I grew up surrounded by people who value health labour (that's why I'm inclined to push back against it myself), so I'm familiar with many different motivations for valuing, engaging in or advocating for health labour. And COVID protections align with every single one of the motivations I can think of.

Some people value and engage in health labour because they themselves want to be healthy. They want to live longer, or have quality of life for longer, or simply avoid the unpleasantness and inconvenience of poor health. And COVID protections help achieve all this.

Some people value and engage in health labour because they believe sufficient diligence will save them from distressing outcomes. And COVID protections are a form of diligence that reduces the likelihood of distressing outcomes.
 
Some people value, engage in, and advocate for health labour because they believe people have the responsibility to their fellow taxpayers to reduce the healthcare they need and therefore the healthcare costs they incur. And COVID protections will reduce the amount of healthcare people need and the healthcare costs people incur. 

Some people value and engage in health labour because they want to be seen to be A Healthy Person, walking around with a yoga mat and instagramming their smoothies. And this can also be done with COVID protections, walking around in an N95 and instagramming your efforts to build a Corsi-Rosenthal box.

Some people engage in or advocate for health labour out of a sense of smug superiority. Doing this labour makes them feel like they're better than other people who aren't doing it, or calling out other people's failure to do this labour lets them position those people as Less Than. And many COVID protections are also things you can do, or call out other people for not doing, for both your individual health and for general public health.
 
Some people value, engage in and advocate for health labour because they value individualism and personal responsibility. They value making personal efforts to take care of yourself and your loved ones without any expectation that the systems and structure of society will do so. And individual COVID protections like masking and vaxxing and providing good indoor air quality everywhere you can align with this. It really seems like the people who vociferously tout individualism in other aspects of health labour should be the ones lugging a Corsi-Rosenthal box everywhere they go!

Some people advocate for health labour because they're profiting from it. They sell nutritional supplements and fitness programs and such. And this can also be done with COVID protections, selling masks and air purifiers. You could get an additional revenue stream while also keeping your clients healthy enough to continue working and earning enough to keep buying your regular products!


I've heard some people say that this comes from a place of eugenics - people thinking that you'll only be affected by COVID if you have inferior genetics, and having superior genetics means you'll be safe from COVID. 

What I don't get about that is why people who believe in eugenics would also value health labour so much. (I'm aware of the historical precedent, but I don't understand it.) If your genes were so superior, why would you need health labour at all? Surely superior genetics wouldn't need carefully balanced fitness and nutrition, and instead could handle whatever the natural course of modern life throws at them!


There are all kinds of reasons why people are into health labour, and they all align with prioritizing COVID protection. And yet, a surprising number of people who are into health labour seem to be disregarding, or even disdaining, COVID protection. 

I just don't understand.

Monday, June 20, 2022

The Boy Who Cried "No Wolf!"

I was talking to my doctor about the risk assessment of getting dental care (given that I'd need to remove my mask to do so), and he said that the hygiene and air quality standards for dental offices are actually high enough that it would be a safe environment to be unmasked in.

My immediate, visceral reaction was a shockingly strong "That can't possibly be true!!!"

I had in fact looked up the standards for dental offices and they did seem to have plenty of air changes, I looked up the specs of the hepafilter system the clinic I was considering going to had installed and didn't even know that level of air changes was possible, my doctor is better positioned than I am to determine what ventilation measures are sufficient . . . so why do I feel so strongly that it cannot possibly be safe?

After thinking this over a bit, I realized it's because there have been so many instances where they removed protections when it wasn't safe to do so (including, most recently, when they removed mask mandates and 90% of the people I love in the world promptly contracted COVID) that we have a critical mass of cumulative empirical evidence that "meets requirements" ≠ "safe".

It's like the opposite of Aesop's fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. 
 
In the fable, a boy repeatedly comes running into his village shouting that there's a wolf when there's really no wolf. Then, eventually, a wolf does come, and no one believes him.

What's happening here in Ontario is they're repeatedly telling us it's safe when it's clearly not. And if, one day, it ever is safe, I will have a very difficult time believing it.
 
 
The thing is, if everyone started doing absolutely everything absolutely perfectly in terms of COVID response, all indoor spaces would be like a dental office, with ventilation that makes it impossible for COVID to spread. And, unless something changes drastically, I don't see how I will ever be able to believe this and feel safe.

Now, you're thinking, if all environments become safe and make it impossible for COVID to spread, COVID numbers will drop! We'll see it in the data!

Except governments are publishing less and less data, even though the data is still necessary! We're left here squinting at the low-precision Y axis of the wastewater signal charts and trying to figure out how flaws in government-issued data might be affecting the results on various automated amateur data-viz websites. 
 
They never even restored PCR testing criteria to where they were pre-Omicron, so official R-value data is a big asterisk with "Currently, R(t) based on cases cannot be estimated accurately"
 
I think what they're trying to do is induce a feeling of "no news is good news!" in the public, but what's actually happening is they're creating a situation where promising numbers are increasingly implausible. Are case counts actually low, or is it just because of restrictions on PCR testing? Are active case numbers actually going down, or was there just not a data drop today?

***

I do realize this makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist, and that brings up something else:

It's super weird that the existing conspiracy theorists aren't thinking this way!

Long before COVID, there were plenty of conspiracy theorists who thought there was a vast government conspiracy to kill or harm people.

And, somehow, they seem to look at the current situation where the government is changing policies in a way that increases the number of people killed or infected, and . . . don't think this is part of the conspiracy?
 
 
I do see why someone might not believe there's a government conspiracy to harm us. Maybe, from where you're sitting, you don't see any evidence, and it is quite the claim to make without evidence! Maybe you find the idea just too frightening to contemplate! Maybe you look at the people who do think there's a government conspiracy to harm us and think "Those are unpleasant individuals and I don't want to be like them!"

But if you've come into the situation already believing that there's a conspiracy, how do you arrive at "But this current situation where people are being killed and harmed because of government inaction is, of course, unrelated to the government conspiracy to kill or harm people!"

Thursday, January 13, 2022

Why were they willing to lock down in March 2020?

Currently, there seems to be a shortage of political will to lock down to stop the surging omicron variant of COVID-19.

What I don't understand: if they're unwilling to lock down now, why were they willing to lock down in March 2020?

Usually if you ask this, people answer "because capitalism doesn't care about people's lives."

But we had the same capitalism in March 2020. And in March 2020, lockdowns were unprecedented - I don't think most ordinary people would have faulted the government for not locking down, because that just . . . wasn't a thing that we did. And in March 2020, we didn't know about Long COVID yet. (Or, at least, ordinary non-medical people whose lives hadn't yet been affected by post-viral syndrome didn't.) And in March 2020, it was less commonly known that COVID is airborne. 
 
Even if we think about it solely from the point of view of capitalism without regard for human decency, in March 2020 we didn't have so many people out sick that it was causing staffing shortages, closing nearly half of library branches and cancelling GO Transit trips.
 
As far as the general public could tell, capitalism could have chugged merrily along in March 2020 without issue, whereas the impacts are visible and tangible and undeniable in the omicron era.

So why were they willing to proceed with lockdowns and restrictions in March 2020?

To be clear, I'm not saying that they were wrong to do lockdowns and restrictions in March 2020. Rather, I'm saying that the argument for lockdowns and restrictions is far more compelling right now, and we're all old hands at it now. We all know how to zoom and pivot to takeout-only and choose the optimal grocery pickup slots.

So why were they willing to take then-unprecedented measures in March 2020, but aren't willing to take well-established measures now?

Sunday, January 12, 2020

Disillusionment (Part 1)

This post contains descriptions of transphobia.

I never really thought about transgender before I became an Eddie Izzard fan.

I'm not transgender myself, my formal and informal education didn't include notions surrounding transgender, I didn't knowingly know any trans people, I'd never had to translate about anything remotely related to transgender . . . it was just one of the many subjects that wasn't on my radar.

Then, nearly 13 years ago, a google search took me to an Eddie Izzard video, which took me down a youtube rabbithole, which led me to my very first hero, role model, and inspiration. Eddie gave me a huge portion of what I needed to grow up from an insecure, uncertain young woman to a more confident, more competent middle-aged woman.

And, along the way, got me thinking about transgender.

I listened to what Eddie had to say in standup and in interviews about gender identity, googled some concepts that were new to me, and then let the ideas gently simmer while I went about the business of growing up.

As these ideas simmered, some realizations bubbled up.

I came to be able to discern my own gender identity, as separate from biology and socialization.

I came to recognize thoughts and feelings and reactions dating back to childhood that support this.

I came to see parallels between some of the experiences of trans people and some of my own experiences, which led me to stop seeing trans people as Other and start seeing them as people basically doing the same thing as I am, just from a slightly different starting point.

I became aware of trans people in my online and real-life communities.

I became aware that I should be listening and learning when people talk about their firsthand experiences, rather than boldly opining.

I became aware of non-binary, of ways to write and ways to make policy that are all-inclusive, not just masculine or feminine.

By the time transgender came up in my translations, I had a general idea of potential linguistic pitfalls and what I should verify with reliable sources, and was able to guide my colleagues accordingly.

Politically, I've become increasingly aware of how policies I'd previously thought innocuous (and sometimes didn't even recognize as policies - I just thought "that's the way the world is"!) could cause disproportionate harm to trans and non-binary people.

And, most importantly, I've learned to listen to and believe trans and non-binary people (and other marginalized groups) rather than thinking I need to be an expert myself.

I'm still very much in the listening and learning phase of my journey (since my starting point was zero, I've had a lot of catching up to do!), but I've been slowly and surely becoming more and more informed since that fateful google 13 years ago pointed me towards the path I need to be on.  It's been a gradual, painless meander in the general direction of the right side of history.


And that's why I'm both baffled and gutted by Heather Mallick's recent column, in which she describes a transphobic talk as "a feminist event", describes the trans women who were protesting the talk as "enraged men", and parallels these trans women with the perpetrator of the Montreal Massacre.


You see, that google 13 years ago that brought me to Eddie Izzard was inspired by Heather Mallick's writing. Her book title and her Eddie Izzard fandom brought me to Eddie, which changed every aspect of my inner life for the better, including setting me on my journey from being completely ignorant of transgender to being less and less assholic.

I have been very grateful to Heather for this ever since. I even considered walking up to her at an Eddie Izzard show (I recognized her from her column headshot) and thanking her for introducing me to Eddie's work, but I wasn't confident that I could do so without coming across as creepy.

And now I feel disgusted with myself for having - for years! - carried around positive feelings about someone who could say such horrible things.

And I'm also completely baffled that someone could start at the same starting point as me - could, in fact, direct me to the starting point when I didn't know where it was - and then head in exactly the opposite direction.

And then I'm wondering if, because this was my starting point, I might somehow unknowingly be transphobic myself???

What do you even do with this???

***

That was an awful lot of hundreds of words about my own feelings - what with this being a personal blog and all - but the real problem here is not about me at all.

The real problem is that this is a column in a high-circulation newspaper.

Newspapers are tools of information, so they have to be particularly mindful of serving the ignorant.

Having a columnist who is transphobic but somehow comes across to ignorant people (like me) as an ally of trans people is a disservice to ignorant readers. It exacerbates my ignorance. In fact, it conceals my ignorance from me, which is the exact opposite of what I need my newspaper to be doing - I need my newspaper to be enlightening me about areas where I didn't even know I was ignorant!

I can't tell if, when the Star hired Heather Mallick, they thought (as I foolishly did at the time) that she was a trans ally, or if they could tell that she wasn't and hired her anyway, or if they didn't care.

If they could tell or if they didn't care, they need to smarten up!

And if the Star was under the same mistaken impression I was, they need to find people who saw it coming.

As I've been picking through my emotions and slowly piecing them together into a blog post, it also came out that J.K. Rowling is transphobic, and it came to my attention that people have been flagging this for years. (I must start following some of them on Twitter!)

There must have also been people who could see years ago that Heather Mallick was transphobic, even back when I still thought she was an ally. The Star should consult with them when hiring people to write their columns.

Or, better yet, find some trans people who saw it coming and hire them to write columns!


I became aware of this protest, and of the nature of the speaker being protested, because of the trans people and allies I follow on Twitter. Similar things happen as I follow disabled people, and people of different races, and people from different countries, and people who speak different languages. As people talk about whatever's on their mind, information of which I was previously ignorant effortlessly reaches me, and the path towards the right side of history becomes just a touch clearer to me.

The Toronto Star, as a tool of information, should also be serving this function. It should be finding the voices that historically haven't reached its readers - especially readers who are ignorant like me - and putting those voices right where they will reach us effortlessly, nudging us away from our ignorance and in the general direction of the right side of history.

Tuesday, November 05, 2019

Why is there a "gender" field in Elections Canada's voter registration?

You can use Elections Canada's Voter Registration Service to see if you're registered to vote.

You enter your name, date of birth, gender and address, and it tells you if there's an entry on the voters list that matches those criteria.

My question: why is gender one of the criteria?

It's obvious why they ask for your name.

Your address is relevant because it confirms the riding you're eligible to vote in and the poll you should vote at.

Date of birth confirms that you're old enough to vote.  It can also help distinguish you from other people at the same address who share the same name (given that it's not uncommon for parents and children to live together and that it's not uncommon for children to be named after their parents). Also, historically (with the existence of the phone book) it's been fairly simple to find out a person's address, but less easy (or, at least, requiring some degree of acquaintanceship) to find out their date of birth.  Added to that, date of birth is a data point that doesn't change. You can change your name, you can change your address, you can change the gender marker that appears on your ID and personal records, but your date of birth stays the same.

But gender doesn't add much to proving or confirming someone's identity.

Because so many given names are most commonly associated with one gender, it's not terribly likely that the gender marker would help differentiate you from other people with the same name. It can happen that people with different genders have the exact same name, but it's not nearly as robust a factor as address or date of birth.

And, because so many given names are gendered, it's not a workable factor for authenticating your identity either. A malicious actor (or a bot programmed with data scraped from baby name sites) would probably be able to guess the gender of the majority of people on the voters list.


On top of the fact that using gender as an identity factor adds little to no value, it also creates a situation where any negative impact is felt strictly by the most marginalized demographic.

People who continue to use the gender they were assigned at birth will have no problems whatsoever with choosing the same gender as appears on the voters list, or with having their gender as it appears on the list match the gender that appears on their ID.

But people whose gender marker on their official documentation has changed may find that their previous gender marker is still on the voters list, which would mean the online system says they're not registered to vote when in fact they are.  Or it could cause problem at the polling station, when the gender indicated on the list doesn't match the gender indicated on their ID, or the poll worker's perception of the voter's external appearance.

At a minimum, the presence of a "gender" field on the voters list creates the possibility of extra red tape for transgender voters, non-binary voters, and any other voters whose gender marker has changed at some point in their lives. Worst case, it could prevent these populations from being able to vote.

But it would have no possible impact on people whose gender identity and gender marker align with what they were assigned at birth.

Since we still live in a world where non-cis people are all too often marginalized, this means any negative impacts of having a "gender" field land squarely on the marginalized group.


Elections Canada does deserve credit for introducing a "Gender X" option on the voters list.  But I do encourage them to look critically at whether they need to be including gender at all. Does it actually add any value? And is that value worth the burden that it places squarely on the marginalized group?

Thursday, January 03, 2019

Things I Don't Understand: why do my thighs get colder than my calves?

Whenever I walk around outside in cold weather, my thighs get colder than my calves.

This makes no sense, because my winter coat is knee-length, so my thighs are covered in coat while my calves aren't.  (I don't own or care to shop for winter coats of any other lengths, so I can't do the obvious science experiment.)

Neither my boots nor my socks are tall enough to cover my my calves or warm enough to outweigh the warmth of my coat. (In other words, they're ordinary everyday socks and shoes, not thermal footwear for outdoor activities.)

My thighs have noticeably more fat on them than my calves do.

Even my feet don't get cold as much as my thighs do, and my feet are downright bony!

The coldness of my thighs can be felt externally as well as internally.  In other words, if I take off my pants as soon as I get home and feel my thighs and calves with my hands, my thighs are colder to the touch than my calves are.

Has anyone else ever experienced this, or know why this might happen?

Saturday, December 01, 2018

People who are reluctant to call landlines

As I've blogged about before, I prefer having a landline to using a cell phone for everything.

However, in recent years, I've noticed that people (including business relationships) are reluctant to call my landline, even when I explicitly tell them to.

For example, I will say "Please put in my file that my landline is the preferred number. I work from home so I'm at that number 23 hours a day, and I live alone so it is a private number. If I'm not at home, I'm not equipped to check my calendar or schedule an appointment or anything, so if you call my cell phone I'll just have to call you back anyway." 

And they still call the cellphone.

I do try to disincentivize calling the cellphone.  I don't answer the cellphone when I'm at home, sometimes even turning it off when I'm home (depending on whether I'm open to receiving texts at that moment). I don't answer it when I'm out and about for calls that aren't going to be immediately relevant (for example, I'll answer if it's the person I'm meeting or someone who might be trying to get in touch with me for emergency reasons, but I won't answer a call confirming a dentist appointment or wanting to discuss renewing my mortgage.)  If I do answer and it's something that would better go to the landline, I'll say "I'm not at home right now and not able to address this at the moment.  I'll call you back when I'm at home."  (And then, when I do call back, I tell them to call my landline next time.)  If they leave a message, I don't call them back until I'm at home.  (If they call the cellphone while I'm at home and leave a message, but don't subsequently try the landline, I don't even check the messages until I've gone out and returned back home.)

And I do try to incentivize calling the landline by always answering immediately when the call display shows a number that does have business calling me, and always returning calls immediately.

But people still call the cellphone.

I've even stopped giving out my cellphone number unless strictly relevant, but some people still have it in their records from back when I would blithely fill out every field of a contact form without regard for consequences, and some people do have a reason to be able to contact me by cell in emergencies. (For example, work needs to be able to reach me in case I disappear off the face of the earth, sometimes I give people my phone number if we have an appointment in an place I'm not familiar with, in case I get lost or delayed or something.) And when I do give it out, I tell them "You can use this if I don't show up at my appointment, but normally it's the worst possible way to reach me."

And they still call the cellphone.

I totally understand why some individuals might find not having a landline more convenient for their own purposes, but I'm rather baffled by the fact that they avoid calling someone else's landline even when explicitly instructed to do so.

Somehow, their baggage about calling a landline seems to outweigh my explicitly stated instructions about which number to call, plus all the cumulative empirical evidence about which number I'll answer first and which voicemail I'll respond to most quickly.

And what makes it especially weird is I get the vibe that people who are reluctant to call landlines seem to feel that doing so is rude.  Even though calling my cell increases the likelihood of interrupting me at a bad time. If I'm not at home, I am almost certainly in the middle of something and almost certainly do not have privacy.  If I am at home, I may or may not be in the middle of doing something and almost certainly do have privacy.

Again, I understand why some individuals might feel that calling in general might be rude - society as a whole certain seems to have moved towards texting or emailing to confirm it's a good time to call rather than calling cold - but this isn't what's happening here.  What's happening here is I'm getting a call without warning that requires thought or action or decision-making or scheduling on my part, and callers are deliberately choosing the number that's most likely to reach me at a bad time, despite my clear instructions to use the other number.

Baffling.

Sunday, November 11, 2018

Things I Don't Understand: objecting to assisted dying when you don't mind if people die

This post was inspired by, but is not directly related to, this op-ed outlining how the new provincial government's policies could kill people.

Policy can kill people.  Politicians who enact such policies and other proponents of these policies either don't care if people die, or see people's deaths as acceptable collateral damage.

What's weird is the intersection between not caring if one's policies kill people, but being opposed to medically-assisted death. If you don't care if people die, why would you object to people dying?

Some people hold the idea that people should contribute to society rather than being a burden to society.  Others refute argue against this idea, saying that your value comes from who you are as a person rather than what you can contribute.  (I actually don't hold either of these ideas - I don't feel it's my - or anyone's - jurisdiction to go around insisting others contribute to my satisfaction or accusing others of being a burden, but I also don't feel that every human being has intrinsic value for the simple reason that I can't perceive any intrinsic value in my own essential humanity.)

So I also find it weird when people who hold the "contribute to society or you're a burden" idea are opposed to assisted death. In a paradigm where it is possible for a person to be a burden, why would you be opposed to someone saying "I'm too much of a burden, so I'm going to get out of the way now.

One reason I have heard for objecting to medically-assisted death while not objecting to death itself is that if you can do it yourself, you don't need medical assistance.

But the benefit of medically-assisted death rather than suicide is it doesn't leave a mess for other people to clean up.  Currently, we don't have any non-medical method of suicide that doesn't leave a carcass in a place where it's inconvenient to others for there to be a carcass.

In contrast, in medical settings where people die, they're fully trained and prepared to move a dead body and hygienically clean up afterwards. (In my grandmother's long-term care home, they have whole procedures in place for this eventuality!) Until we have Suicide Place, medical contexts are our only option for people to die without being an undue burden upon others.

So it's really strange to me that people who don't mind that their policies might kill people are opposed to people choosing to die.

Sunday, September 30, 2018

Dear Miss Manners: what if you're bereaved and have poor acting skills?

From a recent Miss Manners:
Dear Miss Manners: At the funeral of a very dear person who was a founding member of the church I attend, I approached the deceased's sister outside the church before the service. I attempted to hug her and express my condolences. The sister all but recoiled, stating that she was not accepting any displays of condolence because it was "too upsetting" to her. Another family member, who was standing nearby at the time, just looked at me with a kind of "what-can-you-do?" expression on her face.
I was stunned and somewhat embarrassed because other people standing near enough heard her say this. I have not seen this person since the funeral about one month ago, and I am still a little rubbed about her behavior.
Should I be? She even made a remark to the effect that she knew her niece — the deceased's daughter — would probably hear about it and be upset with her, but that she didn't care.
Miss Manners replies:
Thus both admitting and defending being rude to you.
Although we try to make allowances for the emotional state of those in fresh mourning, that does not include hurting other mourners by repulsing condolences. On the contrary, the immediately bereaved should be representing the deceased to those who also feel their loss.
So yes, Miss Manners agrees that you should be a little rubbed about this behavior. And that for the sake of your late friend, you will now let it go.
Miss Manners did address the letter-writer's question, and did address the letter-writer's hidden question about whether it was appropriate for the family member in question to behave that way.

But, as the kind of socially-inept person who reads an etiquette advice column to better myself, I have another question: what if you are bereaved but, for whatever reason, don't have the acting skills to represent the deceased to the other mourners?

Is Miss Manners saying you shouldn't attend the funeral in that case?  Is there an etiquette-sanctioned way to attend the funeral but avoid people?

The family member whose behaviour so appalled the letter-writer and Miss Manners is the deceased's daughter's aunt, which, by my math, makes her either the deceased's sister or sister-in-law.

If we were to make a hierarchy about such things, the general consensus would be that the deceased's sister attending the funeral is more important than the members of the deceased's church getting their emotional needs attended to.  If we were to analyze the situation under Ring Theory, the sister would be the one who gets to do the dumping, and the letter-writer would be the one who has to do the comforting.

So would Miss Manners advise a person on an inner ring to skip a funeral if they can't attend to the emotional needs of a person on an outer ring?  Or does etiquette have something else in mind for people who, in their grief, just can't hold it together enough to fulfill the requirements of etiqutte?

Monday, May 28, 2018

Does good vision care insurance even exist?

I want to get vision therapy for my post-head-injury vision issues. It isn't covered by OHIP and apparently it's expensive, so I started looking at whether there's insurance that covers it.

(I know I probably can't swoop in, buy insurance, and instantly be covered for a pre-existing condition, but nevertheless I was interested in what's out there.)

And I could not find a single insurance plan that covers vision therapy.

I also could not find a single insurance plan that provides enough coverage for people's actual real-life glasses needs. 

All I could find is an inadequate amount for an eye exam every two years (even though optometrists recommend an annual eye exam), plus an inadequate amount for glasses, which maybe maybe maybe would cover a simple pair from the cheap rack at a chain store during a good sale, but would be nowhere near sufficient for people who need complex lenses or multiple pairs of glasses.

Is there even such thing as good vision care insurance that will cover the actual expenses that actual people incur, and maybe even extraordinary expenses for extraordinary situations like vision therapy?

I always figured that high-quality products were available somewhere out there for a price, but it seems that is not the case for vision care insurance. Is high-quality vision care insurance out there somewhere that's just outside of the awareness and google-fu of proles like me, or is there really no such thing?


Sunday, September 03, 2017

Those People (but not you)

The following is a quote from Believe Me by Eddie Izzard. As usual, any typos are my own:

Which was odd, since one of her really good friends - a man she'd met in San Francisco when she was on holiday there with my father - was gay and he and his partner lived there together. I think she definitely must have known that they were gay, but somehow it didn't bother her.

I think lots of people in the world behave similarly: they can like individuals for who they are, despite the fact that they don't' necessarily agree with or approve of the bigger issues and ideas related to their sexual or gender identities. Its a strange disconnect to me -  not wanting to let facts affect your opinions - but it seems to work that way. I've been on the receiving end of this kind of thinking. I may seem more acceptable as a transgender person to some people, and they may be more accepting of me because of my charitable marathon running, and perhaps being on the telly, but they won't necessarily change their mind-set about LGBT+ people in general.

This makes me think of an odd phenomenon I've experienced over the years: people who rant and rail about "those people" (who have a certain characteristic or do a certain thing) but then don't include you in that, even though you do or might plausibly have that characteristic or do that thing.

Initially I thought they were just putting on a show of backpedalling in an attempt at being less rude. But then I had relatives whose hobby is ranting and railing about people who don't have jobs seem genuinely surprised that it never occurred to me that they would help me out if I lost my job.  They seemed to think it was glaringly obvious that of course they'd help me out if I lost my job, even though every word I've ever heard them say about unemployed people is that they're bad and wrong and lazy and unworthy of any help.

I was also once in a conversation with a small business owner who was expressing prejudice about a certain identifiable group, but then seemed genuinely surprised when I assumed they would prefer not to have clients of that identifiable group.  (And then, in an interesting feat of mental gymnastics, expressed the idea that the problem with Those People is they aren't interested in being a client of the business in question, and if they were a client of the business in question they would be One of the Good Ones.)

I don't understand how people can think this way.  And I'm not saying that in a bemoaning-lack-of-human-compassion sort of way, I'm saying I can't extrapolate from my own experience having a human brain to figure out how the human brain can do this.

If they think being unemployed is bad and wrong and means you're lazy and unworthy of help, why wouldn't they conclude that I'm bad and wrong and lazy and unworthy of help if I lose my job?  If they do conclude that but feel morally obligated to help me anyway, why would they be surprised that I wouldn't expect them to do that?  And why would they reassure me in advance that they'd help me if they think being unemployed is so bad and wrong it needs additional external disincentives?

Conversely, if they want me to be confident I'd cared for and supported if unemployed, why would they spend so much time ranting and railing about unemployed people in the presence of someone who could become unemployed at any time and historically has had difficulty getting jobs?

If the small business owner expresses prejudice against a certain identifiable group, why would they be surprised that I'd conclude they'd prefer not to have clients from that group?  If they want more clients from the group, why would they express prejudice against that group?  If they are in fact prejudiced against that group, why do they see it as a problem that members of the group are disinclined to do business there (as opposed to being indifferent or tacitly relieved)?

Friday, June 16, 2017

Why do politicians want people to telephone them?

Recently, a greater than usual amount of instructions for political activism has been reaching me, and a common theme seems to be to telephone politicians. The instructions are to tell the person who answers the phone that you would like the politician to take or stop taking a particular action, and tell them any personal stories that support this request.

But why on earth would the telephone be the optimal medium for political activism?

If you telephone an elected official's office, someone has to answer the call. If you tell them an anecdote, someone has to write it down.  If they have a case tracking system, the person who answers the phone has to enter their notes into the case tracking system. The whole process moves at the speed of human speech, and is subject to transcription errors on the part of the person answering the phone, and dictation errors (as well as general human error and any lack of preparedness that's borne of inexperience) on the part of the person making the call. This is especially egregious because less-experienced phone-callers have to write up a script for themselves, which they read to the phone-answerer, who transcribes it into whatever system the political office uses.

But if you send them an email, the message will reach your political official (or enter their automated system) in your own words, either by copy-paste or through an automated algorithm. No human intervention, no possibility of human error, and also no staffing expenses to deal with your inquiry. It's faster for political staff (reading is faster than typing) and might also be no less slow for the citizen if - like me - they'd have to write up a script before making a phone call, or - like me - they can type at the speed of speech anyway. There's no human error, because your very own words either reach the politico directly or are entered into the automated system. From the point of view of the politico, they can get their constituents' POV straight from the constituents' mouth, and/or get their constituents' POV without having to pay the salary of political staff who run itnerference.

So how did it come about that a telephone call is considered the most effective way to reach politicians?

Saturday, April 29, 2017

Spotted in the wild: a person who can leave the house without a plan

I previously blogged about how baffled I am that there are apparently people who can leave the house without a plan. One of these people was seen in the wild in a recent Ask A Manager column:

I have been working at my job (a Fortune 500 company) for nine months, after I graduated college last year.

My boss and I went to a business lunch and he drank a lot. He was upset that I couldn’t drive us back to the office because I don’t have a driver’s license. He assumed I did. He didn’t tell me to drive until we were in the parking lot. I have epilepsy that makes me have seizures in my sleep. I have never had one when I an awake, but because it’s still epilepsy, I am not allowed to drive by law. I live in a large city with buses, cabs, and a subway, so I get along just fine if none of my family or friends can drive me.

I refused even though he insisted, and we had to take a cab back to the office and my boss had to take a cab back to get his company car the next day. Instead of expensing it, my boss and his boss want me to pay both cab fares. My boss said I should have told him I can’t drive. I work a desk job with no driving component and it was not mentioned in the requirements for my job. The cab fares totaled over $100 and I don’t think I should have to pay because my boss decided to get falling down drunk while he was on the clock. And even if I did have a license I wouldn’t have driven a company car without permission from someone higher than my manager. Is it okay to go to HR with something like this or is it expected I would have to pay?

The comment thread on Ask A Manager already has a lot of productive discussion on what the letter-writer should do and on the appropriateness of drinking during a business lunch, so that's probably the best venue for advice to LW on actual substantive issues.

What I'm interested in here is the boss's thought process (or lack thereof) when he left the office.

He was on his way to what he perceived as the kind of event where you get drunk.  But he just automatically assumed that someone else would be in a condition to drive him back to the office. He didn't ask, there was no history of this person driving him home, he just blindly assumed someone would take care of him.

It's mindblowing to me that someone can have been adulting long enough and well enough to become a boss without either getting in the habit of or automatically making a plan for how to get home.Why doesn't his brain do this automatically? What has his life thus far been that he's never had to think about it before, or at least hasn't had to think about it enough times that he automatically thinks about it?

Sunday, April 02, 2017

Boys' entrance and girls' entrance

The school in which I attended middle school was built in 1929, originally intended as a high school. It was a brick and stone building, built in an architectural style that the internet tells me is called Collegiate Gothic.

At the front of the building are two imposing-looking entrance doors.  Carved in the stone above one door are the words "Boys' Entrance".  Carved in stone above the other door are the words "Girls' Entrance."

The mystery: the school has always been co-ed.  (It's been co-ed throughout living memory, and a search of newspaper archives can find no hint that they ever changed it to co-ed.)

Each front entrance door leads to a stairwell, both of which are identical. You can go up to the second and third floor or down to the first floor. Each stairwell let out in the same hallway, about a classroom length apart.  There were no hints inside the building that it had ever been divided into two and then later merged (and the interior of the building was such that it was clear when you were entering one of the wings that had been added later etc., so I doubt they would have removed any sort of dividing wall without leaving evidence.)

The gender segregation of entrances was never enforced within living memory.  (We actually used the back doors a lot more often because they were more convenient.)  The signs were only still there because they were carved in stone and it's hard to uncarve stone.

But the mystery remains: why have gender segregated entrances leading to the exact same hallways in a co-ed school in the first place?

Thursday, September 29, 2016

Things I want to know from history but can't seem to google up properly

How were multiple brothers with the same surname addressed?

In the early 19th century (and probably some adjacent eras as well), the oldest unmarried daughter in a family was addressed as Miss [Surname], and her younger sisters were addressed as Miss [Firstname]. For example, the Bennet sisters in Pride and Prejudice are addressed as Miss Bennet, Miss Elizabeth, Miss Mary, Miss Kitty and Miss Lydia.  In Little Women, Meg and Jo receive an invitation to a danced addressed to "Miss March and Miss Josephine".

My question: what about brothers?  If there were multiple adult brothers, how were they addressed?

Which way did the buttons on lady's maids' dresses go?

Conventional wisdom says that men's clothes and women's clothes button on opposite sides because men dressed themselves and women had help getting dressed. (I question that, because upper-class men had valets just like upper-class women had lady's maids, but that is what the conventional wisdom says.)

But, within that reasoning, what about the clothes worn by lady's maids and other women who helped upper-class women get dressed? Did their buttons go in the same direction as men's, or did they emulate the fashions of upper-class women?

I've been dressing myself in women's clothes since I developed the motor skills to do so, and, as a result, I find it awkward and counterintuitive to button up a men's shirt on myself. I once bought a set of men's pyjamas when I was having trouble finding a pair of straightforward cotton pyjamas in the women's section, and I find the backwards buttons so irritating that I leave them buttoned up all the time and put the top over my head like a t-shirt. Surely any advantage of reversing the buttons would be negated by the fact that the lady's maid is accustomed to dressing herself...

Saturday, August 27, 2016

Why can you mail packages in street mailboxes?


Mailing a package in a Canada Post mailbox
Mailing a package in a Canada Post mailbox
Those red Canada Post mailboxes you see on the sidewalks have a small silver flap into which you can put individual letters, and a larger pull-down door into which you can put packages, as shown at right.

Mailboxes have been like this for as long as I can remember.  Even when I was a child in the 1980s, ever mailbox I saw (some of which, I'm sure, long predated the 1980s) had the large opening for packages.

Which raises the question: why would anyone put a package in a street mailbox? Correct postage for a package varies depending on size and weight, and, even if you could reliably calculate the postage at home, people rarely have a wide selection of different denominations of stamps that would enable them to affix correct postage.  Under normal circumstances, you'd have to go to a post office.  So why would a person ever put a package in the mailbox?

Of course, in the 21st century, the answer is ecommerce. When returning a product from a website with free returns (and perhaps under other circumstances of which I'm unaware), sometimes you get a shipping label that you can stick on a package and pop it right into a mailbox without having to go to the post office.

But mailboxes were designed to accommodate packages long before ecommerce was a thing!  Why?  Under what circumstances did people mail packages in street mailboxes back in the day?

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Why do some plugs and cables wear out?

My earbuds stop working every few months. First one ear goes, then both of them.  It seems to happen whether I buy them cheap or mid-range. (Haven't tried expensive ones myself, but other people have told me they wear out too.)  This has been happening since I was a teenager using them to listen to a walkman, and it continues at the same rate even now that I work from home (which is relevant because I use my earbuds for far fewer hours a day and they also spend much less time being knocked around in my purse.)

The Mini DisplayPort to VGA adapter that I use to connect my external monitor to my computer wears out every couple of years. First the image doesn't always appear on the external monitor when I close the computer lid (I have to open the lid to get to the power button), then it starts taking multiple unplugs and replugs for the image to show up on the external monitor, then the monitor starts blinking out at random times, and finally it does this weird thing where the whole computer freezes when I try to switch to the monitor.  Then I get a new adapter, and everything goes back to normal.

I had the same problem with the cable that connected my cellphone to my computer, back when such a thing was possible. It would just stop working every few months.

Why does this happen?  These things are basically just plugs and wires. What exactly would cause them to stop functioning?

And why doesn't it happen with things like kettles and toasters and lamps, which also have plugs and wires?

Saturday, May 07, 2016

Teach me how non-employer-specific unions work

I recently received an email telling me that the drywallers' union is on strike, and this might cause  delay to my condo. (Which isn't a problem - I'm perfectly comfortable in my apartment in the interim and I sincerely hope the people working so hard to build my home get a generous settlement that helps them be comfortable too.)

Googling around the idea, I get the impression that unions in the trades work like I recently learned unions in show business do - the union isn't specific to an employer, all workers who belong to a certain category are members of the union, and the different employers pay them according to the collective agreement for reasons I don't wholly understand but nevertheless am glad work.

Since they're going on strike, I assume they're in negotiations for a new collective agreement and the negotiations have stalled.  (At least, this is the only situation I'm aware of that leads to a strike).  Which raises a question I never thought about before: who's on the other side of the negotiating table?

The unions with which I'm personally familiar are all for the employees of a single employer.  You work for that one employer, you're part of that union. You switch to another employer, you're no longer part of that union. So in collective agreement negotiations, the union is negotiating with/against the employer.

But since the drywallers and others like them (and the show business unions too) seem to represent everyone doing the same job for all different employers, who are they negotiating with/against? Is there someone who represents all the employers? A union of employers of unions?

Or is there a word for this kind of union where the workers work for many different employers, so I can google it better?  (Non-employer-specific union was fruitless, and googling around the idea of multi-employer union kept getting interference from US health insurance plans.  Also, I think Google's auto-complete feature is anti-union. But doing the same searches with DuckDuckGo just gives me even fewer Canadian results on the first page.)

Thursday, March 31, 2016

Journalism Wanted: who are the people who write publishable letters to the editor without knowing they'll be googleable?

Recently, the Toronto Star's public editor wrote about people who want their letters to the editor unpublished because they're googleable.

My question: who are these people?  This is really a unique convergence of factors. They are people to whom it occurs to write a letter to the editor, they are savvy enough to write a letter to the editor that gets selected for publication, they are completely unaware of the fact that a letter to the editor would become googleable, and they are affected by the fact that their letter (and the opinions contained therein) are googleable.

How do all these factors manage to converge? The combination of inclination to write a letter to the editor and unawareness of how googleability works makes me think of people who are very old and technologically illiterate, but would these people be affected by the googleability of their letter?  I mean, my own parents are senior citizens and they know how googleability works, so those who are unaware of it would be, like, octogenarians and above, most of whom aren't in the workforce or any other situation where the googleability of their opinions would have any impact.

Also, they don't print truly extremist positions in letters to the editor. If someone wrote in with hate speech or something, it wouldn't get printed.  But one of the reasons cited for requesting a letter to be unpublished is professional repercussions for the political views expressed.  Jobs where people would suffer repercussions for political views sufficiently benign to be printed in a letter to the editor are generally the sort of job that requires some degree of savvy and nuance - the sort of thing where you'd think people would need to know how googleability works in order to function properly at their job.  So how did they get there?

I really want the newspaper to interview these people (even if anonymously) and tell us their stories.  How did all these factors converge?

Where have all the anti-chafing gels gone?

I recently had my very first experience with thigh chafing. I have no idea why it happened now or why it has never happened before, but it made every step I took an ordeal and preoccupied every aspect of my life.

I tried every solution I could think of or google up (baby powder, vaseline, moisturizer, diaper cream, antiperspirant, personal lubricant, Body Glide), and none of them provided the frictionless experience I needed to get through the day.

The remaining option I hadn't tried but had seen praised all over the internet is Monistat Chafing Relief Powder-Gel. I was reluctant to use this because it seemed to be silicone-based, and it turned out that many of my hair problems had been caused by silicones (or, at least, had been solved by eliminating silicones) so I was wary of it as an ingredient.  But, having tried everything else and not been happy with the results, I figured it was time to risk it. So I waddled over to Shoppers Drug Mart...and couldn't find it on the shelf.  I asked the pharmacist, and she said they didn't sell it.  She added that they did used to have a similar product from Lanacane, but they didn't have it any more.

So I waddled over to Rexall, and they also didn't have the Monistat either.  They did have the Lanacane Anti-Chafing Gel...but it was on clearance, suggesting that it's been discontinued!  Which is tragic, because it turns out it's the best of all the products at creating a frictionless situation between my thighs!

Monistat's Canadian website doesn't even have the Chafing Relief Gel, and the price of the product is greatly inflated on amazon.ca. Lanacane still has the Anti-Chafing Gel on its website, but it doesn't have a separate Canadian website and its availability online seems to be petering out.  Googleable evidence suggests that they're both still readily available in the US market.

And I haven't seen any other silicone-based anti-chafing gels on the drugstore shelves.

Why is this whole category of products apparently disappeared from major chain drugstore shelves, and perhaps even have gone so far as to be discontinued?  Other products just aren't comparable!


(If you googled your way here looking for a solution for thigh chafing, the real hero turned out to be ice packs. They brought immediate relief to the physical discomfort, and a diligent icing regime promoted healing far faster than I thought humanly possible.  I went from "OMG, I'm going to have to go to the doctor" to "I wouldn't even have anything to show the doctor" in 48 hours. However, people can't always have an ice pack between their legs every single moment of every single day, and people want the option of prevent the chafing before it happens, so we need anti-chafing gels too.)