Monday, October 02, 2023
"And also" is the key to appreciating the little things in life
Saturday, April 15, 2023
Advice for the Ask A Manager letter writer who found scales in the break room
Monday, August 15, 2022
Defining the intersection of walkable and accessible
Saturday, June 11, 2022
Cause and effect
Tuesday, January 18, 2022
Flaws in my antiracism education: educating us like children rather than future adults
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.
Tuesday, October 26, 2021
What if we measured beauty standards in labour required to be unremarkable or credible?
Thursday, September 16, 2021
Things They Should Invent: "Browsing-Friendly" sign for small businesses
Tuesday, September 07, 2021
The mysterious missing verses of The Tottenham Toad
The Tottenham Toad came trotting down the roadWith his feet all swimming in the seaPretty little squirrel with your tail in curlThey’ve all got a wife but me.
Here's the weird part: the internet says that this is the whole song, but I clearly remember it has having three verses! I distinctly remember other lines from the song, and there is no record of them on the internet.
I remember the following lines:
Sunday, September 05, 2021
Could an eBay-style bidding system help painlessly cool the real estate market?
Tuesday, June 29, 2021
Magic Words: "or . . . ?"
Sunday, June 06, 2021
Magic Words: "human being"
Friday, April 09, 2021
The big stuck boat as an analogy for political disagreements in relationships
There's no debate over whether or not the big boat is stuck: it is a big boat, and it is stuck, and we are all aware of those facts, even those of us who are currently located in outer space.Furthermore, most of us share the opinion that it's disagreeable, logistically, for the boat to be stuck. The boat being stuck is inconvenient. It's a big disruption! Nobody can say it isn't a big disruption. None of my distant relatives will get into arguments on The Face Website about whether or not the stuck boat is making a nuisance for lots of people. I like that.
Now imagine if, instead of a ship on the other side of the world, the problem is something more immediate, something that threatens your survival or safety or bodily integrity, or that of people you care about.
To use the example that's at the forefront of everyone's mind, you're trying to keep people safe from the virus, and but there's someone insisting the virus doesn't exist and advocating for activities that will spread the virus.
They're just . . . in the way, aren't they?
If they're someone you already care about, you might feel it's worth keeping them in your life despite the fact that they're in the way. Or you might not. But if they're a new person, there's really no point in bringing them into your life if all they're going to do is get your boat more stuck.
Sunday, January 03, 2021
Vaccine conspiracy theory conspiracy theory
If I were to assemble the elements of the current situation into a conspiracy theory, that theory would be that people in positions of power were contributing to the spread of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and/or not working to debunk these theories to create conditions where those in positions of power would have to be at the front of the line for any vaccine roll-out in order to set an example.
If vaccine reluctance wasn't a thing, there would be no reason to vaccinate politicians and public figures ahead of front-line workers, health workers, food workers, etc. But now that vaccine reluctance is a thing, politicians and public figures can very publicly go straight to the front of the vaccine queue, be photographed getting their vaccine, and be lauded for setting a good example.
Wednesday, July 01, 2020
The mystery of the disappearing desks
One thing I do have around the house is a desk. And, with the pandemic, I was surprised to learn just how many people don't have a desk.
My high-school graduation gift was a computer - a desktop computer, because that's what my father thought was most suitable. Laptop computers did exist in those days, but in the days before wifi you were tethered to a wall if you want to use the internet anyway, so desktops were a lot more common.
I set up my computer on my desk in my childhood bedroom, and subsequently on the desk in my dorm room and, being an internet addict, I spent most of my waking hours there, talking on the internet to other people who were also at their desktop computers tethered to the wall.
When I got my first apartment, I brought in my furniture from my childhood bedroom (my parents had the foresight to furnish our childhood bedrooms with regular grownup furniture rather than small/cutesy child-specific furniture). It was a small apartment, but my computer was still my top priority in my waking hours, so I set up my desk right in the living room, so I could continue my habit of spending time on the internet talking to other people also sitting at their desks.
Around this time I learned about ergonomics at work, so I applied the same principles to my desk at home. My set-up in student housing had been unergonomic and caused me a lot of neck pain, so I wanted something more sustainable for my adult life.
Then, when I got a laptop, I saw no reason not to continue with my comfy, ergonomized desk. I connected the laptop to my ergonomic peripherals, and kept right on spending my days at my desk, talking to people on the internet who, I had every reason to believe, were also at their desks.
Then, when the pandemic came along and everyone who can work from home started doing so, I was shocked to discover that the internet was full of people who . . . don't own a desk!!! All these people whom I'd always pictured as being at their desks were suddenly setting up makeshift workstations at kitchen tables and on couches and in bed . . .
Where did all the desks go??
I do understand intellectually that you can internet on laptops and mobile devices, but I've always found working at a desk more comfortable and convenient.
I also understand that many people live in small homes - I do myself! It's just my desk has always been so important to me that it's my second priority, after a bed.
So it's quite astonishing to me that it's such a low priority for so many people that "how to work from home when you don't have a desk" was a major topic of conversation in the early days of the pandemic!
But in addition to the question of "Why don't people have desks?" there's also the question of "What happened to the desks that people used to have?"
A lot of the "no desk, now what?" that's reaching me is coming from people who have been on the internet (in a personal capacity, not just for work or school) for at least as long as I have. Which means that, once upon a time, they almost certainly must have had a desk in their home - even if not a literal desk, then a designated table where a computer could be set up.
And now they don't. They must have, at some point, gotten rid of the literal desk. Which is so bizarre to me - they looked at what I consider the second most important piece of furniture in a home, and thought "I don't anticipate ever needing to fulfill this function again."
Or what if they never had them in the first place? What if, for all these years, all these people on the internet I thought were sitting at their desks actually weren't?
That would be interesting to study - survey people who were caught out without a desk in the pandemic and ask them if they've ever owned a desk.
If you had asked me, back in the 90s when I was setting up my very own computer at my very own desk, to predict what will happen in the world in the year 2020, I would never have come up with "A lot fewer people own desks"!