Books read in September 2021

New:

 

1. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

2. Motorcycles and Sweetgrass by Drew Hayden Taylor

3. Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado-Perez

4. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Reread:

1. Creation in Death

My voting by mail experience

Elections Canada posted the final candidates list for each riding on September 1. Based on this information, I figured I don't expect anything to change before election day, so I decided to vote by mail.

To vote by mail, you need to include a picture of your ID. A scan of my Ontario Photo Card worked, even though the card had expired during the pandemic. (Ontario decreed that ID expiring during the pandemic is still valid.) I'm not able to independently assess any better than you are how safe sending a photo of your ID over the Elections Canada website may or may not be. 

(Weirdly, gender is also a required field on the application for a mail-in ballot)

.

I sent in my application late at night on September 1, and by noon September 2 my status on the Elections Canada was "Registration status: Accepted. Voting kit sent".

 

The voting kit was waiting for me in my mailbox on September 7, alongside my voter registration card.

The voting kit doesn't contain a ballot with the names of all the candidates in your riding. Instead, it contains a blank card for you to write the name of the candidate you're voting for, meaning you're responsible for looking up the candidates' names yourself.

(Journalism Wanted: how much leeway do the people counting the ballots have regarding misspellings, etc.?)

You put the card with the name in one of the envelopes provided, then put that in a second envelope bearing identification numbers, which you sign and date. Then you put that in a third envelope bearing the address of the local Elections Canada office and prepaid postage. 

I put my ballot in the mailbox at some point on the weekend of September 11-12, and the status on the Election Canada site changed to "Complete ballot received" on September 15.

 

Then, just minutes after I got that update, one of the candidates on my riding resigned. So much for "I don't expect anything to change before election day"!

Things They Should Invent: "Browsing-Friendly" sign for small businesses

When I have to do in-person shopping for clothes, I prefer to shop in a mall. That's because mall stores are more browsing-friendly - you can drift in and out, getting a sense of what's available, and it's all very low-commitment.

In contrast, I dislike shopping for clothes in small businesses with main street (Yonge St.) storefronts, because it feels like more of a commitment to walk in. I don't know what they stock, I don't know if it will meet my needs, I don't know what the prices will be like, but I still have to walk in (with the door often ringing a bell when I do so), usually walk right past the owner and either take up their time helping me or dissuade them from helping me before I can even see if the contents of the store meet my needs well enough to even try things on. And then, if nothing meets my needs, I have to look the owner dead-ass in the eye and tell them that I'm not going to be helping them with their livelihood today.

It would be so much easier - and I would be so much more likely to shop for clothes at small neighbourhood stores - if I could browse them like mall stores!

But it also occurs to me that there are likely a non-zero number of small business owners who wouldn't mind if I did just that.

If only there was a way to tell who they are!

Solution: a standardized "Browsing-Friendly" sign that small businesses can put in their window, indicating that they have no objection to people wandering in and idly browsing their wares without any commitment to buy.

This would encourage customers to browse small businesses they might otherwise be reluctant to enter, thereby increasing the likelihood of customers finding the products they need in small businesses and of small businesses capturing market share that would otherwise go to mall stores. 

 

Win-win situation!

The mysterious missing verses of The Tottenham Toad

Some snippets of a children's song popped into my head recently, starting with "The Tottingham Toad went hopping down the road..."

So I googled around, and the internet is unanimous about the lyrics:

The Tottenham Toad came trotting down the road 

With his feet all swimming in the sea 

Pretty little squirrel with your tail in curl 

They’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:

- "The Wimbledon Whale he stood upon his tail" 

- "The Canterbury Crow said 'Now I have to go'"

- "As he drank three cups of bread and tea"

- "It's so sad it fills me full of glee" 

- "Lazy little lynx she just sits and winks"

And zero of these lines appear on the googleable (or duckduckgoable or bingable) internet!

I'm particularly confident about the "lynx" line because Child!Me had never heard of a lynx, so I wouldn't have made up or misremembered in the direction of something I'd never heard of. Wimbledon might be wrong, because Child!Me had heard of Wimbledon and therefore might have interpolated it into the lyrics.

 

Has any other human being in the world heard these verses, or are they completely lost to history?

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.