We are part of the 99%

The following picture was tweeted into my timeline. I don't know its origin, but I felt compelled to respond.



If you can't read it, there's a transcript below. As usual, any typoes are my own.

I am a college senior, about to graduate completely debt free.
I pay for all of my living expenses by working 30+ hours a week making barely above minimum wage. I chose a moderately priced, in-state public university & started saving $ for school at age 17.
I got decent grades in high school & received 2 scholarships which cover 90% of my tuition.
I currently have a 3.8 GPA
I live comfortably in a cheap apt., knowing I can't have everything I want. I don't eat out every day, or even once a month. I have no credit card, new car, iPad or smart phone - and I'm perfectly okay with that.
If I did have debt, I would not blame Wall St. or the government for my own bad decisions.
I live below my means to continue saving for the future.
I expect nothing to be handed to me, and will continue to work my @$$ off for everything I have.
That's how it's supposed to work.
I am NOT the 99%, and whether or not you are is YOUR decision.

Greetings, anonymous picture person, I'm very pleased to meet you! It sounds like we have a lot in common! I also graduated from university debt-free. I also paid my way with low-wage jobs (although, after about five years in the workforce, I was able to pull my way up to 150% of minimum wage). I also saved money for university, although I started at the age of 8. I also earned scholarships with my mid-90s average. I'm glad you get to live comfortably in an apartment! I couldn't justify the luxury of an actual apartment, so I lived in a cheap single room in student housing where things would crawl out of walls and give me panic attacks. (This also meant I had to eat out if I wanted to share a meal with friends, because I didn't have a kitchen or the physical space for more than one person to eat.) I did have a credit card in university because I'm up to the simple task of paying it off in full every month, but if you can't handle that then I applaud your decision not to have one. Even a used car was an unnecessary luxury at the time (still is, in fact), and the other things on your list didn't exist then (although I still don't have them because I can't justify the expense of a data plan.) After I graduated, I was hired by the place where I did my internships on the basis of the excellent work I did for them, and have been happily employed there ever since, with my duties now including overseeing internships for people like you. I've been able to afford an actual apartment and, a few years later, a nice apartment, still living within my means.

Isn't it satisfying when you do what you're supposed to do and things work out like they're supposed to work out?

That's what Occupy is fighting for. A world where you do what you're supposed to do and things work out like they're supposed to work out. Where you can get over 30 hours a week of work. Where universities are moderately priced. Where you can go to university even if you didn't start saving until you were 17. Where good grades will get you scholarships that will pay the majority of your tuition. Where a student can afford a cheap apartment and a used car. Where five years of hard work and brains enough to win scholarships will get you more than barely over minimum wage. Where saving for the future is even an option.

The 1%, the rich and the powerful, fucked up the world's economy, wrote themselves bonus cheques that are orders of magnitude bigger than the likes of us who have to pay our way through school on scholarships and low wages will see in a lifetime, and are trying to make the rest of us, the 99% (which does include you, BTW - even with today's unemployment rates, scholarships and 30 hours a week don't put you in the richest 1%), pay for it by creating a world where it will be harder and harder to have things work out just by doing what you're supposed to do. They're trying to make there be fewer jobs, have them less well-compensated and less secure, and at the same time to reduce available public services. This means that it will be harder for you to get and keep your 30 hours and you'll get paid less for it, and at the same time your tuition will go up and your scholarships will go down.

Occupy is not about blaming Wall St. or the government for your bad decisions, it's about the things that you and I value - hard work and planning for the future - working out the way they're supposed to work.

You are part of the 99%. Being part of it is not your decision, unless you're powerful enough to unilaterally become part of the riches 1% AND ensure that everyone else stays poorer than you. But what you do with it is your decision.

Do employers not have respect for basic work ethic?

A common job interview question is "Why do you want this job?" And the true answer, "Because it's a job," is not acceptable.

Based on what my parents and grandparents tell me about their employment history, it seems you used to be able to get a job on the basis that you need a job and the job in question is a job and you're capable of doing the job in question. Employers would hire their employees' kids in the summer solely on the basis that the kids needed summer jobs. They didn't need to convince the employer of why they wanted to shovel coke or pack meat, it was obvious that they needed to make money. Apparently they even used to have designated places where people who needed work and employers who needed day labourers would all go and match themselves up with each other. The employers would hire people simply because they were there and willing to work!

And yet, every job I've interviewed for, including fast food, has had a "Why do you want this job?" question.

When did this start happening? Why do they do it? It makes me wonder if today's employers don't have respect for basic work ethic, that they went and created a world where willingness to work to earn a living is not considered sufficient motivation.

Some post-election information

1. The report from Three Ontario Votes (which I've mentioned before) is now out. I'm disappointed they didn't do a full seat count for the AV model, but otherwise it's informative.

2. My traditional post-election test of the Hill & Knowlton Election Predictor: Using the actual popular vote as reported by CBC, Hill & Knowlton predicts Liberal 56, Conservative 31, NDP 20. Actual seat count: Liberal 53, Conservative 37, NDP 17.

The scariest thing I've read lately

The following is a quote from John Lanchester's I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay. As usual, any typos are my own:

By June 2008, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, or ISDA - the association of companies dealing in this stuff - was estimating the total size of the [derivatives] market as $54 trillion, close to the total GDP of the planet and many times more valuable than the total number of all the stocks and shares traded in the world.

That terrifies me, because derivatives are entirely artificial. They just made them up because they wanted new financial products. Meanwhile, the GDP of the planet is real. It's the money we make for doing our jobs, the money our employers make from selling the products and services we produce, the money we spend on our rent and groceries and cough syrup and haircuts. And yet, this entirely artificial thing that fucked up the global economy was close to being bigger than anything real!

And, since the derivatives market was many times more valuable than all the stocks and shares in the world, this meant that the portion of financial work that comes close to touching on reality was utterly marginalized in favour of this wholly artificial creation.

And, with it, they managed to fuck up the global economy.

How can those of us who have to live in reality, and make and buy and do real things, possibly feel safe?

What if some people are better at materialism than others?

Some people think that money, or accruing material objects, doesn't lead to happiness. My personal experience is that it my money and my material possessions do make me happy. There are a lot of opinions about this in the world, but most of them (including what I've blogged previously on the subject) are rather absolutist, in that they assume it applies to everyone the same way.

But what if it doesn't?

The first possibility that comes to mind is that different people gain different degrees of happiness from materialism. But sometimes I hear people saying materialism doesn't lead to happiness in the first person, i.e. describing how they would purchase material goods thinking it would make them happy, but it didn't.

I've never had that happen to me. How does that even happen? How do you not know that something isn't going to make you happy, and how does this happen repeatedly?

Which leads to the second possibility: what if some people are better at materialism than others? What if some of us are good at judging in advance what material possessions will make us happy, whereas others are just purchasing stuff willy-nilly or are easily deluded regarding what will make them happy?

How does the aging population affect voter turnout numbers?

With the low voter turnout in last week's provincial election in the news, I find myself thinking of my grandmother.

My grandmother has been losing her faculties for some time, but between the last election and this one, she's being diagnosed with Alzheimer's and put in a nursing home. I don't know if she voted, and I don't know if there's any mechanism other than logistics to stop her from voting if she wants to. However, I do know that she's probably not competent to vote - she has enough memory problems that she simply cannot develop an informed political opinion - and I do know that she's most likely still on the voter's list at her old address, where she lived and received a voter card for every election for 60 years.

In calculating voter turnout, she counted as a no-show. But if she didn't vote, that isn't actually a problem.

As the population ages, we're going to have more and more people in my grandmother's situation. I wonder if this will be enough to affect overall voter turnout numbers?

What I have to thank Steve Jobs for

The time: early 80s. The place: the spare room in my parents' house. My father spent hours at the machine, staring lines and lines of green, hard-to-read words. I toddled up to see what was so interesting, and discovered that, even though the screen was boring, it had BUTTONS! So, of course, I tried to push the buttons.

In one of his better parenting decisions, rather than telling me not to push the buttons, my father decided to teach me which buttons to push. We started with a simple kiddie game called Bouncing Numbers. A number bounced around the screen, and I had to press the same number on the keyboard. To get to the game, I had to put a certain diskette into the disk drive, then type "RUN BOUNCING NUMBERS". So many letters, and it took a long time to find them all because the buttons with the letters on them weren't in any sensible order! But I figured it out and quickly became fluent in it. I learned how to run some other games, got into one of the programming books and started writing simple programs, and by the time I reached kindergarten I was confidently computer-literate.

Many people have written tributes to Steve Jobs in the past few days, most often singing the praises of Apple's 21st-century creations. But Apple's first inventions were some of the very first home computers ever. Bringing the computer into the home enabled me, and thousands of others like me, to become fluent computer users before we could tie our shoes. We'd then invite our friends over to play computer games, and, within a generation, computers evolved in popular consciousness from big scary geeky technology to something anyone can just sit down and figure out.

Voter's Resources

Since we just had a federal election in May, I'm not rewriting everything from scratch. The pertinent links are below. For how to use them, click on "How to Vote", "Where to Vote", and "How to Vote Strategically" below. As usual, this post will be updated until election day. If I've missed anything, please let me know in the comments.

Getting Started

Election day is October 6.

Voter information from Elections Ontario

My How to Vote
My Where to Vote
My How to Vote Strategically


Platforms

Conservative
Green
Liberal
NDP

Tools

CBC Vote Compass
Election Prediction Project
Hill and Knowlton Predictor
DemocraticSPACE
LISPOP
Riding-by-riding polls for the GTA

Voted

Another election on a beautiful day, and another provincial election nursing a virus (which has mutated from a sore throat to a runny nose today). I encountered many many doggies today and got a lot of petting in, including my next-door neighbour's dog for the whole elevator wait and ride. Hopefully that's enough good luck.

I didn't get a voter's card this year and had to wait in a bit of a line to register (a process that was a bit slower than I recall) but it got done in under half an hour with no particular difficulties. I voted in a seniors' residence instead of a school this time. Some of the residents were milling around outside watching all the comings and goings, and I believe some of them were working at the polling station. Nice friendly community-like chat waiting in line, dogs and children got squeed at, and the whole process took under half an hour.

Now I'm at home to nurse my cold and a glass of wine, and watch results.

Complaints about vitaminwater

Given the sudden dearth of Fruitopia in my environs, I decided to try the flavour of vitaminwater that looked like it was indicated for fighting a cold ("defense" it's called, complete with USian spelling.)

1. The flavour said raspberry-apple. It didn't taste like raspberry, or apple, or fake raspberry, or fake apple. It tasted like fake cranberry. If I wanted that, I'd get cranberry juice.

2. The nutrients featured prominently on the label were vitamin C and zinc. However, on reading the fine print, I noticed these were the last two of the medicinal ingredients, behind a bunch of B vitamins (which, while important nutrients, are not what I'm after when I'm fighting a virus).

3. It contains 90 mg of vitamin C and 3.75 mg of zinc. In contrast, my vitamin C supplements contain 500 mg, and my zinc lozenges contain 35 mg (plus 50 mg of vitamin C).

I suppose I should have read the label in detail before I bought it, but I'm used to things sold medicinally (and this is labelled medicinally, with medicinal and non-medicinal ingredients rather than a nutrition box) containing significant amounts of the nutrients they're meant to supplement. In any case, I resent actual foodstuff (i.e. fruit juice) being taken off the shelves in favour something that's less food-like, less nutritious, less effective, and less yummy. I don't mind fake food in and of itself, but I don't want it displacing real food!

Where has all the fruit punch gone?

Normally, I drink water during the day and with meals. However, I'm currently nursing a sore throat (likely viral), so I find myself wanting juice.

Citrus juices are on my no list for GERD, so I decided I'd drink fruit punch. At home I just mixed up a jug of Minute Maid fruit punch from concentrate (which has been my default juice since childhood), and at work I figured I'd just buy a couple of single-serving bottles of the same stuff or its Fruitopia equivalent.

But they don't sell it anywhere. Cafeteria, food court, drugstores, convenience stores, the juice aisle in the grocery store - no one has single-serving bottles of fruit punch, or in fact any non-citrus non-cranberry fruit juice.

They sell orange juice, lemonade, cranberry juice (which I'm not terribly fond of and, at least in the forms being sold in single-serving bottles, does not have significant amounts of vitamin C), and a bunch of sports drinks and vitamin water concoctions.

But I don't want fortified flavoured water when I'm sick, I want actual fruit juice! The sweetness is what soothes my throat and makes it go down easier than water.

Last time I was sick in a way that made me want juice, you could get a few different kinds of Fruitopia everywhere. Now you can't. It seems to have all been replaced with vitamin water. I already have vitamins and water in my arsenal, what I need is juice. But, somehow, it's been discontinued.

Things They Should Invent: central repository of research ideas

As I've blogged about before, one thing I really enjoy about the workplace as opposed to academia is that I don't have to come up with my own ideas for what to work on. All my major projects, even in undergrad, were "think of a topic and do a project on it," and I could never think of a good topic or tell what kind of topic would produce a good project. In the workplace, I simply translate what I'm assigned. This is one of the reasons why I haven't done a graduate degree - the idea of having to think up a thesis topic (and probably project topics for the coursework) puts me off now that I've become accustomed to a world where I simply do what I'm told.

However, I often come up with ideas for research in other fields.

Surely I'm not the only person in the world who has trouble thinking of something suitable to research. And surely I'm not the only person in the world who occasionally thinks "Hey, someone should do a study on that!"

So why not put the two together?

We need one single central website where people can post any research ideas they come up with, and would-be researchers can look for good ideas. The ideas could be random things that occur to you, or they could be information you want for which no research has been conducted (for example, if you'd like clinical testing conducted on a natural remedy you're considering). Prospective researchers could use ideas or use them as a jumping-off point for their own ideas. Researchers who do use ideas could mark them as such, thus drawing attention to their research. Users could also vote for other ideas, so the ideas that more people like get a more prominent place on the page. Perhaps this demand for the research could even be a factor in helping secure research grants?

Things They Should Invent: drop-in daycare in medical buildings

This post was inspired by the following question from a Carolyn Hax chat:

Hello, I am feeling very overwhelmed and hope that I can get a kick in the pants. I have 2 children under 2. My husband and I moved to a city we hate - despite months of attempts, the moms groups have been very cold to me, for example. He is getting deployed, and is away for weeks at a time. It takes everything in my power to get up each morning and do things with my kids. I know I am battling with depression and/or PPD, but I can't go to a therapist because I don't have child care. I know the steps to take to help improve my mood and stress level (exercise, etc.) but I can't drag myself out of it all to start, and I just wind up eating junk on the couch after the kids go to bed. Any words of advice? Thanks, I've been reading this chat since the beginning.

Reading this, I remembered how one of the community pools where we'd have swimming lessons had a "daycare", which was really just a room where kids could go and play with toys under adult supervision while their parents participated in adult swim classes or took a younger sibling to an infant class.

So why not put something similar in medical buildings?

It would be easier than a regular daycare from the perspective of all parties. The daycare operators wouldn't need to plan a curriculum or provide snacks since the kids would only be there for an hour or two. And the parents wouldn't need to worry about whether the daycare provides an optimal curriculum and a classroom environment that's conducive to social development, all they need for a couple of hours is for it to be safe.

It wouldn't even be terribly extortionate for the daycare to be run on a for-profit basis and charge the parents market rates for their kids to attend, because any parents who are in the market for drop-in daycare while they attend a medical appointment would otherwise have to pay for child care during their medical appointment anyway.

I'm surprised there aren't more things like this.

Teach me how union finances work

There is clear choice in this election, said Hudak from Dundas on Saturday. Taxpayers can’t afford to pay big union boss salaries anymore or pay for their ad campaigns, he has said.

Does Tim Hudak not understand how union finances work, or do I not understand how union finances work?

My understanding, extrapolated from conversations with union members and observations from having worked in a unionized environment, is that union members pay union dues out of their salaries, and the expenses of operating the union (including advertising and any pay the union leaders receive for doing their union leader duties) are all funded from the union dues. My understanding is that the employer does not pay into the union (wouldn't that be a heinous conflict of interest?) So the amount of money a union spends on various things is between the union and its members.

Extrapolated to the provincial government, this means that the money union leaders get for their work as union leaders and the money unions spend on ad campaigns come out of the pockets of provincial public servants, in their role as the employees. The taxpayers, in their role as employer, aren't paying for any of it. And what the unions spend money on is between them and the public servants - the taxpayers and the government, in their capacity as employer, have no say in it or authority to change it.

Am I understanding this correctly? If not, please correct me in the comments.

Wherein I once again consider a career as a political advisor

Me in January 2009.

Bob Rae today.

Things They DID Invent: Interview Your Bully

A while back, I came up with the idea of interviewing bullies and other mean people to get inside their head and find out what they're thinking.

Turns out Salon is doing it, having people interview their bullies! Half of me thinks this is brilliant, half of me thinks no good can possibly come of it, and half of me wishes I was brave enough to do it myself.

Things They Should Invent: sleepable ER waiting rooms

This story of a blogger's experience in the ER got tweeted into my twitter feed, and what struck me reading it is that, because he arrived in the ER in the evening and had to wait several hours, he basically went a night without sleep.

This sounds like a solvable problem.

What if there were cots for ER patients waiting to be seen? What if there were recliner chairs? What if, instead of just calling patients' names, the admissions people would actually go out into the waiting room to find them?

If patients could sleep in the waiting room, that makes wait times less of a problem. Compare the prospect of sitting for hours in an uncomfortable chair in a room full of sick people vs. the prospect of taking a nap and they'll wake you up when they're able to treat you. It would turn some ER visits (for example, a small child with a fever) from a nightmare to a mere inconvenience. Sleeping certainly gets better health outcomes than sleep deprivation. And hospital staff will have to deal with fewer angry/agitated/distressed patients if a significant number of patients are asleep.

With a few changes in furnishings and interior decoration, they can make the whole ER experience far easier and less stressful for everyone.

The Ontario voter list mystery

I'm not on the Ontario voter list this election. I'm never on the Ontario voter list. Every single Ontario election since I was 18, I didn't receive a voter card and had to register on election day.

I have voted in (and registered at) every Ontario election since I was 18. Last election, I lived at the same address as I do now, so my registration from last election should be valid.

I was registered federally for, and voted in, the election this past May, and I'm pretty sure both federal and provincial get their voter's lists from the tax rolls. I recently got a jury duty questionnaire, which means provincial does know about me. But I'm not on the voter's list. And the same thing happens every election. Weird.

Things They Should Invent: incentivize clinical testing of natural remedies

Whenever I'm looking into natural remedies for various things, I keep running up against the problem that clinical testing simply hasn't been done so answers don't exist to the questions I have. A lot of the time I'm willing to take the risk and try it out on myself, but for certain things (like if I think might weaken my birth control pills, for example) I want hard data. And I keep googling up against the fact that studies haven't been done, because studies aren't required for natural remedies.

I don't want to make clinical testing mandatory, because that would take a bunch of stuff off the shelves until it gets tested, even if many people have been using it harmlessly and effectively for years and years. I just want to create some kind of carrot to encourage testing of natural remedies, and to remove any barriers to testing them.

Unfortunately, I don't have any specific ideas that wouldn't have been thought of already. They'd be able to put "clinically tested" on the label. They know that already. They could do they research as pure science, through universities, rather than commercially like pharmaceutical companies do. They know that already. Someone could start a non-profit. They know that already.

But it would be extremely useful if this could somehow be made to happen, and it would increase the credibility of natural remedies in the eyes of those who are likely to be skeptical, including conventional medical professionals who are disinclined to recommend useful remedies solely on the basis that they haven't undergone formal testing.