Childfree for Dummies: Part IV

Apparently not wanting children is "bitter, selfish, un-sisterly, unnatural, evil."

Not all my childfree brethern will agree with me or publicly admit this, but I will tell you right here, upfront, that it's true - I am in fact bitter, selfish, un-sisterly, unnatural and evil.

In other words, not at all the kind of person you'd want raising children.

So don't you think I should be sterilized before some poor innocent child is subject to my bitterness, selfishness, un-sisterliness, unnaturalness and evilness?

(Also: Why do doctors who refuse to sterilize patients on the basis that those patients are too young and don't know what they're doing permit those very same patients to have kids?)

Sign of recession?

I've noticed that this year an awful lot of father's day cards are about the stereotype that kids hit up their parents for money. Like it's always been there, but the proportion is way greater this year.

Unfortunately that's completely useless to me. I'm nearly 30, I don't go to my parents for money. And if something went horribly wrong and I did have to go to them for money, I'd be too ashamed of it to joke about it.

Actually, now that I think about it, a lot of the child-to-parent sentiments on greeting cards become less applicable as you get older. (At least on the so-called "funny" cards - I don't go in for the mushy ones.) Most of them are things that are applicable when all parties are sharing a household or when the parents are trying to raise children to adulthood. I can probably still get away with cards like that now, but it's going to be ridiculous 10 years from now. But I'm not seeing anything humourous that applies to child-parent relationships where both parties are adults in separate households. Do they think we all get mushy as we get older? Do they think today's elders lack a sense of humour?

Hopefully the greeting card industry will evolve in that direction. There used to be zero humourous cards that were suitable to send to a grandmother from an adult grandchild, and now there are a few. Hopefully cards for parents will follow suit.

What's up with people who don't realize that relationships aren't unilateral?

I don't know what advice column this is originally from, so I'll like to Childfree Abby:

DR. WALLACE: We have two children, a 17-year-old son and a 16-year-old daughter. Our daughter is interested in boys and has been for over two years. Our son shows no interest in girls. In his spare time, he only wants to work on his 1959 Chevrolet that we bought him for his birthday. I do everything possible to try to interest him in dating, but nothing has worked.

(more...)

The weird thing about this letter, and advice columnists reply, and the other letter and the comments in reply, is that none of them seem to be questioning the parents' premise that it's entirely the son's choice that he isn't dating and he need to be convinced of the benefits of dating (or, in these particular cases, of dating girls).

The thing is, you can't just start dating unilaterally. You need someone who is willing to date you, and they should probably be someone whom you're interested in dating yourself. But it doesn't seem to occur to anyone that one of the possibilities is that he might not have found someone in which there is mutual interest in dating.

I've seen this in real life to. I've had a number of people ask me why I'm not married (including a relative who thought an interrogation along these lines was the most suitable topic of conversation as we were sitting in the audience waiting for my younger sister's wedding ceremony which was about to start any second). When asked this, I always reply that it isn't something you can do unilaterally. You need at least one other consenting individual. The weird thing is this always - always always always, ever single time - seems to go in one ear and out the other. My interrogators often continue by trying to convince me of the benefits of marriage (which I am very well aware of and agree with them completely on) as though I need to be talked into it, completely disregarding the fact that you simply cannot get married unless you have someone to marry.

The other weird thing is I only ever get this interrogation in the singular. I'm walking around en couple but unmarried, no problems. Walking around alone, sometimes I get interrogated. It's never ever ever an implied "When are you guys going to get married?" When it happens, it's always without exception "When are you, personally, going to get married?"

Happiness

Apparently Canadian women are happier than US women. I don't know, I'm suspicious of happiness studies. There was recently one that suggested that money doesn't buy happiness as much as people think it would, but the methodology on that one sucked. They asked peope to estimate how happy they'd be a certain income levels and then asked them to rate how happy they are now. What they should have done is tracked the same group of people longintudinally, to see how their actually happiness evolved as their income evolved. Because personally, money does buy happiness for me - and I didn't even realize to what extent it does until I got a bit of money. I was happy in university - living away from my parents, my very own high speed internet connection, interesting job and interesting course work both of which I did well in. But now I'm even happier because I have air conditioning and a dishwasher and I don't have to worry about what's going to crawl out of my walls. I wouldn't want to go back to how I was living in university (it's been months since I've had a panic attack, and years since I've had a panic attack in my own home) but I wasn't unhappy then. I just didn't know how much better things could get.

I also reject the premise in the Star article that being happy is a choice, because I can't choose my emotions. (If you can and you feel like convincing me that I should be able to too, I'll need you to give me detailed step by step instructions.) I am happy under circumstances that not everyone would be happy with, but that's a matter of personal taste, not of zen virtue. I'm actively happy I have no children because I don't want them, but that's no consolation to someone who's struggling to conceive. I love living in an apartment and taking the subway, but that's irrelevant to someone who aspires to but can't afford to own a house and a car. Some people would say that not needing the things that you're "supposed to" want, and therefore not being unhappy as a result of not having those things, is choosing to be happy. But it isn't, it's just awareness of your own personal preferences.

Ten days in Sunset Valley

In keeping with my latest fandom, my first household in Sims 3 is Eve and Roarke (who, because the game requires a first and a last name, is named Roarke Dallas - I think they'd both be amused at that). I like the way personalities are constructed in this version - you pick five major personality traits from a long list, and then a long-term lifetime goal based on those traits. The results are remarkably spot-on - Roarke is throwing parties and schmoozing with the guests while Eve is taking the opportunity to question those guests, then getting called back into the police station, and getting bonus happy points whenever she eats pizza. I also appreciate how the goals the characters want to achieve vary nicely over time. In the original Sims you'd reach a point where you just can't achieve any more, and in Sims 2 it would get rather repetitive. But here I'm playing with the longest possible life span and I'm seeing some nice variety in both short term and long term wants. I don't think I'm going to get bored waiting for an interesting want to come up.

My only complaint is that fast forward is slow! It's downright frustrating! I don't know if that's because of my CPU speed (it's 2.8 GHZ - the game requires 2.0) but I really wish they could do something about that.

The interesting thing is this is the first Sims game that I got right on the release date, so the internet doesn't yet have answers to all my questions. For example, I simply cannot find Willow Hennessy, whom Eve needs to befriend so she'll (assuming Willow is a she) will serve as a police informant for the Developing Informants challenge. I looked around the whole town and she isn't walking around anywhere, there's no Hennessy household, there's no floating turquoise icon showing her location like there is for the people Roarke needs to befriend, I have no idea what to do - and the internet doesn't know either. Also, I've been spending a really long time on the Cook 5 Perfect Meals and Build Muscles wants - way disproportionate to the number of points I'll get for them - but I can't google up any insight on how I might expedite them.

It's also a bit frustrating not to have access to the full range of cheats (I don't even know how to do the thing where you delete a Sim and their moods and wants are reset - I've found the Make All Happy cheat, but I can't figure out where to actually go to delete and reenter) and to Sim PE. I wanted to make the Kendall household from the Margaret of Ashbury books. That's a complex household - Roger Kendall needs to be an elder and his wife Margaret needs to be a young adult, but the game won't allow an elder to marry a young adult. Roger has two sons from a previous marriage who are older than Margaret (which is what makes that household interesting to play), but you can't create older adult stepchildren in the in-game creator.

But overall, if we could just have a patch to speed up the fast forward, I will be very happy and enjoy learning the ropes along with the rest of the user community.

Redraw the midtown Toronto electoral map

Click here for a Google map of Yonge & Eglinton. It opens in a new window because you're going to have to keep referring to it to follow along this post.

See the cluster of highrises? (If you're having trouble seeing the cluster of highrises, click on Satellite and remove the checkbox from Show Labels to see more clearly.) The vast majority of the highrises are residential. As of this posting, there are at least six more completed and inhabited highrises that aren't shown in the several-years-old satellite imagery, and at least three more under construction. There are a wide variety of shops, restaurants, services and amenities at street level on Yonge St. and on Eglinton Ave., and there's a subway station right at the intersection of Yonge & Eg. When they first built the subway this was the terminus, so it's been a transit hub for over 50 years and has developed accordingly. The result is a high-density, walkable, transit-centric, safe, convenient neighbourhood. As you can see, the highrise cluster is surrounded by houses, but since each highrise contains at least 200 units, we far outnumber the house people.

The highrise people define the culture of the neighbourhood - are the culture of the neighbourhood. The neighbourhood is safe and convenient and walkable and high-density because of us, and we sought it out because it's safe and convenient and walkable and high-density. It's solidly yuppie but nowhere near posh because of us, and we sought it out because it's solidly yuppie but nowhere near posh. If you remember the Three Cities income polarization study, you might have been wondering what's up with that tiny island of middle-income smack dab in the middle of Toronto, surrounded by a sea of higher income. If you remember Poverty by Postal Code, you might have been wondering what's up with that tiny island of moderate poverty smack dab in the middle of Toronto, surrounded by a sea of low poverty. That's us. We are distinct from the surrounding communities by virtue of differences in income and lifestyle.

However, our political boundaries do not reflect this.

Our little community falls on the intersection of three different electoral ridings. Refer back to the Google Map, and turn labels back on if you turned them off earlier. Everything west of Yonge and north of Eglinton is in the riding of Eglinton-Lawrence. Everything east of Yonge and north of Broadway (i.e. two blocks north of Eg) is in the riding of Don Valley West. Everything south of Eg west of Yonge and south of Broadway east of Yonge is in the riding of St. Paul's. (All these riding names link to Elections Canada maps. I can't seem to find a Google Map of riding boundaries and don't know how to make one myself - if you know of one, please leave a link in the comments.) We are in a distant corner of each riding, and in each riding we are outnumbered by house people. We are a larger high-density cluster than any other within the boundaries of any of those three ridings, but because we're carved up into three pieces we are a negligible demographic within each riding.

This isn't a huge problem at the federal and provincial levels. I've never felt inappropriately represented by my MP or my MPP, and I do feel like I fit in well with the general demographics of my riding. However, it is something of a problem at the local level, because when it comes to issues under local jurisdiction, house people and highrise people have different needs and priorities, car people and transit people have different needs and priorities, and people tend to prefer the kind of density that they have chosen to live in.

And that's the thing about Yonge & Eg - if you're here, you're here by choice. While it isn't nearly as rich as the surrounding houses, it's not the cheapest of neighbourhoods. It's not trendy, but it is a desirable location and priced accordingly. If you prioritize living in a house, you could get a house in outer 905 for the same money. If you prioritize a living arrangement that is convenient for driving, you can live somewhere further from the subway where parking can be had significantly cheaper. If you don't like density, you can live somewhere lower density at a significantly lower cost. If you're living in a highrise at Yonge & Eg, that means that you want a high density neighbourhood, you want a walkable transit-convenient car-optional lifestyle, and you either want a highrise or you're willing to accept a highrise in exchange for the high density car-optional neighbourhood.

But because we're divided among three different wards, we are outnumbered in each of our wards by people in a significantly higher income bracket who have chosen a different kind of neighbourhood and a different lifestyle. They're into houses and cars and lower-density residential neighbourhoods. They might live in Lawrence Park or Forest Hill or Bridle Path. They might care about lawns. They might not care if the grocery store is within walking distance. They might consider it a good thing that their street isn't busy. They're not after the same thing we're after, because if they were they'd choose to live in our hood.

However, because they outnumber us within each ward, they sway our city councillors on municipal issues. This puts us in the weird position of living in a highrise at Yonge & Eg and being represented by a city councillor who is opposed to building highrises at Yonge & Eg. We might have moved here deliberately to live carfree, only to find ourselves represented by a councillor whose first thought on any development is "but how will it affect traffic?" We sought out and rejoice in the benefits of our high-density neighbourhood, only to hear our councillor say "density" like it's a dirty word. We're cheering over the Eglinton Crosstown line, but might be represented by a councillor who is hesitant about it.

We are a community with shared needs and priorities, and, when it comes to issues under the jurisdiction of the local government, our shared needs and priorities are different from those of the surrounding communities. The entire highrise cluster should fall within the same ward so our community and its unique needs can be suitably represented at the one level of government where our unique needs are in fact relevant.

More information please: isotope edition

Why does only one nuclear reactor produce medical isotopes? Why don't they all? I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere in media coverage - if I've missed something, post a link in the comments.

Also, Medical Isotopes would be a good band name, as would Sexy Isotope Crisis. I think anything containing the word isotope would make a good band name. And also I just like saying isotope.

Isotope. Isotope isotope isotope.

Isotope!

Things They Should UNinvent: connection fees for telecommunications

If you switch phone or TV or internet providers, you usually have to pay a fee to get hooked up.

If they really wanted people to switch, they'd get rid of these fees.

Is the US louder than Canada, or is Buffalo louder than TO?

For a long time I've noticed that the commercials on US TV channels are kind of loud and unsubtle. I just assumed this was a difference between the US and Canada.

But it occurs to me that the difference might not be that they're USian and we're Canadian. It might be because the US channels I watch most often are from Buffalo, and the Canadian channels I watch most are from Toronto. Toronto is the biggest city in Canada, whereas Buffalo is smaller and is more of a local centre. So TO is more likely to be able to attract top advertising dollars and talent to make sleek and clever commercials.

What do you think?

I wonder if shoplifting will increase as reuseable shopping bags become more common

The other day, I was carrying around a big reuseable shopping bag full of all kinds of things. There were a few bottles of wine, several bottles of hair products, and a couple of library books. It was close to full, awkwardly-shaped, heavy, and rattling. When I put it in a small shopping cart at Dominion, it took up nearly the whole cart.

Then it occurred to me that it would be the easiest thing ever to shoplift with that thing. I select something off the shelf, put it in my cart with no particular care, it could easily end up in the bag by accident. It wouldn't be readily noticeable to myself or others, and it could totally plausibly happen by accident. I could go through the checkout with an assortment of cheap groceries, have one or two expensive things accidentally fall into my bag, and claim "Oh, shit, terribly sorry, it was a total accident, of course I'll pay for those!" if called out on it.

If you're using one of those stiffer rectangular bags that stores keep trying to sell you for a dollar, you could totally walk around with it heavy and full, put it down on the ground as you browse the cosmetics shelf, then accidentally knock things over and have one or two of them land in the bag. The bag is there, wide open. Putting it down is perfectly natural if it's heavy. And I don't know about you, but I accidentally knock stuff down half the time I shop for make-up.

I wonder if stores have noticed a difference in shoplifting rates since people started carrying around these behemoths.

Mashup bunny: Dion vs. Dion

From the retro files, someone should mash up The Wanderer vs. Runaround Sue

If they wouldn't work as a mash, you could totally tweak the tempo (and the key if necessary) and combine them in an a capella or barbershop arrangment.

A pillow between your knees

The past few months I've taken to sleeping with a pillow between my knees. It's SO much more comfortable, like exponentially so - my hips are aligned better and don't need to be cracked nearly as much when I wake up. If I'm particularly stiff going to bed, curling up in a quasi-fetal position with a pillow between my knees feels like one of those static yoga poses that slowly loosens your joints. I just lie there still and feel my hips ease and relax.

I've mentioned this to several other people, and those who have tried a pillow between their knees all unanimously agree that it helps in a way similar to what I've described.

But why? Why are we designed so that we're more comfortable sleeping with a physical obstacle changing our alignment than sleeping however we just naturally fall? That doesn't seem like very good design to me.

Things They Should Invent: kettles that go PING!

There are some kettles that whistle when they're boiling, but they just keep boiling until you come and unplug them. There are other kettles that shut off automatically once they've started boiling, but they don't make any noise to tell you they're done apart from the subtle click of the switch turning off.

I want the best of both worlds. I want a kettle that automatically shuts itself off AND makes a noise to tell you it's done.

Things They Should Invent: universal standard exemption from Godwin's Law

The problem with the generally-accepted application of Godwin's Law is that it assumes that a comparison with nazis is always hyperbole.

This is not necessarily true. I'm sure we can all envision, even if only hypothetically, a situation in which the best possible analogy is a comparison with nazis, and discourse would suffer from not having this analogy readily available.

Someone - ideally a committee of big-name internet people with a wide variety of political opinions - needs to standardize criteria under which a comparison with nazis is apt. If these criteria apply, people aren't allowed to shut down their opponents by shouting Godwin at them.

Open Letter to Dominion (aka Metro)

Dear Dominion, who I'm not going to start calling Metro:

I know that the thing with charging five cents a bag is municipal by-law and your hands are tied. And while I do resent being inconvenienced even though I came up with a better solution, I get that it isn't your fault.

However, your pratice of having to ring in the number of bags before you ring in the groceries is ridiculous. I can't always tell how many bags I'm going to need just by looking at the groceries, and it's more important to have everything bagged well for the walk home than to save a nickel or two. I suck at 3D spatial estimation like that. Just bag my groceries, charge me for however many bags were used, and let me get on with life.

Update: I've taken to answering the question of how many bags do I want with "Whatever it takes." I'd recommend doing the same if you feel similarly.

Perhaps I need some real problems

I am currently feeling guilty for not having been aware of Tiananmen Square when it first happened. I was 8 years old.

I'm also feeling guilty for using the fact that I was 8 years old as an excuse, because I did look at newspapers at the time, although I didn't have the focus/attention span/discipline to read most of the articles.

Currently wondering

With all the stories of extreme emergency urgent last-minute difficultly-accessible late-term abortions that have been posted in the wake of Dr. Tiller's assassination, I find myself thinking about the technical aspects of abortion.

Specifically, I'm wondering why the drugs that are used to induce labour can't be used for abortion in cases where d&c (or whatever the usual technique is) isn't readily accessible. Obviously, it would be difficult, painful, and time-consuming. But in some of the cases, where the fetus is either dead in the womb* or will die upon delivery, wouldn't induced labour get the job done in a pinch? If not, what am I missing? (I've never been pregnant, you might have to explain things slowly.)

*Another technical question: if the fetus is dead in the womb, will the mother eventually go into labour anyway? If so, why? How would her body know when it's reached term?

Fomenting public outrage: ur doin it wrong

The Toronto Star recently seems obsessed that private-sector consultants on the payroll of the Government of Ontario expensed small food items.

The thing is, as mentioned indirectly in the second paragraph of the article, the consultants were from Alberta, so they had to travel to get here. And in the private sector, it's perfectly normal to have your employer pay for your meals while you're travelling on business. I seriously doubt they could get any decent private-sector consultant if they didn't pay for their meals while on the road. The article is trying to suggest that they shouldn't be expensing their meals because they make so much money, but that's simply how the private sector works. Your salary is compensation for your work, travel expenses are considered additional expenses.

You'll also notice that they're expensing small and inexpensive take-out, eat-at-your-desk type food. You know what this means? They aren't expensing pricey room service meals - they're running down to Tim's instead. In fact, as it says in the 9th paragraph of the article:

Consultant Donna Strating makes $2,700 a day at eHealth. She does not take the $50 per diem to which she is entitled, but charges for miscellaneous meals and snacks.

This means that she would normally be entitled to take $50 a day, no questions asked, with the assumption that she'd spend it on food and other necessities. Based on the items listed, it doesn't look like she's spending anywhere near $50 a day on food. (Judging by the tone of the article, if there were any expensive restaurant dinners the article would have said so.) So rather than taking $50 a day, buying cheap food and pocketing the rest, she's billing for her actual expenses only.

If the Star wanted to foment outrage about this eHealth thing, they could have done so in a number of ways. Some other media outlets have been focusing on how there might not have been a proper tender process for this contract, which is a much more serious issue. If the Star wanted to take a different attack from other media outlets, they could ask why we needed a private-sector consultant from Alberta in the first place? We're a rather populous province with a good number of post-secondary institutions - why isn't the necessary expertise available in Ontario? Why doesn't the Ontario public service have the expertise to implement government policies? Does this happen often? Should we perhaps be working on developing the expertise in-province?

As it stands, the whole thing reads like an especially low-quality attack ad. I expected better from te Star.

Well this is a disheartening development

Sims 3 causes my computer to blue screen, just as it's about to finish loading the town.

I was expecting it to maybe be slow and frustrating because I have only the minimum RAM requirement (figured I'd get more if it was annoying), but I didn't see this coming and the internet doesn't seem to know anything about it yet.

I'm going to uninstall and reinstall, but if not I have no idea what to do.

Update: Updating video drivers fixed the problem.