New Rule: you block information, you lose

This train of thought started with the thing in the news recently where parents in Alberta could pull their kid from the classroom if they didn't like what was being talked about. It occurred to me that from the perspective of getting your kid to live your values in the long term, it would be more effective to talk about and refute what was being discussed in the classroom.

Then I read about how the Iranian government is trying to block people's access to the internet and twitter. So I look on twitter, and what's being posted there (at least on the English side - I can't read Farsi)? First aid information, the equivalent of headline news, amateur video of what's happening. Any competent government should be able to spin around that!

So here's the rule, applicable like Godwin: you block access to information, you lose.

If your position has any modicum of sense and you have any basic communication skills, you should be able to convince people of your position while allowing them access to full information. Readily provide them with copious amounts of selected information that support your position, trusting innate human laziness that they won't wade through google to confirm everything. Tell them about why the information they were given is really incorrect. Get some soundbites out there so they'll become conventional wisdom (like the 50% tax thing).

Blocking access to information should be automatically considered a sign of incompetence in the individual and unsoundness in the position they're trying to promote. They lose!

If you're changing your twitter location to Tehran

If you're changing your twitter location to Tehran, please consider writing it in Farsi. Not all Iranians are going to be tweeting in English.

I believe this is how you say Tehran, Iran in Farsi:

تهران ، ایران

It should be copy-pastable.

I'm not 100% certain - I can't read Farsi - but Google's Farsi interface doesn't correct the spelling and it returns results for things located in Tehran.

If the Farsi is wrong, please post the correct spelling in the comments and I'll update this post and my twitter.

Edited to add: It occurs to me that if you were actually IN Iran, you wouldn't write "Tehran, Iran" as your location. You'd just write Tehran, like how I just wrote Toronto. So here's Tehran in Farsi: تهران

Things I've been told I shouldn't put first

The following is a partial list of things that someone, at some point or another, has told me I shouldn't let dominate/control/define my life or shouldn't plan my life around or shouldn't prioritize over other parts of life:

- work
- love
- friends
- the hobby that made me happiest (has happened several times with several different hobbies
- quiet restorative introvert time
- avoiding phobia triggers
- socio-political issues
- music studies
- language studies
- internet life
- my own needs
- other people's needs

Petition to open the Canadian Embassy to injured Iranians

You can sign here if you're interested. The petition is intended for Canadian residents only.

Fashion advice please

Normally I wear crappy cheap jewellery because I'm not good at jewellery so I don't want to spend too much on something that may or may not work. But now I need to get a few earrings in real gold or silver to keep my existing piercings calm and happy while I add new ones.

Yellow gold looks better with my skin tone and colouring, but it's old fashioned. People my age don't often wear it, it's more often worn by people my parents' age. White gold or silver is more age-appropriate, but doesn't work as well with my skin tone.

Which one should I go for?

Props to Centre Shoe Clinic at Yonge Eg Centre

I often get my shoes repaired because my gait wears them down unevenly and my shoe size is such that I won't necessarily be able to find a suitable replacement. However, usually I either know exactly what the problem is and what needs to be done to fix it, or the problem is visible and I can just point to it.

In this case my problem was more complicated - the shoes felt vaguely unstable, but I couldn't really articulate how or why, and I couldn't see any signs of a problem on the outside. So I took them down to Centre Shoe Clinic uncertain if they'd be able to help me or even tell what the problem was from my vague diagnosis.

Fortunately for me, they're good! They could tell what the problem was, explain it to me in a way I could understand, and even tell me how to help prevent it in the future. It required major surgery that involved taking the shoes completely apart and replacing some pieces inside the sole to restore the shoe's structural integrity, but when I got them back there was no externally visible sign that they had ever been taken apart.

It's very comforting to know there's that level of expertise right here in my neighbourhood.

Analogy for banked sick leave

Suppose your employer gives you 12 days of paid sick leave a year, unbankable. (Q: Why 12? A: Because it makes the math easy.) You can use these days at any point during the year, but you aren't going to get more than 12 in a year. And if you don't use them all because you haven't been that sick, they don't roll over into the next year.

Now suppose your employer announces that they're going to restructure things a bit. Not a change in benefits, just purely administrative. Now, instead of up to 12 sick days a year, you get up to 1 sick day a month. You can use this day at any point during the month, but you aren't going to get more than 1 in a month. If you don't use it that month because you're not sick, it doesn't roll over into the next month.

That's less helpful, isn't it? We don't get sick every month, and we don't always get only one day worth of sick in a calendar month. Most months you don't need any sick days, some months you need two. It's less realistic, less fair, and rather arbitrary. And if your employer did work that way, wouldn't it be more tempting than it is now to call in sick one day during the last week of the month just because you're tired or you have a bit of a sniffle or you need a mental health day?

Allowing employees to bank sick leave over a career is better than having sick leave expire at the end of the year for exactly the same reason why allowing employees to use their 12 days of sick leave at any point during a year is better than limiting them to one a month. It is a direct logical extrapolation.

Careless reporting

The Toronto Star governs itself by a set of values called the Atkinson Principles. The second Atkinson Principle is Social Justice, and the fourth Atkinson Principle is The Rights of Working People.

I think they came perilously close to violating those principles with a bit of irresponsible reporting about city employees' sick leave.

The situation is that city employees' sick leave is currently banked, and they get paid for sick leave that is left unused when they leave their employment with the city. In the current labour negotiations, the city wants to take this away and the union wants to keep it.

There really two separate questions here, the second conditional on the first:

1. Should sick leave be banked?
2. Should employees be paid for unused banked sick leave?

Banking sick leave is not uncommon, although far from universal. As I've blogged about before, of the people I know who have paid sick leave, nearly all of them have bankable sick leave. This is a good arrangement because, as many people are fond of pointing out, sick leave is for when you're sick, and most people don't get sick at the same rate every year. Most years you only need a couple of days (say half a day for your annual check-up and then one day off because your brains are draining out your sinuses), but one or twice in your life you need a whole lot of time off, say for chemotherapy or major surgery.

With bankable sick leave, there is no other provision for time off for major medical conditions that require extensive time off. The assumption is that you'll use your banked sick leave for this. You can probably convince your employer to give you unpaid time off for major illness (in the cases of the people I was able to ask while writing this blog entry, the unpaid time off is technically at the employer's sole discretion, but realistically you'll get it), but there is no separate paid long-term disability leave. For example, someone I know worked at her job for 20 years with barely a day off, then one day threw out her back and required several months off to recover. Because she had nearly 20 years of sick leave banked, she was able to take the time she needed to recover without loss of income, then returned to work bringing with her 20 years of corporate memory back with her.

Whether or not to pay employees for unused bank sick leave is a separate issue. Some of the situations I'm familiar with get paid out or are tacitly allowed to tack it on at the beginning of retirement, others don't get any compensation for it - it's just sitting there as a safety net. In any case, it is possible to bank sick leave with or without paying employees for unused leave. It can work both ways.

The problem with the Toronto Star article is that they're presenting it as a single yes/no issue. They're presenting the pay-out as an integral part of banked sick leave, implying that to get rid of the pay-out you have to get rid of banked sick leave. If you look at the poll, they present it as a yes/no question, with no room for opinions such as "Banking the sick days is perfectly reasonable, but the payout at the end is a bit excessive." And, if you look at the comments section (I know, I know) a lot of people seem to be reading it as a single inseparable black and white issue.

My concern is that this article, especially with its somewhat sensationalist presentation (it was the most prominent article on the Toronto Star homepage all of yesterday, with the cartoon the largest image on the page), will lead people to become outraged at the prospect of up to 130 days' pay-out (which, as we know, people will be inclined to read without the "up to") and, seeing the pay-out as inseparable from banked sick leave, then write their city councillors demanding that banked sick leave for city employees be eliminated. Then our city workers will be stuck with a less just sick leave system that does not respond nearly as well to real-life sick leave needs, and all because of some unnuanced reporting from our city's largest newspaper.

How do older people end up with social skills that are no better than mine?

I know I have no place criticizing people's social skills because I don't have that many myself. Normally when I encounter someone who is socially awkward, I see where they're coming from and we try to muddle along.

But it occured to me that my social skills have been improving over time. I see someone use a formula I could use, so I yoink it and use it myself. For example, I used be awkward about leaving voicemails asking people to do something specific - I never knew how to end them smoothly. Then someone left me a voicemail saying "...so if you could get back to me on that by the end of the day, that would be great. Thanks!" That would totally work! So now that's how I end my voicemails. I do that whenever I see someone do something that would be a solution to a problem I have, and I'm slowly improving over time. It isn't anything deliberate, it's just the normal process for diffusion of linguistic innovation.

But I know people who are far older than me and don't have much better social skills. They can be like twice my age, but they don't often do better than me and in some cases do worse than me.

How does that happen? Are they not improving, or were they worse than me to start? If they were worse than me to start, how did they get jobs? And I'm not saying that snobbily (I've only had one good interview ever myself) - I know there's a certain amount of charm required to do a successful job interview, even for a position that isn't big on people skills, and I can't imagine that a person with my people skills minus 30 years of experience could do that. Did job interviews require less charm 30 years ago?

Or is it possible that society's people skills in general have improved, and any given individual stays in their place within the hierarchy? It might work that way, since everyone is probably improving the same way I am. When I'm 100, kids are probably going to look at me and wonder how I ever functioned in civil society.

Blah

Two of the things I need to blog are important. I'd would be derelict in my duties as a citizen if I did not blog them. Plus there's other stuff floating around in my head and sitting half-written in my drafts.

But I've been spending all day wrestling disorganized thoughts into a sensible and cohesive form, and I just don't have it in me to do this with my own thoughts. Plus my apartment's a mess. And I'm really overdue for one or two fussy girly things that involve spending long periods of time in the bathroom. Posh problems, I know, but there we go.

Here's a picture of a baby armadillo drinking from a bottle. Which caused the google ads that seem to have suddenly appeared on blogger to try to sell me baby formula. So I'm going to loudly insert the world childfree here. CHILDFREE!

Has anyone bothered to question the nature of military life?

This train of thought started here but veered widely off and is now almost entirely unrelated.

Military training - and by extension military life - is intentionally dehumanizing. We've all seen boot camp movies, we all have a general idea of how it works. They break you down through humiliation and dehumanization then build you back up in the image they need. And then they own your ass and you go where and do what you're told. That's just how it works.

But I wonder if anyone has ever bothered to truly question and think critically about whether this is necessary? I think everyone tends to just generally accept that that's how the military works, that's what makes it the military. It's always been like that, that's what people expect from the military. But is it actually necessary? Are they mindfully doing it this way for a reason, or are they just doing it this way because that's how they've always done it? Is anyone giving this serious thought?

Why children are obsessed with candy

I was trying to remember something that happened when I was very young. I thought back and retrieved the memory of walking around with my grandmother in her neighbourhood and she was telling me about the thing I was trying to remember. Like most memories, this one contained some tiny details. My grandmother was still taller than me at the time. It was one of the first spring days that year when I didn't have to wear a jacket. I could see the water from the top of this one hill. And I was thinking about wintergreen lifesavers - either my grandmother had just bought me some, or I was hoping to convince her to buy me some.

Then I realized: I was thinking about lifesavers, like extensively! I was so fixated on the idea of getting lifesavers that it's coming out as an underlying emotion in the memory 20 years later! As adults, if we want lifesavers we just buy some without a second thought. But kids can't just go and buy lifesavers. They don't have money, and if they do have money they still need permission from a grownup to go to a store, and then the grownup is there to approve or veto their purchase. So that leaves my child-self there absolutely obsessed with convincing her grandmother to buy her lifesavers (Should I ask outright? Should I play coy?) and/or the fact that her grandmother has just bought her lifesavers (Should I eat them all now? Should I save some? What will my parents think?). It wasn't something over which I had any control and I was entirely at the mercy of the grownups buying lifesavers for me and permitting me to have lifesavers, so it became this idee fixe.

And my grownups had never actually been unreasonable about my having candy! Looking at it from an adult perspective, my grandmother would totally have bought them for me if I'd asked, and it might have made her a bit happy to buy me a treat that makes me happy. And my parents wouldn't have taken away a treat that my grandmother bought me, and might have even come up with the idea of testing the theory that they make sparks if you bite them. But because I couldn't just go get them myself, because it was logistically necessary to ask for and receive permission to have lifesavers, they became this Great Big Thing in my mind.

So maybe if all kids has $5 in their pocket and a corner store that they could walk to themselves, they'd stop obsessing with candy (after an initial burst of enthusiasm).

New Rule: when talking about the social safety net, use factual quantities

Some people think our social safety net is far too generous and waste of taxpayer dollars. Some people (full disclosure: myself included) think it is insultingly weak and an embarassment to us all. Both sides think there's a certain amount of ignorance on the other side, so we never get anywhere.

Solution: Every time you express an opinion on a part of the social safety net, include the quantity of benefit provided. This information is not difficult to google up, and it's a quick and easy way of ensuring that no one in in the conversation is coming from a position of ignorance.

For example, instead of saying "I think Employment Insurance is...", you say "I think Employment Insurance of 55% of your average earnings up to a maximum of $447 a week is..."

Instead of saying "I think welfare is...", say "I think welfare benefits of $572 a month for a single person with no dependents are..."

Since you aren't ignorant, this will have no impact on your argument, but it might pre-emptively mitigate some of your interlocutor's ignorance.

Technical specifications: since this information is readily googleable, on the internet a precise number with a link to a primary source is required. In verbal conversation, you're free to round to the nearest hundred for monthly values or to the nearest thousand for yearly values. If your interlocutor has a Blackberry or an iPhone and wants to fact-check you during verbal conversation, that is specifically not to be taken as a dis. The whole topic works better when everyone has factual information.

This rule also has a corollary that functions like the generally-accepted application of Godwin's Law: if you give incorrect quantities, you lose.

Childfree for Dummies: Part V

Some people dismiss our self-identification as childfree because they themselves used to not want children, but grew to want children when they got older.

As it happens, I used to want children. When I was 10, 11, 12 years old, I had what I can best describe as a strong biological yearning for to have a baby, and even as old as 14 the idea held appeal for me. Nothing ever came of it because mentally and socially I hadn't reached the point where even kissing a boy seemed like a pleasant way to pass the time. But as I grew up and matured, I came to realize that it wasn't actually children I wanted. I wanted a living breathing visible sign to show the world that someone loved me, and when that desire met my newfound flood of hormones it manifested itself as a yearning for a baby.

Does that invalidate your desire to have children, making it merely a childish phase that you will grow out of?

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.