How to decommercialize christmas without sacrificing anything

But after a disastrous Christmas last year and lacklustre sales most of this year, many retailers are desperate to make up the shortfall in the final four months.

Holiday sales can account for as much as 40 per cent of annual sales, more for those who specialize in giftware.

So that's the problem. That's why retailers are so aggressive with the music and the decorations. They've associated huge sales with this season.

So what we as consumers have to do as consumers is make xmas sales unremarkable, and this without fucking up the economy.

Here's how:

In 2010, don't give your xmas presents on xmas. Instead, give your xmas presents (to your family and friends, as well as any employees and service providers to whom you give a xmas tip) on your own birthday. To dissuade retailers from responding by instituting year-round xmas decorations, do not purchase any xmas presents from retailers who have decorations up before November 28, 2010, which is the first day of Advent 2010. Because people tend to give you presents on your birthday, the result will be multiple opportunities to exchange gifts and good wishes throughout the year.

Santa will bring kids their presents on their half-birthday. Q: Why not their birthday? A: As people born in December and early January can attest, when your birthday coincides with xmas you tend to get less than your rightful share of presents (rightful share being determined by observing siblings and peers). This will maintain the common standard of two annual gift-receiving occasions, which is particularly important when you're a kid and can't just buy stuff for yourself. This will also enable Santa to have more consistent workflow management, with elves specializing in different parts of the production process being more steadily employed year-round, and to save in overtime costs. Mrs. Claus also looks forward to spending a quiet Christmas at home, drinking eggnog in front of the fire and reflecting on the true meaning of the season, for the first time in over two millenia.

Santa assures all good little boys and girls that they will receive their presents on their half-birthday regardless of whether a tree and/or stockings and/or milk and cookies are present in the home.

December 25 (or 24 or January 6 or whichever day you use in your particular culture) can, of course, still be used as a religious feast day, a family gathering, and/or a statutory holiday. But the only socially mandated gift-giving that will occur on or marking that day is xmas gifts from and birthday gifts to individuals whose birthday is December 25, and xmas gifts from Santa to children whose birthday is June 25.

In summary, in 2010:

- Give your xmas gifts on your own birthday
- Santa brings kids their xmas gifts on their half-birthday
- Don't buy xmas gifts from retailers who have decorations up before November 28
- Your religion's, culture's, and/or family's customary celebrations can continue to be held on the customary date, but without the exchange of gifts.

Let's all work together to decentralize xmas 2010 and bring some sanity back to what should be a happy occasion.

Do more people want to keep what they have, or do more people want more?

Disregarding the altruistic and social justice aspects, the purely selfish aspect of my politics can be reduced to "I have some good things. I don't want to lose them." I don't particularly care whether or not I gain more good things. The selfish part of me doesn't particularly care whether or not other people gain more good things (the altruistic part thinks everyone should have access to the good things I have if they're interested). The primary focus is just not losing what I have.

I think there are some people whose primary goal is not to keep what they have, but rather to gain more. There also seem to be people who are focused on what other people have, and seem not to want other people to have more than them, or to gain new things at a greater rate than they themselves are.

It would be interesting to study what percentage of society falls into which categories.

I don't intend this judgmentally - I realize it's very easy to say you don't need more once you have enough - I just think it would be interesting to take the pulse of society from this perspective.

What are you supposed to do when you hear someone scream outside?

I'm sitting hear in my apartment with the windows open and I hear someone scream, maybe two or three times. It could be a woman or a child. It doesn't sound specifically like distress, although it doesn't sound specifically playful either. I scream in more distress when I encounter an ordinary household pest. I can't see anything really, but it's dark out. The scream could be coming from the street, or the balconies of any of the neighbouring apartment buildings, or inside any of the neighbouring apartments if someone has a window open. The source of the scream could be anywhere within a three-block radius containing well over a thousand households. That's if I'm estimating correctly how far sound can carry.

Now I'm hearing other screams that sound playful from the same general direction. They are a mix of different voices, some male, some female, some children.

Now, if someone is in fact being attacked, it will be all over the newspaper tomorrow that no one called for help. But I'm sitting here 12 storeys above the ground, unable to see anything. Am I supposed to call the police saying it's possible someone in my general vicinity in this high-density neighbourhood might possibly be in distress, although it's possible they might be having fun, or might be a child being tormented by their sibling, or might be having an overzealous game of hungry hungry hippos?

Now I heard two more, more like the original voice, that sound more towards the distress side of the scale (but not objectively distressful).

It's 11:00 on a Friday night in a neighbourhood with a young adult demographic, so it would be very odd indeed if there was no one having fun under the influence of anything within this radius. And people having fun under the influence do often scream while walking down the street, although they tend to sound more obviously playful.

Two more: one not-really-playful, one more playful, followed by a loud collection of various voices talking loudly. Whatever's going on, there's an assortment of people of various ages and genders there, assuming I'm hearing who's all in the same place properly.

If I had a bug, I would scream in distress several times. Then I would deal with it, drink or med myself down, and go to sleep. If someone who isn't on my floor tried to come to my rescue, they'd never find the source of the screams.

One more, again didn't seem distressed or non-distressed, but the number and variety seem odd. Then two more that sounded like a child being tormented by a sibling, and a short one that sounded playful. A dog barks, a child shouts, a man calls out in response.

I don't want to live in a neighbourhood where you scream for help and no one helps, but I don't know where this person is or if they are screaming for help. Either they aren't or I have convinced myself they aren't. What are you actually supposed to do in this situation? What can I do if I'm ever on the street screaming for help to maximize the chance someone will help me? (One idea I once came up with is, if at all possible, to run out into traffic. Then I'm suddenly all the cars' problem too.)

And now it has started raining, and all I can hear is the rain beating down on my metal balcony railings.

Why does it bother you that I'm quiet?

Question for extroverts:

I've blogged before about how when I was a kid people would say to me "You're so quiet, you never talk."

Question: suppose we're in a randomly-assembled group (classmates working on a project, co-workers on the same shift, people who happen to live in the same neighbourhood waiting for a bus). Sufficient conversation is flowing among the group, but I personally am being quiet.

Why does it bother you that I'm being quiet?

This always happened in randomly-assembled groups with sufficient flow of conversation. Among friends, I'm better able to think of stuff to say (or babble mindlessly and boringly). When there is insufficient flow of conversation, people never seemed to tell me that I'm quiet. The vibe I got is that my quietness bothered them (rather than being a poorly-conceived attempt to draw me out), and googling around this idea I've found that extros are bothered/weirded out by quiet people.

So why, precisely, does it bother you? (Not that I can really do anything about it - I don't have a secret stash of witty conversation that I'm stingily withholding - but I cannot even begin to imagine why this would bother someone.)

Wherein the catholic school boards solve a 40-year-old problem

Apparently some of the catholic school boards are eliminating the uniform kilt because students are wearing them too short.

I think this is hilarious, because my mother wore her uniform kilt too short when she was in high school, back in the 1960s. It's actually my mother who (inadvertently) taught me how to roll a kilt so your hemline is high but you can readily lower it when there are teachers around. I never went to a school that had uniforms, but I still know the technique.

If my mother had chosen to start her family in her early 20s, and then I had chosen to start a family in my early 20s, my mother could easily be the grandmother of one of the high school students who's now seeing kilts banned from their wardrobe because people are wearing them too short. Imagine that! "But my grandmother got to do it!"

Women's trust is irrelevant to men's contraception

Tangental to this:

One thing I've frequently seen mentioned in discussions about the possibility of a male birth control pill is that it wouldn't fly because women wouldn't trust their partners to take the pill.

The more I think about it, the less I can see how this is at all relevant.

If my partner doesn't want children, he takes his pill. If I don't trust him to take his pill, I take my pill. Then we're doubly protected. Nothing wrong with that.

I've recently come to the realization that I still want to be sterilized even if my partner has been sterilized. But that doesn't mean my partner shouldn't get sterilized too if that's what he wants.

I know many people make these decisions as a couple and operate under the assumption that if between the two of them they can't make a baby, they're fine. And it is entirely their right to do so. But that doesn't mean that people who happen to be coupled shouldn't also be allowed to take measures to make sure that they, personally, don't sprog.

Some people will say that making these decisions as an individual implies that you're going to cheat. (Personally, I was thinking more along the lines that I could get raped.) But even if you are going to cheat, isn't it better to avoid making unwanted children while doing so? Best-case scenario: there's an affair, you reconcile and decide to move forward, if there are no children you can leave it completely behind you. Worst-case scenario: you DTMFA, there aren't any sprog requiring child support payments to take away from your alimony.

How do psychic people know they are psychic?

We tend to assume that other people can do what we can do. If I can read that sign over there, I assume you can read that sign over there. If I heard that noise, I assume you heard that noise.

So if you are psychic, you'd assume other people can read people as well as you can. So you wouldn't think of it as psychicness, you'd just think of it as...being able to read people. Like how you can tell if someone's trying to hit on you or just making smalltalk, or you can tell if someone is nervous or uncomfortable.

Things They Should Invent: wireless internet in laundry rooms

Seriously, all laundromats and apartment buildings NEED this!

Why your childless friends stopped calling

I often see in advice columns new parents complaining that their childless friends aren't calling them as much or aren't as involved in their lives.

Here's why:

We don't want to wake up the baby.

We know that you're not getting much sleep, and that the baby requires a lot of time and attention. We know that whatever idle chitchat we might have isn't nearly as important as letting the baby sleep if it's asleep, or as letting you parent the baby if it's awake. So we aren't going to go barging in on your important stuff for our less important stuff. Frankly, we don't know how you do it, but we do know well enough not to go imposing additional burdens on you.

So if you want to chat, call us when it's a good time for you. If you want something specific from us, let us know. Remember: you have been childless, but we have never been parents. Your needs have changed immensely, but ours are still pretty much the same. You know where we're coming from as well as you ever did, but we can only guess where you're coming from. You're the only one with the ability to bridge the gap, because you're the only one in this relationship who's been on both sides.

xkcd knows everything

How to fix your computer.

In case you needed just one more reason to sponsor Eddie Izzard's run

In case the fact that Eddie Izzard is running a marathon a day for a month (while injured and insufficiently trained) to raise money for charity isn't enough to move you to donate, it seems he's also rescuing lost kittens as he goes along.

You can donate here.

From the "things I never knew were a problem" file

The edge of the strap of my beautiful, well-made, comfortable new sandals lands exactly on the cuticle of my big toe.

Friction + cuticle = not good. My morning commute involves probably a total of three blocks of walking, but by the time I got to the office there was blood.

With normal blisters and stuff, I just work through it and after a few days of pain the shoes and my feet come to an understanding. But in this case, I don't know if my cuticles will ever toughen up to the extent needed. (I don't mind wrecking my cuticles and a couple of days of blood and bandaids if it will solve the problem, but not if it's going to be unproductive.)

So the moral of the story: don't by sandals where the edge of the strap lands exactly on your toe cuticle.

Filing her nails while they're dragging the lake

I like version far better than the original:

Search String of the Day

Tubals make you horny

Do they? Forever, or just temporarily? Could it possibly be because you stopped the Pill after your tubal and it was suppressing your sex drive?

(Search String of the Day concept shamelessly yoinked from L-girl)

Brilliant Ideas That Will Never Work: Godwin's Law penalty box

First, we make a universal standard for necessary exemptions from Godwin's Law (i.e. cases in which a comparison with nazis is appropriate).

Then, anyone who makes an inappropriate comparison with nazis gets a time-out. They are banned from all discourse for a certain period of time, like a penalty in hockey. If any particular political faction is egregiously overusing nazi comparison, these penalties will enable their opponents to dominate discourse, like a power play in hockey.

A potentially feasible variation: people who make completely irrelevant comments in comment threads (e.g. the gist of the article is "Look! Baby ducks!" and someone comments "See, this is what's wrong with feminists!") is banned from commenting for a certain period of time.

Teach me how US health care works

Conventional wisdom is that you can't get medical care in the US unless you can pay for it. When I was a kid, they'd tell us to always carry your travel insurance information on your person at all times, because you can't assume a hospital will treat you until they know you're able to pay the bill.

But what happens if you go to the hospital, prove you can pay for the treatment they expect that you'll need, then it turns out to be more complicated and the complications are beyond your ability to pay? Do they turn out out of the hospital before you're fixed up? If not, what happens?

This train of thought was brought on by information I've seen in various places about the cost of childbirth, although I'm sure it applies to other situations as well. Apparently an uncomplicated vaginal birth costs four digits, a complicated c-section costs five digits, and NICU care (i.e. when the baby's in one of those boxes with tubes sticking out of him) costs six digits. I've seen, in multiple places, numbers in the $500,000 range for preemies who required a NICU stay. I would never be able to pay that - not even with a lifelong payment plan. However, I could easily afford the bill for an uncomplicated vaginal birth. But when you show up at the hospital in labour, not even the doctors can tell how complicated it's going to get. How do they handle this?

How clothing standards are completely subjective

My body is covered neck to wrist to ankle in thick, unflattering material that hides my shape. My hair is completely covered. My face is free of makeup.

There's a knock on the door. I'm hesitant to answer because I feel overexposed, but it's the UPS guy and if I don't take the package then I'll have to go all the way to Jane & Steeles to collect it. So I answer, and he averts his eyes a little to protect my modesty.

If he had come to the door half an hour later, I would have been wearing a fitted scoop-neck cap-sleeve shirt, a knee-length skirt, more makeup than strictly appropriate, and my hair completely uncovered and styled in a way that hints at its length and lusciousness. If the knock on the door had come then, I wouldn't have hesitated to answer because I wouldn't have felt overexposed, and he wouldn't have felt the need to avert his eyes because I was clearly fully clothed.

In the outfit I described in the first paragraph, I was just out of the shower in a bathrobe and hair towel. In the outfit I described in the third paragraph, I was dressed for work on a hot summer day in Toronto.

Teach me about the US political process

Logistically, legislatively, is there any reason why they couldn't just legislate a single-payer health care system into place without first seeking broader consensus? I get that it's a bit arrogant and assholic to go around unilaterally doing something that so many people are opposed to, but could they just make it happen if they didn't care about pissing people off and future electability? If not, why not?

Advanced urban navigation

In the subway:

- If you're using a token, use the token-only turnstile. Not all turnstiles have a card swiper, so leave the ones that do for the Metropass users.
- If there's only one escalator and you're going in the same direction as it, take the escalator. Leave the stairs for the people going in the other direction, who have no choice but to use the stairs.
- If there's a train coming and you aren't running for it, assume the people behind you are running for it.
- Your dog is truly awesome, and everyone in the subway car agrees and is having a fabulous time petting him and squeeing at him. However, you need to have him in a sit on a tight leash every time the train pulls into a station. Why? Because some people are afraid of dogs, and those people might be waiting on the platform completely unaware that there's a dog in this car. You need to give them an opportunity to get on, get their bearings, realize there's a dog over to their right and head as far as possible to their left before Mr. Puppyface comes and slobbers on them. I know he's harmless, but that doesn't mean everyone wants him to lick them. There are a lot of harmless people on the subway too, but you still want a chance to consent before some random person walks up and kisses you.


In the grocery store:

- Act like you're driving. Do you leave your in the middle of the road parked perpendicularly when you need to run into a store? No, you pull off to the side. If you're driving down a busy street and accidentally pass your intended destination, do you do a u-turn (blocking all of traffic) and go back? No, you go around the block. Do the same with your cart.
- If your kid doesn't know the dance, don't let them push a cart during rush hour. You wouldn't let them practice driving during rush hour if they didn't know the rules of the road, would you?
- Don't have your children stand behind you in the grocery line. They get in the way of the person behind you putting their stuff on the conveyor belt, which slows down the line for several people. Have them stand in front of you, put stuff on the belt, and collect bags once the cashier has bagged your groceries.

On the street:

- If the sidewalk is temporarily narrower than usual due to construction or some other obstruction, don't panhandle, fundraise, hand out free samples, stop to talk on the phone, snog, smoke, loiter or wait for your friend in the narrow section. Walk a few doors down to the wider section so you don't block the whole sidewalk for everyone.
- I can totally see why you might leave garbage on the ground in front of the garbage can if the garbage can is full. However, before you do this, look at the company name on your take-out cup. Then look to your left and look to your right and see if you can see any franchises of that company. If you can, throw out your cup in there. There's no excuse to have Tim Hortons cups on the ground two doors down from Tim Hortons.
- When driving, signal your turns even if there's no car behind you. If the pedestrian to your left doesn't see your left turn signal, she'll assume you aren't turning in her direction and jaywalk out onto the street in front of you.


Life in general:
- If you're ever in charge of some being that doesn't understand the meaning of "Excuse me," (dog, cat, small child, llama, etc.), it's your job to make sure said being doesn't get in people's way.