So I pre-ordered Eddie Izzard: Live from Wembley on Amazon.ca. The release date was yesterday. Normally when I preorder something from Amazon I receive it on the release date, or worst case it ships on the release date.
Then I receive an email from Amazon saying that there's a delay in my order, and the new ETA is Nov. 18 - Nov. 23. I appreciate the notice, but I'm super curious as to what exactly happen. Did they run out? Is there a flaw in the distribution chain? A brief perusal of the fandom doesn't turn up any other instances of this happening. Is it just me?
And to add to the mystery, there are now two Eddie Izzard: Live from Wembley DVDs on Amazon.ca: one released yesterday, which I ordered, and one with a January 2010 release date. I can't find any evidence of this second DVD with the January release date from any other retailer, including US Amazon.
This is all very odd. I've never had anything like this happen with Amazon, or with Eddie's material, or with preordered new releases of any sort.
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Monday, November 02, 2009
Things They Should Invent: lemon creme brulee pie
Meringue doesn't taste like it looks like it should taste like.
However, creme brulee tastes like meringue looks like it should taste like.
So why not combine lemon and creme brulee and have something that tastes like what lemon meringue pie should taste like?
However, creme brulee tastes like meringue looks like it should taste like.
So why not combine lemon and creme brulee and have something that tastes like what lemon meringue pie should taste like?
Places where I don't think you should shop
This is a continually-updated list of places where I don't think you should shop:
- overstock.com
- Shopper's Drug Mart
- Leon's
- Starbucks
- Carlton Cards
- Indigo
- Kitchen Stuff Plus
- Yonge Eglinton Centre
- Ikea
- Canadian Tire
- Sheppard Centre
Q: Why don't I think you should shop at these places?
A: Because they're doing xmas advertising and/or decorations too early.
- overstock.com
- Shopper's Drug Mart
- Leon's
- Starbucks
- Carlton Cards
- Indigo
- Kitchen Stuff Plus
- Yonge Eglinton Centre
- Ikea
- Canadian Tire
- Sheppard Centre
Q: Why don't I think you should shop at these places?
A: Because they're doing xmas advertising and/or decorations too early.
Things They Should Invent: vaccine in pill form
Wouldn't it be easier and save a whole lot of time and drama if we could all just administer our own vaccine? Problem: I don't know about you, but I don't know how to administer an injection.
So what they should be working on: vaccine in pill form or some other self-administrable form.
Alternative: come up with a way to teach people self-injection as a matter of course (in school? by family doctors?)
Currently wondering: outside of mass vaccination contexts, if your doctor writes you a prescription for a particular vaccine or some other medication that has to be administered by injection, are you allowed to inject it yourself if you know how (e.g. you're a medical professional yourself or whatever?)
So what they should be working on: vaccine in pill form or some other self-administrable form.
Alternative: come up with a way to teach people self-injection as a matter of course (in school? by family doctors?)
Currently wondering: outside of mass vaccination contexts, if your doctor writes you a prescription for a particular vaccine or some other medication that has to be administered by injection, are you allowed to inject it yourself if you know how (e.g. you're a medical professional yourself or whatever?)
Sunday, November 01, 2009
I wonder if the Disney princesses are princesses for the same reason children's protagonists have to be underparented
I often see complaints that Disney is setting a bad example for little girls by having all their protagonists be princesses.
I wonder to what extent this is a plot requirement?
In general, protagonists in children's literature/TV/movies are underparented. This is basically a plot requirement. You can't get into many interesting adventures when your lifestyle involves being driven to playdates in a minivan.
I wonder if the Disney princesses also have to be or become princesses for similar reasons?
For example, being a princess enables Pocahontas and Ariel to run/swim around singing and daydreaming, which leads to them having adventures and meeting their men. If Pocahontas was a prole, she'd probably be too busy tanning hides and farming corn, and if Ariel was a prole she'd probably be too busy doing whatever the mermaid equivalent was. The stories are about how they get to have adventures and defy family convention, and they simply wouldn't have room to do that if they weren't princesses, just like how if they wouldn't have room to do that if they weren't under-parented.
Cinderella and Belle had to become princesses to give them a happily ever after within their historical contexts. Cinderella had to escape from her family to have a happily ever after, and the only way to really do that was to marry. An alternative would have been to have her marry some sweet peasant boy and then her life is full of hard work but happy, but to make that look like a happily-ever-after they'd also have to have some rich, hunky, evil prince type who also wants to marry her. And there's also the problem that Cinderella's family of origin is somewhat upper class and could likely block a marriage to a peasant boy, whereas they couldn't possibly block a marriage to a prince.
Belle actually did want to avoid an undesirable marriage to Gaston, but the only options available to her would be for her father to create a successful invention, or for her to marry someone else. And she does this in an unconventional-for-fairytales way by a) seeing Gaston as an undesirable mate despite the fact that he's conventionally attractive, b) falling in love with a man (Beast) who isn't conventionally attractive. (Yes, he tranforms back into a conventionally attractive man at the end, but a) that's the perfect metaphor for how love works, and b) you couldn't expect them to consummate their marriage with him in beast form.) Watching it as a kid, I interpreted it as she had the open-mindedness to go for the non-attractive guy that everyone is shunning rather than the popular and attractive but evil guy, and is thereby rewarded with a happily-ever-after that includes love and security and no longer being dependent on the success of her father's capricious inventions.
(Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are also often included on the list of Disney princesses that are problematic, but I don't remember enough about the Disney versions of this story. I don't think I ever saw the Disney Sleeping Beauty, and all I took away from childhood viewings of Snow White is the dwarves' general silliness. The romantic subplot wasn't of interest.)
I should add that, watching these movies as a kid, I never perceived the protagonists' beauty as an essential part of why they got their happily-ever-after. I perceived it as because they were sweet and kind and charming. So that did make me feel a bit bad because I'm not and never will be that sweet and kind and charming, but I was already getting that guilt from catholicism. And the fact that they were princesses was no more unrealistic than the fact that the protagonists in all my children's and young adult books could run around without parents.
I wonder to what extent this is a plot requirement?
In general, protagonists in children's literature/TV/movies are underparented. This is basically a plot requirement. You can't get into many interesting adventures when your lifestyle involves being driven to playdates in a minivan.
I wonder if the Disney princesses also have to be or become princesses for similar reasons?
For example, being a princess enables Pocahontas and Ariel to run/swim around singing and daydreaming, which leads to them having adventures and meeting their men. If Pocahontas was a prole, she'd probably be too busy tanning hides and farming corn, and if Ariel was a prole she'd probably be too busy doing whatever the mermaid equivalent was. The stories are about how they get to have adventures and defy family convention, and they simply wouldn't have room to do that if they weren't princesses, just like how if they wouldn't have room to do that if they weren't under-parented.
Cinderella and Belle had to become princesses to give them a happily ever after within their historical contexts. Cinderella had to escape from her family to have a happily ever after, and the only way to really do that was to marry. An alternative would have been to have her marry some sweet peasant boy and then her life is full of hard work but happy, but to make that look like a happily-ever-after they'd also have to have some rich, hunky, evil prince type who also wants to marry her. And there's also the problem that Cinderella's family of origin is somewhat upper class and could likely block a marriage to a peasant boy, whereas they couldn't possibly block a marriage to a prince.
Belle actually did want to avoid an undesirable marriage to Gaston, but the only options available to her would be for her father to create a successful invention, or for her to marry someone else. And she does this in an unconventional-for-fairytales way by a) seeing Gaston as an undesirable mate despite the fact that he's conventionally attractive, b) falling in love with a man (Beast) who isn't conventionally attractive. (Yes, he tranforms back into a conventionally attractive man at the end, but a) that's the perfect metaphor for how love works, and b) you couldn't expect them to consummate their marriage with him in beast form.) Watching it as a kid, I interpreted it as she had the open-mindedness to go for the non-attractive guy that everyone is shunning rather than the popular and attractive but evil guy, and is thereby rewarded with a happily-ever-after that includes love and security and no longer being dependent on the success of her father's capricious inventions.
(Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are also often included on the list of Disney princesses that are problematic, but I don't remember enough about the Disney versions of this story. I don't think I ever saw the Disney Sleeping Beauty, and all I took away from childhood viewings of Snow White is the dwarves' general silliness. The romantic subplot wasn't of interest.)
I should add that, watching these movies as a kid, I never perceived the protagonists' beauty as an essential part of why they got their happily-ever-after. I perceived it as because they were sweet and kind and charming. So that did make me feel a bit bad because I'm not and never will be that sweet and kind and charming, but I was already getting that guilt from catholicism. And the fact that they were princesses was no more unrealistic than the fact that the protagonists in all my children's and young adult books could run around without parents.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Things They Should Study; how does cultural prioritization of self-sufficiency affect employment rates and the economy as a whole?
Further to my previous thoughts about cultural prioritization of self-sufficiency stemming from Big Sort, I find myself wondering about its economic impact.
For example, my parents think it's decadent to buy lunch at work every day and think people should bring lunch from home. I think it's an annoying waste of time to make lunch at home and much prefer to buy it. If everyone thought like my parents, there'd be far few fast food places, food courts, coffee shops, delis, etc. So those food service jobs wouldn't exist, so there'd be less demand for wholesale food suppliers and bulk purchases of paper napkins, so there'd be less work for commercial delivery drivers, etc. etc. etc. If everyone thought like me, there'd be more of these jobs. I'm not an economic expert, but it seems to me that it might affect the broader economy.
Similar, in my family we do our own taxes or each other's taxes. Taxes are done within the "tribe" (in the sense of tribe that I coined in my Big Sort post). If everyone worked like us, there'd be no call for businesses such as H&R Block. However, because there are people who think it's a valid option to pay someone else to do your taxes, this whole business sector exists.
Given the geographical trends in attitudes towards self-sufficiency, I find myself wondering if they correlate with employment rates. Is there less employment in places that place greater priority on self-sufficiency because people are doing for themselves or keeping it within the tribe?
The trick to studying this would be you'd have to control for the fact that urban areas (which place less priority on self-sufficiency) have more jobs as a matter of course. That's how they got to be urban areas. If you build, say, a steel plant, all the jobs are going to be at the steel plant. The workers probably aren't going to live right next door to the steel plant (they do tend to get a wee bit smelly), but they may well end up sorting themselves into certain other neighbourhoods depending on whether they do or don't prioritize self-sufficiency.
For example, my parents think it's decadent to buy lunch at work every day and think people should bring lunch from home. I think it's an annoying waste of time to make lunch at home and much prefer to buy it. If everyone thought like my parents, there'd be far few fast food places, food courts, coffee shops, delis, etc. So those food service jobs wouldn't exist, so there'd be less demand for wholesale food suppliers and bulk purchases of paper napkins, so there'd be less work for commercial delivery drivers, etc. etc. etc. If everyone thought like me, there'd be more of these jobs. I'm not an economic expert, but it seems to me that it might affect the broader economy.
Similar, in my family we do our own taxes or each other's taxes. Taxes are done within the "tribe" (in the sense of tribe that I coined in my Big Sort post). If everyone worked like us, there'd be no call for businesses such as H&R Block. However, because there are people who think it's a valid option to pay someone else to do your taxes, this whole business sector exists.
Given the geographical trends in attitudes towards self-sufficiency, I find myself wondering if they correlate with employment rates. Is there less employment in places that place greater priority on self-sufficiency because people are doing for themselves or keeping it within the tribe?
The trick to studying this would be you'd have to control for the fact that urban areas (which place less priority on self-sufficiency) have more jobs as a matter of course. That's how they got to be urban areas. If you build, say, a steel plant, all the jobs are going to be at the steel plant. The workers probably aren't going to live right next door to the steel plant (they do tend to get a wee bit smelly), but they may well end up sorting themselves into certain other neighbourhoods depending on whether they do or don't prioritize self-sufficiency.
How department stores can get my business
Apparently department stores are trying to make a comeback.
Here's how they can get my business: organize the women's clothing section by clothing type, not by brand.
When I'm shopping for clothes, I'm looking for, say, black pants. I don't care which brand, I don't care which line, I don't care which carefully-selected marketing demographic, I want black pants.
The way department stores are currently arranged, they have a section for every brand. This means I have to wander all over the floor, looking at the pants rack in every single section. This is annoying and time-consuming.
Meanwhile, when I wander into Reitman's or Smart Set, I can go to the side of the store with the more career-oriented clothes, look at all the pants in that section, and that's that. Even at Winner's (which I also find annoying to shop because the racks aren't easily scanable), I just have to look through the racks labeled "pants".
So if you want me to shop at your store, put all your career wear in one section, and arrange the displays so they're easily scanable. I want to walk up, take a look, and immediately have an idea of the range of black pants available, regardless of brand. Then I'll happily go through the racks for the specific items that pique my interest.
Here's how they can get my business: organize the women's clothing section by clothing type, not by brand.
When I'm shopping for clothes, I'm looking for, say, black pants. I don't care which brand, I don't care which line, I don't care which carefully-selected marketing demographic, I want black pants.
The way department stores are currently arranged, they have a section for every brand. This means I have to wander all over the floor, looking at the pants rack in every single section. This is annoying and time-consuming.
Meanwhile, when I wander into Reitman's or Smart Set, I can go to the side of the store with the more career-oriented clothes, look at all the pants in that section, and that's that. Even at Winner's (which I also find annoying to shop because the racks aren't easily scanable), I just have to look through the racks labeled "pants".
So if you want me to shop at your store, put all your career wear in one section, and arrange the displays so they're easily scanable. I want to walk up, take a look, and immediately have an idea of the range of black pants available, regardless of brand. Then I'll happily go through the racks for the specific items that pique my interest.
Astronauts and dogs and Twitter
1. Astronaut Leland Melvin appears to have had a formal astronaut portrait taken with his big gorgeous dogs! I'd love to have been behind the scenes in that photo session.
2. Astronauts Scott Kelly and Ron Garan, currently in Moscow, found a stray dog...on a train!
2. Astronauts Scott Kelly and Ron Garan, currently in Moscow, found a stray dog...on a train!
Friday, October 30, 2009
Why I am madly in love with Sheldon from Big Bang Theory
(Gloating: I totally caught the translation error in the subtitles at 2:07 - Poodle just confirmed it for me. This is noteworthy because I don't actually speak Portuguese.)
Thursday, October 29, 2009
The other problem with the Omar Khadr situation
Why is Omar Khadr in prison in the first place? Because he allegedly threw a grenade that mortally wounded a US soldier.
I know nothing of the legalities and technicalities of the situation, but the fact that a person can be arrested for allegedly attacking invading/occupying soldiers who are attacking them offends my sense of fair play.
It would be like going into a paintball game with a fully loaded paintball gun and shooting paintballs at people, and then pressing assault charges when they shoot paintballs at you. It would be like starting a game of dodgeball on the playground, and then running tattling to teacher "Waaaah! She threw a ball at me!"
If you're going to send soldiers into other countries and have them go barging into buildings trying to capture people, you have to assume they're going to get shot at or have grenades thrown at them or whatever. If you don't want your soldiers to get shot at, don't go around making war zones.
I know nothing of the legalities and technicalities of the situation, but the fact that a person can be arrested for allegedly attacking invading/occupying soldiers who are attacking them offends my sense of fair play.
It would be like going into a paintball game with a fully loaded paintball gun and shooting paintballs at people, and then pressing assault charges when they shoot paintballs at you. It would be like starting a game of dodgeball on the playground, and then running tattling to teacher "Waaaah! She threw a ball at me!"
If you're going to send soldiers into other countries and have them go barging into buildings trying to capture people, you have to assume they're going to get shot at or have grenades thrown at them or whatever. If you don't want your soldiers to get shot at, don't go around making war zones.
Do non-socialists see their views as being for the common good?
Terminological note: "non-socialist" is not the word I'm looking for. I'm looking for an opposite of "socialist" that isn't inherently negative (i.e., tempting as it is, "fascist" won't do.) If you can think of le mot juste after reading the post, let me know in the comments.
I once heard someone who wasn't socialist (and may have been opposed to socialism) define socialist as "I want this but I don't want to pay for it." I find that definition imprecise. When I want something and don't want to pay for it, I go to FilesTube or Pirate Bay. When I'm being socialist, I'm saying "Everyone should be able to have this," and most often I'm saying "I have this, I see it is good, I think the world would be a better place if everyone had it." It isn't about me, it's about everyone.
Oddly, this is similar to my attitude towards breaking the rules. Sometimes, when the line at a store is really long, I'm tempted to just shoplift my purchase - not because of the money, but because of the unreasonable wait. Haven't done it yet, but it is tempting sometimes. So I was googling around this idea once, and found people saying that people who shoplift (yes, for the express reason that the line is too long) just think they're specialer than anyone else. This isn't true in my case. I'm tempted to shoplift not because I think I'm special, but because I don't think it's reasonable to have to wait in line to buy your food for longer than it would take to eat said food. If anyone else shoplifts in this situation, I totally see where they're coming from. It's not that I think I should and they shouldn't. Similarly, when I jaywalk, or when I skipped class in high school, it wasn't that I thought I was above the rules, it was that I thought the rules were unfair (to everyone) and no one should have to follow rules that are unfair.
So thinking about this, I find myself wondering if non-socialists feel that their views are somehow for the common good (rather than just "I shouldn't have to spend money on stuff I don't use myself). On one hand, my own viewpoint is less selfish than they think it is, so it would be ungenerous not to consider the possibility that their viewpoint is less selfish than I think it is. On the other hand, the fact that people think I'm thinking of socialism purely in terms of my own benefit - and the fact that people think I break the rules because I think I'm specialer than anyone else - suggests that these same people might view their own politics - and any disregard for the rules that they might have - purely in terms of their own benefit.
I once heard someone who wasn't socialist (and may have been opposed to socialism) define socialist as "I want this but I don't want to pay for it." I find that definition imprecise. When I want something and don't want to pay for it, I go to FilesTube or Pirate Bay. When I'm being socialist, I'm saying "Everyone should be able to have this," and most often I'm saying "I have this, I see it is good, I think the world would be a better place if everyone had it." It isn't about me, it's about everyone.
Oddly, this is similar to my attitude towards breaking the rules. Sometimes, when the line at a store is really long, I'm tempted to just shoplift my purchase - not because of the money, but because of the unreasonable wait. Haven't done it yet, but it is tempting sometimes. So I was googling around this idea once, and found people saying that people who shoplift (yes, for the express reason that the line is too long) just think they're specialer than anyone else. This isn't true in my case. I'm tempted to shoplift not because I think I'm special, but because I don't think it's reasonable to have to wait in line to buy your food for longer than it would take to eat said food. If anyone else shoplifts in this situation, I totally see where they're coming from. It's not that I think I should and they shouldn't. Similarly, when I jaywalk, or when I skipped class in high school, it wasn't that I thought I was above the rules, it was that I thought the rules were unfair (to everyone) and no one should have to follow rules that are unfair.
So thinking about this, I find myself wondering if non-socialists feel that their views are somehow for the common good (rather than just "I shouldn't have to spend money on stuff I don't use myself). On one hand, my own viewpoint is less selfish than they think it is, so it would be ungenerous not to consider the possibility that their viewpoint is less selfish than I think it is. On the other hand, the fact that people think I'm thinking of socialism purely in terms of my own benefit - and the fact that people think I break the rules because I think I'm specialer than anyone else - suggests that these same people might view their own politics - and any disregard for the rules that they might have - purely in terms of their own benefit.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Why hasn't the climate map received North American media coverage?
Recently I saw an item on Google News about how some scientists had made an interesting and interactive map of how a 4 degree increase in world temperature will affect different parts of the world. Fascinating!
However, it didn't turn up in any of my usual news sources, which was odd. So today I searched in Google News, and I can't find any evidence that this story has been picked up in North America, not even once.
So what's up with that? Have you seen the climate map mentioned in North American media?
However, it didn't turn up in any of my usual news sources, which was odd. So today I searched in Google News, and I can't find any evidence that this story has been picked up in North America, not even once.
So what's up with that? Have you seen the climate map mentioned in North American media?
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Things They Should Invent: divide tone-deaf into two concepts
In general usage, tone-deaf is taken to mean you can't sing because you miss the notes. However, its literal meaning is that you can't hear the difference between notes. If you google for online tests of tone-deafness, they're really ear training tests - they test whether you can differentiate aurally between different notes.
However, there are people like me who can hear music and differentiate aurally between notes just fine, but can't hit the right pitch when singing. I know I'm not hitting all the notes, I can hear that I'm not hitting all the notes, I just...can't make it happen. Similar to how if I try to sink a three-point shot on the basketball court, I'm probably going to miss. I can see the hoop, I can see that the ball isn't going through the hoop, but I can't necessarily make it go through the hoop.
For lack of better ideas I suggest tone-mute for this concept, but I'm wide open to better ideas.
However, there are people like me who can hear music and differentiate aurally between notes just fine, but can't hit the right pitch when singing. I know I'm not hitting all the notes, I can hear that I'm not hitting all the notes, I just...can't make it happen. Similar to how if I try to sink a three-point shot on the basketball court, I'm probably going to miss. I can see the hoop, I can see that the ball isn't going through the hoop, but I can't necessarily make it go through the hoop.
For lack of better ideas I suggest tone-mute for this concept, but I'm wide open to better ideas.
Monday, October 26, 2009
I want these!
Joan Jett, Debbie Harry and Cyndi Lauper in Barbie form.
Those would have been such an awesome addition to my all-blonde Barbie collection.
Those would have been such an awesome addition to my all-blonde Barbie collection.
Currently wondering about anti-vaccine sentiment
Why do people think their immune system is strong enough to fight off a whole disease, but don't think their immune system is up to properly assimilating a vaccine?
Everyone look at the xkcd website today
Even if you normally read it through a feed reader, make sure to click through to the main page today.
It's beautiful!
It's beautiful!
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Thoughts from Big Sort
A while back, I was chatting with my hairdresser and found out that most of her clients are childfree. I thought on this a while, and it led to my noticing that in a great many areas in life, I choose things that are most suitable for me, and find myself surrounded by people who are like-minded in other ways on top of the factor that led me to that choice.
So I was googling around this idea for a while, and found this book: The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop. The book is very US-centric, but parts of it still seem applicable to my reality, and it led to a number of interesting trains of thought, which I'm going to blog about here.
(Note: The book deals with generalized demographic trends, so this post necessarily does to. I started out putting all the necessary mitigative language in everywhere and it quickly became ridiculous, so everything here is to be interpreted as a generalized trend, not an absolute truth, even if it is phrased absolutely.)
How do educated people perceive education?
One of the things touched on in the book is that people who don't have higher education tend to be...suspicious is the best word I can come up with, but that isn't quite precise (I'm foolishly writing this without the book in hand)...of people who do have higher education. They see us as up in some ivory tower completely removed from their reality, with perhaps an undertone of that we think less of them. That's just completely unlike my corner of reality. Round these parts, education is just something you have or have not done depending on your circumstances and inclination. It's morally equivalent to having read a particular book or not. If you've read the book, then you've...read the book. If you haven't read the book, you can always read it later, or watch the movie, or google it, or continue to go about your life without it. No big deal.
But then in some of the recent strikes (TTC, City of Toronto workers), some people were getting really pissed off that these workers were earning a decent living in jobs that didn't require higher education, and even calling for these jobs not to pay a decent living on the tacit basis that they didn't require higher education. That's so totally WTF I can't even begin to speculate.
But this raises a lot of questions. How many people with higher education think it's no big deal like I do, and how many think it's like some sacred golden key like the strike haters do? Do people with less education perceive people with more education as Other because of the strike hater types, (or vice versa, although I couldn't imagine how that would work), or did the two evolve separately? Could we create a better-functioning society by getting more people to think of it as no big deal? Would affordable tuition do this?
Why do people who value self-sufficiency need small-talk from strangers?
One of the points made in the book was that people who live in more rural areas tend to value self-sufficiency and independence. This surprised me, because one thing I have noticed in real life is that people in more rural areas are tend to want to small-talk with strangers, and find it off-putting that city people tend to not initiate conversation unless there's a specific reason to. My reasoning behind not talking to people unless I have a specific reason to is out of respect. I assume they're perfectly competent people with their own lives and their own concerns, and there's no reason why they would be interested in me. And yet, the population that disagrees with this approach correlates with a population that values self-sufficiency. So what's the story?
Are people who value self-sufficiency more actually more broadly competent?
As I mentioned above, people who live in rural areas and are more conservative tend to value self-sufficiency, seeing it as practically a moral imperative. This reflects something that has long been baffling me. If I mention that I can't do something or can't do it well enough to bother, certain people I know try to convince me I can - like they try really hard, far beyond social ego stroking, and seem really invested in the idea that I really can do whatever if I just try. After reading the book, I realized the people who do this are among the most conservative people I know. So they view self-sufficiency as more of a moral imperative - if you're self-sufficient, you're a good person; if you're not self-sufficient, you're being a lazy-ass and therefore a bad person. These people generally see me as a good person, so their initial gut reaction is that because I'm a good person, of course I can do whatever it is!
But, of course, the way real life works is that different people are good at or not good at different things to different degrees. So people who value self-sufficiency are going to do things themselves whether they're good at it or not, and are more likely to interpret the results of their efforts as adequate even if they are sub-optimal because they view it as a moral imperative. Meanwhile, people who have no particular problem with the idea of not being self-sufficient are more likely to look at sub-optimal results as "Meh, I'm not very good at this" and hire someone to do it next time.
It would be really interesting to study people who do and don't value self-sufficiency as a moral imperative and see how good they are objectively at various things. The trick is you'd have to control the results for the amount of practice the people have. For example, my parents think it's excessively decadent to hire someone to paint, so they paint themselves, and they've probably painted a whole house a total of four times in their lives. Meanwhile, I'm not very good at painting neatly and the smell of paint nauseates me, so I've painted maybe a quarter of a wall in my life and very much hope never to paint anything ever again. (I would unhesitatingly choose to live with peeling paint if I couldn't afford painters rather than attempt to do it myself.) So if you wanted to study who is objectively better at painting, you'd have to control for the fact that my parents have painted so much more than I have. Maybe they could study what people consider an acceptable result for their effort or something like that
What if we're working with two different definitions of self-sufficient?
One of the major examples the book gives of these attitudes towards self-sufficiency is that the self-sufficiency as moral imperative people view public transit as a waste of taxpayers' money and everyone should just STFU and drive themselves. (No mention either way of how they feel about toll roads - I haven't seen many toll roads in exurban areas.) This made my brain explode a little, because my initial, visceral attitude towards public transit is that it provides self-sufficiency. You can just go anywhere, no need to be dependent on a car or on other people to drive you, life is easy.
This all reminded me of a conversation I once had with my father back when I was a in my early teens. They were thinking about extending a bus route into our neighbourhood, and my father thought it was a waste of money because everyone in our transitless neighbourhood had a car - that's why they chose to live in the transitless neighbourhood. I was all "Um, no, I don't have a car. Kids who are old enough to go places themselves but not old enough to drive don't have cars. Seniors living with their adult children can't necessarily drive." I could think of dozens of individuals in the neighbourhood who would be well-served by a bus route. But my father was like "You don't need a bus, your mother and I drive you places. Kids are driven places by their parents. Mrs. Old Lady down the street is driven places by her adult children." A very disheartening thing when you're at the point where you're starting to want to do things independently of your parents, like all the protagonists in your favourite young adult novels.
But in that conversation, my father and I personify the two different views of self-sufficiency that I think are on the two sides of the Big Sort. I see self-sufficiency as an individual's independence from other individuals. I don't want to be dependent on my parents to drive me around. I see my grandparents also being dependent on my parents to drive them around, and I don't want to live like that either. However, people like my father see self-sufficiency as what I will for lack of a better word call their "tribe" (family, household, relatives, neighbours) being independent from outsiders. I think they feel that they take care of their tribe, and they don't want anyone else meddling with it. And I think they also feel that they're already doing the right thing and taking care of their tribe, so they shouldn't have to take care of someone else's tribe too. So at the crux of the divide is whether you think the tribe should be independent of the government, or whether you think the government should enable people to be independent of their tribe.
How you feel about this isn't necessarily reflective of the quality of your tribe. For example, I once saw someone propose that to save money, hospitals shouldn't give their patients meals, on the logic that hospitals are in the business of medicine, not catering. Patients' families should bring them food instead. Now, if I were in the hospital, my family would totally bring me food. We don't always like each other, we don't agree on most aspects of politics, but I have no doubt they would bring me any and all food I wanted for the duration of my hospital stay. However, I can totally imagine dozens of situations in which this model of the patients' families bringing food would be unsuitable, so, despite the fact that my tribe would totally feed me, I remain vehemently opposed to the idea of leaving people dependent on their tribe for food.
I think a problem with the tribe-centric view is that it doesn't always allow for the possibility that individuals do need to operate independently of the tribe. For example, I have seen several cases where right-wing fathers (I've only ever seen it with right-wing fathers, although I'm not discounting the possibility that other people do it too) have opposed some political measure because they think it would make it harder for them to provide for their children. However, they either didn't notice or didn't care that said political measure would make it easier for their children (who were either already or almost launched) to provide for themselves.
It would be interesting to study this self-sufficiency/tribe-centricity thing to see if the attitudes correlate with a person's position in their tribe. For example, cities are full of people who have left their tribe of origin upon reaching adulthood, which means that their only role without the tribe has been one of dependence. This would lead one to conclude that the people who value the individual's independence from the tribe are those who would be dependent upon the tribe, and the people who value the tribe's independence from outsiders are those with provider roles within the tribe. However, there are still people who stay in the more rural/conservative areas by choice despite their dependence on the tribe, even though they could live as independent individuals with the greater amenities available in urban areas. So there must be some other factors going on there, but I can't see them at the moment.
So how do we unsort ourselves?
As the book points out, people don't choose where to live because of the presence of like-minded individuals. We choose where to live because it suits our various needs. It's a reasonable commute to work. The quality of the housing is as close to ideal as we can manage. The distance from or proximity to various things is as close to optimal as we can realistically manage. Similarly, I chose my hairdresser because she specializes in long hair, not because she and her clientele are childfree. I chose my job because the work is a good match with my strengths, not because I'd be working with people with a similar family immigration history.
So how can we unsort ourselves? I don't know about you, but I'm not about to move to a less suitable neighbourhood, job, or hairdresser, especially not in service of spending more time with people whose political opinions I consider somewhere between sub-optimal and repugnant.
Or should we?
One thing that has really baffled me about Toronto municipal politics is people who live in Toronto proper, but don't want the trappings of urban life. They don't want bus service on their street or a subway stop in their neighbourhood or mixed-use zoning. They want to be able to park three cars on their property. I honestly do not understand at all why they choose to live in Canada's most urban municipality when they don't want urban life, and when the lifestyle they do want is readily available (at a significantly lower cost) just over in 905. As I've blogged about before, I chose my neighbourhood of highrises specifically for its urban nature, and it's very frustrating when people who live in houses outside our highrise neighbourhood try to stop the building of new highrises. So maybe we'd all be happier if we sorted ourselves fully.
But it doesn't seem right to position ourselves so we're completely disregarding a whole chunk of society just because they prefer a different lifestyle.
So I was googling around this idea for a while, and found this book: The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop. The book is very US-centric, but parts of it still seem applicable to my reality, and it led to a number of interesting trains of thought, which I'm going to blog about here.
(Note: The book deals with generalized demographic trends, so this post necessarily does to. I started out putting all the necessary mitigative language in everywhere and it quickly became ridiculous, so everything here is to be interpreted as a generalized trend, not an absolute truth, even if it is phrased absolutely.)
How do educated people perceive education?
One of the things touched on in the book is that people who don't have higher education tend to be...suspicious is the best word I can come up with, but that isn't quite precise (I'm foolishly writing this without the book in hand)...of people who do have higher education. They see us as up in some ivory tower completely removed from their reality, with perhaps an undertone of that we think less of them. That's just completely unlike my corner of reality. Round these parts, education is just something you have or have not done depending on your circumstances and inclination. It's morally equivalent to having read a particular book or not. If you've read the book, then you've...read the book. If you haven't read the book, you can always read it later, or watch the movie, or google it, or continue to go about your life without it. No big deal.
But then in some of the recent strikes (TTC, City of Toronto workers), some people were getting really pissed off that these workers were earning a decent living in jobs that didn't require higher education, and even calling for these jobs not to pay a decent living on the tacit basis that they didn't require higher education. That's so totally WTF I can't even begin to speculate.
But this raises a lot of questions. How many people with higher education think it's no big deal like I do, and how many think it's like some sacred golden key like the strike haters do? Do people with less education perceive people with more education as Other because of the strike hater types, (or vice versa, although I couldn't imagine how that would work), or did the two evolve separately? Could we create a better-functioning society by getting more people to think of it as no big deal? Would affordable tuition do this?
Why do people who value self-sufficiency need small-talk from strangers?
One of the points made in the book was that people who live in more rural areas tend to value self-sufficiency and independence. This surprised me, because one thing I have noticed in real life is that people in more rural areas are tend to want to small-talk with strangers, and find it off-putting that city people tend to not initiate conversation unless there's a specific reason to. My reasoning behind not talking to people unless I have a specific reason to is out of respect. I assume they're perfectly competent people with their own lives and their own concerns, and there's no reason why they would be interested in me. And yet, the population that disagrees with this approach correlates with a population that values self-sufficiency. So what's the story?
Are people who value self-sufficiency more actually more broadly competent?
As I mentioned above, people who live in rural areas and are more conservative tend to value self-sufficiency, seeing it as practically a moral imperative. This reflects something that has long been baffling me. If I mention that I can't do something or can't do it well enough to bother, certain people I know try to convince me I can - like they try really hard, far beyond social ego stroking, and seem really invested in the idea that I really can do whatever if I just try. After reading the book, I realized the people who do this are among the most conservative people I know. So they view self-sufficiency as more of a moral imperative - if you're self-sufficient, you're a good person; if you're not self-sufficient, you're being a lazy-ass and therefore a bad person. These people generally see me as a good person, so their initial gut reaction is that because I'm a good person, of course I can do whatever it is!
But, of course, the way real life works is that different people are good at or not good at different things to different degrees. So people who value self-sufficiency are going to do things themselves whether they're good at it or not, and are more likely to interpret the results of their efforts as adequate even if they are sub-optimal because they view it as a moral imperative. Meanwhile, people who have no particular problem with the idea of not being self-sufficient are more likely to look at sub-optimal results as "Meh, I'm not very good at this" and hire someone to do it next time.
It would be really interesting to study people who do and don't value self-sufficiency as a moral imperative and see how good they are objectively at various things. The trick is you'd have to control the results for the amount of practice the people have. For example, my parents think it's excessively decadent to hire someone to paint, so they paint themselves, and they've probably painted a whole house a total of four times in their lives. Meanwhile, I'm not very good at painting neatly and the smell of paint nauseates me, so I've painted maybe a quarter of a wall in my life and very much hope never to paint anything ever again. (I would unhesitatingly choose to live with peeling paint if I couldn't afford painters rather than attempt to do it myself.) So if you wanted to study who is objectively better at painting, you'd have to control for the fact that my parents have painted so much more than I have. Maybe they could study what people consider an acceptable result for their effort or something like that
What if we're working with two different definitions of self-sufficient?
One of the major examples the book gives of these attitudes towards self-sufficiency is that the self-sufficiency as moral imperative people view public transit as a waste of taxpayers' money and everyone should just STFU and drive themselves. (No mention either way of how they feel about toll roads - I haven't seen many toll roads in exurban areas.) This made my brain explode a little, because my initial, visceral attitude towards public transit is that it provides self-sufficiency. You can just go anywhere, no need to be dependent on a car or on other people to drive you, life is easy.
This all reminded me of a conversation I once had with my father back when I was a in my early teens. They were thinking about extending a bus route into our neighbourhood, and my father thought it was a waste of money because everyone in our transitless neighbourhood had a car - that's why they chose to live in the transitless neighbourhood. I was all "Um, no, I don't have a car. Kids who are old enough to go places themselves but not old enough to drive don't have cars. Seniors living with their adult children can't necessarily drive." I could think of dozens of individuals in the neighbourhood who would be well-served by a bus route. But my father was like "You don't need a bus, your mother and I drive you places. Kids are driven places by their parents. Mrs. Old Lady down the street is driven places by her adult children." A very disheartening thing when you're at the point where you're starting to want to do things independently of your parents, like all the protagonists in your favourite young adult novels.
But in that conversation, my father and I personify the two different views of self-sufficiency that I think are on the two sides of the Big Sort. I see self-sufficiency as an individual's independence from other individuals. I don't want to be dependent on my parents to drive me around. I see my grandparents also being dependent on my parents to drive them around, and I don't want to live like that either. However, people like my father see self-sufficiency as what I will for lack of a better word call their "tribe" (family, household, relatives, neighbours) being independent from outsiders. I think they feel that they take care of their tribe, and they don't want anyone else meddling with it. And I think they also feel that they're already doing the right thing and taking care of their tribe, so they shouldn't have to take care of someone else's tribe too. So at the crux of the divide is whether you think the tribe should be independent of the government, or whether you think the government should enable people to be independent of their tribe.
How you feel about this isn't necessarily reflective of the quality of your tribe. For example, I once saw someone propose that to save money, hospitals shouldn't give their patients meals, on the logic that hospitals are in the business of medicine, not catering. Patients' families should bring them food instead. Now, if I were in the hospital, my family would totally bring me food. We don't always like each other, we don't agree on most aspects of politics, but I have no doubt they would bring me any and all food I wanted for the duration of my hospital stay. However, I can totally imagine dozens of situations in which this model of the patients' families bringing food would be unsuitable, so, despite the fact that my tribe would totally feed me, I remain vehemently opposed to the idea of leaving people dependent on their tribe for food.
I think a problem with the tribe-centric view is that it doesn't always allow for the possibility that individuals do need to operate independently of the tribe. For example, I have seen several cases where right-wing fathers (I've only ever seen it with right-wing fathers, although I'm not discounting the possibility that other people do it too) have opposed some political measure because they think it would make it harder for them to provide for their children. However, they either didn't notice or didn't care that said political measure would make it easier for their children (who were either already or almost launched) to provide for themselves.
It would be interesting to study this self-sufficiency/tribe-centricity thing to see if the attitudes correlate with a person's position in their tribe. For example, cities are full of people who have left their tribe of origin upon reaching adulthood, which means that their only role without the tribe has been one of dependence. This would lead one to conclude that the people who value the individual's independence from the tribe are those who would be dependent upon the tribe, and the people who value the tribe's independence from outsiders are those with provider roles within the tribe. However, there are still people who stay in the more rural/conservative areas by choice despite their dependence on the tribe, even though they could live as independent individuals with the greater amenities available in urban areas. So there must be some other factors going on there, but I can't see them at the moment.
So how do we unsort ourselves?
As the book points out, people don't choose where to live because of the presence of like-minded individuals. We choose where to live because it suits our various needs. It's a reasonable commute to work. The quality of the housing is as close to ideal as we can manage. The distance from or proximity to various things is as close to optimal as we can realistically manage. Similarly, I chose my hairdresser because she specializes in long hair, not because she and her clientele are childfree. I chose my job because the work is a good match with my strengths, not because I'd be working with people with a similar family immigration history.
So how can we unsort ourselves? I don't know about you, but I'm not about to move to a less suitable neighbourhood, job, or hairdresser, especially not in service of spending more time with people whose political opinions I consider somewhere between sub-optimal and repugnant.
Or should we?
One thing that has really baffled me about Toronto municipal politics is people who live in Toronto proper, but don't want the trappings of urban life. They don't want bus service on their street or a subway stop in their neighbourhood or mixed-use zoning. They want to be able to park three cars on their property. I honestly do not understand at all why they choose to live in Canada's most urban municipality when they don't want urban life, and when the lifestyle they do want is readily available (at a significantly lower cost) just over in 905. As I've blogged about before, I chose my neighbourhood of highrises specifically for its urban nature, and it's very frustrating when people who live in houses outside our highrise neighbourhood try to stop the building of new highrises. So maybe we'd all be happier if we sorted ourselves fully.
But it doesn't seem right to position ourselves so we're completely disregarding a whole chunk of society just because they prefer a different lifestyle.
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