I redesigned the economy in the shower this morning

We start with a cradle-to-grave guaranteed income, let's say $20,000 a year (indexed). However, if you are employed, then the employer gets some or all of that money. A certain level of employment is defined as "fully employed". Let's say "fully employed" is a non-temporary job paying least $40,000 a year (indexed) with full benefits a defined-benefit pension. If you are fully employed the employer gets your $20,000, but you don't care, because you make way more than that and have benefits and a pension. If you are less than fully employed (lower pay, or no benefits, or temp work), you get part of the $20,000 and the employer gets part of the $20,000. The ratios would be such that it's never more profitable for the employer to provide less than full employment, and the worker never loses money by working more. I'm willing to consider the possibility of designating a temp or non-benefit job as "fully employed" at a higher salary threshold, but it has to be high enough that it doesn't discourage employers from providing benefits or secure employment.

Children also get $20,000. However, some of the money goes to their parents/guardians, and some if it goes into an account to save for their education. The kids get to keep a relatively small amount (perhaps increasing each year) that basically functions as an allowance. When they turn 18, they start getting the full $20,000 a year. (Thus emancipating them from their parents). If they go to postsecondary right out of high school, the money in their education account is used to pay tuition and any other school-related fees. Three ideas for if they don't go to postsecondary, in ascending order of paternalism:

1. They get access to the money in the education account outright.
2. Every year, they get access to an amount of money equal to the average tuition fee that year. (Of course, if they do choose to go back to school, they get their full tuition paid even if it's higher than the average.)
3. The education account is rolled over into a retirement savings account that will pay out an annuity in retirement.

So overall, citizens are more financially secure, consumer confidence increases, government social spending is at a steady and predictable level regardless of economic conditions, employers are more motivated to create and maintain Good Jobs, the aspects of the childcare problem that can be addressed by throwing money at the problem are addressed, education is affordable, and young adults are able to emancipate themselves from their parents and launch whenever they feel like it.

The problems with the Test The Nation IQ test

1. The time limit is per question. In real IQ tests, the time limit is for the section or for the whole test, so you can speed through the easy questions and take your time on the harder ones.

2. Because you're taking the test at home on your computer, you can talk out loud, which is completely unlike real IQ tests. I have an auditory memory, so this is enormously helpful to me. As a result I got 49/50 questions right, which places my IQ at 144 (on a scale that goes up to 150).

Oddly, the question I got wrong was in the Memory: Images section, in which I was certain I'd gotten everything right. I look forward to the answers being posted so I can see which one I got wrong.

Of course, the main reason I did so well in the memory sections (other than being able to talk through the scenes out loud) is that I've taken enough of these tests that I know exactly what kinds of questions they might ask. Really all this proves is I have good test-taking skills.

(The test is here.)

Building a better protest rally

The problem with protest rallies is ultimately they are boring and not particularly productive. You're standing there in a crowd while the people on stage tell you stuff you already know, then you walk around a bit and make noise so people notice you. Not especially fun or interesting, and doesn't achieve anything other than visibility.

I do get that visibility is the point. A big loud crowd of people gets attention and makes it clear that a lot of people feel strongly about the cause. Critics are likely to dismiss petitions, email campaigns, facebook groups etc. far more readily than an actual crowd of people. But instead of just showing up and making noise and shouting at each other stuff we already know, we should do something, make something, create something, help something. Surely we can make better use of thousands of intelligent, engaged Canadians than just being extras in a crowd scene!

So here's what our Something has to be:

1. Tangible: The value of the crowd is its tangibility, and we need to retain that. If everyone showed up in Yonge Dundas Square and left their mittens behind, that would show how many people were there (problem: then we'd all have to buy new mittens).

2. Visually impressive: Close to 10,000 people is a lot of people. It's "Holy shit, look at all those people." The Something has to be similarly visually impressive. For example, if everyone put their business card in a jar (problems: not everyone has a business card, and not everyone is free to take political action in their employer's name) that wouldn't be visually impressive - 10,000 business cards isn't really a lot. If everyone left their mittens behind or brought a can of food, that wouldn't be particularly visually impressive either - it would look like a lot, but it wouldn't be "Holy shit!" But if everyone brought a live squirrel and released it in Yonge Dundas Square (obvious problems: how do you catch and transport a live squirrel? Plus it's cruel to squirrels), the reaction would be "Holy shit, look at all those squirrels!"

3. Practical and feasible: So suppose everyone showed up at Yonge Dundas Square, stood there and knitted a scarf, and then we left all the scarves on the ground, carpeting the entire square. Tangible and visually impressive, but the problem is not everyone knows how to knit. If everyone got in a car and drove around really slowly with a sign on their roof tying up traffic, that would be tangible and visually impressive, but would severely reduce the numbers because you can't assume everyone has a car. But if we all showed up and drew chalk outlines of our bodies (problems: symbolically inappropriate for this protest, dependent on the media being willing to go to the trouble of photographing it from above) that would be extremely feasible. Leaving your mittens behind might be impractical enough to deter people, but bringing a can of food is generally doable (the problem being that 10,000 cans of food aren't that visually impressive.)

4. Productive and helpful: The ideal would be for the protest to have some lasting positive impact, beyond political awareness. That would give us more of the moral high ground and be good PR vis-a-vis people who are wary of protests in general. The squirrels and the slow-driving cars would just annoy people (and squirrels) so we wouldn't want to do that. The scarves, the mittens, and the cans of food could all be donated somewhere where they'd do some good. It would be even better if the Something could be permanent, like building Habitat for Humanity houses (problem: even if a tract of Habitat for Humanity houses springs up overnight, it isn't obvious to the non-expert how many people were involved).

While writing this I came up with the idea of everyone coming to the protest site and building a small (like 1 or 2 feet high) inukshuk. But that's not super-feasible and not particularly productive. (Where would we get rocks from? How would we make it visually apparent what the inukshuks represent? Plus critics would say that maybe just a few people showed up and built many inukshuks each, and it would annoy people if we cluttered up Yonge Dundas Square with inukshuks.) Plus I don't know whether 10,000 small inukshuks in Yonge Dundas Square would be visually impressive or not.

Then I had the idea of building inukshuks out of nonperishable food, and after the protest is over donating all the food to a food bank. Questions: is it architecturally feasible to build an inukshuk out of nonperishable food, and would the amount of food required be generally affordable? How much trouble/annoyance would it be? What would we do about critics' inevitable allegations that maybe it was just a small number of people building a large number of inukshuks? And would it be visually impressive?

Any other ideas?

When and how did entails stop existing?

Several Jane Austen novels are based on the concept of entails, where an estate could only be inherited by a male heir, and daughters were left with nothing (making it necessary for them to find husbands, thus triggering the entire plot of a Jane Austen novel). In at least some of the cases (Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility) the fathers of the family couldn't do anything to change the entails. Even though they were the boss of the estate, their hands were completely tied by the legalities of the entail, and they had no way of seeing to it that their daughters were provided for.

So what I'm wondering is, how did it come about that entails no longer exist? If they're so wrapped up legalities that the people in charge of the estates did not have the power to change them, how did they get changed?

Being safe

I was reading some statements from a politician who is more right-wing than I'm comfortable with, and I found myself whimpering at the screen "But I just want to be safe!"

The policies being described would make people have to struggle to earn a living where now we merely have to work. They'd make aspects of life that are currently effortless somewhat difficult, and/or hinder work that is currently being done to make difficult aspects of life easier. Similar political opinions often want to weaken the safety net that will catch us if we fall, making it easier to end up in grinding poverty and harder to climb back out. That makes me feel less and less safe.

What makes me feel safe is if I can be a good girl, do what I'm supposed to, go to work and do my job well, pay my bills in full and on time, don't be a dick to people, don't do anything too stupid, and that's enough to keep life from getting worse. The policies I was reading about would result in life being worse even if people are good and do what they're supposed to. I can't feel safe in a world that works like that.

People who are the same flavour of right-wing as the politician whose statements I was reading tend to be opposed to taxes. It's not something I feel myself - taxes have always felt negligible to me, but then I don't make enough money to be in a very high tax bracket, so I do get that it might feel different if you're in a high tax bracket.

What I'm wondering: do taxes make them feel unsafe, the same way the policies I was reading about make me feel unsafe? Or is it something other than feeling safe?

Worst. Dear Abby Letter. Ever.

Last letter in today's column:

DEAR ABBY: I'm having a dispute with my husband. He thinks that you screw in a lightbulb clockwise. I disagree. I say counter-clockwise. Which of us is correct?

Um, why not grab the nearest lamp and check for yourself?

Life imitates Star Trek

Synthehol!

Wherein a foreigner who knows nothing about privatized health insurance tries to fix the US health insurance system

What if US health insurance companies weren't taxed on their earnings, and were instead taxed on the value of the claims they decline? If they pay in full every claim submitted to them, they won't pay any taxes. If they pay none of the claims submitted to them, they have to pay taxes on the full amounts of all the claims submitted to them.

Other problems I've heard of are a) insurance premiums being too expensive, and b) patients being refused insurance coverage at all because they are or have been sick. So in addition to taxing the amounts of any claims that are refused, they should also tax the amounts of any insurance premiums above a certain percentage of the client's income, and there should be a penalty for every applicant they refuse to cover, equal to either the cost of their average client or the cost of their most expensive client (I can make arguments for both).

Now the obvious flaw here is that taxes are never 100%, so the insurance companies would still be saving money by doing whatever they want. It's possible that anti-tax sentiment would provide sufficient motivation, but you can't make policy on the assumption that people are that stupid. So the next step is to use any money collected through this coverage denial tax to create an insurance fund for people who can't get or afford coverage elsewhere. So basically the insurance companies are paying the insurance premiums of people they refuse to cover.

I think they either did or were talking about making a rule in the states where every citizen has to buy health insurance, so it would be perfectly logical to tweak legislation at this point to make that more feasible. And if the insurance companies don't want to pay any denied-claim tax and just want to revel in unbridled capitalism, all they have to do is provide their services to anyone who asks at a fair price.

Adult material?

Via Slap:

[Canada Post's new] policies, which came into effect just over a year ago, now mandate that all “sexually suggestive” admail—even commercial mail that is explicitly addressed to the recipient—be clearly labelled as adult material, thwarting all attempts at discretion. This includes all images “that are suggestive of sexual activity,” as well as text that “describes sexual acts in a way that is more than purely technical.”

Technically, as per the letter of the law, that would include romance novels. That would include fashion magazines if they contained some of the more provocative perfume ads. If "images" includes video, that would include DVD box sets of most (if not all) the Golden Globe nominees for Best Drama. None of which is porn. It is intended for adults, yes, but you can buy romance novels in a grocery store, and see images suggestive of sexual activity by channel-surfing after 10 pm.

What were they thinking when they wrote this definition?

Open Letter to the Toronto Star

Dear Toronto Star:

How come an article that gets a graphic content warning on your website appears on the front page, above the fold, with no content warning in your print edition? What is your reasoning here? What scenarios did you have in mind when imagining that online readers might require a content warning but print readers would not?

Sincerely,

A reader who prefers to avoid graphic content at the breakfast table

Why does the military do disaster relief?

Mentioned frequently and matter-of-factly in the news is that the military is sending search-and-rescue and other disaster-relief teams to Haiti. Which is very much a good thing.

However, this is making me wonder how it came about that the military has disaster relief in its skill set in the first place. We accept it as a given, but if you think about it, it's rather odd for an organization originally intended for warfare to develop humanitarian expertise. Not questioning its value - I'd much rather have them doing disaster relief than making war - just wondering how it happened.

Things They Should Invent: celebrate functional fashion design

If you've ever had the pleasure of owning a particularly well-designed piece of clothing, you'll know that they work with your body to make your shape look better than it is. Well-placed design features smooth out any lumpiness, make your torso look sleek and your breasts look high, and use your hips to create a general impression of sexy curves rather than pear-shaped endomorphism. I had the extreme good fortune to find two such dresses in the past year (name-dropping to give credit where credit is due: dresses by Calvin Klein and Adrianna Papell respectively, both found at Winners) and was very impressed by the thought that went into the designs. It was like engineering or architecture! I came away with a profound appreciation of the talent that goes into good fashion design.

However, haute couture doesn't really work this way. The outfits on a fashion show runway are pure artistic expression by the designer, and the models are specifically chosen for having figures and features that aren't going to interfere with the clothes.

Fashion magazines do sometimes do articles on dressing to enhance or conceal certain aspects of your figure, but they place the responsibility on the wearer to find clothes that work for them. It's presented as a way to improve the wearer's shopping skills, without lauding the designers for designing helpful clothes.

This does make sense from a practical perspective (the person reading the magazine is the wearer, who presumably does want clothes that work for them), but I think it's unhelpful overall. People often worry that the use of extremely skinny fashion models leads to body insecurity and eating disorders among the general population. I'm wondering if it isn't the skinny models per se, but rather the fashion hierarchy that celebrates haute couture where models are chosen not to interfere with the clothes as the pinnacle of design achievement, while actual well-designed clothes that work well on real people are seen as more downmarket. This leaves people feeling insecure because their body won't serve all the clothes, whereas in reality the clothes should serve the wearer. Good interface design makes it obvious where to click, rather than requiring users to RTFM. Good architecture or engineering works with how users are going to naturally use the structure, rather than requiring a change in user behaviour. Good fashion design - the work that is celebrated as the pinnacle of fashion design - should be similarly user-centric.

I'd love to see a piece in Vogue where big-name designers make clothes for real people. Not magazine "real people" - flawlessly attractive people whose hips happen to be slightly bigger than their bust, or size 12s being dubbed "plus-size models". I'm talking about people who are as conventionally attractive as Susan Boyle. Get top designers to design clothes specifically for these real people to wear in real life, and present it as a celebration of real design skill.

Alternatively (or in addition), there could be a TV show akin to Project Runway where the designers are given real-life design problems. The subjects could be real people, or they could be more extreme real-life issues (like that one house makeover show where they renovate houses for families with special-needs octuplets or whatever). Up-and-coming new designers could have challenges like making a functional and attractive wardrobe for someone with a colostomy bag, or creating flattering workout wear for a 60-year-old triathlete who has to train outdoors in the Canadian winter, or designing clothes that a transgender person could wear throughout their entire transition. This show would have to be done well (i.e. not stooping to presenting the subjects as a freakshow), but I think it would be enormously valuable both for the body image of the general public and for the design profession to present functional user-centric problem-solving as the pinnacle of exemplary fashion design.

Foolish pricing decision from Rogers

In October, I received an email from Rogers offering me a significantly better price on my existing home phone service. Being the procrastinative sort of person that I am, I didn't get around to switching to the new package until December. It was a good decision and I came away feeling like I won (which I never do when dealing with telecommunications.)

Yesterday, I got a letter from Rogers saying that the price of my phone package was increasing by $3. My first visceral reaction was "Dude, WTF????" I haven't even had a full billing period on my new phone package yet! I felt completely baited and switched!

And to make matters worse (for Rogers), in that same day's mail there was also an offer from Bell where the big bold number at the top of the page was now marginally lower than the new price with Rogers.

Of course, having been a consumer of telecommunications for several years, I had the sense to step back from my initial visceral feeling of being cheated to run some numbers and read some fine print. And it turned out that I'm still marginally saving money with Rogers and the fine print of Bell's offer pushes its price marginally higher than Rogers'.

But I have to wonder, what kind of a business decision was that on Rogers' part? If they had just made the home phone offer $3 higher in the first place, I would have come away feeling like I've won. Why even introduce this opportunity for customers to feel baited and switched?

A gap in my musical education

For reasons I cannot fathom, my parents' Beatles collection never included Abbey Road. So the first time I knowingly heard I Want You (She's So Heavy) was a couple of years ago in Across the Universe:



It only just occurred to me that the Beatles version probably isn't intended to sound militaristic.

Professionally-administered personality tests

I read somewhere that you can get personality tests (Myers-Briggs etc.) professionally administered. Has anyone ever had that done? If so, does the professional administering it help you pick the most applicable answer? One problem I always have is that I'm always mentally screaming at the test "Well, both!" or "It depends on the context!" Abstract or concrete? As it happens, I like my tangibles abstract and my intangibles concrete. Are you more analytical or emotional? Well, either or both, depending on the context. I tend to get a gut feeling, analyze the fuck out of it, fret that maybe I'm missing some key point for a couple of days, and end up going with the gut feeling. But I don't consider a gut feeling out of which the fuck has not yet been analyzed to be valid. So where does that fall on a dual choice test?

It would be interesting to do these personality tests in a context where I can talk through these questions with someone. Is that what professionally-administered involves?

An Eddie Izzard reference in Ziggy...AGAIN!

This is the second time I've seen an Eddie Izzard reference (at 0:55) in Ziggy.

The first time was the one shown by Comics Curmudgeon here, and the relevant Eddie is here at 3:49.

And I don't even read Ziggy!

Wherein I might have figured out how customer service works over a decade after I started working customer service

The salesman is very much a salesman. Intellectually, I know every trick he's doing. His face lights up with friendly recognition when I walk in, just like my face has lit up for every customer who interrupted the work that I absolutely had to get done by the end of shift. When he says "Don't you own another pair in this line?" he isn't actually thinking he remembers which shoes I've bought before, he just recognized me as a return customer by the way I phrased my request and was trying to elicit that very information from me. And yet I fell for it, hook, line and sinker.

Normally I don't fall for these things. So why did I this time? Because I was feeling insecure. By objective standards, I'm not cool enough to shop in that store. By acting as though he recognized and remembered me, salesguy was validating my presence, making me feel like I'm totally allowed to be in there.

My first customer service training was when I was a fast food cashier, and it was presented as trying to make customers feel like we're their friends. I thought that was ridiculous and insulting to the customers. Like they're really going think that we're friends just because I call them by name after reading their name off their debit card? Like they're so lacking in friends they'll feel good when some random fast food cashier treats them like they're friends? But now I'm thinking it might be more validating. Yes, you personally are totally allowed and welcome to be buying food here. Seriously, come back again soon, you're exactly the kind of person we're here for. Since my days of working in fast food I've received a wide range of customer service from a wide range of places, and the good customer service was always characterized by validating me and making me feel like I'm allowed and welcome, whereas the bad customer service always made me feel like I wasn't actually supposed to be there.

But if customer service actually works this way, that would mean that everyone is as insecure as I am. If that is the case, how on earth does society function?

How on earth do people arrive at seeing heterosexuality as morally imperative in the first place?

The fact that I am congenitally monogamous often confuses people. I am not religious, I have no intention of raising children, I don't in any way see monogamy as morally imperative (assuming you're not leading anyone to believe you're being monogamous with them), so often people don't understand why I am monogamous.

An answer I've found helpful is to describe it as my sexual orientation. Monogamy and commitment are what I find sexy. Polyamory and/or casual sex are simply not sexy to me and there's just...no point in my wasting my time with them, the same way that (if you are monosexual*) people who are not your target gender are simply not sexually attractive to you and there's just no point in engaging in sexual and/or romantic relationships with people who aren't your target gender.

Because monogamy is my sexual orientation, it would never occur to me to deem it a moral imperative. I don't even get to the point of thinking about it terms of broadly-applicable morality. It is simply what I find sexy, so I proceed accordingly.

So thinking about this, I really can't imagine how the people who consider heterosexuality morally imperative got to the point of thinking of it in terms of moral imperative. So you think people of the opposite sex are sexy. How do you get from there to thinking that everyone in the world should only ever have sex with people of the opposite sex? If you think redheads are sexy, would you at all ever possibly arrive at the point of thinking about it in terms of broadly applicable morality, and come up with a rule that everyone should only have sex with redheads?

*I know some people don't like the word monosexual, but I can't figure out how to construct the sentence without it. If you object to this word choice, feel free to rephrase the sentence for me in the comments.

Currently on my mind

- It sure is cold outside.
- How's my job security?
- Will that change I suggested improve productivity or just annoy the admin team?
- Prorogation: WTF?
- What's up with my rent increase?
- When are they going to correct the N2 exemption error in the Ontario Residential Tenancies Act?
- Should I buy a condo? If so, WTF do I do?
- Is a certain elderly person I know losing her mental faculties?
- What do I do about friends who I know are perfectly intelligent but aren't keeping themselves politically informed?
- How do I make my injured toenail grow back without becoming ingrown?
- Why has flakiness increased since my last scalp treatment?
- How many errands could I reasonably get done today?
- Should I buy a duvet?
- How should I go about updating my wardrobe?
- Is that a zit coming in in my ear?
- Why has the quality of my undereye makeup deteriorated recently, and what can I do about it?
- Is the blog entry I have in mind of sufficient interest?
- What would happen if Eve Dallas met Dexter Morgan?
- How do I get Eddie Izzard to bring his tour to Toronto?
- What does it mean when Zonealarm says "Protection up, UI is initializing", and why does that generate tons of temp files in my C:\windows\internet logs folder?
- Cheese would be yummy right about now.
- What kind of computer mouse should I get to fit my giant hands? Where's a good place to go shop for unconventional computer mice where you can look at them in person?
- How can we as workers reverse the socioeconomic trend towards contract hell and restore Good Jobs in all fields of work like my grandparents enjoyed in the 1950s?
- I wonder whatever did happen to Mariam Makhniashvili?
- Was that Minnie Driver I saw walking down the street?

This sort of thing is all floating in the background as I go about everyday life. I'm sure it's the same for you.

That's why I'm really surprised that some people say "People don't care about [political issue], they're too busy worrying about their jobs and families!"