Why do they consider business attire risky?

From the contents of a downtown condo's G20 Resident Information Guide:

Here are suggestions of things we would normally do, but won't be allowed to do during the summit:

* Pick up parcels.
* Use any of the building's stairwells (unless in the event of emergency, of course).
* Order food for delivery.
* Have guests (if you expect a guest, they must be pre-registered by June 24).
* Hang out in the lobby (read: no loitering).
* Wear anything other than T-shirts outside the building (because wearing business attire may put us in a "susceptible" position).
* Engage in conversations with the protesters.
* Leave the building in our cars (I need more exercise anyway).
* Use the barbecue, patio or recreation areas (you know, because cooking some meat or running on the treadmill may or may not attract hungry, exercise-seeking protesters).

Why would wearing business attire put you in a susceptible position? Wouldn't that make it obvious to all the police and army and paramilitary that you're just an ordinary person going about your business?

Wanted: shave minimizing lotion

I used to use a product called Jergen's Naturally Smooth on my legs, to slow down the regrowth of my (shaved) leg hair. It was discontinued, so I started using another similar product called Aveeno Positively Smooth. Now the Aveeno has been discontinued and I can't find another similar product.

Can anyone recommend anything?

I already know about Kalo, but I'm looking for something more at a drugstore price point, that I can afford to slather liberally on my legs nearly every day for most of the summer. It doesn't need a miracle, it just needs to keep me from growing a five o'clock shadow on my ankles. Trust me, it's for the greater good of society if I don't have a five o'clock shadow on my ankles.

I'm not looking just for moisturizers that you like using on your legs, I'm looking specifically for something that will mitigate stubble regrowth.

I, and everyone who has to see me on the commute home in hot weather, would appreciate any recommendations anyone might have.

The major flaw in the immigration program for Afghan interpreters

This is an old story, but I haven't heard this major flaw addressed yet so I'm putting it out there.

There's a program to fast-track immigration applications for Afghan interpreters serving the Canadian Forces. I am very glad that such a program exists. These guys have, by far, the greatest risk, the worst working conditions, and the lowest pay of all the many language professionals serving Canada or Canadians. They are serving our country; the least we can do is give them the protection of our country.

However, there is a major flaw in this program:

Neither Kenney nor officials in his department could say exactly when the successful immigrants, who are allowed to bring along two family members each, would arrive in Canada.

They are allowed to bring two family members each. But surely it isn't uncommon to have more than three people (i.e. the interpreter and the designated two family members) in a household? Surely it isn't uncommon to have more than two minor children? Think about your family. Think about your family of origin when you and all your siblings were minors. How well would it have fared if the primary breadwinner left and took only two people along, leaving the rest behind?

How many interpreters are facing a Sophie's Choice of which two family members to take to safety in Canada? How many interpreters are declining to take part in this program simply because they don't want to have to leave some of their dependents behind, perhaps to face retribution for the interpreters' actions?

I was relieved when I heard that my country was going to help protect my Afghan brethren, but now I'm ashamed that we have such a short-sighted, bureaucratic, punitive rule that only allows interpreters with average-sized families to access our protection by sacrificing some of their family members.

An appropriate rule would be that they can bring their household, or they can bring their spouse and children, or even to say that the program is just for the interpreters themselves and they can have their family follow them through normal family reunification measures later. (Not saying that leaving the whole family behind is better, just that it's a more appropriate scope for a rule.) But a limit of two family members is completely arbitrary, in a casually cruel sort of way.

I want my country to be better than that.

Why do religious people want other people to say grace?

Ken Gallinger's ethics column in this Saturday's Star (which, weirdly, hasn't been posted online) has a letter from someone whose friend has recently become religious and now wants to say grace before every meal. But rather than saying grace herself, she says to the assembled group "Who's going to say the blessing?", trying to bully someone else into doing it.

I've heard of this happening quite a number of times in different contexts. Religious people put their non-religious guest on the spot by trying to get them to say grace. Even my own loss of faith was triggered by the fact that my parents suddenly wanted me to say grace. It wasn't that they wanted grace to be said, it's that they wanted me to do it, despite the fact that I didn't feel good about the idea. Desperate to be able to explain why I felt so strongly about not doing it (with adult vocabulary, I can articulate that the display of false piety made me feel hypocritical and rather dirty, and I was convinced that we would go to hell for trying to trick God by lying to Him, but as a kid I couldn't articulate this) I started thinking critically, long and hard, until I ultimately came to the realization that I'm an atheist.

So why do they want people who aren't interested in saying grace to say grace? If thanking the deity for the meal is so important, why aren't they eager to do it themselves? Why do they want to make their guests uncomfortable and have their deity get lied to rather than simply expressing their own genuine gratitude with quiet dignity in accordance with their faith?

Improving the deal-breaker personal ads

A while back, I came up with the idea of deal-breaker personal ads. You start out by disclosing your deal-breakers and your own characteristics that you think might be deal-breakers for prospective partners. Then after you've eliminated all the deal-breakers, you can look at each other's positive characteristics.

The problem with that idea is the human tendency to define things by their first impression. It might lead people to have pre-conceived (and negative) notions of prospective partners because they've been introduced to them as a set of annoyances.

Solution: you still vet the deal-breakers before you go on to the positive characteristics, but the deal-breakers aren't matched up with particular individuals. You get either a long list of individual deal-breakers and you don't know how many or which ones go with which person, or you get a list of people's sets of deal-breakers so you know which ones belong to the same person but you don't know which person they belong to. (I can make arguments for both approaches.) Then you accept or reject from that list.

Then, after you go through your deal-breaker list, you get a list of the people whose deal-breakers you've accepted (as long as they've also accepted your deal-breakers) with their traditional positive profiles. From the positive profile, you can click through to see which deal-breakers belong to them. So you still get a list of matches already vetted for deal-breakers, but you don't get a first impression of anyone as a collection of negatives.

Awesome customer service via Twitter!

1. In the library, I see a sign showing their renovation plans. On the sign is a post-it saying "Do not photograph." That's weird! I have no interest in photographing the sign, but it's odd that I wouldn't be allowed to photograph something prominently displayed in public space. So I ask the guy checking out my books why, but he didn't know. We had a bit of fun theorizing and laughed at the absurdity of the whole situation, and I left plotting a nefarious scheme to make a big show of photographing the thing just so someone would stop me.

Catching up on my tweets that day, I decided to tweet @TorontoPublicLibrary and ask them about the sign. It looked more like a promotional account than a question-answering account, but it's worth a try. After all, that's what Twitter is for! So I was pleasantly surprised to see that one Toronto Library person responded promptly and copied the tweet to another person who was able to answer my question!

It was a silly and inconsequential question, but they nevertheless took the time to answer it. Which, in a weird sort of way, is totally fulfilling the library's mandate.

2. I read an article that suggested that TFSAs don't work precisely how I thought they worked, and there might be financial penalties involved. I'm not super good at money stuff, but from where I'm sitting it looked like that sort of thing could be avoided with failsafes in the computer system. You know how if you enter the wrong number of digits in a "phone number" field on an electronic form, it simply won't let you proceed? They should be able to do the same thing with if you put too much money in your TFSA.

My TFSAs are with ING Direct, so I went to ING's website to see if they had a suggestion box. I couldn't find anything that quite looked appropriate, but I noticed they had a Twitter account. I clicked on that and it really looked more promotional than anything else, but I noticed they retweeted an account called @CEO-INGDIRECT. Meh, what the hell, that's what Twitter's for! So I tweeted him, and got an answer back within an hour - on a Saturday!

I chose ING in the first place because they seemed easy and straightforward. I could figure out how to do what I have to do, and didn't feel like there was a secret extra layer of stuff I don't understand lurking underneath. So I'm very gratified not only that they already have a mechanism to protect me from messing up my TFSA, but also that the CEO will take a moment out of his Saturday to reassure me that safe.

Biopsies

A biopsy is when they find a lump that isn't supposed to be there, so they take a tiny bit of the lump out to see what it's made of (especially to see if it's cancer). And the if it's cancer, they go in again and take the whole thing out and maybe blast you with radiation too.

So why not take the whole lump out the first time they go in to do a biopsy? It's not supposed to be there even if it isn't cancer. If it is cancer that just needs a lumpectomy, hey, guess what, you've cured it! All done, off you go, have a nice day! And if it's cancer that requires further treatment, you're going to need to go in for further treatment anyway.

A mission for everyone who has, or knows, a 905 phone number

1. Think of a 905 phone number, any 905 phone number with which you're familiar. It's better if it's an older phone number that was in use before 1993, but if you don't know any older ones any 905 number will do.

2. Remove the 905 area code and replace it with 416. Then call the number and see if it rings.

3. Post in the comments what happens. Don't post the actual number! Just is the number from before or after 1993, and does it ring.

Why are we doing this? Because prior to 1993, 416 and 905 all fell under the 416 area code. They split the area code in 1993, assigning 416 to Toronto proper and 905 to the suburbs and outlying areas. The ostensible reason for this was that we were running out of 416 numbers.

But I just called the phone number I grew up with (but with 416 instead of 905), and it said it hadn't been assigned. So I'm wondering whether that's a fluke.

So let's do an experiment! If you have or know of a 905 number that used to be a 416 number before the area code split, give the 416 number a call, and post the results in the comments. Don't post the phone number! Just is it from before 1993, and did it ring?

More information please

1. Are the G20 costs high relative to costs of similar things? A billion dollars sounds like a fuck-ton of money. Media have pointed out how many hungry people it would feed or how much subway it would buy, but how much security can it buy in other situations? Galloping Beaver points out that it can buy a year of Canadian Forces operations in Afghanistan. See, that's informative! And that means we are owed an explanation of why protecting Toronto costs 100 times as much per day.

I saw an article presenting as outrageous the fact that $100,000 was spent on a gazebo. Is that a lot for a gazebo? I don't actually know. I have no frame of reference. While building a fake lake within sight of the real lake is inherently ridiculous, is $2 million $57,000 a lot of money for the thing that they are building? I have no clue. They could be getting gouged, or it could be outstandingly good value on par with the 4 drinking glasses I just got for $2.50 at Kitchen Stuff Plus. I have no frame of reference.

I really want media coverage to contextualize this systematically. It's very easy to see a large number, clutch your pearls, and get outraged. I can do that myself without media help. What I do need journalism for is to help me contextualize it. And if there is room for outrage, then we'll go in well-informed, so politicos can't pat us on the head and tell us that it's complicated and we don't understand.

2. Are people really over-using medical care? A recurring idea is that there should be an out-of-pocket fee to for medical appointments to stop people from making frivolous medical appointments. But do people really make frivolous medical appointments? If anything, I'd say our culture encourages more medical appointments than people are inclined to make for themselves. Advice columns are always sending people to the doctor at the slightest provocation. The fashion magazines I read as a kid always said that your doctor can help with your zit emergencies. My university even required a doctor's note if you wanted to bring your own bed to res rather than using the one provided. This one guy who was seven feet tall had to get a note from a doctor asserting that the normal bed is too small for him, when he could have proven it in 10 seconds by lying down on the bed! I see lots of people being told they should go to the doctor, but I don't ever see real people actually going to the doctor frivolously.

It is true that the patient might go to the doctor out of ignorance, but that isn't something that will be helped by charging people money. Going to the doctor out of ignorance needs to be addressed by educating patients, by giving them the tools to triage themselves. This is accomplished with Telehealth and with decision trees like these. If the patient genuinely doesn't know that this isn't something they need to see a doctor for, they still do need some kind of health care to teach them how to tell whether or not they need to see the doctor.

(At the very least, if the charge is really intended to be a disincentive to frivolous doctor's appointments, it should be waived if you were referred by Telehealth or a medical professional, or for doctor-recommended preventive care. And organizations that require a doctor's note should be responsible for paying the charge. Although even that's imperfect - for example, I know when I have strep throat - I got it every year in childhood and get it frequently enough in adulthood to recognize it. If I had to pay a fee or get referred by Telehealth, I'd just be cluttering up Telehealth.)

3. What happens to inmates' money? Recently in the news was a move to prohibit people who are in jail from receiving OAS and other government benefits to which they'd normally be entitled in their capacity as citizens. This makes me wonder: what normally happens to inmates' money? Obviously they can't spend it freely while in prison, because that would rather defeat the purpose of prison. But what does happen to their money? Can it still be used to maintain ongoing expenses (i.e. can they keep paying your rent with whatever savings they might have)? Can their spouse/dependents access it?

My gut reaction is to oppose taking pensions and other benefits away from prisoners, because I feel like that opens the door to taking them away from other people that the government deems unworthy for whatever reason. (Not sure how legally valid that is, it's just my gut reaction.)

But it also occurs to me that it might ultimately lead to recidivism. This whole thing started with serial Clifford Olsen, who isn't getting out of jail, but most inmates ultimately are going to be released at some point. It seems to me that if they have been rehabilitated (and if they haven't been rehabilitated that's a correctional system problem, not a social safety net problem), having a bit of a nest egg will make it easier for them to peacefully reintegrate into society, whereas if they are desperate for money they'd be more likely to return to crime.

It also occurs to me that, if inmates' families are able to access the inmates' assets, then disqualifying inmates for pensions is simply punishing innocents. It isn't the families' - especially not the dependents' - fault the criminal is a criminal. It's possible the criminal has still contributed to the household, either by earning income or even just by being someone who can kill spiders and help flip the mattress, and the household suffers for his absence. It's also possible that criminals who are released from prison after the age of 65 may never be able to reintegrate into the job market, and their spouse and/or children will end up support them for the rest of their lives. So why should this be made even more burdensome?

Clifford Olsen is an extreme case. I wish we had more information on how this affects more common cases.

Cunning abuse of flags

Apparently it's illegal to desecrate a flag in the US.

What a strange, petty, fussy thing to be illegal in a country that makes such a big-ass deal of not even making hate speech illegal! Encouraging genocide is fine, but damaging a piece of fabric with symbolic value is illegal? Weird!

I do wonder how they manage to fit that into their broader legal framework. Desecrating a flag seems like the perfectly logical symbolic manifestation of legitimate protest against the reigning government, which is something that, if not explicitly legally enshrined, is certainly celebrated in the US. Desecrating a flag is elegant and effective as an act of symbolism while being harmless to all persons and properties except the flag itself. You'd think they'd tacitly encourage it so as to avoid more damaging forms of protest.

Wherein a surprise cheque in the mail makes me depressed

In my mail today was a brown envelope from the Government of Ontario. Ontario? WTF? So I open it, and it's my first HST transitional rebate cheque, for $100.

That just pisses me off.

It isn't the tax that pisses me off. It isn't the fact of the rebate that pisses me off. It's the fact that they never corrected the major inequity in the rebate: Single individuals get $300, but couples without dependent children get $1000.

That is, quite simply, wrong. Living as a couple is not more expensive than living as two single individuals. The rebate for a couple with no dependents should not under any circumstances exceed the rebate for two single individuals.

Of course, I pointed this out right away, as soon as the March 2009 budget came out. I blogged it and emailed it to my MPP and the Minister of Finance and Dalton McGuinty. I talked to people about it, and all the married and cohabiting couples in my life agreed with me that it's unfair, so I encouraged them to write to their MPPs. Basically I spotted a flaw in the plan and did everything I'm supposed to under those circumstances. But they didn't correct it.

I am incredibly frustrated because lately it seems like this is happening with everything.

- Transit City has been defunded, and none of the candidates are proposing solutions that will solve the part of the problem that affects me personally.
- Abortion is being excluded from international development maternal health programs.
- No one is working to correct the flaw in the ORTA that allows landlords to increase rent as much as they want if the building happens to have been built after 1998.
- The new copyright bill makes it illegal to break digital locks.
- The City of Toronto is encouraging buildings to close their garbage chutes rather than encouraging them to use them for recycling or organics.
- They're requiring stores to charge people 5 cents for plastic bags and eventually banning the use of biodegradable bags rather than simply requiring stores to use biodegradable bags in the first place.
- They introduced age-specific (rather than experience-specific) restrictions for young drivers.
- They seem to be seriously considering forcing a rape victim to testify in court with more of her body exposed than she is comfortable with.

And there are at least two other things too. I know I had at least 10 things, but I'm so upset I can't think of them.

All of these are things that I wrote my elected officials about. I wrote sensible, reasonable, coherent letters (much more sensible, reasonable and coherent than this blog post) identifying the crux of the problem and proposing specific solutions. In at least half the cases (garbage chutes, plastic bags, rent increases, driving restrictions, HST rebate) my solutions were objectively better for all involved. (They might in fact be better for all of these issues, but I can't objectively assess my solutions in all of them.) I did exactly what I was supposed to and was helpful and productive, but none of this stuff got fixed.

But when they came up with the excellent of idea of making O Canada inclusive, people wrote in and complained so they chickened out. And when they came up with the excellent idea of updating sex ed for the 21st century, people wrote in and complained and they stopped. But they never stop when I write in and complain.

I am drained and frustrated and exhausted. I'm being a good and diligent citizen, and no one is listening. But they are listening to the people who want to hurt me.

Our standard of living has been stagnating or declining since 1980. I was born in 1980. Things have been getting worse my whole life!

My parents were about the same age I am now when they had me. They had been married for seven years, so the choice to have a child was deliberate and mindful. And this choice must have been informed by the context in which they grew up: be good, and life will get better. My parents were good. They did well in school and went to university and got good sensible jobs, and were therefore able to achieve a much higher quality of life than the one that they grew up with. So they tried hard to make us smart, insofar as parenting can influence that sort of thing, so that we could achieve the same.

I was also good. I did well in school, got a good sensible job, never hurt anyone, and turned out vaguely smart as well. And I'm being a good girl politically too, always writing my elected representatives with good, logical, sensible, coherent letters that propose helpful solutions whenever I have something useful to contribute. But it isn't working! And, in a number of cases, they're actually hindering my quality of life!

This all feels so depressing and hopeless.

Congratulations!

Congratulations et félicitations to L-girl and Redsock, who are being sworn in as Canadian citizens today!

Things They Should Invent: no insurance limit on smoking cessation aids

A friend of mine is quitting smoking. (YAY!) When I asked if his insurance covered whatever method he chose to use, he said that they do, but only up to a certain dollar amount.

Isn't that the stupidest thing ever to have a dollar limit on???

People should get all the smoking cessation aids they need to quit smoking! That might even be worse than the dollar limit on psychotherapy.

And people wonder why I have a conspiracy theory (once blogged, can't find it now) that employer-provided health plans are intended to keep you alive long enough to work but kill you shortly after retirement!

Why are they holding the G20 here if they don't want the trappings of a city?

They're fencing off part of downtown. People will need to go through security screening to get to their homes and jobs. They're closing the CN Tower. They're canceling baseball games. They're canceling performances of musicals. They're closing down U of T. They're closing the art gallery. (And I'd very much like to know if all these workers are losing their wages for this time.) VIA trains won't be running downtown. They're removing garbage cans and bus shelters and street furniture from downtown.

It sounds like they don't really want a whole bunch of people and things all crowded into one small area, all hurrying about in different directions and legitimately engaged in a wide range of eccentric activities.

In other words, they don't want a city.

So WTF are they holding it here? They clearly don't want us to be us! Why don't they hold it somewhere more isolated or at the very least lower density?

Conspiracy theory of the moment

Bicycles are considered equal to cars (or any other motor vehicle). They should be on the road, not the sidewalk. They are entitled to take up an entire lane on the street.

On the surface, that sounds good and positive and validating towards cyclists. But what if it's really a conspiracy to keep cycling from being a viable and commonly-used mode of transportation?

Biking in the road is difficult and scary for the cyclist, and is also kind of scary for the driver. If you hit another car, you hurt the car. If you hit a cyclist, you probably kill a whole human being. There's huge outcry about how cyclists should be on the road so they don't interfere with pedestrians, but I personally feel safer walking among cyclists than driving among cyclists, and I feel better able to dodge pedestrians while biking than to dodge cyclists while driving. (I freely concede this might be because I'm a bad driver, and good drivers might feel differently.)

People who aren't hardcore and brave simply aren't going to bike as a primary mode of transportation if it means they have to share a busy street with cars. I'd say the majority of people simply don't want that kind of risk with their morning commute.

Has anyone ever looked into the origin of the law that puts cyclists on the road? Why is it there in the first place? Who thought it was a good idea, and why?

Things They Should Invent: standardized deprovocation procedure

With the arrival of the G20 in Toronto, all the usual concerns are coming up about authority figures planting agents provocateurs in with the protesters.

So what we need is standardized, universally-agreed-upon way of de-escalation any provocation. Anyone who suspects they are witnessing provocation should engage in the standard deprovocation procedures, and anyone who witnesses the standard deprovocation should also engage in the deprovocation procedure. This will prevent the provocateur from having influence, and might also draw attention to any provocateurs.

The standardized deprovocation should involve being calm and quiet, and should involve some easily visible sign that you are currently engaging in deprovocation. There also needs to be a generally agreed-upon social standard that having one's behaviour deprovoked is not a personal diss, for people who aren't agents provocateurs but just get over-excited by the energy of the crowd.

So how would a deprovocation work? Here's an idea as a starting point: when you witness something you believe might be provocation, you stop, turn away from the provocateur with your arms crossed like a Klingon discommendation ritual, and stay still and silent for 10 seconds. Then you proceed just like you were before, as though nothing had happened. If you witness someone else deprovoking, you also stop, turn in the same direction as the deprovocateur with your arms crossed like a Klingon discommendation ritual, and stay still and silent for 10 seconds. Once the deprovocation is over, forget about it. Don't scold or start a witch hunt for the original provocateur.

This particular method does have its flaws and I'm sure people could think of a better way, but you see what it achieves. The provocation cannot escalate or be interpreted as escalation if everyone is still and silent. Turning away from the provocateur eliminates their audience, so they cannot provoke. It is a visible gesture to witnesses and cameras that you, personally, are actively trying to de-escalate.

If a method can be agreed upon and used by a critical mass of people, it should make it impossible for anyone to successfully provoke and allow benign crowds to peaceably self-police.

What if we don't care enough about the environment because our country is so big?

So I've been playing with IfItWasMyHome.com, which projects the oil spill on a map so you can see how big it is in comparison to an area you're familiar with. So I projected it on Toronto, and yeah, they're right, it's really big.

Then I projected it on London.

Holy fucking shit.

It is wider than ENGLAND! It's about the same size as Belgium and Netherlands combined! It could swallow Wales whole without leaving a trace, and they have their own language!

When projected on a map of Southern Ontario it does look big, It would swallow the world as I know it and then some, but that's just a tiny little corner of our country. Anything that would be lost if we disappeared is reproduced similarly enough in other parts of Canada and/or the US. But in Europe the same amount of land contains whole cultures with histories that go on for centuries (millenia?) beyond anything of which we can conceive.

What if this is making us too blasé about the environment? What if we're subconsciously less motivated to protect our land and water because we have so much of it? I never even realized just how much water we have in the Great Lakes (proportionately speaking) until I saw that the oil spill is a bit smaller than any one lake, but it's as wide as all of ENGLAND!

Being a polyglot makes me sheltered

A while back, I found a clip on YouTube of a Japanese a capella group singing Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?



Watching this, I was struck by how the only thing I understand are the lyrics to Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. I don't understand the spoken introduction, I don't understand the signs, I don't understand the various other spoken words. If put in that environment, I couldn't buy a coffee or a train ticket or even ask for help, unless someone there happens to speak my language.

That concept is terrifying! Like paralyzingly, can't-breathe terrifying! I have never in my life been in an environment where I don't speak the language! Sure, I've been in the presence of conversations in a language that I don't understand, but I've always been able to read the signs and address any random passers-by in the default local language. The idea of not being able to makes me feel helpless, like when I was 2 and fell asleep in the car seat and my mother decided to take the groceries into the house first and then come back for me and I thought she'd forgotten all about me.

Then I realized: I have never been in an environment where I don't speak the language! Isn't that weird? People travel to places where they don't speak the language all the time, but I'm so used to knowing languages that I find the prospect terrifying.

Power has been restored at Yonge & Eg

The hydro electrical power outage at Yonge & Eglinton this morning (i.e. June 1) was apparently fixed around 11:30. Why yes, I am front-loading this post with keywords. I couldn't find anything when I was googling from work to figure out if I should go home, so I'm making a blog post in the hope that it might help someone else.