Monday, June 30, 2014

Books read in June 2014

New:

1. The Master of All Desires by Judith Merkle Riley
2. Mary Poppins, She Wrote by Valerie Lawson
3. Life Below Stairs: Domestic Servants in England from Victorian Times by Frank Edward Huggett
4. She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth by Helen Castor
5. New York to Dallas by J.D. Robb

Reread:

1. Innocent in Death

Sunday, June 29, 2014

Open letter to "No Acronym Here" in this week's Savage Love

From this week's Savage Love:

My husband and I have been happy swingers for four years. Our issue? I'm pregnant. My husband had a vasectomy two years ago, and neither of us has wavered in our desire to remain childfree. We know the "father" is the male of a couple we play with regularly. We used protection, of course, but we know these things are never foolproof. We consider ourselves good friends with this couple, but we are not in any sort of "poly" relationship with them. Our question is this: Do we need to tell the couple about what happened and our decision to terminate the pregnancy? We wouldn't ask them to help pay for the procedure, and their feelings on the matter wouldn't change our course of action. We're just unsure about the "swinger etiquette" in this situation.
The part of Dan Savage's answer that discusses how this man might feel or react:
On the off chance that your play buddy is one of those guys who either is against abortion or hasn't given the issue much thought—because he's never needed one—you should let him know that your freedom to choose has directly benefited him and his family. You should also let him know that there's a small chance your husband impregnated you. Either way, you're terminating this pregnancy.
But there's another possibility Dan Savage didn't mention: what if LW's play buddy is one of those guys who is against abortion because he wouldn't want a child he fathered to be aborted?  If this is the case, he might get very angry at you, and, if you tell him before the abortion happens, he might try to stop you. (And, from a political point of view, he'd cite this as a perfect example of why abortion should be criminalized.)

Unless you know him (or his feelings towards reproduction) well enough to be certain he wouldn't react this way, you and your husband should make a plan that includes what you would do if your play buddy reacts this way.  It is a thing that exists in the world, and you could be in for a bad time if you announce the abortion as good news when he'd take it as bad.

Monday, June 23, 2014

How the library can improve its automatic return system

I should be happy about my library's automatic return system, since it's yet another example of one of my inventions materializing in real life, but I'm seeing some problems that can make it very inconvenient from time to time.  Here's how I'd improve it:

1. Let it accept more than one item at once. The self checkout and scan multiple items at once (my personal record is six large hardcover books), but the return slot can only handle one at a time.  This is irritating when the person in front of you is returning a lot of things at once.  The other day I was behind a lady with two small children who were returning a total of 20 items.  This is a reasonable number of children's picture books to check out for two children over a 3-week loan period, but it takes for-fricking-ever to scan them all in one at a time. A massive line formed behind this family, and there was nothing that could be done to expedite the process.

2. Continue to have a manual return slot. I've seen manual return slots at other libraries that have automatic returns, but mine doesn't have one.  So if there's a line for the automatic return or the automatic return is malfunctioning, there doesn't appear to be any alternative.  (I recently learned that you can also hand the book to the person at the circulation desk, but there's no signage or anything to that effect. And if the automatic return is malfunctioning, the circulation desk person is probably in the back room trying to fix it.)  If we could just pop books into a manual slot, we wouldn't be getting stressed and frustrated when the automatic return malfunctions or the person in front of us has 20 items.  (Or maybe they wouldn't even be in front of us because they'd just pop their 20 items into the  manual slot and be out of there in 30 seconds.)  I think most people would continue to use the automatic returns because they verify that your item has in fact been checked in - plus, they're fun! - but simply making them optional would vastly reduce frustration.

Sunday, June 15, 2014

My farmer's market dilemma

There is a farmer's market in my neighbourhood.  I'm glad there is, because it's only a very recent development.  For most of the time I've lived here, we haven't had a farmer's market.

However, most of the booths aren't really farmers.  They're selling baguettes or macrons or local organic vegan lunch.  I prefer the few booths that are farmers - I want to be able to buy fresh produce from someone who can have an informed conversation about the quality of the produce and the realities of growing it.

The problem: the quality of produce available from the actual farmers at the farmer's market isn't as good as the quality of produce available from small neighbourhood stores like Summer's Best, or sometimes even the quality of produce available from the local Metro supermarket.

The asparagus at the market is wimpy and skinny, whereas Summer's Best and its peers have nice fat asparagus. The varieties of apples at the market are non-yummy, whereas the greengrocers and the supermarkets at least have McIntosh.  And the farmer's market is never cheaper, and is often more expensive.

I'm torn.  I want to support the farmer's market so there will continue to be a farmer's market right in my neighbourhood.  I want to support the farmers selling fresh produce so farmers will continue to sell fresh produce at a farmer's market right in my neighbourhood.  But I also want the better produce.  I want to buy the better produce in order to create demand for the better produce and incentivize produce sellers to sell the stuff that I like right in my neighbourhood. Plus, of course, I want to eat the yummiest possible food.

I do get that the farmer's market might need some time and TLC to take off, and I want to give it the opportunity it needs.  But where's the threshold?

Friday, June 13, 2014

Post-election round-up

- Signs I saw in my own riding: 1 Liberal and 1 Conservative.  I also saw a few Kathleen Wynne signs in her riding (which is adjacent to mine).
- Robocalls received: 1 from my Liberal candidate and 2 from my Conservative candidate. I consider robocalls a bad thing.
- Flyers I received in my mail: 1, very well-targeted, from my Liberal candidate. I consider this an appropriate way for political parties to advertise.
- TV commercials I saw: entirely too many, all negative in tone, nearly all Conservative. I consider political TV commercials a bad thing.
 - Test of the Hill Knowlton predictor: when we input the actual vote percentages, it produces Lib: 55, Con: 32: NDP: 19. 
- Test of the Too Close To Call predictor: when we input the actual vote percentages, it produces Lib: 56, Con: 30, NDP: 21. 
- The actual results: Lib: 59, Con: 27, NDP: 21
- Lesson for the parties to take away from this election: Shifting left of your usual position gets you more seats; shifting right of your usual position gets you fewer seats.

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Voted

An uncomfortably hot day - normal summer temperatures, but early enough in the summer that I'm not used to them yet -  but a quick and easy vote.  I actually got my voter card in the mail (a first for an Ontario election, even though I've already voted six times provincially (including 2 by-elections) over the course of 15 years, and three of those times were at this address.  There was no line, the polling station people were friendly and cheerful, and everything went as smoothly as humanly possible.

Except that dogs are avoiding me today.

As I've blogged about in previous elections, good election outcomes correlate with me petting a doggie on my way to vote.  So I took the most roundabout route justifiable to my polling station, with the goal of petting a doggie along the way.

Unfortunately, the dogs just weren't buying it!

I greeted every opportune dog with "Hi puppy!" and a face full of love and enthusiasm, which usually gets them to try to jump up on me.  But none of them seemed interested.  I commented "Oh, what a cute/gorgeous dog!" to promising-looking dog owners, but got a lower response rate than usual, and, even when the human responded, the dog was uninterested and didn't engage with me at all.

I don't get why dogs aren't interested in me today! Do I smell?  Do I not smell? Can they tell I have an ulterior motive?

Ultimately, I gave three dogs a single tap on the back (while admiring them in a socially-appropriate manner, with their humans encouraging the interaction), but they didn't consent to more.  I hope that's enough to count as petting a dog for election outcome purposes.

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Saving for retirement ≠ pension

I recently took the 2014 Ontario Vote Compass test.  I found it was useful for identifying areas where parties' platforms weren't what I expected or their positions relative to each other weren't what I expected.  But one of the questions baffled me.  It asked if I agree or disagree with the statement:

"Ontario should require workers to save more for retirement."

At the end of the Vote Compass test, you can click on a link to see the rationale for the compass allocating each party's position to each issue.  And when I clicked through for this one, it became apparent that the issue they were talking about was the creation of an Ontario pension plan.  By "require workers to save more for requirement", they meant "create a provincial pension plan.

This is gravely misleading!  While saving money for retirement is certainly an important part of a pension plan, the two concepts are certainly not interchangeable.  The big deal about a pension plan is not that you divert money from your income to save for retirement, but that the plan turns this money into a steady source of income for your old age.  

Saving money is simple. Turning your savings into a pension is complex.

Saving money is arithmetic - actually, it's just addition and subtraction (and maybe even just addition depending on how you do the math), with no multiplication or division necessary.  Turning your savings into a pension is...I don't even know what kind of math it is, and I got an A in every math class on my high school's curriculum.

You can tell immediately if you're succeeding at saving money - the balance of your savings account goes up and doesn't go down. You can't tell if you're successfully creating a pension for yourself until it's too late.

Saving money is a diligent personal behaviour.  Turning savings into a pension is an entire profession, requiring its own training and expertise.

To reduce a pension plan to "you should save more money" is like reducing having perfect teeth to "you should brush your teeth."  Yes, the diligent personal behaviour is necessary, but you also need the professional expertise to achieve your goal.

The enormous benefit of having a pension plan instead of doing it yourself is that your pension is managed by expert professionals who are hired by expert professionals, and whose primary mandate is to make the pension plan succeed.  If you hire a financial planner as an individual, you're stuck with just your own non-expert knowledge to determine whether they're competent or a charlatan, and it's quite likely that their primary mandate is to sell specific financial products or have a high number of transactions or pull in new customers, depending on their compensation model.  Finding a skilled and competent financial planner who will work in your own best interests is not necessarily a simple matter for those of us who aren't financial experts ourselves, and we can't necessarily tell if our planner is in fact doing their job properly before it's too late.

With a pension plan, you also have economies of scale, and can mitigate risk by diversifying more than an individual can and by distributing risk over a longer period of time than an individual's personal retirement savings.


I think the Vote Compass test may have landed on this phrasing because one of the parties has nothing in their platform about creating a new or expanding an existing defined-benefit pension plan, and instead uses the phrasing "Give Ontarians the opportunity to save more for their retirement..." by promoting PRPPs. But this does not negate the fact that the other parties' platforms talk about actual defined-benefit pensions, where a given input will guarantee a given output.  This is far more than simply requiring people to engage in diligent behaviour, and the CBC and the Vote Compass people do us a disservice by representing it the way they did.

Saturday, June 07, 2014

Voters' Resources (Ontario 2014 edition)

Getting Started

Election Day is June 12!

First, go to the Elections Ontario website website and to find out your electoral district, your candidates, and where to vote.

Here is the ID you need to vote.

On Election Day, your employer is legally required to ensure that you have three  consecutive hours during polling hours during which you are not schedule to work. This means that if your voting hours are 9 am - 9 pm and you work 11 am - 7 pm, you employer is required to allow to you either come in at noon or leave at 6 pm.  However, if you work 9 am - 6 pm, there are still three free polling hours after the end of your workday.

Issues

The platforms:

Conservative
Green
Liberal (there is a more comprehensive PDF under each section, but I can't find the whole thing listed on one page)
NDP (apparently you can download the whole thing as a single document if you fill out a form providing your email address)

There's also the CBC Vote Compass, which asks you about your positions on various issues and shows you which parties' positions are closest to yours. I found it particularly useful for showing me where parties' relative positions were not what I expected - and therefore where I need to focus my reading and research.

Strategy and Predictions

My "How to Vote"
My "Where to Vote
My "How to Vote Strategically"

Riding-by-riding predictions:

- The Election Prediction Project
- Hill + Knowlton Election Predictor. (You need poll data for this. You can input your own that you find in the media or on the internet, and Hill + Knowlton regularly tweets predictor results based on recent polls.)
- ThreeHundredEight (scroll down or use your browser's search function to find riding projections)
- LISPOP
- Too Close To Call, (scroll down or use your browser's search function to find riding projections) which also has a riding by riding simulator into which you can input poll data and see how various ridings come out.  (I found I had to disable Ad Block for the simulator to work properly.)
- Election Atlas

Election Almanac lists quite a lot of poll data and seat projections from different sources. I have no way to tell if it includes every poll, but there are quite a few.

These predictors all use different methods so what's interesting and informative is to see the extent to which they agree or disagree about the outcome in your riding.

***

This post was last updated on June 7, and will be updated throughout the election campaign, right up until voting day.  If there's anything you think belongs in here but hasn't be posted yet, let me know in the comments.

Tuesday, June 03, 2014

Things They Should Invent: list added sugar separately in nutritional information

There has been a lot of news coverage lately about the health risks of added sugar, but the general consensus seems to be that naturally-occurring sugars (like in fruit) don't present the same health risks.

Unfortunately, the nutritional information boxes on food packaging don't distinguish between these.  For example, the organic unsweetened applesauce in my fridge contains 12g of sugar per serving.  The supermarket ice cream in my freezer contains 13g of sugar per serving.  But I suspect the ice cream has far more of the added sugars we're supposed to avoid!

It's pretty glaringly obvious if you're comparing ice cream to applesauce, but what if it were a fruit smoothie?  Some of that sugar is going to be the naturally-occurring sugar contained in the fruit, and some of it is going to be the added sugar that we're supposed to avoid.

If they want people to take this seriously, they should list the added sugars separately from the naturally-occurring sugars in the nutritional information.

Saturday, May 31, 2014

Books read in May 2014

I had a very busy month and didn't get to read very much.

New:

1. Treachery in Death by J.D. Robb
2. River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay

Reread:

1. Born in Death

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

How I inadvertently embarrassed a couple of goths

The other day I saw a couple of goth kids.  They were very young (maybe 14) and clearly just beginners, but the look was definitely goth, which I haven't seen around in quite a while.

I have a certain affection for goth as a concept, which dates back to my transition from middle school to high school.

After doing time in a middle school where you'd get bullied for wearing jeans in the wrong shade of blue, I was delighted to discover that a wider range of fashion was perfectly acceptable in my high school.  People wore jeans and t-shirts, or skirts and heels, or flannel grunge, or funky thrift store outfits, or surgical scrubs (they were trendy for some reason), or baggy gangsta pants, or pink-mohawked punk, or earth-mother hippie skirts, or full-out goth.  There weren't distinct fashion-based cliques and quite often people would wear vastly different looks from one day to the next.

I liked the goth aesthetic (and it's well-suited to my long dark hair and pale skin), but I lacked the talent and discipline to go fully goth.  So I dabbled, incorporating bits and pieces here and there.  And I found the actual goths didn't mind that I was dabbling, and generally turned out to be kind and intellectual people, all of which was quite a relief after middle school!

Many of the teens I see around this season are wearing fashions that I rejected.  Things like leggings, tight jeans, pants tucked into boots, high waistlines, baggy shirts (sometimes even tucked into high waists) and tank tops with enormous armholes seem to be worn by a surprising proportion of teens, but for me they're all things that made me feel frumpy and gross.  I wore them because I didn't know better or didn't have a choice (wearing a narrow-fitting shirt isn't an option when all the shirts commercially available are baggy).

But, also around the time I started high school, fashions evolved.  Shirts became fitted and were worn untucked, waistlines dropped, and jeans became hip-hugging flares.  This is all far more flattering to my curvy long-legged short-waisted narrow-shouldered body, so around the time that social fashion policing went away in my corner of the world (allowing things like goth to exist), fashion also evolved in a way that allowed me to dress in a way that was flattering and attractive for the first time in my life.

The fashion cycle hasn't returned there yet, but seeing the goths reminded me that we're probably on our way back.  Seeing them, I felt a sense of nostalgia for a time and place where, for the first time in my life, fashion trends were available that I could use, subcultures were available that I could dabble in, and kindness and intelligence could be found in the most surprising places.

Unfortunately, this combination of affection and nostalgia manifested itself in my saying aloud, in the tone of voice one might use to herald the first crocuses of spring, "Awww, look! Goths!"

And they heard me.

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

How to Vote Strategically


Some people vote for the party whose platform they find most suitable (the Best Party). Other people try to prevent the party whose platform they find most harmful (the Worst Party) from being elected, by voting for the party that's most likely to defeat the Worst Party (the Compromise Party). This is called strategic voting.

The most important thing about strategic voting is that your strategy has to apply to the reality in your riding. The media feeds us provincial polls for breakfast every day, but they're not directly relevant. Regardless of what the rest of the country is doing, your vote will only be used to elect your own MP. If your riding is already disinclined to elect the Worst Party, there's no point in a strategic vote - you'd just end up making the Compromise Party look more popular than they really are.

So here's what to do if your priority is stopping the Worst Party from winning:

1. Ask yourself: "If I don't vote, who's going to win in this particular riding?"

If the answer is a party other than the Worst Party, vote for the Best Party. If the answer is "the Worst Party" or "it's too close to tell," go on to step 2.

2. Ask yourself: "If I don't vote, who's most likely to defeat the Worst Party in this particular riding?"

This is your Compromise Party. Read their platform. If it's acceptable, vote for the Compromise Party. If it's not acceptable, vote for the Best Party.

Remember: ignore the provincial polls; think only about the situation in your riding!

Tools to help you figure out likely outcomes in your riding can be found here.

Monday, May 26, 2014

Bad instructions (and dishwasher detergent)

I recently received a sample of dishwasher detergent, and I noticed a problem with the instructions.  A scan of the packaging is below (click to embiggen).  Can you spot the problem?


The answer: step 2 of the instructions is the run the dishwasher.  Step 3 is to check to make sure the items are dishwasher safe.

Shouldn't you check to make sure the items are dishwasher safe before you run the dishwasher??

***

I don't recommend the actual product either. The little detergent pack got stuck in my detergent dispenser and didn't dispense at all, meaning my dishes were still dirty after the cycle ended.  I had to pry it out with a spoon, which punctured the detergent pack and made detergent powder explode everywhere.  So I decided to run the dishwasher again, thinking maybe the detergent exploded everywhere would at least clean the dishes (and, if not, running the machine was easier than cleaning up the stray detergent), but it still didn't clean the dishes.  That's two cycles of water and electricity for nothing!  I eventually had to put my usual liquid detergent in to get the dishes clean.

I've tried a number of different powder packs (they seem to be a popular item to give out free samples of) and I always have similar problems. Powder just can't compete with liquid, and I don't know why they're going through all this trouble to keep trying!

Sunday, May 25, 2014

Where to Vote


Some people (such as university students renting housing in the community where they go to school or have a summer job who also still have their parents' house as their "permanent address") are in a situation where they could legitimately vote in one of two possible ridings.  This post is intended to help them decide where to vote.

Where to Vote:

1. If one of the ridings is a really close race, vote in that riding. If both are close, vote in the riding with the closest race. If neither is really close, follow the instructions below.

2. Of the parties running candidates in your riding, decide which one has the best platform that comes closest to meeting your needs and your vision for the province (hereafter the Best Party). Then decide which one has the worst platform that is furthest from meeting your needs and deviates the most from your vision for the province (hereafter the Worst Party). You are judging the parties as a whole, not the individual candidates in your riding. Assess each party individually without regard to possible strategic voting - that comes later.

3. Based on your own needs and your own vision for the province, decide whether it is more important to you that the Best Party win, or that the Worst Party does not win.

4. If it's more important to you that the Best Party win, vote for the Best Party in the riding where the Best Party is least likely to win.

5. If it's more important to you that the Worst Party not win, and the Worst Party has a chance in either of your ridings, vote for the party most likely to defeat the Worst Party in the riding where the Worst Party is most likely to win.

6. If the Worst Party doesn't have a chance in either of your ridings, vote for the Best Party in the riding where the Best Party is least likely to win.

Tools to help you figure out which party is most likely to win in your riding can be found here.

Saturday, May 24, 2014

Teach me how to keep my sweaters from acting like clutter

In the winter, I most often wear an open-front sweater (cardigan or wrap cardigan) over another shirt.  In the summer, I sometimes wear a smaller, lighter top of a similar style over whatever I'm wearing, just for a tidier look.

When I'm sitting at my desk and feel the need to take my sweater off, I drape it over the back of my chair.  But I don't promptly put it away, because I might get cold and feel the need to put it back on.

I'm not as diligent as I should be about putting the sweaters back in the closet, so I often end up with multiple sweaters hanging on the back of my chair.

Then, with the passage of time and multiple sweaters and lots of getting in and out of the chair, the sweaters start getting pushed off the back of the chair and fall down and get tangled around the chair legs and wheels and mechanism.  I get frustrated by this, pick them all up, and throw them all on the couch. 

So the vast majority of the time, I have a cluttery surfeit of sweaters hanging on my desk chair or piled on my couch.

Putting them away in the closet like I'm supposed to obviously isn't something I can convince myself to do, so I'm looking for better ideas.  Where can I keep my sweaters so I can conveniently take them on and off without them looking like clutter?

Context:  my desk is in my living room, which also contains a couch and TV and general living room stuff. There isn't room for anything beside the desk, because on either side are the doors to my bathroom and bedroom.  I don't really want to keep something right beside my desk chair, because I already have to move my desk chair out of the way to do yoga, so I don't want to introduce another thing to move out of the way.  There currently isn't room for anything else under my desk, although that may change in the future if I ever get around to cleaning and donating my old desktop computers.

The best idea I have right now is a clothes tree, but I don't really like that idea because I'd have to do a lot of rearranging to find room for one, it wouldn't be within convenient reach of the desk chair, and it doesn't seem like it belongs in a living room.

Anyone have any better ideas?

Thursday, May 22, 2014

How to Vote


1. Of the parties running candidates in your riding, decide which one has the best platform that comes closest to meeting your needs and your vision of the province (hereafter the Best Party). Then decide which one has the worst platform that is furthest from meeting your needs and deviates the most from your vision of the province (hereafter the Worst Party). You are judging the parties as a whole, not the individual candidates in your riding. Assess each party individually without regard to possible strategic voting - that comes later.

2. Based on your own needs and your own vision for the province, decide whether it is more important to you that the Best Party win, or that the Worst Party does not win.

3. If it is more important to you that the Best Party wins, vote for the Best Party. If not, continue to the next step.

4. If it is more important to you that the Worst Party does not win, assess the Worst Party's chances of winning in your riding.* Not in the province as a whole, just in your riding. If you feel that there's too great a risk of the Worst Party winning in your riding, vote for the party most likely to defeat the Worst Party. If you feel the risk of the Worst Party winning in your riding is acceptably low, vote for the Best Party.

Remember: do NOT use province-wide polls to inform your strategic voting. Your vote is only effective in your riding. No matter how earnestly you vote, you cannot cancel out votes in another riding. Vote strategically only if the situation in your very own riding demands it, regardless of what the rest of the country is doing.  The process for how to vote strategically can be found here.


Tools for assessing a party's chances of winning in your riding can be found here.

Friday, May 16, 2014

Answering Social Q's

From Social Q's:

While riding in the Quiet Car on Amtrak, which prohibits speaking on cellphones and loud conversations, I sat down next to a man who was reading a Kindle. Soon, I heard his breathing grow louder and increase to full-blown snoring. I know that snorers have no control over their sound level. But neither could I imagine reading quietly for several hours with that roar coming from two feet away. What would the appropriate response have been? (Note: Snoring is not specifically prohibited on the signs.)
The columnist suggests LW either move or wake up the snorer and tell him he's snoring.  But I don't think it's necessary to tell him he's snoring.  It's not like he can do anything about it.  Just nudge him and "accidentally" wake him up.

I am regularly included in group text messages. At times, I receive as many as 100 texts from group members within a five-minute period, leaving me feeling as if I’m trapped in other people’s streams of consciousness. I rarely respond to these messages and would prefer not to be included. Is it possible to opt out of them?
I wonder if there might be a technological solution for this. With email, you can set rules that would screen out emails with multiple recipients, for example. I wonder if you can do this with texting, perhaps with some of the texting apps that people seem to find it useful to use?  If not, lets add it to the Things They Should Invent list!

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

What if the real problem is on the other side of the "confidence gap"?

I recently blogged about The Agenda's blog post about their difficulty booking female guests.  Steve Paikin framed the problem as prospective female guests not wanting to go on TV when they didn't feel they were experts in the subject matter, but, as a viewer, I think it's more of a problem that The Agenda is willing to books guests who aren't up on the subject matter but will read up on it before going on TV (something Steve Paikin presents as laudable.)

I had a similar thought when I read the article circulating about the "confidence gap", which proposes that men advance more than women because men are more confident, i.e. more likely to loudly declare "Yes, I can do that!" regardless of whether they actually can.

Why are they assuming that the men's behaviour is baseline and correct?  What if the problem is in fact that people who are overconfident are being unduly rewarded?  What if the problem is that the system isn't set up to recognize people who have a fair and accurate assessment of their abilities?  What if we could circumvent the Peter Principle by figuring out a way to accurately and proactively identify and recognize people's actual objective skill levels and set them up with commensurate responsibilities and compensation?

Disregarding my role as an employee, if I look at this solely in my capacity as a client, as a part of the economy, as a part of society, I find it unhelpful that people would get promoted and rewarded simply for being loud. In my capacity as a client, as a part of the economy, as a part of society, I need people in positions of power and expertise and authority not just to be the most competent, but also to have a realistic sense of their own abilities and limitations.  It is very important that they only say "Yes, I can definitely do that" when they can definitely do that.  If they're running around saying "Yes, I can definitely do that" when they don't actually know because they've never done it before but they're willing to give it a whirl, that just make things worse.  We need to be able to trust the professionals and experts of the world to actually be competent professionals and experts, and we can't trust them if their best credential is that they're loud.  This creates a world where you have to approach everything with caution - Can that shoemaker in fact fix my shoes? Can that doctor in fact do that operation on me? - even though you don't have the expertise to independently evaluate these people in the first place.  That would make things worse for everyone, so we need to make sure the people responsible for putting people in positions of expertise and authority are able to assess them based on actual expertise.

Talking with Ehrlinger, we were reminded of something Hewlett-Packard discovered several years ago, when it was trying to figure out how to get more women into top management positions. A review of personnel records found that women working at HP applied for a promotion only when they believed they met 100 percent of the qualifications listed for the job. Men were happy to apply when they thought they could meet 60 percent of the job requirements. At HP, and in study after study, the data confirm what we instinctively know. Underqualified and underprepared men don’t think twice about leaning in.
Are these men who meet 60% of the qualifications getting the promotions?  If so, there's something wrong.  Why are they listing qualifications if they aren't required?  Why are they considering applicants who don't meet the qualifications if the qualifications are required?

The people who are applying only if they meet 100% of the qualifications are doing the job poster the basic human decency of taking them at their word.  If they are being punished for that, the system is broken.
We were curious to find out whether male managers were aware of a confidence gap between male and female employees. And indeed, when we raised the notion with a number of male executives who supervised women, they expressed enormous frustration. They said they believed that a lack of confidence was fundamentally holding back women at their companies, but they had shied away from saying anything, because they were terrified of sounding sexist. One male senior partner at a law firm told us the story of a young female associate who was excellent in every respect, except that she didn’t speak up in client meetings. His takeaway was that she wasn’t confident enough to handle the client’s account. But he didn’t know how to raise the issue without causing offense. He eventually concluded that confidence should be a formal part of the performance-review process, because it is such an important aspect of doing business.
How to raise the issue is very simple: in the meeting, you say "[Young Female Associate], what do you think? Do you see any points that haven't been addressed?"  Then, after she says something useful, you mention to her after the meeting "I'm very glad you mentioned [useful thing] in that meeting!  It was very important, and no one else seems to have thought of it."  Lather, rinse, repeat until you reach a critical mass of feedback (which shouldn't take super long - half a dozen meetings at most.) 

This lady's manager thinks she is excellent in every respect, but does not have as accurate a sense of her own skill set as perhaps she should. She truly doesn't realize that, despite the fact that she's a relative newbie, the other people in the room don't see the thing that she sees or don't have the idea she does, rather than having already thought of and dismissed it (I've discussed my own experience with this phenomenon here). So she needs to have this demonstrated to her with specific examples and be set up for success. That's where the manager comes in - as someone who sees her work as well as others' and is more experienced in this field, the manager is the best person to give her a sense of what her own skill set is - strengths and areas for improvement.  But because he doesn't know how to do this part of his job without raising offence, her career progression suffers.

He's in this management job without knowing how to boost a shy, new employee's confidence - and instead coming up with the ridiculously ineffective idea of grading people on confidence.  He should be setting her up for success by giving her openings to see first-hand how her contributions are valuable and necessary, but instead he's setting her up for failure by adding a performance-review item that correlates with her greatest weakness, without doing anything to help her improve other than perhaps telling her to improve.

Which leads me to wonder: did this manager, who can't figure out how to effectively coach a quiet employee without causing offence, get his management job simply because he was the loudest person in the room?

***

I should also add my personal experience with confidence: the more confident I get, the more willing I am to admit when I don't know something or don't have a certain skill set.  When I was just starting out my tech support job in university, I pretended I knew everything everyone was talking about out of imposter syndrome, terrified that they'd mock me or fire me if I (a teenager who had never been more than a personal home user - and this in the 20th century) admitted that I hadn't heard of reimaging a computer. I just said "Yes, of course I know what that is," and frantically muddled my way through.

But as I've had more and more experience validating the fact that what I know is acceptable and I won't get in trouble for not knowing everything, as I've been influenced by Eddie Izzard and learned how to do Entitlement, I've become more and more confident - confident enough to accurately represent and express how capable I do or don't feel in a given situation.

For me, saying "Yes, I definitely can" when I wasn't certain I could was a symptom of lacking confidence.  Saying "Probably, but I'm not certain," or "Sorry, I have no experience in that," or "I'll give it a try but I can make no guarantees" is a sign of confidence.

Monday, May 12, 2014

Teach me about animal shelter economics

From The Ethicist:
Here is an ongoing argument among my friends: Group A says you should adopt a pet only from a no-kill shelter to support the shelter, while Group B says you should adopt a pet only from a kill shelter to save the animals from death. Which is preferable?
The question to which I don't know the answer:  to what extent does adopting an animal from a specific shelter actually support the shelter?

If these were regular businesses, it would be obvious.  For example, there's a Shoppers Drug Mart and a Rexall in my neighbourhood.  If I decided to stop shopping at Shoppers and shop exclusively at Rexall, Shoppers would make less demand and profit and Rexall would see more.  If everyone made the same decision, Shoppers would cease to exist.  If Shoppers saw that everyone was shopping at Rexall, they might think "What is Rexall doing that we aren't?" and try to emulate that.

But do animal shelters work that way?  If people adopt their animals, they have room for more animals.  If people don't adopt their animals, they don't have room for more animals unless they kill some. That part is clear. 

But does adopting the animals serve as an economic incentive? If nobody adopted from the no-kill shelter, would the no-kill shelter cease to exist?  Would it be incentivized to become a kill shelter? Would anything else bad happen to it or to its animals?

Conversely, if nobody adopted from the kill shelter, would it cease to exist?  Would it be incentivized to become a no-kill shelter?  Or would it just keep on killing animals it can't fit?

It seems to me that the primary factor in whether animals end up in a kill or no-kill shelter would be which shelter people choose to surrender animals to.  It doesn't seem like adoption decisions would enter into it. What am I missing?