The mystery of the semantically null Amazon reviews

I was recently researching a potential purchase and reading a lot of Amazon reviews to do so, because Amazon had the most reviews for the most different products.

 

And I discovered something really weird: five-star reviews that aren't actually positive reviews of the product, and very often provide no information whatsoever.

 

Examples: "I bought it as a gift from someone else." "I haven't received it yet." "I haven't tried it yet but I'm sure it's fine."

 

Why would you write a review like this when you could just . . . not?

 

 

Then the universe provided me with what might be the answer!

 

I try to avoid Amazon whenever possible because of their labour conditions, but I ended up ordering a couple of products there because I couldn't find them anywhere else. 

Each of these products had a card inserted in the packaging saying the seller would give me an Amazon gift card if I wrote a review of the product, and sent them an email with the order number and a link to the review.

One offered me a $10 gift card for a review of a $25 purchase, and the other offered me a $15 gift card for a review of a $35 purchase.

 

I can certainly see how this might incentivize people to leave a review even if they have nothing to say!

I didn't leave any reviews so I don't know if they actually send you the promised gift card. (Apparently my sense of "I don't want them to win!" is worth more than $25 to me.) I don't know if they only give the gift card for a five-star review (the cards didn't say anything to that effect) or if these semantically null reviewers think Amazon is like eBay and sellers will be penalized for reviews that are less than five stars.

But, in any case, there's something very, very wrong with the system if sellers are incentivized to turn over 40% of the purchase price in exchange for a review!

Things They Should Study: would replacing property tax with a municipal income tax meet our needs better?

The pandemic is adding to the cost of delivering Toronto's city services, while some residents and businesses find their incomes drastically reduced as a result of pandemic-related shutdowns. (And a small number of other businesses find their revenues increasing!)

So our property tax rates are being debated, and city council finds themselves in a catch-22.

It's time to very seriously and thoroughly study an alternative: replacing property tax with a municipal income tax, which would make a point of including  (but not being limited to) rental income, business income, and revenues from selling real estate.

 

The primary concern expressed about property tax is that the value of your home can go up while you're just quietly living in it, even though your income and budget are unchanged - even if your income decreases!

 

Replacing property tax with income tax would address this. If your income suddenly decreases, your tax would decrease commensurately, regardless of what's going on with local property speculation. 

 

 

At this point, some people point out that if a home has appreciated significantly, the owner is sitting on a high-value asset and should be taxed on this.

 

Replacing property tax with income tax would address this. It would totally tax property owners on the money they make from their high-value asset, it would just take the more user-friendly approach of levying that tax at the moment they actually have that money in hand.

 

People also point out that real estate can be a revenue generator, because you can rent it out.

Replacing property tax with income tax would address this by taxing landlords on their rental income. But, at the same time, landlords wouldn't be incentivized to raise rent to cover taxes, because they'd be taxed a percentage of whatever rent their charge, rather than being taxed a specific number.

These two factors converge to address the the so-called "condo tax", where commercial property owners are taxed on "highest and best use" - i.e. what their property would be worth if redeveloped - and then that tax is passed on to the business that rents the property as a rent increase. 

 

Replacing property tax with income tax would address this by taxing property owners on any money they make selling their property to developers, but would take the more user-friendly approach of taxing them at the moment they actually have the money in hand, and the taxation burden would not be passed on to small businesses because a building that's being sold for redevelopment wouldn't be occupied by tenants.

 

 

Another argument in favour of property tax is that it's intended as a wealth tax, but property ownership provides an incomplete picture of wealth. Jeff Bezos could buy the condo next to me, which is absolutely identical to mine, and would owe the City of Toronto exactly the same amount of taxes as I do. Meanwhile, I'm fully leveraged whereas he could buy the condo outright with the money he made in the time it took me to compose this paragraph.

 

Replacing property tax with income tax would address this inequity, by taxing this hypothetical Jeff Bezos on the billions that he makes, while taxing me on the tens of thousands that I make.

 

 

Speaking of rich people buying condos, another problem that exists in the Toronto real estate market is absentee owners buying up condos as investments or a place to park assets, sometimes not even living in them or renting them out! (This has often been covered in the media as a "foreign buyers" problem, but the real problem is that they aren't living in the home, not that they are from another country.) 

 

Replacing property tax with income tax might address this issue. Perhaps people rich enough to casually buy real estate that they aren't even using would be disincentivized if they had to pay income tax in a whole nother jurisdiction? (It doesn't seem like enough of a disincentive to me, but the way money people tend to talk about taxes makes me think they find taxes more of a disincentive than I do.) And if they don't find it a disincentive, it's more money for city coffers.

 

 

Q: But don't you know that municipalities aren't legally permitted to levy income tax?

 

A: Yes! That's why we need to very thoroughly study it, so that if it does turn out that income tax is more appropriate, we have a compelling case for the levels of government with the power to change those laws.

 

Q: But don't you know that rich people rarely pay taxes?

 

A: Yes! That's why we need to very thoroughly study this, so it can be executed in a way that doesn't leave any loopholes to wiggle out of.

 

Q: What about sales tax?

 

A: I have no objection to studying sales tax too, and it may even have already been studied because I do hear people talking about it from time to time. But it seems to me that income tax is more likely to address the flaws in the property tax model, while also being closer to its original intention as a wealth tax.

 

 

Property tax is the oldest surviving form of taxation, dating back thousands of years. It's quite possible that, like many things dating back thousands of years, it isn't the very best way to meet 21st-century needs. 

The pandemic only magnifies the flaws of the property tax model. As we plan our pandemic recovery, it's time to seriously study an alternative to property tax.

Books read in February 2021

New: 

1. Kiss of the Fur Queen by Tomson Highway

2. Trickster Drift by Eden Robinson

3. They Call Me George: The Untold Story of The Black Train Porters by Cecil Foster

Reread:

 

1. Visions in Death

Things They Should Invent: beds that adults can safely jump on

One of the delights of childhood is jumping on the bed. 

But you can't jump on the bed as an adult, because you'll break the bed.

This is a marketing opportunity!

Someone should invent beds that are sturdy enough for adults to jump on! Bonus points for them being sturdy enough for two or more adults to jump on! Extra bonus points for those two or more adults being in the 80th percentile of weight! Super duper bonus points for somehow working out a way to do this without disturbing the people in the apartment downstairs!

I have no idea how to figure out what kind of bed to buy, and I would totally buy a bed I could jump on solely on the basis that I can jump on it. 

I'm sure there would also be a market among people whose bedroom activities are particularly athletic, and an additional market among people who want to give the impression that their bedroom activities are particularly athletic.

Books read in January 2021

New:

1. Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if your Life Depended on It by Chris Voss with Tahl Raz

2. Feeding My Mother: Comfort and Laughter in the Kitchen as My Mom Lives with Memory Loss by Jann Arden

Reread:

1. Divided in Death

Things They Should Invent: all bathrooms must be completely slip-proof

A household accident that often has devastating results, especially for elders, is slipping and falling in the bathroom. 

 

And one of the things I dread most about eventually having to go into long-term care is that you aren't allowed to bathe unsupervised because of the risk of slipping and falling.

(Which literally adds insult to injury, because some people end up in long-term care because of a broken hip caused by slipping and falling in the bathroom!)

 

 

Both of these problems could be solved by making 100% of bathrooms completely slip-proof. Floors, tubs, showers, everything!

 

 

At this point, you might be thinking "surfaces become slippery when wet - it's just basic physics!"

 

But since time immemorial, humans have been inventing things to defy the laws of physics.

We have devices that allow us to see in the dark even without a light source. 

Most modern kitchens contain a device that will heat food without becoming warm to the touch itself.

 

We've had a device that makes it possible to safely jump out of an airplane and land unharmed since long before we even had airplanes.  

 

Surfaces becoming slippery when wet is just another physics challenge that human innovation should be able to overcome.

 

 

Googling around this idea, I did find bathroom tiles that purport to be slip-proof. 

 

However, the fact of the matter is that people still slip and fall in bathrooms, and bathing alone is still seen as an unacceptable risk for elders in care. So either the existing slip-proof tiles are not sufficiently slip-proof or they aren't being used and slippery tiles are being used instead.

 

In either case, this needs to be fixed. All bathrooms should systematically and without exception be slip-proof. Just like how all cars have seatbelts by default, all bathrooms need to be slip-proof by default.

 

It would be a vast improvement to everyone's quality of life and, if we need an economic argument, will significantly reduce medical costs.

Vaccine conspiracy theory conspiracy theory

If I were to assemble the elements of the current situation into a conspiracy theory, that theory would be that people in positions of power were contributing to the spread of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and/or not working to debunk these theories to create conditions where those in positions of power would have to be at the front of the line for any vaccine roll-out in order to set an example.

If vaccine reluctance wasn't a thing, there would be no reason to vaccinate politicians and public figures ahead of front-line workers, health workers, food workers, etc. But now that vaccine reluctance is a thing, politicians and public figures can very publicly go straight to the front of the vaccine queue, be photographed getting their vaccine, and be lauded for setting a good example.

My 2021 new year's resolution

 I hadn't been planning on making a resolution, but a simple and useful one came to me a couple of weeks ago:

While the coffee brews, I'll do something I've been procrastinating.

Normally, while the coffee is brewing, I stare blankly at the internet doing nothing - after all, I can't do anything productive when I haven't had my coffee yet!

So now, instead of doing nothing, I'll do something I've been procrastinating. Something small, because it doesn't take that long for coffee to brew. Empty the dishwasher. Break down a cardboard box for recycling. Make an online purchase.

Since it doesn't take very long for coffee to brew, I might not finish my task. I might just empty one rack of the dishwasher, or just manage to remove the tape from the box, or just add one item to my cart. That's okay. I can stop when the coffee is ready. Or I can keep up the momentum, whatever feels right in the moment.

This works well for me for several reasons:

1. I respond well to "sprints" - working full-out at a task until some external phenomenon interrupts me. (Yes, I've heard of the pomodoro method. No, it hasn't solved all my life problems.) Coffee brewing time is the perfect length for a sprint.

2. This doesn't require any additional time commitment. Not even the infamous "just 15 minutes a day!" Coffee brewing time was previously unused dead time, and I've found a way to make use of it.

3. It helps me address the things that fall through the cracks in my system. Some things pile up because there isn't a place for them in my system (which I never managed to figure out how to reboot), or because there isn't enough room for them in my system. This lets me make progress on those things without having to figure out how to revamp the system, or having to take the emotional risk of completely disregarding the system.

4. There are no specific "shoulds" or tacit prerequisites on my "to do while the coffee brews" list. Part of the problem with my system is I've inadvertently imposed prerequisites on myself. I keep falling into a trap of "I can't do the thing that really needs doing because the system dictates that I have to do other things first!" (Unfortunately, removing prerequisites isn't sufficient to fix the system and sometimes would bring its own problems.) But while the coffee brews, anything that needs doing meets the requirements.

I've been doing this for a few weeks already, and have made a noticeable dent in my tangible and mental to-do piles. (If you could see my piles, you'd be like "That's an after picture???" and the answer is yes, it is.) We'll see if it's enough to affect my quality of life in the long run.

Journalism Wanted: where does Courtney Love get her COVID tests from?

Recently tweeted into my feed: Courtney Love says that wealthy people have had access to home COVID tests for months.

The article that was tweeted into my feed and others I've been able to google up basically reiterate the content of Courtney Love's original instagram post. 

But there a lot of questions here that some mild investigative journalism should be able to answer - or, at least, pinpoint the non-answers.

Who manufactures these tests? Who sells them? Are they out of reach to the general public because of price? Or because the test company will only sell to famous people? Or some other reason? How did Courtney Love and others like her find out about them in the first place? When Courtney Love wants to buy a COVID test, exactly what steps does she take? What would happen if a regular person who isn't rich and famous took those exact same steps? If someone asked Courtney Love where exactly she gets these tests from, what would her answer be? Would she decline to answer because they'd deny her tests if she leaked? Or for some other reason? Is manufacturing capacity limited? If so, what would it take to scale up?

Courtney Love's post flagged a problem, but didn't pinpoint what exactly the problem is. It could be anything from the utterly banal "home COVID tests cannot be produced at a sustainable price point" to the utterly terrifying "some malicious actor is trying to make sure only the rich and famous survive COVID by concealing the existence of convenient tests from the rest of us".

The job of journalism is to tell people what exactly the underlying problem here is, not just to transcribe Courtney Love's instagram posts. With a bit of investigative journalism, this would be a very interesting and probably very important story. But without the investigation, it's nothing but a celebrity gossip feed.

Things They Should Invent: one-way mirror webcam cover

A challenge with video chat is eye contact. We're inclined to either look at our interlocutor's eyes on screen, or to look at ourselves on screen. This means we aren't looking at the camera, and therefore appear shifty and weird to our interlocutors.

Proposed solution: a cover for the webcam made of a one-way mirror. In other words, the webcam can see you, but you see the mirror. If you make eye contact with yourself in the mirror, you're looking directly at the camera, so it looks to your interlocutor like you're making eye contact with them.

This would also make it easier to modulate your facial expression. I know that if I leave my facial expression unmonitored during a video chat, I tend to look like I'm sneering. (Really, my lips are just asymmetrical). But if I monitor my facial expression on the screen, I'm not looking at the camera and therefore look like I'm not paying attention. A mirror over the camera would make it easier to perform up to expectations.

40

I turn 40 today!

I think I am in a good place in life.

- Apart from the fact that I'm not married, I've done literally everything I imagined doing with my life. I have no bucket list.

- I'm weathering the pandemic well, and sustainably. I was sprinting at first and had to dial it back to a marathon pace, but I can keep this up long-term if necessary.

- So many of the life decisions I made when I was younger - so many of the life decisions people tried to dissuade me from! - have paid off during the pandemic. Obviously luck and privilege also contributed strongly to my coming through the pandemic well, but it's remarkable to me how basically every life decision people tried to dissuade me from paid off during this pandemic.

- My job comes easily to me. It's harder after my head injury, but still doesn't meet the criteria of objectively hard.

- Based on information to date, buying my condo was the right decision.

- My body continues to do what I need it to as well as it ever has. Any issues are head-injury-related, not aging-related. (Of course, I'd also love for the head injury to no longer be a factor.)

- I have social capital, at least in the circles I move in. At work, with family and friends, in the community, I can say "I think we should do X" or "No, I won't be doing Y", and I'm heard and respected. I can also say "I don't know how this works, what do I do?" or "I'm frightened and confused" or "I can't lift this", and people help. (Again, privilege is certainly a factor, but it didn't work this way for me when I was younger.) In non-pandemic times, people I know will let me hold their baby, and even strangers will let me pet their dog.

- I've been following a lot of younger people on Twitter, and it makes me feel confident about the future and quite content to step aside and let the youth lead. They tend to be more radical than people I encounter in the natural course of my life (most of whom are my age or older), and I feel good about this. I like the idea of a world where people like me are dated and old-school and things are growing and evolving beyond what we could even imagine when we were visiting geocities sites with our dial-up modems.

- I've recently stumbled into a new fandom (Good Omens!) and it's really good for me. I'm going through the same kind of growth and evolution as when I fell into Eddie Izzard fandom 13 years ago, and I'm looking forward to seeing who I become when I emerge on the other side.

Horoscopes

 My birthday horoscopes ceased having any remotely accurate interpretation with my head injury, but I'm still recording them here for my own reference.

Globe and Mail:

Artistic activities must be giving every chance to thrive over the coming year, even if it means having to cut back on work and getting by on less financially. You’ve been promising to create something amazing for as long as you can remember, so get to it!

Toronto Star: 

Profound, patient and prepared, you are in it for the long haul. A project you passionately believe in begins and succeeds brilliantly in 2022. Your strongly controlled emotions will find an outlet this year. If single, you tend to be solitary, but you do fall in love this year, in May. If attached, your relationship adds much richness to your life. GEMINI is light and almost ethereal compared to you.

As an aside, my horoscopes promise me love every year and it never materializes. This year's Globe & Mail horoscope is the first one I can remember that didn't promise me love.

(Also, absolutely everyone in the world is light and almost ethereal compared to me, and I'm not sure why that's in my horoscope.)

Books read in November 2020

New:

1. Queen of the World by Robert Hardman

Reread:

1. Remember When

Toronto needs to remove snow not just from sidewalks, but from the areas around sidewalks

I was particularly disappointed to see that the City of Toronto isn't extending sidewalk snow clearing to areas of the city that don't yet receive this service, because that's a giant step in exactly the wrong direction. In a pandemic year we need even more than sidewalk snow clearing. To maintain physical distancing, we need areas around the sidewalk, like curb lanes and boulevards and the edges of lawns, to be cleared as well.

Pedestrian physical distancing isn't just a question of two "lanes" that need to be six feet apart. Faster walkers also need to pass slower walkers. Some people are walking dogs or herding children. Some people insist on walking two or three abreast. Some people are carrying bulky grocery bags. People with wheelchairs or walkers or fragile ankles need to be able to avoid walking on the curb cut.

To physically distance through all these variables - especially on older residential streets with narrow sidewalks - we need to use not just the sidewalk, but also lawns and curb lanes. The sidewalk on my own street is just barely six feet wide, so I'm always stepping off the sidewalk onto the street, or onto a lawn or driveway, so I can stay six feet away from other people. I probably step off into a curb lane or onto a lawn about three to five times in a typical block of walking.

And in snowy weather, curb lanes and lawns aren't available because they're covered in snow. The curb lanes are full of snow plow windrows, and lawns are, at a minimum, unshovelled, and, more often, covered in snow banks from sidewalk snow clearing.

What the City of Toronto needs to do is clear not just sidewalks, but also curb lanes and at least 3 feet of lawns that are adjacent to narrow sidewalks. (Q: Won't that damage the lawns? A: The City can replant the lawns in the spring. Lives are more important than lawns.) They need to truck away windrows that end up in the curb lane, and go around making sure sewer grates are clear so gutters don't fill up with water.

In the Old City of Toronto - the portion of the amalgamated city where sidewalks aren't cleared - all these sidewalk-related needs and pandemic-related needs are exacerbated. There is higher population density, more people walking as a primary form of transportation, and more people who don't have cars. Older sidewalks tend to be narrower, buildings tend to be closer to the sidewalk, and the curb lane tends to be right next to the sidewalk (rather than there being a boulevard between the sidewalk and the curb lane). Grocery stores and other necessities are more likely to be within walking distance, so more people are carrying bulky packages and rolling bundle buggies. More streets have businesses with patios and lineups and those signs that they put out on the sidewalk. 

In short, there are more people trying to physically distance in less space as the second wave of COVID balloons around us. The City needs to help its residents stay safe by extending snow clearing not just to all sidewalks, but to the areas around the sidewalks.

Things They Should Invent: search and sort grocery websites by nutritional information

In the course of ordinary, in-store, non-pandemic grocery shopping, we often pick up items off the shelf and read the labels. 

During the pandemic, we aren't supposed to be handling items we don't buy. Also during the pandemic, many people are shopping online (either for delivery or for in-store pickup), and (at least according to the marketing emails I'm being bombarded with) grocery store chains seem to be encouraging this.

One thing grocery chains could do to make online shopping easier and to discourage people from handling things in store is for store websites to have extremely robust searching and sorting by ingredients and/or nutritional information.

They often have ingredients and nutritional information that you can click on for individual products, but searchable and sortable would be far more convenient and user-friendly.

Examples:

- Show me all products from the "salad dressing" category sorted in ascending order of sugar content, so I can choose the lowest sugar salad dressing that meets my tastes.

- Let me use the Boolean NOT function to exclude all products that contain my allergens.

This information is already in grocery stores' computers - you can see it when you look up specific products on their website. People already know how to program computers to do things like sorting and boolean search. 

If they could let us do this on store website, it would improve uptake of online shopping and reducing handling of items in-store, and may also introduce consumers to new products that meet their needs better than what they were buying before. A win for everyone!

Gold Bond Ultimate Healing: a hand cream that meets my pandemic needs

 As I've blogged about before, I've needed to up my hand lotion game because of all the additional pandemic handwashing.

Lately I've been using Gold Bond Ultimate Healing Hand Cream, and it seems to do the job. I'm moisturizing my hands exactly the way I was before the pandemic, and they feel comparable to their pre-pandemic state, with no cracking or pain.

My dyshidrotic eczema is still present, but under control, but which I mean it's in the calmest and least itchy state it can be in while still existing.  

I haven't tried every hand cream out there so I don't know if this is the best one, but my hands feel like there's no pandemic, and that's not nothing.

What if the difference in first wave and second wave pandemic response is due to racism?

Sitting here watching the second wave of the pandemic spiral with those in power doing little to nothing, I find myself increasingly surprised that the lockdown actually happened back in March. Given the apparent lack of political will to return to the now-familiar lockdown when numbers are skyrocketing and the seriousness of COVID is clear, I'm amazed that they initiated the then-unprecedented lockdown back when it still seemed possible that the threat of COVID might be overblown.

It makes no sense whatsoever!

Which makes me wonder: might racism be at play?

As I've blogged about before, I'm not nearly as good as I should be at spotting racism. I've been trying to learn, but it's slow going (especially since I don't want to, like, actively seek out racists to see what they're saying). However one thing I have learned is that when I feel a specific shade of "This makes no sense whatsoever!", it usually means that what I'm missing is recognizing how racism is at play in the situation. And this is the specific shade of "It makes no sense whatosever!" that I'm feeling here.

So, if it is a question of racism, how might that be playing out?

I see two possibilities, which are not mutually exclusive:

1. As far as we know, the pandemic began in China. Maybe back in March there was a sense that COVID was foreign, and the lockdown was motivated by keeping that Bad Foreign Disease away. Now that community transmission is by far more common, they don't see it as as much of a threat.

2. Here in Toronto/Ontario/Canada, COVID-19 is disproportionately affecting marginalized people, including racialized people. Black and brown people have disproportionately high COVID numbers here in Toronto, and white people have disproportionately low numbers. So maybe those in positions of power and authority are thinking "It won't affect us", or even "The people it will affect don't matter."

As I said, I'm not as good as I should be at spotting racism, so there are almost certainly going to be nuances here that I've missed.

But, conversely, if someone as clueless as me thinks this situation makes so little sense that I'm arriving at the idea of racism, it's probably a sign that those in power should, at a minimum, make the situation make more sense.

Cascade Complete is inferior to Cascade Original

I've always used the lemon-scented Cascade gel dishwasher detergent, which I believe is currently marketed as Cascade Original.

However, I haven't been able to find my usual Cascade during the pandemic (can't tell whether it's because of the pandemic or just a coincidence), so I bought Cascade Complete, which is blue, not lemon-scented, and claims to have more cleaning power.

Unfortunately, Cascade Complete is an inferior product. It doesn't always get fried egg remnants off the pan, and it often leave brown stains in the white mugs I used for coffee or tea. I've never before had either of these problems either with my current (decent quality) dishwasher or my previous (very mediocre) dishwasher.

At this point, some people (and, I'm sure, the Cascade corporation) would recommend using detergent in the pod format. Unfortunately, that simply doesn't work for me. the result is always a dishwasher full of dirty dishes with a mess of half-dissolved dishwasher pod at the bottom. Only liquid/gel dish detergent has ever worked with the combination of water and dishwasher that I have here.

I sincerely hope they haven't discontinued the lemon Cascade and it becomes available again quickly, because Cascade Complete is far less adequate, and I won't be buying it again.

Navigating conversations with family language barriers

From a recent Social Qs:

When we visit my mother, she speaks to me in Hungarian, her native language, in front of my husband who doesn’t understand a word of it. He told me he feels excluded by this because he can’t participate in our conversations. I’ve told my mother her behavior is rude, but she persists, saying, “I am Hungarian, and this is my house.” She is fluent in English, so she could honor our request if she wanted to. Also, she and I speak on the phone frequently. If she had something private to say to me, she could do it then. Otherwise, she’s nice to my husband. Any advice?

My recommendation, as someone born into a family with internal language barriers, is to translate everything your mother says into English for your husband's benefit. You can do this on a turn-by-turn basis, or summarize every few turns. (It will become clear and intuitive to you which approach is best.) This is hard work and quite inconvenient, but that very inconvenience adds a lot of clarity to the situation.

If your mother is speaking Hungarian out of pure stubbornness and can in fact manage just as well in English, the delay of waiting for everything to be translated will incentivize her to speak English whenever she can manage it. If she does in fact struggle to express herself adequately in English, she should find it a relief to have someone else doing the work. 

Another thing you might discover is that not everything is relevant to your husband. In the process of translating everything, you might both eventually find that there are some branches of the conversation that he just doesn't care about. This is good, useful information! It means that once you've established to everyone's satisfaction the proportion of the conversation that's irrelevant to your husband and the typical contents thereof, your husband may be comfortable with leaving the irrelevant portions untranslated.

When your husband does have something to contribute to the conversation, he should feel free to contribute in English, even if that portion of the conversation was in Hungarian. As you know, understanding another language is easier than speaking it, so, counterintuitive as it may seem to unilingual people, the conversation can still work perfectly well with him speaking English. And if your mother has some trouble understanding your husband's English statements, you can translate them for her just like you translate her Hungarian statements for him.

The advice columnist also suggests, as a last resort, that LW simply not bring the husband to visit the mother. I have no objection to that idea either, and don't think it needs to be a last resort, although I can't tell through the internet whether there's a good reason why LW is bringing the husband or whether this is one of those circumstances where married couples mindlessly do things as a couple even though there's no reason to bring both of them. But, in any case, translating the conversation is one of those things that will help if your mother's intentions are good while inconveniencing her if her intentions are bad.