My theory, which is mine

I always advise fellow translators to use a more specific preposition than "regarding" (or synonyms thereof). I feel that "regarding" forces the reader to make some effort to figure out how the two elements are related to each other, and if you can use a more specific preposition, then the reader doesn't have to make this effort.

However, I have also begun to think that using no prepositions whatsoever, by piling the elements together as a noun phrase or something similar, might make it even more effortless for the reader. This obviously wouldn't work for non-Anglophones (at least not non-Anglophones coming from Romance languages), but I really do suspect noun phrases scan more effortlessly for Anglophones. Perhaps it's because it implies to the reader that they're closely familiar with the subject matter, giving them a sort of false reassurance.

Specific (fake) example:

"The problem regarding the umbrellas"
takes more effort to read than
"The problem with the umbrellas"
takes more effort to read than
"The umbrella problem"

Strictly speaking, they all provide the same amount of information. If someone is completely unfamiliar with whatever the problem with the umbrellas is, calling it "the umbrella problem" isn't going to help them. But if they already have the information they need to understand "the problem regarding the umbrellas", then "the problem with the umbrellas" or "the umbrella problem" will be more effortless to read and understand.

Is this consistent with your experience with the English language?

(Anonymous comments welcome, non-Anglophone comments welcome, but if English is not your first/primary language please tell me what is.)

Improving anti-peer-pressure education

Last week, I blogged about how my grandmother gave me strategies for tricking your friends into thinking you're drinking when you're not, which surprised me because in what world do your friends try to get you to drink when you don't want to? But then I realized that the anti-peer-pressure education I received assumed just that.

The anti-peer-pressure education I received talked about strategies for convincing our interlocutor of our no - making excuses or distracting them - as though simply politely declining wasn't an option. I now find myself wondering if this might have actually introduced the idea that it's normal to peer pressure people, whereas in real life, in the adult world, it isn't. So have an idea for modifying peer pressure education to address this.

On the first day or two, they go through the material normally, with their usual teacher. But the next day, there's a substitute teacher. Rather than being chosen from the supply teacher pool using whatever the normal method is, the sub is very carefully cast. She's young, probably just out of teacher's college. She's attractive and dressed trendily, and very much comes across as someone's cool older sister.

The sub gets the class started off on the anti-peer-pressure exercises from the textbook, then drifts off to the side of the classroom while the students are supposed to be doing their seatwork. She settles in comfortably near where the cool kids are sitting, casually leaning against a ledge or table and looking over the exercises they're working on. Then, in a conspiratorial tone that can be overheard by the entire classroom, she says to the cool kids "I can't believe this is in your curriculum! Do they seriously think you guys are pathetic enough to be obsessing over who is and isn't drinking that day?" It isn't a massive rant, it's more of a bitching session with the students, like you'd have with your classmates when given a particularly stupid assignment. She doesn't make any sort of point of telling the students that they shouldn't smoke or drink or whatever, she instead just quietly accepts it as something people do, the same way we handle it around adults. "I mean, yeah, if you're having a beer you offer your friend a beer. But why on earth do the people who wrote this book think you'd be pathetic enough to obsess over whether they take you up on the offer?"

This will introduce the idea that it isn't cool or adult to peer pressure people, and create motivation by presenting it as something that the boring grownups don't think the kids are cool or adult enough to understand.

How to buy better school performance with one simple tweak

I've read in a number of places that one approach to improving school performance is to offer money to schools who improve, or offer the most money to the schools who improve the most.

I'm not sure whether or not that approach would work, but here's a simple tweak to maximize its effectiveness: give some of that money to the students.

All students get some money. Students who pass get more money than students who fail. The highest-performing students get more money, but the most improved students also get more money. The highest-performing student in the school and the most-improved student in the school get exactly the same amount of money. Maybe the money baseline could increase with each grade, so that you'll never that less money than last year for getting exactly the same marks (i.e. if a D student pulls their average up to B in grade 10 and gets a shitload of money for improvement, we don't want them to get less money for maintaining a B in Grade 11.)

A school can only be successful if it elicits the desired behaviour in its students. School administrators and teachers already want the students to show the desired behaviour, if only because it makes life easier. If financial incentives are effective and appropriate (and I'm not sure whether or not they are), why not give at least part of them to the group that actually front-line produces the results being evaluated?

Wherein I dare attempt to improve upon Miss Manners

I realize it's insanely presumptuous for a socially awkward dork like me to even think about improving on Miss Manners, but I think I have something that could be useful here.

Dear Miss Manners:

A client came in for tax season! We only see each other once a year. Anyway, in she came for her appointment; I came from around the corner in the office, saw her sitting/waiting, and greeted her with, "Oh! When are you due?" She looks about five to six months pregnant, but ISN'T!!!

We proceeded to discuss drinking enough water, medications, doctor visits, blood tests, etc. But the fact of the matter is she isn't pregnant.

How do I apologize for assuming? Should I apologize?

Something that might work to add as an element of the apology: "I'm so sorry! A co-worker of mine was pregnant recently, and she kept wearing a shirt exactly like that one during the stage where she didn't quite want to wear maternity clothes yet - she's such a tiny little thing that she could wear clothes in proper grown women's sizes until practically the end of the second trimester - anyway, she was wearing a shirt like that about three times a week and we were all speculating on whether she's pregnant but no one wanted to be the one to ask, and when I saw that shirt I just free-associated! In any case, you wear it far better!"

Analogy for childcare decisions

I've noticed an awful lot of people like to make sweeping declarative statements about which childcare choices are good or bad. But one thing I've noticed from watching my peers who become parents is that, in addition to the dictates of circumstance, so much depends on the personalities of the people involved. Some kids are ecstatic about going to daycare. Some (like me when I was little) would absolutely wither if forced to spend their days in a large group. Some parents find it fascinating to watch their kids every single moment of the day. Some find it outright dull, and do better once the kids are old enough to have an actual conversation.

So here's a series of analogies:

Is it a good idea to go to grad school?
Is it a good idea drink milk?
Is it a good idea to live with roommates?
Is it a good idea to retire at 65?

The answer to all of these questions is "It depends." It depends on your personality, and the personalities of the other parties involved. It depends on your financial and career situation. It depends on your state of health. It depends on your personal values. It depends on the current economic context.

The same goes for childcare decisions. And it really disturbs me that so many people who think their choice is right for everyone are going around having kids.

Things They Should Study: the origin of the neener cadence

Picture a small child taunting his friend, tongue sticking out, thumbs to temples, fingers waving, saying "Neener neener neee-ner!" or "Nanny nanny boo boo!"

You know the exact cadence with which he's neenering, don't you? It's close to the tune of Ring Around the Rosie.

Why does everyone neener with the exact same cadence?

Someone needs to find out where this came from and why it's so universal.

My subconscious does mashups

Last night, I somehow ended up watching a bunch of Springsteen videos on youtube. Then I had dream based on the Dancing in the Dark video, where an oddly attractive young Bruce Springsteen pulls a girl (who the internet swears is Courtney Cox) out from the audience to dance with him on stage. But in my dream, they started doing Billy Elliot-style dancing (like starting at 1:30 here) in perfect unison while singing Born to Run.

I think I'd actually pay good money to see that.

(Unfortunately, that was followed by a dream where I had to stay at in university residence to do on-site training and my room was infested with scorpions, so I woke up edgy despite such entertaining dreams.)

"Forced'?

Human Resources Minister Diane Finley has accused the Liberals of wanting to revive a national child-care program so that parents don’t have to raise their own children.

“It’s the Liberals who wanted to ensure that parents are forced to have other people raise their children. We do not believe in that,” Finley said in the Commons Thursday, the same day that Liberals were promising to revive the national program scrapped by the Conservatives five years ago this week.

This has been all over the blogosphere already, but I haven't seen anyone focusing on what I think is the key word in Minister Finley's statement: forced.

When a government program is available, people can make use of it or not make use of it as they choose. They are by no means required to make use of it, and certainly aren't expected to modify their life choices to make use of it! For example, the Employment Insurance system provides maternity and parental leave benefits of 55% of your average insured earnings up to a maximum of $468 per week. People with new babies can apply for this program, or they can just not apply. However, the existence of this program does not in any way mean we are forced to have babies.

The fact that a government minister landed on the word "forced" in reference to the hypothetical availability of a program makes me inclined to take a step back and look at the other programs this government is providing. What are they trying to force us to do?

But aside from this, you know what is actually, in real life, forcing parents to return to the workforce and send their kids to childcare? Labour conditions! As I've blogged about before, if I had a child, staying home with the kid wouldn't be an option, because I'm the one whose job provides dental benefits. I would be forced to go back to work as soon as parental leave runs out because the current economic context doesn't make it possible for my partner to have a job with benefits.

Even if both partners have jobs with benefits, it still isn't necessarily safe to just leave one's job. I blogged before about my grandmother's co-workers, who voted not to have a pension because their spouses had pensions. Doesn't that sound ideal? A world in which your spouse's pension is enough to support both of you in retirement, so you don't have to worry about accumulating pensionability and can work or not depending on what best meets your family's needs? Well, it turns out many of those spouses worked for Stelco. And this is what happened to their pensions. In a context like this, it would be outright irresponsible to walk away from an opportunity to accumulate pensionability - or even to accumulate CPP eligibility! Even if one pension looks perfectly good now, who knows what will happen in the future? We will spend far more time being seniors than children spend being children, so we can't just put our ability to support ourselves in the last couple of decades of our lives at risk.

Of course, if improving employment conditions is beyond the scope of the government's influence, they could also reduce the likelihood that new parents will be forced to return to work earlier than they'd like by improving the social safety net. My issue of being the only one with dental insurance would be moot if OHIP covered dental care. Concerns about maintaining one's pensionability would be lessened if the CPP provided more than an absolute maximum of $960 a month. If OHIP covered everything we might conceivably need in terms of elder care, we wouldn't have to worry so much about being able to support ourselves in the last decades of our lives.

If this government is really concerned about new parents being forced to return to work sooner than they'd prefer, they need to create a combination of labour conditions and social safety net that makes it possible to stay home, in terms of both meeting the family's immediate needs and long-term consequences.

And, in the meantime, we need to start thinking about what would lead a government minister to conclude that the existence of a program forces Canadians to change their life choices.

Do elders lose their social skills, or just have fewer to start with?

A recent study suggested that elders have more trouble identifying social gaffes than younger people do.

What I'm wondering: does this mean elders lose the ability to identify socially inappropriate behaviour, or does this mean they had lower standards of socially inappropriate behaviour to start with?

The article suggests that the scientists think they are losing their ability, but I don't see anything in the experiment (at least not as described in the article) to rule out the possibility that they never had it in the first place.

This brought to mind a conversation I once had with my grandmother. She told me that if I go out to a bar with friends, I should always order vodka and water. That way, when I've had enough to drink and my friends are trying to get me to drink more, I can quietly ask the bartender to fill mine up with just water, so my friends won't know that difference. All of which raises the question: in what world do your friends try to make you drink more when you've had enough, to the extent that you have to trick them into thinking you're drinking???

Obviously this isn't enough of a basis to draw actual conclusions, but it does occur to me that people who think it's absolutely routine and unremarkable for your friends to pressure you into drinking more than you feel you can handle might never have had sufficiently high standards of socially appropriate behaviour.

Snow day Scrooges

Just over a month ago, many people were complaining that the True Spirit of Christmas has been lost in a sea of rampant commercialism.

Yesterday, many people were complaining that kids got a snow day even though the weather ended up not being as bad as originally forecast.

It surprised me the extent to which the two groups overlapped, because you know what a snow day actually is? The embodiment of the True Spirit of Christmas!

A snow day is a gift from the heavens and an answer to everyone's prayers. It's a day spent with one's family, enjoying the simple things in life like a nice sleep-in, building a snowman, and drinking hot chocolate, and respecting and appreciating the power and beauty of Mother Nature. Warring siblings develop temporary truces, knowing they're stuck together and wanting to get the most out of this rare opportunity. And happy memories are made that will last a lifetime.

These are the kinds of things many people in our society claim to value, and most parents claim to want their children to value. They're used to sell us trucks and Tim Hortons and political platforms, and they're what people have in mind when decrying the commercialism of life. So why throw it all away just because it might slow down the wheels of commerce a wee bit for one day?

What if non-specialist teachers taught all mandatory courses?

My high school history teacher passed away recently. I think he was a good teacher, so while trying to think of something to write in his obit's guestbook I was trying to think of why I think he's a good teacher. And what I came up with is he got the material into my head. History was neither my favourite nor my least favourite subject. I don't have any particular passion for it, and I only took the required course. But this teacher easily and painlessly got me to a mindset where, even 15 years later, the material that is relevant to whatever I'm doing or thinking about is there in my head. When we were talking about a coalition government last year, I could name-check King-Byng and modify a well-known historical quote to come up with coalition if necessary but not necessarily coalition. I knew enough about the Upper Canada Revolution that I groked and could banter with @RebelMayor. I know what the Boer War was and how Canada got caught up in it. I know why we have Catholic schools, and I know why so many of my co-workers are ex-Catholic. I can name-check all the major characters and plot points from both world wars. I know what a Bennett buggy is and what the On-to-Ottawa Trek was. I don't know everything about everything, but I have a solid grounding and know where I need to do more research. While this teacher must have had a passion for history, it didn't permeate his work - which was a good thing! In his classroom, we could simply learn the material without being expected to pour our whole heart and soul into it, and it stuck.

In comparison, my Grade 12 English teacher had a passion for literature, and that made me detest the subject matter. He loved comparing and analyzing and dissecting, and I simply don't care that much any more once the story is over. Even the few glimmers of interest that arose naturally were promptly extinguished, smothered by his constant demand. I found a Shakespearian sonnet that spoke to me, and got marked down in my analysis of it for not drawing religious parallels. I memorized and understood Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy, and lost marks for not being able to write it out with the exact same punctuation. I thought Newspeak was kind of cool and was in a headspace where I could have made a rudimentary attempt at drawing parallels with the language choices of current politicians, but we had to have a fricking debate about it in front of the whole class! Overall, we studied about half a dozen major works from generally-accepted Western literary cannon (plus poetry and ISU), learned the whole hubris-hamartia-downfall thing, and I found a few things that piqued my interest. That should have been enough for a required course, but this teacher put me right off with assignments that simply didn't work out unless you had the level of passion for the subject matter that he had and I didn't.

I've had this happen in other subject areas too. Teachers who are passionate about subjects I'm indifferent about smother any sparks of interest I might have developed, whereas teachers who are more blasé make subjects I wouldn't normally care about seem more approachable without hindering any existing interest.

So, to address this, what if all required courses in school were taught by non-specialist teachers? They didn't study the subjects in university, they don't have any particular passion for them, but they learned them in high school just like everyone else and now have to refamiliarize themselves in order to teach them. So they understand what it's like to struggle with the subject matter or to have to figure it out despite a lack of enthusiasm, and can get the basics into everyone's brains. Students who then find the subject particularly interesting can go on to study it in elective courses taught by specialist teachers who also have a passion for the subject matter, while students who don't particularly care can absorb the basics without having the subject ruined by a teacher's enthusiasm for fussy and finicky aspects of the subject matter.

My subconscious is smarter than me

In the dream I was having just before I woke up, I needed to exchange cell phone numbers with a strange man. I didn't like him, he didn't like me, but we would be needing to make some logistical arrangements later. So he reads off his cell number for me: "Four one six, five nine four, **mumble mumble mumble mumble**"

"I'm sorry," I reply, "I didn't catch those last four numbers."

With facial expressions, body language, and intonation that all suggest he is reading off the numbers slowly and clearly, he once again mutters something unintelligible.

I'm feeling kind of embarrassed now, but we do have to get this done, so I say "I'm sorry, I still didn't catch that. I don't know what's wrong with me. Maybe if you just type it into my phone yourself..."

"Oh, don't worry," he says "I was just testing to make sure you aren't a spy."

It turns out he thought I might be a spy from the country that he perceived to be his country's enemy, so he was casually reading off the numbers in the mother tongue of the country he thought I might be spying for to see if I understood.

That's brilliant! It wasn't his own mother tongue, it was the mother tongue of the enemy country. So someone from that country might have effortlessly understood the numbers and typed them in without even realizing it. I never would have thought of that! I might have thought of using my own mother tongue, but I never would have come up with using the enemy country's mother tongue.

Except that I did think of that. In my subconscious, because this was a dream I had! Spooky!

Talking to your doctor

I've blogged before about how I question the conventional wisdom that we need user fees and such for medical services because people are apparently going to the doctor for foolish things.

But then I see things like this:

The new study shows, however, that there are significant gaps in preventive care.

Only two in five people over the age of 45 reported having talked to a health professional about what they could do to improve their health or prevent illness (measures like quitting smoking, increasing exercise or limiting alcohol consumption).

Why on earth would I need to talk to my doctor about that? I already know I shouldn't smoke, should exercise more, and should probably drink less.

As I also think I've mentioned before, I've been watching my sodium intake after noticing that my body reacts negatively when I eat too much high-sodium foods. When I've mentioned this IRL, people of older generations have asked me "Did your doctor tell you to cut back on the sodium?" No, I figured it out myself. Why would I need a doctor to tell me a readily observable correlation?

Even last time I had a bad cold (lasted the better part of a week, took a day and a half off work), elders asked me if I'd been to a doctor. Why would I go to a doctor when a good night's sleep and drinking plenty of juice is slowly but surely doing the job?

Do people who are older than me have less medical self-knowledge or something? Shouldn't they have more, what with all their life experience and growing up in an era where they had to pay to go to the doctor?

If my own observations here do end up being indicative of a larger pattern, maybe medical costs will drop and our health system will become more sustainable in the long term, as the percentage of the population able to work out their own preventive and self-care increases.

Miscellany

1. In the news: they might change the law to make it easier to perform a citizen's arrest. Missing from all the coverage I've seen: how do you do a citizen's arrest anyway? I haven't the slightest idea, but all the coverage seems to be assuming that you already know how.

2. Via Slap:

The United States effected new regulations on Tuesday that finally allow gay people to have the hospital visitation rights as straight partners.

Until Tuesday, hospitals participating in the Medicare and Medicade federal programs were free to deny hospital visitation rights to gay couples because they weren’t considered family members. With the new regulations, patients are allowed to designate whomever they choose as visitors.

But this raises a big question that I haven't seen anyone mention among all the gaiety: why weren't patients allowed to choose their own visitors in the first place??? What if you want to see your best friend? What if you don't want to be alone with your abusive spouse who put you in the hospital in the first place? What if your personal hero unexpectedly drops by? How on earth could people smart enough to become medical professionals and experienced enough to rise to a level where they make policy ever think such a blind blanket policy is appropriate?

3. Apparently some kids have been throwing things and yelling homophobic slurs at people in the gaybourhood. The first thought that enters my mind: they should be banishèd. In the Shakespearean sense. If they're going to bring that particular flavour of immature closed-mindedness to the places where everyone goes to make it Get Better, they should be forced to get out of our space and go live out their adolescence in a more closed-minded place.

Of course, that isn't an appropriate reaction on my part. I'm an adult and they're not, so it's my duty to be able to understand why they're acting this way and craft an effective and compassionate response that enables them to continue enjoying the same gaybourhood privileges as everyone else while convincing them to stop ruining it for others. Two of my core values are in there: noblesse oblige by the party with more agency towards the party with less agency, and working towards making it possible for everyone to enjoy what privileges I enjoy.

But I can't do it. My brain won't bend that way. I understand intellectually that it should, but it doesn't. And the reason why my brain won't bend that way is it's still recovering from the damage inflicted by my own bullies. And so the cycle continues...

Is Web 2.0 making information less accessible?

I recently learned that an excerpt from an upcoming book I'm looking forward to is only available through an iphone app. Despite the fact that it's promotional material trying to make me want to buy the book, it isn't on the internet anywhere. And because it's specifically an iphone app, people who don't have an iphone, ipad, or ipod touch can't get it at all. (I tried installing the app on my ipod touch, but it turns out the preview is available only the US, which is a whole nother rant.)

When Eddie Izzard first started his last US tour in 2008, I could do a google blog search the day after each show and find multiple reviews of each gig, or at least what he was wearing and which wikipedia entry he looked up. By the time he got to Canada in 2010, internet trends had moved away from blogs more towards Facebook and Twitter, so you couldn't necessarily find comments on any given show. They were all buried in people's Facebook walls, ungoogleable to the outside world. Not the most important thing in the world, obviously, but it was information I was looking for and could no longer find.

Blogger blogs, like mine, are very googleable. As a result, I get a lot of hits from people googling about things like the difference between La Senza and Victoria's Secret bras or how I connected my computer to my monitor. These things are helpful to people, and they wouldn't be able to find them and benefit from what I've learned if I'd posted my discoveries on a Facebook wall or Twitter feed instead.

One of the most egregious misuses of Facebook is promotional pages (either commercial or activism) that require you to join or "like" them (or whatever they're calling it now) to access the content. Apart from its inherent ridiculousness (if you don't let me see the information about why your group is of interest to me, I'm never going to join it), it renders information completely inaccessible (and ungoogleable) to casual passers-by, especially as more and more organizations move towards Facebook as their primary/only web presence. On top of that, my employer (and a number of others, I understand) blocks access to Facebook from office computers. So if I'm translating about an organization and I need information about them, I can't get at it.

I totally understand why you might want to keep your online presence limited to a select group of people, but I'm worried that as more user-created information is put on friends-locked walls or in ungoogleable apps, we might be not only losing access to existing information, but losing the ability to determine what information exists. Even though Google can't access all existing information, it can almost always confirm that the information exists somewhere I just can't get at straight through the internet. For example, the existence of academic papers has been googleable every time I've looked, even if I have to go through a library to get them. What if we lose this ability?

Kudos to Sesame Street!

Kudos to Sesame Street for a completely non-triggering depiction of a spider! The video is here (not embedding in case there are people who trigger more easily than I do), showing Jim Parsons teaching the audience the meaning of the word "arachnid" with the assistance of a blue muppet spider.

I don't know if this is by design or just a happy coincidence, but nearly everything that triggers visceral fear has been eliminated. It doesn't descend from the ceiling, it walks on from the side. And it doesn't walk on with its eight legs (thus creating that terrifying motion), it enters nondescriptly on invisible legs as most muppets do, with the exact same movement you'd find on Grover or Kermit. It has two eyes and a toothless mouth arranged on as human a face as you'll ever find on a muppet. It's blue. If it weren't for the eight (motionless) legs on its back, it could be a ladybug. Or a hunchbacked anything muppet. I had a brief demi-second of squick when Jim Parsons touched it (because EWW! He TOUCHED IT!). But then the blue guy said "You kind of freak me out" and that made me laugh and the squick was gone. It was far better executed than I'd have thought anything involving an arachnid could possibly be.

There is a parenting theory wherein, to prevent children from developing a fear of creepy crawlies, you talk to them about how good and interesting they are and try not to show any fear yourself. During the brief time between when my parents started doing this and when I had my first phobia incident (story is #3 here), it seemed kind of phony and artificial, as though they knew something and weren't telling me. But Sesame Street actually achieves this, by doing something that's completely natural within the Sesame Street universe and portrays the spider as harmless and friendly (and this despite the fact that Jim's first reaction is to scream), without using any imagery or elements that would trigger a congenital phobia like mine.

As an easily-triggered arachnophobic, I appreciate how incredibly difficult a balance this is and I wouldn't have thought it possible to do well, so kudos to Sesame Street for pulling it off!

(Props to @BroadwayProfe for knowing me well enough to know I'd appreciate this despite the subject matter, and for presenting it carefully enough that I could make an informed decision to watch and take precautions to avoid triggering.)

Patriarchy: ur doin it wrong

This train of thought started with something I heard years ago about people living under the Taliban in Afghanistan. Apparently women weren't allowed to leave the house unaccompanied by a male relative. My first thought is this has to be inconvenient for the men too, because the women can't even go to the market or do errands without a chaperone. This didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. If I had a spouse whom I saw as subservient to me, I'd totally be making them do all the errands!

Then, several years after I learned this, I was watching Big Love. Nikki (the most fundamentalist of the wives) thinks its inappropriate for her sister-wives to have jobs, on the basis that they should be taking care of the family. But that would leave Bill (the husband) with at least 10 (maybe more, depending on the season) mouths to feed single-handedly. And he's an entrepreneur! Surely it's of value for at least one of the wives to keep herself employable (as Barb, the first wife, does, being a substitute teacher) in case the business fails!

Then I saw this article on an evangelical movement where daughters are expected to stay in their parents' home until marriage and basically serve as additional homemakers rather than going to school or having a job. But how many homemakers do you need? I know that in my own family, if I thought I should be living with and serving my parents, I would be far more useful to them by bringing home my salary than by additional homemaking. Even if they had put me through university, they would have recouped their investment quickly.

They wouldn't have to completely subvert their dogma to make these changes either. The husband/father could still retain his role as head of household and decide who will work in the home and who will work outside the home, dictate or veto specific career paths, etc. It's like the men who created these patriarchies are really excessively disproportionately insecure in their dogma and their own place within that dogma. It surprises me these cultures can continue to exist for so long despite this insecurity - and it surprises me that this insecurity persists despite the longevity of the cultures.

Things They Should Invent: client-directed bank account flags

Being childfree with poor people skills and centenarian ancestors, I'm operating the assumption that I won't have anyone to help me in the last couple of decades of my life. So I've been watching how my parents are helping my grandmothers, and trying to figure out how I will do those things independently in my old age, even if I'm losing my faculties at the time.

One of the things my parents help my grandparents with is managing their money, so I've been thinking about how I could make my money manage itself as I deteriorate mentally. It would be easy enough to set up automatic deposits and payments, ensuring that I don't have to remember to pay bills and don't get myself evicted through my own forgetfulness. But how can I keep myself from spending too much money?

Currently, I don't use a tight budget where I'm only allowed to spend $X on clothes and $Y on food etc. My system is I'm allowed to spend money on whatever I want, but the balance of my primary account has to stay within a certain range. If it goes below the bottom threshold, I have to stop spending on everything but food and immediate necessities (and budget carefully on those) until it goes back up into the acceptable range. This system works well for me.

What I'd like to be able to set up to duplicate this when I'm older is have the bank's computer alert me when my account balance goes below the bottom threshold. Using today's technology as a general example, it could be a smartphone app. You get an alert when your balance gets too low, and maybe a little red light glows on your phone to remind you. If you're spending money uncharacteristically, something could pop up pointing out why this is uncharacteristic and asking if you're sure. (For example, if you're grocery shopping today even though you did a full grocery shop yesterday, this system would catch it.)

This would all be completely optional, of course. The nature and thresholds of the alerts would be entirely of each person's own choosing (and maybe they could have some presets for people who are already unable to make sensible choices for themselves.) The responses to crossing the threshold could also be customized: maybe it just alerts you, maybe it prevents you from spending that money for 24 hours, maybe it alerts your caregiver, maybe it makes you talk to a bank representative.

Beyond the problem of people who are losing their faculties, this could also be useful for people who have trouble with financial self-discipline. For some people, a little glowing light reminding them that they're running low might be enough to stop them from making that impulse purchase.

On Money for Nothing

1. I have never knowingly heard Dire Straits played on the radio in my life.

2. The version of Money for Nothing I have (origin unknown - acquired in university, back when it was briefly trendy for people to host internal FTP servers to share all their music and movies with everyone else in res) doesn't contain the offending verse, so I didn't know until just a day or two ago that this song even contained a slur.

3. I have no objection to not censoring individual words or not censoring songs based on individuals words. However, if they are going to censor based on individual words, I think slurs should be censored. I'm far more offended by slurs than by the word "fuck". I was shocked that the radio edit of Cee-Lo's Fuck You still contained the N word. Yes, I'm aware of the cultural conventions surrounding use of that word, but they changed the lyrics to circumlocute a word I use all the time while keeping a word I would never use. That doesn't seem right.

4. I've had this fricking song on my head for like 3 days straight! Get it out!!!