climate change activist and science communicator; photographer; mapmaker
Posts where I spout off on one topic or another
I wrote before about how Google’s “Don’t be evil” slogan is really the minimum requirement for such a powerful organization.
Jacob Mchangama, a Danish human rights lawyer, has put this in a nice way: “The dream of all dictators is to know as much about you as Google does”.
Incidentally, that is all the more reason for companies like Google to refuse to comply with illegal search requests from governments.
Living things are frequently presented with choices that involve a time trade-off. There is an immediate effect, and then there is a delayed effect. For example, you can quit your job today because you hate it, but may need to deal with delayed effects in a few weeks when your rent comes due, along with cell phone bills and all the rest. Sometimes, the delayed effect involves a different creature entirely from the immediate effect. For instance, a person assembling an automobile can do a shoddy job of assembling the steering or braking system, leaving some hapless future driver to deal with the consequences.
When the space of time between the two effects is long, there is more of an incentive to ignore the delayed effect. You might not be around (or even alive) to experience it. The same is true when the delayed effect is uncertain. Presented with the choice between something 100% likely to pay off right now, but only 50% likely to have a cost in the future, there is an incentive to take what you can get right now.
The biggest incentive exists when the creature that will suffer the consequences is totally unrelated to you. This situation is omnipresent in politics. Politicians are judged on the effect they seem to be having right now. Little consideration is given to consequences down the road and, by the time any such consequences have arisen, the politician and the people who voted for them are likely to be long gone, or at least no longer associated with the situation in the minds of the public. Also, because decisions impact one another, responsibility for outcomes usually gets hopelessly muddled. What actually occurs on the long-term is the cumulative consequence of choices made by different individuals, firms, and governments along with a large dose of random chance. A particular outcome – like a firm going bankrupt – cannot usually be attributed to a single cause. Rather, it must be said that various policies at different levels of government had an effect, along with managerial choices and technological change, not to mention relevant developments in other countries, etc.
All this seems to pose the risk of creating dangerous ratchet effects, where movement in one direction is possible but movement in the other is impossible or unlikely. While there may be situations in which the temptation to make some easy money in exchange for causing long-term problems will be rejected, those opportunities are going to keep arising and the people calling for a conscientious approach will not always win out. Indeed, they are likely to fail quite often, given that the people chasing the quick buck will quickly end up with goodies for themselves and for their supporters. A community might be able to resist the temptation to blow up a local mountain to access the coal inside on a series of successive occasions, but the choice not to do so is always temporary. By contrast, the one time when they decide to go with the dynamite approach closes off any possibility of restoring things to how they once were.
Whereas we have a strong personal interest in looting the future for our own immediate benefit, there is only really our sense of moral and aesthetics that holds those urges in check. Those senses often turn out to be very weak. Furthermore, the world will tend to select against people who take the long view. In the near-term, they seem like spoilers who forced everyone else to pass up a good opportunity. In the long term, the causes of outcomes are all muddled together, so the people who urged restraint probably won’t get any credit for what they protected. They also may not be around to benefit from any credit, if it is provided.
None of the ideas here are new, but the cruel logic I am trying to express seems to be extremely powerful and one of the strongest things working against humanity in the long term. If we are going to survive another 10,000 years, we are going to need to learn to discipline ourselves, and to support those who impose discipline upon us. We cannot just keep looking out for our personal short-term interests and hoping things in general turn out for the best.
When it comes to recreational drugs, the objective of policy should be to prevent suffering while respecting the sovereignty individuals possess over their own bodies and minds. Our current approaches do not do that. Rather, they seem designed to either raise money or punish people. Neither of those objectives really serves the objective of reducing harm.
If you really want to restrict problematic usage of a drug, here are a couple of ideas for things you could do:
Imagine if convenience stores could only sell tobacco at cost. There would be no incentive to carry it, except perhaps the hope that customers who come in for tobacco will buy something with a mark-up on it as well. Requiring restaurants to sell alcohol at cost would hugely change the incentives they face. Right now, restaurants make so many profits from alcohol that the owners and servers both have a strong financial incentive to encourage people to drink. If they had to sell alcoholic beverages at cost, fewer restaurants would choose to be licensed and they would push alcohol on customers less. Given that alcohol is one of the most harmful drugs, that would have significant societal benefits.
Of course, there would be enormous resistance to any such policy. Restaurants and convenience stores want to hang onto their alcohol and tobacco profits, just as various organized crime groups want to hang on to profits from marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, heroin, etc. Still, society may well be better off in a world where drug policy seeks to encourage responsible use (which may mean no use at all) while simultaneously working to reduce the harm caused within society by drugs.
When I was a student, it was pretty common to be invited to a person’s home to sit on mismatched chairs and eat spaghetti on mismatched plates.
In post-student life, some people have gotten all fancy and started having ‘civilized’ dinner parties that set an unattainable standard for formality, complexity of food, and so on. I think it is plausible that this intimidates those of us who are less skilled and less well-equipped.
As someone who doesn’t expect to live in any place for more than a few years, I do not want to buy large numbers of matching things. I think I also preferred the cheap-wine-fuelled informality of student parties to the comparatively arid quality of many ‘adult’ parties. Some of that may be linked to the social sterility that Official Ottawa thrives at cultivating.
If things go unexpectedly well, my time in Ottawa will soon be over. Whether that is achieved or not, I think I should host a some-people-sitting-on-the-floor and no-fancy-appetisers-in-sight party sometime soon.
I have never had a driver’s license – just a new driver’s permit that I got in high school and which expired in 2003.
There is one practical reason why I have never acquired the legal authority to drive a vehicle on my own. While I can understand the justification for it, the new graduated licensing systems used in British Columbia and Ontario make getting a full license a big pain. There is a written test, multiple road tests, and progressively diminishing restrictions on what you can do with each kind of license. To begin with, you can only drive at certain hours and with a limited number of passengers of a pre-selected type. In high school, I had access to a vehicle and parents who were willing to practice driving with me. While away at university doing my undergraduate degree, I was a long bus ride away from those things and quite busy to boot. That has remained true as I went to Oxford for my M.Phil and came to Ottawa to work.
There is also a non-practical reason for my situation: I hate cars. They may actually be the one thing in life that makes me the most angry. Twice in Ottawa, I have been hit by moving cars while riding my bike. Taxi drivers are especially reckless and dangerous. Countless times, I have nearly been hit as a pedestrian. I have frequently been splashed with puddle water, slush, or mud by passing motorists. I have been kept awake countless nights by the growl of cars passing near my bedroom. I have frequently been annoyed by what an enormous percentage of the total space in city centres is devoted to the requirements of these dirty, dangerous vehicles. I have breathed toxic fumes from countless automobiles, and will suffer along with everybody else from the climate change they are causing.
To me, choosing to drive a car seems callous and selfish. It suggests that you put your own comfort and convenience ahead of the health and safety of the people around you, who you endanger with toxic emissions, greenhouse gases, and the ever-present possibility that your multi-tonne hulk of steel and glass will smash them to death. If I had my way, nobody would be allowed to drive in city centres. Rather, they could park at the edge and rely on some combination of non-motorized and public transport within the urban core.
One day, it may be necessary to get a license. There are a frustrating number of places that see a driver’s license as the preferred form of identification, and who will only accept a passport or health card after much effort and cajoling. A license would be useful for moving, for exploring the outdoors, for camping, and for travel. If the opportunity arises – and I have easy access to a vehicle and willing teacher – I will probably put in the hours and effort to get certified. But I will not aspire to drive often.
I am increasingly wary of Facebook. I don’t trust them with my photos, phone number, or full name. I worry about all the information they can extrapolate from my web of friends.
My hope is that Disapora will emerge as a less evil social network – one that supplies the considerable benefits of social networking, but with real respect for the privacy and interests of users.
Thanks to my friend Alison, I have an account on the alpha version of Diaspora. I have some invitations, so if anyone is especially keen to give it a try, they should let me know.
As shown in a video from the Canadian Press, Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff was asked whether he had ever smoked marijuana. Here is what I think he said in response:
I have smoked pot as a young man, yes. I did not. And it’s one of the reasons. And I urge young people not to repeat the experience. It did not ruin my life. I just think there are a lot more important and interesting things to do with your life, including a glass of wine after dinner. I mean, let’s all relax here.
The Globe and Mail captioned the video: “Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff admits he smoked marijuana when he was younger, but he says, he prefers a nice glass of wine.”
If that’s what it comes down to – a matter of preference – I feel obligated to ask about the severe double standard that exists in the law now. Ignatieff’s drug of choice is available in all of Canada’s finest restaurants. They will bring it to you for free in first class on Air Canada. And yet if you prefer the other drug he has tried, you risk being branded as a criminal, fined, and potentially imprisoned.
It doesn’t make sense to apply a harsh legal regime to drugs that are less harmful than alcohol. If we grant adults the sovereign right to poison themselves with alcohol or nicotine or caffeine, we should acknowledge the same right with regard to marijuana, MDMA, and other comparatively benign substances.
Walking around the other day, observing the slow emergence of spring, it occurred to me that there is another whole set of reasons to provide children with early and accurate sexual education, aside from their important right to understand their own bodies.
Briefly, it is impossible to understand nature, history, or biology well without knowing about sex. Why do plants have flowers? Why do birds and insects fly between them? Why do animals form pairs? Why do some species of bird have males that look very different from females (displaying sexual dimorphism)? Why is there such a variety of life forms on Earth? Conversely, why are there so many similarities between life forms on Earth? What defines the human species?
None of these questions can be answered in a satisfactory answer without reference to sex. Plants have flowers because sexual selection helps produce diversity, which improves survival odds. Plants bribe more mobile creatures into carrying around their sex cells (pollen), paying the bribe in the form of nectar. Animals often form pairs to ease the burden of parenting. Sexual dimorphism is reflective of differing investment costs in reproduction between sexes, as well as the way in which sexual selection can drive evolutionary development. Sexual reproduction has contributed to biological diversity, and yet the fact that many organisms need to perform the same basic tasks explains some of their similarity. Humans are the set of organisms that can mate and produce fertile offspring with one another.
Any understanding of nature that excludes sex is sure to be terribly impoverished. As such, it seems foolish to delay telling children about it until they themselves are starting to reach sexual maturity. It seems much better for it to be a fact of life they have learned accurate things about all along.
I have previously mentioned Put This On as an interesting fashion-themed blog. It seems worth pointing out that their fourth video ‘Grooming‘ is full of what I consider bad advice.
They suggest that the proper way to shave is to use shaving soap, a badger hair brush, and an old-fashioned razor. This is dangerous, takes forever, and involves terrorizing badgers.
You are much better off getting some shaving oil (like the kind sold by King of Shaves) and a modern razor like the Mach3. Shaving oil doesn’t hide your skin, so you are less likely to cut yourself, and a couple of drops per day is all that is required. It is quick, cheap, safe, and vegan-friendly.
Ira Glass recently produced an especially interesting episode of This American Life, talking about a particular drug court in the United States: Very Tough Love.
One potential advantage of the fiscal mess states like Canada and the United States have gotten themselves into is that it might help drive the advancement of more sensible drug policies. Our current approach is excessively punitive, fails to respect the sovereignty of the individual over their body, and is needlessly costly and destructive.