/travel/Thou Shalt Not Externalize
[from my recent flight to San Francisco]
If God had been an economic agnostic economist, he would have saved time by having only one commandment: Thou Shalt Not Externalise. Lying, adultering, killing, coveting: all impose costs on others and on society in general. Killing and other crime imposes the direct cost of crime onto the victim, as well as the social costs of policing and enforcement. Lying and adultery reduce trust in general, and contribute to the breakdown of families. Intuitively I think even coveting imposes a social cost, though I'm not sure exactly how.
A few years ago, I was mulling over some debates I had in university about free markets, the role of individual rights, the existence of group rights, and that sort of thing. I was waiting for a flight, which somehow always makes me a bit reflective — probably in anticipation of the period of calm, uninterrupted time that air travel often offers. Two women ahead of me were discussing flight prices, and per-item baggage fees (new in Europe at the time) and how they hated it, and I had a novel (to me!) thought: putting aside the philosophical rigorand the arguments about efficiency and minimal government intervention and maximal freedom and optimal wealth distribution and maximizing happiness and all that, most people simply don't like certain outcomes of market economics: the need to price shop and to be diligent about carefully worded agreements, the frequent power imbalances, and the intrinsic drive to externalize.
Since last time I flew, there are now per-checked bag fees in the US; this returns some of the true cost of baggage to passengers &mdash a properly capitalist move. The response of the passengers is to maximize use of carry-on bags. The plane can't actually support that when it's full, so the bags don't fit in the overhead bins and have to be brought back to the front through the narrow aisles to be checked —presumably for free — slowing down the departure time for everyone.
None of these actions are unreasonable; each is really very capitalist in nature, yet the outcome seems sour because the incentives are wrong.
I'm on an airplane again, reflecting: this is the most intense externalization of costs I knowingly participate in. It's a business flight and my employer buys offsets, but these still do not come close to internalizing the costs*. For many greenheads, this is "the one thing". "I try to be green, but flying is definitely one exception" is something I've heard a lot, as I've commiserated with likeminded people who struggle with the same stuff I do. Lately I've been thinking of that as analogous to "I support emancipation, so I've really cut back on my household slaves, but out in the plantations I just can't do without them." (It's in some ways very different, obviously. I said analogous, not equivalent.) It shows awareness and resistance to the externality, yet practically speaking I'm still emitting more than my own annual sustainable CO2e emissions during this one return flight which is all that really matters.
* Carbon offsets are priced based on the marginal cost of offsets in a world that's offsetting a tiny fraction of its total unsustainable CO 2e emissions. In order to fully internalize the costs you would need to pay based on the average price of offsetting or reducing our total unsustainable emissions. This is, at least, somewhere in the $50-$400/tonne CO2e range, much more than the $10-$20 of retail offsets .
New Albums from the Gallery
/life/nyc/Arrive
It's with a decided sense of irony that I'm finally writing the complementary post to the last one from a flight from JFK (New York) to SFO (San Francisco). But it's true — this morning I got a kitchen table, four chairs, a rocking chair, and a beanbag chair to supplement the boxes of stuff my dad brought down with him from Ontario (thanks dad!). It turned my kitchen from a depressing one-fork town to a proper-looking place of cullinary enjoyment, and gave me more than the suitcase-load of clothes to rotate through — hurray! Now I just need some food in the cupboards! Moving is "the one thing" I really really can't do independently 'cause I don't drive, and my moving karma is at an all-time low, so if I'm ever in the area when you need help with a move, please let me know.
It's good to be back at work, and I'm slowly settling into my new project and new location; it's pretty weird joining a team when you're the "most senior" employee (by start date) but are rusty and uncertain in your own knowledge from a long respite, and certainly in new turf with its own local culture. I'm not sure I navigated it superbly, but nor did I make an utter ass of myself. I hope. There are several former-Dubliners here too, which has been really nice for having a hook into the goings on of various teams and instant pints-after-work.
I've started learning about New York a bit — Hallowe'en night was fun and involved lots of ambling around lower Manhattan &mdasah; but between work, settling in, hanging out with my sister and her fam, I haven't explore much still. There's no rush though, and it turns out it's a pretty big place so it may take a while.
My apartment is good — I always expect one unanticipated (or, when you're lucky, anticipated!) quirk in any place I rent, and in this case the "Frankie" subway shuttle is louder than I expected: no big deal during waking hours, and it's totally tolerable for sleeping with the windows closed...hopefully by the time it's the season to have windows open I'm used to it. The neighbourhood is hard to gauge. I've met a few of my neighbours, but haven't had much reason to strike out in the immediate vicinity of my building.
I am delightedly shocked with the cycling in Manhattan. It's got a wonderful flow to it, and feels much safer than Dublin (with less attentive drivers making more sudden moves) and even Toronto (cursed streetcar tracks!). Most of my commute is on dedicated bike path on the Brooklyn Bridge (where tourists occasionally start walking across the bridge right in front of you and get a good fright) or the west side bike trail, which is basically uninterrupted cycling. It's really invigorating to have a long cycling commute again, and I'm already starting to be back in decent shape after the no-time-for-exercise election madness in September and October.
So yeah, I arrived, just before I departed again.
/life/sabbatical/Depart
I had arranged for my visa paperwork to be sent to my parents' place — I'd go there for thanksgiving, and maybe we'd drive down that weekend, or maybe I'd bring it back to Ottawa with me. Either way, the key was to try to be in Ottawa for the Tuesday night election results to roll in, and then to get back to New York on Wednesday, to start work on Thursday.
My papers didn't arrive on Friday. When the London office opened on Monday morning, I got a tracking number which said it would be delivered on that day by 17:30. Not bad, I hoped: I'd be able to catch, at worst, the overnight bus to Ottawa, and be in the office for election day. But 17:00, then 17:30 came and went. I called the London office of the courier company, and they said it was maybe misrouted. By Tuesday morning, it turned out it had gone to Windsor instead of Orillia and would take another day.
After much scrambling, I decided to redirect the package to Ottawa, to get ahold of a high-quality scan of the original, and then to bus my butt to Ottawa. I'd get there just in time for the election night party, and then try my luck at the border crossing the next day. One of my friends-from-Finland who now lives in Ottawa with her fella has family in Binghamton, NY, so she was going to take me across the border and visit family. Good deal for all, assuming the border crossing was seamless.
The election night party was...well, we lost our only seat, didn't come really close anywhere, and increased our vote by less than 50%. The party was still fun, but there was certainly a degree of deflation. However, some further analysis gives a pretty good impression...not the success discontinuity that I had come to hope for, but strong steady gains. I think we left around 3am, and I finally made it to bed by 4am. At 7:30, alarm clocks started going off; by 8:15 I was out the door to head to Avis to get our rental car. We took care of that, picked up my stuff, and rolled out.
Fingers crossed, we got to the border. I have only done one land-border crossing in my adult life, and I've never applied for a US visa, so I only had a rough idea of how it would go down. Basically, you talk to the normal border guard, he gives you a yellow piece of paper with your plate numbers on it, and you pull off and go into an office. By then, they have your car keys, your passports, and one (of three) copies of the visa paperwork, so you're pretty stuck. They took my paperwork, and mostly just disappeared, popping out to ask a few questions, then to collect a once-in-a-lifetime 500USD "fraud charge," (presumably you have to pay it again if you are trying to use a different identity. ha.) and to take my fingerprints on the fancy scanner machine. They were friendly and efficient and clear about how the visa worked. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised by the whole experience, having braced for the worst.
From there, we drove on to Binghamton, I boxed up my bike and repacked my stuff (it was pretty hastily and hungoverly packed) and I caught a bus onwards to New York.
(Note that this marks the end of my sabbatical; if you've got a sabbatical-specific RSS subscription, it will end here; consider the general feed.)
/life/sabbatical/Asthma and Bogus Surveys
A combination of a precipitous drop in exercise, decreased dietary quality, stress, a cold, and an encounter with fresh oil paint seems to have exacerbated my asthma over the last week. I had a minor cease-up this morning, so decided to get a script for some tasty tasty salbutamol (aka Ventolin). I went to one clinic, but it looked like it was going to take about two hours, so I went to another in the same chain 'cause they allegedly had a five minute wait (hah!).
Anyway, when I finally got to sit in a room, they asked me to fill out a survey. "Meh, sure, I have nothing else to do." Name, address, home phone, hmm..this isn't very anonymous.
"Which of the following applies to you?" Aha! The survey proper!
"I am concerned with excessive hair growth and would like to have it removed." Umm. no. next.
"I would like to diminish the appearance of vertical lines on my lips." Hmm. I don't even know which way my lip-lines run.
"I would like to enhance the size of my lips." This survey is very focused on my lips.
Five more bullets, and then "I have no cosmetic concerns." Yeah.
How bogus.
/life/sabbatical/Onward Journey
I took a ring with two keys on it, spun it off my keychain, and placed it on the countertop. I picked up two shoulder bags and two canvas bags, closed the door behind me, and left. Two couches and a foam mattress sat on the downstairs patio along with a couple bags of magazines — the last remnants of a flurry of freecycling. (The result was good: less than two "supplementary" large garbage bags of waste from two years of living.)
I often wish I had a timelapse photo of my keychain: a solitary bicycle key through highschool, the long UW-branded lanyard from first year that I spun around incessantly; the various sets of housekeys, eventually attached to my pocket knife, and then its progressive decay from an unforgiving life in my pocket; periods, like now, when there's a chaos of loaned keys from places where I'm staying; and still, brief times where the only key is for a bike lock...somehow these changes uniquely represent the transactional points in life.
I'm on a bus now, to Ottawa, back to the election campaign. In about two weeks, I'm going with my stuff to NYC, and then popping back up to finish off the campaign. Then begins my onward journey, on October 15th, to New York, for real. To the United States, a place I once thought I'd never work. To Google, and a new project and a new team. To a city absorbing the collapse of a major industry. To a country on the brink of a potentially game-changing election. To live in the same town as my sister for the first time in nearly ten years.
To my onward journey.
/life/sabbatical/Credit Card Fraud
Yesterday I looked over my credit card, and noticed a charge I didn't recognize. A few phone calls later and it turned out someone had been using my card to buy wireless time in Toronto.
One of the merchants (who will rename nameless) erred somewhat in giving me the details of the purchaser — probably a violation of their privacy policy, notwithstanding the fraud — which included a phone number one digit off from mine (the phone is currently off), an email address @live.com, and an address that turns out to be a bike shop in Toronto.
Visa was prompt and effective, even promising to investigate the oldest fraudulent charge which was over three months ago. I'm surprised that they got away with it; it seems like the fact that they used a name, email and phone number that weren't mine would enable Visa to shut down that purchase, if the merchants were sharing that information.
The whole thing reminded me of this YouTube clip:
/life/sabbatical/A (Novel?) Pure CSS Image Rollover Technique
CSS:
a.rollover { background: no-repeat -9999px -9999px; display: block; }
a.rollover:hover { background: no-repeat top left; }
a.rollover:hover img { visibility: hidden; }
HTML:
<a class="rollover" style="background-image:url('blog-roll.png')" href="/blog">
<img border="0" alt="blog" src="blog.png"/>
</a>
This is a variant on other techniques I found. By setting the a tag to be a block-level element, it gets the size of the contained image; by setting the background by offsetting it, you get preload; by setting the foreground but using visibility:hidden (as opposed to display:none) it keeps its size. You also get a single point of truth for the button: image, rollver image and alt tag are all in the same place. Finally, this works everywhere I tested it (Safari 3.1.2; Firefox 2 and 3; IE6 and 7).
There are a few gotchas: don't be lazy and set background instead of background-image in the style tag, because that sets the other background CSS back to the default, specifically repeat:repeat. The images need to be the same size, pretty much. If you haven't cleared borders around images, they might be a problem, too.
I dunno if this is actually novel, but I didn't see it as I looked around. The (IMO less natural and more fiddly) technique of using a single image and changing the offset seems to be more popular.
/life/sabbatical/Bell Canada Sucks -- I'm leaving!
I called Bell a few days ago to cancel my cell phone plan. It was a twelve (12) month contract, and I'm pretty sure there was a 30 day cancellation period. After the identity verification, the conversation went roughly like this:
Me: I'd like to cancel my cell phone plan.
Her: When would you like cancel it?
Me: Ideally, September 30th, but if it has to be at the end of a billing period, then September 19th or whatever it is.
Her: Okay. We can do it for September 30th. That's after your contract period, so you should call back on September 19th.
Me: I believe I'm required to give 30 days' notice, and since there aren't thirty days after the end of my contract, I'm not sure that will work.
Her: What day do you want to cancel?
Me: September 30th if I can, but the 19th is fine.
Her: Okay, well, for the 19th, here will be a fee for cancelling early.
Me: I don't understand. It was a twelve month contract, I'd like to cancel it after 12 months.
Her: Yes, there's a fee of $100 because you're future-dating the cancellation during the contract period, so you're terminating during the contract.
Me: Can you explain that to me? I just want to terminate my contract at the end of it.
Her: Yes, so there's a fee for cancelling early.
Me: That can't be; you can't charge me an early cancellation fee for ending a twelve month contract after twelve months. Is that really what you're trying to do?
Her: Yes, there's a cancelation fee for that.
Me: Okay, can I speak with your supervisor please?
It was the fastest and fiercest I've ever gotten angry with a telephone person, partly because I saw it all coming, and I'm generally ticked at the horrible customer service and pricing and market manipulation in telecomms in Canada.
It took a couple minutes, and then the same voice came back:
Her: Sir?
Me: Yes.
Her: Okay, it looks like we can go ahead and do that for you.
Me: Oh, great! So cancelling Sep 19, and no fees?
Her: Yes. Can I ask why you're cancelling?
Me: I'm leaving the country.
Her: Oh, forever?
Me: Well, for a while.
Her: Okay, you will be disconnected on September 19th. Anything else I ca--
Me: Great, thanks. That's all, then.
Her: Good bye.
Weird. What happened while I was on hold? My best guess is she played back some of the call for the supervisor. My tone was extremely curt, and I had said "you can't charge me an early cancellation fee for ending a twelve month contract after twelve months" with great conviction, mostly 'cause I felt..err..great conviction.
It really seems like they were just fishing for me to go along with another month or whatever. The transcript above is actually substantially less ambiguous than the original conversation.
This all stems from the fact that I'll be moving to New York in late September. I'm going back to Google after a reasonably successful leave. Canada's my ultimate home, and I think Toronto in particular, so I'll be back often to say h'lo.
/life/sabbatical/Letter to Minister Prentice
I just fired this letter off to Jim Prentice, who tabled the rather vile Bill C-61 on Canadian copyright dereforms. I'm not sure if it's all properly addressed, but then I realized I really shouldn't have to care.
Hon. Minister,
As a Canadian citizen, I'm disappointed by the lack of balance in Bill C-61. The balance in copyright policy should be struck by governments, with strong provisions for fair dealing and personal use to maximize art and the enjoyment of art. Certainly, a "balance" should not be left to corporations shielded behind legal buttressing of so-called "digital locks".
When I buy a DVD, I should be able to format- and time-shift it, regardless of the existence of digital locks. To call this a "very technical issue" as you did in your interview with The Search Engine is disingenuous; this is a simple issue that will affect Canadians in their day-to-day lives. Indeed, since a truly effective digital restriction system would prevent the fair dealing that's inherent to the social balance of copyright law, it's unclear to me why they should even be permitted in Canada. These problems only scratch the surface of what's wrong with Bill C-61, but I'm surprised something so clearly out of balance was tabled in the House of Commons.
As an active citizen, I participated vocally in the last round of national copyright consultations, and I'm disappointed and distressed that the lessons learned then were ignored, and no further public consultation was held. I strongly support thriving art and culture in Canada, but I certainly don't believe this bill will serve small artists, nor does it serve consumers.
Sincerely,
Rob Ewaschuk
Toronto, ON
In other news, Toronto Pride Parade 2008 was super fun, World Wind Energy Conference 2008 was super learnful, Canada Day in Ottawa was a giant party of red and white and sunny green grass fields, I think our mouse is really actually gone, Trev, Krista and Phil visited from Dublin and it was good, and summer in Toronto is lovely.
/life/sabbatical/A Good Day
Yesterday was a good day. I spent two hours working with the local Green Party candidate on the permanently soon-to-launch new website, with great productivity in terms of deciding what content to put up, and where to draw the lines around duplicating the central Green Party website.
Then I got a call from Jesse and we had a good lunch at Fresh -- the Ninja Bowl has the tastiest preparation of tofu I've ever had.
Then I went into Pembina and did some actually-good work, which I'd been struggling to do this week. Then it turned out there were two events at the Center For Social Innovation, where Pembina has its office. The first was a "speed geek" event, where you went table to table for five minutes each, hearing about what people are doing. Then there was a free-beer party for a long-time Environmental Defence guy who was about to start his own legal practice.
The "Speed Geek" event was a fascinating examination of leverage. Jeff presented Borealis Offsets, who are doing tree-planting for carbon credits. They're selling
"80-year carbon", which means that they sell today carbon to be absorbed over the next 80 years (unless those trees
burn, or are eaten by pine beatles, or the land is illegally logged, or..) In the offsets biz, this is a pretty
unpopular practice from what I can tell, but they still seemed to be getting going and planting trees pretty cheaply.
He said they'd shift to one-year carbon as soon as it was cheap enough to do so; present voluntary carbon offset prices
are in the $6-$10 per tonne CO2e* range. He had an interesting argument that, since we were already over the 350ppm CO2 that we need to safely end up at, emissions-reductions credits were
bogus since we necessarily must do that anyway, and the only realcarbon credits are true net-sinks of carbon, not
just net-reductions.
Jenny was representing a large but informal network of youth workers and researchers. It reminded me how little I know about working with people who aren't colleagues or peers or customers or teachers, but children or youth or troubled people or the elderly. They seemed to be almost forming non-labour union, objecting to the repeated bogus "consultations" from the government that went nowhere - though that certainly wasn't a central message, it was clearly something she felt very strongly about.
But by far the most interesting group was Markets Initiative. In some sense, they were a free-marketers nightmare in terms of what they demonstrated. Essentially, 10 or so years ago, they walked into the paper industry, and asked paper mills why they weren't making more recycled paper and paper using sustainably harvested pulp, and the industry said there was no demand. They went to the publishers, and asked why they weren't buying, and the publishers said that it was a boutique product, and far too expensive. Markets Initiative got publishers to issue policies over a large (years) timescale about ramping up recycled paper usage, so the mills had a clear demand signal. They also got authors to sign on, requiring that their books be published on Ancient Forest Friendly (AFF) paper. That's a designation, not a certification, meaning (I think) that it's not monitored and audited as tightly, but they do depend on the Forest Stewardship Council for the certification of sustainable forests.
The acheivements of a small group of people in greasing a market effect were phenomenal, aided in no small part by the concentrated clout of the authors - Margaret Atwood, J. K. Rowling -- as opposed to the much more diffuse clout of the book-buying public. But, they basically had to do all of this work not-for-pay to get it to happen, acting as free environmental and business development consultants to smooth things along. To me, it's a testament to the amount of market inertia, especially where costs are basically totally externalized, even in the presence of strong signals. The most recent Harry Potter book was published on fully AFF paper in 22 countries, and the presses were halted in Finland by Rowling because they weren't using it. Cool!
After the party dwindled, a fella I know from the Green Party and a CSI guy who works for Carbonzero and who is of asian descent talked about racism, multiculturalism, the subtle semantics of context in questions like "where are you from?", "where did you grow up?", "what's your ethnic background?" and whether (as I often think and hope) Canada, and especially Toronto, and especially the core, is finally entering a post-racist period, where your skin colour (though not where you grew up, or where you were educated) is finally becoming irrelevant.
In other, less world-altering news, I've found some time to work on Learning Cubes (formerly and maybe futurely known as pbrain, but all the good domains are taken), which is basically online collaborative flashcards for learning things that require brute memorization like languages.
* tonne CO2e means "tonne of Carbon Dioxide or equivalent"; since some gases like HCFCs are actually have a much more potent greenhouse effect than CO2, you can offset a tonne of CO2e for a much smaller amount of HCFCs. Either the IPCC or Kyoto (or both?) have conversion rates to use.
