When me and my partner got married she decided to take my last name. I didn’t have a strong opinion on the matter. Truth be told I wanted us to both change our last name to something awesome like DragonHeart, sadly that got vetoed.

The reaction from some people to that decision is interesting in that some seem to assume if she took my last name we may be all about the gender stereotypes and she certainly couldn’t be a good feminist.

I think that misses the root goal of feminism which is that all genders are treated equally. In this case it’s the fact that she made the decision and not me that counts. Feminism doesn’t mean that she keeps her last name. It means that she’s empowered to make that decision on her terms.

With the same logic I don’t see how we can outlaw Hijabs or other religious garment in the name of “protecting” women from oppression. ( see Québec’s new law on the matter). It seems a bit like trying to combat theft by telling people they can’t have iPhones because people will steal them instead of stopping the person doing the theft.

If there is a case when someone is forced to wear something they don’t want to wear, whatever that may be, shouldn’t we stop the person doing the oppression instead of targeting the victim?

All that to say that the state and society should promote personal freedom ( within the constraints of certain responsibilities that come with those rights ) and not enforce some misguided decision regarding what personal freedom means for each of us.

I’ve day dreamed of blogging for a while. It’s always that my posts come out all perfect and logical, with great sources for all my arguments. You know, unrealistic expectations. The other thing stopping me if I think fear. The fear that I’ll write something and it be wrong or I’ll offend someone so much as to be publicly shamed. The odds of that are slim but I think the “safety” of Facebook, that only people you “know” can read your posts (if your settings are correctly set) is a part of why posting on Facebook is easier. I can just write something off, random thoughts and I don’t need it to stand the test of time and have it scrutinized by everyone who looks me up, either as a conference speaker in any potential future job applications or if ever I were to run for public office (The chances of which keep getting slimmer and slimmer). But I don’t think the fear of something should be a reason to not do something. The rational odds of something bad coming out of this are pretty slim, kind of like sky diving.

All that to say, I’ll be posting random thoughts here, and hopefully the public pressure of following up on this now that I’ve announced it will be enough to get me to stick to it.

I don’t think I’ll be auto posting to Facebook and Twitter as a general rule, but maybe the posts I think are worthy of being shared / read.

The Toronto housing market is in a bubble. Almost everyone seems to recognize that.

And yet in one article an economist said something I found  very interesting. Paraphrasing, they said that the bubble won’t bust dramatically because there’s no catalyst to set it off. Meaning unlike the 1989 Toronto bust and the 2008 US bust this will be a slow levelling off and not a huge bubble busting and surprising everyone. 

I think that’s a bit naive and optimistic. I think the catalyst will be self driving cars. Cars changed the way cities are built. I don’t think the subburbs would be as big a part of cities as they are now. I think self driving cars will lead to a similar revolution. I think I will drive (or ride as part of some sort of transportation service) in a self driving car in 5 years. I think over the next 10 years the preferences of where people want to live will be more and more away from downtown cores. Once people realize this, panic will set in and the new thinking will be that real estate in a downtown city is a terrible idea. 

I don’t think it will actually be the death kneel of realestate in Toronto. But I think it might just be what pops the bubble. 

Edit: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/3/20/cars-and-second-order-consequences has a good thorough breakdown of all the ramifications. He (probably wisely) stays away from predictions. 

Over the last few weeks I’ve seen a lot of people talk about what they think the reason for Trump winning the election is. Some of them more interesting than others. But I haven’t really read anything from anyone taking responsibility for the rise of Trump. (Apart from some fake news artists trying to boast).

Everyone’s too busy to find someone or something to blame. No one is looking inward in what they could of done to change the outcome of the US election.

With that in mind here’s what I could of done differently:

• I didn’t make calls to get out the vote
• I didn’t make calls to persuade people to vote for Hilary
• I only posted a few posts on social media about the election
• I didn’t reach out personally to friends I have in the United States to talk about why I supported Hillary
• I took for granted the election results because of polling

Hopefully some introspection will help me better influence the outcomes in the future.

The kind of people who read my blog (all 6 of you) probably know of the Dunning Kruger effect.

The general knowledge goes something like this graph:

Basically it starts that you know nothing but don’t know it and then you know stuff but don’t know stuff (often people will tell others about this part and explain that it’s the scientific evidence of the Imposter Syndrome [I’m sure I’ve been guilty of this])  and then eventually you know what you know.

Now that’s all nice and fun. But it’s actually not what was in the actual paper.
Here are the actual graphs from the paper:

That’s a pretty far cry from that graph I found while googling Dunning-Kruger.

It appears many other “wisdom meme” like this may be false such as the “fact” more money might in fact mean more happiness and that hedonistic adaptation and happiness might not be as strong as we thought. ( This all comes from a great post here: http://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/ ).

Now the goal of this post is not actually to talk about how wrong I am / you were (despite my clickbait title). What I actually think the goal of learning this should be is that we should be compassionate with one another. I see lots of people be it with the US election, Brexit, the migrant crisis, economic policies etc that are really demeaning towards people who don’t share their opinions. Now the thing is, odds are you are wrong on a great deal of those topics so be kind to others who disagree with you, because while they might be wrong, there’s a good chance you are as well.

I’m reading a book that talks about vulnerability. I think that is partially what I was trying to express in the previous post. Blogging is in a way letting yourself be vulnerable. The reasons we want blog posts to be air tight is because we are exposing ourselves. Others can come in and say things like: “I already knew all of that” or variations on what we said was not good for any number of reasons.

The truth is I never feel qualified to speak at conferences.

I just recently in the past few months pushed myself to do them, and at first I was sure no one would accept my submission, but I got a very high success rate. When I read up on the other presenters I’m always like wow this person did this, and that person did that. And I think I have a tendency to compare myself to all of them together, I think this a common thing we do with our “system 1” (from the Thinking Fast and Slow book). If you were to ask someone if they do it, they would be like, of course not that doesn’t make any sense. But in that moment, I think that’s what we do. Is it the imposter syndrome? Perhaps, I know I have many signs of it. And while I do think being humble is much better than being arrogant I think it’s sometimes hard for me to walk the line between humble and imposter syndrome. Maybe it’s the birds of a feather flock together scenario but it seems a common pattern in my friends.

A co-worker of mine (Matt Wiebe) has recently(ish) started blogging. I really enjoy reading the thoughtful posts.
I think as humans we have a tendency to forget when we didn’t know things or didn’t have the same opinion we once did. I often feel that anything I would write would be self evident to everybody and they’ve already had all these thoughts. And personal experience has also taught me that the quote “life is a journey that no one else can take for us” (find real quote). But I think I’ve also noticed that we can help others go thru the learning process a bit faster and a bit smoother than we did. In the past I always tried to help people in the past, and I still do, it’s just that way I go about it is different. I would previously feel like I had failed if I could not convince the other individual to heal themselves (in a mental health sort of way). It took me a long time to realize that it wasn’t more effort or less effort or anything I did that could impact someone to the point where they will change. I’ve had friends who were in exactly the same situation I had just been in, and that they had counselled me thru. When I gave them the same advice, they wouldn’t listen. It’s very hard to step away from things like this but I think we have to. All that to say that I think it is worthwhile to have a blog and to post things to share, either as reminders of things they already know or to help give someone the idea for something they can incorporate for themselves.

I think blogging is inherently hard because there is a different expectation than Facebook or Twitter. The medium, and our eexperiences with it (reading popular blogs for example) make it that we believe this is somehow more formal, that it has more staying power. Part of it (for facebook at least) may be the lack of the public being able to view your writing. We therefore want to polish it. We don’t want to write something that is not air tight. It’s easy to post a random thought that is not worked out to Facebook, but on your website? It feels like the bar is higher.

The NDP and the Green party have both announced some form of prescription drug coverage.

Canada is the only industrialized country that has medical coverage without prescription coverage. Now obviously it doesn’t need to be 100% covered for everyone but we need to at least have a sliding scale where you can actually pay for the medications you are prescribed.

This is a topic I’m really passionate about and I’ll explain why. Over a decade ago I was diagnosed with depression and generalized anxiety disorder. Looking back I’ve had it since I was very young. I used to vomit and feel physically sick every time I was anxious about something.

Around 2004-2005 I started freelancing as a programmer, I didn’t have consistent clients and it was hard to manage with the depression. My medications cost about $500 a month at the time. I didn’t make enough money to pay my rent and my medications in many of the months of those years. I was in debt and struggling to get by. I was very fortunate that my doctor gave me many free sample packs at the time to make sure I didn’t stop taking my medication cold turkey because of cost. I also had family members who lent me money when I really needed it.

A few years ago, in approximately the same time period I met a man downtown who was homeless, I talked to him and he mentioned that he couldn’t pay for his medication. He mentioned the name of the medication and it was the same on I was on.

After a few years I started feeling better and I had moved over to Quebec for the cheaper rent and to help my uncle with a property so I was covered by the Quebec Drug plan. That made it possible to stay on my medication.

I often think back to that man who I never saw again, and I think of how easily that could of been me. Had I had a few different bounces I could be homeless with no job. I’m very lucky that I have a great job that pays well and has great medical benefits and (and maybe I’m alone on this) I’m proud to pay taxes. And I want my taxes to go to helping others in situations like this. We often talk about homelessness and how it’s terrible and we should do something about it. But we rarely ask how this happened. Up to 74% of people who are homeless have a mental illness.

Even if you don’t agree that we have a duty to pay for people’s prescriptions and health care. Even if you were to be incredibly selfish and only think about yourself, economically it still makes sense. I was lucky to get some lucky bounces and I’m now healthy and a productive members of society, able to pay taxes, able to contribute back. Many other people who weren’t so lucky or privileged would love to be able to have a ‘normal’ life, to contribute to society, they would love the opportunity to be healthy and pay taxes.

Anyway you look at it, we need universal prescription coverage.