Category Archives: Random Thoughts

Buying Toilet Paper / Poverty is Expensive / Financial Success as a Virtue

So I bought toilet paper recently, because it finally came back on sale (for context to anyone reading this in the future, for some reason there was a run on toilet paper at the onset of the pandemic). But all that to say, we hadn’t needed to buy toilet paper since January. Part of that is because when stuff is on sale I’ll just buy a ton. It’s not like we might stop using toilet paper, or that the toilet paper is going to go bad or there’s a new version of toilet paper that will make all previous ones incompatible until you install a new firmware on your internet connected toilet.

But there’s a big privilege in that. I’m able to wait until the toilet paper goes ~50-60% off and stock up. I can even wait for it to go on sale at Costco (which is why I end up with 100+ double sized rolls and don’t need to buy it for months).

In my early 20s, I wasn’t doing so hot financially((this is an understatement, it was a disaster)), I remember once buy a 4 pack of toilet paper at giant tiger because well, there wasn’t any room on my credit card for any more. I couldn’t do the smart thing and buy it on sale in bulk. So I paid wayyy more per roll, which is ironic because I needed the money a lot more now than before. Poverty was very expensive.

Somewhat related, we have a belief as a society, one we hold onto dearly, that the world is a meritocracy. And don’t get me wrong, in some ways it is, yes, on average, if you work hard, you’ll on average do better than someone who doesn’t.

But the deck is stacked. Not only is the deck stacked, but we then use it as an excuse for discrimination / moral judgment. We don’t have as many people being outright discriminate, we kind of sneak it in via proxy, and often that proxy is an economic one.

We had (and still have) many systems in place that made it so certain groups weren’t able to build wealth, be it via underfunded schools (to say nothing of the residential schools clusterfuck((I don’t even feel like clusterfuck is a good enough adjective to describe that shameful history))), racist or classist policies for housing((some of you might think this is mostly related to the US since we hear about their stuff more often, but no, CHMC also helped racist shit)), unequal access to healthcare((I wouldn’ tbe able to make any money if I didn’t have my meds)), and many other ways I’m not even aware of.

And this is going to sound like a broken record, but this is one of the reasons I support a basic income. It’s not going to fix all that shit directly or undo the damages of the past. But it at least ensures everyone has a floor with which they can build on and it’s a good start to fixing the race and gender wealth inequalities.

There is no reason we have poverty in Canada, as Martin Luther King said:

Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will.
The poor are less often dismissed from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent.
[…]
The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity.
[…]
The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them.
The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

Wisdom vs Knowledge

I feel like I write this blog post every few months. Or maybe I don’t actually write / publish it, it’s hard to know what I’ve been thinking about writing and what I’ve actually written((http://stephboisvert.ca/2018/04/08/wisdom/))((http://stephboisvert.ca/2014/01/11/know-thyself/)).

At some point in life you start to learn about self actualization & self transcendence and the paradoxical way that self actualization leads to self transcendence. Somehow, having a better realization of one’s self leads to a realization that there is no real “self” without everything around it. We aren’t this “self” in a vacuum, we are part of something bigger.

It’s a bit like if you think about the human body as a collection of cells. While yes, the cells are all distinct and unique((Just as everyone named Chad is “unique”)) but really they form tissues that form organs that forms a body.

The cell has no concept of me. It doesn’t understand what a “Stéphane” is. And yet, there is no Stéphane without cells.

Anyway, the original subject of this post wasn’t supposed to be on self actualization and that, but rather on how often we come to learn things, usually waves hands in the air “deep meaningful things” about the state of the world, consciousness or ourselves. On how to be compassionate or on how to self regulate or on how we always alternate between the victim, the saviour and the villain.

But that wisdom is ephemeral. We forget. Someone cuts us off in traffic and we forget about the actor observer bias and we just muter to ourselves about their incompetence.

It’s not enough to “know” stuff. We need to live it. We need to integrate it in our daily lives. And to me, that is true wisdom.

Maybe the government shouldn’t be “Agile”

Folks in government love to have disclaimers everywhere that their opinion is not necessarily the one of their employers and the view presented here and their personal ones. I’ve always found that a bit tedious and unnecessary but since I’m going to post something slightly related to “Digital Government” I though I might as well just drink the whole kool-aid.

There was a good question asked on Twitter

But when reading some of the answers and from lurking at the #GCDigital hashtag, I’m not sure it’s the right question.((Also, to actually directly answer the question, I think it’s near impossible to be the “real” agile [as opposed to the “wagile” doing sprints inside a waterfall] ))

I posted a thread on twitter about it, because I think that’s what the cool kids are doing these days, but wanted to unroll it here. (And fix some formatting)

So my answer:

I wonder if that’s actually the right question. At times, it seems we’re focused on “Agile” and “Digital Transformation” but those things are meaningless. They are, at best, proxies of what the true goal should be.

In my opinion, the real goal is to deliver better services to people.

That’s it, point blank. All the other stuff, “Agile”, “Digital Transformations”, “Microservices”, “Cloud Native”, those are all distractions.

We sometimes get so focused on adopting the “best practices” from tech vendors promising the new buzzwords in nice packaging or trying to imitate other tech startups that we lose sight of the real goal.

Facebook has been agile, they use all of the tech buzzwords and all of the metrics and user research etc. So does Clearview, so does Twitter. The outcomes of those companies is not what I would want the Government of Canada to look like.

So why not focus on what we really want to achieve?
How can we serve people better in the government context?

I haven’t encountered anyone who was like: “If only I could fill out my EI claim on a serverless edge computing platform that had machine learning, was secured via the blockchain and developed via agile methodology”

The focus shouldn’t be how on do we try to change this massive institution’s project methodology to one that has been successful in the private sector.
Rather, I think it should be, how do we, in the given context((Let’s not pretend the GC is like a private enterprise. We have restrictions and parameters that, for better or for worse, are different from private enterprises)) serve people better? What will tell us that we have served them better? And from there, iterate on practices we think will achieve that outcome.

Because that’s the only really important part of agile. How do we iterate on processes that help us achieve our goal.

And the goal isn’t to be agile, the goal is to serve people better.

The ramifications A.I.

This is a bit of a cutesy title as A.I. or machine learning or deep learning or whatever the “buzzword du jour is” is just a fancy algorithms.

You’ll find countless books, presentations, articles and more on the dangers of algorithms but it’s always interesting to see it in action.

As many have demonstrated, the AI often just reinforces existing biases and power structures. A very simple example is Facebook. Most of the traffic to my site comes from Facebook, and posts have 2 real trajectories in terms of views. Either it will get ~10 views (usually something like plant pictures, or how it’s not that bad). Or it will get ~80-100 views, and those with > 50 views usually have a few things in common, they are usually negative, on negative topics, or gossipy.

What is that Facebook is showing my post to a few people, see how they react and then, if there’s some engagement, they start to show it to a wider and wider circle of folks. In effect, the posts you read of mine is impacted by the Facebook algorithm.

Having worked with many news organization, it’s understandable how they came to worship the algorithm and employ (mostly) snake oil SEO folks to try to appease the gods.

Anyway, that’s what I tell myself when a “good” post doesn’t get as much traffic 😉

We should probably all be vegetarian and other cognitive dissonances

I find people are strangely defensive about not being vegetarian or vegan (I’m neither). It’s almost as though accepting that we should probably eat less meat would imply that they are a bad person.

It’s logical in a sense, if you accept that we should be vegetarian, then if you’re not doing that, you’re clearly a hypocrite and just overall a bad person for not doing what is “best”.

This happens with pretty much everything. We have a way of polarizing ourselves, just to justify our decisions. That co-worker we don’t like? Well they must be a truly horrible person because if they weren’t, then we’d be an asshole for not being compassionate towards them. We do the same thing with relationships (I’m no longer with that person, therefore they clearly weren’t that great), and even with COVID (whatever your level of risk, you’ve justified it to yourself and everyone else is wrong).

While you may scoff and say that those things are silly and you don’t do those. You do, even unwittingly (skip to the part about the Monet prints, around 9 minutes in).

But what if you don’t do that? What if you sit with the cognitive dissonance?

Now you probably expect some BS about how that’s true wisdom and seeing the truth behind the world or something. But really, it’s just painful. To be reminded day in and day out that we don’t fit our vision of the ideal world. To be trapped in that self questioning, anxiety and mental anguish…. It’s hard to be judgy of people who don’t want to deal with it or are too tired to deal with it.

It’s not that bad

I feel like everytime I express something that isn’t pure bliss everyone freaks out. Which is strange because I feel like when things were really really bad in my life, I wouldn’t talk about it. Relatively speaking, things are pretty great. I have a job that pays well and is challenging. I’m not in any way going to get fired and the economy isn’t going to impact my job.

There’s like a bazillion things going right, not the least of them that I have a over-abundance of peas in the garden, so you know, things are pretty great.

But that doesn’t mean everything is all sunshine and rainbows and lollipops

Shit happens, and even if, in the scale of things, shit isn’t so bad, as humans we seem to have a bias to focus on the dangerous and negative things (probably evolutionary adaptation). So why not talk about them?

I find it’s dangerous not to talk about stuff. Even, (maybe especially) when we’re wrong about it. How else are we supposed to learn and grow? How else are we supposed to try to feed the more information out to the world to slowly arrive at a better approximation of the truths of the universe?

Anyway, thank you for everyone checking in, I really do appreciate it, and you don’t need to stop. Just understand that maybe everything isn’t hopeless bullshit 😉

First person bias

I don’t think that’s the right name for the bias I have in mind, but since googling isn’t showing me the one I’m looking for I’ll just call it the first person bias for the purposes of this post.

The problem is that we all live in our own heads and we interpret the information and everything in how it relates to us. Even when it doesn’t.

I’ve had a few posts now, some of them where I didn’t expect this and some where I did. For example, my post on personal libraries where I initially was like, shit, I think person X might think it’s about them so I reached out to them to tell them it wasn’t. Only to realize the next day that a few other people who would probably see it as me talking about them, and not you know, me talking about my own personal library.

While writing the post I was really so self involved that I didn’t really think about how others would think it’s about them. Like if I’m somehow spending my time sub-blogging((sub-tweeting)) about other folks. I’m too stuck in my own head for that.

Now there’s clearly a balance here, talking about stuff and not being aware of how others could perceive it is sub-optimal. And I think I agree that this should be something that “public” people should worry about. But it goes back to why I haven’t written in a while((you know apart from getting phone calls from the family asking if everything is okay)) and why kids have a finsta((fake instagram account so your parents can follow you on it))((Note to any kids reading this, you need to have 2 finsta accounts, so you can have some plausible deniability by revealing the existence of the decoy finsta account))

I wanted to end this post with a song, the one that is like “You’re so vain you think this song is about you” or something, but then, people would assume I’m calling them vain 😉

(Also, I couldn’t find the version of the song I knew… the original song is clearly not the one I thought it was)

On gaining weight

So I’ve been eating like shit since December. Now this is not super surprising in itself, I usually gain ~10lbs in the winter and then get back down. But right now I’m up 30Lbs from my last few years average. That’s basically going back more than half of what I’ve lost since 2014.

It’s in a sense embarrassing since I felt like I had this weight stuff under control. Now clearly there are extenuating circumstances, we have a pandemic, work is a shit show and my “love life” is a shit show((Before anyone panics, me and Nicole are very much happily married))

And it’s not like I don’t know why I’ve been gaining weight, it’s not like I’m eating well and exercising regularly and just can’t figure out where it’s coming from. I’ve gone back to eating carbs as a way of escaping dealing with shit and just this morning ate 3 bowls of Honey Nut Cherrios so you know, it’s pretty clear.

It’s also not one of those, I’ve gained weight but I’m still healthy, nope, doing a lot less exercise and I feel a bunch of things I haven’t felt in a while, some knee pain and back pain for example. Funny how dragging around an extra 30lbs 24 hours a day will do that to you.

I’ve made a bet with my father, that we’ll both lose 25lbs by December and whoever doesn’t achieve it does a substantial donation to the local food bank. In retrospect it’s a bit backwards in that I’m trying to not give money to the food bank, but I do think we’ll probably end up making the donation regardless but now at least there’s a bit of accountability.

Oddly enough, during this same time I’ve helped my brother lose 40lbs, clearly I just stole 30 of those for myself….

Why I haven’t been writing much

As I mentioned, I haven’t been writing much recently. The problem with the essence of a blog is that it’s allegedly an online diary. Now that works well and fine if you’re on livejournal as ZergMaster69 and no one has a fucken clue who you are. But the problem is that on a blog you’re exposed((that’s from 2015, but I said basically the same thing in 2017 and 2018 and 2018 again, and 2020 as well)) (you can hover over the footnote number to see the footnote inline). In real life you basically have a few set of archetypes you present yourself to the world with.

Take for example who reads this blog, there’s 4 general category:

  • Family((Mostly my aunts [Hi!]))
  • Co-workers / former co-workers((There’s a bias here to former coworkers who worked at Automattic who potentially followed my blog vs current co-workers who mostly have no clue I have a blog))
  • Friends((Current “real” friends))
  • Random acquaintances((Folks from twitter, high school, university, politics))

Now the problem here is that these people usually get wildly different archetypes and perception on who I am.

Let’s take my most popular post((Now there’s a longer story to that since I thought my parents knew, since I told my dad before we got married and asked him to tell my mom. He clearly forgot, so, you know, they learned from family members who use social media, I’m sure that was a fun time all around)) by far, I think part of it is folks love gossip, and that shit is ripe for gossip. I can only imagine family members((again, probably mostly my aunts)) sharing that via their chat group((potentially via fax machines)). That post breaks the whole archetype I presented to family, (most) co-workers and (most) random acquaintances. I’m sure basically 0% of them would of guessed it.

I’ve mostly not mentioned anything related to poly since because well, again the whole archetype stuff. Unlike Facebook where I can pick and choose who sees updates((and I probably will do that to be honest)) on a blog, well, it’s all public. And let’s be honest, I don’t really want random family members to ask follow up questions on my recent heartbreak, then again, I don’t think anyone really wants to talk about heartbreak with family members no matter the circumstances….

Anyway, all that to say, fair warning you might have to endure some sappy emo shit on this blog for a bit.