I agree. I’m retired. My working life was approximately bookended with two radically different “social value” jobs: turf farm labourer and “town man” (technically, public works foreman, but that doesn’t do justice to the reality of being the only employee).

In the first, I was helping to grow grass for people too lazy to put in their own lawns. I have difficulty imagining a less useful industry. For all the damage caused by the petroleum industry, we at least get energy and materials in exchange. Lawns? Give me a break.

In the last, I kept the water safe to drink, the sewage safe to return to the environment, the garbage off the street and properly landfilled, and the infrastructure in good repair.

When I look back at all the other jobs I did, only working for an ambulance manufacturer comes even close to having the same social value as that town man job. Most of the rest could easily have been wiped from the face of the earth and the net effect would be an improved society.

… and the people in a position to bring them heel that just turn a blind eye.

For anyone curious about how this might play out, take a look at Telus Health. Telus is a Canadian telecom company that has branched out into several health care businesses, from clinics to building and hosting¹ electronic healthcare records. There are currently battles over whether it is legal to force prescription fulfillment through Telus providers.

That’s right, a telecom company, that most reviled, least trusted sector of the economy, is trying to take over healthcare in a country with a (mostly) single-payer, tax-funded, (mostly) free at the point of delivery, public healthcare system. And they’re doing so successfully.

Amazon is actually late to the game.

(1) I don’t know for sure that they are hosting the records, but the fact that the word “Telus” shows up in the url makes it seem like like a reasonable conclusion.

Well sure it could. Isn’t that why there are Realtors running around Canada and USA promoting real estate purchases in the region?

Sick fucks. At least wait until you’ve wiped them out before you sell their property.

Yeah, point taken. The toxic fuckery I saw and experienced and probably propogated in school is likely why I’ve put in effort to be better.

I believe that a) the purpose of work is to enable us to fulfill our destinies and b) work, except for a very tiny percentage of people, is otherwise unrelated to our destinies.

In my case, there is no way that I’ll ever be able to feed and shelter myself by building boats and furniture; sailing, rowing, swimming, and fishing; playing with my kids and going for walks with my wife. Yet those activities are where I feel most at peace and most fulfilled and happiest. If working doesn’t leave me the time and money to do those things, then it’s just not worth showing up.

More experiments that are followed through to completion, with the results used to improve outcomes across the board instead of being repeated in an endless series of trials.

I went to an experimental high school in the early 1970s. Among other things they tried were:

• Multi-grade classrooms for the transition years from arithmetic to introductory algebra to pre-calculus. Not the traditional 1 teacher for 2-3 grades, but 3 grades with 3 teachers taking turns. Some of us moved between grades depending on what we mastered and what we struggled with. My perception was that about 1/2 would get through 3 grades in 2 semesters, 1/4 would get through 3 grades in 1 semester, and 1/4 would require the full 3 semesters. But they cancelled the experiment after 1 semester.

• Contract assignments in a history class. We were given the list of papers to submit at the start of the semester. Despite class running normally, we could choose to do the necessary reading and research to fulfil the contract as we saw fit. About 1/3 of us completed our contracts by halfway through the semester, then they didn’t know what to do with us.

• Work at our own pace with the promise that if we finished early enough, they would transition us to the next grade without waiting for the next semester. A few of us put together an alternative study group and invited others to join. About 1/3 of the class took 6 weeks to finish all the homework assignments and write all the exams with the lowest mark being in the high 80s. They decided that this meant there was something wrong with the plan, cancelled the experiment, and forced us to sit through the rest of the semester. Nearly half of those hard workers opted out of further education after high school and two actually dropped out without a diploma.

Thanks for putting exactly the nuance I was looking for! Symbols are important, but diversity disappears when we use symbols as a substitute for reality.

Thanks.

Hah, definitely not! 67 on my last birthday.

Nope. 67 and doing my best since high school to be inclusive in my thinking.

I guess I just don’t get how anyone other than a toxic fuck or at least a thoughtless stereotyper could say that most of what you point out of indicates gayness.

Someone else went through a “symbolic analysis” that helps me see some of it.

That flag is a horrible design, but how does something “look gay?”

I live about as close to the middle of nowhere as is reasonable for most people. You cannot escape any of that stuff, only reduce your exposure.

Especially people. It’s not “city people” who are annoying, but people in general. I don’t care who you are or where you live, you will always find someone annoying. Also, there is no city person so annoying as the one transplanting themselves to the middle of nowhere. :)

I’m more intrigued by the purple zones. 7-14 days late. I live a couple of hundred kilometers north of that big “late zone” next to Canada.

Springs don’t feel particularly late to me, although I also don’t have any real data. Farmers seem to be in the fields earlier than they used to, leading to harvest starting earlier than it used to. Gardeners don’t always wait for the end of May to plant the way they used to.

On the other hand, my record of pellet consumption (we heat using a pellet stove) shows our heating season getting longer. I just assumed that that was because we’re getting less tolerant of a chill in the air as we age.

I get so tired of “but that’s the system we have.” It’s just another way of saying “but we’ve always done it that way.”

There are other ways. Is it a challenge to find the right path to those other ways? Yes. Does that mean we should just never work towards change? No.

I’ll get on side with the idea that a tip strike is the wrong way as soon as someone offers suitable alternative tactics.

For myself, I live where the minimum wage for servers is the same as the minimum wage for other workers. As a result, I feel there is no particular need to tip. That doesn’t mean I never tip, but I never feel ethically or morally compelled. I refuse to patronize any establishment that has tip pooling based on the bill rather than on a tips collected. I refuse to patronize any establishment that includes managers and owners in the tip distribution. I refuse to patronize any establishment with mandatory tipping.

That is bordering on tautological. How do you suppose anyone would prepare in the absence of risk assessment?

Forward-looking, thoughtful individuals or even individual municipalities might take concrete action, but country- or continent-wide? Not a chance.

In addition, some of the mitigations will involve national and international regulations, standards, and projects that are beyond the reach of individuals and municipalities.

You say all that as if that is the only possible system. I can understand creating a system where tips are pooled for distribution to everyone who has no supervisory duties. But a system where a tip is assumed so that there is a possibility of actual financial loss should be illegal.

I bet if we could organize a widespread “tip strike,” the system, including legislation, would rapidly change in ways that make tipping unnecessary.

… and then there is drainage.

Our lot is positioned to collect all the runoff across a few acres. In itself, that’s manageable, but the septic holding tank is sitting under the trailer with insufficient height above the ground. Even that wouldn’t be a problem, but a new neighbour did some perfectly legitimate landscaping that causes a pool to form where runoff used to make its way directly to the creek behind our lot.

So now, every spring, I have to take a shovel and do drainage management to try to get the water running down the road instead of into our yards. It’s kind of fun in its own way, except that I cannot get people to understand that they have to stay to one side of the road, even if that means taking turns. Every time someone drives in the wrong place, it creates ruts that direct water to the wrong side of the road.

I just got in from trying to break up an ice dam that is causing water to run into our septic tank.

Thanks for tagging. I would have missed it.

It sounds like you’re on the right track. Unsurprisingly, we have some substantial differences, some based on the fact that we live in a park.

We are not allowed to have a septic field, so we just have septic storage tank. Getting an off-season (winter) pump-out is very expensive, so we do a lot to keep pump-outs to once a year.

• RV-style toilet for occasional guests
• composting toilet for us (only urine goes to the holding tank)
• clean grey water (most laundry, most personal hygiene, most dishwater) goes on our raspberries and fruit trees.

We are not allowed to have a well, so we put in a freshwater cistern. I haul water from a very good well. Our household use is about 180 litres a week. I pump from the cistern into jugs that I bring inside. Most gets poured into a highly rated gravity filter. Laundry and showers use unfiltered water.

We got used to living out of jugs before we had a cistern, so giving up on plumbing after the 3rd freeze-up was a no brainer.

Laundry water gets warmed up either by the pellet stove or sitting in the sun, depending on season. All other hot water comes from a kettle on our propane range.

Depending on the season, our laundry either gets hung outside to dry or hung on drying racks in front of the hot air blowing from our pellet stove.

Irrigation water comes from the season water distribution system that the park has. It’s just raw lake water.

Our power used to be just 30 amp service, so we’re quite accustomed to low power living. Up until the last couple of years, our grid was so unreliable that our standby generator ran about 100 hours a year (probably closer to 400 hours if we didn’t ration how long it ran). Grid upgrades mean that we’ve only used it about 4 hours in the last 2 years, and mostly during planned outages as they continue to work on the lines.

My plans for this year are:

Install an interior water tank against the ceiling, filling it manually via a permanently plumbed, self-draining line. No more jugs! Then I’ll hook up our hot water heater and bathroom/laundry plumbing to make showers and laundry easier.a

Crawl under the trailer (a mobile home) and remove the axles. This means it’ll no longer be classified as a mobile home so we can take advantage of subsidies for energy efficiency, heat pumps, etc.

People have been trying for several decades to get unpaid but necessary labour classified as work. Largely unsuccessfully, because that brings in a lot of other things like how to calculate pensions. (In Canada, we have a government run pension plan that pays out based on contributions. Homemakers can’t contribute, because they’re not earning any money.)

Then you have workplace injury compensation, access to supplementary health insurance, and a myriad of other things.