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Let me through I got here late!
May. 27th, 2008 12:59 pm
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 4. High today: 13. Which is 14 degrees off yesterday's high. We still have not had as many days over 20 in May as we had in April. Could be frost on the pumpkin seedlings back in KW tonight.
Now that I have mostly forgotten about everything I was meaning to say, it's safe to start over. Actually, I only just popped in to say that L. was reading me some quotes from Leon Kass tonight, and I came to one of those realizations which suddenly explain things and seem so obvious that they make you wonder why you never had them before and whether this really is a realization or something you actually knew all along anyway, namely this: the reason that I have been trying and failing to be a conservative (by which I mean a conservative and none of the several varieties of liberals currently passing for conservatives) the last several years is that I'm inclined to agree with the diagnoses but find the cures worse than the diseases.
(But this is just another way of saying that my most basic inclination is the most basic liberal inclination: the right trumps the good, procedure trumps substance--left to their own devices, people will generally screw up their lives and be unhappy, but they ought to be left to their own devices anyway. (Though some of my opposition to conservative cures comes out of a more deeply conservative attitude that there's not a damn thing you can actually do about it anyway.))
You might also like to know that among the 24 "census metropolitan areas" for which StatsCan has consistent numbers, the median distance commuted to work increased in 19 between 1996 and 2006, decreased in four (Saint John, Montreal, Vancouver, and Victoria), and stayed the same in one (Winnipeg). In the Toronto CMA (roughly co-extensive with what is now popularly known as the GTA), the median commuting distance rose from 9.3 km to 9.4.
Last week, when the Globe reported on StatsCan's inflation report for April (which had food at 0.5%, compared to 1.8% overall), I discovered that you can't do anything about the people who believe that food prices are skyrocketing (such as the idiots on the Globe idiot board) because they believe there is a Massive Conspiracy to cover up the true rate of inflation, which is actually somewhere around 10% or higher.
Oh yeah, one thing I was going to talk about was the Two Days' Hate we had around here when the TTC union threw an unexpected fit of unionism, rejected its tentative agreement, and went on strike. I mean, the hate--it was astonishing. I eagerly await the next garbage strike. But what particularly gets me is this: what you heard in the hating (and still hear; as I found at my nephew's first birthday party last week, you can still hear the hate echoing) was that if the bus drivers want to be paid more, they should quit being such jerks. (Slightly related, my favourite signpost from the strike: the graffito, a picture of which appeared in the Star, spraypainted on the closed doors of a subway station, reading "IF YOU WANT $30/HR GO TO UNIVERSITY!". I also enjoyed the smashed windows in the emergency subway exit down in the ravine. THAT'LL SHOW 'EM!) Now, this is such a conventional bit of conventional wisdom--I should say, it somehow, sometime, became such a bit of conventional wisdom; it didn't used to be and I don't know when exactly it happened--that it took me a while to realize that, actually, I have been a periodically regular TTC user for many of the last twenty years, and if a driver has ever been a jerk to me, I don't remember it. What has made an impression on me is my fellow passengers being jerks, all the damn time, if not directly to the drivers, then at least on the busses and trains where their jerkishness is the driver's problem.
AND ANOTHER THING that reminds me of: cognitive dissonance. One reason people think the drivers are jerks is that the drivers fail to stop and wait for them when they're running toward the bus as it's pulling away. (A funny thing about this is that bus drivers often do start away, see people coming, stop, open the doors and let them on, and then pull away again, leaving behind new stragglers who are now angry that the jerks never stop and wait.) But something that people like to complain about about public transit generally is busses clumping together. Now, busses clumping together is going to tend to happen through the magic of statistics anyway. But it's especially going to happen if busses dosn't leave on time because the drivers stop to wait for stragglers.
The other cognitive dissonance thing: everyone was jumping up and down a few weeks ago about the fact that, according to another of the census-related reports StatsCan is periodically releasing, median income in Canada for full-time employment was only slightly higher in 2006 than it was in 1980. So, on one hand, we're upset whenever anybody else's pay goes up (including and especially people around the median, whose incomes will effect the median most directly, like bus drivers); on the other hand, we're upset when median pay fails to go up.
Finally, in other now-old news, and it turns out that it was not actually safe to start over, the CAW has agreed to wage freezes (in addition to concessions in various other areas) with each of the three automakers, so I guess we might be seeing if there's anything to what I was suggesting around here last month about autoworkers' contracts being bellwethers if not trendsetters for the labour market in general. (Well, OK, I actually just suggested trendsetters.)
Now that I have mostly forgotten about everything I was meaning to say, it's safe to start over. Actually, I only just popped in to say that L. was reading me some quotes from Leon Kass tonight, and I came to one of those realizations which suddenly explain things and seem so obvious that they make you wonder why you never had them before and whether this really is a realization or something you actually knew all along anyway, namely this: the reason that I have been trying and failing to be a conservative (by which I mean a conservative and none of the several varieties of liberals currently passing for conservatives) the last several years is that I'm inclined to agree with the diagnoses but find the cures worse than the diseases.
(But this is just another way of saying that my most basic inclination is the most basic liberal inclination: the right trumps the good, procedure trumps substance--left to their own devices, people will generally screw up their lives and be unhappy, but they ought to be left to their own devices anyway. (Though some of my opposition to conservative cures comes out of a more deeply conservative attitude that there's not a damn thing you can actually do about it anyway.))
You might also like to know that among the 24 "census metropolitan areas" for which StatsCan has consistent numbers, the median distance commuted to work increased in 19 between 1996 and 2006, decreased in four (Saint John, Montreal, Vancouver, and Victoria), and stayed the same in one (Winnipeg). In the Toronto CMA (roughly co-extensive with what is now popularly known as the GTA), the median commuting distance rose from 9.3 km to 9.4.
Last week, when the Globe reported on StatsCan's inflation report for April (which had food at 0.5%, compared to 1.8% overall), I discovered that you can't do anything about the people who believe that food prices are skyrocketing (such as the idiots on the Globe idiot board) because they believe there is a Massive Conspiracy to cover up the true rate of inflation, which is actually somewhere around 10% or higher.
Oh yeah, one thing I was going to talk about was the Two Days' Hate we had around here when the TTC union threw an unexpected fit of unionism, rejected its tentative agreement, and went on strike. I mean, the hate--it was astonishing. I eagerly await the next garbage strike. But what particularly gets me is this: what you heard in the hating (and still hear; as I found at my nephew's first birthday party last week, you can still hear the hate echoing) was that if the bus drivers want to be paid more, they should quit being such jerks. (Slightly related, my favourite signpost from the strike: the graffito, a picture of which appeared in the Star, spraypainted on the closed doors of a subway station, reading "IF YOU WANT $30/HR GO TO UNIVERSITY!". I also enjoyed the smashed windows in the emergency subway exit down in the ravine. THAT'LL SHOW 'EM!) Now, this is such a conventional bit of conventional wisdom--I should say, it somehow, sometime, became such a bit of conventional wisdom; it didn't used to be and I don't know when exactly it happened--that it took me a while to realize that, actually, I have been a periodically regular TTC user for many of the last twenty years, and if a driver has ever been a jerk to me, I don't remember it. What has made an impression on me is my fellow passengers being jerks, all the damn time, if not directly to the drivers, then at least on the busses and trains where their jerkishness is the driver's problem.
AND ANOTHER THING that reminds me of: cognitive dissonance. One reason people think the drivers are jerks is that the drivers fail to stop and wait for them when they're running toward the bus as it's pulling away. (A funny thing about this is that bus drivers often do start away, see people coming, stop, open the doors and let them on, and then pull away again, leaving behind new stragglers who are now angry that the jerks never stop and wait.) But something that people like to complain about about public transit generally is busses clumping together. Now, busses clumping together is going to tend to happen through the magic of statistics anyway. But it's especially going to happen if busses dosn't leave on time because the drivers stop to wait for stragglers.
The other cognitive dissonance thing: everyone was jumping up and down a few weeks ago about the fact that, according to another of the census-related reports StatsCan is periodically releasing, median income in Canada for full-time employment was only slightly higher in 2006 than it was in 1980. So, on one hand, we're upset whenever anybody else's pay goes up (including and especially people around the median, whose incomes will effect the median most directly, like bus drivers); on the other hand, we're upset when median pay fails to go up.
Finally, in other now-old news, and it turns out that it was not actually safe to start over, the CAW has agreed to wage freezes (in addition to concessions in various other areas) with each of the three automakers, so I guess we might be seeing if there's anything to what I was suggesting around here last month about autoworkers' contracts being bellwethers if not trendsetters for the labour market in general. (Well, OK, I actually just suggested trendsetters.)
