Thought That Came Unbidden

Digital bankruptcy

There is too much noise in the world. Too many news stories, sales, random email lists we can’t remember subscribing to, and apps demand our attention constantly. And I’m just talking about grabs that come from engaging with your computer, be it desktop or laptop.

As recently as 6 years ago, people were doing research to discover just how your cell phone can distract you. The answer is: just by being in the room (2014, 2017, 2018). The mere presence of the device, even if it is out of sight, draws part of your mental attention creating Fear of Missing Out (FOMO).

I’m betting you can feel that itch along your palm as you unconsciously reach for your own phone right now, if you aren’t already holding it as you read this.

Attention is something I have very little to spare right now, and I haven’t quite figured out why. I’m fairly certain it’s due to some fucked up internal coping mechanism that tells me as long as I’m busy I’m controlling my environment, and if I’m controlling my environment I can’t get hurt. My anxiety is a tad transparent these days.

But because I’m working hours ridiculous enough that I’m rolling into the last two weeks I will work this year with almost four full days of uncompensated overtime, dealing with personal administrative crap when I’m not working hasn’t been a high priority.

Total primary inbox.

Unread. That’s a lot of email.

The shift to e-bills at the beginning of the pandemic fed my anxiety something fierce. My blue collar roots take pride in always being able to pay something and to do it on time. The prospect of missing a bill led me to activate the Updates tab in Gmail.

Huge mistake. Massive.

It went okay for the first couple of weeks as Gmail learned based on what ever algorithym the bro who programmed it determined. And then shit went off the rails.

Bill notifications started going to promotions. Stuff from my mother started going to updates. Nothing was where I expected it to be. I told myself for months it was manageable. It manifestly wasn’t.

About a month ago I killed the Updates tab by moving everything into my inbox. Now everything that’s 90% relevant is in one place.

Every.thing.

Today I’m declaring digital bankruptcy. I’ve done a cursory pass through the 1,500+ emails in my inbox to try to find things I might actually need. And now that I have, everything is going into archives on the theory that if I handle things as they come in I can reduce the amount of noise.

Let’s hope this works.

Good, fast, or cheap shouldn’t be a life or death decision

There is this saying in tech that there are three major factors governing quality, cost, and time.

Sometimes you can mitigate a compressed timeline by adding more resources – aka: people – to a project. There is a tipping point in any project, though, where more hands isn’t going to matter if you have an immovable deadline.

Or, as a friend of mine is fond of saying: 9 women can’t make a baby in a month.

We have raced toward a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 for at least 11 months, ever since the virus’ full genetic sequence was published in January 2020.

Current vaccine research builds on research done on SARS and MERS, two respiratory illnesses with outbreaks in East Asia and the Middle East. Building an previous research helped, I’m sure.

This week three companies have announced successfull clinical trials bringing a bit of breathing room and relief to the world even as millions of Americans ignore what they should be doing – staying home and having yet another excruciating dinner via video call – and flock to airports to travel for our Thanksgiving.

Can anyone say ICU Christmas?

Pfizer, first to market with their announcement, says their vaccine is safe and 95% effective.

Moderna, behind Pfizer by only a few days with their announcement, says their vaccine is also safe and around 95% effective.

Not to be left behind, AztraZeneca and Oxford University announced their vaccine is safe and about 70% effective if given in an experimental dosing regimen of 1/2 dose followed by a full dose 30 days later.

Three possible vaccines for a virus that has we have confirmed has infected over 59M people and confirmed to have killed almost 1.4M people. The efficacy numbers look great. And here is where we start making trade-offs.

Pfizer’s vaccine requires a storage temperature of -70degC while Moderna’s requires only about -20degC. For those of us functioning in Farenheit world that’s -94 (colder than Antarctica) and -4 (about your average high quality home freezer) respectively.

AstraZeneca’s, meanwhile, can be transported and stored at 2-8 degrees Celsius/36-46 degrees Fahrenheit. The company also says it will be able to ramp up production faster because their vaccine is based on a slightly different scientific method than the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

Without going to far into the whys, the TL;DR on this is: We have three vaccines with varying levels of effectiveness and varying complexities to produce, distribute, and store. The least effective one can be produced quickly and stored and distributed with no expensive refrigeration equipment needed.

Good, fast, or cheap.

It will be interesting to watch this play out. A vaccine that doesn’t require special equipment to store means its better adapted to delivery in rural places with unstable infrastructures. Who lives in these places?

I’ll give you a hint: mostly people who aren’t white.

Which vaccine gets approved, produced, and delivered is going to be what card players call a tell. Is the world moving toward justice where everyone gets the same protection regardless of their skin color or wealth? Or are we going to end up with rich, white folks getting the highly effective, but expensive vaccine while the rest of us get 70% effectiveness and fucking hope for the best?

When we throw around good, fast, or cheap in the tech world the follow-up is always: Pick two.

Sunday clip show: Beautifully drawn self-care

Yep, it’s another clip show. It feels shitty to do this and I still have to.

I’ve been running 45 minutes late all week. And by the end of the day on Wednesday I’d already worked two 10-hour days this week. Did I mention I’m rolling over 20 hours of uncompensated overtime into the last month of the year?

I know, I shouldn’t complain. I have a job. I have a job that has allowed me to work at home and largely stay isolated from the effects of the pandemic. And Large Financial Institution, true to its deeply risk averse heart, announced to us yesterday they have extended fully remote work until at least June 2021.

I’m still running 45 minutes late and it’s only 06:30. Because if that, you’re getting a clip show.

Monday’s clip show was all about beautiful images of the natural world. Seriously beautiful images. Today’s is about comforting art talented people have drawn to help remind us that self-care matters and the pressure to be more, do more, and conform is bullshit.

Once again, Firefox users get protection from Facebook’s ironclad tracking.

Blessing Manifesting

Her drawings are unrelentingly colorful and utterly perfect for 2020. Daily reminders to treat yourself well and remember that you aren’t alone on the planet. Also, her self-care planner is amazing.

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The Latest Kate

The most adorable animals you’ve ever seen reminding you that depression fucking lies, anxiety is a bully, and all those perfection standards pushed at us by TV, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue are bullshit. You are fine just the way you are.

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Beginnings and endings

The sun is coming up as a write this. Out my window clouds tinged with orange striate a sky so lightly blue it is almost white. Today is beginning, at least here anyway.

Sixty-one years ago today my maternal grandfather’s life ended. There aren’t a lot of details in the family lore.

My mother’s older sister, who was in nursing school, got up to start her day. She went downstairs to put on the coffee and found him slumped over at the dining room table, a glass of baking soda and water nearby. He had, apparently, awakened in the middle of the night with what he probably thought was heartburn and what turned out to be a massive heart attack.

He was 47 years old.

Is it a tragedy that a man who was by all accounts a loving father, a good friend, and hard worker died so young? Maybe. Our definition of tragedy is both loose and a moving target. What’s most notable about my grandfather’s death is how is was handled.

My grandmother was an Italian Catholic. Like Irish Catholics in America, Italian Catholics can have a deep and suprising affinity for the church. And when you are Catholic there are certain rules about rites and rituals. One of them, for instance, is you can’t be a Mason. Why? Because the Masons have their own version of the last rites, which conflict with the official ones blessed by Rome.

But no where in the rules of being a good Catholic does it say a funeral must be held a within a certain number of days after death. In fact, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops makes no mention of when rites must be held.

The great tragedy of my grandfather’s unexpected passing wasn’t his death itself. It was how his funeral got handled.

I’m going to give my grandmother a tiny wee bit of pass for being a grieving widow with a sudden lack of income, two kids still to raise, and two kids almost out the door. And since family lore is, again, light on details, I’m not really sure who holds the blame.

The great tragedy of my grandfather’s death is my uncle spent his 13th birthday at his father’s funeral.

Because reasons

There are situations in life that raise questions that are so fundamentally outrageous that at some point in your adult life all you can do is look quizzically and say “But why…?”

There have been a lot of those questions in the last four years. And a lot of them for me have centered on Kentucky.

Voters in Kentucky have elected Mitch McConnell to the U.S. Senate 7 times including the 2020 election. That means if he serves out the term he will be sworn into in January 2021, McConnell will have been a Senator for Kentucky for 42 years.

Think about that for a minute. What does it take to hold the same job for an entire lifetime? Despite being vastly disliked, McConnell has been especially effective at building himself up and campaigning.

My in-law family lives in Louisville, which is a blue spot in the sea of deep red that is the Commonwealth. None of them are especially fond of Mitch and yet, even though the Democrats ran a war veteran, Marine fighter pilot moderate who at one point actually endorsed Donald Trump, against him, she couldn’t get any traction with them either.

Kentuckians seem to consistently vote against their own best interests if you just look at the facts.

In 2018, US News & World Report ranked Kentucky overall 40th based on quality metrics in 8 categories

health care (#44)
education (#38)
economy (#39)
infrastructure (#26)
opportunity (#20)
fiscal stability (#45)
crime & corrections (#11)
natural environment (#12)

That Kentucky ranks 26th in infrastructure doesn’t surprise me. Elaine Chao, Mitch McConnell’s wife, is secretary of transportation. Draw your own conclusions. Though according to this commenter on Quora, Kentucky gets a D grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers for its infrastructure.

With these stats you would think that voters in Kentucky would look at their federal representation and make changes. But they don’t. And they don’t consistently.

Go ahead…ask “But why…” now. I’ll wait.

There are a lot of those “But why…” questions floating around in the world.

Why despite his apparent, flaming misogyny, did 52% of white women vote for Donald Trump in 2016?
Why did 56% of them do it again in 2020?
Why in 2016 did 28% of Latinos vote for Trump? Perhaps they liked being called rapists and criminals.
Why did 32% of them doing it again in 2020?

We can write off some of the increase in numbers from 2016 to 2020 simply to increased voter turnout. More people = higher percentage in every category.

But that increased voter turnout doesn’t explain the existence of those numbers to begin with in the face of the actual words coming out of the candidate’s mouth.

At our house, one long boozy afternoon this summer, we decided those “But why…?” questions come down to any one or a combination of the following reasons:

“Because people…” – Fill in whatever reason you like here: Because people are lazy, short-sighted, emotional, contrary, unable to see systems. Because, as James Cameron so aptly wrote in 1991: It is in our nature to destroy ourselves.

White supremacy – This one should be pretty obvious. Racism and white supremacy are woven in the fabric of American culture at so basic a level getting them out is going to be like untying the Gordian Knot.

The patriarchy – This one is holding the hand of the previous one in that fabric of American culture. Black political activists, at least those in the circles I observe, tend to say that white women vote the same as white men. The almost total failure of second wave feminism shores up this arguement.

The next time you have one of thos “But why…” questions come up pause and see if any of these answers apply. I’m betting they will.