Archive

Hello!

T and I spent the day in Montreal with family—a last minute decision, but a nice change of scenery (even if much of the scenery was obscured by blowing snow). It’s been a lovely weekend, spent happily with people I love very much. (Montreal friends, I’ll be sure to come for longer next time, and give you a heads-up!)

To the links!

• Anne Helen Petersen paints a compelling portrait of the “layoff brain”, a generational psyche borne of constant precarity. I’ve been thinking about this essay all week. (Including, for reasons the section on “Consultant Layoff Brain” and the excerpt about McKinsey. What a broken world.)
• A story of a week spent with Ursula K. Le Guin—on meeting our heroes (gods?), writing, and facing it all with good humour. May we all have something of Le Guin’s clever grace. (via Mita Williams)
• Vass Bednar’s most recent newsletter does some characteristically clever policy thinking with Canada’s anti-spam and (federal) privacy law, imagining versions of control over technology well beyond our current paltry offering. What I perhaps appreciated most, the imagining aside, was Bednar’s pointing out the potential already inherent in the legislation, missed due to lack of enforcement efforts.
• Tom Critchlow points out a web publishing gap: it’s relatively easy to get a webpage online; it’s relatively hard to get a small database online, particularly one that people can contribute to collaboratively. (via Simon Willison)
• The South Pole is a constant process of snow management, to the point where decades-old buildings, though still fully functional, are buried under many feet of snow.

Good afternoon! (That’s me, trying to wake myself up as a small food coma combines with a dreary weather day.)

I’ve got some exciting spreadsheets to make today (cost benefit analyses! travel planning!), so will dive right into the links:

• I ate up this essay on the historical significance of the secretary role, a position of privilege and power once accorded great importance. Some of the observations on recordkeeping and filing are relevant well beyond the “secretary to important person” context: “we use computers, everyone can file their own things, look at the cost savings!” entirely misses the huge productivity costs of self-filing, which is very rarely done well.
• Speaking of recordkeeping and archiving, two Canadian historians (rightly) call out Canada’s absurd process to access historical government records (where little is made open by default, instead requiring an access request and manual review of every file before release), comparing it to the UK’s, which regularly announces new tranches of 20-year-old files automatically opened to the public. We accept such mediocrity.
• An excellent explanation of administrative burdens meant to expand access, by Jordan Kyle. It’s a great explanation of administrative burden generally, where people have to do a bunch to access some benefit or service they’re eligible for, adding a huge (often hidden) cost for (often vulnerable) people to access (often necessary) services.
• Ben Werdmuller gathers a host of research on how ineffective layoffs are—how they give the appearance of doing something economically smart, while devastating workers and hurting the company or organization itself in the long-run.
• Dan Sinker’s experience of not feeling up to trying for the last few years really rings true. Here’s to a year of trying?

All the best for the week ahead!

Hello! Good afternoon—or, well, it feels like afternoon here, as the sun stretches closer to the horizon and the shadows lengthen.

There are two modes we can go by. (There are always more, but let’s pretend there are just two. “Assume a can opener”, and so on.)

1. We can wake up with an alarm, to a schedule of hours and minutes and recorded time. In this mode, I aim to wake up by around 7 at the latest, though without a reason to get out of bed struggle to do so.
2. Or we can wake up with our body’s intuition, usually informed by light and hunger and so on. When on vacation, particularly longer ones, this tends to be more my speed.

The first mode might make you feel like you’re “behind” when you sleep in, that you lost time—you’ve overshot the schedule, time has slipped away, and now there’s simply less of it (because you can’t intrude on the sleep necessary to wake up at your planned hour tomorrow, of course).

Hello!

Been a bit of a week. Returned to Ottawa after a few (pretty full, heavy) weeks away, only for all the stress to dump on me and trigger a sick reaction (life happened, in other words, h/t Tantek Çelik for the link). My body telling me to rest more, even if I didn’t realize it at first—though I’m glad T did. It’s fitting that I read Mandy Brown’s latest, “Reentry”, right after asking for a bit more time to rest, for which I’m grateful to my new team for so graciously accommodating. So here we are, resting—reading, writing, and whatever else comes up (tending to the body’s needs, inseparable from those of the mind, as Winston Hearn’s recent year-end reflection reminded me).

And now for a flood of links:

• Susan Jean Robertson on being thoughtful about reading and favourite makes from 2022. (T and I got ourselves a sewing machine for Christmas, so the latter is particularly neat to see.)
• Ellen Pasternack captures so succinctly the problem I’ve long lived with statistics (and quant methods generally): the enormous gap between intro classes and diving any deeper into the concepts and techniques. Also offers some interesting ideas for how academic units can better support their researchers.
• Two Canadian writers dove into federal government contracting this week, Paul Wells and Justin Ling, following a Radio-Canada report similar in its findings to a Globe and Mail report on McKinsey. It’s all worth reading, if you care about questions like state capacity or whatever we call it—the ability for government to function. McKinsey is in the spotlight here, due to the timing of a trend in contracts with the firm and the firm’s being often in the headlines, but pick any of the Big Four and you’ll find a similar story (though with perhaps a different arc): Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PwC. Having written about this a few times last year (“Playing for team public”, “Assurance”), I care deeply—and am glad to see journalists and others digging into this.
• Appreciated Wesley Wark’s surfacing of an easily forgotten principle of the federal access to information system: it was never supposed to be the only way that records became public. I’d add a reference to s.2(3) of the act, which reads: “This Act is also intended to complement and not replace existing procedures for access to government information and is not intended to limit in any way access to the type of government information that is normally available to the general public.” The principle was written into the legislation from the start!
• Much of my reading—and linking—these days is to either personal sites or Substack newsletters (as with four of the links above). Patrick McKenzie (patio11) dove into the paid newsletter economy.
• Rach Smith wrote about an amazing regular day—and what made it possible, and why that’s not always possible.

Hello!

It’s been a pretty full day here (Italian families hang out on New Year’s Day, so I’m chock full of lentils and whatnot), after a full few weeks.

2022 was quite a year. The pandemic kept raging, despite an apparent collective effort to ignore it. I grew a fair bit, in ways I’m only just coming to recognize, and look forward to exploring more. Some notable personal changes, for my own (but public) record:

• T and I moved in together (!!)
• T and I adopted Arthur
• I started regular therapy sessions (which have been great! but the great-ness definitely depends on who you’re working with—I used a matching service that helped quite a bit)
• I started planning to get out a bit more (starting with some small concert trips in 2023)
• We went on some nice hikes, particularly during the fall colour season, finally getting to know the trails around us after a few years in the city
• My family maintained our weekly catch-up calls, with T (and Arthur, more often than not!) now a regular fixture
• I said goodbye-for-now to CDS, after contributing to some cool things this year, including amending a law and making an Order in Council
• I actually shipped a civic tech project, versus just creating an undocumented code or data repository (though I made plenty of those, too)
• Folks around me went through the challenges of aging—I did my best to help when I could, or to be a supportive and listening ear when that was the most I could do

Hi there!

Bit of a different situation today: writing this post from my phone, on the road. It’s been quite a week, but things are feeling more or less righted today.

In years past, I’ve used this near-end-of-year issue to discuss some favourite reads. Honestly, it’s been a slow year for reading: again, most of my reading happened through my book club (schedules and accountability!). Briefly, though, some notable books:

• We started the year reading Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel (who, if you didn’t know, is divorced), which is an excellent read for the times—particularly then, when Omicron was first making its ravages known, locking us down. Little did we realize it’d be the last, for many of us.
• The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich, another timely read, for its depiction of the tumultuous year that was 2020. Set in an independent, Indigenous bookstore in Minneapolis, it includes events from 2019 through 2020, including the murder of George Floyd and the pandemic. Shoutout also to the excellent “Totally Biased List of Tookie’s Favorite Books” that accompanies the book, as any book set in a bookstore should have.
• Finally, a nod to Pachinko (with thanks to T for the recommendation), a feat of worldbuilding (or, that term applied to a real setting, to things that’ve happened) that makes accessible a whole history of which I had very little knowledge.

Hullo!

Today began gloriously sunny, lighting up the decimetres of snow we got the last few days. It’s more subdued now—low-level clouds moved in, darkening and softening the views. Still, feels properly Christmas-y and so on, which is cute.

It’s been a pretty busy end to the year. This week saw the end of a long-running project, a continuation of the legislative change work from earlier this year. It felt great to pass the baton from the strategic policy side of things—getting a framework in place—to the delivery side of things, though of course there’s been plenty of mixing along the way.

Now, though, things feel at peace. Changes are afoot with me and work—Friday was my last day at CDS for a while, as I embark on a new adventure, on which more another time. I spent a fair amount of the week reflecting on, writing about, and discussing the past and future of CDS, and of the broader digital government project (federally, in Canada, globally, whatever you’d like). As ever, I was struck by the great privilege of getting to do this work—to contribute to public service, to try to help others, if mostly in a quiet, behind-the-scenes way. My fourth anniversary post (also linked above) includes links to many of my thoughts on the subject. No doubt there’ll be more like that, as I get my thoughts in order.

Hello!

Say a government has a policy objective. Implementing it requires sophisticated underlying infrastructure. This infrastructure is large, complex. Likely there’s a legacy system in play, one that, though at times stretched at the seams, continues to work—more or less, often with much thanks to staff heroics.

Senior actors in this government—politicians and public servants alike—know they need to get this right. They’re terrified of the alternative, of the impacts of failure, any failure, on people’s lives. At the same time, they’re not fully confident in their own ability—that is, the ability of the government and its public servants—to get it done.

Likely this is for a few reasons: the public service has (been?) shrunk, and lacks the capacity (if not the ability) to get this done; similar initiatives, in their own experience or elsewhere, have gone off the rails; there are a lot of stakeholders, internal and external alike, and they’re worried their own organizational structures and procedures will get in the way of satisfying those stakeholders. And, also, because they’re decision-makers with a lot riding on their decisions—and, let’s face it, they’re human—they want some kind of assurance that things will be okay.

Hello!

It was a good week. Changes afoot, on which more another time—for now, reading and rest.

As an opening note, I really appreciated Sara Hendren’s framing of “critique and repair”, as two modes or posts from which we might engage the world and seek change (via a post by Hendren on “solutions journalism”):

Critique is alive and well (thank goodness!). What are its modes of action? Critique unmasks hidden or suppressed realities. It reveals ugly truths. It subverts or even negates mainstream or inherited or lazy narratives.

…

Repair language suggests new futures. It invites possibility. Perhaps it translates ideas from the past that might be reinvigorated or more accessibly understood, or perhaps it enchants by asking: what if? What if this new different thing could come to life?

…

But understanding each mode as a post—as a vantage with a view of the horizon that is necessarily partial, with particular assets and with unavoidable drawbacks—is one way to sidestep the often corrosive debates about “civility” that tend to explode in urgent times. Instead of policing the tone of others, wanting either less or more anger, less or more imagination and kindness, we might instead ask: What is my post?

Hello!

I spent much of the weekend working on a civic tech project, so I haven’t got much juice left to write in-depth here.

The project is a web version of testimony presented at the Public Order Emergency Commission (POEC), variously known as the “Emergencies Act Inquiry”, “Convoy Inquiry”—you know the one. I’ve written in past weeks about the interesting documents the POEC is surfacing, but didn’t realize until late this week that there are verbatim transcripts posted as PDFs after each day of testimony. (See, for example, the transcript from the last day of testimony, with the prime minister as witness.)

They’re great! They’re thorough, well-structured, and machine-readable. (The first and second attribute is great for anyone; the second and third attributes made this project possible.) Court reporters (stenographers, in other parlance) are really good at what they do. Transcripts are very helpful: not everyone can or wants to listen or watch a long video of a hearing; you can’t easily search a video; and so on.

For the Extremely Online™, this last week has been a continued horror show. It’s renewed and revitalized my impulse to have whatever I write (post, photo, etc) on the web under my roof, to homestead my digital presence.

To that end, I finally took some time to follow an idea I’d noted in August, to make my own site more IndieWeb, by setting up an IndieKit server. (Words!) That’s now running happily, enabling me to post notes to my site, which then get syndicated out to Mastodon. (Back then, I’d planned to send them to Twitter—alas, the time has come to leave.)

My first syndicated post was a test (successfully syndicated to Mastodon), to which I exuberantly replied shortly thereafter (it was posted originally on Mastodon, then copied back—still figuring out how I’ll handle that). It’s very nerdy, very fun, and deeply satisfying—who knows if I’ll actually post more short notes, but the plumbing’s all in place now, if I want to.

• You should really just subscribe to Mandy Brown’s website, A Working Library, as I’ll link most every post I read there. “Out of time” explores the idea of restlessness and technology, how tech “consumes rest”—and Mandy reminds us of radical definitions of rest, which oughtn’t feel so radical.
• Combining many of my interests (disaster / emergency management, insurance, policy, bureaucracy, to name a few), a profile of the Disaster Financial Assistance Arrangements program caught my eye. One point that struck me: the idea that “governments just don’t know how to say ‘no’”, to requests for assistance beyond the program’s parameters, or to building in known danger zones (like floodplains). To whom are governments comfortable saying “no”, and in what contexts? In the domestic disaster context, the answer seems clear, but I contrast it to the countless, often invisible or unpublicized “no”s that governments make, direct (decision) and indirect (indecision) alike, often suffered by the most vulnerable.
• It was a pleasure to watch Sean Boots and Amanda Clarke present their recent research into the scale of government contracting (specifically IT spending, in this context) at a recent meeting of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates (OGGO). A scholar-practitioner combo for the ages!
• Interesting to consider the various mechanisms and incentive structures through which government can help to secure open source software. Of course, there’s an argument to be made that making software open source in the first place is a (potentially, at least) positive contribution to security, because it enables otherwise impractical scrutiny. (Amanda made a similar point toward the end of the OGGO session, pointing out how, if ArriveCAN’s code were open source, weekend hackathons could be spent scrutinizing work, instead of recreating it.)
• Enjoyed Rach Smith’s description of her “lifestyle-centric career”.
• Anil Dash with the how-to for two key kitchen staples: roasted garlic and pickled onions.

I’ve been lacking the motivation to go outside the last few weeks—little surprise, as the seasons change and our bodies only gradually adapt. And as I write that, it starts snowing! Alas. Promising myself to get out, a little and often if that’s what it takes, will get me through it.

The last week or so has been full of lovely family time. It also had a fair bit of screen time (though less than if I’d been working, I suppose), eyes glued to the rapid decline of Twitter, mind thinking about the possibilities of Mastodon and elsewhere. I promised myself I’d take a break this weekend, but between working on a side project and playing Flight Simulator, thus far that hasn’t worked out.

Promises, eh? Perhaps the only promise to self we can truly, fairly make is to give ourselves grace for the times we inevitably fall short of our hopes or expectations.

• As a bunch of people learn about (intuitively or explicitly) the limits and possibilities of the ActivityPub protocol (which Darius Kazemi helpfully explains how to learn) that underpins Mastodon, Bookwyrm, and other fediverse services, it’s neat to read Robin Sloan’s reflections on specifying a protocol—especially the call to imagine.
• Brexit has caused a host of pressures for the UK civil service. An interesting one is a commitment to (immediately? eventually?) replace EU laws having effect in the UK. This is, it turns out, very hard to do: the laws cover 1973 to 2016 (or 2019), and “nobody ever thought the whole thing would need to disentangled, and so nobody thought to keep any track of it”.
• Kudos to folks writing at the Globe for digging into bureaucracy. Two notable pieces from this week: Shannon Proudfoot on the federal government’s recent struggles with service delivery; Tom Cardoso on the apparent (though questioned) barriers to the proactive release of completed access to information requests. (On the latter, a reply by Tim Sayle points out that Library and Archives does, sometimes, proactively release packages for its records; though there’s a whole other rabbit hole to go down about why we need to access historical records through an access to information request.)

I’m pretty tired, so I won’t dive into the big thing of the week—constitutional unconstitutionalism is what I’ve been calling it, and yes, sure, in a formal legal sense this is probably permissible, and yes, sure, there’s good political theory in favour of (at least some degree of) parliamentary supremacy (though there’s also good stuff in favour of judicial review! there are no absolutes!), and yes, of course, it’d be great if kids could be in school, but this is a chilling attack on labour, which makes pretty much everything possible, so it’s right to be up in arms, and it’s well past time for workers to get their due. Each of those breathless sentence segments warrants at least a paragraph of its own, but that’ll (have to) do for today.

• This piece on socially acceptable anxiety came at a great time. As a friend at work put it, “it must suck to think so much, about everything”, and, whew, were they ever right. Sometimes, alas, we can’t simply think our way out of things—that does suck, but it’s an important start to recognize it, and flow accordingly.
• Craig Mod walks a lot. This week, he reiterated his key tips for a good walk.
• brr is a delightful blog, chronicling the author’s experience leading up to and during their (currently ongoing) placement as an IT tech in ANTARCTICA. It’s great fun—very cool, you might say. I liked: “Hut Point!” for an example of the small rules and incredible amount of cooperation and planning that enable a year-round village at the end of the world; “Onboarding Timeline” for an overview of the many (MANY) overlapping approval and clearance processes; and, well, all the posts—there’s so much to learn, and I’m looking forward to more!
• Some fine folks have filed a class-action lawsuit over GitHub Copilot, the automagic code completion (writing!) tool that’s taken developers by storm. As the accompanying background investigation discusses, this has potentially enormous implications for questions of “fair use” and open source code—an area with relatively little case law to date. Matthew Butterick, co-leading the case, noted his initial legal misgivings about Copilot earlier this year.
• Oh wait, ha! You thought I was really just going to do a breathless mini-rant about shutting down labour, without at least one related link? As some scholars at Active History remind us, it’s thanks to a labour strike that we have—checks notes—widespread maternity leave (which has since evolved into parental leave). One way or another, this week has been the start of something big.

Ooooookay—all the best for the week ahead! Particularly to those on the picket lines.

Lucas

Hello!

Had one of those “sitting an exam you haven’t studied for” dreams last night, except it was very much a history student version of it: I dreamt that it was the end of term and I hadn’t started on any of my papers. Glad to not be in that situation, though it had the hilariously opposite effect of prompting me to look into grad school again—maybe I’ll be one day ready again to dive back into the world of exams and essays.

Went out for an amazing foggy, then sunny, bike ride this morning. Felt so good during and after. This body—mind connection stuff, it’s real. Must do more, of course. Perpetual note to self, there. Sigh.

Okay, one section on social media and the crisis du jour (Twitter, Elon Musk, Mastodon), then a quick bit on some interesting documents from the inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act, then a few links.

What a lovely weekend it’s been. Plenty of time outside, alone and with friends, biking and walking and eating and enjoying the scenery. But it’s also tired me out!

I’ve been thinking through a big decision, which tends to take up brainspace. It’s interesting to see where my mind and attention wander when under “thinking stress” like this.

For example, I spent time reading documents from the inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act. We have, for example:

• the readout of a conversation between a bunch of federal deputy ministers and various police chiefs
• the notes of an OPP incident commander from the bridge blockade in Windsor (apparently the “INCIDENT COMMANDER’s notes” template is in… COMIC SANS!?)
• a WhatsApp group chat for city staff debriefing updates from the National Capital Region Command Centre (NCRCC) (apparently WhatsApp continues to play a role in city hall drama!)
• oh hey, more WhatsApp chats between the city manager and the general manager of emergency and protective services (there’s a very relatable “I hate WebEx” on page 22)

Hello there!

It’s been a few weeks of glorious fall colours. T and I have been making a point of getting out, to bask in some of this precious season while it lasts. (Seasons are so funny—the quintessential part of fall lasts for perhaps a third of the season, followed by at least a month of dreariness. Sigh.)

Inside the house, most of the plants are struggling, after having previously thrived. We think it’s something in the soil—either that, or some airborne infection or invisible pests. (It could be our plant care technique, too, but it’s been a suspiciously coordinated decline.) It’s overwhelming to deal with all of them, hard to accept the loss (or significant trimming) of some beloved green friends. But there’s also, I suppose, some embrace of life’s cycle in doing so, an acceptance of earth passing to earth that comes with this season. So it goes.

Onto the links!

I often put off shopping (and the research it often requires) until I can do so in one burst, which I did recently. I recently had something like four or five deliveries coming over two or three few days (each from a different carrier!).

Living in an apartment downtown, deliveries can be stressful! There’s missing them, the intercom not working, packages left at your door (or maybe not!), and so on. They’re stressful for drivers, too: nowhere to park, or parking illegally while dashing in and out of unfamiliar buildings, only to have to navigate busy streets while on a tight schedule. Hence I normally avoid deliveries, but today’s economics are such that I can only get some items online, or it’s far more practical or affordable to get them delivered versus heading out to a store in the suburbs.

I try to send deliveries to the post office (which anyone can do, for free, with Canada Post’s neato FlexDelivery service), because we have this incredible public logistics network, but many private companies, for private reasons that make sense in their contexts, opt to use other carriers that don’t have access to the public network (or won’t use it, again for private reasons), and so we have all these public pick-up and drop-off points that are probably underused, and instead loads of packages just left on doorsteps and so on, with all the stress that can bring. So that sucks.

This process has reminded me of—I saw it somewhere, Twitter probably—a hypothetical: “Would you choose slower delivery, if it gave your delivery drivers real benefits and better working conditions?” And, if slow would actually result in those things, yes! So much yes! But will it actually?

Hello! It’s October, delightfully, and we’ve resolved to get out regularly to enjoy the changing leaves. So far, on a good track in that direction.

Friday marked the country’s second annual National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Actions can take many forms—from learning, to donating, to advocating for changes in your local community. Of the 94 calls to action, the number deemed complete varies from 11 to 17—depending who you ask. (Check out the section explaining where CBC, Yellowhead, and Indigenous Watchdog each fall on the CTAs deemed complete by the federal government; the reasons for difference tell you a lot about what “deemed complete” means in practice.)

The Yellowhead Institute produces yearly reports on Calls to Action Accountability, a powerful accounting because of the analysis it adds to its review. As the 2021 report notes, all three calls to action completed last year came in the month of June, “following the discovery of 215 unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School … more action on the Calls to Action in three weeks than the last three years”.

This suggests that action is possible (three CTAs in one month!), but that action doesn’t happen absent political pressure (three CTAs in… three years). The need for justice—for love in public, as Cornel West calls it—remains as strong as ever, if we (we who are not Indigenous) can heed the call to demand action, and to act where we can.

Hello!

Meant to get this out earlier today, but the weekend took a series of unexpected turns. All’s good now—on with the show!

• I’ve been thinking about work. Fortunately, plenty of other folks—with much more widely varied experience, y’know, working—have been kind enough to share those thoughts online.
  • Lara Hogan organized years worth of practical tips and reflections, mostly on management but also on work in general. I’ve returned to her advice on giving feedback a number of times, and look forward to exploring all these other categories of advice.
  • Mandy Brown argues that place of work doesn’t matter, while also mattering a great deal. The former, in that working in-person vs. remotely doesn’t have an inherent advantage for, say, mentoring and development of junior staff. The latter, in that different locations of work require different approaches to realize our goals—and that managers and leadership need to be intentional about identifying and working toward those goals, giving attention to where and how their teams work in the process.
  • Steph Gray uses a timeline to reflect on a long period of work (over ten years), with the poignant note that you can timeline “as a way of reminding yourself to feel pride”. (I found this after reading Steph’s post on the system he helped rig up to track The Queue, the long line of people waiting to visit the Queen as she lay in state.)
• Audubon has released a visualization of bird migration patterns, including a feature where you can select a location (e.g., the city you live in) and see the birds that migrate from / to / through that place. It’s mindboggling to see the distances some birds—including the tiniest, unlikeliest species!—travel in the course of a year.
• Vass Bednar sums up the quiet shift Canada’s biggest companies have made, into giants increasingly enabled by Big Tech style techniques (and workforces). Loblaw is, as ever and appropriately, the prime example.
• Ottawa’s less than a month from the 2022 municipal election, and the reasons to vote are plentiful.
  • One of the tricky things with Ottawa is that, for almost any issue, multiple orders of government need to get involved (with each order represented through different bodies, again depending on the issue). It’s easy to disengage as a result, not knowing who and how to press for change. But it’s undeniable that the municipal level plays a huge role—including in projecting an ambition for the city.
  • Consider the plight and impending closure of a neighbourhood bike shop (full disclosure: the shop I frequent!), which suffered in numerous ways, one notable example being a long-delayed property tax bill that arrived too late to qualify the business for the city’s pandemic property tax relief program. Municipal programs matter. (Yes, they’re hardly the only factor at work here, see also my note above about the jurisdictional complexity of operating in this city.)
  • By the way, advance voting is open.

All the best for the week ahead!

Hello!

It’s been a great week, full of catch-ups and chats and down-time and up-time. With more to come, today and tomorrow!

Some links—most of which have some kind of technical or nerdy deep-dive theme—for your weekend reading:

• Hannah Ritchie with an interesting data-informed look at low-emissions behaviour—which often, paradoxically, doesn’t jive with other “morally good” advice like “eat local” (the emissions costs of transporting most food is so negligible that it doesn’t make a huge impact; the food you choose to eat, though, does have significant environmental ramifications). I also enjoyed Leo Barasi’s nuaunced reply about the environmental costs of plastic vs cotton bags (it doesn’t take 20,000 re-uses of the latter to match the emissions cost of a plastic bag, that’s a worst-case scenario). Both, I think, point to the importance (and difficulty!) of understanding the many inputs (including counterintuitive technologies!) to the complex systems that enable our world.
• A great deep-dive into multi-factor authentication, following the Uber hack. The level of detail here is great, as is the format (a conversation on the internet!).
• Huge kudos to the folks at the US Library of Congress for the release of the Congress.gov API. It’s a great, modern, detailed API For those curious, Canada’s equivalent would be the House of Commons open data initiative, though it only covers one of the two Houses of Parliament, doesn’t have a great API setup, and is mostly only available in XML (as opposed to JSON).
• Everest Pipkin shares the experience of watching a million 3-second videos, gathered originally to train AI systems. I particularly appreciated Pipkin’s reflection on the work that went into tagging these videos—performed by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers—and how reductive those categories can become. (via Matt Webb on the “awkward sourcing” of contemporary large language model AIs)
• Greatly enjoyed the Fat Gold Guide to Extra Virgin Olive Oil. Olive oil, it’s so great! (I arrived here through a circuitous route—the best of routes on the web—that included Robin Sloan’s site. Some other fun pieces from Robin: programming as home cooking, which resonates really well with my experience; “Specifying Spring ‘83”, a draft for a new protocol for the internet; Robin shares the “assumed audience” for each newsletter and, just before that, delightfully explains why he refers to people by first name, something I’ve long grappled with.)

Hello there!

It’s been quite a week, hasn’t it? We came back from a great weekend away, with plenty of ice cream and friendship time, only to confront long days (and nights) at work, topped off by the surreal spectacle of the Queen’s passing.

(On that—I don’t have much to say! It’s simultaneously a huge event and a non-event—particularly nowadays. I’ve revelled in nerdy constitutional and procedural tidbits, but I’ll spare you those. I’ll share instead a thread from the ever amusing “depths of wikipedia” Twitter account, tracking the flurry of Wikipedia edits around the announcement. I love internet culture!)

But enough of this week. Let’s ponder a slightly longer horizon. With major apologies in advance for the self-indulgent reflection that follows!

Hello! Writing you Friday, but if all goes well you’ll get this sometime Sunday. We’re away for the weekend with friends and I’m trying my best to disconnect!

September’s finally here, eh? August flew by. At work, I was filling in for Michael, my manager—it was invigorating, but, also, I’m glad Michael’s back. At home, I’ve travelled (within Ontario, heh) more than I have for some time, including some last minute plans we made when opportunity presented itself. It’s all left me thinking about what’s next. Fall has always felt like a time of renewal (despite what the leaves do), of starts, and I’m happy to lean into that where I can. It may be time to exit a few holding patterns, in other words.

I’ve got a few things to do before we hit the road today, so, briefly, on to the links! Just a few this week:

• the pressure for strategies and plans, and the people crisis that arises from uncertainty around both (h/t Sarah H)
• a few linkblog posts from me this week: sharing a policy’s legal opinion; critical minerals, net-zero, and consumerism; software development vs government contracting, and how the Phoenix contract included the worst of both worlds (h/t Sean B for resurfacing Waldo’s post)
• with thanks to Maria Popova’s annotations of David Whyte’s Consolations, I picked it up this week—brief, poetic definitions of everyday (and unexpected) words, absolutely lovely to read in the morning or before bed (times when the mind seems most open to redefinition)

They’re filming yet another Christmas movie in the courtyard below, which means August is nearly done. Strange to say it, but it increasingly feels like fall is in the air—bring it on, I say, shorter days excepted. (It’s… very amusing to see crews carting in evergreen boughs and fake snow, and painful to imagine how hot it must be for the cast in their sweaters and toques despite the feels-like 30 temperatures.)

Anyhow—I hope your week has gone well. It was a pretty good one here, with a last minute roadtrip for some lakeside family time. Looking forward to more adventures ahead!

Matt Webb calls calls for a rapid, government-supported push into wind energy production in the UK, offering a policy proposal tailored to the political preferences of the Tory government, in response to rapidly increasing energy prices in the UK (which are directly connected to Russia’s war on Ukraine).

Hello!

It’s been a bit of an odd week—lots of good, some tricky, but on the whole doing fine, if fairly tired. There’ll be some more such times ahead, but we carry on! Is that enough of an intro? On with the links:

• Responding to Sidney Dekker, Mandy Brown highlights how “only restorative accountability offers the hope of preventing future harm”. This, coupled with Dekker’s “[retributive] accountability as settling” versus “[restorative] accountability as telling”, left me thinking about public sector accountability and Parliament.
• Continuing one of my favourite unofficial themes on his blog, “what can public sector tech learn from urban design”, Sean advocates for matching the timelines of tech projects to the tenures of the leaders responsible for them. It struck me that the CDC, in its recent reorg, took the opposite tack: requiring outbreak response leaders to stay on the file for at least six months (outbreak response benefits from continuity—as many things do!).
• Simon Collison’s obituary for Bearface, beloved cat for over sixteen years, has sat with me since I read it a few weeks ago. May we all know such love and companionship (he writes, watching Arthur watching the sunset).
• After reading several of his novels years ago, I’ve recently come to enjoy Cory Doctorow’s daily linkblog. Two recent highlights: John Deere’s monopoly power crosses industries, making it extra pernicious—but hackers are fighting back; bossware is about pseudoscientific metrification enabled by high technology, yes, but it’s mostly about the boss–worker power dynamic—and that’s how we overcome it.
• Enjoyed Susan Jean Robertson’s discussion of attention and technology, responding to an interview with Mary Ruefle.
• Also enjoyed Jack Cheng’s description of late-stage editing, drawing on both Robert Irwin and the Taoist butcher. A neat design: Jack’s organized his Sunday newsletter archive with tags—not generic ones, but deeply personal ones, tuned to his newsletter’s most frequent or meaningful subject. (Sunday has long been an inspiration for this newsletter. I wouldn’t be surprised if this tagged archive one day inspires one of my own.)

I hope you’re well. All the best for the week ahead.

Good morning!

I’ve been getting up around 5:30 when T has day shifts, both out of solidarity and because, while I don’t like getting out of bed early, I enjoy being up early. It means I’m writing you as the sun makes itself known, sitting in the front room while Arthur “birdwatches” (waits hopefully for one of the many birds at the feeder to come down to his eye level, so he can pounce at the window).

Last night, we watched Turning Red (well, T and I watched it while Arthur tried variously to eat the laptop or sleep). It’s fantastic. I shared the excitement of Canadian audiences watching the film in seeing its clear Toronto-ness (I’m neither a Toronto hater nor a Toronto lover, it’s fine!)—as not merely an impostor city, but as itself. And thank goodness for films diving into the bumpy, messy, uncertain dynamics around puberty, adolescence, and that time of life, particularly when done with such humour and sensitivity.

The rest of today’s letter is a shout to the wind about the state of our healthcare system. When I feel frustrated, immobilized in the face of a systemic problem, often one of my first steps is to write. This is personal, it’s political, and, as with so much that falls into those categories, it’s important for all of us.

Hello!

Spent a few hours on the shore of Lake Ontario today, enjoying fish and chips with my dad and Oma. It was lovely—but hot. My brain is more fried than I’d hoped, between that and a celebration of my Italian grandparents’ 60th anniversary yesterday, so will keep today’s letter short.

• Sidra Mahmood briefly captures the important distinction between consultants and multinational consulting companies—and the apparently enormous, dangerous deference given to the latter.
• Considering the return to office from a disability lens, with proposals for a “Nothing about us, without us” approach. I appreciated, and learned from, the connection between the practical barriers faced by disabled individuals and the state of healthcare—rendering it harder than ever to access accommodation.
• On Intel, AMD, and the chip wars—with a surprising geopolitical twist at the end.
• Sara Hendren quotes Reinhold Niebuhr on grappling with incongruity. Hendren offers this potent observation: “Humor for everyday life is necessary; but when humor tries to take on the existential matters, it so often becomes bitterness and despair.”
• Jeremy Keith gathers different pieces on search-based organization, in contrast to the directory mental model. Metaphors matter, folks!

Finally, a self-nod to a (delightfully nerdy) post I wrote early this week, describing a change to my site making it easier to post links. There’s some overlap between the links annotated from my site and those in this newsletter—a place for everything, and so on :)

Arthur’s on the couch beside me, dreaming about whatever cats dream about; my family are arrayed through various rooms of the apartment; and T’s sleeping off a night shift. I am, in other words, surrounded by loved ones—and happy for it.

I’m pretty tired, so straight into the links we go:

• Maria Popova always weaves together her reading with deft and grace—including a recent piece on suicide and living, centred around a Roxane Gay reading of a Gwendolyn Brooks poem.
• Simon Willison recently shared highlights from twenty years of blogging. I’ll always cheer for folks celebrating their blog—blogging can be such a nourishing experience.
• Cory Doctorow recommends A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys and I just want to run out and read this book.
• In last week’s issue, I linked to Michael’s piece on “Government from home”. This week, Steph Percival followed with a call for a fairer, flexible future of work, grounded in empathy and ethical experimentation, and Sean contributed his own perspective on the power dynamics inherent in the current approach toward “hybrid” work.
• Mandy Brown reflects on the idea of practice as a way to ponder and shape the future, drawing on Octavia Butler and adrienne maree brown. Practice is one of those delightfully malleable words—a verb and noun, both of which have a a number of adjacent but distinct definitions, definitions that can prompt a different way of approaching a situation—and this piece captures well its potential.

All the best for the week ahead!

When new leaves grow on one of my houseplants, I sometimes greet them with, “Welcome to the party, pal.”

Hello! Happy Sunday to you. (That opening quote is… by me. I thought it’d be interesting to open with a tweet-esque note, as I try once again to use the platform less, this time inspired by the shareholder / board / evil acquirer mess.)

I’ve been trying to write today’s newsletter for a bit, but zoning in and out of focus:

• I went down a personal website / IndieWeb rabbithole (this happens often!), this time looking at IndieKit, built by Paul Robert Lloyd (whose personal website includes such fascinating data as number of kilometres travelled and CO2 emitted for various trips [the data for which you can see on GitHub]).
• Previous to that, I’ve spent the weekend in a post-booster blah. Grateful, as ever, for science and logistics and so on, though frustrated with the lack of good public health direction as to when to get a fourth shot. Sigh.

Hello!

Bit of a slower day here—mostly laying low as this heat rolls through. It seems Europe’s in for a wallop of a heatwave, but I don’t have the heart to trot out the old arguments about it. The effects of extreme heat are here now—it’s long past time to be doing sensible things about them. Going to try to spend the rest of the day more or less off screens, so will keep this brief.

• Reflecting on this perspective on repair and maintenance as an act of community.
• Enjoyed Nicole Fenton’s most recent letter, on reckoning with hard world events.
• An interesting idea, to try to train your ambient awareness of CO2 levels.
• Appreciated the latest in Sean’s “Public service heroes” series, profiling Madelaine Saginur & Melissa Toutloff—two folks I had the pleasure of working with in 2020. Yay for good people!
• Shared this a few years back, but it’s so good I’ll share it again: Mandy Brown, quoting Robert Grudin, on procrastination as disrespect for the future.

All the best for the week ahead!

Hello!

This week’s reading seemed to converge on a theme of “thinking and acting in systems”. This is, perhaps, the root challenge of our times.

• Using self-driving cars as an example, Marianne Bellotti writes about safety culture, failure in complex systems, and how they intersect with waves hands AI. This may become my go-to introductory piece on the subject—short enough to read quickly, profound enough to forever change how you think. Key points:
  • Human error is not the actual root cause we think it is: it comes from our desire to see a human accountable; we stop incident review processes when we find someone who’s deviated from what’s expected / documented for them, but this ignores that it’s entirely natural, and often preferable, to deviate from those expectations.
  • Self-driving cars currently use a “human delegates to AI” model: humans supervise AI action, and are expected to take over when needed. In reality, it’s often far too late for a human to take over by the time something’s about to go wrong—but the human at the wheel will still be blamed.
  • A safer approach (if we’re to keep both humans and AI involved) would be “AI delegates to human”: this forces the creator of the AI system to clearly define its limits, to only allow its use where it’s truly safe to do so—in part, because it makes the creator more directly liable for the decisions the system makes. These incentives matter!
• On the topic of AI, Simon Willison’s been sharing his observations as he tries out some of the interactive AI systems that’ve cropped up: image generation and narrative description of code. His writing offers an accessible overview of these systems—and their more profound implications—and introduces central concepts like “prompt engineering”. Most importantly, they provide tangible examples of what it’s like to think in the grammar (language?) and “mindspace” of these novel, relatively opaque systems.
• Mita Williams’s University of Winds from this week (issue 290), delves into systems thinking on a few axes. Williams shares a link to a piece on understanding and defining energy security—this prompted me to dive into Low-tech Magazine, including its novel solar-hosted website and its list of “low-tech solutions” to life’s necessities.
• Paul Wells uses RCMP testimony to the Mass Casualty Commission to surface tensions in communicating in complex systems—namely, how those doing the communicating seek control over that act, versus the messiness of dealing with interlocutors like journalists. The major change here, from the perspective of RCMP communications staff, is the advent of social media, and the direct connection it offers, versus the indirect communication of press conferences and interviews.

Unrelated to systems thinking (at least on the surface), I like the idea of East Coast skeptics and West Coast skeptics: the difference being in how you react to realizing that you can’t know everything.

Hello!

I hope you’re doing well. I don’t say that enough, tend not to address you directly—but it’s true, I do hope that, today and always. It’s an important affirmation, I think. I hope also that the sun shines for you, that clean water is there when you need it, that the air is light, and so on. All of these things can hurt, but, properly taken care of, they’re there to help, too. In other words, I care for both you and the environment you live in—you shape the latter, the latter shapes you, and they’re both important to me.

We took an afternoon walk in the heat today, thinking it wouldn’t be so bad. I’m feeling better now, thanks to some gently insistent care from T (living with a nurse, it’s great!), but the heat left me tired and loopy—please excuse, well, wherever we end up as a result!

Today’s format: Three medium(ish) sections, separated by two annotated links. It’s a bit longer than usual, but I hope worth your time. Let’s go!

Hello!

Friday, T and I drove Arthur to the vet for a regular check-up. It was perhaps shortsighted to go at the end of the workweek, heading into a sunny summer weekend, but we took whatever appointment we could get.

Traffic downtown was abysmal. I was struck by the stress and frustration of driving—and I love to drive! Maybe I’m out of practice, maybe you get used to it the more you do it, but the emotional toll of driving was huge, compared to the relative benefits. Now, we drove for a reason: it was the most flexible, convenient, affordable way to get where we needed to go (the economics of car-sharing like Communauto shine best for short, in-city trips, versus taking a taxi / Uber / transit). So clearly it was “worth it”, versus the alternatives.

Those who drive often cite just this, freedom and flexibility, as justification. And, to an extent, I sympathize—our built environment incentivizes the personal vehicle, and it does bring real convenience (it’s a portable storage locker and private space, hard to beat). Nor do we seem on track to fix that: Ottawa’s LRT inquiry demonstrates the profound mediocrity that elected officials—and the driving public—accept of public transit. Further, there isn’t the same political attention for poor transit that there is for roads (see the political popularity of gas tax cuts).

This week saw the formal end of life of two software products—both were famous, for a time, before ending their lives more or less infamously.

First, Internet Explorer. Microsoft’s announcement of its eventual demise spawned a countdown site and the decommissioning itself spawned a hilarious gravestone. I particularly enjoyed Dave Rupert’s reminiscences on the browser—they reminded me of not-so-long-ago conversations as a developer about supporting IE.

Even once decommissioned, there’s a long, long tail in browser usage: a few years ago, reviewing analytics for a government site at work, we found a small but consistent level of visits from Internet Explorer 6, even then an unsupported version; they all happened during work hours, and the pages visited were public-facing, leading us to think the browser was still installed on some kiosk in a small office, to browse the department’s pages.

Hello!

Pretty tired today (rainy day, and T and I only realized midafternoon that we’d made half-caff espresso this morning), but hanging in. We’re all curled up in our corners—T on the couch, Arthur on the windowsill, me on the lounger. It’ll be a restful end to a week of good walks and good talks (including a particularly rewarding verbal ramble with Asad).

Let’s get right into the links:

• “Six Thousand Years of Forests”, by Sophie Yeo, with sound recordings by Joseph Monkhouse and illustrations by Elin Manon (making a feast for the senses), considers a long history of forests in Britain—though much of the change over that history has happened in a relatively short time. Change, faster and faster, but trees still need the time they need (or maybe they’re driven to grow faster, too). (via Alan Jacobs)
• Will programming move entirely from localhost to cloud dev environments? Maybe, who knows! An interesting thought experiment anyway.
• Long-time readers will know that I have a pretty straightforward relationship with heat (as in, hot outside air): I dislike it. Not only is cooler weather more comfortable (no sweating!) and more practical (layers! extra pockets!), it’s also safer (to a point, of course). But it’s going to become rarer and rarer as the climate changes—so researchers are digging into nuanced, practical advice for surviving prolonged heat exposure. Part of the No Safe Place series, on climate adaptation—the kind of writing and research we so desperately need.
• I’ve also been looking to read and support more local news, particularly as the municipal elections gear up. For that, Ottawa Lookout has been a great source—there’s always one or two tidbits in it that I enjoy reading, and the food recommendations in the subscription version are well worth the price of entry.

I’ve just spent who knows how long perusing biking maps of Ottawa, planning for countless little tours. The past week or so has seen me doing plenty of research on cat-related things—well worth it, since T and I brought home Arthur on Thursday night, and he’s already stolen our hearts. I reckon these three—biking, T, and Arthur—will be big parts of the summer ahead, and I’m so glad for it.

Otherwise, it’s been a pretty lazy Sunday—for which I’m glad. Work was busy this week (lots of hurry up and wait), and socializing a bit fuller than it has been for a while. Which aren’t bad things! But they lead to a very tuckered out Lucas. Anyhow, we’re all lazing in the sun now—no complaints.

The main theme of my notable reading this week seemed to be financialization. It was not happy reading.

• Though paywalled (ha!), the Globe and Mail ran a front page feature on the rapidly increasing presence of private equity in health care, buying up medical, dental, and veterinary practices and squeezing them for profit (disrupting the industry’s private practitioner model in the process). And much of the money for these investments come from pension funds!

• Cory Doctorow wrote about housing speculation, and who loses when we treat housing not as a right, but as a financial asset: > Housing is a uniquely dangerous form of speculation, because shelter is a primary human right, and being unsheltered is catastrophic. When a nation replaces labor rights and a social safety net with speculation on housing, it pits the living conditions of everyone who doesn’t have a home against everyone who does. A country whose residents’ dignified retirement depends on house prices going up is a country whose government is committing to making shelter more expensive.

• This reminded me of a recent observation that my apartment building, officially owned by a pair of numbered companies, is an income source for Great-West Lifeco, which built the property and manages it through its subsidiary, GWL Realty Advisors. GWL Realty Advisors also has a commercial arm, which, hey now, property manages the two main office buildings for the department I work for (indeed, it owns one of the two buildings). And get this—my dental plan at work, the Public Service Dental Care Plan? It’s administered by the Canada Life Assurance Company, itself a subsidiary of Great-West Lifeco.\ \ There’s something particularly… interesting… that the people negotiating the public service dental care plan at TBS work in a building property managed by a subsidiary of the same company that currently administers the plan. And some of those very employees might even live in a building managed by the same company! All of which is there to provide income to the insurance company, which itself provides income to the Desmarais family’s Power Corp. \ \ To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything intentionally nefarious about this arrangement. Rather, I think it’s an indication of how our current form of capitalism integrates and financializes everything around us. You can’t really escape it.

Hello!

It’s been quite a packed week. My parents were up visiting, which was lovely, with evenings of family friends and catching up. This weekend has been busy, with T and I running a bunch of errands while also seeking restful downtime. All feels good, though, with exciting changes on the horizon.

The links this week have quite a bit of “web-y-ness” to them, but I reckon there’s something of interest for most:

• Monica Powell on documenting your accomplishments in a “shine document”—no win is too small to write down for your future self to reflect on. Powell links to Julia Evans’s brag doc template, which I’ve found helpful for this—though I’m not as regular with it as I ought to be.
• Jeremy Keith on Stewart Brand’s concept of pace layers, with examples of the powerful metaphor’s application from career paths to design to reading. Browsing Jeremy’s site, I ended up on the dConstruct conference’s archive, full of interesting talks by thoughtful people. (Or are they thoughtful talks by interesting people? Thoughtfulness begets interest, people beget the talks, so I’ll stick with the order as written.)
• Anil Dash on his Webby Lifetime Achievement award for the predecessor work to… non-fungible tokens (NFTs)—worth reading for his reflections on not only what’s become of NFTs, but also how the term “lifetime achievement” weighs.
• Maria Popova, quoting and reflecting on Charlie Mackesy, on living with fear, and fear as a (necessary!) step to other emotions. Two parts I particularly liked: her use of “tense” in saying “our prospective imagination — the ability to tense into the future and everything that could possibly go wrong in it” (tense in terms of both time and anxious action—brilliant!) and the relationship between truth and sincerity. Reading to the end, Popova links to a past piece of hers on Thich Nhat Hanh and four Buddhist mantras for turning fear into love—the mantra approach sat well with me.

Hi folks!

Yesterday afternoon featured one of the fiercest storms I’ve seen in Ottawa for a while. The water running down the street was so voluminous it leapt the curb, the sky so dark it felt like nighttime in the middle of the afternoon. Walking around, the damage is apparent: trees down across the city, whole neighbourhoods still without power, and countless knock-on effects. This, coupled with the unseasonable temperatures the last few weeks, has me thinking yet again about an era of climate unpredictability—adapting to uncertainty seems to remain, as ever, a key skill to learn.

Drained from the weather, but hanging in! Will be brief today, as family’s visiting and we’re off to see some friends.

• Building from last week’s issue, which included a few links on transportation on logistics, here’s Rachel Premack on the follies of the shipping industry, in which bigger seemed to be better until the economics became too unwieldy. (I also enjoyed Premack’s article on truck inspections—announcing inspections may actually increase compliance. I love observations like this that don’t quite make sense at first glance, but reveal their logic once slightly peeled apart.)
• I like the different angles in this story profiling a new fish supply business introducing Great Lakes fish to commercial and home kitchens. From Indigenous food sovereignty to novel ways of preparing and sourcing fish to pushing back on overly industrial food supply chains—fascinating!

Good afternoon!

While I’ve plenty to share, I’ve been slow today to write—something about the weather, maybe, the heat leaching energy, even while I chill in relative air-conditioned comfort. I’m conscious of falling into old habits, now amplified by my access to A/C, of staying inside and avoiding physical activity—which, of course, just makes me depresso and stresso, leading me to dislike the heat ever more. Ah, what a cycle.

Anywho, though, things are pretty good, really, so let’s get into it.

It’s a beautiful spring day in Ottawa—even emphasized with italics, “beautiful” doesn’t quote cut it, which, I suppose, is why we have poetry. Life, in other words, could be much worse.

On the other hand, spring heralds the return of heat, with all its pleasures and stresses. Voyaging out on the bike has been a highlight of the season so far; I’m hoping for as gradual a start to summer as we had for the spring, to keep those rides as cool and comfortable as possible.

Evenings are stretching on, filling each day with possibility—let’s make the most of the days, shall we?

Good morning!

It’s May. Wow, eh?

This time last year, leaves were already out on the trees, and spring flowers were merrily on display. We’re not quite there yet this year, but I’ll take today’s sun and blue skies as a good sign that we’re well on our way.

Hi there,

I’m perched on the ladder of a tree fort in my parents’ back yard, here in Waterloo, soaking up some sunshine, fresh air, and unseasonably warm April temperatures. The birdsong is happy and so am I.

Being a public servant, I tend to believe that the state can be a force for good in people’s lives, visibly and invisibly. This belief is coupled with an awareness—a sometimes painful one—that the state can also be a force of, well, not-good—whether acting in harmful ways or not acting in the face of harm.

This intro is, as with so many times over the last two years, a reflection on the state response to COVID.

Hi there!

I’m experiencing heavy time dilation this week—my perception of days and hours is way out of whack with what the clock says. But I’m not complaining! It’s neat to experience things at a different pace.

I have been feeling particularly gloomy about the state of the future. Democracies seem to be on the ebb, struggling to withstand the strength of populism (including its southern theocratic flavour), our societal response to pandemic inequities seems to have returned to the usual shrug, and climate change remains an existential threat.

And I think, at many times, I will still feel that way.

T called me to the window yesterday, to see a heron flying lazily over downtown. There are many signs of spring, but I always take great, excited joy in this one: the great blue heron, beating its slow approach to warmer days. Welcome, friend—I hope you find both peace and bounty.

As we move into April, cognitive dissonance around the pandemic feels ever higher. Catching the virus is inevitable, some say, or an acceptable tradeoff for “getting back to normal”. I struggle to see how catching a virus with potentially significant long-term effects on the cardiovascular system and the brain is “worth it”, even as I do very much want to be more out and about—and understand that I may well catch it! I also don’t see how we can “evaluate our own risk” or “decide on our comfort levels” when testing and reporting have been scaled back, with public health authorities at all levels seemingly cowed into silence and inaction.

I’d be less upset if there was even acknowledgement of what’s happening, with practical advice tailored to changing conditions—Ramadan, Easter, and spring mean April will likely see elevated levels of social contact, but I’m hearing little to no updated public health messaging to reflect this. Maybe it’s there, but I’m just not getting it. Sigh.

It also seems that governments are overlooking meaningful changes that’d help not only with COVID, but with all airborne viruses, like higher quality ventilation standards and in-room filters for older buildings. A right to clean(er?) inside air seems like a huge win, with the related benefits to general health worth the cost. Nor is it a new idea—see the campaigns against public smoking as an example. But is there space in our political discourse for new rights? I’m not so sure. (Must resist the defeatist urge! Better worlds are possible, worth striving for!)

Good afternoon!

The city put out street sweeping notices this morning, a sure sign of spring in Ottawa. I gathered numerous links this week—thanks in part to some tab cleaning—so let’s get into it:

• The cover story (ish—it was featured on the cover) in yesterday’s Globe and Mail is a fairly in-depth discussion of Canadian healthcare inefficiency—that is, directing existing money toward providing better care. I particularly liked the call-out that Canada does not have a healthcare system, but public health insurance—with patchy coverage at that. (I didn’t like the logically flawed line that “[COVID-19] restrictions were needed to protect hospitals, even though Canada’s per capita hospitalization rates have mostly been lower than those in Britain, the United States and France”, but I’ll leave that criticism as-is.) Thinking about structural solutions, yes!
• Two more interesting pieces on economics and public finances (can’t believe I’m writing those words): one, on the effects of inflation on higher education student loans; two, on who actually pays for roads (gas taxes are but a small part of the story—non-drivers actually subsidize drivers’ road use!). (The latter led me to CAA’s driving costs calculator, which seems to me a helpful input for reckoning about car ownership when budgeting.)
• Some good Twitter threads this week (threads aren’t really a medium, but also they’re kind of a medium?):
  • Wells Lucas Santo on why Fahrenheit is probably better than Celsius for day-to-day purposes (in temperate climates, that is)
  • Luke Simcoe on public sector salary disclosure (the sunshine list!) and how journalists cover power
  • Deb Chachra on “random infrastructure and infrastructure-adjacent tidbits”
• In a concerning turn for freedom of information, a town in New Jersey sued a woman for filing about two records requests a month, saying they were “voluminous” and “burdensome”. An absolute waste of public funds to try to shut down attempts to access information like this.
• Researchers investigated modern-day buildings in Florence, finding remnants of San Pier Maggiore, a church deconstructed in the late 1700s—fascinating to see how its architectural details persist today, hundreds of years later, in the buildings that grew to replace it.

In non-web reading, I started Human Acts by Han Kang, for a book club with friends. It’s a good illustration of why we ought to be hesitant to call in the military for domestic operations—though the police aren’t really a better option. Sigh. Violence solves nothing. On a more optimistic note, the book’s also a good illustration of the importance of community—of stepping up to help others. Thank goodness for that.

Good morning!

I was up late playing Cities: Skylines last night (no regrets), but I bounced back with a triple espresso to start my day—it’s hard to predict where the afternoon will take my energy, though, so I’ll write to you quickly now and hope for the best.

Some links for you today:

• Amil Niazi on ambition has left me thinking all week: ‘There’s an illusion with work that everything you give up now, all the stolen time commuting, working overtime, checking your email and Slack notifications after hours, will somehow earn you freedom and capital in your later years. But the farce of “work hard now, play later” has been exposed for millennials and Gen-Zers; most of us will be working until we die. It’s hard to maintain your ambition in the face of that reality.’ (I’ve never considered myself ambitious—this is a great articulation of my more recent reasons why not.)
• Despite our economic obsession with software and the like, the built environment remains central to our lives. A few interesting pieces on that topic, with a dash of disaster response thrown in (since it’s becoming increasingly central):
  • Flood response and the significance of insurance in shaping our future behaviour
  • Modifying building codes to account for minimizing the effects of disasters
  • Accounting for new technologies and techniques in firefighting to enable more economical medium density housing
• This story about an Alberta MLA confirming and reporting a security vulnerability, only to have to resign from caucus and face investigation by the police, is a great example of why governments need good vulnerability disclosure policies—and why those policies have to sit within a broader legal framework affording protection for ethically identifying vulnerabilities. (It’s important to consider who gets investigated for such “cybercrime”, in the absence of such a framework…)
• I spent some time analysing my walk data, visualizing my range in Ottawa in 2020, 2021, and thus far in 2022. It’s already prompting me to change up where I go for today’s walk!
• With Wellington closed to traffic (kinda), proposals swirl for how Ottawa’s parliamentary precinct might be redesigned or reimagined. For those seeking grand boulevards, I’m reminded of a Paul Wells column from a few years ago, putting into context why other cities have such grand designs—and why it’s totally okay that Ottawa doesn’t.

It’s here—we’ve gone from “springlike” to “spring”, at least officially. There’s still snow on the ground, and ice in the rivers, but it’s melting quickly. Indeed, on this morning’s walk I saw the ice breaker that’s a sure sign of spring in Ottawa. (It’s not quite an icebreaking hovercraft, but it’s neat nonetheless.) T and I both waved at some geese and said, “welcome back!” as we sat in the park the other day, glad to hear the birds making their return.

In too many ways, it feels like last year’s newsletter from around this time still holds up:

Yesterday was the first day of spring. I woke relatively early, layered up (these edge weeks are so odd—chilly mornings, “hot” afternoons), and ventured out, binoculars in hand. The birds are (coming) back, and I was glad to bear witness.

…

It feels like we’re racing ahead. Toward, on the one hand, as I wrote last week, a third wave here in Ontario. Toward, on the other, genuinely brighter days ahead. (I mean, the days will lengthen for a few months, so I suppose that’s not merely a metaphorical statement.)

With the lifting of mask mandates, erosion of local control, and “stealth Omicron”, it all feels like a “we’ve been here before” kind of situation. But never have folks been so on their own, particularly those at higher risk from the virus. Not to mention the pretty widespread, and poorly understood, risk of long COVID. Sigh. I have few words to share at this point—just a knowing nod of appreciation to those still doing their part to protect their community.

(A sombre reflection on the current moment. I invite you to skip ahead to the end for two beautiful links, if that’d do you best.)

Two years ago, with COVID clearly upon us here in Canada, I began thinking, “okay, let’s prepare for about two years of waves hands this.” Two years, based on some cursory reading on past pandemics, and early glimpses at our approach, felt about right: long enough to set expectations realistically (i.e., not to feel like it’d be over in a few weeks, but to be pleasantly surprised if it were), but short enough to not lose hope entirely.

What I didn’t expect at the time—though wouldn’t have been surprised by after a year or so of this—was to see governments simply… giving up, after those two years. As if wishful thinking and a rejection of evidence (COVID is airborne! masks work incredibly well! surface cleaning is only marginally useful against COVID!) would bend a virus to a desired timetable.

Alas, that damned virus is still here. While there’s some progress toward understanding long COVID and its risk factors (“some” is doing a lot, there), it’s largely absent from high-level government communications on the subject, or high-profile plans. Leaders have given up on protecting the community at large (which means protecting the most vulnerable within it, as a community is nothing but its people), favouring instead a rhetoric of personal responsibility (“wear your mask if you want to”, “if you’re not yet comfortable…”) whose logic is weak, to say the least, in the face of a virus transmitted by air (air being perhaps the quintessential common resource).

Good afternoon!

It was a tough week. And I was barely reading the news.

It feels weird to have a tough week when the world is on fire (literally, metaphorically, literally again). Then again, it’s important to remember how our context—the world is on fire!—affects how we proceed and respond to our own events. Things that’d be manageable during a “normal” week (but what’s normal anymore) will be that much harder, sometimes to the point of being overwhelming, during a hard week.

I’m doing better now. I was reminded, through the last week, of the importance of a few things:

Hi there. It’s been quite a week, eh?

The overwhelming story, in print and online, has been Ukraine. “Overwhelming” applies, in every sense: it is overpowering, irresistible, crowding out most any other story.

We are confronted with war. And confronted with it visually, anecdotally, personally. “Thanks” to technological advancements in the hundred or so years since war artists depicted the First World War, imagery providing a sober dose of reality is so easily at our fingertips. We can watch war in real-time, as we’ve been able to since satellite broadcasts became practical, but it’s now more often than not through the lens and mouth of people on the ground, as with the popular uprisings in the Arab world since 2010. And it seems conventional media are in shock, showing their racism overtly instead of covertly.

But, because Russia is involved, disinformation is rampant. It is hard to know what to trust of what we see online. Real-time exposure from afar can also breed an immobilizing anxiety. There is a privilege to slow news, to turning off or restricting access to social media, to conflict being elsewhere and thus something to be consumed instead of something happening to us. As with any privilege, it can be used to effective ends, by redirecting that anxious energy toward pressuring politicians, toward supporting Ukraine and its people. I took a break from doomscrolling to spend some time this afternoon outside the Russian embassy, demonstrating for freedom in the right way.

Hello!

It’s been (yet another) interesting week in Ottawa. A few reflections, for posterity:

• Over the last few days, downtown Ottawa has looked very different. The view outside my window became one of police and tow trucks, instead of flag-waving occupiers.
  • Though police seem to have been successful in clearing out the downtown core, I don’t really believe in policing as a long-term solution to any of this. For one, as I expand on below, police action will likely serve only to victimize and radicalize movement participants. Now, I don’t think the solution here, as some politicians seem to suggest, would have been to go and negotiate with the occupiers. The movement was too incoherent in its demands, and the ones that did surface—abolish all mandates, replace the democratically elected government—were too extreme, too incredible to warrant the legitimacy that negotiation would offer.
  • But I also believe that policing—and its implication of force, of violence—simply can’t be the go-to solution for society. It causes more harm than good. Consider, as an alternative, the vision presented in the Choosing Real Safety declaration. And such a vision isn’t mere wishful thinking—look only at the success of the “Battle of Billings Bridge” last weekend to see what community organizing can do.
• While the week unfolded, municipal politics proceeded in a business-as-usual fashion—that is to say, mayor Watson continued to exercise poor judgement and play his cruel politics.
  • Late last weekend, Watson cut a backroom deal with the occupier organizers, to concentrate the trucks downtown (without, of course, consulting downtown councillors, or anyone, really).
  • Then, Watson and allied councillors orchestrated an odious overthrow of the police board, during a meeting in which councillor McKenney attended from ground zero of the occupation, to show to fellow (mostly unsympathetic) councillors just what conditions were like.
  • Councillor Meehan summarized well the shenanigans Watson wrought, the petty politics he’s long practiced.
• Even as trucks are cleared from downtown, this doesn’t end.
  • This moment will likely go down as one of radicalization and emboldening for far-right populism in Canada: while the “protest” was ostensibly related to COVID-19 protections, like vaccination and mask mandates, its main organizers have long been involved in hateful movements, and its methods—terrorizing the people of downtown Ottawa for weeks on end—were anything but peaceful. Not to mention the on-again-off-again support from even some mainstream parties and politicians. These positions aren’t going away.
  • This will serve as a test, to show how far white supremacy can go without being challenged (about three weeks seems to be the measure), and as a flashpoint. And now that police finally did intervene, this movement can victimize itself ever more, pointing to the apparent violence they suffered—nevermind the violence they themselves inflicted.

Despite all this, my week was decent. Plenty of long walks, good food, and time with T, family, and friends. I hope you found bright moments amidst the gloom, and continue to in days ahead. All the best for the week ahead!