Blessed by the Potato

In our most recent hydro bill, we received one of those little propaganda pamphlets explaining why our electricity bill has to go up again. In it is this little statement:

“For most Canadian households, electricity makes up about 1% of the household budget. In fact, one penny per dollar powers many things that we simply take for granted: lights; appliances; air conditioning[…]”

And then right be side that is a little city-to-city comparison, pegging a typical 1000 kWh Toronto Hydro bill at about $135.72 (ours usually comes in ~$100/mo; elsewhere they say a typical Toronto Hydro customer usage is 800 kWh/mo, which would scale to $108.58). Now combine those two pieces of information and you have Toronto Hydro saying that a household budget is $13,572/mo or $162,864/year (or using the slightly lower monthly usage, $130,291/year). That’s quite a bit above the actual household pre-tax income, let alone the spending budget.

They provide the source as Stats Canada, so of course I had to go fact check on them. In the table the total Canadian household expenditures for 2011 is given as $956B, with electricity at $17.4B. The percentage of the household budget that electricity represents is then 1.8%, which should be rounded up to 2%, not down to 1%. Even then it seems too low, putting the annual household spending budget above $70k, over $90k with that 1000 kWh bill — at about the level of pre-tax household income, rather than the spending budget. I’m pretty sure electricity likely makes up even more of the household budget than that.

Looking at the Stats Can data, we have a parent category for electricity called Housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels. Now I couldn’t find detailed notes explaining this category, but here’s my best inference: the total should be right, but the subcategories might not be fully broken down. Within that Housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels category are Paid rental fees for housing and Imputed rental fees for housing. We know from all the studies of the Canadian housing bubble that the ownership rate is about 70%, and that it should be the more expensive slice of the market that falls under the ownership umbrella, thus imputed rent should be a fair bit more than 70% of the total of rent paid and imputed rent. At $48B and $142B it is, but just by a bit: rent makes up about 25% of that total. My suspicion is that there are some people with all-inclusive rents whose electricity is lumped under that subcategory rather than electricity proper, under-reporting the amount Canadians spend on electricity.

Anyway, at the very least the Toronto Hydro pamphlet should have rounded to 2% (small numbers either way, but you know, double what they said).

Continued from yesterday…

Calories are loyal. If someone buys a meal, the calories in the food belong to them. If you try to steal a bite, the calories will run away from that bite and stay with the group, remaining loyal and whole to the person who bought the food. Yes, free food is also calorie-free.

Calories can’t swim, at least not in water (gravy and syrup are a whole other matter). This is why drinking lots of water is a hot diet tip. However, it makes us question the wisdom of not eating while swimming: calories would never follow you into the pool.

Pile the calories up and leave them. One good way to avoid calories is to scare them away into one pile on your plate, for instance by making soft yet menacing banging noises with your fork. Then, leave a few bites behind. The calories will have piled into those last few bites. Babies know this instinctively, and will smash, shake, and scream at their food during mealtimes… and then never, ever eat the last bite of anything.

“Light” means that some of the calories have been removed from the food. The remaining calories are thus lonely and feeling vulnerable. This makes them more likely to want to make friends with your hips. To compensate for this you should build up the self-esteem of any “light” foods before eating them by praising and encouraging the calories. Make light conversation, complement them, maybe even sing a soft, cheerful song. Once the “calorie reduced” food has been built back up, the other methods will work again.

Air of course has no calories, and to a very close approximation Rice Krispies are 100% air, so they’re calorie-free. With a small extension of the principle, anything largely made up of puffed rice is also calorie-free. For example, Whatchamacallit bars. A similar principle is at work with popcorn and whipped cream.

Did you know that calories get sleepy? Calories get very set in their ways, and don’t adjust well to changes in their sleeping schedule. This is why it’s important to get a good breakfast early in the morning: not only is it a good start to your day, but it’s also so you can sneak up on the calories when they’re too tired and sleepy to make you fat. Of course, you have to find the right calories for that.

Some calories go to bed early, while others are all-night party animals. This is why drinking Coke and eating nachos and chocolate at night will always make you fat, because those are night-time foods. But, those same foods make excellent breakfast selections. Breakfast-for-dinner, or Brenner is always a good idea for the same reason. Plus, who doesn’t love waffles at midnight?!

Calories are little things that live in food. They’re tasty and give your body energy. Things without any calories aren’t really food at all. In small amounts, calories are great things. Trouble arises when large groups of calories get together though. They start getting mischievous ideas, and once inside your body avoid getting burned, instead turning into fat — which is not what we want. There are a great many resources out there to help you diet, to find ways to count the calories in things, and limit how many you allow to get together at once in your body. But why give them that kind of power over you? Did you know that calories are just as afraid of you as you are of them? This handy guide will show you the many unknown facts about calories so that you can keep them in line and eat whatever you want — without getting fat.

First, threaten your food. It’s never polite to threaten other people, but calories aren’t people. Severe threats or growling noises can scare away calories, and other people at the diner. Just be sure to leave them a safe place to run to, or they’ll be back with a vengeance! (True for both groups).

Calories are afraid of heights. If you put your food in a high place, such as on top of the fridge, the calories will get scared and jump out. This is best facilitated by giving them a ramp or ladder to climb down from. Calories are small, with hundreds of them fitting into a single cookie, so even a piece of thread looks like a grand staircase to them. They’ll have no trouble making their way down if they’re scared enough of being up high. Even if they have to jump. They hate heights that much, and do not have logical responses to stressful situations.

A corollary to this is that food in low places may collect the fleeing calories from the food in high places. This is why even when you’re following your diet and only eating the lettuce in the crisper drawer of your fridge, you always seems to gain weight anyway. The calories from your butter have snuck down there! Lettuce, by the way, is secretly evil. Under controlled lab conditions, it presents itself as largely free of calories, hardly associating with them at all. But out in the wild real world, lettuce readily aligns itself with calories, harbouring them and building them up within its nested leaves as some kind of highly fortified barracks, turning those mindless loitering calories into a highly trained force to be handled with extreme caution and delicacy.

Calories have weak grips. If you shake your food before you eat it, you can loosen up the calories and even shake some out entirely! They can’t hold on to the delicious food with their weak grips, and will fly away. A good way to facilitate this is to break your food in half: the calories will just come pouring out! Combine this tip with the previous one, and shake your food above your head — just watch out for crumbs and sloshing.

Calories go on vacation. They don’t want to work at making you fat any more than you want to work on TPS reports when on vacation. Take them out for a nice trip by the river, and lay out a picnic under a shady tree. Who can think of work in situations like that?

To be continued tomorrow…

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Almost three years ago I created a video called Little Known Facts About Calories. I had planned to make a whole series of such videos, but the first two had such a cold reception and so few views that I gave up — making those flash videos is a fucktonne of work, and after three years it still hasn’t even hit 100 views (though to be fair the subsequent installments would have been easier after I had climbed partway up the Flash learning curve and had created the base shapes for the calories and other elements). So here, with minimal editing and embellishing, are the notes that would have formed the basis for the planned ten-episode run (would have been about 6 minutes of animation all-together).

Jenn recently linked to an interesting article about post-doc pay, and how the low pay (and other issues, like the constant moving and uncertainty and short-term contracts and lack of benefits) right at the point where women’s fertility starts to drop is one factor keeping them out of science. Go and read that article, but I think this goes well beyond just women in science, post-docs and starting families.

I keep thinking of ways to dramatically reshape the way we do science. They may not be practical, but I like thinking outside the box from time to time.

One set of related ideas I keep coming back to are the issues of compensation and focus. Grad students and post-docs are paid terribly. How terrible? Well, in my department grad students made about $14k-16k as a base stipend (and that level has not changed in almost two decades, inflation be damned), top students with national scholarships could take home about $33k. Yes, per year, with restrictions on seeking outside work. This is in part because they are said to be trainees who are learning how to be proper scientists. Except if they make it through the funnel and up the pyramid, or whatever visual metaphor you may choose, they teach and write grants and supervise — skills they are largely not being taught.

So the idea I toss around is that of a permanent post-doc, or professional bench scientist: a position for someone who will spend their life doing hands-on research, and who gets paid a professional salary for it.

Along with that would be wage/stipend increases for grad students: there is a lot of catching up to do just to get back to the inflation-adjusted level of poverty they were at a decade ago, let alone getting to the point where it is recognized that they are the driving force behind science, and that a senior PhD student is a professional with years of training and specialized expertise making less than minimum wage. One related option might be to shorten PhD programs — it runs the risk of devaluing the degree, but did the 4th and 5th years of my own slog through grad school add much to my development as a scientist that the 2nd and 3rd years did not already? How has the average time to graduation changed over the past couple of decades?

It’s a tough issue, and would represent massive disruptive changes, with no real advocate to push for it. I’m really not even sure myself if these wild speculations I sometimes have are worth any further consideration at all. I mean, even if that is a place we wanted to move to, how would we possibly get there?

In a sense, science is powered by slave labour. If we restricted entry into grad school so that a higher percentage of PhDs could stay in academia (and let the industries that end up hiring PhDs instead hire MSc grads or some newly-created in-between research-intensive 3-4 year expert degree); or reduced the graduation hurdle so that they only did 2 experiments instead of 3, and graduated before 31 years of age — or really any change along those lines — we would limit the amount of science that could get done on current budgets. Unless we truly were able to hire more efficient and productive talent (or focus and dedicate the talent we have) with the increased compensation, the fact is that less research would get done for today’s research budget. This seems an insurmountable problem.

Then I thought, what if instead of thinking of slavery as a harsh verbal rhetoric, I looked at it as an actual model? After all, that problem has been solved. Slavery doesn’t exist in the modern civilized world, but did at some point in our past. Many countries weaned themselves off, with the US having a particularly dramatic and definite end to the practice after the Civil War. How did the transition work out then? What lessons can we learn for transitioning the economic model of science? Unfortunately I’m not enough of a historian to say, so I will have to end here as some food for thought.

It is an eternal debate: do we live for today or save for the future? Some kind of balance needs to be found, as living a hedonistic, spendthrift lifestyle only to end up spending your autumn years on government assistance is no good, but neither is playing the miser through your younger, healthier years just to die and leave it all behind.

I always thought I managed to walk this line fairly well: I work hard and save for the future, with a plan to retire earlier than 65 (after all, who knows what kind of shape I’ll be in by 60), but still enjoy the moment. I’m aware of the power of compounding, and have internalized the math that saving & investing a dollar today means I can spend three in retirement. Inversing that, taking a year off from work now might mean I’d have to tack on 3-5 more working years at the end of my career before retiring.

That’s pretty simple logic on the opportunity cost of taking time off — and it gets even worse when you consider the potential damage of a gap to my career. So I’ve never really considered taking time off without a damned good reason to. Heck, even on my vacations I tend to find side projects to work on, even if they’re not the most profitable post hoc (e.g., book). But now that Blueberry is on the scene I start to wonder.

I missed my daughter’s first steps today. That’s not such a surprise, as even Wayfare has missed some of her firsts (she seems to show off for grandma), and I’m at work all day. Yet it kind of puts a sharp focus on something that’s really been bugging me about my job: I spend so much time commuting and working that I hardly see the whole reason I’m going through the whole mess. A few months ago when she was into her “stranger danger” phase, I went a full week without seeing her, and when I finally did she freaked out and cried because she didn’t recognize her dad. So missing her first steps is a moment that does make me — for perhaps the first time — step back and seriously consider taking some time off from my career.

It’s also a bit of a timely issue because Wayfare’s mat leave has run its course, and yet Blueberry is still too young for daycare, leaving us searching for childcare options. It is heart-wrenching to even think of handing over our little girl to some stranger to watch over, yet it is also difficult to get by on just one income, particularly in this city. I know eventually she will have to go off to spend more time being raised by strangers than with us — at school if not daycare — but it doesn’t stop me from wondering if taking a year off now and draining my savings might be totally worth it. It sure seems nicer to spend some time at home taking care of my baby than to be able to take more time off at the end of my career, when the house will be cold and empty.

And this is the age when I want to be there for her: at 12 she won’t want to see “Da”, she’ll be at school for most of the day and then want to disappear into her room with a book or video/holo game when she’s not. Right now she’s thrilled to have me around, and the world is a magical wonderful place full of adventure and discovery. I want to be there to see her point to a bird singing in a tree and exclaim “Bir!” or to a passing jet and do the same*. I want to watch her dig through her bag of toys until she finds a match for whatever’s already in her hand, and then merrily bang the two similar items together. When she’s a teenager she’ll likely just infuriate me if I see her at all.

But the cold math is the same: Wayfare and I make more than a nanny or daycare service, so Blueberry goes off to the strangers’ arms while we work to keep our heads above water in this crazy world.

An alternative to quitting or taking a full leave of absence — indeed my preferred solution — would be part-time work: ideally I’d work 3-4 days a week, Wayfare would work 2-4, and with one of us having the flexibility to work weekends plus occasional childcare from the grandparents we’d be set. But unfortunately it’s tough to find part-time work — I doubt I’d be able to swing it at my current job, the HR system isn’t really set up for it. Indeed, a 9-day bi-weekly work option (adding ~1 hr to each day and then taking a day off every other week) is a recent experiment there, and that plan’s only around for the summer. Plus there’s too much for me to do to just cut back (though they could almost use another 0.5-0.8 FTE, so perhaps hiring a full-time person and dropping me down to 4 days a week would work for everyone if only the money in the budget could be found).

Health insurance is another hurdle: I get it, Wayfare doesn’t, so it made and continues to make some kind of sense for me to try to keep a stable full-time job while she gets to take the mat/pat leave and spend all the time with Blueberry, even though she’s actually the higher-earner in the family. The value of group insurance for someone so sickly nearly covers the spread in gross pay.

Taking time off would be an easier decision if I had more freelance experience and could use that as essentially a part-time career. Part of what makes me consider it so closely is that I do have some margin of safety in my planning: pushing a planned retirement age from say 60 to 65 is not so bad, not like moving it from 65 to 70 — it’s not like I’d be cutting things so close as to be taking major risks on my ability to work later in life (health, etc.).

Though really as I get more comfortable (even as I write this out) with the idea of sacrificing disposable income and retirement savings to spend time with Blueberry, the big remaining fear is the gap on my resume. It took months to find a decent non-academic job in the first place, and that included accepting the dreaded subway commute. It did kind of backfire on me: part of the reason I went for a non-academic job was to have more stable hours to spend time with my family, and here I am a year later lamenting how little time I manage to spend with my family. Part was for better (short-term) pay: it would have been a lot tighter on a post-doc’s salary, yet here I am considering throwing the financial plan out the window for shits and giggles (literally). With such a gap on my CV and publication record I doubt I would have the option of trying to pursue an academic career now — will it be the same for a non-academic career after a year of being a homemaker?

I just don’t know what to do. I suspect that all my considering and weighing will lead me back to the default choice: keep working, let the woman take the mat/pat leave, and after that let her work part time with hired help to cover the rest of the childcare. It’s kind of sad, but I don’t really see another path…

* – It is apparently babies who confuse birds, planes, and Superman.