I am going to lose my job — my salaried job with medical and dental and even a pension plan. Didn’t even know what a pension was until the employee benefits counselor clued me in, and it nearly blew the top of my skull off. For a couple of weeks I was like that lucky conquistador from the poem — stout what’s-his-name silent upon a peak in Darien — as I dealt this wild surmise: 20 years of rough country ahead of me leading down to an ocean of Slack that stretched all the way to the sunlit rim of the world, or to the end of my natural life expectancy, whichever came first.
Neal Stephenson, “Spew”, Some Remarks, 2012.
January 3, 2014
QotD: Pensions, an idealized view
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Virginia Postrel on “first world problems”
I’ve heard the term many, many times (and used it more than a few times as well), but as Virginia Postrel points out, it didn’t just happen by chance that there are “first world problems” we can mock-sympathize over:
Third world conditions are defined not merely by economic misery but by unreliable services. “At the age of fourteen I had experienced a miracle,” writes Suketu Mehta in Maximum City, his critically acclaimed 2009 book on Mumbai. “I turned on a tap, and clean water came gushing out. This was in the kitchen of my father’s studio apartment in Jackson Heights [New York]. It had never happened to me before. In Bombay, the tap, when it worked, was always the first step of a process” taking at least 24 hours to produce drinkable water. Mehta’s family lived an affluent life but with third world problems.
By contrast, in a developed country, barring a major natural disaster, you can count on uninterrupted electricity, hot and cold running water, sewage disposal, garbage pickup, heat (and in hot climates, air conditioning), telephone service, Internet access and television. The roads and bridges will be in decent repair; the elevators will work; the ATMs will have cash; and you’ll be able to find a decent public toilet when you need one.
These things aren’t necessarily free, but they’re cheap enough for pretty much everyone to enjoy them. Most significantly, they’re ubiquitous and reliable. Even when natural disasters strike, we can expect heroic efforts to get things back to normal. Under normal circumstances, we can depend on these services to be there consistently and to work as promised. We can make plans accordingly. That’s a first world privilege.
[…]
It took years of sustained efforts by online retailers and delivery services to make overnight orders realistic. It also took dissatisfaction: insanely demanding companies working to please insanely demanding customers — or, in some cases, to offer customers services they hadn’t even thought to ask for — as each improvement revealed new sources of discontent.
“Form follows failure,” is what Henry Petroski, the civil engineering professor and prolific popular writer, calls the process. Every step forward begins with a complaint about what already exists. “This principle governs all invention, innovation, and ingenuity; it is what drives all inventors, innovators, and engineers,” he writes. “And there follows a corollary: Since nothing is perfect, and, indeed, since even our ideas of perfection are not static, everything is subject to change over time.”
Rising expectations aren’t a sign of immature “entitlement.” They’re a sign of progress — and the wellspring of future advances. The same ridiculous discontent that says Starbucks ought to offer vegan pumpkin lattes created Starbucks in the first place. Two centuries of refusing to be satisfied produced the long series of innovations that turned hunger from a near-universal human condition into a “third world problem.”
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This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week’s (unusually short) roundup has more coverage of the “A Very Merry Wintersday” event which will continue until mid-January. In addition, there’s the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
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It’s time to say goodbye to “strong female characters”
No, I don’t mean get rid of strong characters … but lets move on from the patronizingly token “strong” female character who is just physically strong:
… Hollywood has taken our love of strong female characters and converted it into something dully literal. Strong female characters have become Strong Female Characters, a mutant sub-genus that has less to do with actual women than T-Rexes: physically intimidating, but mentally nonthreatening. But muscle strength isn’t all that interesting on its own — otherwise, Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme would be where George Clooney and Brad Pitt are on the Hollywood A-list. As Sophia McDougall argued this summer in the pop culture feminist critique of the year, strength is too often a substitute for personality where female characters are concerned.
The Mary Sue points out in yet an interview with Neil Gaiman about — you guessed it, “Strong Female Characters,” because he and Joss Whedon are apparently the world’s only authorities on writing interesting women — that “strong female characters don’t necessarily have to have Hulk strength, they need to be strongly written.” Well, sure, we all want female characters to be strongly written, but the problem is no one knows exactly what that means anymore.
[…]
Like the Bechdel test, the “female characters with agency” solution is an imperfect one. But we humans really enjoy our one-stop solutions and easy fixes, and plot-driving female characters is the one we need right now. Because the problem with the representation of women on screen isn’t just that there are almost five times as many male characters as there are female ones, but also that the relatively few women characters who do appear are constantly reduced to roles of passivity and, thus, inconsequentiality.
Female characters don’t always have to win, but we’d like to at least see them try. The time has passed when we are satisfied with a woman character holding a gun or kicking butt as a cheap, insincere nod toward equality. We’re done with strength. Now we want to see the struggles.
H/T to @Elisabeth for the link.
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Patterson goes to the Pro Bowl after all
The NFL Pro Bowl will be following different rules this year and one of the rule changes is the elimination of the kickoff (instead of a kickoff, the receiving team will just get the ball at their own 25 yard line). Cordarrelle Patterson was the best kick returner in the NFL this season, but if there are no kickoffs, there’s no need for KRs on the team. However, Pittsburgh’s Antonio Brown will miss the Pro Bowl and Patterson has been named as his replacement.
Patterson may already be the NFL’s best kick returner … a point that is moot in the Pro Bowl because, for the first time, the Pro Bowl has eliminated kickoffs entirely (teams will just get the ball at the 25-yard line to start each possession). Brown was on the Pro Bowl roster as both a receiver and a punt returner, so it’s possible that Patterson could get a look in that role in the Pro Bowl. Patterson was on the field for a couple of punt returns for the Vikings late in the season.
From what I can see of the Pro Bowl rosters, Patterson is now currently the only rookie on the team. Don’t know if that will help his Rookie of the Year campaign or not … but it should.
The Pro Bowl teams will be selected on 22 January, with the game itself taking place in Honolulu on 26 January.
The most visible change to the Pro Bowl this year is that the teams will no longer represent the two conferences: the teams will be chosen in sandlot style by two honorary captains (Jerry Rice and Deion Sanders) from the pool of nominated players.
Update: Interestingly, Patterson has also been named to the first team All-Pro roster as a kick returner. He’s apparently the only rookie on the All-Pro team this year. Adrian Peterson was nominated to the second team at running back, despite having his second-worst year statistically.
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