Tuesday: in which I discover my inbox is over 700 messages

I usually read email on devices now, and they do not give a current count of messages in the inbox, or I am not seeing it, which amounts to the same thing: a total lack of awareness on my part. It is sort of like how one’s weight can drift up if one does not monitor it via a scale or clothing or whatever.

Anyway. I was at my computer and checked my mail and was a little horrified to see over 700 message. Yikes! And I had cleaned it out pretty thoroughly a month ago, so I cannot even blame that wave of email from the whole transition to school from home — that was long gone.

So I got it down under 300 messages, but at that point, I was just tired, so I stopped.

Also, the monitor arrived! And it works. It was way faster with Minecraft than my monitor hooked up to A.’s chromebook (the goal!). However, still slower than native, so R. reset the resolution from 4K to 1K, and, it is minecraft, so it does not matter, and now it is really fast. So she has a chromebook plus Asus monitor that is really nice and should be quite flexible for both minecraft camp and for school in the fall.

However, the chromebook does run a lot of the apps for tech and design camp. So I am waiting for the cord (forgot to order it) to connect T.’s old apple laptop to the new monitor. In the meantime, I moved my old apple monitor downstairs and hooked up T.’s old apple laptop to that (it is now set up as the tech and design laptop, running El Capitan and thus supporting old applications). I left the mouse and keyboard upstairs; I will probably come to regret this.

I walked by myself. I walked with A.

I made waffles.

I had a delightful phone call with J., and later, one with K.

Mocking NYT analysis of risk assessment

Expect updates.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/30/smarter-living/why-youre-probably-not-so-great-at-risk-assessment.html

“Confirmation bias. If you are wondering if it is safe to dine outdoors with friends, you may do a search for: “Is dining outside safe during coronavirus?” But, Dr. Helweg-Larsen points out that search is likely to turn up articles about why it is safe to dine outside at this time. “What most people do is that they only seek confirming evidence,” she said, a phenomenon called confirmation bias. If you really want the full breadth of information on dining out, you should also look up “dangers of dining outside during coronavirus."”

It is like this person does not know how search engines work. If you google dangers of dining outside during coronavirus, the first two pages of results are full of articles with headlines that are basically, is it safe to dine outside.

The whole article is a lot off. Not a little off. A lot off. This is the first clear cut display of B team that I have seen this year. NYT — and other news outlets — have produced a lot of random garbage over the last few months, but it was pretty clearly their first string of reporters and editors. This is the first evidence that people are finally taking vacation / time off and the B team is producing content. So, yay! They need a break, too! (Interpret that however you like.)

This article has the usual confirmation bias and sense of control / agency issues in it as well.

What the article SHOULD have been about is not, hey, wearing a mask might cause you to take on more risk than you should. Nor is it, flying in an airplane is safer than driving. ESPECIALLY since the tradeoff on cars and airplanes has gotten a whole lot more interesting. What it should have been about was how to identify drivers (boredom, loneliness, need to make a living) that might push you to deny / pretend away risk, and engage in creative thinking and problem solving behaviors to figure out how you can satisfy those needs with lower-risk substitutes, or, absent that, how you can do the risky thing in the safest possible way. Sure, you might take more risks on a bicycle with a helmet that without, but if you have a powerful drive to do the risky thing on the bicycle, you should fucking well put on the helmet.

That is what all of these articles should be about. Instead, they tend to be blame-the-victim or suck it up, buttercup, just do not do The Risky Thing. Useless.

To use a specific example, dining outside at a restaurant during coronavirus. If you have decided you are really gonna do that, you can mitigate the risk further: eat early or late, to avoid crowds; pick a patio with very well separated tables; pick a day where there is a breeze vs. one with no breeze, wear your mask when entering and exiting; dine out only with people who are part of your household; if you dine out with non-household members, share with them pre-emptively your temperature taken the day of dining out BEFORE leaving the house, to give them the opportunity to take their own temperature and share, or to share other symptoms; make it no pain for anyone who is not feeling well to cancel out, etc. If possible, if dining out with non-household members, opt for side-by side dining, vs. facing each other. If you have a habit of shaking hands or hugging, make a specific plan with your compatriots how you will greet each other (virtual hug, elbow bump, foot bump), so that your old habits do not lead you into greater contact than you intended.

Basically, I wanted an article that was less You Are Bad At This So Stop and more Here Is How You Can Incrementally Improve

A minor digression on DVC points

It is a piece of Received Wisdom that one should never convert DVC points into RCI points. It is such a piece of received wisdom, that I did not have any ideas what the rules governing that were. That was not so bright of me! I had some points that were stranded — and then I had more points that were the result of Someone Else canceling their participation in a shared vacation (understandable, but I could have wished that they made that decision in the 9 months ahead of that, and not the 9 days after I finally bought their plane tickets, when they swore they were going. And no, nothing changed between then and when they bailed). The resulting 132 points across 2 memberships, all past their banking deadlines, nagged at me until I thought, hey, could I put these into RCI?

Short form: yes! In increments of 10 points. But I can borrow points from a future year to bring it up to 10. And because they were not banked points, I could transfer from one membership to another, to combine them. Yay!

And I have until the end of 2022 to use them. Yes, end of 2022. Woot!

I tried to call on Monday to do this, and it kept ringing busy. I knew that was going to happen. It was a Monday. Also, the FB DVC group said people were calling after hours just to get the recording instead of the busy signal. I tried Tuesday. Several times, each day. No luck. But today, around 3 something, it rang through! Surprised the hell out of me. I had a 35 minute wait, but everything worked great.