Lone Signal

Blog

  • 9 things to do when you’re locked out of your apartment

    9 things to do when you’re locked out of your apartment

    The thing about today’s smart devices is that they can be too smart for their own good.

    Last Wednesday, for example, I went to collect a delivery at my front door. I’d been expecting a new SIM card, and the network provider told me I’d need to receive it in person, for security purposes.

    True enough, the courier needed me to sign for the letter. Cooperative recipient that I was, I stepped outside to do just that.

    And my electronic lock, bless its programmatic soul, happily launched into action as soon as the door swung shut behind me.

    Other people’s experiences might be different, but when I collect deliveries at the door, the process usually takes 5 seconds, tops. It doesn’t need me to bring my phone. Or my house keys. Or a copy of my flatmates’ mobile numbers, just in case.

    Of course, normally, the process doesn’t leave me stranded at 3:30 PM on a quiet workday, gaping at my front door, equipped only with my clothes, house slippers, wallet, and a SIM that would have been infinitely more useful if there was a goddamn phone to put it in.

    Like my electronic lock, I was duped by my own programming.

    How do you make the most of a bad situation?

    I’ve talked about the millennial penchant for optimization before. A waiting period of God knows how many hours is terrible for productivity.

    Here are some things that can help an anxious millennial brain pass the time:

    1. Walk around the block

    Do you know how many small shops are in your area? There could be a lot of gems that you just haven’t found yet.

    You might also find something helpful, like an internet café that will let you pull your contacts from the cloud so you can call your flatmates and get home.

    Caution: If you live in a developed country, the chances of finding an internet café are next to nil. These countries have iPhone-toting gradeschoolers and 20GB mobile data plans. There aren’t enough people being locked out without their phones to drive demand.

    2. Canvass the grocery store for supplies

    There’s something calming about the fluorescent lighting and orderly aisles of a grocery store.

    But don’t buy anything yet.

    You don’t know how long you’ll have to wait, and you want to be able to drop by later without looking like you’re casing the joint.

    3. Think about the life choices that brought you to this point

    Is this where your thirteen-year-old self thought you’d be?

    4. Ask somebody for the time

    If you don’t wear a watch, not having your phone with you can leave you unmoored from time itself. The solution is to ask someone else.

    In the dead afternoons of a workday, you might have trouble finding somebody. But an apartment block runs on the hard work of maintenance staff. Most of them will be around, and most of them will have phones or watches, which will be more than you can say for yourself at that point. Once you do get an answer, remember that the time won’t be the only thing you need to thank them for.

    5. Acquire a new skill set

    Just because you’ve been taken out of the rushing river of modern, digital life, doesn’t mean you have to fall behind. There are many skills you can hone even without Google to guide you.

    For example, your vocal cords will still function without an internet connection. This could be a good opportunity to rehearse the latest hits and prime yet another aspect of your life to be monetised on the web.

    (All sarcasm aside, if you can use the time to check out a nearby gym, join a free class, etc., then by all means. Don’t waste your life any more than you have to.)

    6. Actually buy supplies from the grocery store

    Once you hit your third visit — and if it’s a workday afternoon, you will — the only way to avoid looking like a creeper is to buy something.

    Pick up some water, snacks, maybe some items you needed to buy next week anyway. If the grocery store is open 24 hours, don’t forget to be extra-nice to the cashier. That will help you later, if you need to come back and ask her if you can hang around until your flatmates (hopefully) return in the morning.

    7. Contemplate crime

    This might seem contradictory after the previous step had you spending money to avoid looking like a creep. But see, you need to be as un-suspicious as possible if you’re going to start planning your climb up to your apartment’s open kitchen window.

    Which, after the four- or five-hour mark, you will.

    8. Take a break

    If you made optimal choices in Step 6, have a Kit-Kat, too.

    Not everyone will need to take a nap at this point. If you do, though, just know that it is entirely okay to curl up on the floor by the shoe rack. This is not as undignified an act as your neighbours would have you believe.

    9. Commit that crime

    Everyone has a different breaking point. Regardless, you will hit yours.

    When that happens, always opt to leave the least possible damage on the premises, especially if you’re renting and want some part of your deposit back.

    10. Get rescued

    At some point, your flatmates will actually return, and you will be saved from any further humiliation at your own hands.

    Alternatively, your flatmates will arrive just as you’ve pried open your front window and started trying to poke the electronic lock open with an umbrella. Just remember that all the prior steps will have already stripped you of your dignity, so you won’t lose anything if this happens.

  • Collected quotes, 1 of n

    Collected quotes, 1 of n

    This entry is part 1 of 6 in the series Quotes and Excerpts

    All these clocks, like the whole information industry today, run the risk of no longer communicating anything because they tell too much. But they also possess another characteristic of the information industry: they no longer speak of anything except themselves and their internal functioning.

    Eco, Umberto. “How Not to Know the Time.” How to Travel with a Salmon and other essays. Vintage: Random House, pp. 47-50.

    You can never know your cat. In fact, you can never know anyone as completely as you want.

    But that’s okay, love is better.

    Paul, Caroline & MacNaughton, Wendy. Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology. Bloomsbury USA, 2013.
    By way of Maria Popova’s Brainpickings post.

    Ask good questions. Good questions save time. Bad questions waste time. Bad questions create unnecessary back-and-forth conversations, which create frustration and conflict. People who ask bad questions get frustrated because they can’t get help, and people who are trying to help get frustrated because answering bad questions is so damn frustrating.

    Zhu, Gordon. “How to be good at asking coding questions.” Medium,https://medium.com/@gordon_zhu/how-to-be-great-at-asking-questions-e37be04d0603. Accessed 24 January 2019.

    Here began his fantastic attachment to his friends, especially the humbler ones. The lonely boy found affection among strangers and, in sheer gratitude, he gave them his pocket money, his toys, even the clothes off his back. His friends became his family: his home became every street, every street corner, every house however humble where he had known kindness, where he had been received as one of the group, where he had been given refuge as a “stowaway.”

    Joaquin, Nick. “The Short, Unhappy Life of Boy Vergel.” Reportage on crime:Thirteen horror happenings that hit the headlines, Anvil Publishing, 2017, p. 128.

    The fatalism of the Filipino is usually passive, expressed in the classic proverb about our fortune coming to us though we seek it not. But the more complex form of that fatalism sees a man as being steered in a certain direction by one circumstance after another until he finally reaches a point when, though he acts voluntarily — or thinks he acts voluntarily — he is actually being pushed by the circumstances that brought him to the point of action. The fatalist, as he looks back before he acts, sees everything as having conspired to make him perform that particular act, and therefore sees it as inevitable, as “fate.” This is the amok mentality. Afterwards, what others regard as an act of will, the fatalist regards quite sincerely as a product of circumstances.

    Joaquin, Nick. “Four and ‘Fate.’” Reportage on crime:Thirteen horror happenings that hit the headlines, Anvil Publishing, 2017, p. 163.

  • Podcast notes: Broader implications

    Podcast notes: Broader implications

    This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Today in Science

    Listened to an illuminating episode of the Global Dispatches podcast recently. The featured guest was Dr. Angela Chang, who discussed a groundbreaking study on the links between vaccines and poverty prevention.

    This is the first study that looks closely at the non-health impact of vaccines. It’s impressive: the research uses statistical modeling and analysis to highlight important connections between development and medicine. More importantly, it yields results that can directly inform public health policies.

    To measure the non-health impact of vaccines, Dr. Chang’s team looked at two main figures:

    • averted deaths
    • averted cases of medical impoverishment (brought on by lost income, treatment expenses, etc.)

    One key takeaway is that vaccinations have a markedly larger impact on death and medical impoverishment figures from poorer sectors. This makes sense: poorer households are more vulnerable to disease and the financial risks of treatment. As the paper itself states:

    Although the poorest quintiles experienced the lowest vaccine coverage rates, they enjoyed the most health benefits in terms of absolute number of averted deaths: The poorest quintile accounted for the largest share of deaths averted by all vaccines (23–34 percent), and the poorest two quintiles accounted for over half of the deaths averted by most vaccines.

    […]

    The number of medical impoverishment cases decreased greatly with increasing wealth (exhibit 2). As expected, the vast majority of averted impoverishment cases occurred in the poorest quintiles, and fewer than 20,000 cases were averted in the richest quintile. For many vaccines … more than 40 percent of the averted cases occurred in the poorest quintile. Overall, the results suggest that vaccination would lead to an important reduction in medical impoverishment cases in the poorer quintiles.

    Chang, Angela et. al. “The Equity Impact Vaccines May Have On Averting Deaths And Medical Impoverishment In Developing Countries.” Health Affairs, vol. 37, no. 2, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2017.0861.

    Distributional impact is another important point, as Mark Leon Goldberg highlighted in the interview as well. The impact of vaccines varies — some bring greater benefits to the poor than others. As the paper points out, viewing vaccination programs through this lens can help policymakers prioritize initiatives with a bigger projected impact on the poor.

    In other words, the paper is a big step towards learning how we can better wield health policies to achieve social equity.

    The study has major limitations, mostly because global data is scarce. For example, estimates of incurred costs for specific diseases are spotty at best, and certainly difficult to find the more countries you want to examine. Still, it’s a great first step, and I’m glad to have heard about it from the podcast.

    You can listen to the episode here. The full paper is available online (thank you, open access). It’s not too technical a read, and it should take no more than 30 minutes to go through. Please read it when you can.

  • Home and the city

    Home and the city

    I’ve been working my way through Reportage on Crime, an anthology of Nick Joaquin’s true crime stories. One such piece, “The Lodger,” deals with the demographic shift in Manila brought on by the influx of laborers (and their families) from the provinces.

    I don’t have the same intimate understanding of Manila as Nick Joaquin does, which probably helps explain my disagreement with his prescribed solution to the worsening city sprawl:

    The area should be cleared; the squalor there replaced with multi-story residences, so that Manileños who have fled to the suburbs may be attracted back to the city. What the city badly needs is people with roots in it, people who care about it, people who look on it as home, not a lodging house.

    Joaquin, Nick. “The Lodger.” Reportage on Crime: Thirteen horror happenings that hit the headlines, Anvil Publishing, 2017, p. 154 (pp. 139-155).

    This diagnoses incoming workers (and therefore, lodgers) as an affliction. But why should they bear full blame when their arrival has essentially been driven by the dearth of opportunity in their home provinces?

    What’s baffling is that Joaquin acknowledges this in “Flesh and the Devil,” which comes earlier in the anthology. Writing about the hellish world of sex trafficking and how so many young girls from the provinces seem so willing to enter it, Joaquin writes:

    “[T]hey are still willing to risk their bodies, their honor, their very lives on a trip to the city — and what drives them is despair, utter despair. They act on the desperate hope that they can somehow avoid falling into the usual hell and succeed in making for themselves in the city a life less grim than the slow agony in the barrio.

    Joaquin, Nick. “Flesh and the Devil.” Reportage on Crime: Thirteen horror happenings that hit the headlines, Anvil Publishing, 2017, pp. 96-97 (pp. 95-103).

    He doesn’t extend quite the same sympathy to the lodgers encroaching upon Joaquin’s old Manila. Even Joaquin’s broadening of his lens, immediately after the quoted solution above, doesn’t push far enough. At best, it glosses over the most salient aspects of the problem; at worst, Joaquin misrepresents the issue:

    The tides of commerce that have engulfed so much of Quiapo should be diked; more important than more business are more places where people can live within convenient distances to their work.

    […] The projected multi-story tenement in Tondo is very much in the right direction.

    Joaquin, Nick. “The Lodger.” Reportage on Crime: Thirteen horror happenings that hit the headlines, Anvil Publishing, 2017, p. 154 (pp. 139-155).

    I have two major objections to the above argument.

    First, Joaquin’s statement tags the unchecked industrialization of Manila as the problem without acknowledging its critical flipside: the neglect of the provinces. It’s not so much that Manila is being made into too-attractive an option for workers; it’s that Manila has become the only option — the only place for anybody to go for any hope of a reasonable living — and distended and decrepit for it.

    While I do agree that any push for urban development/commercialization must come with the infrastructure to sustain that progress, at some point that ceases to be the main issue. We should all be worried when “development” outstrips the systems and structures that should buttress it, yes. But we should also question the hyper-concentration of investment and opportunity that fuels such metastatic growth in the first place.

    That brings me to my second point. The remark about the new Tondo tenement assumes accessibility, which is far from a given. Plenty of tenements could be built, but these don’t come with any guarantee of affordability for the lodgers who make up the problem that Joaquin thinks such tenements will solve.

    Even assuming, arguendo, that these places’ amenities consist of nothing more than the minimum living standards required by law, there’s “the greed of the propertied” (as Joaquin himself writes) to consider. The law of supply and demand doesn’t quite account for capitalist hunger, nor the regulation-flouting power that helps feed the moneyed classes.

    Which brings us back, in a way, to the Point #1 and some common denominators for many of Manila’s lodgers: a poverty of decent, attainable options, never mind comfortable or desirable ones. They might be choking Manila, but they do so in self-defense: the conditions that created the city destroyed better alternatives and possibilities elsewhere.

    Someday, when I’m not quite the same crumbling husk as Manila’s many abandoned buildings have become, I might try to expand this into some sort of full-fledged rumination on the economics of urban housing, dormitory life, fleeting encounters with the Bay Area’s homeless, and the gradual corrosions of the relentless urban grind.

    For now, I guess I’ll end this with the assertion that rootlessness isn’t exclusive to transplants. Modern cities have no natives — none comfortable inhabiting the role, anyway.

  • The Optimal Starbucks Breakfast

    The Optimal Starbucks Breakfast

    Optimization is the millennial affliction. (There was a trenchant Buzzfeed essay a while back that delved into how this impulse drives our generation to burnout.) Since seeing that insight articulated in plain, stark language, I’ve been more conscious of its truth in my own life.

    Take today’s breakfast stop at the local Starbucks. I lived through an everyday manifestation of that optimization impulse, and I have to say, it’s more than a little disturbing in retrospect.

    But first, some context:

    1. I keep a strict budget that covers, among other things, expenses for food and dining out. This has been a bit strained lately.
    2. My Starbucks card needed a top-up if I wanted to buy anything with it.
    3. I was 2 stars away from another free beverage.
    4. There was an ongoing mobile app promotion that granted 5 beverage stars if I bought 5 lunch or bistro food items.
    5. I have been tracking my nutrition lately since this tends to affect my mental health.

    Somewhere along the process of taking in all this information, my leisurely weekend breakfast morphed into a quest to make the most of my upcoming Starbucks transaction. The goal was simple: walk away from the counter with food and drink in hand, my budget and nutritional goals intact and my Starbucks card sporting as many new beverage stars as possible.

    The one big problem? The only remotely appetizing thing in the display case was a turkey ham sandwich — a breakfast item.

    (You could say that there was a multitude of bigger problems with the situation, such as:

    1. How much I have apparently started caring about a rewards program that is ultimately designed to reward a multinational capitalist bastion with even more of my money
    2. How anybody who simply wants to get out of the house and read a bit apparently can’t do so without digging into their wallet
    3. How I was getting a coffee at Starbucks, ye old purveyors of over-extracted coffee, of all places
    4. How I was drinking coffee at all despite drinking mostly black tea all week and already getting coffee the night before, even when I know damn well what too much caffeine does to my brain

    Or how about:

    • 0. How I unthinkingly — automatically — started tackling the whole situation like an honest-to-goodness word problem to solve

    I’d agree with you on all counts — just not at the moment that counted, since I was too far down the optimization rabbit hole, AKA Problem #0.)

    My mind was running through options and charting outcomes all the way to the counter. There was a mozzarella and tomato sandwich that looked slightly less forlorn than all the other lunch food — maybe I could buy that instead? But it used focaccia bread, which I don’t like, and it would definitely have less protein than turkey. Should I try the new cold brew? But mornings demand a hot drink. How much did I need to add to my card? Which drink would be the most economical and the least offensive to my palate?

    I walked up to the counter still searching for the best possible solution, never mind the words to actually convey it.

    It’s funny when, where, and how you end up re-evaluating what you know of yourself sometimes. (Tsk. You think you know a person — the only one you even have any hope of claiming to know completely — and then you walk out of the house one day and you’re not who you thought you were.)

    Introversion and a constant flirtation with misanthropy have always been hallmarks of the image I have of myself. (Don’t ask me why. These might or might not be relics from my teenage turmoil phase.) And yet! And yet, that fraught morning, I was genuinely grateful to be yanked into small talk with an overly chipper barista.

    It was decision time. One way or another, the pursuit of the optimal had to end.

    I topped up my card, placed my drink order (brewed coffee, or the most inexpensive way to let Starbucks know you really don’t care about the company’s core product), and then there was no escape. Bend the limits of budget, nutrition goals, and palate to get one step closer to extra benefits from the reward program? Grab what I wanted and rue the missed beverage stars and lost time to rack up rewards?

    The barista’s expectant smile started dimming. I floundered.

    It was ridiculous. So much uncertainty — and not just mine at that point! Baristas do heroic work putting up with indecisive customers every day, let me tell you. So much mental energy and time devoured by an ultimately inconsequential problem.

    To hell with it. In what was probably the most toothless, superficial act of defiance I will ever carry out, I smiled and ordered the turkey sandwich.

    The next order of business was finding a spot so I could set down my breakfast and chew over (heh) the disturbing little crisis that had played out in my head. I scanned the relatively empty cafe and, horror of horrors, there was an outside table with a good view of the lake; a stool at a shared worktop with better height; comfortable couches that nevertheless would be better suited for bigger parties; and even more options downstairs.

    To think that one can escape the chokehold of optimization with a single, forlorn breakfast sandwich is foolishness. But we Sisyphuses must imagine ourselves happy, I suppose, because how else could we persist?

  • On “Death of a Red Heroine” by Qiu Xiaolong

    On “Death of a Red Heroine” by Qiu Xiaolong

    I mistook this novel for a murder mystery.

    It is that, nominally: Chief Inspector Chen Cao and Detective Yu of the Shanghai Police Bureau spend their time investigating the murder of Guan Hongying, a national model worker found dead in an obscure county canal. Chen and Yu dig for clues, interview witnesses, mull over theories about what might have happened — all the while insisting, to themselves and their superiors, that the case is a simple homicide.

    Don’t be fooled. The case isn’t simple, and its resolution is not the point.

    Death of a Red Heroine intertwines Chinese politics, culture, and history, and like the detectives, my mistake was taking all of these as window dressing for the criminal investigation. In hindsight, I’ve come to conclude that it’s the other way around: the dense tapestry of 1990s China (or at least, Shanghai) is the real story here, and the mystery serves mostly as a rod from which to hang it.

    The difference emerges when looking at what questions the novel poses. Unlike typical crime novels, Death of a Red Heroine doesn’t dwell on how the murder was committed, nor does it focus on how to solve the case. Instead, the main challenge here is how to put the perpetrator behind bars.

    I don’t want to spoil anything, so it’s safest to say that, while mostly unrelated, all the government hurdles and resistance that Cao and Yu encounter find a fitting capstone in the perpetrator’s identity. Yet who the perpetrator is ultimately doesn’t matter either: it’s what they represent that counts. By delving into the criminal’s psyche, many crime novels try to interrogate the corruption and moral failures of the human spirit; here, however, Xiaolong sidesteps the individual to place those failings within the heart of society and the institutions that run it.

    What we get, then, is a portrait of the murderer not as an embodiment of the rot that can fester within us, but as another cog in the much larger assemblages of oppression that we can (and do) construct.

    With all this set in a socialist China lurching into “modern times,” Inspector Cao’s heroism takes on a refreshing specificity. If the crime and the criminal are an exploration of society’s failings, then Cao (and Yu) is an argument for the fundamental decency that persists regardless. In a country busy remaking itself — and wondering constantly about what it can and should be — Inspector Chen Cao, with his “modern” sensibilities and his classical Chinese literature, speaks to the hope of what China can become.

    Is that the China that emerges when the novel ends? The novel knows better than to present a definitive answer, but it still tries for a satisfying denouement. Pick up the book — if nothing else, you’ll have a great time figuring out if it succeeds.