Around the web

Image courtesy of Rudd image gallery.

A useful discussion of how to say the right thing to someone in hospital (or other bad situation.)

Christianity Today wonders if antidepressants keep people from God.  Fred Clark at Slacktivist responds:

No pious jackasses sit around pondering “Should Christians Take Insulin?” No insufferably holier-than-thou idiots pretend it would be deeply spiritual if they said, “Rattlesnake anti-venom can help, but it can also hinder our reliance on Christ.” Or “An emergency appendectomy may sometimes be beneficial, but only if we’re careful not to allow it to overshadow our true savior.”

Obesity Panacea debunks the latest “Paying people to lose weight is the ticket!” study, noting that the weight was regained during the 3-month follow-up:

Over the course of the 4 month intervention individuals in the incentive groups earned an average of approximately $300, in contrast to $0 awarded to those in the control group. Interestingly, the average weight loss achieved by those receiving a financial incentive was significantly greater as compared to that of the control group (13-14lbs vs. 4 lbs, respectively). Furthermore, only 10% of individuals in the control group versus approximately 50% of those in the incentive groups achieved the target weight-loss of 16lbs.

However, during a subsequent 3-month follow-up, study participants gained back much of the lost weight after the cessation of the financial incentives – a finding which is common to most, if not all, weight-loss intervention studies.

[...]

[I]ts a cute and gimmicky approach to providing incentive for weight loss, and the idea makes for great headlines (as recently illustrated). I’m sure financial incentives can work for some, but this is no obesity panacea.

(emphasis added)

At ASDAH’s HAES Blog, Fall Ferguson has an interesting question about the opportunity cost of society’s obsession with weight & thinness:

[W]hat do we forego as a society when we allocate precious social, economic, cognitive, emotional, and physiological resources toward pursuing and maintaining our weight-based paradigm of health?

Some of the damages discussed are to public health, proper health care for many thin and fat people, productivity, fun, creativity, self-esteem, and happiness.  I know many who’ve found that abandoning weight loss efforts provided more time and energy for LIFE, such as school and work.  (In our current culture, it can also mean accepting difference.)  But it’s worth thinking about: What could be accomplished if we weren’t wasting so much effort on weight?

Music Monday: Molly Lewis

Molly Lewis also played at Norwescon :)

“It All Makes Sense At The End” is about breaking up with Wikipedia. If Wikipedia was a person.

And here’s a video of Molly performing “Sell Out” by Reel Big Fish with various guests at her graduation party concert in Seattle:

What is with Ina Garten?

Just for grins, I looked at which search terms have been most popular so far this year.

And so far?

Variations on the blog name: “living 400 lbs”, “living 400″, etc.
Variations on the blog topic: “400 lbs”, “400 pounds”, “super obese”.
Variations on Ina Garten’s weight: “ina garten weight”, “ina garten weigh loss”, “ina garten weigh loss 2012″, etc.

Apparently people are curious, or apparently I’m weird for mentioning it.  At least it’s mostly leading to this post and not speculation.

Another popular one that gets on my nerves is “what to do when your sore”.  Can we just be clear that it should be “what to do when you’re sore” or “what to do when you are sore”?  Please? :)

Monday Music: Let’s Dance

Specifically some dance music from some of the new-to-me performers at Norwescon!

From local jpop artist Rai Kamishiro’s new album is “Doki Doki Feelings“

Lyrics are on bandcamp.

Chiptune artist Jonny Nero Action Hero.  Here’s his Doctor Who song “Exterminate“:

Lyrics are on bandcamp.

And from nerdcore artist Klopfenpop comes “Don’t Panic“:

Lyrics are on bandcamp.

Quotes: Work

Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.  — Dorothy L. Sayers

Work is the curse of the drinking classes. — Oscar Wilde

If you don’t want to work you have to work to earn enough money so that you won’t have to work. — Ogden Nash

By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day. — Robert Frost

The biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work. — Charles Kettering 

Nothing will work unless you do. — Maya Angelou

 

Weight Talk, Business Travel Edition

I’ve been working with people in the UK and German offices of the company I work at since I started.  Now that I’m a manager, my boss mentioned that a trip to Germany for training may be in the works.

Image courtesy of Rudd Image Gallery

…which would mean flying while 400lbs.

In the interest of being diplomatic, I expressed interest and pleasure that I would have an opportunity to meet the folks I correspond with and share my expertise. Then — in the interest of full disclosure — I brought up the possibility that an airline might require me to purchase a second seat if flying coach.  My primary concern was that this may happen while boarding, and could lead to delays if another seat isn’t available.  My boss said she understood that was the whim of airlines, not me, and that she would make sure the company paid for any such additional seat charges.  (She’s also thinking that it would be reasonable for to fly business or first class since the flight time would probably be over 12 hours.)

I am pleased that I did not get emotional. I stayed matter-of-fact and somewhat detached.  I was prepared to be told that this would be dealt with if it happened, or that this meant I would not be able to travel for business.

One side effect of being fat, for me, is that I don’t apply for jobs that I’m qualified for that require travel.  (Usually in the corporate training field, teaching programming or software usage.)  I don’t exactly feel this is a loss given the TSA and how airport air tends to affect my asthma, but I usually have lots of other jobs to apply for.  If I was in marketing, for example, business travel would be a much bigger deal for me.

US: Where Your Taxes Go

It’s tax season in the US.  It feels like it’s always tax season, since we’re always debating taxes, but now’s when we’re actually doing our own personal returns.

Last year the White House put up a calculator to show the breakdown of where taxes go in the system.  It’s still up, even if it’s a bit out of date, and I plugged in some numbers.

Screenshot from WhiteHouse.gov

Tax policy can be boring and complicated. It also affects society. The US has varied tax rates (and it’s certainly not alone in that) for the federal income tax. It also has a flat payroll tax on wages for Medicare and on the first $110,100 earned for Social Security.

What does this mean in practice?

• Many low-income people pay more on the payroll taxes than they do on federal income tax.
• Investment income has no payroll tax and often has lower tax rates.

I have a higher-than-average income from my job and no investment income, so I pay the payroll and income taxes.  OTOH, I live in Washington State, so I don’t have a state income tax.

Quote of the Day

Scientists who study obesity at the cellular level say genetics determines people’s natural weight range, right down to the type and amount of food they crave, how much they move and where they accumulate fat. Asking how someone got to be so fat is as meaningless as asking how he got to be so tall. “The severely obese have some underlying genetic or metabolic difference we’re not smart enough to identify yet,” says Dr. Rudolph Leibel of Columbia University Medical Center. “It’s the same way that a 7-foot-tall basketball player is genetically different from me, at 5-foot-8.”

Fat has been blamed for cardiac trouble, diabetes and some forms of cancer. But fat-acceptance activists argue that the epidemiological studies that link fatness to disease often fail to adjust for non-weight-related risk factors found more often in fat populations. Poverty, minority-group status, too much fast food, a sedentary lifestyle, lack of access to health insurance or to nonjudgmental medical care, the stress of self-loathing and being part of a stigmatized group — all are more common among fat people, and all are linked to poorer health outcomes at any weight. This makes it harder to say to what extent an association between obesity and disease is due to the fatness itself or to the risk factors that tend to go along with being fat.

— Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times Magazine

Typing “Fat People Are” into Google

I understand if anyone doesn’t want to read this.  But it says something about our society.

When typing “fit people are” into Google,* it helpfully tries to finish the thought for me, providing “more successful”, “happier”, “harder to kill”, and “smarter”.  The search results are similar.

Google for “fit people are”

Typing in “thin people are” shows options like “better”, “beautiful”, and “more successful”.  The top piece discusses the latest “moderately fat people live longer” study.**

Results for “thin people are”

Finally is the “fat people are” results: “gross”,” lazy”, and “stupid”.

Typing “fat people are” into Google

Google doesn’t just index the web.  It also aggregates what other sites are linking to and what people are searching for — and what they navigate to.   The effort Google puts into making their search results find what people are looking for makes it also a somewhat accurate reflection of our society.

*Google does, over time, reflect what an individual has searched for in the past.  As I frequently search for fat-positive items, these screenshots were generated using a browser I rarely use, where I wasn’t logged into Google. I’d also cleared the browser cache.

**If Google is using IP addresses to adjust results this may be due to my usual fat-positive bias. Might be helpful to know if anyone else sees this.

UPDATE: Several other folks get the same or similar results.

Music Monday, Monday

“Monday, Monday” by The Mamas & The Papas.

(Oh, and do I need to point out that Cass Elliot died of a heart attack, not choking on food?  And the heart attack is likely related to her fasting and other extreme weight-loss attempts?)

Rape of Women (not Men) in fiction, Kickstarter, and A Kitten

Discussing rape in fiction in her brilliant essay titled “The Rape of James Bond”, Sophia McDougall asks writers to ask themselves:

“Would I ever write a story in which the male hero is raped as part of his origin story, or as the nadir he had to fight back from, or to inspire someone else to take revenge?”

And if you would, yes, I think perhaps you should go ahead and do it. If done very well, and respectfully, it could even help to destigmatise the experience of male survivors. It could help to diminish that sense that rape somehow defines female experience.

And if you would not, ask yourself why not. And if there’s any part of you that answers, that you wouldn’t find a male survivor of rape heroic, that it’s too humiliating to even think about – then, for everyone’s sakes, until you can honestly find a different answer within yourself, you need to not be writing about rape at all.

(links added)

On a different note, people are talking about Kickstarter a lot.  Indie musician Marian Call, who organizes some of the most organized shows I’ve helped with,  organized a very successful Kickstarter for her first-ever tour of Europe.  And did the tour, and has released the live album that the Kickstarter promised.  Oh…and blogged about it.

A lot of it comes down to making sure you will have supporters, and not expecting them to sent by central casting.  Pre-Kickstarter, Marian had done other fundraisers, both quiet ones and auctions. She knew who would want to contribute and what they’d want.  Marian also has 3 bullet points that are variations on “know your audience”, “respect them too” and “like your audience”. But she also points out the financial side:

[Once] you deduct 10% for Kickstarter/Amazon and then 15% for taxes, and then you really add up the cost of fulfillment, you might be earning only $2-3 at your reward level that seems to profitable. [On the NUMBER SMASH page of my public budget] I calculated what each reward level would cost me, and then I wondered how many people would go for higher-return vs. lower-return rewards. What would people buy the most of?  If everyone went for necklaces & USB drives, could I still actually afford to do my trip?  I worked through a couple different scenarios to get a good estimate of what rewards would cost me — and how much I would need to ask for to wind up with $7,000 to make it to Europe & back (the answer is about $11,000, so $4000 would go into fees & fulfillment).

And:

Does anyone want you to make the thing you want to make? Are people clamoring for it? Because — this is an important distinction — there is art you make because other people want you to make it, and there is art you make because you must make it. [....Y]ou only want to crowdfund something people want and need and get super excited about.  [If they don't]  I’m not saying don’t make it. I’m saying fund that thing in another way.

Not everything has an audience.  Or has found their audience, at least.   If you’re interested in Kickstarter, either as a funder or a fundraiser, you may find Marian’s writeup useful. (Also longish and conversational.)

And here’s a video of a kitten playing with a Roomba.  Happy Friday!

Late Forties?

On if the things that WordPress includes in its blog statistics page is “referrers”, aka, links people have followed to my page. Some are perennials, such as search engines and other fat blogs. 

Recently one was to a forum I didn’t recognize. Curious, I followed it to a discussion of fat and health, where I was cited as being in my “late forties”. 

Me: “LATE forties? 46 is LATE forties? Sure, I’m over 40, but … 46!!  Not 49!!”

Anyway. I’ll be over here waiting for the AARP welcome packet with my hair dye & Daria DVDs.

Things to Read

A clear explanation of why  New York’s fat hatred is much more harmful than the soda ban from Melissa McEwan:

People do not die of “obesity.” Some fat people die from complications of what are commonly known as “obesity-related diseases,” like heart disease and diabetes, but those diseases have only been shown to be correlated with fat, not caused by fat. (Which is why thin people have them, too.) So it’s not even accurate to assert that obesity kills indirectly.

This, however, is a thing that is accurate to say: Fat hatred kills people all the time.

And speaking of correlation, an explanation of causation vs correlation at The New York Times makes use of a correlation between ads for junk food and fatness:

The problem is that their policy recommendations rest on a crucial but unjustified assumption: that any link between obesity and advertising occurs because more advertising causes higher rates of obesity. But the study at hand showed only an association: people living in areas with more food ads were more likely to be obese than people living in areas with fewer food ads. [...] In fact, it is easy to imagine how the causation could run the opposite way (something the article did not mention): If food vendors believe obese people are more likely than non-obese people to buy their products, they will place more ads in areas where obese people already live. [...]

This is not an arcane statistical point or a mere technical criticism of one academic article. Too often, relationships that are far from being understood are assumed to reflect a particular, strong causal connection, leading to no end of regulatory mistakes. 

(Emphasis added)

And from a woman’s story of getting fat after marriage:

I missed the husband who loved me no matter what, not the new anti-fat crusader he had changed into. But he felt the same way: he’d fallen in love with a plump-but-not-fat woman who wanted to be thin, and now he had a fat wife who’d “given up on herself.” And Ihad given up: given up on dieting, given up on the idea that my body needed to be fixed.

 I already wished I hadn’t spent so many years beating myself up for being fat; I wasn’t going to stay in a marriage where my husband did it for me.

The article is good, and bonus points for a photo of the author in scuba gear with the caption “Cage diving with great white sharks: more fun than dieting”.

Quotes: Truth

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
—Mark Twain

“…a truth you don’t understand is more dangerous than a lie.”
—Mira Grant, Blackout

“I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.”
— Harry S Truman

“You can’t kill the truth.”
— Mira Grant, Feed

“The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it.”
—Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

Naming

Seeing discussion of women changing their names again.  (Sigh.)  But there is something is often NOT said about this, that I think should be:

Practically speaking, it takes time and money to change your name.

Social security office, driver’s license & car title – those are often the main things people think of.  If you go in person you can probably use the same certified copy of the marriage document for it.

…and the bank, again with a certified copy of the marriage certificate. OK.

…and updating things at work.  OK.

…and call your utilities, landlord, credit cards….

…got a passport?  Again, certified copy, and if you mail it off, you’ll want one just to mail off.

…. if you own your home?  Well, changing the name on the deed of one’s home can require filing a conveyance document/deed – you essentially “sell” the house to yourself.   Right.  Do you want to trust you’ll get that right without a lawyer? 

I didn’t keep my birth name out of my “commitment to feminism”.  I got married in my 30s. I was looking at spending days trotting my marriage certificate over to the social security office, dept of licensing (driver’s license and car title), bank, credit union, 2 brokerages with local offices, and getting forms notarized and more certified copies of the marriage certificate to mail to 2 other brokerages, and then hire a lawyer to help me sell my condo to myself?  Oh HELL no.

Name changes are complicated enough that there are services to help you do this. 

On the other hand, a friend who hated her last name* was thrilled to have an excuse to dump it.  (She didn’t own a home, but did have a passport.)  So, it depends on your motivation.

Also: society is fine with women who want to change their names on marriage, but not men.  Why?

*Imagine if your last name was pronounced “mean”.

Music Monday: Whistle While You Wait

When it’s your first time in Tok and you’re broke and just limping down the line
And it’s forty below and you know that they know that you’re a hopeful from Outside
And people speak distinctly as if you’re foreign
And you forgot to plug your car in
And you’re clearly overdressed, even for winter
And your self-assurance slowly starts to splinter
Oh it takes a little effort to keep your head on straight
To laugh as if you mean it, to whistle while you wait
It takes a little effort to warm up one more smile
To bear another stare, to brave another mile

— Marian Call

International Women’s Day

Happy International Women’s Day.  You might want to check out the free album Talis Kimberley created for International Women’s Day:

On Thursday I saw someone tweet that she’d like to celebrate International Women’s Day but she’ll be busy with “precarious part-time work”, housework, and child care.

This started me thinking.  International Women’s Day isn’t all that big a deal in the US, so I will celebrate by working my salaried professional job at a large company that provides me with vacation, sick leave, and medical insurance.  I have been acting as the technical lead on my team; recently I was promoted to team manager.  Some coworkers have said, “Congratulations on getting the job I thought you already had!”   The primary difference is that I’m officially managing people now.  As this is a big company, this responsibility comes with training videos & documents on management duties and expectations.  I am pleased to have these resources available.

Image courtesy of the Rudd Center Image Gallery

I began working at this company as a temp.  The offer to convert to employee included the largest salary I’ve ever had, a signing bonus, and a stock grant.

What does this have to do with International Women’s Day? Besides that at one point it was International Women Workers Day?

For one thing, women—at least in many countries— have more opportunities now, and I benefit from that.

For another, it shows how far we have to go.  I know that women are more likely to be underrated technically and underpaid compared to male peers in my field. That’s an industry problem.  On a broader scale,  the US is one of the richest (if not the richest) country in the world to not have universal medical care.  How many people in the US die from lack of health insurance?  How many are tied to employers for the benefits?  I grew up with good healthcare (thanks to the Teamsters negotiating my father’s contract) and I had a good public education, but not everyone does. I lived at home, worked part-time, got loans, and completed a computer science degree before starting full-time work.

My parents were working class. Mom completed 8th grade before getting her first full-time job as a maid.  Dad graduated high school and worked in a warehouse; Mom ran a home-based child care business for most of my life. Working in software meant I was making more money than both my parents combined in my early thirties.  I’m a professional who’s brushing against upper middle class, despite being fat and dressing casually.  In some ways I have a charmed life, even though polls show some would rather “give up life or limb” to avoid my life.

I’m not sure I’d have the life I have if I’d been born earlier.   Yes, women have always worked.  Some inspiring women, for me, are  Dorothy Sayers, Dorothy Stimson Bullitt, Grace Hopper, Anita Borg, Mary Gates, and The Rt Rev Barbara Harris.  I’m not sure I would have had the moxie to do what they did.  Then again, I don’t have to.

 

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Updated to remove screencap and twitter name of locked tweet that I did not realize was locked.