Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

The appeal and wisdom of Stoicism

CBC’s Ideas with Nahlah Ayed ran a good segment on Stoicism during the coronavirus pandemic. It covers a lot of what I find appealing about philosophy and the contrast with the “power of positive thinking” notion which I dispute both factually and ethically. We can’t make things happen by wanting them or “thinking positive”, and indeed our total control over what happens in the world at large is extremely minimal. As with mortality, those are the conditions which we must live with and it’s counter-productive or delusional to choose to believe otherwise.

The piece closes with a reference to Seneca’s “On the Shortness of Life“, which is probably productive reading even during these times when people feel subjected to an undeserved burden of social isolation or illness. It also reminded me of Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s excellent audiobooks, which I am loading back on to my phone to accompany further solitary walks across the city.

Oil and stock price shocks

The always-slightly-overenthusiastic Slate.com reports:

The financial world resumed melting into goo on Monday thanks to the global coronavirus outbreak, with stocks falling so hard and fast in the morning that it triggered a rare 15-minute timeout on trading. By day’s end the S&P 500 collapsed by 7.6 percent—its worst showing since the financial crisis. The sell-off followed after Saudi Arabia’s leaders decided that now would be a good time to purposely crash the price of oil, a shocking and risky move likely to further destabilize a world economy that’s already wobbly thanks to the incipient pandemic.

…

The events that sparked Monday’s panic were the result of a clash between Saudi Arabia and Russia over what to do about oil prices, which have been tumbling ever since the number of coronavirus cases began to surge in China around January. Initially, the Saudis argued that its fellow OPEC members and their allies, including Russia, should respond by cutting production to prop up prices in the face of falling demand. But Moscow officially rejected that proposal on Friday.

So Saudi Arabia resorted to its Plan B. Over the weekend, the kingdom embarked on a surprise price war designed to cut into Russia’s sales, while promising to further flood the market by increasing its own production. It’s a move we’ve seen before from the country, which waged a brutal price war in 2014 and 2015 that eventually forced Russia to start coordinating its production with OPEC. But as of now, the Russians have responded by vowing to pump more of their own oil. We appear to be entering a standoff.

Of course this has been dominating the news for weeks, as people discuss the overlapping consequences of decreased oil demand due to coronivirus-induced reductions in travel and energy use; changing energy production policies from OPEC, Russia, and other jurisdictions; and whatever else is panicking global markets and making people willing to buy 30-year Treasury bonds with less than 1% interest.

Feel free to discuss scenarios. Will the coronavirus recession be the straw that brings down Trump? How will high-cost oil jurisdictions respond to these economic conditions? Will non-fossil fuel energy be hurt by cheap fossil fuel prices, or encouraged by concern about fossil fuel price volatility and political instability?

Early 2020 feelings

A few factors in the last few weeks have left me thinking broadly about the past and the future: the date roll over to 2020, my 36th birthday, and the feeling of progressing toward finishing the PhD. It has been a mingled set of feelings, but with a sad tone.

Breaking it down into components, part of it is certainly stock-taking about past decisions and outcomes and wondering about alternative courses my life could have followed. That also includes an awareness of how many contingent and semi-random things ended up having a big effect. I have certainly wondered what life would have been like if I stayed in Vancouver after my BA or in Oxford after my MPhil. I have also been feeling aware of all the travel which I have missed since I stopped flying in 2010. In particular, there have been major trips all over the world — to countries and regions which interest me but which I have never seen — which family members have undertaken in that time. I have been feeling a sense of how it’s not always possible to go back and cover what you have missed: the nature of time ensures that missed opportunities cannot be jumped back to, even if they can sometimes be re-created.

Another distinct element has been not thinking about choices or alternative possibilities, but just things which were memorable or important in the past but which are now gone forever. My pattern in life has generally been to have a few close friends who I at least interact with a few times per week. Who is in the set has changed drastically over time, however, with high school and UBC friends, Oxford friends, Ottawa friends and classmates, and then Toronto / U of T / Massey friends. It’s weird to think that there are people in the world who spent long spans as my closest social contacts and who I haven’t now spoken with in years.

All this hasn’t been getting me down too much, and it’s certainly possible to redirect feelings about all these past experiences into a sense of gratitude for having met these people, been to these places, and had these experiences. It’s also not a bad idea to be thinking big picture as I am coming to the end of the PhD and contemplating what to do after. It’s clearly going to be a trade-off between who I want to be near, what kind of work would suit me, and how that will fit in with climate change advocacy. I suppose one big advantage to having this fractured or fragmented past with many identifiable eras and sets of friends is that it avoids the anxiety of having concentrated on one place and one thing and being worried about having too much excluded various other choices.

Kneading the literature and my interview data into the dissertation manuscript

I have all of my data analysis done and printed in a thick binder sorted by subject matter.

With a 58 page bibliography, I feel like I am a good way through the literature review, though my room and computer are still well populated with a set of things which I have read and annotated but still need to be incorporated into the manuscript, as well as a much smaller number that still need to be read.

I have a 98,000 word manuscript, not counting the bibliography, but it has been written in thousands of little sessions and surely needs a fair measure of editing to make it all clear, non-redundant, and smooth-flowing.

Perhaps the following makes sense as a path to completion:

  1. Finish incorporating all paper and digital sources into the manuscript
  2. Complete a read-through and first electronic edit of the entire draft, making note of places where evidence from the interviews would provide useful substantiation
  3. Read through the empirical package, adding relevant quotes and references to the manuscript
  4. Print off and hand-edit the manuscript to the point where I think it is completely ready to go to the dissertation committee for their substantive contents

Exploring Toronto

One of the cleverest and most philosophical limericks is:

There once was a man who said, “Damn,
It has borne in upon me I am
But a creature that moves
In predestinate grooves;
I’m not even a bus, I’m a tram!”

It’s strange that living in Canada’s largest city I nonetheless overwhelmingly see the parts that are within an hour’s walk of my home, and I tend to see the same short stretches of street day after day when doing chores, meeting friends, or working on my research.

To deliberately defamiliarize myself a little I took the list of 75 TTC subway stations on Wikipedia, drew a random number between 1 and 75, and took the subway to York Mills to explore a new neighbourhood and take some photos.

Next time I’ll try to do a random journey while there is more daylight left, and perhaps with a friend in tow. As an experiment this time I only brought my keys, camera, and a TTC payment card — no phone, music player, cash, or wallet. I had a surprising number of conversations, perhaps just because I wasn’t listening to headphones or staring at a screen, but clearly actively paying attention to what was happening around me.

Life is a set of orderly piles: books, papers, notebooks, and manuscripts to process

While there have been times, mostly when I was at Oxford, when I made an effort to write daily for the sake of communication to people at home and documentation there is often a negative correspondence between how busy I am in life overall and how much I post.

Pretty much my entire effort is devoted to the successful completion of my dissertation and PhD, though a project of such duration is inevitably a study in the practice of survival and the maintenance of social relations as well as intellectual application and research effort.

Amateur radio

While finishing my dissertation remains my top priority, I also signed up for an amateur radio course being offered by the Toronto Amateur Radio Club.

It’s something like ten 2-hour instructional sessions, followed by the federal government exam to get a basic certification and call sign.

It should be an interesting way to spend a couple of hours on Monday nights, provide a useful life skill, and grant an opportunity to meet another community of nerds.

October

September was a comparatively slow month for thesis work. A little bit of that is probably loss of desperation as the project has broadly come together and it has become clear that it’s possible to finish. More important, the social doldrums of August ended so now there are a lot more calls on my time: events at the political science department, friends visiting town, activist happenings, and so on.

Nonetheless, I need to keep focused on finishing the dissertation. It has been a bit annoying in ongoing conversations to have relevant material in the text, but be unable to share it. I’m not planning on taking the academic publishing route, so at least I will be able to release it as soon as the defence is done and the text has been accepted by the university.