Blessed by the Potato

Every year I fall for it, the hopeless optimism of the holidays: “Oh, I’ve got two whole weeks out of the office, I’m going to get so much done!” The to-do list has been piling up all year, from little things like finally fixing the RAID array on the desktop and doing some much-deferred software updates, to making plans to see old friends, to finishing off some major side projects and long-overdue blog updates. Oh yeah, and with all that time “off” I’ll somehow catch up on sleep and have some fun playing trains with Blueberry and try all the video games on my wish list.

And every year it’s the same burnout: I didn’t quite manage to do all my shopping online before the break, and lose the first day off to traffic and parking and retail hell with the other last-minuters. Whoops, forgot to factor in that 5 days are “lost” to the insanity of Potatomas and related holidays. ‎And a day or two of work that I brought home with me has to get done at some point. Then I’m down to just a few days to get two weeks worth of planned stuff done, and I feel like crap for not accomplishing anything.

So next year I’m going to have to go in with lower expectations, which means accepting that some things are not going to get done. This year that’s going to mean Fallout 4 will just have to wait (and my Radblock just arrived from OPG, too!), and so will the course (which is fast becoming vapourware).

A Conference Board of Canada report on PhD graduates and careers came out (“Inside and Outside the Academy: Valuing and Preparing PhDs for Careers”). Much is being made of the economic implications, especially the grad students made terrible life choices angle, with this quote from the report seeming to get more play than all 135 other pages combined:

“Earning a PhD typically takes 8 to 12 years of study (or more) after completing high school, giving those with lower educational attainment an earnings head-start and initial advantage, which takes some time for a PhD graduate to catch and pass. To illustrate, compare a PhD who takes five years to finish his or her degree to a master’s graduate. If the PhD student had no paid employment during that time (which is unlikely given the nature of PhD funding), the master’s graduate will have earned $282,935 more than the PhD graduate by the time the PhD is earned. (See “Funding for PhD Students.”) With an average annual income of $69,267 or $12,680 more than the master’s graduate—it will take the PhD graduate just over 22 years—a substantial part of his or her working life—to close the cumulative earning gap. As such, while PhDs do see positive returns over master’s graduates, these returns are modest and, on average, the earnings of PhD graduates will not surpass master’s graduates until the later stages of their career.”

This is actually not pessimistic enough. The average PhD-holder will NEVER make up the earnings difference if you factor in the time value of money — worse if you make it more apples-to-apples. That is, if you consider that not only do you earn less for much of your working life doing a PhD, you also have to live like a grad student for many of those years.

One of my professors did this calculation years ago, showing that despite doing quite well in his career outcomes (one of the few to become a high-ranking professor), if he wanted a job working with MRIs he could have got his MR-technician certificate and lived like a grad student and post-doc for the first few years, banking the extra salary, and even earning considerably more at the end of his career would never allow him catch up to the compound growth of those initial savings. The opportunity cost of doing a PhD is huge (and this is for a STEM PhD).

Imagine a 22-year-old graduate from a bachelor’s program finding a job that makes $45k pre-tax. They decide to match their lifestyle and spending to their grad-school-bound friend (solidarity!), who lives off of $17,000 between a stipend, odd jobs, and volunteering in research experiments. They pack away $19,000 in just their first year, and invest it wisely, and keep that up all through their friend’s graduate degree. By the time the PhD student gains an honorific and finds a higher-paying job at age 30, the guy who just got a bachelor’s degree has a net worth of $273k¹. They then both start living large, spending $47,000 per year on lifestyle expenses (which the bachelor’s holder can afford thanks to raises over the intervening years), and the PhD-holder socks away 15% of their new, higher income, building wealth to retirement.

But despite making more while living the same lifestyle, the doctor comes well shy of breaking even at age 65, with $989k less in retirement savings than the bachelor’s holder. Even with minimal (risk-free) time value to money and no investing, the doctor’s extra earnings are too marginal over the working types to surmount years of earnings and savings and compounding.

In real life there is only one person who lives that frugally when they don’t have to (and that was newsworthy) so the loss is somewhat illusory. But even saving just a few thousand per year straight out of school and banking their raises will let those who get straight to work get to enjoy higher quality of life earlier and still not lose out on lifetime savings relative to those who make terrible life choices.

(The peak of education appears to be a master’s degree — only two years sacrificed, and with enough earnings oomph that you pass the bachelor’s holder in 7 years).

However, not everything in life is about economic optimization. I could have made way more money if I had pursued business out of undergrad, or gone into a professional program instead of grad school, but I’m not exactly starving. And I do like science and what I do, and job satisfaction is not exactly value-less (just hard to value).

This article in University Affairs has some good discussion on the report, including this quote:

Not one person I know who has a PhD did it for the economic returns that they calculated in advance. Maybe the argument implicit here is that this is what we all should have been doing? That we should be rational actors in a market for the credential that will provide maximum returns.

I don’t know what to say. Yes? Economics shouldn’t be the sole reason to pursue a degree, especially not a doctorate. But the sacrifice and lack of payoff for doing one should not be totally ignored either, and we do need to raise a bit of awareness on that point before people start grad school. I did not know about the economic trade-off when I enrolled (at least, not the magnitude of the difference), and I was a relatively money-savvy undergraduate student. I think there is a need to get the message out there that doing a PhD is a labour of love that mostly likely will not produce any economic benefit.

That UA article references this one in the Post: “We’re letting a bunch of 17- and 18-year-olds dictate our labour market composition, and they’re not given a lot of advice to make decisions about what might be in their best interests.” It’s not much better at 21 when you have to decide whether to be awesome and go to grad school to unlock the secrets of the Universe, or be lame and go make a big pile of money and happiness and social adjustment and have kids while you’re still fertile and shit.

Anyway, the common belief amongst 3rd and 4th year undergrads contemplating grad school is that it’s the path to take to eventually have more money and to get a secure job teaching at a university. Both notions are mostly wrong — grad school opens that path but it’s still a low-probability path. Unless working years start getting a lot longer², most PhDs will not come out ahead financially; the awareness machine is already cranked to 11 telling us that most PhDs will go into non-academic careers. There are other good reasons to go to grad school, but that trade-off should be made with eyes open.

1. Assuming a 5% return on their investments and 4% annual raises.
2. Which if they do, will be thanks to longevity and brain research done by PhD students.
Final note: I believe that many people would still go on to grad school even with eyes fully open about the costs and trade-offs because they’re just wired for research and hopelessly optimistic about being in the minority that become faculty.

I’ve attended a few recent talks about medical device start-ups and serial entrepreneurs, and just tonight got to listen to Dr. Stephen Larson (currently of Northern Biologics) talk about his career path.

Part of his story was pretty typical of others I’ve heard or read about: he joined a company as it was spinning out from a university where the technology was developed, and passed the reins on to someone else as the company made it to the revenue-generating stage from the start-up stage, where it needed a CEO who could be more of a salesperson. Then he went on to run another start-up company. Scott Philips had done surveys of dozens and dozens of such entrepreneurs, and found that on average they started (or joined soon after the company was spun out to guide it through the start-up phase) five companies through their careers.

Another point that Stephen made was that it really helps to get some kind of business experience before trying to run a start-up.

There’s a bit of a myth (helped, no doubt, by massive and highly visible successes like Bill Gates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, or Mark Zuckerberg) that successful start-ups are launched by people while they’re still in school or recent grads. And maybe that works for some companies in fields outside medical devices (like all the various app or *-tech fields), but aside from a few mega-successes, the successful ones do seem to have some experience under their belts — whether that’s in academia, the business world, or working in industry for a more mature company first.

Yet oddly enough, many of our government-funded support programs for entrepreneurship are highly age discriminatory. Some have age limits in the 20’s, which excludes almost everyone who pursued post-graduate work (except for a few who finish super-fast). A recent article in the globe featured a start-up, and the founder mentioned how confusing all the support programs are. It’s a bit of a job to find out what kinds of support your fledgling company might be eligible for, apply for it, manage the reporting, etc. And there is a lot of overlap between some of these programs — but I wonder if that’s by design, to create some randomness for natural selection to work on, and to provide many opportunities for entrepreneurs to try to sell themselves to supporters.

Word on the Street is just three weeks away, and I’m excited to have a booth there this year, where I’ll be hawking the Value of Simple (the booth will be called Simple Investing).

It’s tough to estimate how many copies I’ll need on hand, so I just figured that if I sold a copy every five minutes I’d be doing pretty well, did the math, and will arrive with just under 100 copies. Running out would be a good problem to have, so I’m hoping that it turns out to be a conservative estimate — but if I’ve over-estimated, expect a sweet sale for xmas orders this year.

I’m gearing up for it in other ways too. While I’ve long been with PayPal to accept credit cards for orders through my direct site (and to invoice for credit cards for side business stuff), for this kind of event I wanted to get a mobile card reader to take payments on-site. I was briefly excited to see that PayPal had one called PayPal Here — and it even supported Windows tablets! — but then saw that they don’t like Canadians and I had to go find someone else until some indeterminate future date when the rollout came north of the border. Intuit has an option for Canadians, but only works on iOS devices. That leaves Square¹, which I had actually heard of and knew as the little start-up that kicked off the use-your-mobile-phone-to-take-credit-cards business. Though they don’t support Windows tablets or Blackberries (the devices I will have on-hand at WotS), they did support Android, and Wayfare is currently shopping for a new cell phone and will likely go Android.

I have to say I was impressed with the whole process — easy to sign up, and the hardware is tiny and light and arrived in just a week. Thanks to this thread at CrackBerry I was able to get the app working on my BlackBerry (which does run many Android apps — getting them on is usually the tricky part), and have charged myself a $1 sample transaction just to see how it worked. Other than having to sign with my finger (no pen or stylus I have seems to work on the BB’s screen), it was incredibly smooth and easy. As an aside, given that new BBs run Android apps, I’m surprised companies with apps like this don’t bother to port their apps over so us dinosaur BB users can download them without workarounds. I know we’re a small and dying breed, but it’s not nothing.

Other than that I’m trying to come up with all the material I will want at the booth to give away and help with promotions. I’ll be bringing along some hardcopies of the reading guide, which makes me wish I had designed it for standard print sizes instead of for screen display. Bookmarks tend to be a standard thing, but I’m not sure what to put on mine that would make it useful or stand out against a sea of hundreds of other bookmarks (maybe one of the comparison tables? “Don’t Panic”?).

Wayfare had a great idea to take advantage of the family-oriented nature of WotS: have stickers for the kids and RESP info cards for the parents, so I’m working on the design for that, with not much time left to send it to a printer and get it back before the big day!

Readers, anything else you think I should include? Or is this getting to be too many little bits of cardstock at the table?

1. This is an affiliate link, but that didn’t affect my review of Square. If you use this link to sign up they’ll waive my credit card processing fees, but if you do so after WotS it’s likely that will be of no benefit to me anyway.

My cat died today, 18 and a half years old — almost 18 years to the day since we got her. I moved out at 23, when my kid sister was 12, so in many senses I was closer to that cat than my own sister (certainly in terms of time spent within a few feet of each other). Forgive me if I’m a bit of a mess for the next few days.

I’ve often said she’s the best, most amazing cat in the world — you all think that of your cats but you’re wrong because it was my cat (well, now one of you might be right). However, it’s always been hard to explain why she was the best cat, so I suppose I will just throw pictures and mini-stories at you (keep scrolling), and otherwise just remind myself that I don’t need to convince anyone else that she was not just awesome and sweet and loving but the best cat ever.

What’s really amazed me the past few years is how good she is with Blueberry (and vice-versa).

The Origin Story

We got her years ago, on PEI. At the time I didn’t want to get a cat because I had had dogs until shortly before my sister was born, and my dad promised I could get a dog as soon as he stopped smoking (aside: he would not quit for ~7 more years, when he went cold turkey after a cancer diagnosis). I never saw her at the combination vet clinic/pet store where they got her, but supposedly she was super-friendly with all the people coming in to the store, and was nearly 5 months old (she roamed the store, she wasn’t in a cage). There wasn’t much of a market for pure-bred Himalayan cats on the Island, so the store owner said she was going to adopt her herself if no one got her by 6 mo. My mom and sister fell in love and raced back to the cottage to try to convince the rest of us that we needed a cat. My dad had a conference call, and my sister kept trying to ask him to get the cat. He kicked my mom and sister out of the cottage for making too much noise while he was on the call. My sister made pleading faces and hands at him through the window. Still on the conference call, he scrawled across a piece of paper “FUCK OFF, get the cat.” And so they hopped in the van and went right back to adopt her.

Taking her from the pet shop to our place seemed to break her brain: she couldn’t handle more than two people in a room and was constantly under a bed or the couch. I liked to stay up late into the night reading (some things never change), so I was often the only person up when the nocturnal cat came out to explore. We became best buddies. She immediately started sleeping under my bed, hiding from the others during the day, then snuggling with me in the recliner at night while I read. It took a few weeks, but soon enough she was sleeping on top of the bed with me.

Back in Toronto she started sleeping not just on my bed, but up on my pillow. She used to lick and groom the top of my head before we’d go to sleep. As my hair started falling out she seemed to have a realization that it was not a thing to do any more (I like to humanize it by thinking she mistakenly blamed herself for the hair loss), and instead slept beside me for bit, until a few bad nights of getting nearly rolled on and twitched out of place drove her to the foot of the bed. She also loved the basement. It was full of boxes and dust and places to hide, and being a teenager and the oldest child, I had claimed the basement as my own lair, so once again we became the two souls out on our own, and I started to think of her not as the cat that my mom and sister brought home on an impulse, but as my cat.

—

Driving

She hated driving. Supposedly she yowled the whole way back from the pet store in the first place. When our month-long vacation on PEI was over, we had to get back to Toronto in the van, and she yowled until about Moncton before settling back with me on the very back row of seats in the van.

When I moved to London, which was about a 2-hour drive away, she would cry for about the first hour and a half of the trip. Every time. The first time I took her out with me it was a terrible snowstorm, and I think it took nearly four hours to do the drive. On that one I swear she figured out how to modify her meows to call to me (and later Wayfare) by name. “Meeep, meeep, meeeowww, jeeeeow, jeeooon, jeeeooon, jeeeooon… [Way-fr; way-fr]…” After I stopped taking her back and forth every weekend she seemed to settle down about driving (a bit).

Even after she stopped crying the entire trip, we’d still get subjected to the protest pee when we tried to drive with her, where she’d pee in her travel crate as soon as it was placed in the car. We got that treatment on her very last long-distance trip, our return drive from the cottage two weeks ago.

—

Kitty and Blueberry

One thing that never ceased to amaze me is how this shy, skittish cat became fast friends with a toddler. I know Blueberry is awesome and very good and gentle with the cat, but she’s still a toddler and kind of unpredictable. Blueberry would “read” bedtime stories to the kitty while she napped on the couch, and was constantly bringing her toys and interesting things to sniff. Kitty would follow Blueberry around for a surprisingly large part of the day (given how much elderly cats sleep), and often came in to sit and listen to me read bedtime stories to Blueberry. They’d “ooga-mooga” (rub noses) together, and roll on the floor in the sunbeams together. Blueberry was excellent at giving kitty just one or two treats, and kitty was always super-excited to hear her politely ask “Daddy, can I give the kitty a treat please?” and start crinkling the bag.

—

Fluffball

She was super, super fluffy (Himalayan). But underneath all that fur she was always a small, dainty cat. She was a grazer who always left lots behind in her food bowl, just naturally skinny. All that fur was constantly flying off, and for a long time my wardrobe tended towards grey to hide the omnipresent cat hair.

Wayfare is incredibly allergic to cats, but had almost no problems with my kitty as long as she didn’t take a nap on Wayfare’s face. Many other people I’ve known with allergies didn’t even know I had a cat until they saw her, because their allergies weren’t triggered. I never thought I had cat allergies, but now I wonder if that’s just because of how awesome she was, as I find I get itchy eyes every now and then when I go visit my sister’s cat. It’s too soon to seriously consider whether we will get another cat, but I wonder if Wayfare’s allergies (and possibly Blueberry’s allergies, who also reacts to my sister’s cat but never to my kitty, even when smooshing her face into her side) will preclude us from getting another in the future.

Fur like that needs brushing, and for many years she would willingly come up on my lap and let me brush her. Normally she wasn’t allowed on my desk, but I’d let her up if she let me brush her for a bit. Starting a year or two before Blueberry was born, we were having more and more trouble getting her to accept regular brushing — she’d bite at the brush, or stop coming up on my lap entirely. So we got into a regular habit of cutting out big knots of hair as it bunched up instead. As she got older and less flexible, we had to really thin out the hair on her back near her tail because she couldn’t keep up with her grooming, and wouldn’t let us brush her. The past few months she wasn’t brushed at all: with the weight loss and dehydration we were just too afraid of hurting her or stressing her out, so she was just a big ball of mats across her sides and tummy — though miraculously the fur on top was still pristine and gorgeous (even the vet commented on it).

—

Goodbye My Dear Friend

I stayed home from work and spent the day with her today, doing a bit of work on the laptop in the living room while she snoozed in a sunbeam from the front window. I’d pet her, and cry, and she’d purr for a few seconds and go back to sleep. At lunch I had mac ‘n cheese, and she woke up to lick some cheese sauce off my noodles, just like old times. I tried offering her food and treats, and while she took 3 treats she only touched food twice, and even then only got a few teaspoons in.

A half hour before it was time to go to the vet she woke up, had a bowel movement, and visited her food bowl. Just like a cat to make the decision hard on you at the last minute. I figured if she was indeed doing a bit better with a few more good days in her, the vet visit could just be a chance for some more subcutaneous fluids and a checkup. We started the vet visit with a health check to kind of assess where we were at in terms of quality of life remaining and make sure that this was a helpful move. She was down to 3.5 lbs, her kidneys had atrophied, she was anemic, and above all, she just lay down on the examination table and didn’t try to get away. I offered her more treats and she wouldn’t lift her head up to take them. Those last two were the deciding factors for me. She died peacefully while I pet her.

The house feels so empty. Which is weird, because I’m up working on my computer, and for the past few weeks she would have been down on the windowsill at the opposite end of the house, not able to manage the stairs to come up here and visit me. There’s no way I could hear or otherwise sense her from here if she were here, but somehow I can just feel the emptiness (the rest of the family left for the weekend in part so Blueberry wouldn’t have to deal with kitty’s death and daddy being a mess). In some ways I’ve slid into the loss gradually — for instance, she used to always steal the footrest under my desk for a bed, but her limited mobility has meant that she hasn’t been there for weeks, so checking before I put my feet up was already a thing I was getting over. I’m not sure I’ll be eating mac ‘n cheese or laying in the sun in the living room for quite a while though.

She was a loving, gentle cat, and she was loved by all who knew her. I miss her terribly.