Blessed by the Potato

There is no authoritative body or ISO standard that defines what “generational” label applies to a given group, or what the age barriers are. When I saw the label “millennials” extended to those born in 1979¹, I thought it was going too far. I personally use the definitive year of 1982. Those born after that point were too young to have the formative experience of watching Orson Welles’ greatest and final film in the theatre: Transformers.

Now, my use of Transformers: the Movie is partly to be funny, and partly to highlight that part of what defines (or perhaps should define) a generation is the shared formative experiences. I find the broad, broad range of ages that many people throw into one “generation” makes this really hard to accomplish. The baby boomers are fairly easy to define because you can see quite clearly the massive up-swing in birth rates following WWII.

But GenX? By some people’s reckoning, people my age are the tail end of GenX, and then after that are the “Echo” of the baby boomers, often also called GenY (though I am myself, as are many GenXers my age and even a bit older, the child of baby boomers). Other than “not baby boomers” I’m not sure precisely what should define GenX. Cable TV, NES, and synth in our music? It’s hard to say what, exactly, people my age have in common with 50-year-olds to join us together in a generation.

After that was supposedly Gen Y, those born around 1980 through to sometime in the 1990’s. Children of the 80’s we used to call them, though in Ontario the last OAC cohort might also be a good grouping metric. Then those born in the 1990’s had their formative years in the new millennium, so they’re “millennials” (though some will hold that the term applies to those born in the 2000s). Except the start date for “millennials” keeps getting pushed back by different sources, until the point now that they’ve completely merged with the Echo generation.

One issue is that we can’t even decide how long a “generation” should span. Again, the baby boomers are relatively well delineated across a nearly 20-year span. But by no means does that mean that all following generations should be 20-year spans, that’s ridiculous (and a big source of the disappearing Gen Y). For some teenage mothers, two biological generations would fall within the same meme generation. More generally, it’s so tough to have shared experiences across that timespan, and the demographic pig-in-the-python factor just isn’t there. So ultimately, it’s an arbitrary label.

And the damned problem is that as useless and ridiculous a notion of dividing up “generations” is, it’s not going away. It’s so much easier and cuter to refer to “millennials” or “GenX” in a column than “young 30-something adults” or “those kids now pouring through high school and undergrad.” And we can forget enitrely about disposing with the human propensity to generalize and engage in ageist stereotyping. We could at least agree on what the delineations for the generations are so we can speak the same language about it. But because it is ultimately completely arbitrary, there are numerous definitions out there. And there is no good choice for who the standard-setter should be (StatsCan won’t touch it, though several academics have tried).

So, to make the definitions less arbitrary but the source more so, here I present Potato’s Definitive Generational Breakdown. There are multiple potential labels for different groups depending on how you want to split them up, with justifications for each.

1910-1927 – The Greatest Generation. This label has been around long enough that it is in common use.

1927-1945 – The Silent Generation. This label and range has been around long enough that it is in common use.

1946-1965 – The Baby Boomers (“boomers”). Defined at first by demographics and then by a shared love of cars, suburbia, and pop music (and by definition, anything the boomers listened to en masse became popular).

1965-1976 – Generation X (“GenXers”). Some people extend it right into the 80’s, but not me. These people cherish memories of when MTV (and Much) played music videos and still can’t ever quite feel like they belong. Also, thanks to global warming weirding, 1976 was the last year someone could have been born and still experienced an average year for global temperatures: each year since has been above the long-term mean.

1977-1981 – Echo Prime (“primers”). A narrow band of responsible, upstanding citizens raised on a steady diet of Mattel and Hasbro role models, particularly including giant transforming robots. Old enough to remember a world without technology, but young enough to have adapted to it. Their formative years were spent in a world where the Matrix of Leadership was a solemn burden carried for the good of all, and opened only in the most dire of times. A world where you had to work hard, scraping across the surface of the earth to get ahead (and not a universe where everybody could fly because flying is cool and gravity sucks). A world where you had to transform yourself into another shape and behaviour to fit in amongst earth culture and stay safely invisible².

1982-1994 – Children of the Eighties, Echo Boomers (“echos”). Growing up with GUIs most of them don’t remember the horrors of DOS or 640k of system memory. With their boomer parents well-secured in their careers before spawning, and controlling the world (as boomers do), they are spoiled beyond belief. The positive messaging they’ve lived with in their sheltered little lives has meant that even when they do hide their true face, it’s still some unrecognizable, unique-and-beautiful-as-a-snowflake-space-hovercraft thing, making no attempt to fit in at all. Or gorillas and dinosaurs living together, with no sense of scale. For them there’s no respect for the Matrix of Leadership, and a crisis worthy of cracking it open can include any time a rave’s lightshow needs a little something extra.

1995-2010 – Millennials. Too young to remember what the fuss and fear was over Y2K, or for that matter Terminator, they think computers are their friends and live on their smartphones. Language capabilities are nearly completely atrophied: if u tlk 2 dem yul c. Sometimes the children of boomers, they are just as likely to be the organic, free-range kids of GenX. That cross-over point happened (and thus marked the end to the “echos”) around 1995, adding further credence to a separation between millennials and GenY/echos.

2010-2025 – Children of the (Zombie) Apocalypse (CZA or tentatively “GenZ“). The zeitgeist and humanity’s collective imagination clearly indicate that the zombie apocalypse is coming soon, but it is a bit too early to definitively label this generation with the “Z”. It could be any one of a number of apocalyptic scenarios that defines my daughter’s generation. For instance, a robotic uprising is still in the cards, and despite recent disarmament treaties the world still has more than enough nuclear weapons to bring about a Fallout-esque end, complete with skin-eating mutants.

2026-2050 – New Empire Citizens (“We have evolved beyond such arbitrary titles”or “Neckers“). A span even longer than the baby boomers, and an even more prolific demographic bump, these children of the survivors grew up in the New Empire and all its technological marvels. Writing and typing skills have completely atrophied in the wake of telepathic implants, and they have never had to face death at the hands of the shambling hordes and/or robot stormtroopers. Their food comes fresh from “farms” and the bountiful ocean, and the spoiled brats wouldn’t eat a 10-year-old can of cat food found in a basement pantry of the bombed-out house they’re sheltering in — not even on a dare — representing the greatest experience gap a generation has ever experienced from their parents’ time.

1 – Via this post at Boomer & Echo.
2 – I’d just like to say at this point that I’m even impressing myself for milking the crap out of my Transformers analogy/joke. Of course, I only had 3 hours of sleep last night so who knows how that actually comes across to a rational, rested mind.

With the 6th day of the power outage coming to an end there’s still no sign of power for our street. The neighbourhood association got its hackles up after the Toronto Hydro soundbites today about being down to individual houses/house-to-house action when nearly a square kilometre was still dark for us. (The current wording is “localized neighbourhoods”.)

The utility still won’t provide anything like an estimate.

I can understand that in the first day, when trees were falling faster than lines were going back up, it was impossible to provide any estimates. But at that time we were told to prepare for up to three days. Some of us are well past double that, and it would be really good to know what kind of arrangements to make at this point — our frozen houses aren’t really habitable, and our relatives (though too polite to admit it) are clearly getting a little sick of our couch-surfing, house-crowding ways. For those who booked hotel rooms to stay warm, a generator might be cheaper than continuing to pay by the night if this is going to take another week. I’m fine on the couch and have my laptop for updates, but if I have to stay away for many more days I’m going to want to move more stuff out (and maybe grab more than 2 changes of clothes so I’m not constantly doing laundry at the in-laws’).

Though we bugged out early (largely because of Blueberry, partly because I had a bad feeling about the whole thing based on how terrible our power reliability has been in the best of times this year), it was hard to leave at the time because you keep thinking “any hour now…” I’ve been back to check on the house once or twice a day, and the neighbourhood is deserted now. I cleaned out our fridge and freezers, must be over $500 in spoiled food (and lots of home-made and frozen toddler dishes). Less than a third of it was salvageable.

On the news there was a factoid that the fire department is dealing with 10 times as many carbon monoxide calls as normally. I find that a really oddly low multiple with so many people trying to keep warm in unique ways. Is the baseline rate that high, or is it that the few cases we’ve heard about in the news are about it for carbon monoxide calls?

We’re now heading into our sixth day without power here in Toronto, one of the hardest-hit sub-regions. From driving around the now-deserted neighbourhood, there are a lot of wires down that have just been marked with caution tape and left on the ground. If they all have to be strung back up to restore power, it could be another day even after the crews get to us.

The ice is so thick on everything: well over a cm thick on the ground, and now covered with ~6 cm of snow. The first day the ice was textured, kind of like curling ice, so it wasn’t actually all that slippery, but now it must have melted and refrozen a bit, and with the snow on top it is deadly slippery out.

We bugged out on the first day. Our power has been so wonky over the last year — with an eight-hour outage every month on average — that I actually asked for an inverter for xmas. Unfortunately (or fortunately*) I didn’t get one, so when I heard on the news that it could be up to 3 days to get everyone reconnected, and that colder weather with the potential for wind was coming for the city, I figured this ice nonsense was just going to get worse, and with the baseline level of problems in our neighbourhood grid we would likely be the last ones to be reconnected (closer to the 3-day mark, in other words).

While Wayfare and I could manage the cold by bundling up and staying under blankets, Blueberry just doesn’t have that kind of sense. So even though it was icy and the traffic lights were out, I decided late that first day to bail and crash with my dad north of the city (where they had heat, power, and got snow instead of ice). It was a difficult call to make at the time, as packing up all the stuff a toddler needs in the dark and cold takes time, and I was worried the drive was riskier than the cold (though it would be more pleasant, the icy roads and travelling beneath the branches we could see were falling to the ground was definitely more likely to kill us). But, my parents’ house in Toronto was out, Wayfare’s parents in Markham were out, and the tree branches were literally falling before our eyes, making the problem worse and worse for the hydro crews.

Well, in hindsight it looks like the right move. Just about the whole neighbourhood is abandoned now. Surprisingly, other municipal services have come: the roads and sidewalks have been plowed, and so did the garbage trucks. No sign yet of when the power will be back on. If my initial guess of “we’ll be last” is right, and the news is now saying Saturday for the last few households in Toronto, well, it could be a few more days to go. Of course, they’re also calling for gusty winds to move in over the next few days, which could start the problems all over again as all that ice is still on the trees.

When we left, the house was just ticking down through 14°C (from a set-point of 21-22°C, depending on what part of the programmed cycle it was in), a rate of heat loss of about half a degree per hour. Though they had already said on the radio that people should start running their taps to prevent freezing, I figured we had at least another day before we had to worry about that — and likely longer as the rate of heat loss would come down as the house got closer to the outside temperature. I was surprised though as we came back from the north country 3 days later to find the house was at about 4°C, and was still there the next day. I figured having part of the house (particularly the part with the hot water tank) below the frost line would help keep it “warm” (warm being a relative term when just above freezing is the goal so pipes and mystery bottles in cabinets you never thought about when evacuating don’t explode), as might a tiny bit of greenhouse effect when the sun’s out. So even if it takes another day or two for the power to come back on, it doesn’t look like we’ll have to worry about burst pipes and waiting months for a plumber to give us back indoor plumbing.

It’s eerily quiet in the house and the neighbourhood. So many people gone, no cars trolling around, no fans or furnaces, just silence.

As a last-minute xmas gift, my dad got me a small gas generator (he’s far enough north that they’re still in stock — I’m surprised so many people in Toronto would wait for hours in line to get one there, but wouldn’t take the same amount of time to drive to Barrie). It’s big-font rating is 2000 W, but the capacity is closer to 1600 W continuous. That’s enough to run the fridge, a small space heater, or the fans on the natural gas furnace. Unfortunately, the furnace isn’t wired up in a way that will let me plug it in, and I’m not about to go mucking about with it at this point. The house is too cold to bring it back up with space heaters (though for next time, space heaters might be enough to slow/stop the loss of heat if we start while it’s still warm).

The generator is nearly ten times as expensive as the inverter solution I was thinking of for the Prius (and surprisingly, not much more fuel efficient), though it is nice to just be able to pull the cord and plug in an extension cord, and not have to wire things to the 12 V battery or worry about someone stealing my car. On the downside, the Prius can run for nearly 2 days on a tank of gas in “backup generator mode”, while the generator I have requires refuelling every ~4 hours.

* – I say fortunately because if I did have an inverter to unwrap for this, we might have tried to stick it out. It might have saved the food in the freezer, but 1000 W (the capacity of the inverter I had asked for) doesn’t get you very far with space heaters. Instead of bailing before the wind and snow, and getting to spend a few days with the family up north, we likely would have had a miserable few days of shivering in the dark as the temperature continued to drop from the already-chilly 14°C — just slower than it would have without an inverter/PriUPS to provide power. That, or I would have had to hack the furnace to make it plug-in-able.

Just got this in the old work email:

Colleagues,

October is Ultrasound Awareness Month and I would like to take this opportunity to recognize our Ultrasound Technologists (Sonographers) for their contribution and efforts to the organization over the past year.

Nope. That is it. First it was a proliferation of ridiculous days, the pinnacle of which was the self-parodying Talk Like A Pirate Day. Then some things started getting months: Prostate Cancer took November after Breast Cancer grabbed October. Kind of a dickish move: there are only 12 months and December is totally Christmas’ bitch so there’s really only 11 for all the causes in the world to play with. Cancer is kind of big so sure, it can take a month (at least Ovarian decided to share October with Breast), though 2 is really pushing it.

But Ultrasound Awareness Month? Nope, no it isn’t. That is not a thing. Not even if you try to slip it in when the month is almost over and get it to share with Breast Cancer, Halloween, and changing leaves. I don’t even think ultrasound merits a day: let’s give them 35 seconds of ultrasonic screeching at lunch and get on with our lives. Come on, ultrasonographers get to take pictures of people’s babies. How much more recognition, appreciation, and job satisfaction do you need than a weepy mom-to-be finding out the sex of their bundle-of-joy-in-progress?

I mean, there’s trying to get recognition for a group of people who likely deserve it, which is great. But a month for ultrasonographers is just so far beyond the pale. It’s gone way beyond standing up to tout accomplishments, sharing stories of determination, and being recognized for hard work and contributions to being a dickhead braggart “hey look at me I’m totally better than all of you! Appreciate me! For a whole month!” Yes ultrasound helps deliver more effective health care, but nurses only get a day and they have to clean up shit* and injure their backs lifting people. Do you think you’re better than nurses — 31 times better than nurses? Moms, dads, secretaries, the entire organized labour movement, and motherfucking veterans only get one day each. Get over yourselves, god.

Damn those cocky sonographers and their ridiculous professional association’s ambitions.

Seriously, at what point do we get to say “nope, no it isn’t” when someone tells us it’s X appreciation/awareness month? At what point do we have a moral responsibility to stand up to a self-interested trade association trying to take over a whole month? Of course, Prostate Cancer Awareness Month (November) is also shared with Alzheimer’s, Lung Cancer, Diabetes, COPD (yes, lung gets two entries), Financial Literacy, and an insane approach to novel writing, which kind of underlines my point that it can’t be all of these things so this notion of a month dedicated to awareness is a little ridiculous. Let’s also consider what foolishness a dedicated month of something gets us: if it weren’t for Julius and Augustus Caesar awareness months, September through December would still be the seventh through tenth months of the year, and their names would make sense.

* – By which I mean actual human feces, but also urine, blood, pus, and other sundry smelly fluids.

My mom and my aunts were quite concerned with my grandfather’s mental state as he aged. It was becoming clear that he was suffering from the onset of dementia and cognitive impairment (Alzheimer’s specifically), but nobody knew what to do. Most of the time he was fine: dementia isn’t a one-way slide into a mental fog, it’s got its good days and its bad. And living out in the country, just him and my grandmother, driving was an essential part of their lives. Yet clearly ensuring a 3,000 lbs guided missile was always safely operated was a priority for the safety of him and everyone else on the roads. Any discussion of selling the car or turning in his license was a major fight though, with nothing but hurt feelings all around as the girls found themselves up against an immovable object time and again, and not really being sure themselves how essential it was to “ground” him. Then one day while driving he merrily crossed to the other side of the road and sped along, completely oblivious to the fact that he was going the wrong way. Fortunately the lack of traffic on a PEI rural highway meant no one got hurt, and that incident galvanized my aunts and they made him give up his license. Since then, the issue of people being competent to drive has entered more prominently into the national consciousness, and Ontario for one changed its licensing so that seniors had to take regular renewal exams, and made it easier for physicians and family members to report a potentially dangerous driver.

Driving is so contentious because it’s so closely linked with a person’s sense of freedom and mobility; many even view it as a right. Yet it is also visible: you can tell when your parents are uncomfortable heading out at night or in the rain, and you might be in the car when you notice them run a red light, take long enough to get going at a green light that the queue behind them is honking angry, or cross over to drive on the left. Some new technologies like lane keep assist can help improve the margin of safety and keep them driving longer, but you know that one day the decision will have to be made.

Less discussed is what happens to a person’s finances. Even aside from being capable, do they have the interest in rebalancing funds in a passive portfolio? Are all the bills getting paid on time, or are some slipping through the cracks? It’s a much tougher nut to crack: we face significant societal taboos to not discuss finances or mental health, and unlike driving there are no innocent bystanders being run down nor are the problems visible. Also unlike driving, finances can be handled at your own pace, and you can wait until you’re having a good day to deal with them (and for the most complex investing decisions, one day per year may suffice).

Still, the major question is: when should you get help? A DIY approach saves fees and doesn’t require a ton of specialized knowledge, cat-like reflexes, or time invested. The right approach (keeping things simple, following evidence-based best approximations, controlling what you can and letting the market do the rest) can be successful and easy. But it still requires some attention, some decision-making, and some knowledge — and does leave you open for losses if mistakes are made. There will quite likely come a time when some help is needed.

I think a formal, painful process is the way to go. Decide, years in advance while tempers are cool and minds are sharp, what will be the criteria for needing help (family meeting, majority rules? Professional assessment*?). Identify what form that help will take (complete control, advice, double-checking) and who it will come from (relative/friend, professional advisory firm). Perhaps see a lawyer about a conditional power of attorney (IANAL). Yes, it will suck all the fun out of Christmas dinner this year, so maybe combine it with your other painful but necessary family talks that you’ve been putting off (organ donation: take ’em all; life support: trust the EEG and don’t save a vegetable; toilet paper: goes over the top).

While investing seems like the bigger risk — so unfamiliar and rarely encountered — regular monthly bills, credit cards, and chequing accounts can potentially be bigger sources of losses if ignored or mishandled. Systematic withdrawal plans can also simplify and remove execution risk on the investing side (as can automated bill payments on the household management side). Reducing leverage and transitioning to less-active styles are also good ideas (if you used those in the first place).

It’s also a helpful process to go through so you consider what will happen if you die. In that case I think it’s easier** — your non-DIY-investing spouse may need a plan or annuity to help them cope, but at least the situation is a little more cut and dry: you don’t start off arguing about whether or not you’re dead and capable of continuing to manage your affairs, and everyone will know to swoop in and offer to help in that case (and you’ll have a capable executor named to help out, right?).

Not that I’ve actually done any of that with my parents, but I keep meaning to.

* – Note that this is not likely to happen promptly (avoiding the doctor, visiting on a good day, reticence on the part of the clinician to diagnose cognitive impairments)
** – Yes it sounds wrong.