Today I found out that you can shorten Timothy to moth. Welcome to Timothywrites.
A long read
1. What’s in a cheap
That $5 Uber Ride, $8 Burrito, and the Brutal Costs of “Cheap”
There’s a lot about what goes into “cheap” that we don’t realise. And we don’t realise that it says something about the way we view other people, the world we live in, and how we think about work. This is a very good article for thinking through work, at least.
If you listen to the sophistry emanating from corporate leaders and their stenographers in the business press, prices for goods and services are surging, and one of the causes is quite simple: Workers want more money. Following the shareholder’s logic, modest increases in worker pay—their demand for a living wage—must be “passed on” to the consumer. And so, as a spate of headlines this week now remind us, a Chipotle burrito now costs 4 percent more than it did last week.
Linking rising prices to workers’ demands for better wages is becoming a widely used trope. “From the cereal maker General Mills to Chipotle Mexican Grill to the paint maker Sherwin-Williams, a range of companies have been raising prices or plan to do so, in some cases to make up for higher wages that they’re now paying to keep or attract workers,” Marketplace reported on Thursday. While consumer demand is returning, workers aren’t, so restaurants are raising wages, not because most workers haven’t had a raise against inflation in 40 years, but because it’s a way of getting workers back in the door, despite potentially hazardous Covid-19 and more familiar crappy job conditions.
These headlines are about assigning blame: Your lunch just got more expensive thanks to the guy behind the counter. As a result, the framing implies, people should resent workers for demanding wage increases—not to mention an increase in the minimum wage to $15 or more. (This role reversal of misapplied sympathy even extends to business owners, who threaten that higher wages will force them to lay off workers, thereby tamping down worker activism.) Simple economic cause and effect, apparently. These headlines warn the reader, in other words, that every choice has a cost. And that’s true, it’s just that we’re talking about the wrong ones.
3. Sadly, not all men are anti-racist
Blokes and their casual racism
The uploading of these images is intensely personal and the topic of comments invariably turns to the appearance of the “bloke”. I uploaded a picture midway through 2019 of myself eating a Maxibon. Within the day my post had been commented on 34 times. Some comments were supportive, mostly from my friends. But the overwhelming majority turned to race. Being of South-East Asian background growing up in Australia, these types of comments are not something unfamiliar to me. I have grappled with race and culture many times and I expect that battle to continue long into the future.
Some of the comments ranged from some very interesting comparisons like “Cream on Cream off Mr Miyagi Bloke” or “Cream on Kim Jong Un bloke” and my personal favourite “Cream on Jackie Chan after a few Maxibons” to downright racist, such as “Cream on open your eyes bloke” (If you ask any of your South-East Asian/ East Asian friends living as a 2nd generation in a Western country, I can guarantee that this has been said to them at least once in their lives).
Longest read
5. It’s cheating because we call it cheating
There’s a great reddit thread detailing more info than the article but there are a couple of other points that I would like to make about why people cheat.
There are two options for the university.
Do online exams where students are allowed to cheat
Do online exams where students have to download invasive programs that watches them while they do their exams which students have already said they don’t want
Make sure an article like this gets published so there’s so much uproar about the first option that Dawn Freshwater gets to tell everyone they just HAVE to go for the second option
We moralise the work of these types of exams. We think that this kind of learning is the hardest because it has to be if it makes you the best. I’m not saying it’s not hard, it’s very hard for me, that’s why I didn’t go into it. But it is also made hard because of how we think about it.
You have to do an exam with no open books even though that’s how the ‘real world’ works. You can’t consult with others. We think that you alone should carry that knowledge (which leads into problematic behaviour in the ‘real world’). You alone should put in the hours of work and if you don’t, even if you know it, you shouldn’t benefit. And then we also think that because you know that knowledge, you’re the smartest and best person in the room.
Ben Carson is one of the best neurosurgeons in the world and I heard him speak in 2014. I’m sure he’s done a lot of work. He’s one of the dumbest people I’ve ever seen. His ideas do not connect. He does not know how to think critically. He knows a lot of stuff. But he does not have a lot of understanding. Let’s say we could know that never in his life has he ever cheated. I could probably find another neurosurgeon who did cheat who can think more creatively about their life, profession, and understanding of humanity. Cheating is bad, but it’s a way of creatively finding an answer. We don’t like it, but it does demonstrate SOMETHING.
A few people have pointed out how much organisation has to go into cheating for these online exams. The people you know, the conversations you have to have. That’s work too. We love to valorise Oceans 11 movies because they’re cool and fun but they don’t show how much work goes into being a criminal. You learn things from that work too. You learn things while you cheat.
But I don’t love cheating. I just think it’s interesting how it’s being framed. And a bit disingenuous. We can create exams and ways of testing knowledge that don’t require hours of cramming. We can do open book exams with resources that make you learn as you are taking from them. It’s just not built into the way that we do knowledge, in the very hard sciences anyway, yet.