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Delivery Driver, Occasional Musician, and Former Academic (Ph.D. in Musicology)
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The Canadian Federal Budget
CBC News Network is constantly interrupted by ads telling me that my government health insurance doesn’t cover enough and Kurt Browning telling me that as a homeowner 55 or older (only one of those things is true for me) I should get a reverse mortgage to help pay for things.
A federal budget is always going to be a compromise, but increasing funding for the CBC, keeping on track with moves towards universal dental care and pharmacare, improving the situation of affordable housing, and paying for various things by increasing taxes on the wealthiest 1% seem perfectly sensible to me.
I’m not completely happy with the Liberal government, and it is the NDP that has helped get certain things done. Meanwhile, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are being totally disingenuous about addressing affordability. Yes, the carbon tax is a challenging scenario, but please do not let them make that the only election issue. We’ll be very sick of hearing about it long before the fall of 2025.
The Purge, 2024
Imagine painstakingly collecting several hundred academic and other books and thousands of research and teaching documents and other things over about thirty-five years, keeping all that in storage, and then having nowhere to keep it anymore and getting rid of about 90% of it into recycling, trash, and thrift store donations.
Sports vs. Academia
I like the PWHL, and I also like that its player salaries are in a reasonable range for what is, after all, just a game: from $35,000 to $80,000 US (averaging $55,000, or lower middle-class). On the other hand, if it’s going to sell out Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena, perhaps it could try to double that, so all professional women hockey players would be at least solidly middle class and only some of them above that. If the NHL’s salaries didn’t range from $750,000 to $12.6 million US (averaging $3.5 million), I might also take it seriously. Not to mention football, baseball, basketball, etc.
It’s too bad other professions, also with highly-credentialed/experienced/talented people, can’t be bothered to guarantee an annual income of at least $35,000. Instead, organizations such as academic societies give amounts on the order of $500 a year to a handful of unaffiliated scholars. That doesn’t even cover the cost to attend a national or international scholarly meeting, let alone pay anyone anything like a month’s rent. Academic publishers also continue to expect people to write book chapters and journal articles without paying them anything. They should at least find money to pay people who don’t have any related income coming in.
Ph.D. Parents and the Tenure-Track
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01425-4 (“Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty”)
In the US, “faculty are up to 25 times more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D. Moreover, this rate nearly doubles at prestigious universities and is stable across the past 50 years. Our results suggest that the professoriate is, and has remained, accessible disproportionately to the socioeconomically privileged … .” It must be similar in Canada.
In the field of history (their humanities’ example), 26.7% of tenure-track professors have at least one parent with a Ph.D., and 34.3% have at least one parent with a master’s degree. Professors are 25.3 times more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D. than the general population does, whereas all people with Ph.D.s are merely 1.9 times as likely to have such a parent. Both cases, but especially permanent faculty members, approach zero in having–like me–high school completion as the highest level of study of either parent.
It’s unusual for someone of my lower socioeconomic background to have completed a Ph.D. at all and not in any way surprising that I didn’t become a tenure-track professor. It would have been several hundred times as unlikely for me to become a professor compared to people with at least one Ph.D. parent. Ethnicity is rightfully discussed as an important factor in these issues, but I am white, and socioeconomic status is also a major factor.
The Canada Revenue Agency and Canada Post
The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) won’t accept my additional employment expenses for a used vehicle I purchased in 2021 to work as a Rural and Suburban Mail Carrier (RSMC) for Canada Post for about fifteen months. I kept meticulous records about my purchase and my fuel, maintenance, and repair expenses beyond what Canada Post gave me, but the CRA claims I owe them $2,857.27. Given the number of days I worked 8, 10, or even 12 hours while only being paid for 4, 5, or 6 hours, the federal government should be paying me that amount. I’ve re-sent my paperwork both electronically and in printed form, but they’ve so far ignored my attempts to make them look at my file again. Canada Post relies on a patch-work of 8,000 mainly part-time RSMCs (70% of whom are women) who generally use their own vehicles, and I honestly don’t know how they get away with it.
Happy Canada Day
Happy Canada Day! I see numerous Canadian flags every day I’m on my rural Ontario FedEx route. However, almost all of them are on the property, including vehicles, of freedom-convoy, anti-mandate people. The flag was established in 1965 (so was I!), the same year as universal health care and around the time that multiculturalism was starting to emerge as official policy. In 2023, there is still much to be done, especially reconciliation for indigenous peoples and addressing climate change. So, let’s celebrate openness, helping each other, and so on. The US continues to move backwards on things like abortion and LGBTQ rights, and the Canadian “freedom” enthusiasts undoubtedly wish that Canada would do the same. Let’s not do that, okay?
Academic Lawsuit
https://globalnews.ca/news/9753491/mcgill-instructor-lost-job-lawsuit-diversity/amp/.
There are tens of thousands of us out here wishing we could each sue the academic institutions that didn’t hire us for tenure-track positions. That’s especially the case for instances in which we were short-listed, did multi-day campus interviews (sometimes in another country), and so on. Most of us have already been left behind by academia. This guy should get over himself and move on.
ChatGPT
https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt
There’s a meme going around about artifical intelligence (AI) software actually being plagiarism software, but that’s not really what’s going on.
I’ve used ChatGPT to see what it would do. For topics where there’s a lot of info out there, it’s maybe 80% on point, but genericizes the info, has no particular (or at least no strong) “thesis,” shows no evidence of research, provides no references (and can’t if you ask it to), and is poorly written. So, all of that is similar to a high school or early undergrad essay that would probably get a C or D.
If it directly took sentences from somewhere without citing them, that would be plagiarism/fail/F, but I don’t find that’s usually what it does. It’s more insidious than that.
On more obscure topics (even when the facts are out there in at least a few places), it makes up almost everything and is only maybe 20% accurate, in addition to many of the above problems. That’s not plagiarism, but it’s a definite fail/F.
The program is actually really good at coming up with poems and lyrics in the style of certain writers, but that is also not plagiarism.
Burt Bacharach
I’m a bit late acknowledging Burt Bacharach’s passing last week. However, one of my earliest memories, along with watching the Apollo 11 moon landing on TV, was hearing B. J. Thomas’s recording of Bacharach and Hal David’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” on the radio. I did eventually see the movie for which it was written: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Unfortunately, I somehow eventually became a musicologist. Happiness did not step up to greet me.
New Job for FedEx
I’m now working full-time as a delivery agent for a FedEx Ground contractor. It’s for a largely rural route about 1.5 hours south/southwest of Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge, but including very scenic stretches along Lake Erie. I get to drive a fancy, almost-new Mercedes Benz Sprinter cargo van and use an excellent package route phone app. I also get benefits (including retirement savings) and a raise after a three-month probationary period. Thanks to Ryan and to Gerry (who put me in touch).
After over a year of getting nowhere, I got tired of working for Canada Post as an on-call relief (OCRE) rural and suburban mail carrier (RSMC). I had only occasional full-time work, no guarantee of continuing part-time work (which they told me I’d have until the end of August), no benefits, no pension, and no way to pay off the used mini-van I needed to do the job much of the time. Other times, I had to drive 20-30 year old, corporate-provided right-hand drive vehicles: Grumman LLV step-vans (which I called “ice-cream trucks”) and a rusty old Honda CRV. That FedEx can be run so much better makes me seriously question a bunch of socio-economic and political issues.
Durrell Bowman 