Organizational assumption: automobile

Things you forget being in an area well-served by transit: outside of those bubbles, which is most of the USA, everyone just assumes automobile ownership. I found housing that allows me to walk to work. So I call to make an appointment for orientation and find it's several miles out of town. Then there's another task to be accomplished a mile away from that location. I mention taking the bus (because I've scoped the area and know the bus route), and the person acts as if taking the bus is unprecedented, but can be accommodated. This makes me suspect they'll have me run across town again for a upcoming, somewhat trivial task that could easily be accomplished on site. Welcome back to the work world - where the work is not the actual work (at least not yet?)

One downside of taxpayer funded health

This is one of the downsides of having a national health system. In the US, if you can find the money, you can probably find a doctor who will do just about anything. Whether it's an effective treatment or not is another matter, but doctors perform a lot of questionable procedures in the name of income, and supposedly for "rare cases" or potential cures outside of orthodoxy. There's a lot more latitude for quackery, but there's also a lot more latitude for experimentation. When the government and taxpayers are paying for it, you have to draw the line on what's considered effective - you can't be funding questionable procedures for everyone; funneling lots of money to potential quacks. But as this article illustrates, a cabal of orthodoxy conspires to bully others in support of where the line is drawn.

The Australian system could be improved by allowing more self-funded experimentation - meaning, the government won't necessarily pay for it, but if someone wants to try it in Australia, it should be allowed on an experimental basis, with the patients' full knowledge that it's considered experimental and there could be serious hazards or side-effects. If someone is dying, they won't care. People with money are going outside Australia for treatment, where even more questionable doctors claim more questionable practices are actually effective.

Top neurosurgeon Dr Charlie Teo says Sydney Children’s Hospital refuses to let him operate on sick children

Family life

Where I'm from, people believe that having children and a family is the be all and end all of life. They believe it so strongly they think that if ever sperm has a chance to meet egg, the parties involved should be forced to join the club. Considering society there pretty much revolves around the family, people with little interest, broader interests, or even delayed interest in procreation leave to seek adventure elsewhere.

On the shuttle bus to the San Francisco airport, I met a guy from Malaysia who said "San Francisco is the only American city I like." In many ways, San Francisco is the opposite of the mindset of where I grew up. Rather than being insular, it is open and full of people who read widely and travel internationally. People successfully raise children there, but the cost of real estate makes it a challenge, and a swath of middle class families with children does not exist there. Travelling internationally is a challenge when it requires buying a six-pack of airline tickets.

A friend recently posted a link to an article that discussed the subtle or not so subtle prejudice felt by a woman not wearing a head scarf in an area that is veering back to more fundamentalist leanings. What is this small town venom - where people use shunning and gossip freely about neighbors, but can't discuss politics openly because it would only lead to dangerous friction? There are places where conformity is valued above diverse viewpoints and civil discussion. On the right, it is the small town or insular mid-size cities. On the left, it is political correctness that stifles healthy discourse. Both sides have their bullies that directly or indirectly enforce conformity and shun outsiders.

Physics - did they know more in 1910?

Now that it's later in the antipodean summer, I'm realizing other aspects of how well this house in Sydney is designed to deal with heat. The winter sun shines on the front porch and heats the bricks. The summer sun is blocked from shining on the front porch. By 10 am in the winter, the front bricks would be warm. Now, 10 am in the summer, they're still cool. 1910 - when there was less technology, and better knowledge of simple physics.