What Is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?

Introduction

If you are reading this post long after its March 2025 publication date, you might become puzzled at its many failings until you realize, “Oh, wait, this was written back when Dana wrote his own blog posts instead of assigning them to GPT-28-turbo-XL-prime! The lameness is because he did his own very light research instead of basing his observations on the entire body of knowledge of the Internet, and because it’s a plebian human voice instead of an infinitely exalted and witty A.I.!”

I have now blogged 14 times about A.I. and its evolution. My last ChatGPT check-in was about three months ago. The A.I. version hasn’t changed since then; as of this writing it’s still GPT-4-turbo. But what has changed is the range of tasks I’ve experimented with. I now realize my previous posts failed to appreciate some of the things ChatGPT does really well. This post showcases those, while also providing commentary on what the A.I. still does not excel at (and likely never will). You’ll also learn more about why you may have seen an annoying banner about cookies at the top of this blog.

Caveat

This post is mostly about ChatGPT though it touches on Google Gemini. What it doesn’t cover is the “Visual Look Up” feature on Apple’s iOS platform that leverages “Siri Knowledge.” I don’t currently own any Apple products (except an iPod mini in a drawer somewhere) so all I know about Siri is that it did a comically poor job of identifying the breed of my brother’s cat today, based on this snapshot he sent me:

How an A.I. could think any image looks like both a cougar and a wallaby is beyond me. I’m going to assume Apple is so far behind in the arms race that we can simply ignore it for now.

Real-world problem solving with GPT-4-turbo

Until recently I’d only messed around with GPT-4 for the purpose of evaluating it (and, whenever possible, mocking it). But then I hit upon a real-world use case and dove back in. My motivation, which I’m sure you’ll relate to, was: HOT CASH MONEY. Who wouldn’t want this, other than those tedious killjoys who spout aphorisms like “Money is the root of all evil”?

By way of background, I’d noticed that the albertnet page view count had soared in recent months. It took this blog something like 14 years to reach a million page views, but in the last six months alone I’ve now seen almost 1.4 million more. But then, isn’t this how the Internet works? Moore’s Law? Nielsen’s Law? All that compounding magic? In the whole time I’ve had this blog I never even considered monetizing it through ads, but every man has his price. (I’m not sure exactly what mine is, but I reckon I’ll know it when I see it.)

Driven mad with money-lust like one of the guys in “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” I needed answers—fast. So I asked GPT-4-turbo, “My blog, www.albertnet.us, has received 1.2 page views in the last three months and traffic is increasing. If I turned on Adsense, approximately how much money would I earn per month?”

Yes, “1.2 page views” is a typo, but I didn’t make it here … that’s actually what I asked ChatGPT. It replied, “What the hell do you mean 1.2 page views? How do you have 2/10 of a page view? Did some user barely see the screen, like out of his peripheral vision? Or are you just whacked out on coke and smack and typed your query wrong?”

Okay, you got me … that’s not at all how GPT replied, though honestly I think that would be the better answer. What it actually provided was a lengthy essay, full of data points and computations, answering this useless question. My favorite part of the response was, “Number of Page Views (Traffic) – You’ve mentioned you have 1.2 page views in the last three months, which is approximately 400 page views per month (assuming the traffic is consistent).”

Huh? How do you get 400 by dividing 1.2 by 3? I guess the chatbot arbitrarily assumed the figure I provided was in thousands. That’s a pretty big logical leap, and GPT didn’t document the fact of this assumption. It then proceeded to run a bunch of calculations based on 1,200 views, the punch line being that I could make about $2/month. So the more succinct answer would have been, “Dream on, bloggy-boy.”

When I corrected my original query to 1.2 million page views, GPT-4-turbo reran its calculations and informed me that I might expect to earn something in the neighborhood of $2,000/month in passive income. Now we’re talking! It did suggest a number of caveats, such as how my  results might be affected by the geographical location of my readers, the positioning and type of ads, ad targeting, how well ads match my content, user engagement, and so on. I asked it a bunch more questions specific to Adsense, whether GPT’s estimated click-thru rate (CTR) assumption is realistic, etc. While it provided all kinds of useful info, it missed one very important rule of thumb: if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

I mean, come on … albertnet is a blog about nothing. I’m not going on political rants that cause trolls to leave endless acerbic comments and then forward my post to 90 friends with an exasperated preface like “can you believe this shit?!?!!?!” If all it took to create a nice passive income stream was to blog every single week for 15 years straight so that after more than 3,500 hours of writing you’ve amassed over 750 posts, comprising over 2 million (juicy, searchable) words, then everybody would be getting into this business, obviously. If quality, rather than nudity, attracted people’s attention, every liberal arts grad on the planet would be driving a Benz. (Well, except for me, because regardless of my income—actual, theoretical, or pipe-dreamed—I will always be the world’s cheapest man driving a used Volvo.)

I feel really bad for the earnest blogger who sees all this traffic growth, does a basic ChatGPT query, thinks he can trust the response, and makes a lot of effort adding ads to his blog to harness this new fountain of riches. I hope nobody is that naïve. Since I’m not, my first impulse was to get a second opinion. So I put my query to Google Gemini, without the typo this time, and it gave me a very similar answer: I could make right around $2K a month, just for setting up Adsense and then sitting on my ass!

This seems like the kind of claim I’d get from a spammer. In fact, I’m going to check my spam right now to look for this kind of hoax. Hmm, that’s odd. Though 22 of my 50 spam messages are from recruiters, none is this specific. I do, however, have a message from “Super-size” titled, “Now imagine each night, having 5 or 10 concubines around you, each one craving your masculine essence in them. #632352.” This subject line is interspersed with various emoji including, oddly enough, an avocado. Is avocado a concubine’s favorite food? Let me ask ChatGPT. Okay, it replied in the negative, pointing out that concubines were prominent “in ancient or medieval times, when avocados were not available in their regions.” I think the innuendo of “in their regions” was accidental. (And now I’ve realized how long and pointless a digression this has been. I’m tempted to apologize, except this might end up being my favorite paragraph of this entire post.)

The caveat GPT-4-turbo should have provided is, “My calculated revenue assumes the page views are from actual readers, not bots.” The idea of bots grossly polluting my page view stats was my natural assumption, but not one GPT addressed. I think this is an important object lesson: it doesn’t matter how useful A.I.’s responses are if you don’t know to ask the right question. Perhaps A.I. will advance to the point that it would not only sanity-check my page view stats, but would be the one to keep an eye on my blog traffic to watch out for moneymaking opportunities in my stead. (If and only if it knew albertnet to be an amazing viral sensation for reals.)

Where ChatGPT shines

After feeding me all that false hope, ChatGPT asked if I’d like help setting up Adsense on my blog. I decided instead to enlist its support vetting the quality of the page view stats. Having drilled down a bit on my own (which Blogger doesn’t make super easy, by the way), I discovered that page views from France were 12% of my total over the last six months, 14% over the last three months, and 39% over the last 30 days. I shared this with the chatbot and queried, “Is there A.I.-driven or bot type traffic that would originate in France that could artificially inflate the metrics around my readership?” (I now regret the specificity of this, as I was clearly “leading the witness.”)

ChatGPT responded with a clear and detailed essay about the probable causes, including “Bot Traffic (Most Likely Explanation).” It filled me in about scrapers and SEO crawlers and A.I. training bots, and suggested I use Google Analytics to investigate further. This ended up being an excellent suggestion and led to my most engaged use of GPT ever.

First I quizzed the chatbot about whether Google Analytics has a free version (it does), whether I’m giving up any privacy (basically not), etc. Then I set up Google Analytics (aka GA4), which was pretty straightforward, except I noticed in the Terms of Service that I’m expected to comply with GDPR (the EU General Data Protection Regulation) when gathering this detailed user data. I happen to know what GDPR is, so I asked GPT all about it, in terms of what I’m really expected to do to comply. It turns out that compliance is a royal pain in the arse (my words, not ChatGPT’s). Since I do get readers from Europe (whether it’s 39% of all traffic or not), I need to have a publicly posted privacy policy and a banner announcing my use of cookies (which is how GA4 can track usage). I almost abandoned the whole project, on the mere assumption that my page view stats are so obviously bogus I don’t need to expend all this effort verifying it, but then … what if these traffic stats aren’t bogus? What if I really could just sit back and rake in money? Isn’t it worth spending some time and effort investigating the possibility?

I asked GPT for some nice boilerplate text for the privacy policy, and though much if its response was unusable, some of it was good, and if nothing else this rough draft prevented writer’s block and paved the way for my policy, which you can read here and which I’ve linked to in my blog’s footer. (I’ll need to revise that policy pretty radically, as you shall see, but it’s probably a good thing to have anyway.) The harder task was creating that cookie banner, since it’s not just a static digital placard but an actual functional utility that captures a user’s cookie preferences and turns them into policies that impact the behavior of GA4. That is no small feat, and probably nothing I’d tackle on my own.

Before I pressed on I had a long, rambling discussion with ChatGPT about how to get everything going. I learned a ton, including info about the following:

• The various metrics I’d be able to get from GA4 (i.e., is this truly worth it?)
• What free utilities exist that could be leveraged for setting up the cookie banner and how to choose the best one
• Approximately how long it would take to set up the banner based on the chosen utility
• How to create a Google Tag and write an HTML script for my blog’s template that would invoke it
• How to create the HTML script that would invoke the banner
• How to pause GA4 if I have trouble invoking the banner (spoiler: I did)
• How to back up my blog’s HTML template before messing with it (though GPT didn’t suggest this, which again illustrates the difference between a) being able to describe how to do something, and b) taking the initiative to do that thing)
• How to debug my script and figure out why it’s not working

These weren’t just general instructions it provided that I’d have to suss out on my own. GPT4-turbo provided sample script text that actually worked (eventually). Here’s an example of its suggested script:

 <head>
    <!-- Your other head tags -->
    <script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=YOUR_TRACKING_ID"></script>
    <script>
        window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
        function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
        gtag('js', new Date());
        gtag('config', 'YOUR_TRACKING_ID');
    </script>
</head>

To reiterate, I am not a seasoned HTML jockey and would have struggled with this syntax, to say the least, were it not for the chatbot’s help. And even if I had originally built my blog from scratch (i.e., coding all the HTML myself without a Blogger template), I’d have been rusty enough now that I’d have been wise to leverage GPT for this task anyway. As I went through all this scripting, it dawned on me why a lot of people are worried about A.I. taking our jobs. This is just basic HTML but GPT was hugely helpful; If I were a full-on programmer and suddenly became (say) twice as efficient because I was grabbing blobs of basic code for simple operations instead of creating them from scratch every time, I’d naturally consider how all my colleagues have also become twice as efficient, and I’d start to worry about my employer realizing they could make do with half their programming staff. Scary stuff.

The upshot

Once GA4 was up and running, ChatGPT was very helpful in walking me through understanding all its metrics, not all of which were very intuitive. In a perfect world, I’d have discovered an average engagement time of ten minutes per post, indicating actual human readers. In reality, I learned that—guess what?—average engagement time is under three minutes, and GA4 shows way fewer page views than the Blogger stats. In other words, Blogger most likely is reporting on a lot of bogus visits from bots. If ChatGPT were like a really cool know-it-all big brother, it would have said, in response to my very first inquiry about the growth in traffic, “Dude, don’t trust the Blogger stats. They’re useless.” I wouldn’t have had to do all this research.

After asking ChatGPT a bunch of questions related to the delta in traffic as reported by each platform, I had it recalculate the ad revenue I might hope to get from my blog in light of the better data. It estimated about $0.40/month, and then went on to suggest a whole bunch of ways I could improve user engagement. I then led it on a thought exercise about how much of the real traffic is based on old posts, since a) albertnet posts are not timely, and b) the longer a post is up, the more views it will gradually accrue. GPT agreed with my assessment: that any improvements going forward would only marginally increase traffic and engagement, as they’d only apply to new posts.

Next I asked GPT for its best guess as to how much improvement I could achieve if I implemented all its suggestions … double? triple? tenfold? It replied that “doubling or tripling engagement is probably a reasonable and achievable short-term goal.” (This doesn’t impress me as intelligent … I think the chatbot is just highly suggestible.) I went on to ask, “Do you think it’s worth implementing these strategies with the goal of monetizing my blog through ad revenue?” It provided another long essay that concluded, “Yes, but with realistic expectations … treat ad revenue as a potential bonus or passive income stream, and consider other monetization strategies as well (affiliate marketing, sponsored content, or selling your own products/services).”

And this is where, I think, A.I. is still falling short. It’s great at helping the user with nuts-and-bolts technical tasks, especially those of the type performed countless times by other users (for example, inserting scripts to invoke GA4 and/or a cookie banner). But synthesizing a lot of information and drawing the best conclusion is still beyond its ability. By its own reckoning, my real, human traffic would bring in $0.40/month, and by implementing all its suggestions I might triple user engagement … but it failed to grasp that earning a mere $1.20/month isn’t worth any amount of effort. A.I. was ultimately unable to suggest the right strategy for me to take regarding my blog.

One last thing…

The sad part of this tale of exploration is how useless all my effort has ended up being. If I had any reason to suspect that, after fifteen years, my blog would suddenly go viral, I could keep an eye on Google Analytics to savor my success … but I don’t. I might as well be a frog looking in the mirror every morning to see if I’ve miraculously become a prince. Not that I actually care, mind you … as described here, I’m happy to be a humble frog croaking out my unsung song. But there’s no point bothering new readers with that cookie banner, especially since—as I recently discovered—the damn thing doesn’t even work.

This is another thing ChatGPT overlooked … it failed to suggest that I actually put that banner through its paces, which I’ve now done. Through basic experimentation I’ve discovered that it doesn’t end up mattering what preferences the user selects … his session is duly recorded in GA4. (Only if a user uses a Private or Incognito window are his sessions ignored … even if he allows all cookies.) Meanwhile, site visits from mobile users are not counted at all by GA4, I have just determined. That may be because I never got the banner to work on mobile, and Google can tell this and wants to observe the GDPR rules.

So now I have to go shut the whole thing down, to maintain GDPR compliance. The entire exercise was (to borrow from Shakespeare) “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” (Shakespeare was writing about lust, but I think his sonnet also covers the lust for money quite nicely.)

Check back in a week or so and (with ChatGPT’s help) I’ll have backed out the GA4 scripting and gone back to an unstudied, non-monetized blog with no banner. My privacy and cookie policy will have had a makeover as well. I’m no richer for this little exercise, but a bit wiser, and now you are too.

Other albertnet posts on A.I.

• I, Chatbot
• Almost Intelligent – Part I
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
• A.I. Smackdown – Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 2
• Schooling ChatGPT
• Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part II
• Tech Reflection – Two Sides of AI
• AI Smackdown – ChatGPT vs. Copilot vs. Gemini
• More AI Smackdown - ChatGPT, Copilot, & Gemini Write Poetry

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

The Toilet Paper Hoarding Conundrum

Vlog

This week’s post is available as a vlog. Just kick back, crack open a beer, and click below.

Or, if you prefer my text to my mug, below is the classic format.

Introduction

Five weeks into shelter-in-place, it’s still hard to find toilet paper. I’ve never seen anything like it—but did you know this isn’t our nation’s first paranoia-induced toilet paper shortage? It turns out there’s a lot we didn’t know about this basic consumer product. In this post I’ll delve into the following:

• The great TP famine of ‘73
• Non-pandemic toilet paper hoarding
• How unnecessary toilet paper actually is
• The psychology of toilet paper stockpiling
• Toilet paper hoarding as microcosm

Ah, “microcosm” … there’s a real English-major word for you. Don’t worry, I won’t get all eggheaded on ya. How could I, with such a low topic?

(Check out these stoked shoppers. One is saying to the other, “Look, not only do they have toilet paper here, but a choice of brands! It’s like 2019!”)

The great TP famine of ‘73

The world has seen pandemics before, and it’s seen worse. But this bizarre toilet paper hoarding? Actually, that’s happened before too, and what’s more, there was no global crisis precipitating it. This was back in 1973, and as described here, it all started with a congressman who, irritated with a relatively unimportant pulp paper shortage, which was “allegedly caused by companies that increased paper exports to avoid Federal price controls,” took to the American media to drum up support for his constituents. The press ignored him until he reframed the issue as a potential toilet paper shortage. This they jumped on, as did news agencies globally. Pockets of Americans started stockpiling, though this fell short of a national phenomenon. Then Johnny Carson got involved.

Johnny worked the news tidbit into his opening routine, during which—struggling to keep a straight face—he declared, “I wanna tell you, it is serious.” After that broadcast, everyone went nuts and started hoarding toilet paper, just as we are now. Perhaps they were being even sillier, believing in a nonexistent supply problem without even having an ostensible cause to point to. (Even before the Carson piece, the Scott Paper Company went on television to confirm that their production was as high as ever.)

Is it ever rational to second-guess the toilet paper supply?

There certainly are circumstances in which it’s perfectly rational to expect a dearth of toilet paper. One of these is large public events. I learned early on to bring my own TP roll to bike races, as the portable toilets often run out. One year at the Everest Challenge stage race, a guy coming out of the San-O-Let warned me, “There’s no paper. I had to use my arm warmers.” I thought he was joking, until I got in there … how disgusting. Fortunately, I’d planned ahead.

The other time you should BYOTP is when traveling to certain countries. Some of them simply don’t use toilet paper (more on this later) and others tend to run out due to theft. A Quora discussion on the topic “Why is there no toilet paper in Chinese public toilets?” tackled this apparently widespread problem. A few respondents explained the rationale behind the behavior:

It’s because they used to [be] poor or they [are] actually poor now … in 2018, Chinese per capita disposable income is 28228 Yuan or about 4000$ per year. And rural people’s per capita disposable income is 14617 Yuan or about 2000$ per year, 40 Yuan per day. Let’s say one roll of toilet paper is maybe 2 Yuan, so it’s almost 1/20 of rural people’s income for one day.

For some old people, extreme poverty had a destructive influence on their morality—Stealing will let you survive and being lawful makes you (and your children) starve to death.

One correspondent even provided this security camera footage.

Lest you think only Internet randos are reporting this, the New York Times wrote here about how technology is being used in China to address the problem: 

The authorities in Beijing are fighting back, going so far as to install high-tech toilet paper dispensers equipped with facial recognition software in several restrooms. Before entering restrooms in the park, visitors must now stare into a computer mounted on the wall for three seconds before a machine dispenses a sheet of toilet paper, precisely two feet in length. If visitors require more, they are out of luck. The machine will not dispense a second sheet to the same person for nine minutes. 

Still, the prevalence of toilet paper theft is subject to exaggeration. One person in the Quora thread chimed in to state that he generally has no trouble finding toilet paper, providing ample photographic evidence. He also shared this photo of a method used to deter waste:

Perhaps I’ll steal that idea and post a handy usage guide in my own bathroom!

Is toilet paper even necessary?

Sometimes, a westerner’s inability to find toilet paper is a matter of foreign custom. Russians, for example, used scrap paper until fairly recently. As described here, their first toilet paper factory was built in 1969, and due to low output the product was strictly rationed. One citizen recalled, “The lucky ones who managed to buy it would thread rolls on a string and walk home wearing their spoils like a necklace, to the envy of passers-by.”

This scarcity of toilet paper in Russia continued for decades. A respondent to this Quora thread wrote, “I was in Russia for one month in 1985. There were baskets of ripped up newspapers in each bathroom stall.” A friend of mine who visited in the ‘80s reported a similar scenario, and in fact accidently walked in on two maids as they cleaned his hotel room. They were caught red-handed with the roll of toilet paper he’d brought from home, passing it back and forth and giggling. It must have seemed absurdly posh to them.

Moreover, many countries simply don’t want toilet paper. This fascinating thread provides lots of testimony from people, mainly in India, who consider it disgusting that anybody uses toilet paper instead of water. Some examples: 

Unless I live in a desert, I would never want to carry my mess in my pants for days!

Let’s imagine, a crow shits on your shoulder or head … Will you still use a tissue paper to clean it? 

Water is more efficient and practical for a populous country like India where we have plenty of rivers and ponds. It will be quite impractical to switch to tissues.

This valiantly but imperfectly translated assessment actually blames the western toilet paper tradition for the Black Death:

Britain enraptured from crapping from the windows … within the eighteenth century and victimization pans to shit in rooms so property somebody carry it and inflicting plague and Black Death to toilet rolls. We washed our bottoms and washed our hands at the moment. So, no plague. No Black Death.

One helpful respondent offers this challenge: 

Put some Nutella on your right hand. Then wipe it off with a piece of paper, preferably toilet paper. Put some Nutella on your left hand. Now wash this with water, preferably a faucet. Now touch and smell both the hands. The right hand would smell of Nutella and you may feel some remnant on it too. But the left hand neither smells of Nutella nor there is anything to touch. Now imagine. Put your bodily waste instead of Nutella. Now tell me, which one is more hygienic??

From this same thread I learned that Pakistanis also prefer water to toilet paper; that Italians also do; and that an American who lived in India for 38 years learned to prefer water to toilet paper. He writes, “There is nothing better than a jet of water to pressure-wash the exhaust port of your Death Star.”

Within this anti-TP context, it’s hard for me to understand why—at a time when people all over the world are dying of a horrible virus—Americans are getting so worked up about their preferred method of, uh, cleaning up. What’s the big deal, when toilet paper alternatives clearly exist? Maybe it’s because America is also out of hand sanitizer?

Which brings us to …

The psychology of toilet paper stockpiling

Chances are, lots of people hoard toilet paper simply because others are doing it. Imitation is perhaps the quintessential human behavior: it’s how we all learned to talk, after all. Where such copycat behavior is concerned, rest assured very little contemplation of supply chain fundamentals is going on.

Beyond that, this hoarding behavior may give us some sense of control at a time when we feel we have little. As articulated by this article in The Conversation, “Stocking up on toilet paper is … a relatively cheap action, and people like to think that they are ‘doing something’ when they feel at risk.” The article also points out, “Modern economies run on trust and confidence. COVID-19 is breaking down that trust. People are losing confidence that they will be able to go outside and get what they need when they need it.”

I have to think the CDC’s reversal on wearing masks hasn’t helped maintain this trust. “You don’t need masks,” they told us, and look what happened: those who defied the CDC and hoarded masks anyway are now almost the only people who have them. In this way cynicism and distrust have been reinforced.

Toilet paper hoarding as microcosm

There is no overall supply problem with toilet paper, and actual usage of this product is not increasing. If anything, we’re all scared shitless. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) Therefore, if nobody altered their behavior in any way—that is, if they purchased toilet paper on the same schedule they always have—we would all continue to have plenty.

And yet, in the short term we don't, because too many people are behaving irrationally. It doesn't take unanimous foolishness to create a problem; just a critical mass. After all, it doesn’t help me to think rationally about the toilet paper factories running at full capacity, because irrational behavior is creating outsized demand. The shortage, in short, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The paranoid and/or highly organized types have far, far more toilet paper than they need, while the optimistic and/or disorganized among us are running out. The clear thinkers don’t get to lord their sensible approach over anyone; instead, they’re trampled by the stampeding masses.

In a more general sense, one downside of freedom is our vulnerability in the face of what can amount to crowdsourced public policy. Consider the problem of non-vaccinators (aka anti-vaxxers): they don't perceive diseases like measles or HPV as a threat because they've never encountered them, so they declare these diseases a non-threat and stop vaccinating their children. By behaving ignorantly, they are creating widespread problems that affect everyone in their cohort, and sometimes beyond. Measles, for example, could be eradicated worldwide if everybody were vaccinated; instead, it persists and is making a comeback. (As reported by the CDC, last year saw more than 22 outbreaks, with well over a thousand victims, here in the US—a country where this disease was thought to be eliminated 20 years ago.)

This same phenomenon could happen with COVID-19, as frustrated citizens demand an end to shelter-in-place and/or ignore the rules. By mistaking the success of social distancing for a lack of need for it, they lead us back into danger. Lashing out at the authority they’re tired of bending to, they err on the side of undue optimism. Oddly, this is almost the reverse of the toilet paper irrationality: in that case, they’re being unduly paranoid about something they have relatively easy influence over. As the Conversation article notes, TP hoarding “is an example of ‘zero risk bias,’ in which people prefer to try to eliminate one type of possibly superficial risk entirely rather than do something that would reduce their total risk by a greater amount.” In other words, it’s easier to hoard toilet paper than to shelter in place … never mind the return on investment.

Where the microcosm breaks down

Fortunately, there is enough toilet paper to go around, ultimately, and we'll reach a point where so many people have so much stockpiled, they'll eventually stop hoarding it. Their garages will get so overrun with TP, they'd feel silly buying more, and will finally learn to pass up their next opportunity to continue stockpiling. Eventually, the shelves will be replenished, and then the hysteria will die down and we'll go back to normal, which consists of all Americans having enough TP in their homes that they don't worry about it. Supply and demand will once again be in perfect balance. You might call it “hoard immunity.”

Alas, the world's overall resources don't work like that ... there really isn’t enough to go around, which is why a lot of people are malnourished, don't have educational opportunities, don't have great access to affordable health care, etc. The supply and demand of money has never been in perfect balance. Just about everybody wants more money, and it never starts to look ridiculous to stockpile it. Industries like advertising and marketing exist to increase demand, irrespective of the target market's standard of living, which in turn drives up monetary greed.

This brings us to what may be the harshest, most protracted aspect of this pandemic: long after the toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and mask shortages are over; when the shelter-in-place rules have finally been relaxed; well after the coronavirus has either run its course or been thwarted by a vaccine, we will likely be stuck in a terrible recession. And unlike the toilet paper shortage, it won’t affect people equally. Once again, the have-nots will take it the hardest.

Obviously there’s not much I can do about COVID-19 or its economic devastation. But where toilet paper is concerned, I will do my part: I haven't stockpiled any and I'm not going to. This is my symbolic stand, the simple, tiny gesture I’ll make in solidarity. I'll leave some toilet paper for the next guy and if I run out, so be it. Life will go on. (Or not.)

More reading on the pandemic

• Shelter-in-Place FAQ
• E-Book Options During COVID-19 Lockdown
• Is Cycling Safe During the COVID-19 Pandemic?
• More COVID Chronicles – Baking in Place
• When Will the Pandemic End?
• What Are Hospitals Like During the Pandemic?
• How to Talk to Your Cat About COVID-19
• Teleworking During the COVID-19 Pandemic
• Why Don’t The Dutch Wear COVID Masks?
• Travel Tips During the COVID-19 Pandemic
• COVID Wristbands

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

A Cure for Holiday Consumerist Bloat

Introduction

Do you ever feel glutted around The Holidays?   Not just by food, but by stuff?  I always do, whether I receive many gifts or not.  The sheer spectacle of all that commerce gets to me, and I know I’m part of the problem.  I try not to spoil my kids … I really do.  So does my wife.  And yet somehow, every year, the consumer habit runs away with us and we overdo it.

This year, I enjoyed a strong sense of catharsis, which came from a rather surprising source.  What was this source?  Here’s a hint.

The reluctant consumer

I hate Christmas shopping mainly because I hate shopping.  I guess it’s how I was raised.  My brothers and I never knew the value of the dollar—in the sense that we greatly overvalued it.  You know that famous L’Oréal slogan, “Because I’m Worth It”?  It would be a slight exaggeration to say my family’s version was “Because I’m Not Worth It.”  Our version (had it been verbalized) was more like “Because It’s Not Worth It.”  The “It’s” in this context meant “whatever you were considering buying.”  Nothing, it seemed, was worth its price. 

Buying gifts is, to me, the worst form of shopping because chances are you’re going to guess wrong and buy somebody something he doesn’t even want.  When I open a gift, I’m practically wincing because I can’t stand such misfires. As a kid I once bought my dad a mirror for his bike.  He tried to seem pleased with it but clearly wasn’t.  A few years later, when I was a racer, a guy on my team got a sheepskin saddle cover from his grandma, and would have to remember to put it on his bike whenever she came to visit.  And then there’s the colleague who shows up at work with his new canary yellow fleece vest, which he wears exactly one time (as a gesture toward his wife), before it disappears forever.  The whole process is so inefficient.

But that’s not even the worst part.  I can totally handle buying birthday presents for people, because then I have time to think.  In the weeks before Christmas, especially with the economy back on track, everybody is out there shopping together, clogging up the system.  My wife and I got stuck in a mall in Fremont this year (long, boring story) and when—due to gradual suffocation amidst the rest of the human cattle—we decided to bail, we were horrified to realize we couldn’t find the exit.  Honestly, I’ve had a better time getting a cavity filled.  (And don’t even get me started on the holiday-themed music.)

The next day I headed out to a local mall for stocking stuffers.  I pulled in to the parking lot and it was pure gridlock in there.  Nobody could even move, and they were just sitting in their cars, waiting for somebody to leave—but the way the cars were lined up, it seemed you could be waiting hours.  I drove out of there, parked a few blocks away, and walked.  After I got home, realized I’d been overcharged almost $20, and started to drive back.  The street traffic was completely jammed and I realized I was too angry to drive.  I drove home, got my bike, and rode there instead.  Even though the rain was coming down in sheets, I was much less miserable.

What about e-commerce?  Yeah, I did a lot of that, too.  I used to hoard boxes all year so I’d have them to wrap gifts in at Christmas time.  Now, I get so much crap mail-order, my tiny garage is overflowing with cardboard.  I feel like a cog in this runaway retail machine, or like human grist for the retail mill.  Disgusting.

A few non-solutions

Would it help if I paused for a moment and reflected on what Christmas is really all about?  No, because when I look around me, I don’t see a lot of people praying and going to mass—I see a lot of people shopping.  Practically speaking, giving and getting is what Christmas is about.  This is mainly true in the modern era, but don’t forget about the Magi who gave gold, frankincense, and myrrh.  As a present, gold is alive and well (in its modern configuration, the gift card), but you have to wonder how well the second two gifts were received.  (This was before gift receipts, after all.)

On a bike ride this morning I passed a church with one of those little marquees, which read, “THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE AREN’T THINGS.”  As platitudes go, this falls a bit flat.  (I don’t like it as much as “He who dies with the most toys STILL DIES.”)  And though the sentiment is probably true, it’s not really that useful.  Am I supposed to tell my kids, “Instead of exchanging gifts this year, we’re all just going to hug a bit more”?  Yeah, right.  Should I tell them their Christmas wish lists have to include at least three items that aren’t physical objects?  (They’d dodge by asking for “shopping spree” or “trip to Hawaii.”)

Life experiences are a nice counterbalance to egregious buying.  What about a lovely, sunny day, or a beautiful sunset?  I enjoyed both on Christmas day, when I went for a long, slow ride in the Berkeley hills.  Check it out:

But those still l didn’t reverse the self-disgust I felt after all that commerce.  After all, between the shopping trips, the trip to Office Depot to buy more packing tape, the parking lot incident, all the time I spent wrapping gifts, and two afternoons of braving the long line at the post office, I figure I missed out on at least three or four rides, and as many sunsets.  This one ride wasn’t a Christmas gift so much as the end of my precious time being stolen.

The catharsis

My catharsis came in the form of some Me Time, which I spend building a Me Thing:  specifically, a replacement for my dearly departed commuter bike, Full Slab.  Its frame broke last summer after five years of loyal service (and a few years as my road bike before that).  For the last five months I’ve been commuting on the Arseless, which is very cool old English 3-speed which I do love, but which I hate to ride:  not because I’m keeping it nice or something, but because it rides like crap.  It’s heavy, the bearings are pretty much shot, and it routinely slips out of second gear (not for lack of adjustment but because an internal part has rounded-off bits that are supposed to be sharp).  On top of that, the fenders rattle so loudly I can’t hear myself think.  Could I try to fix these things?  Yeah, but painful experience tells me that when a bike is fifty years old and has never been properly maintained, it’s best not to go anywhere near it with a wrench.

Why not just buy myself a nice commuting bike for Christmas?  In general I consider that a fine idea, and something I’d recommend to anybody with an income.  A good bicycle is about as virtuous a purchase as I can think of.  But as a really bike-y person with a bicycle shop background, I’m way beyond traditional retail.  Buying something stock would be polluting my pure bike experience by blending it with that same consumerist spirit I’ve been deriding throughout this essay.

You see, part of what kills me about being stuck in traffic, or in a parking lot, or at the mall, is the anonymity of the experience:  the sense of being swept up in some mob, immersed in a mindless group activity.  Within that shopping mall is a finite variety of things to buy, with a seemingly infinite number of people buying them, and each item carefully calibrated to appeal to the highest number of consumers.  (The king of that effort must be Apple, who sold 75.5 million iPhone 6 units in one quarter.)  I’m a bit disturbed by the fact that many people actually care what the most popular gifts are, and will purposefully seek them out.  American consumers start to seem so much alike, I start to forget which one of us I am.

So for me, to imagine buying a new bike at the Christmas sale is to imagine hundreds and hundreds of these bikes being churned out on an assembly line.  This train of thought brings me to “Pink Floyd The Wall” and those school kids going down the conveyor belt to the meat grinder.  I don’t want something marketed to the buying public; what I want is a bike that is not only fast and light and cheap, but unusual and cool.

Think of the new car Max gets in Mad Max.  Remember the scene in which his cop buddies are unveiling the car to him, singing its praises, to lure him back to the force?

      “You can shut the gate on this one.”  “It's the duck's guts.”  “Yeah, she's the last of the V8s.”  “Sucks nitro.”  “Phase 4 heads.”  “Twin overhead cam.”  “Tell him about the blower.  The blower, man!”  “She's meanness put to music and the bitch is born to run!”
      “How the hell did you get all this together?”
      “It just happened, Max, you know?  A piece from here and a piece from there.”
      “So easy?”
      “Yeah.”

Except it’s not easy, not with my bike at least.  I procured the frame months ago (online, Chinese, about $120 which—given the biking circles I run in—is practically nothing).  The problem was, this frame wasn’t compatible with most of the components from Full Slab, so instead of a bike I had a Project.  And I just didn’t have the time or energy to fight with the thing.  Months ago, I got as far as sanding off the thick powder coat paint that, due to a programming error, some robot neglected to mask during the frame’s construction:

Finally, this week, with some time off from my job, I managed to log some serious hours out in the garage, figuring out what old parts to use (“a piece from here and a piece from there”), fighting with the wacky French steerer tube springy thingy, looking for half an hour for a cable housing ferrule I dropped on the floor (costs maybe 25 cents, but of course the bike shop’s closed for the holiday), and basically making glacial progress—until, amazingly, the whole menagerie of donor organs suddenly turned into a real bicycle, with a smooth clean look that largely belies its Frankenbike heritage:

It’s kind of the bicycle equivalent of decorator crab:  you just use what’s available, and in the process achieve total uniqueness.  The fork on this bike is from a friend who traded it for a lunch—he refused to take money for it because it flexed like crazy and gave him the willies.  (It was on my rain bike for a while before something better came along).  The bars and stem came with my older daughter’s mountain bike (it was the spare set I got when I bought the bike used from a friend).  The crankset and bottom bracket are hand-me-downs from my backup road bike (which got an upgrade due to compatibility issues with my current race frame).  The seat post is from an old (dearly departed) Orbea.  The saddle is one that I got ages ago from a friend to put on my younger daughter’s mountain bike; I reclaimed the saddle before passing the bike along to my niece.  The rear derailleur—freakin’ Dura-Ace, baby!—is from like six road bikes ago.  The brakes are from my older daughter’s new road bike (off-brand Tektro, which work fine but which on principle I had to replace right off the bat).  The shifters, bottle cage, and freewheel seem to have been spontaneously generated by The Box.  (“I can't remember where I got 'em, but I got 'em, know what I mean?”)

There’s a long tradition of recycling your old junk to make a cool, weird, serviceable bike out of it.  I believe this is the basis for the fixie culture that has become so popular.  That’s part of the joy of bikes:  they’re easy to work on (compared to a car, anyway) so almost anybody can cobble something together.  On his latest album, Eminem raps about doing this as a kid:  “I bike ride through the neighborhood of my apartment complex on a ten speed which I've acquired parts that I find in the garbage, a frame, then put tires on it.”

Of course it was only a matter of time before the bike industry rose up to capitalize on the fixie thing, offering brand new stock fixies (like these or these) which—don’t get me wrong—have a right to exist, but don’t satisfy my yearning for a bike that’s cool, weird, and cheap—like the one I just built. 

Yeah, my bike has got gears.  I’m not into fixies, because I like cogs and shifters and derailleurs, and I like being able to go up hills, and I like the basic process of shifting.  A single-speed drivetrain would give me about as much enjoyment as my car’s automatic transmission—that is, no enjoyment at all.

Check out the finishing touch:  a head badge a friend made me like ten years ago, when my kids still looked like this.  I’ve been storing this badge all this time, just waiting for a worthy bike to put it on.

To sum up, this bike is what’s given me great relief and satisfaction after the predictable, perennial, and bankable excess of The Holidays.  All that quality time in the garage, messing about with tools, solving little problems, sighing with pleasure when stumbling on cool stuff that had lain dormant in The Box for like two decades, and ending up with the flyest, dopest commuter I’ve ever had … it all gives me such a gratifying feeling of redemption.  Despite having added to my possessions, I feel I’ve thrown off the shameful mantle of passive consumer and—in this instance, anyway—become more of a designer or creator.  Ah, the goodness of bikes!
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