jadero

There was a time when potential financial benefits were secondary to the need for shelter. Over time, the loss of pensions and other factors forced people to put more emphasis on the financial returns. Then institutional investors found ways to turn housing into an asset class. That accelerated the growing perception that housing was about returns on investment, with shelter as a beneficial side effect. Now, the "shelter" component of housing is only just starting to become part of the discourse again, but is still mostly considered a side effect of housing as a financial investment.

Shelter will continue to be a problem until we go back to a system where housing is about shelter and prices rise at about the same rate as inflation (or slower, due to increased productivity!).

That is not my reading of the history. My understanding is that Manitoba came into existence as a result of peaceful Metis activism and was to be a Metis "homeland." The violence only started when the federal government realized that maybe wealth and power was flowing to the "wrong" people and took action to "correct" that, culminating in the Battle of Batoche, where Metis took their last stand against land theft and further displacement.

I'm an old white guy, but was raised to view the Metis and their leaders as heroes in the struggle against Ottawa's exercise of unjust control over the Prairie Provinces. I'm about as far from a Western Separatist as can be, but I firmly believe that Western Separatism is a continuation of that struggle, despite now excluding those who fought and died and, yes, killed during the earliest days of that struggle.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: This is why I think we cannot deal with climate change in any meaningful way. Not "will not," "cannot."

We have the technologies and some of them, like nuclear power, have been available for more than 50 years. Others, like residential construction for passive heating and cooling, have been developed and proven at least 40 years ago, and still aren't found anywhere in our building codes. "But wait," you say, "we didn't know about climate change 40 or 50 years ago!" Well, maybe you, personally, didn't know about it. Maybe you missed the articles in the back pages of the newspaper. Maybe you weren't even born yet. Maybe your governments, like mine, have never seen fit to ensure that this stuff was incorporated into the curriculum. But I was reading about "the greenhouse effect" and likely consequences and possible timelines c. 1970. You can be sure that scientists were sharing what they knew with the economists and governments of the day.

We have the techniques and some of them, like high density housing and public transit and walkable cities, have not just been available for 100 years, but have actively been dismantled after having been part of the urban lifestyle for decades. "But wait," you say, "we didn't know about climate change 100 years ago!" Well, quite apart from the work being done 150 years ago that raised the possibility, we did have experience with fossil fuel pollution and it didn't take a genius to figure out that limiting the demand for fossil fuels would be just a generally good idea.

So what's stopping us? The same thing that has always stopped us: A combination of territorialism, greed, fear of change, and the inability to process large numbers, small growth over long periods of time, and compounding effects. These are all innate human weaknesses that seem to be our evolutionary heritage.

I disagree.

I'm not a doomer because the problem is technically intractable (more on that later). Nor because I can't do enough to change our trajectory. Nor because we (society as a whole, including corporations and governments) can't do anything to change our trajectory.

Nope, I'm a doomer because dealing with this problem is a social problem with its foundations in evolution. It has not and never had been a technical problem. We have the technologies and have had many of them for 50 or even 100 years.

There was more than enough evidence by 1970 to support hypotheses going back to the 1800s; more than enough to justify global initiatives. Yet, by c. 1980, that evidence was being not just studiously ignored, but treated as nonsense. And that programme of dismissal didn't just continue, but grew ever more elaborate and normalized.

There were good ideas and technologies available in 1970 that, had they been acted upon and deployed would likely have greatly mitigated and possibly solved the problem. At the very least, we would have been on the right path 50 years ago instead of arguing about the best way to deal with what our inaction has turned into a crisis.

Now, at 67, I'm starting to think that the problem might be technically intractable for the simple reason that we've waited too long. But even if that is completely wrong, it's clear to me that it is not just socially intractable, but impossible.

While individual humans may have the necessary foresight and behaviour, collectively, as a species, we simply don't have what it takes to see and understand and act when there are compounding effects. Whether it's savings, debts, or ecological and environmental impact, our poor little brains cannot reliably deal with anything other than pure linearity as applied to small numbers and tightly constrained systems. Nor, it seems, are we capable of reliably deferring to those who have managed to acquire the necessary skills.

In the same ways that the very nature of a nonhuman species can lead to population collapse or extinction under changing circumstances, so are we doomed to play out a similar script. I just didn't anticipate that we'd hit the wall while there were still just 4 digits in our year or that we'd be at risk of succumbing to something so simple.

On the one hand, I think you need to put trigger warnings on that shit.

On the other, part of me is pissed that, at 67, I might not live long enough to say "I fucking told you so!" to all the idiots around me and have it mean anything.

Let each ~~person~~ business rise and fall according the merits of their work and quality of their duties. No ~~person~~ business is entitled to anything. Even respect has to be earned.

Several years ago I came across a graph showing relative tax revenues collected from companies and individuals. I don't remember the details, but there was a time when the tax revenues came mostly (or maybe equally?) from corporate taxes and now they come mostly from personal income taxes.

It seems to me that going back to that would be a good place to start. Once we have companies paying for the systems that allow them to thrive, we can tackle personal wealth/income taxation disparities.

I thought the warning label was because they were letting the stuff through. If they were stopping it, the warning label would be unnecessary.

You sound like some of the business people I know who seem to think that society owes them a business or that workers are their just deserts for having graced the community with their business idea.

I've been told for 50 years that I'm not owed a job, so I don't know why employers think they're owed the fruits of my labour.

What a bunch of nitwits. What's wrong with redirecting the carbon tax into alternatives?

Conservatives insist on means testing everything, so make a sliding scale of combined subsidies and tax breaks that pays for low-income people to go solar and/or install heat pumps. Less subsidy, more tax break as you climb through the income levels until you reach a tipping point at which there is no subsidy and the tax break starts to disappear.

The people with both money and brains are doing this stuff anyway. The small number of people with money and no brains will get taken care of by making building codes that require new construction and certain renovations to include solar and heat pumps and by pushing the carbon tax ever higher over time.

And think of all the jobs! Get some existing trades people with the right qualifications some training in the delivery of training and encourage them to open up their shops as training centres, then pay the tuition of anyone who enrolls so that there are enough people to do the work.

That's probably an oversimplification, but that's what smart bureaucrats are for, so stop gutting the public service and put them on the case.

I used to think that body cams for police was plainly a great idea. Now I think that there are a lot of potential problems requiring stringent regulations and enforcement along with meaningful and perhaps severe penalties for misuse.

For example:

• Footage must be encrypted during storage and transmission in ways that make it available to only to those with authorization. No giving away or selling footage or access to footage for commercial purposes. Access logs must be maintained well beyond the retention period of the footage itself and deletion logs must be maintained in something approximating perpetuity (100 years is probably enough.)
• Footage must never be used for any purpose except direct investigation of incidents known to or suspected by the officers in question at the time of recording. In other words, no going through existing footage to support the investigation of incidents that came to light after the recording was made. (No "time travel"!)
• Footage must be retained for some minimum period, but beyond a certain baseline cannot be used for any purpose except investigation and prosecution of the police themselves (and maybe during training?).
• Field use of all forms of biometric recognition is absolutely prohibited. Investigatory use of biometric recognition must be strictly controlled and can be used only to aid investigation and never as evidence by the prosecution.
• Gaps in recordings, regardless of cause, invalidate the use of associated footage for use by the prosecution, except in the case where the officers themselves become the subject of investigation.

That might go too far and might have critical gaps, but seems like a good place to start.

I didn't see any "shit journalism." I saw many references to external sources, including some from police forces themselves. That argues against confirmation bias, the more general bias that what doesn't meet expectations is more likely to get reported, and mere sensationalism.

Obviously, that does not mean that there was no selection bias in the choice of references. If you have alternative sources, use them or point us in the right direction so we can find them.

When recognizing that someone seems to be generalizing, it's worth asking whether that's because it is based on underlying facts or is just in service of an ulterior motive. My take (which may be just confirmation bias) is that the underlying facts argue in favour of some generalization.

Not all police are bad and neither are all departments and forces. But there are too many clear cases of bad behaviour to just ignore the possibility that there really is a general problem that must be dealt with.