Dave – blog@davemckay.ca

Adobe Broken

Yesterday, working in Illustrator, which I first started doing in 1988, I discovered a curious thing. The PNGs I was outputting were not cropped the way they were set up in the document. I had run into a similar problem last summer but in this case the export was not respecting either the clipping mask or the artboard. I would have just exported the layers separately except with that workflow there is limited control over the resolution so I could not make the PNGs 96ppi as the client required.

The workarounds I tried were problematic in themselves. In the end I had to make a compromise between the size and resolution. Since they are for screens, I am hoping it does not matter.

In researching this I found online discussions of this exact problem from 2016. And it is still not fixed. All it needs is a checkbox, for what should be the default, “□ Use Artboard.” This exists in another export mode, so I know Adobe have an understanding of it. It is just that with all the thousands of millions of dollars they report spent on R&D each year they have not yet managed to fix an interface bug that is at least three years old.

And there we have it. The delicious impossibility of “innovation” endlessly improving. We are promised, and pay and pay and pay for better tools and what we get is just poorly realized feature bloat that is not properly supported and once rolled out will forever be unregarded.

It is a delusion promoted by marketing that we can endlessly have new and improved. This is absurd. There is always a point in a design process where you have solved the essential problem and if you keep poking it, the product will start getting worse. And it is not the predator companies with their inane and often broken updates who are to blame. They could not break the tools we use if we stopped buying the broken tools.

Planned Parenthood

I was born late in 1963. In 1969 contraception stopped being illegal in Canada. In 1983 spousal rape became illegal in Canada.

So in the spring of 1963 when my father raped my mother the assault was perfectly legal. She had no access to contraceptives. She had little or no access to reproductive health services and certainly not an abortion. This despite the fact that she was living in astonishing poverty with a drunken abusive rapist and already had two nearly grown daughters.

In fact, gynecological neglect contributed to decades of health problems for my mother which significantly worsened the misery of her later years.

That being said, OHIP started in 1966 so she was more fortunate than her mother who, without birth control had a life of annual miscarriages that took a heavy toll on her health. And even so they both had it easier than my father’s mother who had an unknowable number of miscarriages as well as someteen surviving children by a physically abusive man who once hung his heavily pregnant wife out a second story window and would try to, in my aunt Virginia’s words, “beat the French out of her.”

Antiabortionists like to frame their cause in terms of protecting babies. I will not bother here, again, to explain that blastocysts and embryos and fetuses are not babies, and cannot be persons, but this is so. And such as it is, “pro-life” campaigners cannot be acting as they are to protect the unborn, because the unborn, in the sense that they are proposing, are imaginary.

No, what is actually the case is that these people, or more explicitly the leaders who agitate them for their own purposes, are trying to undermine women’s access to reproductive health services.

Most of the services that Planned Parenthood provide are the contraceptive and gynaecological services my mum and her mum and my dad’s bruised and beaten mother suffered without. Organizations making and distributing disinformation about Planned Parenthood are using abortion as an inflammatory issue as part of a systematic attack on women’s health and their rights in general.

And in some parts of the US this has been very successful and progressed quite far. Either of my grandmothers might have gone to prison multiple times under new legislation in Alabama because of their miscarriages. Please think about that.

Attacks on Planned Parenthood are attacks on women’s reproductive health, on women’s access to health services, on women’s rights. Abortion bans are on the same road as contraception bans and disenfranchisement of women. As the decriminalization of spousal rape. As a return to an appalling age of suffering and abuse of which we should all be profoundly ashamed.

Screening a film intended as part of a defamatory campaign against Planned Parenthood and by extension, women in general, is no grey area of free speech. It is obscene. And in its potential to spread disinformation that is likely to bring severe harm to many women, it is inexcusable.

Intractable Carbon Problem

We need to decarbonize. But it is delusional to think that will be today, or this month, or this year. We really do not have a technology for that.
Electricity would be easy if people were not what they are. We could build nuclear reactors and decarbonize electrical generation within 10–20 years. It would take that long to build them. But that is not going to happen because first you would have to convince misinformed people that we should build nuclear reactors. Best of luck with that. So while possible with existing tech, decarbonizing electricity is by no means going to happen soon. And all the carbon cost of the delay lies at the feet of the antinuclear (energy) lobby.

And yet this is not the most significant problem. In a recent interview a climate scientist was finally asked what the prognosis was for decarbonizing. She made the above point about electricity, but went on to say that both heating and transportation were less tractable problems. And they are. It is not easy to see how heating can be refitted to eliminate fossil fuels. A bigger problem however is that for this, or more problematically to electrify transportation would require a vast increase in core electrical generating capacity that absolutely cannot be achieved with wind turbines and photovoltaic cells.

For the UK alone, electrifying all the vehicles would require an additional 10 full-sized nuclear plants on top of those that would be built to replace existing fossil fuel production.

Particularly in light of the Canadian government’s announcement on the Trans-Mountain expansion it is important to understand that while we must move toward carbon free energy, primarily by educating people about nuclear power, we are still in a fossil fuel age and we still need to manage the production and infrastructure associated with that fact until we can get off this carbon producing ride.

Spun Rock Wool

Where I grew up, our next door neighbours were Louise and Paul Buss. Paul was an immigrant and an engineer. He and his brother invented the process for making spun rock wool.

The Busses built Spun Rock Wools Ltd. in Thorold, manufacturing the insulation and selling it all around the world. Later the whole shebang was sold to Rockwool International. Spun rock wool is Roxul, which you may well have purchased if you were doing any renovations involving insulation.

And yet the Busses lived next door to the relatively impoverished McKays, in if anything a smaller house, although situated on the corner. This wealthy successful man who owned a factory and an international business, who had made valuable contributions to both technology and the economy, was just a neighbour to me. And there it is. Rich and poor, workers and factory owners, we all lived similar lives in the same neighbourhood in much the same housing.

Just a couple of doors down from me was built a conspicuously consumptive mini-McMansion covered in “security” lights and with a crowded driveway. In that house lives someone prosperous enough to be a model of consumerism. And what has that person done, for the world, for the economy? He owns a clothing line… That’s it. He has a brand, marketing and subcontractors.

And somewhere in that difference at either end of fifty years, I think I see what is wrong with our economy.

The fiction of left and right

It is a mistake, that plays into the hands of groups like the Republicans, the Ontario Conservative Party and the Conservative Party of Canada to pretend that we are seeing a polarization between the Left and the Right. We absolutely are not. If anything our entire social structure has been hauled to the “Right” by extremists on that flank.

Moderates, Liberals, New Democrats, and Democrats are not left-leaning but rather represent an intent to maintain and strengthen the institutions and policies that created robust widespread prosperity in the 20th century. In this respect these parties are the true conservatives, conserving the social development that hauled civilization out of the barbarism and iniquitous inequity of past centuries and created just and prosperous societies.

Right-wing propagandists want to characterize their “alternative” as legitimate by representing it as one end of a balanced spectrum. This kind of both-sidesism is necessary to legitimize what is more accurately an attack on civilization and democracy itself.

We all have to stop helping this along by pretending that there is a struggle between left and right-leaning ideologies. What we have is a crisis of radical extremism, which if our societies survive it, will look in the history books like a kind of widespread suicidal hysteria.

Pantone 16-1546

What is most impressive about the Pantone corporation is that it has managed somehow to keep itself in design despite the fact that Pantone ink products were largely made redundant more than 20 years ago. While high-end print jobs for corporate customers might still use a special ink like P16-1546, especially if it is the customer’s branding colour, most of the usefulness of these inks was left behind when four-colour printing became cheap.

Prior to that, you might have chosen two-colour printing (black and a special) to get a colour effect while being able to run your job on a less expensive two-colour press. I worked on such jobs. Those days are long gone.

Moreover for web work, Pantone has no relevance whatever. Selecting colours for CMYK printing or RGB digital using Pantone swatches is a conceit which causes real problems in output because to a greater or lesser extent depending on the individual Pantone number, no Pantone ink swatch colour is exactly reproducible in CMYK or RGB. That was always the point of using them.

Holidays

For me, Thanksgiving is about being thankful for sanitation. It is the most beneficial human achievement. It is taken for granted by everyone who has it, but is the single greatest contributing factor to human quality of life. So Thanksgiving is the day I reflect on being thankful for, primarily, clean water and sewers.

So, I thought what actual thing could other holidays be seconded to represent?

The February statutory holiday, which is, I think pre-appropriately, called “Family Day” but which we all know is for Valentines, shall henceforth be a day in honor of women’s reproductive health services. Not as important as potable water and a general absence of cholera, but a close second.

That is all.

A big fat horsey icon that does nothing.

If people are clearly irritated by a design change, that is you are in a thread started by someone who just wants to turn off some pointless bling a committee added to something in lieu of actual innovation, the solution can’t be that users should not be irritated. In this case a big horsey icon, started appearing smack in the middle of the screen.

So, I sez to im, I sez, “It is just bad interface design. They are prominent “horsey,” and yet largely functionless, unnecessary. It is not all that remarkable that they irritate people because, as is the trend in interface design, they are a bombastic visual element that performs no useful function. And as per a comment above somewhere, yes, you can get used to bad interface design. I would argue that as of late most interface design is pretty shitty. But “getting use to it” does not make it good, and could do a bit to explain some of the persistent, low-level irritation that many people continually experience.”

What do you have to do to get kicked out of the CPC Senate Caucus?

I am happy to see Senator Lynn Beyak “kicked out” of the CPC Senate caucus. I would not however go so far as to say that it represents any moral rectitude on the part of Andrew Scheer or the CPC. They did not rebuke her, indeed they were vocally supportive of Beyak, when she humiliated herself and all Canadians by suggesting, in the House, that residential schools were a net positive if some of the children who survived were Christianized. These racist letters that she posted to her parliamentary website were letters of support for exactly that stance.

So, what has changed? Well, Ontario is having an election this year, and there is an upcoming federal election in 2019. Conservatives will want something to point at to show they are not the racists they have been for years, even if they actively court that base.

But there is another factor to consider. Lynn Beyak is a stupid white woman. The stupid and white are important, not only because her privilege has befuddled her critical thinking, but because her being white is the only reason someone so stupid could have achieved such high office. In the last CPC leadership race candidates were running on xenophobic ignorance and hate, so don’t tell me that these ideas are unique to Senator Beyak, they are common tropes both within the party and its racist base. Nope, Lynn is not especially racist for her party, but she is also a woman. And at this point in time a party that is also misogynistic has looked around for a public relations scapegoat and thrown HER under the bus.

Do women have rights. It’s a simple question and the answer must be yes.

People who want blastocysts, embryos, and fetuses to have ‘rights’ create an unreasonable dilemma.

Either women have rights, or you can require them to carry a child.
Either women can choose to terminate a pregnancy or they do not have a right to security of their person. There is no way around this.

No matter how deeply you feel about the life of an unborn child there is no practical way for it to have rights that supersede or restrict those of the mother.

No matter how distressing you find this reality there is no moral choice that assigns rights to a pregnancy where that would deprive the host of her rights as an independent human being, which blastocysts, embryos and fetuses are not.

No matter how impractical a method of birth control abortion is, disenfranchising pregnant women, and therefore by extension, sooner or later most women, is a repugnant option.

This is why it is intolerable for a political party to advance members who take an anti-abortion stance or who advocate any measure that would tend to limit women’s access to reproductive health services. It is simply not acceptable that any person in a position of authority could stand behind a policy that inevitably diminishes women’s hard-won legal personhood and still moderate gains in equality.

But the distress and hand-wringing is entirely unnecessary. Ask, “Do women have rights.” It’s a simple question, with a simple answer that must be, “yes.”