Author: Dave

I am an experienced freelance graphic artist and sometime canoeist. I feel strongly about the quality of professional work and like sitting by a remote lake on a sun-warmed rock.

Property tax

Repeating myself… again. But this is pretty fundamental to a conversation where we also are running in circles and accomplishing less than nothing.

There are a variety of reasons why your property taxes increase while services and infrastructure deteriorate. Downloading of responsibilities that belong at the provincial level is a good example. But provincial regulation forcing municipalities to spend too much, for instance, on policing, is another.

However the two biggest factors, that perhaps we do not want to talk about are the historic erosion of our industrial tax base and unsustainable car-dependent urban sprawl.

That subdivision, it will ALWAYS generate less, far less, revenue in taxes, than it costs to service it. The actual cost of servicing such development, if passed directly onto the residents of such development would break them.

Anywhere we are having a conversation about balancing municipal budgets or fiscal responsibility; that could not possibly occur unless we stopped, permanently, permitting development that costs more to service than it generates in property tax revenue.

Municipalities cannot perpetuate this kind of development and not lose money from it. Failing to acknowledge this is bankrupting, particularly cities, all across North America.

We already know why we are going broke. We just need the actual data, and the will to fix it.
Not Just Bikes Suburbia is Subsidized: Here’s the Math [ST07]
https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=IGn3B2Rll4BVimjQ

I wish Hinterland well…

There is a game called The Long Dark by a Canadian company called Hinterland. It is a wonderful game. Very beautiful. Very engaging. Single-player; winter survival. I highly recommend it.

But, for reasons, HTL has struggled to meet development targets for years and also struggled to support and fix existing content. Not game breaking, not critical, but worrying.

Meanwhile they have bitten off development of a new TLD2 (Blackfrost) to too-much-chew, without yet having completed the release of the content they committed to for the original TLD.

So, yesterday they laid-off a large number of people for a small studio, which is surely not gonna help with completing more work on time.

I would get a slap for posting this in the HTL forum, but this is exactly what I have been worrying about with the company and the game for a while. People insisting on bigger plans when what they needed, to avoid this crisis, was to focus on their core product.

And who knows, they may somehow pull a rabbit out of a hat and recover and thrive. But poor leadership and messed-up priorities are the likely cause of both the content release delays and the failure to just go through their prior work and clean up messes. Something I have a lot of experience doing in my own field.

Prioritizing instead of having flibbertigibbet sky-pie-eyes bigger than your stomach, can be important.

A Kind of Complicity

Stephen Harper sat as a back-bencher for months after the CPC’s humiliating defeat in 2015, likely because he had a reasonable concern that the incoming government might arrest him and charge him for any of the illegal corrupt things he and his government had done. But, because people have a really distorted idea of fairness, there were never any consequences for the crook.

We keep falling into this trap again and again. We tolerate forgive or pardon people actively involved in tearing down our society and pretend that we are being fair and tolerant. What we are being, is fools.

No one who doesn’t insist that corrupt criminal governments be prosecuted and duly punished should be at the table discussing how we survive this onslaught.

For instance, in unison, every Democrat in the US should be calling for every member of this obscene kakistocracy to be tried convicted and punished in proportion to their complicity.

Both-sidesism has to end. Because tolerance of the intolerable is also a kind of complicity.

Private utilities are corruption.

Regardless of their origins or ownership, social media sites like FB have become the defacto communications utilities of our age. And all utilities should be wholly publicly owned and supplied universally at cost with means-tested rates.

And if you think this would be unfair to the billionaires who have colonized the internet, which was developed and paid for mostly by public spending, then consider that one of the most pernicious facts of Facebook’s policies and management is that they do not give one fuck about what is fair. Facebook is greedy, petty and arbitrary, and dispenses its version of justice with extraordinary fickleness and zero accountability. This is what is so very very wrong with privatization. Zuk cares not one iota what is fair to you. So, I can’t care what is fair to him. He has gleaned his billions, now he can fuck off. The status quo is unfair.

Before YouTube, Canada had this CBC arts program called ZED. It was not very good, but they had a website that was called ZED.ca. It was basically a super version of YouTube. So we got rid of it and now Google has a near monopoly on force-feeding people ads so they can get richer and richer. While at the same time they treat their content providers and users worse and worse.

With ZED, or the great and glorious St Lawrence Seaway, we have the solution, which is an arms-length crown corporation with a mandate from the government, rather than a government office.

And the bureaucratic argument one might make against making any utility wholly publicly owned is just a soiled tissue waved vaguely by billionaires to protect their extractive mechanism.

problematic marriage klaxon

The “You’re Dead To Me” history podcast has a “problematic marriage klaxon.” They ring it, typically, when talking about a child-bride being sold off to some rich old man. However, despite how uncomfortable those historic marriages may make me or us, I am not always certain that those arrangements, then, were all that problematic.

When reading Jane Austen, or more crucially when adapting her books for film, the age and circumstances of the, often children in our eyes, makes adaptation… tricky. Same for Shakespeare. You cannot faithfully make a dramatic film of Romeo and Juliette with actors of the appropriate age without that creeping to the edge of child pornography.

We today however do not have to wring our hands about how problematic it is for an older man to interfere with an underaged child. That, now, is statutory rape and it is unambiguously a criminal offence. Men who take advantage of children, rich men who use underaged girls, they are rapists, pedophiles… criminals.

And while the victims should be entitled to some kind of justice whether that man is uncle Jimbo in Nose-pick Arkansas or the rich son of some esteemed captain of industry, I think it is especially important to punish the men who have the most power to do the most harm.

Perhaps the zeal with which we prosecute and the severity of the punishment should scale with privilege and responsibility and the position of trust, rather than be overlooked because of those things.

PRATT

This is how it works. There is a lot, and I mean a lot, of published misrepresentation, and misinformation out there about “renewables;” about wind&solar particularly. Cherry-picked data, carefully couched half-truths and outright lies. And activists will quote that shit a thousand times. And when anyone shows those people the data that contradicts their deeply held beliefs they either ignore what has been shown to them, or they just deny it. And if pressed, or if they feel threatened by the clear inevitability of their energy fantasy being a delusion, they get mad and they get rude.

That is how PRATTs (Points Refuted A Thousand Times) are so tragic. Almost any wind&solar or anti-nuclear claim, I have a graph, or an article, that I can just pull out… again… that shows the claim to be dishonest or more often just delusional.

But it does not make a difference. Because while there are levels of *belief* from just misinformed to fanatical, in the end, believing the “renewable” orthodoxy is essentially religious. And adherents are quite often willing to dye, or get all of us kilt, on that hill as a matter of devotion.

Science program hypocrisy

I paused a science podcast, cause they pissed me off. Their claim, regarding the promise of nuclear power was that, “the story on nuclear power is more equivocal.”

We need to emphasize that the reality is that nuclear power has the best safety record of any real and meaningful source of electricity and that safe used-nuclear-fuel storage has been a solved problem for five fucking decades!

These popular lies about nuclear power, Points Refuted A Thousand Times, have been a major contributing factor, and the reason why we have done absolutely nothing, less than nothing, far less, to reduce our CO2 emissions.

Anti-nuclear energy activism is effectively the same as fossil fuel lobbying, in that they both equally prevent our actually depreciating fossil fuels and replacing them with abundant low-carbon energy.

And a science program dancing around and promoting disinformation about nuclear energy is the same garbage, in kind, to the science denial regarding the evidence for anthropogenic climate change that the program then went on to deride.

“You’re Being Lied To About Nuclear Waste”

A few considerations…
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“Temporary” dry-cask storage does NOT pose any kind of risk. Not any more than a jug of bleach. Unless you are stupid enough to drink the bleach. And it would be so many orders of magnitude more difficult, and time consuming, and labour intensive, and costly, to “get at” any of the fuel in DCS than to just chug some bleach in front of the washing machine.

A simple solution to automatically cooling wet storage is called a Stirling Engine. As things stand, most backups are diesel, but if you just wanna be able to “walk-away” there are solutions.

The solution to sites where nuclear plants have been decommissioned or removed and the DCS has been left behind, is to rebuild the nuclear plants. Those sites are ideal for new nuclear. All the original connectivity is already in place.

The discussion of military waste is not relevant to civilian energy. Here’s an idea. Don’t build nuclear weapons.

It is insane to put 90% recyclable fuel in DGS. FFS! Recycle it!

OMG! She said, ass backwards, that reprocessing fuel could power the entire US for 100 years at a cost of $100 billion. I don’t know about you, but that seems like $1 billion a year to power the whole country for a century. Um, seems like a really really low-cost. The US could just take that out of the criminal-ICE budget. GFGDCoaS!

If we just took $100 billion from Eloi Mush right now, he would still be a many-multi billionaire and everyone’s energy could be FREE for ten decades? Sounds awesome!

“Burning coal produces toxic coal ash.” Yes. And orders of magnitude more of the radioactive waste in our environment than nuclear technology. Because radioactive Carbon 14 is just dumped into the environment out chimneys of coal plants. Coal burning presents an actual radioactive waste problem.

Worrying about how a collapsed civilization would deal with our waste is a bit like worrying about whether you might have left the iron on after your house has been blown away by a hurricane.

Fascists crave violence.

Here’s the thing. Of course we, the sane and the moderate, wish we all lived in a lawful decent kind world. A world where the malicious were dealt with justly through legal due process. Of course decent people would like saboteurs and misinformation peddlers and frauds and deceitful enemy propagandists to not get shot to death. Just like we would prefer that tens of thousands of ’mercuns, many children, were not gunned down every year.

But that is certainly not the United States under these Fox Republicans. These MAGA deplorables. These violent anti-social deviant ignoramuses and their howling followers. And if you are at all surprised that a disgusting loud-mouthed shameless far-Reich propagandist was gunned down by far-Reich gun nut, then more fool you. That was inevitable in the climate the kakistocracy has fostered. It happened, and it will happen again. And again with increasing frequency as the chaos unleashed by these “Conservatives” progressively erodes what is left of the American dream.

And if you think, as a moderate, that declaring that the shooting was wrong, which we all know, that you will be protected in any way from the political violence that fElontRump and the GQP have unleashed with their fascism, then you are deluded. This was literally far-Right on far-Right violence, infighting among the nut-cases, and THEY don’t care. They never care one bit about the facts or the truth. And they will continue to weaponize the killing to justify deliberately doing violence to you, if you will oppose them in any way.

Yes, we agree that political killings are bad. Except that the assholes with there teeth in the throat of the nation are actively, performatively, reveling in it. And calling for retribution, which is just more violence.

There is no CO2 capture.

From Sept 2, 2022

I was confused yesterday. I was listening to Science In Action interview “University of Toronto chemist Geoff Ozin and Eric Bachman, founder of the start-up CO2 Rail, explain their vision.”

I was confused because their vision is to add rail cars to existing trains everywhere that capture CO2 as they go. And the part that confused me was about energy. They kept saying that they would have huge batteries in the rail cars to run the CO2 extraction, and that these batteries would be continually charged from the WASTED energy of regenerative breaking. The confusing part was the “otherwise wasted,” bit. Electrified rail, like used all over China and Europe does not “waste” regenerative breaking energy. It feeds back into the system powering vehicles that are not breaking…

But then it dawned on me. There is a more primitive kind of rail engine. Almost all rail drive units are electric motors, but in savage countries like Canada those motors are supplied electricity by huge onboard diesel generators…

It suddenly dawned on me that their carbon extraction system depended on adding heavy loads to trains and increasing diesel fuel consumption. Burning extra fossil fuel to extract fossil fuel emissions.

People sometimes put yard waste in big paper yard waste bags. And fine, that may be the only way you have of getting rid of a bag-load of leaves. But the net resource cost of each bag, if price is indicative, is like 50¢ per bag. But the material you are conserving, by diverting the yard waste, is certainly worth less than 50¢. You are using 50¢ worth of resources to conserve 5 to 10¢ (¿?) worth of resources. This is a net waste of resources.

And this is what I was immediately reminded of by Geoff and Eric’s vision. A scheme which takes some CO2 out of the atmosphere, while probably putting more, or at least a large fraction of the amount of CO2, back.

And there it is. Another fantasy environmental ‘solution’ which on closer examination turns out to likely do more harm than good.