Author: Dave

I do not know what the best way of forming a government is. I am not sure what decisions I would make if I were tasked with making one up. At the moment we have first-past-the-post. Is first-past-the-post the best way to form a government? Almost certainly not. Is it the worst? No, not by a long shot.

Our democracy is based in political parties. I dislike party systems since political parties seem inevitably to become representatives of special interests. Whether that is the 1%, bankers, trade unionists, white supremacists, particular religions or fashionable ideologies there is hardly any way for selfish special interests to align with best public policy. But political parties is what we have to work with, so…

Firstly, I want to live in a country that can form functional governments. In principal and often in the past, first-past-the-post has delivered that. Not so much with Mulroney or with Harper, or Harris or Ford, but most of the time, until relatively recently. And there is no essential reason why another system, such as some form of proportional representation could not perform as well. There are certainly examples, contemporary and historical of either working. And there are examples of both not working. And there are examples where the formation of government is inherently undemocratic, but the country somehow gets a decent government anyway.

But no electoral system is proof against people voting irresponsibly, pointlessly, maliciously or stupidly. That we have more than one right-wing extremist party in Canada now fills me with shame. And that does not get better if you do not cast your vote so as to deprive those extremists seats. Elections may superficially seem like some kind of team-based popularity contest. What they are however is a mechanism for choosing a government.

I want you to imagine a bratty child who is given the choice between vanilla ice cream and poison. But they stamp their feet and shriek that they want Tiger. So not having contributed to the choosing they get the poison. People sometimes talk about voting strategically as if it is some sort of compromise, like choosing who to vote for can be a process that dispenses with any thought of consequence.

I do not care who you vote for so long as you deprive the CPC and the PPC and all those whatever-ya-wanna-call-ems seats. If a CPC candidate is elected in your constituency by a smaller percentage than votes cast for candidates who were never going to win then voters who decided to deliberately not elect someone, from whatever party, Liberal, New Democrat, Green, I don’t care, who could beat that CPC are just as guilty of electing them as anyone who voted for them.

One of three things must be true.

One: “Renewable” energy sources, wind and solar, are well defined and resolved technologies that are now capable of meeting the lion’s share of our current electricity needs and expanding to all the proportionately larger component of that demand that must result in our transition from fossil fuels. In which case all is well with the world because even selfish market forces would propel any economy toward renewables.

Two: “Renewable” energy sources, are not fully developed technologies and many issues remain unresolved. However eventually, in ten or twenty or thirty years, they will be. For instance we do not have battery technology to support a transition to wind an solar. Also we need considerable advancement in materials research or vast new sources of rare minerals to come anywhere near meeting the demands of transitioning. But these hurdles may be overcome. At which point, eventually, all will be well as these technologies inevitably supplant ones with greater environmental footprints.

Three: “Renewable” technologies never really come up to meeting current generating levels, let alone the vast increases that would be required to supplant fossil fuels. This is entirely possible. There may not be practical batteries better than lithium-ion. There may never be enough rare elements to build all the units. I hope this is not the case. But it may be.

For decades people have been hoping that fusion was just thirty years away. However it is also possible that the €13 billion ITER experiment in France will conclusively show that fusion is not viable. Should the research have a more desirable outcome then it will still be decades before commercial reactors are displacing other electricity sources. We shall see.

And here is the thing. There is a gap. The gap started in 1997 with the signing of the Kyoto Protocol. The day after that we should have been transitioning to the carbon-free sources of energy at our disposal. Twenty two years ago we should have been building nuclear reactors to at the very least fill the decades gap until some unrealized technology could replace them.

Unless you believe in option one, which is discounted by the very researchers working on the problem, we still need to be building nuclear reactors to fill that gap. And that’s assuming it is a gap and the problems of replacement technologies become resolved in coming decades. Which they may not.

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.

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.

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.

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.