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.

DIY

Once, long ago, I received a manuscript for a book I was formatting. The author/editor had used Track Changes in MS Word, without, at the end, “accepting” all the changes. So I formatted the book, which ran rather long, not with the manuscript, but with every iteration of the manuscript imported into the page-assembly file.

They should have known better, but they were oblivious to the automatic feature, and like so many people, did not properly understand how the tools they were using worked.

Today I learned that the default behaviour of some applications, TextEdit for example, is to autosave any changes you make, but keep EVERY version of your files in a Revert To menu. “A Modern MacOS just keeps the changes by default,” These kinds of paternalistic hand-holding features are a trap for people who are begging to have a version-control nightmare. You need to manage your versions of files consciously and actively.

When editorial got a look at that first-pass I had formatted they spit out their drink. But I had formatted the manuscript file I was given. The formatter cannot be editing the supplied manuscript. So, they had to resupply the Word file WITHOUT every version embedded in it, and they paid me to format the whole book… again.

Cats and rats and elephants…

There is a pretty common misconception that wild animals are “free” and somehow happy. The truth is that life is hard for every wild animal. The reason it is wonderful to see one experiencing joy, for instance a fox playing, is that such moments are a respite from cold and hunger and disease and predation. And it is worth mentioning that every wild animal dies horribly.

People often talk as though some individual animal’s welfare is the reason for conservation. But it is not. And while I am exactly the person who rescues a bird, aside from my petty sentiments on the matter, the reason for helping the animal and returning it to the wild is NOT about its fulfillment. It is about conservation of an ecosystem on which we all depend.

It is the ecosystem that we NEED to conserve. It is the protection of diversity and ecosystem health that enables the proper functioning of all the ecosystem services without which we would be screwed.

And it is regrettable that so many people who think they are “animal lovers” continually advocate for stupid ideas, like protecting destructive invasive species like cats and rats. They think they are on the good-guy team, but they are not.

And perhaps, since so many people who feel strongly about animal welfare and conservation, are so misguided on this subject, we ought to teach more about conservation as part of our biology curriculum.

Don’t feed the trolls!

The kind of accounts that parrot Reich-wing disinformation, lies, slurs, or crap like, “ḟüḉḳ Joe Biden” or, “ḟüḉḳ Trudeau,” mostly they are idiot troll accounts, or worse, actual hostile-state propaganda instruments.

When you engage with them, you legitimize them. In some cases, the operators get paid by the reaction and the reply. That is why so many of their posts and comments are just infuriating kicks to the hornet nest.

If you see someone type some Con shit, instead of hitting reply, which is what they WANT you to do, go to their profile. Is it mostly empty of the banal traffic of a real person’s life? Is it full of posts that were taken down because they were hate-speech? Is it full of obviously inflammatory disinformation posts? Is the account mostly empty, few if any friends, or photos etc?

If so, don’t waste your precious fingers even giving them one. Report them if appropriate, then BLOCK them. If they get too many blocks, they will have to dispose of the fake disposable account and start over. That way at least you made them jump instead of them making you jump.

Lying liars

Encountered a lying liar today who said it takes more electricity to produce nuclear fuel than you will ever get out of it. And, according to the liar, the only reason “they” do this is to make weapons. The comment has been deleted, so I can’t show you the screen-shot. I can’t even find where they got the meme in a google image search. However…

Lets think. I live in a country with NO nuclear weapons, but with one of the most successful civil nuclear energy legacies in the world.

I live in an area where most of my electricity is supplied by nuclear power. Within that greater area, there is, a fuel-processing and manufacture plant.

If the liar were telling the truth, that the manufacture of the fuel for the reactors consumed MORE electricity than could be got from it, we have a paradox. That the single industrial facility, in Toronto, that makes the fuel pellets for the power plants, necessarily draws down more power than the plants could produce. More than 100% of the output from the power plants it supplies fuel to. Suggesting that they are having brown-outs and no one else has ever had electricity. 🤦🏽‍♂️

For the love of just basic sanity, think a little about these kinds of nonsense claims when you see them. Try to remember your grade-school maths and science.

drips

The other day, I replaced the washers on the hot and cold taps of a laundry tub. They were wearing out, they needed replacing.

Anyone might think that was a water conservation measure. After all, when I was growing up there was considerable attention being paid to dripping taps and such. It is super easy to find huge claims of water waste from a dripping tap.

And here’s the thing. I am not negligent, so the tap was not dripping much. But, in order to replace the washers I had to turn off the water supply, and drain the pipes. In order to repressurize the system I had to run all the hot and cold taps to purge the air. In doing so, I certainly flushed more water down the drain than the tap would have dripped over some very long period.

But I replaced the washers, because they needed to be replaced. Not to immediately conserve water. In fact the replacement wasted quite a few litres.

So many of our affectations of environmentalism are like this. We pretend that we are saving a penny when we are spending a dollar. It would be more effective if we actually took the logistical steps we know we should to actually move closer to sustainability.

the real problem is the cars

Yes, the real problem is the cars but do you really think they will be eliminated?

Well, no I don’t. I think we are going to pretend that we can get away with half-assing our mitigation and don’t have to make radical adjustments to our way of life, and that decision will end us.

Fuck, we cannot even get consensus on public health measures in a “relatively minor” pandemic.

However one of two things will certainly happen. We will take the minimum steps necessary to keep this planet habitable or we won’t.

Although “eliminated” is the wrong idea. Having a car is not the problem. Building societies that are dependent on cars, so that you can’t go anywhere or do anything without driving, is the problem. Many people in the Netherlands have cars. They just don’t continually need them for everything. And because of that, driving in the Netherlands is way way better than here.

It is unfortunate that a failure to make fundamental changes in our culture and society has already baked a certain level of catastrophe into the coming decades. That is already unavoidable.

Either way, car-dependent culture will either end as a function of a movement toward more sustainable development and management, or it will end because civilization collapses. We get to choose. But there is no third option however comforting the pretense may seem.

So far we have chosen very very poorly.

We could maybe start mitigating?

Earlier this year there was a landslide that blocked the Chilcotin River. The land slid because wildfires in 2016 killed all the trees on the steep slopes beside the river. Without the trees and their roots to stabilize the soil, it slipped.

The first disaster happened 8 years ago. But then the second disaster happened this year. Eight years is not enough time for a forest, to reestablish. And this is going to become increasingly a problem.

As climate change increases the severity and crucially the frequency of dangerous weather events, the time between events will become shorter and shorter. In the case of serious damage to woodlands that period will rapidly become too short for any recovery to ever occur.

The trees that were downed in North Carolina and Tennessee by Helene, they might have a chance to regrow before they are exposed to a similar event, but as the the climate worsens the odds of local ecosystems having time to recover will just keep getting worse.

We should at least be aware that areas that get burned over or wiped by floods, they are very likely never to get a chance to recover in the next several decades, being hit over and over by similar events.

And while to some extent the consequences of our worse-than-no-progress on mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions so far has baked in a certain degree of future peril, there is no time like the present to start doing something effective to actually replace the largest part of our fossil-fuel dependence with an actual source of large quantities of low-carbon energy.

Low Flow Toilets

You will probably immediately think of precious-water conservation. But that is in no way how we got low-flow toilets. In an age of ever-growing Conservative economics philosophy municipalities with increasing populations were facing a demand for more water. But that would have required spending on public utilities, which would have jeopardized ideological tax cuts. So the solution was that more people needing more water infrastructure investment would just have to do with less.

Which was tricky. Because, if you have even a very basic understanding of wastewater management, you will understand that solid waste is carried through the system by the volume of water flushed with it. Less water, less push.

And so, in the subsequent years and decades after this superficially “Green” conservation measure was enacted, the very same municipalities found themselves spending large sums of money on, for example, replacing or relining sewer laterals which were failing as a result of low water flow.

And the critical lesson here was that more people need more resources. That just telling each individual to make do with less, that does not work.

And so it is with every existential problem we face today. Be it a crisis in energy or resources, sustaining a higher population will always increase the demand we make on this finite system we live in. And unless you are blind, you ought to see that we are depleting this world at a rapidly increasing rate which is not sustainable. And fundamentally, at the base of that is the number of people we are multiplying our individual need for resources by.

People do not want to deal with population. No, that is not it. People are actively aggressive toward anyone discussing overpopulation. It is a taboo subject. “More people good!” is the orthodoxy. But no matter how you want to believe otherwise, THAT is not going to work out.

Four OH Onederground!!!

Firstly, building another highway UNDER the 410 would be a geotechnical and logistical nightmare. Try to think about all the buried services and such that would be cut and need replacement. Such a project could disrupt and make traffic much worse for decades. More than that, it would be a construction nightmare for anyone or any business along the route the whole time.

Tying in a tunnel with the above lanes would require much much larger interchanges where there were connections. This would require taking land, much of it in use, away from surrounding homes, businesses and industry. Remember this mega-farce would be cut right through a dense cityscape.

A many kilometres long tunnel would be a hazard when any accident happened in it. If it is meant to be a super-express, then exits would have to be widely spaced. Have fun sitting in a 14 km backup for four hours, underground.

But here is the real thing. Induced traffic demand is, at this point, well understood. Although obviously not by DoFo. No matter how many lanes you add to the 401, be they beside above under or bypassing the existing lanes, this can NEVER reduce congestion. That never works. That never has worked, which if you drive, you must have actually noticed. No highway expansion in our history has not made traffic worse. It is inevitable. DoFo, in a spectacular display of ignorant stupidity, is just showing us that he doesn’t know anything about transportation planning, or doesn’t care (which may be more likely) and is also not capable of listening to his own experts.

And OMG the cost. Based on the Big Dig (Boston) a 401 tunnel, if it were ever completed, would cost something like $29 billion. But it almost certainly would not be completed because the project would take so long and be so problematic, that a subsequent government would certainly cancel the folly. But in the mean time I suppose, it would be a giant quid pro quo cash-cow for OPC donors.

And here it the real bugger of the matter. Even if the cost did not skyrocket above my estimate, that amount of investment in transit around Toronto WOULD improve traffic congestion significantly.

And as every sensible person looks at this delusional fantasy bullshit and says, “what the fuck,” there are a legion of chair-leg chewing gullible short-sighted ignorant deplorables, sitting in traffic, shouting the old lie, “Hell ya! Just one more lane will fix it.”

Renaming shit instead of fixing shit.

There is a road around somewhere called Stephenson Rd. “George Stephenson was an English civil engineer and mechanical engineer during the Industrial Revolution.” One could argue, that what Stephenson did, kicked off the series of events that is at the heart of our climate emergency and the current ongoing mass extinction.

Literally the industrial revolution and the steam engine started what may, within decades now, bring down civilization, kill and displace, maybe not in that order, billions of people, and wipe out most species. Surely, this is the person in human history who did the worst thing…

We had better rename Stephenson Rd, “Happy Sunshine Flowers Of The Truth Of The People Who Love Life” Road, in some obscure language. Cause that is the move that will avert a climate disaster.