Author: Dave

Concerns over antisemitism in the Labour Party have helped ensure Brexit Conservative election victories and governments in the UK in recent years. This, despite the fact that the UK Conservatives and Brexit are both overtly racist and have brought the united Kingdom very near to dissolution as Scotland is likely to end the Union in the coming months in order to rejoin the EU. Boris Johnston is likely the last PM of the United Kingdom and his racist treacherous Conservative government its last, in a large part because of hand ringing over whether Jeremy Corbyn was or was not anti semitic.

Canada has a terrible history of racist injustice. But to suggest that the current Liberal federal government is maliciously engaged in a campaign of genocide against the First Nations of Canada is absurd. If you think for a second that given the opportunity of waving a magic wand and getting the credit for the miracle of providing reliable city water to remote and rural communities the federal Liberals would not take that you are gravely mistaken. But counter to wishful thinking it is quite possible for an engineering problem to remain insoluble even in concentrated outrage.

So when you are sharing demands for Trudeau to, “do something” about his government’s outrageous failure on issues that have loomed very large in two decades of Canadian politics I would like you to ask yourself who you are actually working for.

If you had to push a car from Ajax to Thorold, which is incidentally up hill, you would quickly discover that that takes a lot of energy. Right now, for almost everyone, that work is done by burning fossil fuels. Which has to stop. But the electric car you need doesn’t get free energy by being electric. In order to do that same amount of work, the amount of energy we get from gas and diesel has to be replaced joule for joule with increased electrical energy production.

And transportation as well as industry and heating and cooling, supplied by carbon sources, are a huge fraction of our entire energy budget. To transition to carbon-free electricity we are going to need vast increases in the amount we generate. It is unlikely to be an exaggeration that our core generating capacity will have to double at least a couple of times to increase our electricity production by enough to offset depreciating other energy sources. In the end, with other factors included, no one should be surprised if it turns out that we need an order of magnitude more generation.

And while we hide the sad truth under “renewables” most of the minority of electrical generation that is called renewable is hydro, which cannot be responsibly increased, or biofuels which are a dead-end source of more greenhouse gasses. Only a tiny fraction of electrical generation is wind and solar, which is what you are hoping people are thinking you mean when you talk about green energy. It is simply a delusion that we are going to produce four or ten times as much electrical energy as we do now without new investment in nuclear power. Anyone who tells you otherwise probably means well, but has no idea what they are talking about.

A friend mentioned the other day how surprised they were that the Liberal government in Ottawa had not introduced many new sources of revenue in its latest budget. And I think the probable reason for that is important to think about if we would prefer to see a progressive future in which things broadly get better rather than worse.

So, consider Canada’s anti-prostitution law. Canada’s past and present anti-prostitution laws have repeatedly been found to be themselves illegal. Any anti-prostitution law is likely to be unconstitutional for a variety of reasons. Chief among these will be the consideration that, like so many other “morality” laws, criminalization of sex work makes the situation, whatever you might believe about it, worse. The law, its enforcement, does in the words of the Supreme Court of Canada, “disproportionate harm.” Despite this, when the old (illegal) law was struck down, the Harper government replaced it with a worse, and it turns out equally illegal law.

And I am pretty sure the current government, the PM and his cabinet understand this. So why don’t they skip the part of this process where the government faces expensive appeal after expensive appeal until the law is inevitably struck down?

Even if you personally do not have strong feelings about the wrongness of prostitution, I would be shocked to find that you do not know people who do. It is quite probable that the choice of this example is on some level upsetting to most people. And that is why I chose it. Because it is so easy to see how taking a right, legal, moral stand on reforming laws governing sex work in Canada would outrage lots of people. It would likely hand the next federal and indirectly some provincial elections to Conservatives who would have a field day with such a policy.

So, why no new revenue in the federal budget? Because one of two things is going to happen after the next federal election in Canada. Either the Liberals are going to form the government or the CPC are. That is the truth of it. The current government needs to fear the easy outrage Conservatives can expect from their supporters. Reforms that hand the disloyal opposition the next election are absolutely no use. And so, a political climate where so many voters are so easily manipulated, outraged and gulled into supporting extremist parties is one in which neither reform nor democracy have much of a chance.

Justin Trudeau was asked, when the government moved to decriminalize marijuana, if they intended to follow the successful Portuguese model and decriminalize all recreational drug use and possession. To which he answered, “no.” Because Canadians would not support that policy. So, doing the right thing was impossible.

And you may squeal that things would be different if we dumped FPTP for something else. But what is really going on here is more fundamental. It is not FPTP that is our problem. It is Canadian voters. As long as enough voters are willing to support extremists and populists, so long as so many thoughtless regressive people can be so easily manipulated by stands taken on inflammatory issues, as long as there is a threat of such people giving such parties power, no party can be free to act progressively.

Sometime in the late ’70s I learned about the greenhouse effect in geography class. Twenty years later in Kyoto world leaders agreed they ought to do something about climate change before the consequences grew too great, before the damage became too problematic.

So, in 2000, me, “Are we gonna build the zero-carbon generating capacity we can now?”

Them, “NO! Never nuclear.” was the answer. “We can make all the electricity with windmills and PV panels.”

Ten years later, me, “It has been a decade of increasing carbon output. We have made less than no progress on carbon emissions. Shouldn’t we start building some meaningful zero-carbon generating capacity?”

Them, “NO! Nuclear scares me! I don’t understand it. I have no useful sense of the risk/benefit ratio. NEVER nuclear. Besides wind and solar are getting cheaper. We can do this with ‘renewables.’”

Ten more years later, me, “Ok, another decade of increasing carbon emissions. Wind and solar have not magicked the problem away yet. They may someday. But right now we need to build lots and lots of zero-carbon generating capacity. Could we do that now? It has been 20 years of not doing anything useful. Can we please do something?”

Them, “NO! Nuclear is an archaic technology. With ‘renewables’ and ‘green energy’ investment we don’t need it. Besides even though wind and solar are only a tiny fraction of unreliable generating capacity we have this great biofuel technology in which we cut down forests to make wood chips. We cook those in bioreactors to make carbon fuel and burn it! It is ‘RENEWABLE!’”

Me, “OMG! that is a terrible idea! That is taking a low-energy-density fuel source that is otherwise a carbon sink and turning it into a source of additional carbon. Wood burning is already a major source of atmospheric carbon globally. We need to reduce its use, not increase it. This is making the problem worse, just with extra steps.”

Them, “But it is not nuclear. NEVER nuclear.”

Me, “My gods. We are never gonna start solving this problem are we?”

Them, “We already have. You just have to BELIEVE that a solar panel on the roof of an apartment block in Scandinavia in the winter at night can produce all the energy that building needs.”

I do not know that I will be alive or able to afford internet in ten years. But I would rather not go through another iteration of this pathetic fallacy.

Why do we continue to completely fail on climate-heating mitigation?

1. People who actively think it is a malicious hoax and actively oppose measures.
2. People who just don’t believe it is really happening, so no measures are warranted.
3. People who misunderstand “climate change,” do not understand the unprecedented time scale, believe it is natural and inevitable and not a problem, certainly not one caused by us, or that can or should be mitigated by us.
4. People who may believe that it is a problem but do not care.
5. People who believe it is not their problem.
6. People who know it is a problem but have some vested interest that they perceive to be threatened by mitigation. So actively oppose mitigation.
7. People who know it is a problem, but think some absurd religious mumbo jumbo. Perhaps it is God’s will.
8. People who understand that there is a problem, but expect a deus ex machina tech solution that requires no risk, compromise, sacrifice or effort on their parts.
9. People who know and understand that the consequences of doing nothing are dire but are emotionally invested in particular developing technologies that cannot have a meaningful impact on crucial timescales. They insist that just another ten years, and another ten, and another will see their preferred technology Superman that climate emergency.
10. People who urgently want mitigation, but not if it involves anything they fear, or anything they misunderstand, or anything they hate. (☠️nuclear power☠️)
11. People who despair of 1–10 and are resigned to an eventually uninhabitable world because people are almost universally unpersuaded by data and facts.

I have been wishing for some way to influence these creatures since Mulroney. Will Rodney leaving his cabinet post change the government’s direction on fiscal or social policy? Of course not.

I am not fooled into thinking they care about petitions. People worth knowing already oppose them and Cons very much do not care. They laugh at “liberals” and give their mean-spirited ignorant base another stir. Protests, they just characterize as uncivil disobedience and the petty snowflakeishness of the “left.”

These people already know the majority of people oppose them, that their policies mostly make most things worse for most people. And they understand that protests and outrage serve their struggling underdog narrative. “If we are offending so many people, we must be doing something right.”

You will let me know if any affirmative action suddenly has an effect on them after nearly fifty years of it not. Of them getting bolder and worse.

The only thing that is going to make a difference is to start saying, “NO!” every time a coworker regurgitates some regressive dogma. Telling family members and friends who spew racist shit to shut up or fuck off. Never tolerating any of the slow creep of nonsense we not-so-suddenly find up to our necks. Because it is our general tolerance of this extremism which has legitimized it. Just as four years of criminality by the trump administration has made sedition hardly newsworthy.

If you cannot do that, then this will keep getting worse here, as it did in the US, until we have our own trump. Fully acknowledging that Ford is but a short distance from that dumpster fire.

Years ago I was at the Lonestar Restaurant in Pickering while a no doubt expensive consultant was coming through telling the management of a place that did one thing well, fajitas, all the things they needed to change about their layout and decoration and indeed it became evident, menu. After that the franchisee dumped more large sums into ripping up old texmex decor and replacing it with other texmex decor. They redesigned the place to make it look revised, superficially different. And they got rid of the delicious beans and replaced them with muck. They replaced most of the fajita sides with mean prefabricated portions. They replaced their in-house delicious corn chips with the same bagged ones you get in a grocery. And after their great reinvention everything that was unimportant, was samey. Much of what was bringing in customers was worse. After a while the proper beans came back. But it was sadly obvious that the menu changes made the food less desirable and poorer value.

And that is a classic example of “redesigns” today. Some branding or marketing idiot with “new” and “improved” on the brain, they come in and they stir the pot. We get redesigns that are only different, seldom better.

The new Apple laptops run a bit cooler. They are a bit faster, although that will never be apparent to almost every user. And they have longer battery life. They also have massive compatibility problems. Backward compatibility problems seem to be the new gold standard for Apple product “innovation.” And weirdly I have been here before. One argument against Macs in the 90’s was a lack of software support. Somewhere in the middle that was improved upon. But here we have come again full circle.

At least back then I could point out that Macs supported all the professional requirements of graphic designers and were at least the best choice for that. But PCs run Adobe Creative Suite and Opentype fonts are cross platform. So, increasingly I cannot figure out why anyone would buy a Mac when they can be annoyed by Windows, getting bigger drives and better CPUs and GPUs at a fraction of the price with better support and more compatibility; and in a proper computer case with a reasonable selection of I/O ports.

Is it something in the water that companies have been so intent this decade on undermining themselves?

We have failed to provide opportunities for women to have careers in and contribute as much as they could to Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. This is not just disenabling for women, but deprives our wider society of their valuable contributions in these critical fields.

A while back I encountered an instance in a book I was working on that replaced STEM with STEAM in discussing promoting opportunities for women. The ‘A’ was for Arts.

But we do not have a critical lack of participation in the arts by women. Women are not culturally excluded from and weeded out of the Arts to the grievous disadvantage of themselves and society. If anything women have historically been relegated to arts and crafts dismissively.

Certainly a lack of women’s participation in arts is not a serious limiting factor in our overall prosperity and ability to deal collectively with the challenges we face as a planet. But a lack of women in STEM subjects is.

Today I was listening to a good interview on BBC Inside Science with professor Linda Scott, author of The Double X Economy. I was surprised to hear her say that we only see a lack of women in STEM because of a narrow definition of Sciences in this context. Setting aside that this idea ignores Technology, Engineering and Maths, her argument was that it was wrong to just think of the Physical Sciences, and that lots of women dominate ‘other’ sciences.

Firstly I doubt that a majority of senior people in many science fields are women. That is the central problem we are generally discussing. But even were this women-in-different-sciences (and I regret that what she was referring to was mainly psychology) idea were true, the physical sciences are kind of the point in relation to Technology, Engineering and Maths. By her own argument women disappear out of a leaky pipe as they go along in these specific fields. And that is a terrible waste of human capital.

Just like throwing Arts in with STEM, throwing Social Sciences in with the Physical Sciences misses the point. Women have not been excluded from painting, performing arts, social work or careers as therapists. They have been, are being, weeded out of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Technology, Engineering and Maths. STEM subjects are survival critical and society cannot afford this squandering of opportunity and talent in these specific areas. It is important not to lose sight of that fact.

You would think that once we had found an optimal solution for a problem we would stick to it. But no. And this is why we almost inexplicably keep having ridiculous and or failed instances of things that could have been, were, fine in past years, decades or even centuries.

Take bridges. The Clifton Suspension Bridge opened in ‎1864. It is fine. But we do not collectively want predictably built durable bridges. We want “world class” unique architectural bridges that inspire fantasy rather than confidence. I mean we know how to build bridges properly. But properly goes out the window as soon as a committee of marketing professionals and tourism yobbos start meeting.

This is precisely why the Morandi Bridge in Genoa collapsed. It was designed as architectural eyecandy without nearly enough thought being put into its engineering design. In the end Morandi’s world-class architectural design was brought down by, … the resonant pounding of rain. If Isambard Kingdom Brunel had designed it a century and a half ago, it would still be in operation.

I was asked today why I have stopped playing World of Warships. The answer was that the developers release frequent broken content updates. Sometimes every other release suffers from crashing, freezing and terrible lag. Sometimes a few in a row work. Sometimes a few in a row don’t. And the thing is. If they just stopped at a version that was stable, the game would be fine. But they have this mindset that everything must be updated and upgraded with feature bloat and more and more content. And you cannot keep doing that and expect the product to work.

I have a new client. And because we are new to each other I decided to minimize complications by doing their work in the current version of Adobe Illustrator (Creative Cloud 2020). And what I discovered is that the current version is the buggiest in more than a decade. In particular the snap-to is at least as unreliable as the previous worst version which was Illustrator 7. There is no way to trust it and it will betray you. But more frustrating still, the application is very laggy. Like laggy as a poorly optimized online multiplayer game might be. But without the excuse. And this causes multitudes of problems.

I was doing work for a regular client today and I was using CC 2018. It has 99.9% of the features of 2020, but without the broken snap-to and the lag. So what were the TWO update cycles since then for anyway? Pointlessly making the product worse!

In every design process, there comes a time when you have solved the essential problems you began with and have a reasonably optimal solution. You may have to revisit that problem if the goalposts move on you. But otherwise, at some point, if you do not stop making changes you are inevitably moving away from the reasonably optimal solution. You are making the design worse. I have often been in that moment were the client direction on a job had turned that corner and the project was on its highway to hell.

And if I could make one plea, it would be that we lose the fascination with updates, upgrades and novelty in the design of things we expect to work.

It is a traditional, particularly eighteenth and nineteenth century idea, that evil comes from sin and therefore punishment of sin is a righteous remedy to evil. And what could be more evil than a fatal car accident?

Drink maybe? Temperance arose out of the idea that the plight of the poor in the first centuries of industrialization was a result of sin; the evils of drink in particular. It was clear that the noble factory owner, excellent church attendance, good manners, wealth and status, he could not be at fault. No, poverty destitution and ruin among the working class had to be a consequence of their sinful intoxication. Enforced temperance would eliminate the sin of drunkenness and the poor would be uplifted. So we got prohibition.

Maybe promiscuity? It has long been understood by misogynists that the suffering of women is in large part a natural consequence of their feminine weakness. Women must restrict themselves to modest obedient behaviour. If they don’t, they must end in ruin, and the virtuous will be sure to see to that. Punishing and shaming, women who do not comply has been a remedy to sin. And so we get all the institutions and petty violences that have been set against women.

And it is well known that, “speed kills.” We have been habituated to the idea that the key to road safety is always slowing everyone down. Therefore it is naturally assumed that what we really need to make roads safer is to punish “speeders.” The act of enforcing posted speed limits by punishing the sin of speeding will set us free.

But the condition of the poor wasn’t a consequence of drunkenness. Drunkenness was a symptom of their outrageous exploitation despair and destitution.

The ruin of “loose” women was never a result of their having gotten unlucky in the course of natural sexual behaviour. It was a result of rampant abuse by men, the absence of reproductive health services and relentless persecution by the righteous.

I have argued elsewhere about the unreality of “speeding” being a widespread serious threat to road safety. So here I just want to make this point. While no one is likely to object to measures to improve road safety, arbitrary speed enforcement isn’t one. It is treating the speed of traffic as Salvationists would treat drinking or sex; as sin. And treating speed as sin, we seek in our vengeful simple-minded way to remedy a largely fantastic ill by punishing sinners.

There are lots of things we could do to improve road safety. Doubling and redoubling transit infrastructure would be best. Redesigning every city to have the kind of pedestrian infrastructure you can see working so well in Utrecht, that would be awesome. But those real measures would require capital investment in infrastructure and take decades to accomplish.

We could even require motor vehicle operators to be universally properly trained and periodically recertified. But that would be expensive and I think deemed intrusive.

So, for now we pretend that giving out more tickets with more automation will suffice. We will arbitrarily punish the imagined sinner and I expect it will work about as well as indulgence in persecution always does.