Category: Social Issues

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

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.

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.

Two fer the ONE

The problem with religious “belief” is twofold.

First, if you teach, usually young children, to BELIEVE one untrue nonsense, then you have equipped them to be credulous of anything.

Second, we are use to “religious” people living within the constraints of modern secular societies that were necessary to end centuries of religious violence. Intolerance is a feature of all mythological belief systems because, if you sincerely believe that there is “evil” and your doctrine stands against that evil, if you are certain that heresy is a threat, if you think that people who do not conform or agree or fall in line are the “other,” then essentially being at war with all those others is inevitable.

We should not be surprised, as we watch fundamentalist Christians in the US, having been given consent to throw off all external constraint, a la “Heart of Darkness,” have reproduced a hideously medieval atmosphere of religious persecution. That tendency to violence is a feature, not a bug. We just got used to several decades of most deeply beliefy religious folk being restrained by secularism.

The wind&solar dead parrot

It was sometime before 2010 that my dreams of windmills and solar panels were dashed. I saw a headline proclaiming something like “for the first time wind and solar have become cheaper than coal for generating electricity.” I was surprised, more than 15 years ago, by that awesome news, but I wanted to know more about this wonderful turn-around, so I started reading the article.

Turned out, the devil in the details was that the headline should have began, “With a 95% subsidy…” What the article with the misleading headline was in fact reporting was that, with a 95% subsidy, the remaining 5% of the cost of wind&solar was comparable to the cost of the same KWh of capacity for a coal-fired generating station.

Or, put another way, wind&solar capacity was, in fact, TWENTY times as costly as coal capacity. However, thinking about this today, I have realized that it is much worse than that. If you take capacity factor into account, you could increase that figure anything from 1–6 again. Although CF varies dramatically by location and by year.

And just yesterday, almost two decades later, I was hearing the same sorts of ludicrous claims, that melt under the slightest scrutiny. Including the one where wind&solar, which in fact contribute a trivial 6% of the world’s energy, are growing exponentially. You just cannot see the exponential growth. But if we just continue to not start building real sources of grid-scale low-carbon energy for another 30 years, then the ‘bird’ will “have nuzzled up to those bars, bent ’em apart with its beak, and VOOM! Feeweeweewee!” Fwee energy.

But the reality is, “Mate, this bird wouldn’t “voom” if you put four million volts through it!”

And I swear by the Great goddess Asherah I would love to be wrong. I would love for the mathematically challenged delusions of wind&solar advocates to be a path to a sustainable future. But it happens every bleedin time that when they make a glorious hopeful claim, it turns out that they nailed it to the perch.

You’ve met people, right?

My mum was a long-time Sunday school teacher. She was one of my Sunday school teachers. She taught stuff to vulnerable kids, as if that stuff was history, that had been proved to be fiction 80 years before she was even born.

But she told those lies just as she had been lied to about it in her turn. And she was never even slightly resentful, any time reality conflicted with that received myth, that she had been lied to. She never was angry with the lying liars.

Nope. Far from it. What she was angry about was if anyone told her she had been lied to. She’d get mad at the revelation that she had been taught… lies.

And in there we can find the reason the world has taken this insane turn to the Reich. People are not bothered much about the lies they have internalized, or the liars that lied to them. What makes them angry, what makes them violent and genocidal, is being told they were lied to.

And that is the human nature that we need better secular education to counter. Because once a person has grown to adulthood believing a load of nonsense, they are forever going to be painfully resistant to correcting their misconceptions.

$1 billion

I think the scale, it makes it hard for people to grasp $1 billion. For instance if anyone has that much wealth, in effect there ceases to be any way for anything, a n y t h i n g, reasonable to have an effective cost.

If you have $1 billion to “invest,” even if you made the worst possible use of that capital, if you put it into a 1% savings account, then your lowest possible annual return on investment, uncompounded, would be 1% of $1 billion, or $10,000,000… per year, in perpetuity.

Without ever touching the principal, your “income” would be multi-millions.

But that is not what happens. If you have that much capital, you invest it in a diverse portfolio to maximize return on investment. Such a portfolio might well be expected to return something like 10%. Which would be $100,000,000 to pish away, every year.

For such wealth, nothing that anyone could ever need or reasonably want has any cost. In a very real practical sense, for the extremely rich, everything, e v e r y t h i n g, is free.

And there is no “earning” in that scenario. Once you have that kind of capital, you never have to do a stitch of work to “earn” your hundred thousand tonnes of flesh. It is all… free.

Now consider that some people have schemed their way to fortunes of hundreds of billions of dollars. This is so wrong.

Automated traffic speed enforcement… is stupid.

Edited from an older thing from 2020…

Automated law enforcement is not purposeful. Our laws are intended to be tools to maintain peace order and good government. But rigorous arbitrary enforcement is used as a source of revenue, and as such is predation. Predation on the public by its own public services.

And generally speed enforcement is safety-theatre rather than a meaningful measure. Most roads have design limits very wide of the speed that traffic moves on them. And most cars are designed to be safely operated with margins wide of the posted limits.

It makes no sense to design a road wide and straight with perhaps several lanes, suited for speeds of 60–80 and then sign that dangerous, often stroad, 50 or 40 or 30. The road that was built is inherently dangerous, but instead of fixing it, a municipality opts to just blame and punish the people driving on it.

But giving out speeding tickets to people exceeding an arbitrarily low posted limit is cheap. And legislators can point at it and say, “Look! we did a safety thing.” And automating the ticketing makes speed enforcement cheaper still.

I am not sure whether to call this incompetence or corruption. And it really does not matter which it is.

PS
In France, when governments try this kind of thing on, local people show up and fill the equipment with cement.