EvilJoven posted:

Too bad most of the public is unaware of or ignoring the fact that private sector productivity is at an all time high and is almost completely detached from the well-being of the average citizen at this point.

EvilJoven posted:

Too bad most of the public is unaware of or ignoring the fact that private sector productivity is at an all time high and is almost completely detached from the well-being of the average citizen at this point.

Helsing posted:

Canada's private sector's rate of productivity growth is actually worse than it was a few decades ago

Helsing posted:

Canada's private sector's rate of productivity growth is actually worse than it was a few decades ago, and the gap in productivity between us and most of the rest of the OECD had grown rather than shrunk.

You can chalk it up to our branch plant economy, our dependence on resource extraction, corporate welfare or some nebulous Canadian culture of complacency, but our private sector is notoriously poor at innovation and productivity growth and the the problem has arguably gotten worse as a larger and larger part of our GDP goes toward either resource extraction or finance / insurance / real-estate.

jsoh posted:

organize a union

quote:

Good Monday morning to you.

It would have been unheard of a year ago to have a premier sitting at the table at a cabinet retreat, let alone one from another party. But yesterday Premier Rachel Notley was invited to the federal Liberal’s retreat in Kananaskis to make her case to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his ministers about the importance of pipelines to Alberta and the nation.

She figures her pitch was a limited hit. But although she didn’t come away with a clear commitment, that wasn’t necessarily her goal. She says it was an opportunity to make Alberta's case. “It’s not like I was accosted by a bunch of combative questions,” she said afterward. “They were lovely in there.” She also laid out her climate plan to ensure everyone had the right information and raised the issue of employment insurance changes that Edmonton was left out of. "That is what we came here to do and I feel like I got a good hearing and I am pleased at the opportunity.”

Back in Ottawa, it’s been a few days since Sen. Mike Duffy was acquitted, but talk about the whole kerfuffle isn’t going anywhere just yet. It’s also possible he could find himself back before the courts before long. This time, however, he’d be a plaintiff, not a defendant, seeking to recoup what he’s lost as a result of the charges and trial. That said, experts say his legal recourse against the Harper PMO is limited.

Out on the East coast, P.E.I. Senator Libbe Hubley says she was surprised by the Duffy decision and doesn’t think justice was served. As for Islanders, they’re disappointed. “They are angry, and I think they have a right to be.’’

Duffy’s lawyer Donald Bayne was on CTV yesterday and said it “strains credulity” to think former prime minister Stephen Harper was unaware his inner circle was working to cover up his client’s controversial $90,000 payment.

In keeping with that, Michael Harris says “if RCMP investigators and ministry of the attorney general’s lawyers had been doctors, they would have been facing a malpractice suit over Duffygate.” He’s wondering when someone is going to call for an investigation to flush out the truth of what went down.

Meanwhile in the Conservative Party, they’re not quite giving memberships away, but they are having a sale amid pressure from MPs who say higher fees could be a deterrent keeping people from joining the party.

Transport Minister Marc Garneau is in Lac Mégantic today to meet with residents at a town hall event where he’s going to outline the government’s plans to upgrade rail safety. The Globe and Mail has more.

The Liberals have announced a whole lot in the way of infrastructure investment — and paying for it may mean leasing or selling major public assets such as highways, rail lines and ports. They’re calling it “asset recycling.” CP’s Andy Blatchford has the details.

Over the weekend, Heritage Minister Melanie Joly announced that a full review of the government’s cultural policy is going to be launched, with the goal of adapting it to the digital age. As part of that there will be a series of public consultations that will examine the government’s role in supporting Canadian content creation.

So here’s one argument that’s kinda gone to pot: It turns out legalizing marijuana won’t necessarily curb organized crime. That’s the finding of an internal discussion paper. CP’s Jim Bronskill got his hands on it and rolls out the details. Still with pot, some cities are startled by a spike in the number of storefront dispensaries that have been popping up and are calling on the government to regulate an area not covered by current legislation.

The Canadian Press has also learned that the Liberals are facing calls to reopen a new peacekeeping training centre three years after the demise of Canada’s former school, the Pearson Centre.

In Nunavut, there could be change coming around businesses’ and households’ ability to own the land they sit on. The territory will hold a binding plebiscite on whether municipalities should be able to release land for fee-simple ownership of the kind almost all Canadians in non-aboriginal communities take for granted. CP’s Bob Weber has more.

In Saskatchewan, the defeated New Democrats have named an interim leader after former Premier Greg Selinger stepped down in the wake of last week’s election loss. Trent Wotherspoon was given the title during a meeting of the NDP’s provincial council in Saskatoon on Saturday, but says he has no desire to hold the position permanently.

So Jason McNamee isn’t the most patient fish. Although the federal government is still investigating a four-year-old experiment off the West Coast aimed at boosting salmon stocks and sparking an international outcry, the former director and operations officer of Haida Salmon Restoration Corp. says he wants to carry out another ocean-fertilizing exercise, this time off South America. Geordon Ormand dives in.

Safe to say Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi will be cabbing it for some time yet. But he is sorry for calling Uber’s CEO a dick.

Here and there:

• Federal Liberal Party cabinet retreat continues in Kananaskis.
  
• Her Excellency Sharon Johnston meets with high school students in Kemptville to see how the school is working to increase awareness of mental health and depression.
  
• Statistics Canada releases a study on educational and labour market outcomes of childhood immigrants by admission class, 1980 to 2000.
  
• The CRTC holds a second round of public hearing on basic telecommunication services and broadband Internet services. Through April 28.

Apparently willing to pull out all the stops to keep Donald Trump from snagging the Republican nomination, the campaigns of Ted Cruz and John Kasich say they've ceded upcoming states to each other to try to block the billionaire from gaining all 1,237 delegates needed to claim it.

We’re not sure exactly what point Ted Cruz was trying to make, but it’s clear the battle to the bottom is in full swing…and has now moved to the bathroom. "If Donald Trump dresses up as Hillary Clinton, he still can't go to the girl's bathroom,” Cruz said. Huh?

Likely unimpressed by the seemingly endless shenanigans, billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, a key source of financing for conservative Republican causes, appears to be ready to switch teams. He says Democrat Hillary Clinton might make a better president than the candidates in the Republican field.

Echoing the message Barack Obama had taken across the pond, Clinton’s camp said Saturday that she also wants Britain to stay in the European Union.

They’ve lived in a secure room in the basement of the Capitol Building for years. Now the Obama administration may release at least part of a 28-page secret chapter from a congressional inquiry into 9-11 that may shed light on possible Saudi connections to the attackers. They contain "specific sources of foreign support for some of the Sept. 11 hijackers while they were in the United States.”

Turning to Syria, the U.S. is expected to announce plans to send additional special operation forces into the country.

In Austria, the country’s far-right Freedom Party candidate has come out on top in the first round of presidential elections, preliminary results show. The BBC has more.

We end this morning in Australia, where New South Wales Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham wanted to make a point about the hazards of fracking. When water bursts into flames due to the methane gas bubbling in it, it’s fair to say he’s probably succeeded.

With that, here’s hoping your day’s a blast.
____________________

International

Obama plans 250 more U.S. troops for Syria, boosting force to 300 (Reuters)
Republicans Cruz, Kasich reach 'stop-Trump' deal (Reuters)

National

Joly launching public consultations, full review of Canada’s cultural policy (Canadian Press)
Liberals consider non-government investors to help pay for infrastructure (Toronto Star)

Atlantic

Sidney MacEwen, P.E.I. MLA, wants voting age dropped (CBC News)
P.E.I. premier offers hope to gay community (CBC News)

Alberta

Calgary Mayor Nenshi blasts Uber’s CEO in video while riding in rival service (Toronto Star)

quote:

John Robson: The welfare state is bust — and so are Americans

How can Americans, living in one of the richest societies in human history, appear to have no money?

I’m not referring to the persistence of poverty. I’m talking about a Federal Reserve Board survey finding that 47 per cent of Americans couldn’t meet an unexpected $400 expense without borrowing or selling something. In a moving, and alarming, essay in The Atlantic, Neal Gabler asks “Who knew?” and responds with courageous frankness, “I knew because I am in that 47 per cent.”

He’s not some kid just starting out. He’s an established writer with a middle-class income and, in some respects, lifestyle, including sending one daughter to Stanford, then Harvard Medical School, and another to Emory, then University of Texas Austin for an MA in social work. Yet he and his wife later had to borrow from the kids to buy heating oil.

What is going on?

Gabler brings up two very relevant points. First, Americans seem clueless about personal finances, including the perils of increasingly easy credit; he dubs himself, “a financial illiterate, or worse — an ignoramus.” Second, real hourly wages have been stagnant since Richard Nixon’s first term and median net worth has been falling for a generation, and sharply since 2008.

Declining real wages for less skilled work is in significant measure the result of the same technical progress that has lowered the price of many goods
Not, of course, for those in government. Their salaries and benefits continue to gallop ahead, as in Canada where, for instance, nearly 80 per cent of Toronto cops now make more than $100,000 a year unlike nearly 90 per cent of everyone else. And Gabler rightly notes that things like TVs and computers and even clothing have been getting cheaper so “stagnant” real wages are not quite as bad as they seem.

Declining real wages for less skilled work is in significant measure the result of the same technical progress that has lowered the price of many goods. And technical progress cannot be stopped. But the clever people in the top quintile could be a bit less smug about driverless cars and smart appliances, and a little more sympathetic to those being squeezed out of decent, dignified manual labour as it continues.

Gabler also blames “that great, glowing, irresistible American promise that has been drummed into our heads since birth: just work hard and you can have it all.” Declining faith in the American Dream, he says, is souring the national mood. And I think the resulting anger is fuelling the insurgent campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. But there’s an elephant in the room Gabler does not deal with.

It’s government.

Not just the expense, as people in the public sector keep cutting themselves a bigger slice of the pie while everyone else tightens their belts. It’s what government spends, and how.

Why are Americans squandering incomes their grandparents could not have imagined, and experiencing financial crisis surrounded by cars and clothes and devices that transport and warm them and deliver all the high-fidelity music in the world at astoundingly low prices by historical standards? What is making them so careless of the future financially? Why have so many dropped out of the School of Hard Knocks that once reliably taught frugality even to people to whom the formal math of compound interest was as impenetrable as quantum theory?

From social security and college loans to food stamps, Americans are not provident because they don’t have to be
It’s the welfare state. Not just for the poor. For everyone. From social security and college loans to food stamps, Americans are not provident because they don’t have to be. If you mess up, the state is there for you. Thanks to the 1930s New Deal and especially Lyndon Johnson’s mid-1960s “Great Society,” there are programs for everybody who failed to cope, paid for by those who coped.

As Gabler notes, without drawing this connection, “The personal savings rate peaked at 13.3 per cent in 1971 before falling to 2.6 per cent in 2005. As of last year, the figure stood at 5.1 per cent.” It is not coincidence that savings rates peaked once people noticed savers were chumps.

Americans’ tendency to vote themselves the contents of the public treasury is partly a symptom of fecklessness. But over time it increasingly becomes the cause.

All is not lost. And it better not be, because some day the music will stop and there will be far too few chairs. When Mitt Romney was outed saying 47 per cent of Americans would never vote for him because they were dependent on the state, he should have seized the opportunity to start a real national conversation. Chickening out instead did him no political good. And sooner or later Americans will have to have that conversation, possibly while looking into a cracked mirror.

Government is sucking the life out of the economy with excessive taxes to fuel spending that sucks the life out of society. It runs trillion-dollar deficits to fund trillion-dollar social programs. And with all this free money flying around, nobody has any.

The welfare state model is busted. And so are Americans.

eNeMeE posted:

Two very different things.

Femtosecond posted:

Yes everything I've read over the last few years has stated that Canadian productivity is abysmal. Basically nothing that various Canadian governments have done to try to move the needle and improve productivity has worked at all.

StatsCan posted:

Regional perspective on innovation in Canada

At the national level, during the 2010 to 2012 period, enterprises in professional, scientific and technical services (77.1%), manufacturing (74.8%) and finance and insurance (73.6%) had the highest rates of innovation. Transportation and warehousing (55.9%), mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction (56.3%) and wholesale trade (56.7%) saw the lowest rates.

Ontario had the highest proportion of innovative enterprises during the 2010 to 2012 period at 71.2%, followed by Alberta (62.1%), Quebec (60.9%), the rest of Canada (58.7%) and the Atlantic provinces (45.8%).

The Conference Board of Canada posted:

Key Messages

-Canada gets a “D” and ranks 15th out of 16 peer countries.

-Relative to their international peers, Canadian companies are poor R&D spenders—regardless of the business they’re in.

-To improve, Canadian business leaders must recognize that the risks of not spending on research and innovation are beginning to outweigh the risks of spending and innovating.

Why is business spending on R&D important to innovation?

Business enterprise R&D spending (sometimes referred to as BERD) is an important indicator of business commitment to innovation. Although such spending is not a direct measure of innovation performance—because such investments can be poorly selected and valuable results are not guaranteed—the development of new or improved products, processes, and services frequently requires R&D efforts. R&D spending “signals a firm’s commitment to the systematic generation and commercial application of new ideas,” according to the Council of Canadian Academies’ Expert Panel on Business Innovation.1 Indeed, R&D spending indicates that a firm is serious about exploring or generating new ideas with a view to developing those ideas into new or improved products, services, or processes.

Moreover, research shows that R&D spending is associated with productivity and GDP growth. A multi-country study by the OECD found that a “sustained increase of 0.1 percentage point in a nation’s BERD to GDP ratio would eventually translate to a 1.2 per cent higher GDP per capita, other things being equal.”2 Thus, BERD provides a useful, albeit imperfect, proxy for business innovation performance.

How does Canada’s performance on business R&D spending compare to its peers?

Canada is a weak performer on BERD. It gets a “D” grade and ranks 15th out of 16 peer nations. Moreover, Canada has been a “D” performer since the 1980s. Although Canadian businesses projected R&D spending of $15.6 billion in 2011, as a group they spend much less than international peers (when BERD is measured as a percentage of GDP).3 BERD spending in the U.S., for example, is twice as high as in Canada. And Canadian businesses spend only a third (as a percentage of GDP) of what businesses in Finland spend on R&D. In fact, not only does Canada lag its competitors on BERD, it also falls below the OECD average.4

Is Canada’s weak performance on BERD simply a function of the industrial composition of the Canadian economy? Canada’s economy is weighted more toward resource-related companies than the economies of many peers, and the resource sector tends to spend less on R&D than other sectors. However, analysis conducted by the Expert Panel on Business Innovation found that “generally lower Canadian R&D spending within the same sectors in both the United States and Canada accounts for a greater portion of the gap [in BERD between the two countries]…than does Canada’s adverse sector mix—i.e., the greater weight in Canada’s economy of resource-related and other activities that have inherently low R&D spending.”5 In short, with few exceptions, Canadian businesses across all sectors have lower BERD intensity than their American competitors.
Who are the leaders on the BERD report card?

Japan and Sweden are high performers on BERD and have been for decades. But the top spot is claimed by Finland—a remarkable achievement that was not foreseen two decades ago. In the 1980s, Finland was ranking between only 9th and 11th out of the 16 ranked countries. As recently as the 1990s, Finland was a middling performer on BERD, ranking 8th at the beginning of the decade and edging up to 5th or 6th by the mid-1990s. By the 2000s, however, Finland was quickly becoming a world-leader in BERD performance. With BERD intensity of 2.37 per cent as a percentage of GDP, Finland ranked second—behind only Sweden—in 2000 and climbed into first place by 2008 with BERD intensity of 2.75 per cent.

How did a poorly ranked, “C”-grade performer become the top-ranked, “A” performer among its international peers? The story appears to be a case of intense, coordinated action in the face of a crisis. In 1991, the Finnish economy faced a severe economic crisis owing to “a near collapse of the domestic banking system and a massive export market disruption due to the disintegration of the USSR.”6 In response, Finnish government and business leaders—led primarily by the information and communications technology (ICT) sector—“committed to transform its economy into one of the most technologically advanced in the world” by increasing and focusing spending and activity to “nurture globally oriented national companies and sectors.”7 The increase in BERD intensity is an indicator of just how serious and successful the Finns have been in this endeavour.

Has Canada’s performance on this report card improved over time?

Unfortunately, Canada has not experienced anything like Finland’s impressive improvement in the BERD report card over time. Canada has been a consistent “D” performer on BERD intensity, ranking no better than 11th out of 16 countries over the past three decades.

To be sure, Canada’s BERD intensity improved from the 1980s to the early 2000s, moving from a low of 0.59 per cent in 1981 to a high of 1.29 per cent in 2001. But the dot-com bust in the early 2000s initiated a steady decline in R&D spending by Canadian ICT firms and a levelling off of spending in sectors, such as pharmaceuticals, that had been posting phenomenal increases in previous years. Overall, between 2001 and 2011, BERD intensity in Canada fell from 1.29 per cent to only 0.89 per cent.

El Scotch posted:

Unrelated

El Scotch posted:

Unrelated

quote:

decent, dignified manual labour

El Scotch posted:

El Scotch posted:

Unrelated

El Scotch posted:

Unrelated

quote:

He’s an established writer with a middle-class income and, in some respects, lifestyle, including sending one daughter to Stanford, then Harvard Medical School, and another to Emory, then University of Texas Austin for an MA in social work.

eXXon posted:

Asset recycling? gently caress off with that garbage euphemism. How long until Wynne starts using it, or did that already happen?

Here, enjoy the Tyee's take on Justin Trudeau, quantum politician.

Dreylad posted:

In Saskatchewan, the defeated New Democrats have named an interim leader after former Premier Greg Selinger stepped down in the wake of last week’s election loss. Trent Wotherspoon was given the title during a meeting of the NDP’s provincial council in Saskatoon on Saturday, but says he has no desire to hold the position permanently.

Pinterest Mom posted:

vyelkin posted:

Wynne used it first.

Brannock posted:

Few people who have ever actually worked manual labor would call it decent or dignified. Human history and technology is the story of how we figured out better and better ways of making it so that we had to do less manual labor.

I like that he harps on the 47% thing, and even has a vague awareness that there's something seriously wrong with where all the money is going in our society ... then just blithely strolls on past it and never thinks about that 90% of the wealth are concentrated in the hands of a tiny slice of the population. Maybe the government, that's why no one has money!

And then, even that aside, him suggesting that we dismantle the welfare state so that people will save money ..... that they'll have to spend when they get into trouble. So basically the same as we have right now (the government is doing the saving), which has a much lower failure rate than if individuals were saving it for themselves. So, okay, dismantle the welfare state, get people to save for themselves. Oops, we just enormously multiplied the number of people who fall through the cracks.

But it's okay! People are saving money now! Oops, all the people saving money instead of spending it has caused a massive economic contraction.

What a terrible article with terrible, poorly thought out opinions. (Unless, of course, and this is more likely, he's shilling for the rich because shutting down welfare means lower taxes means more money for the rich.)

quote:

Declining real wages for less skilled work is in significant measure the result of the same technical progress that has lowered the price of many goods. And technical progress cannot be stopped. But the clever people in the top quintile could be a bit less smug about driverless cars and smart appliances, and a little more sympathetic to those being squeezed out of decent, dignified manual labour as it continues.

National Post posted:

Second, real hourly wages have been stagnant since Richard Nixon’s first term and median net worth has been falling for a generation, and sharply since 2008...

Why are Americans squandering incomes their grandparents could not have imagined...

TheKingofSprings posted:

So with more and more jobs being rendered redundant because of automatization, what happens to those people who now can't get jobs because there just aren't enough open?

Does there just become a class of "expendable" people? When we hit the point where machines are doing most of our non-thinking work for us, will the expectation be that people have to work and can't, or will it be they don't have to work, and why?

Helsing posted:

My favourite part of the article is how early on he fully ackowledges that wages have declined an all but agrees that the American dream is dead:


We should take away subsidies for education, social security, healthcare, etc. , but we should be sure that we're very sympathetic as we do it.

TheKingofSprings posted:

So with more and more jobs being rendered redundant because of automatization, what happens to those people who now can't get jobs because there just aren't enough open?

Does there just become a class of "expendable" people? When we hit the point where machines are doing most of our non-thinking work for us, will the expectation be that people have to work and can't, or will it be they don't have to work, and why?

quote:

We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

TheKingofSprings posted:

So with more and more jobs being rendered redundant because of automatization, what happens to those people who now can't get jobs because there just aren't enough open?

Does there just become a class of "expendable" people? When we hit the point where machines are doing most of our non-thinking work for us, will the expectation be that people have to work and can't, or will it be they don't have to work, and why?

cowofwar posted:

Watch the movie, "Elysium".

EvilJoven posted:

Look at every society in the history of forever for what happens when the majority are starving while a minority are living a life of luxury.

History has shown that every time it gets like this the ruling class thinks that this time the walls are high enough.

And every time they're wrong.

The thing is, we aren't starving, yet.

EvilJoven posted:

Don't worry guys all of lifes problems are easily solved by getting a degree in STEM!

EvilJoven posted:

Don't worry guys all of lifes problems are easily solved by getting a degree in STEM!

EvilJoven posted:

Don't worry guys all of lifes problems are easily solved by getting a degree in STEM!

EvilJoven posted:

Look at every society in the history of forever for what happens when the majority are starving while a minority are living a life of luxury.

History has shown that every time it gets like this the ruling class thinks that this time the walls are high enough.

And every time they're wrong.

The thing is, we aren't starving, yet.

Helsing posted:

If anything, it is the relatively proserpous societies that experience revolutions. Typically it's when gradually rising living standards are suddenly disrupted by a crisis. I would say rapid changes in living standards (either up or down) are more likely to produce a revolutionary situation than static living standards (whether those standards are consistently high or consistently low).

Brannock posted:

Hmm, if I were part of the ruling class, I would definitely find it favorable to push for weapon controls and disarmament among the peasants. Maybe I could even frame it as a good idea and beneficial for the peasants.


The French Revolution was itself triggered by a serious food crisis, even if general population had been becoming more and more aware of the injustices

quote:

I don't think anyone should be cheering for a revolution, though. Even aside from the immediate bloodshed and chaos, taking a look at the past couple decades, revolutions typically haven't turned out well and usually just enable theocracies or kleptocracies. While I'm glad that the Catholics under Francis are paying more and more attention to wealth inequality I'm wary of a situation where they''ll be able to rally up a populist wave and gain power off it. And, no, that the West is highly secular right now doesn't reassure me -- Iran was highly secular before '79.

Unfortunately I don't see a way to slowly re-seize power and wealth from the corporations and the ruling classes. On paper it's possible over a couple decades along with widespread knowledge and engagement (via Internet) , in practice they'll just make gains as fast (if not faster) as we do. By the time we get the millennials enough experience and contacts to make it into serious power and policy positions, their counterparts will be working just as hard coming up with new methods for keeping things favorable for the wealthy.

And of course as Rathika has shown us, the allure of power has a habit of overshadowing other principles.

Helsing posted:

Poor harvests contributed to the timing and course of the French revolution but the French peasantry was pretty well off compared to the rest of Europe. In England much of the peasantry had already been driven into the cities by the enclosure movement and in large parts of the east serfdom would continue for close to another century.

Typically a revolution will start as a rebellion. There will be some kind of local revolt or cause behind a revolutionary upheaval, such as grain shortages and price increases in France due to poor harvests (and market liberalization). However a revolution that actually threatens the power structure has deeper causes than just a shortage. In the French case the background of the Enlightenment and other changes inside French society (as well as the foreign policies of the French Crown) during the 18th century meant that the bad harvests of 1788-89 triggered a revolutionary upheaval with world-historical significance rather than being one more in a long line of mostly inconsequential peasant revolts throughout European history.

This is all a slightly convoluted way of saying that what we can probably look forward to isn't a revolution. It's probably just some local rebellions that invite harsher state repression in response, possibly followed by a genuine collapse at some point in the future.

Besides which, part of a crackdown might possibly involve throwing more breadcrumbs at the populace as well, so hope springs eternal I suppose.


We should try to take a small measure of comfort in the unpredictability of the future. No matter how deterministic our present moment looks, we know that past generations with equally strong convictions about the direction of history were totally unable to foresee the future. If the utopias imagined in the mid 20th century never occurred then perhaps, at least, the very worst nightmares of the early 21st century will also turn out to be misguided. That having been said, I admit the future potentially looks very grim.

The most we can do is focus on the present and try to at least develop some kind of political coping strategies for whatever kind of world we do end up living in.

cowofwar posted:

Similar to how the civil war in Syria required a number of factors not limited to drought/poverty/famine.

Helsing posted:

We should try to take a small measure of comfort in the unpredictability of the future. No matter how deterministic our present moment looks, we know that past generations with equally strong convictions about the direction of history were totally unable to foresee the future. If the utopias imagined in the mid 20th century never occurred then perhaps, at least, the very worst nightmares of the early 21st century will also turn out to be misguided. That having been said, I admit the future potentially looks very grim.

The most we can do is focus on the present and try to at least develop some kind of political coping strategies for whatever kind of world we do end up living in.

HappyHippo posted:

Can the Globe just loving fire Margaret Wente already? http://www.theglobeandmail.com/community/inside-the-globe/public-editor-prose-must-be-attributed/article29749706/
(don't worry it's not a link to her column so you can click on it)