barristan_selmy
No bio...
User ID: 2094
barristan_selmy
17d ago
I've started cooking up this idea in my head for a non-fiction book that deals with the growing generational divide in Canada, which is playing out largely the same way as it is in the US and other Western nations.
The idea is to delve into different dimensions of the divide with both lots of stats and lots of opinion, building up a cohesive framework for thinking about the issue that ultimately lends itself to political solutions. I have a stats and data visualization background and I think my book would be heavy on charts. I envision having case studies in each chapter of other countries that provide examples of either how bad the issue can get, or how to deal with the issue effectively.
I would appreciate any feedback, particularly if anyone has any suggestions for background reading, case studies, prior art, or helpful stats and research. Cheers!
Part 1 - Problems
Education and skills:
- Test scores are plummetting, we can no longer blame COVID
- I've heard enough war stories from high school teachers to know that kids are just not as capable or interested in learning anymore.
- Ask the teachers why not? Mostly, phone addiction, but also just generally lower standards of conduct and a lack of optimism for the future
- Outside of school, I have a strong hypothesis that kids these days are shittier drivers, can't mend a fence, can't do their taxes, etc. and would like to tell this story through stats
Housing:
- Enough has been said on this topic already in our national conversation that people are highly aware of the issues. Highlighting the generational aspects is still not done enough however.
- Home ownership has created two classes of people within our society
- Home owners are generally older and there are enough to form a voting cadre to dominate our political system. Falling fertility and lower rates of immigrant home ownership means it will stay this way for a long time (can run some numbers).
- This cadre has appropriated our government's fiscal policy to enrich themselves for a long time and every election is full of campaign promises to give more money to potential homebuyers, thus inflating their asset value while doing little to create more supply. At the same time, our central bank treats them as "too big to fail" now and this influences monetary policy. So non-homeowners are doubly screwed.
- Membership in the homeowning elite is highly correlated with your age group, so this is a huge generational divide.
- Hardly needs mentioning anymore that high levels of immigration contribute to the problem.
The economy (big section):
- Youth unemployment rates are high and currently skyrocketing
- Immigrants compete in particular with Gen Z/Millenials for unskilled/entry level jobs, while Boomers/Gen X are safe in their managerial roles
- Older folks own their businesses, have equity in their employers, or have pseudo equity through managerial oversight of P&L statements. They represent the capital side of the equation, while youth and immigrants represent the labour.
- The economy has grown while capital has kicked labour's ass for the last 40-50 years, leading to the unprecedented wealth of boomers.
- Low-skilled union jobs that young people used to get have been hollowed out by foreign industry through free trade policy.
- All future growth now seems to be predicated on AI. But AI represents the penultimate triumph of capital over labour. There is nothing coming to replace our current set of career paths that are gateways into the PMC.
- Robotics may represent the ultimate triumph of capital over labour and take away the remaining trades jobs.
- Kids can't all just be influencers that produce nothing, they will be turned into an underclass. We also tried paying people to do nothing during COVID and our version of UBI just ended up in declining well-being and mental health.
Pensions/entitlements:
- Pensions including Canada Pension Plan were set up on an idea of a good ratio of workers to retirees as well as economic growth above inflation.
- CPP for instance used to just invest in government bonds, that gave them enough yield. Now they're putting more on the line by diversifying into risky investments. This is predicating their success on a different kind of growth (capital markets), which may not pan out.
- Pensions are at risk of being underfunded and imploding one day. This is a total breach of the contract that says "We will take 5% of your paycheck and sock it away so you can collect a pension check in the future" and turns it into just a wealth transfer tax from workers to retirees.
- Old Age Security and other government entitlements are also unsustainable financially. Rich boomers inexplicably get a check every month just for being old; this has been part of the national conversation lately.
Healthcare:
- Healthcare systems require two things: funding & staffing.
- Funding is predicated on economic growth. Funding rates are subject to political whims by province, are not institutionalized by say tying to GDP growth or projected demand.
- Staffing is done by young, educated, motivated doctors, nurses, and admin/support staff. Doctors in particular need to sacrifice 20 years of their lives in education to delay the gratification of helping people & making good money. We are fast losing the types of kids who can or want to be doctors.
- Our ageing population is piling more burden onto the system each year.
- The result is the current predictable implosion of our healthcare system. There will be nothing left once younger folks are old enough to need lots of medical attention. There is already little left if you have a problem as a working-age individual, age is not (perhaps rightfully so, perhaps not) a factor in determining your place in line.
National debt:
- Governments are supposed to run deficits to invest in projects and programs with good enough ROI in the form of economic growth to pay for themselves through tax revenue.
- Our governments, particularly since 2015, have instead ran huge deficits just to spend it on social programs that have no hope of ROI while taking economic growth for granted. Many of these social programs benefit older folks disproportionately (I have a hunch it would come out clearly in the numbers. also see housing, pensions, medical). Long term infrastructure is often neglected.
- Wasting money in this form is ultimately just borrowing from the kids' futures so Grandpa & Grandma can build a nice patio.
The burden of military service:
- Militaries need lots of 17-30 year olds, increasingly so due to current geopolitics
- Immigration does little to help because most immigrants in our system are being brought here purely for their educational qualifications. We have opened up eligibility to PRs (green card holders), many are interested and are joining the Reserve Force, but the numbers are small potatoes.
- Most of our valuable Regular Force recruits come from rural heartlands in the Prairies, Ontario, Atlantic Canada, and Québec. These guys are a dying breed because of low fertility rates.
- It would be easy to project the numbers out and show that an unrealistically large percentage of Gen Z is going to have to serve.
- Meanwhile, Gen Z is the latest "least fit generation ever" and less patriotic and interested in serving than previous generations.
The environment and natural resources:
- I don't need to say much about climate change. It's an obvious point but worth mentioning that climate change is a problem caused by older folks that hits younger folks the hardest.
- I would like to go into specific, more tangible cases here and ones that are easier to think about solutions to. E.g. less opportunities and space for fishing, hunting, national parks, etc. for younger folks that older folks got to enjoy in their time. Our natural spaces, clean air, clean water, etc. are a legacy that needs to be preserved and handed down.
- Resource exploitation is how the older generations made this country one of the wealthiest on the planet, at one point. Now that the older generations are sitting on that wealth, we have decided we will no longer exploit our natural resources, taking this opportunity from our young people.
- A great case study that comes to mind is the 1992 cod moratorium. In the Atlantic, we once had a big cod fishery and nearly killed off the population through mismanagement, leading the government to ban this industry in 1992. This basically led to a lost generation where all the young people had to leave Atlantic Canada to find work and Atlantic Canada especially Newfoundland has never recovered.
Culture:
- Film, TV, and music are built around celebrities that are all getting old. There are fewer opportunities for young people than there were.
- I have a weak hypothesis that other forms of media (books, radio, etc.) are being gatekept by older folks as well. This is probably at least partially because young people consume them less.
- Young people instead create their culture inside social media, with memes, TikTok videos, etc. This is a shitty excuse for a culture industry and is having negative effects on our values.
Mental health & optimism for the future:
- Kids are reporting plummeting well-being and mental health, suicide rates, attempts, and self-harm rates are up.
- Lots has been said on this topic, especially with regards to social media
- Another (anecdotal) aspect is optimism for the future: why try, better yourself, put yourself out there, etc. if the future is so bleak? Maybe there is data to corroborate this way of viewing mental health
Politics:
- Younger people have become more radicalized in their views. See the extreme right, extreme left and their popularity on social media/YouTube.
- IMO more moderate views is what happens when people get together and have political discourse through more local means, e.g. town halls, party politics. You're more likely to make a compromise with a neighbour who you can't cast as a far away member of some outgroup.
- Younger people in general are less likely to vote, less likely to become involved in party politics, attend town halls, watch debates, etc. Old people dominate these discussions.
- Here in Canada we don't have the same level of gerontocracy as in the US, but in general politicians themselves skew older (data needed).
Part 2 - Solutions
The economy
- Exact proportional, credible tariffs. Make the rate commensurate somehow with the negative impact on employment for young/working class Canadians.
- Enact broader industrial policy to protect industries that are crucial for our national sovereignty. E.g. we should have our own parallel IT sector (including AI companies) to not be so dependent on the US. This will create a tonne of jobs for bright young people.
- Bring in foreign investment to build things/make things here. Do this by removing punitive taxes, reducing red tape, and in general creating a friendlier more stable climate for business.
- Bring back Canadian capital to be invested in our own economy. Boomer wealth has fled to other parts of the world with cheaper labour in search of returns. Bring it home through incentives, plus mandate that public pension funds need to invest more at home.
- Create an abundance of cheap energy, which is a crucial input to manufacturing, building, etc. Do this by resurrecting our once-exceptional nuclear industry.
Immigration policy
- Immigration can provide relief to certain demographic problems. But immigration is essentially outsourcing childhood to other countries. This itself is a source of intergenerational tension.
- Enact a reasonable immigration policy that brings people in with valuable skills and respects the capacity of our country's resources (housing, healthcare, etc.). Otherwise young people become victims.
- Kill the Temporary Foreign Worker program for low-skilled areas.
The environment and resources
- Balance environmental conservation with creating job opportunities for young people. Recognize that draconian policy on climate change is just an extremely costly form of virtue signalling without cooperation from the rest of the world (which increasingly, there isn't).
Housing
- Remove red tape, push back zoning restrictions (already part of the current conversation)
- Bring back wartime government home-building programs (being talked about, probably will be done).
- Tax land value only and not building value (i.e. Georgism). This will improve the economics for building more density.
- Build new cities away from NIMBYs. Draw people away from the big cities with special tax incentives, government employment, and highly accommodative policy towards potential private employers.
Education
- Expand the trades, entrepreneurship/project-based learning, and other paths rather than pushing everyone towards book learning and a university degree they won't use.
- Greater emphasis on life skills, fitness, civics, etc. (I got very little of this in my high school years)
- Mandate that a large majority of positions in Canadian universities go to Canadian kids. Foreign students should largely be limited to elite schools and programs, instead we have the opposite happening with degree mills.
Retirement
- If pensions are underfunded, decrease entitlements instead of taxing workers who may never get their turn to collect if the system falls apart.
- Seniors should be willing to take a lifestyle hit to take care of the young, if not, they're shitty elders.
- Less handouts (such as OAS) for old people who are already wealthy.
Healthcare
- Prioritize the young, prioritize preventative care (again, think ROI)
- Keep MAID/euthanasia, it's a good idea when it's not pushed on people
- Expand doctor training capacity. Create a corps of doctors that pays medical students a working wage while they are training, as an incentive and to open the opportunity up to more socioeconomic backgrounds.
Fiscal policy
- Stop deficit spending to fund social expenditures. Make it illegal, even.
- The government should step up in building infrastructure projects that are justified in terms of economic growth/ROI.
National service
- Bring in mandatory national service for young people. This could be in the military but also in other organizations. Force them out of their comfort zones and into new places and areas of their community. This is a nation-building exercise.
- Youth unemployment is high, think of it also as a jobs and skills program.
Social media & culture
- Ban social media under a certain age.
- Ban TikTok outright
Part 3 - Call to action (written towards Gen Z)
- Stop doomscrolling, touch grass. Think critically about media. Don't get all your info from foreign psy ops.
- Organize locally. Become involved in your community. Talk to and become friends with people you disagree with.
- Find a way to give back and render service. It could be helping your family, someone in your community, or even serving your country. It will change your perspective.
- Aspire to have kids. Aspire to create a child-friendly society. Aspire to raise the next generation well. It's the best thing you could ever do with your life.
- Basically, get fucking involved in politics. This is a pre-requisite to changing policy. If Gen Z and Millenials were to band together, we could have any kind of society we wanted for us an future generations. It starts with us, right now.
barristan_selmy
30d ago
Agreed, to me it doesn’t read like a real conversation at all. Lots of unnecessary elaboration when the principle in a chat like this should be to relay only minimal, relevant, actionable information for all concerned.
My favorite part is the sycophantic commenting on Europe by Hegseth. Vance: “Please talk more about how you hate Europe and bicycles.”
Makes me wonder if pissing off Europe was the whole point.
barristan_selmy
1mo ago
The people who feel the most insulted are also the ones who screwed up the country with their (and it has been exclusively their) idiotic economic policies
Simply wrong. Canadian nationalism has been the province of the right since being disowned by the woke left and their captain Trudeau for the last decade. I and many Canadians I know who are like me were sympathetic to the Trump administration and their goals before they took power and started showing their immense capacity for bullying and self-sabotage on the world stage. Ideological alignment is one thing, but question the sovereignty of my country and insult the flag that I served under and you’ve made yourself an enemy.
When I was an Ontarian I was a Doug Ford supporter and I think his comments represent this way of thinking best; there is no contradiction in this line of thinking and it has not even damaged him and his image as the strongest Canadian leader in the current trade war: https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.7449512
barristan_selmy
3mo ago
This is not being a shitty trading partner.
Tell that to the WTO. Yes, the US does it too to some extent.
Under international law, we don't have the right to prevent foreign ships from accessing the Northwest Passage.
According to Wikipedia, the status of the Northwest Passage is disputed (mostly by the US). Seems we could assert a lot more control over the Northwest Passage if we put the resources into it, I'm mourning that we don't do this.
We do have a government.
Yes but this is veering into semantics. With the legislative branch handcuffed and with a lame duck executive, no one is steering the ship at the federal level.
barristan_selmy
3mo ago
Sorry, I was using "NCD" as the common shorthand for /r/NonCredibleDefense (and the Motte created the link automatically for me). If it makes a difference, you will probably remain a better person if you never visit this particular subreddit anyhow.
barristan_selmy
3mo ago
Deliberately ruining our economy so we become desperate and capitulate willingly? Maybe. But my point is he doesn't need to, we're doing it ourselves and he just needs to wait a few years.
barristan_selmy
3mo ago
FTFY
barristan_selmy
3mo ago
I took it as a strawman because the term experts was doing a lot of heavy lifting. I think you may have better characterized the correct criticisms of the post.
I have no skin in the particular game of that top-level post and not much to contribute to the discussion, but I reserve my right to criticize. On the subject of effort posts, I hope you will instead visit my recent top level post in Transnational Thursday though!
Fun hypotheticals, complicated feelings, and harsh realities about a war with Canada, from a Canadian point of view
(for the purposes of this rant, "us/we" = Canadians and "you" = Americans)
I've seen lots of bluster and jingoism on our side of the border from politicians, the news media, and my former colleagues in the Canadian military about a hypothetical trade war/actual war with the US. Just because we're dealing with a bunch of nonsense from south of the border, doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about this rationally or delude ourselves about our actual position.
(1) Almost none of us should take the threats seriously. Bullying Canada (or Greenland, or Panama, or whatever but especially Canada) is just going to tank your own economy and food supply, as well as alienate the whole Western world and torpedo your whole project of world peace and economic dominance under a rules-based order. No one wins here except China and Russia. We Canadians should just chalk up all this talk to being just negotiation tactics.
(2) Okay that being said, second off, the Canadian military should and will actually take the threats seriously. An American invasion is just never, never going to happen... but if it does make no mistake, we will fight you, no matter how hopeless. For folks in the military, it's just the nature of the job. I myself would be among the first to rejoin so I can pick up a rifle and shoot back.
(3) We do not have much of a chance of "winning" a war with you, or even slowing you down all too much. The reason being, as every serving and former member of the CAF knows, we have neglected our military and our NATO commitments for decades. Folks will point to our history of making do with little at the outset of a war, and building ourselves up into a fearsome fighting force that punches above our weight. That's garbage talk. We'd be fighting you alone, with very little time to prepare, and inferior numbers and firepower in every way. The best we can do is be unruly subjects and resist an occupation after the fact.
(4) No one in the Canadian or American military wants this fight. Memes like this (currently top on r/NCD) pretty much sum it up. But an actual invasion would quickly harden our resolve against you, much like Ukraine, and I almost guarantee that the first 1,000 casualties will be American and happen in the days before you realize that yes, the Canadians are willing to shoot back at invaders.
(5) Although we will not join you willingly at the present moment (about 90% of Canadians do not want to join the US according to recent polls), Trump has touched on a nerve when he says the opposite. The fact is, after a decade of economic mismanagement, ruinous immigration policy, and rule by the current political/media class, we have very little left to be proud of as Canadians, and much to be envious of when we look at the how the US economy is doing. As such, the inconceivable has now become conceivable in that, if we were to continue down this path for another five or so years, I can see a future world where the majority of Canadians would rather become American than suffer their continued decline of quality-of-life.
(6) Trump is right to be upset. Those us who are able to put down ideology and jingoism and use our brains for a second are sympathetic. Canada has been a shitty ally and trading partner for decades now, and especially in the last decade.
(a) Despite being your largest trading partner, we subsidize our own industry to billions of dollars a year, then dump product on you and hope you will see it as benign enough to let the con go on for another year. At the same time, we are protective of our own shitty, low-productivity, low-growth industries and don't even let American companies enter key markets. Not that anyone wants to do business in Canada anymore anyways.
(b) Our security policy has been to "phone the US" if we ever get in trouble. We don't even have air defense assets. We have two entire working diesel submarines at any given time to patrol three oceans. As mentioned above, we have no effective military or deterrence capability.
(c) We let Chinese nationals who are easily compromised by the CCP infiltrate into high-ranking positions in our government, universities, and industry to spy on us and interfere with our policy. We let partially state-owned Chinese companies buy up our strategic resources. We let spies from the "near-Arctic" state cruise around the Northwest Passageway and scout out our (few) military installations.
(d) We let legitimate refugees and phony "asylum seekers" in by the millions, just so many of them can risk their lives trying to cross into the US the next month. For many Canadians, seeing the sheer numbers of people trying to cross into the US has been the wake-up call we needed.
(e) Our Five Eyes intelligence partners don't even tell us anything important because they don't trust us. Heck every couple of years, your intelligence agencies seem to uncover a plot against Americans being planned on our soil. And what do they do? They skip the official federal channels and just phone up the local police or RCMP, who can actually be trusted to do their jobs.
(7) We are entirely beholden to you for our economy and security. Despite a lot of talk generated the last time around that Trump was poking at us, we have done nothing to diversify the customer base of key exports such as crude. Although at the same time, you are fairly beholden to us for things such as electricity, potash, and uranium. So in a trade war, you lose some, but we lose everything.
(8) In the face of all this, our leadership at the highest level has responded by folding. But instead of just resigning and letting an immediate election happen, our PM has prorogued Parliament, nakedly to buy time for his party to regroup, meaning that we have no actual functioning government for the next two months and he stays in charge nominally, with no credibility to actually negotiate on our behalf. On the flip side, neither do you really... Trump and team are currently ruling by news conference and Twitter while your actual government sits by. I really hope Pierre Pollievre sees this as an opportunity to assemble his team and do the same.
(9) In light of all of the above, Trump's threat of annexing us by economic force deserves to be taken more seriously. What does that look like? I don't think Canadians will accept a hostile annexation into political union. It is more likely to be a "soft" annexation. I can easily see a world where you guys dictate a lot more of our economic policy, security policy, and foreign relations. Trump has already influenced our border and immigration policy in a big way.
(10) Now, for some speculation. What does Trump's team want from all this? Like good negotiators, I think they have been holding out on their true objective here. But once it's said out loud, it's going to look fairly obvious. Canada, Greenland, and Panama. What do all these places have in common? Control of key waterways for home security and projection of US Naval power. It's about the Northwest Passage, dummy! All you guys want is to run the Arctic, so you can keep the Chinese and the Russians out and profit from future Arctic trade routes. If this happens, the fact that we lost control and sovereignty over our portion of the Arctic will go down as a national embarrassment and historic tragedy, somewhere on par with our chronic inability to manage our oil wealth.
If I could sum up my rant, this whole affair is embarrassing as a Canadian. There really is a feeling that pervades every aspect of our lives right now that the chickens are coming home to roost after so many years of mismanagement and neglect by successive governments (especially, but not only by, the Liberals). Although the great majority are blinded by national pride and not willing to admit it, we've got a losing hand here and Trump & co have some legitimate grievances. So all in all, whether it's the Arctic or something else that you guys actually want, things are not boding well for us holding onto our current status in the world.
barristan_selmy
3mo ago
I’m pretty empathetic to the job the mods have to do and won’t defend user antifa, but I tend to agree strongly with what you have to say here. For a place that claims to optimize for “light, not heat”, things such feel like an echo chamber in here too often.
I also don’t think it’s a problem that can be solved by any level of moderation. For example, this post from last week’s Culture War thread felt like the kind of low-effort strawman I am used to seeing on Twitter, yet it received a lot of upvotes and was not criticized by other users.
I think we should do more to hold ourselves accountable to a higher standard of discussion, no matter what political slant is being invoked. Mods can only referee here, they can’t make the plays.
barristan_selmy
9mo ago
Lots of weird looks but it hasn't happened yet!
barristan_selmy
9mo ago
Maybe I'm going on a tangent to your interesting culture war anecdote, but since you touched on it, there is a problem that has been bugging me lately: is there any way we as a society can discourage our best and brightest from going into rent-seeking professions?
I used to be a quant trader. I left because I was bothered by the pervading sense that what we were doing created nothing of value for society or the world, and by the moral decay it seemed to create in the environments I was working in.
Almost by definition, quant trading will never generate any significant positive externalities for anyone, since most of what you are doing is seeking to exploit temporary inefficiencies. And it generates a significant negative externality by draining talent and capital that could otherwise be employed productively.
So why don't we ban quant/algorithmic trading? Or regulate and tax it heavily? This is what governments usually try to do when an industry is generating negative externalities.
I can make a few good arguments not to ban it outright:
- There are well-known benefits to having stable, liquid capital markets in terms of attracting investment to an economy.
- The markets for capital and labour should be efficient, as long as we ensure competition in the industry. Sooner or later, these salaries should come down to Earth and the talent will go someone it's needed more.
- All of the negative consequences of quant trading seem to be higher-order impacts. There's no immediate, visible negative consequences produced from this activity, like say, tailing ponds or child amputations.
- It's difficult to even define what it is exactly. When is it "quantitative" or "algorithmic" vs. "fundamental" or "gut-based" (and are the right-hand terms even more virtuous somehow?)? Maybe you just want to ban noise trading or scalping, but even those could be difficult to differentiate those from other activities such as market-making or longer-term investing.
A lot of the same considerations apply to other lucrative bullshit industries that are currently sucking up talent such as cryptocurrencies, internet advertising, social media, or video games. I think these are all terrible things and if it were between having them or not, the world would be better off without them, unquestionably. But I don't think it's a good idea to ban them, and politically, this is never going to happen.
Taxing these industries could be more practical. A well-considered tax could offset some of the negative externalities and shrink the number of seats available, forcing many would-be quant traders or social media engineers to venture out into the productive part of the economy instead. But there are still practical and political considerations that will prevent this from happening in our world.
So what else can be done? Since the government isn't going to do much to fix things, maybe the solution lies with individuals instead. As in, what would make me our best and brightest go against financial incentives and actively choose not to be quant traders?
To imagine what this solution might be, we can look at the petroleum industry. Years ago, many of our best and brightest engineers used to flock to oil & gas. Dating myself a bit, but when I went to school, chemical engineering was known to be a lucrative option. But then in the last decade or so, besides a correction to the price of oil, working in oil & gas became possibly literally the least cool thing you could do. The younger generations have experienced a major moral awakening, and decided that they wanted to be on the right side of history when it comes to the climate crisis.
Could finance have its moment like this as well? Certainly, back in 2010/2011 it looked possible with the Occupy movement. And of course, anti-capitalist sentiment amongst youth has been rising lately, especially ever since they got their hands on TikTok (what a strange coincidence). I would never rule out change due to negative backlash from an economically alienated, ill-informed mob.
But what I would really like to see is a positive change in the mindset of the elite itself. As someone who is arguably part of this elite, I would put forth the following ethical argument:
- The world has very pressing issues that we need social, cultural, political, and technological solutions for.
- These issues require members of the elite to devote themselves to solving them. Most non-members of the elite will not be able to do so, since they are just scraping out an economic existence as it is.
- Therefore, as the intellectual elite, we have a moral responsibility to solve these issues for the benefit of all (elite and non-elite).
To me, this is the core of a belief system, or possibly even a religion. Speaking as an atheist, I think maybe at least part of the reason that these industries exist in their current form and the world is so screwed up today in our post-modern areligious world is that we've lost a bit of the moral anchor that religion used to provide us. So maybe what it takes to save us is actually a new kind of religion.
barristan_selmy
9mo ago
I bought a 22 lb weighted vest/plate carrier. Really great for running and rucking, and most fun of all: it adds a layer of immersion to the mil-sim shooter I play on the Quest and turns my gaming sessions into nice workouts.
barristan_selmy
10mo ago
I think this situation can be more fairly characterized as a crisis for the current government and balance of power in Parliament than a full-blown constitutional crisis, unless we are speculating about the second- and third-order effects for trust in institutions, separatist sentiments, or populist sentiments on the left/right.
What should hopefully come to pass is that the facts will come out, names will be named, and it will become clear that the Liberals have their hands dirtiest all the way up to the level of the PMO (side remark: the PM himself may not be directly implicated, since if you have been listening to him lately, he doesn’t read his briefs or keep close tabs on anything his advisors are up to). Once that happens, we would hope for a criminal investigation and a swift vote of non-confidence, not necessarily in that order, leading to a change in the party in power.
The real confounder here is how much the Tories and especially the NDP have their hands dirty as well. If the other parties are as complicit as the Liberals, they might be able to keep the current balance of power in place for another year through collusion, at enormous cost to the relationship between the Canadian People and our most hallowed institution of “Good Government”. But that would only postpone the inevitable electoral judgement day.
A preview of the next 6-18 months.
barristan_selmy
1yr ago
These buy-side quant jobs are the best-paying jobs you can get as a pure shape-rotator who sucks at office politics
Bravo, you just perfectly described the theory of my early career and the careers of several other quants I know. Source: am a recovering quant.
barristan_selmy
1yr ago
Google recently agreed to pay the "link tax" and play ball, despite my initial hope that they would fight it more. So it's looks more likely now that they will continue to play ball. Kind of unfortunate in my view, since I think that an abrupt end to social media services operating in Canada would be an unintentional and extremely positive outcome from this whole thing.
barristan_selmy
1yr ago
In practice these bills have enabled far leftist authoritarianism and hate speech, by censoring valid opposition
Too much "bothsidesism" is not in itself an accurate assessment of reality
Thanks, I don't really disagree. But as explained in reply to another commenter, I think it's important to steelman the issue a bit and try to argue from a politically neutral perspective to explore how this issue can be argued effectively with progressives as well as conservatives. The reality as we know is that this bill has partisan objectives and I think everyone reading my post here is capable of filling in the blanks with their own experience of the actual political reality in 2024.
barristan_selmy
1yr ago
The Conservatives are leading the Liberals 42 - 24 in national polls
Pierre Pollievre's only objection so far seems to be that it creates too much "bureaucracy". I would guess that the average Tory voter is still easily swayed by moral panic "it's for the children's safety" type arguments. But this is already his solid base, and I think there's a failure of imagination going on in terms of what could be gained by taking a stand here.
So Canadian news media is in a spot where if they do their job they are likely to go bankrupt after the next election.
A cynical interpretation of course is that they are doing this for the same reason they are funding the CBC so well. Also a bit of cronyism perhaps given that our Deputy PM made her bones in the newsroom at the Globe and Mail.
barristan_selmy
1yr ago
This is progressive-speak for "misgendering", interpreted as such by every court and tribunal, and you know that
I don't know that. Can you please elaborate?
I have been deliberately avoiding discussing this bill from a strict culture war perspective and instead trying to steelman it a bit from a "is this good for democracy" perspective. Of course, every one of these provisions is open to being interpreted from a leftist political slant and yes, we all know that's exactly what this current government intends to do.
barristan_selmy
1yr ago
Bill C-63 (Online Harms Act)
For those who aren't following, Canada's Liberal government last month tabled a sweeping new bill targeted at regulating speech on social media. The bill lays out seven regulated categories of speech:
- Content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor
- Intimate content communicated without consent
- Content used to bully a child
- Inducing a child to harm themselves
- Hate speech
- Inciting violence
- Inciting violent extremism or terrorism
To enforce these restrictions, the bill establishes a set of new appointed government entities in order to enforce compliance with these rules by social media companies, with penalties running up to 6% of global revenue. In addition, it empowers Human Rights Tribunals to investigate complaints by individuals against other individuals and levee fines of up to $20,000.
Perhaps the most shocking thing about the public discourse around this bill has been... the lack of public discourse around this bill. What the hell has happened to us?
Maybe this is the inevitable end game of the gradually hollowing out of the Fifth Estate that has been happening all these years, including by the government itself who has been gradually buying themselves a loyal Ministry of Information through their steady funding increases to the CBC all these years. Maybe it's the disastrous result of a generation entering the body politic that has been steadily brainwashed by the ideologues running our school system, no longer able to form thoughts on their own or engage with the world for more than six seconds owing to a constant addiction to digital stimulation, building the world in their own small-minded safetyist self-image.
Or is it that despite what we promised ourselves never to do, we have finally let 9/11 age out of our collective memory? I for one remember a time not so long ago when the word "government" in Western countries conjured up associations with shady business interests, massive dragnet surveillance, imperialist wars for oil and geopolitical hegemony, extrajudicial black sites, and general suspicion and persecution of Muslims. It was the Big Bad Neocons who were trying to take over the world and police your thoughts. If our government at the time had tried to police online speech and set up a system of kangaroo courts in order to prevent "harms", our media would have been up in arms and many of us would have taken to the streets to protest. Yes, it was cool and righteous to be anti-government.
Now our government says only "extreme" online hate speech would be subject to the rules, and that despite the powers that the legislation grants in theory, they will behave with restraint. And are we really going to believe this, this time around? This is the same government and the same PM who labeled the entire trucker protest movement as Nazis, for the reason that someone used a swastika flag in order to call him a Nazi, and who subsequently imposed emergency powers to crush them.
And what about when the worm turns, and the next moral panic and/or government comes around? Will they persecute Trudeau in the courts for perpetuating hate through his use of blackface? From a cosmic justice perspective this is surely a satisfying outcome, but it's a lamentable world where our political process has degenerated into a saga of political gangsterism where the ingroup and outgroup each take turns exacting revenge on each other. This is definitely the direction we're headed in.
Of course, if you wanted the ridiculousness of the whole thing to be self-evident, you would be hard pressed to pick a better time to introduce the bill than right now. 25 years for "inciting genocide"? In a time when the word genocide is being thrown about wantonly by both Israel and Palestine supporters as the accusation du jour, no one knows exactly what inciting genocide means, except that you can get 25 years for doing it on social media when Albert Speer got only 20 years for his role in architecting a system of literal concentration camp slave labour.
I've got to hand it to the government though, because when you look at who will bear the burden of actually policing social media day-to-day, they have sidestepped the real responsibility. No, it's the social media companies themselves that will determine what does and doesn't constitute hate speech, inciting genocide, bullying a child, whatever. Failure to comply is not an option, because they can be fined up to 6% of their global revenue. Assuming they decide to continue operating in Canada, I have no doubt that given the choice between trying to toe the line and interpret the rules reasonably, and dialing up their content filters to 11, they will choose to play it safe and do the latter. As the late Charlie Munger advised us: never underestimate the power of incentives, which of course we will because we're a nation that seems to do so repeatedly and pathologically at every turn.
Now all that being said, I have avoided the seemingly mandatory disclosure by commenters on this particular issue that there are parts of this law that I'm in favour of (less anyone accuse me of being against protecting children from sexual victimization). I am generally in favour of criminalizing suicide encouragement towards a child, and revenge porn, as long as these trangressions are held to the same level of scrutiny as say, uttering death threats, and are tried to high standards in a criminal court. As I've explored a bit, hate speech, inciting violence, and inciting violent extremism or terrorism are all going to be far too open to interpretation and used to suppress political debate and dissent. As for "content used to bully a child", I don't even think I have to go into just how vague that is or how likely it is to lead to an overwhelming flood of investigations and complaints, and I don't believe that we even should reasonably attempt to protect other people's children from most forms of bullying. So there's the nuance of my position.
In the end, what we will end up with if this bill passes will be a bland, claustrophobic version of the internet where political discussion is restricted to the point that we can barely talk about the weather, and so we just spend all our time online shopping and looking at pictures of food. And for all our political apathy in this county, it might be exactly what we deserve.
barristan_selmy
2yr ago
Can TikTok do the same? Can it just turn down the dials on a soldier, make him less effective? I don't know.
According to a Canadian army officer I know, yes. He took a course during the post-Afghanistan years that was supposed to teach “strategic thinking”. One of their case studies was a problem that the US military faced: amid high unemployment in places like Karachi, Pakistani youths with nothing better to do were being recruited by the Taliban and crossing the mountainous border regions to kill American soldiers. How to solve this?
The obvious and favored course of action was to apply airpower and bomb the heck out of suspected tunnel areas and waypoints in the mountains with B52s. Cost: on the order of $100m - $1b. However, an alternative course of action that was considered took a PSYOPS angle: buy a few hundred generators and a few thousand Xboxes and set up free gaming centers around Karachi. The theory being, by distracting the youth with video games, they would be less likely to seek adventure and meaning by joining up with the Taliban. Cost: on the order of $1m - $10m.
The leadership at the time chose the former course of action. But several years later, the latter course of action is being studied by aspiring senior officers as a brilliant example of innovative and strategic thinking that could have saved a portion of the trouble of fighting a war.
barristan_selmy
2yr ago
Not over the course of the last year, but I went through a personal experience with abortion that has changed my feelings. I have always leaned heavily pro-choice since I see the value of human life as something that basically starts from zero and accumulates over time as we develop. Any other position is extreme, the only room for uncertainty is in drawing the line of when a life is valuable enough to protect against the potential harm of bringing a child into the world who is unwelcome, un-cared for, or has some condition that makes them unequipped to lead a good life. And as I see it, the potential for suffering is low for an embryo or an early fetus that has a brain significantly less developed than a newborn baby. So I would have said, go ahead, abort as many as you like! As long as it’s the first trimester. Plenty of valid reasons to abort well into the second trimester as well, but at that point I would not allow it just for poor planning or inconvenience. Lastly, it’s important that women have good access to abortion to prevent the societal harms of unwanted pregnancies.
Then, at the age of 24, my girlfriend and I got pregnant. We caught it a bit late at six weeks. It came as a real surprise because she was on the pill, it turned out later there was a recall on her medication. But we figured we weren’t ready, so the very next day after we found out we headed into the clinic.
At the clinic it turned out she was carrying twins. That made it a lot harder, for some reason, maybe because it felt special and unlikely to happen that way again if we decided to have kids later. But we still went through with it.
The reality of going through an abortion is it’s a highly unpleasant experience. No matter how much you attempt to detach from it, you will still find yourself emotionally attached to this thing that you created, as if it was another part of you. I felt, and still feel deeply ashamed about the whole thing. Not because of societal pressure or stigma or anything like that, but because fundamentally I killed my unborn children.
I am still pro-choice and my views around timing and access to abortion have not changed, but I now think it is not a decision to be taken lightly and there are valid reasons to be hesitant to have an abortion. I am far more sympathetic now to doctors who refuse to perform or condone abortions as well (it’s also explicitly forbidden under the Hippocratic Oath). And paradoxically, I have a lot less sympathy to those who attempt to interfere with couples seeking abortions and the doctors facilitating that process. It’s extremely difficult to make that decision and carry through with it, and any barrier to access could lead to an outcome they will regret for the rest of their lives.
If the US-China trade war continues and results in a severing of trade across the Pacific, it seems like China loses a major business case for peace. How much does this change the Chinese calculus for an invasion of Taiwan, and should we be worried?
Asking here because I have seen very little serious discussion of this aspect of the trade war from major outlets.
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