@ghostofColGlover @ThomasWic @Debradelai I was thinking aspirational like "Hey, look at this great idea the Germans had! Maybe one day we could try!"
Not all aspirations are good.
Not all aspirations are good.
@ghostofColGlover @Debradelai @ThomasWic Feels like a holocaust museum in the middle east is aspirational.
[RT @MaximeBernier]
In a world where governments and big tech companies censor speech
where the woke far left constantly twists our history and the meaning of words
where questioning the new orthodoxies is dangerous and telling the truth is subversive
WORDS ARE OUR ONLY WEAPONS.
@sursdai @RoseThistle
In snapped me out of a lot of bubbles. When you're looking at the unabashed bad guys and they're acting like they're the good guys you can't help but change your mind.
In snapped me out of a lot of bubbles. When you're looking at the unabashed bad guys and they're acting like they're the good guys you can't help but change your mind.
This is a message for the upcoming generation.
It is really easy to make excuses for your life.
An entire cottage industry of people whose sole job is to come up with the next excuse as to why you haven't achieved your dreams has popped up, people who will make millions never working an honest day in their lives explaining to others why all their problems belong to somebody else.
Alongside those people are a completely different batch, who are trying to tell you why you can never possibly achieve your dreams unless you just tear down all of society and give them all the power. It really doesn't matter which team they claim to play for, they are selling a learned helplessness to you and the wages are your life and your freedom.
It's a really simple thing to do, these people claim that all you have to do is hand over your lives to them and to magically all your dreams will come true. The thing is, time and time again it's proven to be a lie. Hundreds of millions of dead people under communism are proof of that. The unthinkable suffering of the dictatorships throughout the African continent are proof in another light. Ultimately, the only person who can really be responsible for your success is you.
Instead of wallowing all the reasons that you can't succeed, you really need to start thinking about the ways that you can. I'm not talking about some imaginary fancy -- I've seen way too many people get caught up in some absolutely ridiculous fantasy. People who watch too many television shows get this idea in their head that all they need to do is hatch this dramatic plan and they can change the world in one night, and the more dramatic the plan the less work they have to put into it. I've also seen people counting on events that are entirely outside of their control and usually extremely unlikely to happen. One of the best examples was when I was teaching guys to meet women. It was almost like clockwork, every one of them had this girl who they thought they just needed to figure out the magic spell to seduce them and then their girl problems were going to be over. In reality, not one of those girls was interested in one of those guys, because it was a fantasy. There's nothing wrong with having fantasies now and again, but don't mistake them for a plan to live your life. If a girl likes you, you're probably going to know and you're probably not going to have to come up with some fanciful plan to seduce her. Chase an imaginary fantasy too long and you'll find you've spent your best years dreaming instead of making your life happen.
Outside the realm of romance, I've seen people do it in terms of their profession. The fact of the matter is, building your profession takes time and patience and dedication and hard work. It takes 20 years to build a 20 year career. You need to show up every day and give it your best and make people trust you. The more people trust you and trust that you're going to get the job done, the more people are going to want to give you the chance to prove that you can get the job done. You're not going to get some dream job out of nowhere putting absolutely no work in on your own, because dream jobs are highly sought after.
The way to actually achieve your dreams is definitely to start with a plan, but that plan has to be malleable. Start off with a series of events that are SMART -- specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. It's okay to dream big, but you don't dream big by starting big. You start small, and bite off achievable chunks of your goal little by little. You can achieve unreasonable results through reasonable methods by just keeping your eye on the roadmap that you set for yourself. It takes a focus on short term tactics and long term strategy combined to get to where you need to be.
It's a famous saying that necessity is the mother of invention. If that's true, opportunity is the father. Anything that we can accomplish really starts with opportunity. Everybody knows that different people came up with different personal computers in the late seventies, but the reason that personal computers became possible at that point was the opportunity provided by large scale semiconductors. A lot of people hear about the hard work in inventing the car, but few people reflect on the fact that the only reason you could invent a car at that point was because the internal combustion engine and various industrial processes that are already being defined. It was the confluence of necessity and opportunity that made these things possible.
This fact cuts both ways. It means that in your life you're likely to get opportunities that other people won't get, but it also means that you are certain to not get opportunities that others did get. A lot of people talk about Bill Gates hanging out in his basement working on computers, not so many people talk about his rich parents getting him into private schools to work on computers, or the fact that his big break happened to be because his mom knew the vice president at IBM who was developing the personal computer. Everybody talks about Jeff Bezos, but not a lot of people talk about the fact that he was already a high-powered business executive working for an investment firm when he started amazon. That isn't to say that you shouldn't work hard to achieve great things, it is to say don't try to measure yourself against someone else, because you don't know what type of opportunities they've had.
I talked a lot about an opportunities as if they are monolithic, but opportunities usually need to be unlocked by reaching a number of conditions. You can live in a land of opportunities and be totally locked out if you take actions that block you off from those opportunities. When I graduated from college, I heard "Oh, the baby boomers are retiring soon, there's going to be so many jobs!" and some years later that's true. However; even though there are lots of potential opportunities, there's lots of people my age who spent those years not doing anything in particular who never got the education, never got the shitty initial jobs, never put that work in, and even though there's great jobs there's nobody to fill them.
The world right now makes you believe you need to ask permission to do anything. You don't need to ask permission for a lot. When I was younger, I had a bad relationship with a woman who was controlling because she was afraid of losing me. Part of healing from that relationship was taking my power back, and one of the forms that took was messing with my vehicle. I tore out the carpeting, replaced the headboard with fabric wrapped Styrofoam, redid the dashboard. I repaired some of the holes by riveting sheet metal over those parts, then I bought a bunch of flat black spray-paint and painted the whole thing. I didn't ask permission, I just did it.
You know what happened as a result of that? Not much. My truck looked like shit, but I drove it like that until I sold it to buy a new car later. It wasn't a big deal. Seeing that I could accomplish something (and perhaps especially something that nobody would consider positive or valuable) without asking permission or having to beg forgiveness was a key moment in my life. It helped me realize that we're being stepped on, but all we have to do is stand up and they can't do that to us.
Taking your own power often requires taking action, and doing it without prompting. You have to keep your eyes open for opportunities and take them before anyone else notices. You have to act independently based on your own knowledge, because there usually isn't a person with a bell to tell you when opportunity has presented itself. The mindset of a free man is a difficult one to get into, to be the one in charge of your life instead of waiting to be told how to live. It means you should be constantly reading and watching and learning and trying to figure out what you can do and what you want to do.
I've already mentioned, a lot of people want to give up their freedom, to sell it to someone in exchange for being told what to do. If that was a recipe for success, then all the people who do what they're told would be rich and powerful, but that's not the case. Individuals who succeed the most need to forge their own path.
At some point I'm going to talk about economics in depth, but one of the core tenets of economics is supply and demand. If everybody is doing a certain thing, then there's unlimited supply or unlimited demand, so if you are part of that everybody, being part of unlimited supply means that you really aren't that valuable, and being part of unlimited demand means that you are vying for almost everybody for a limited supply of something. One of the most important keys to succeeding in life is trying to find discrepancies in value. If you find something that nobody wants to do, but you don't find that bad to do, there's a good chance you can make a good profit being part of a limited supply. If you find something that nobody wants, but you think that it's actually valuable, then there's a good chance that you can make a good profit owning a limited supply when the rest of the world comes around to realizing the value of what you own. It's something you should always be doing, because it doesn't matter what economic system you live under, it will always be easier to get your hands on something nobody wants, and it will always be easier to do something nobody else wants to do. Properly keeping your eyes open, these are your opportunities.
Likewise, by the time everyone is doing something, it's usually to late to get much value out of it. There's a concept called "Greater fool theory". The greater fool theory states that the price of an asset is determined by whether you can sell it for a higher price, at a later point in time. On assets where the theory applies, it is implied that the asset's intrinsic value is less important than the increase in demand, however irrational it might be. The person buying the overpriced asset later on, for a higher price, is deemed the greater fool. The problem is that eventually you run out of greater fools, and if you're the last one holding the bag, you will have to lose money. The way to get the most value out of an opportunity like that is to be the first one holding the valuable asset before anyone realizes it's valuable. In this way, a free man has the power to get into something before anyone else, get out before it becomes mundane, and make their profit thereby.
One thing that isn't captured well by this description is a key part of decision making: Risk.
Our generation is the most risk averse generation in history. They've been taught to only do the things that are absolutely going to be correct. They've been taught that they are in constant danger. They've been taught that the world is ending right now and we're all going to die. Frankly, it's nothing but a doomsday cult, people worshipping their own death and the destruction of the planet.
In a twisted way, that risk aversion has led people to make ridiculous, absurd risks. Instead of doing small things, they insist that everything they do needs to either save the world or destroy it. It would shock you the number of times I've heard this throughout my life, and it's absurd.
The world isn't going to end in your lifetime, and there's no way to save the world. Quit thinking you're the center of the universe. You're a tiny piece of the world, a single individual trying to make your way through and to find a sliver of success that you can be proud of and that can sustain you.
Understanding that, we need to take calculated risks. You won't save the world, you won't destroy the world, at best you're going to be able to make your life a little better or a little worse. If you make a really smart decision or a really stupid one, maybe you'll become rich or die. No matter what, give it a few years and nobody will remember what you did that time other than you (if you're still around to know it). If you make a bunch of calculated risks and on the balance you come out better off, then you'll over time get better and better. If over time you don't take any risks, then you won't ever come out better off, and entropy will set in and you'll slowly decline into having nothing.
So how to you succeed at taking calculated risks? The most important thing is to keep learning. The key to learning isn't to uncritically listen to whatever anyone has to say, it's to try to cut through to learn truth. Often people who are experts will tell you many true things but distort reality once you're talking about something that benefits them. I like to call this process of looking at what people tell you to separate truth from self serving lie or half-truth a "sanity check". The world's knowledge usually fits together in coherent ways. You'll find that things that fail the sanity check seem not to fit together with other facts. If five unrelated pieces of information tell the same story, then it's more likely that the story is true than if nothing else seems to back it up.
To sum up: you can succeed, people will tell you that it's impossible. Opportunity is the father of invention. Opportunity is something you must help build for yourself and it's inherently personal. Find your own path, take calculated risks, and to do that always keep learning.
It is really easy to make excuses for your life.
An entire cottage industry of people whose sole job is to come up with the next excuse as to why you haven't achieved your dreams has popped up, people who will make millions never working an honest day in their lives explaining to others why all their problems belong to somebody else.
Alongside those people are a completely different batch, who are trying to tell you why you can never possibly achieve your dreams unless you just tear down all of society and give them all the power. It really doesn't matter which team they claim to play for, they are selling a learned helplessness to you and the wages are your life and your freedom.
It's a really simple thing to do, these people claim that all you have to do is hand over your lives to them and to magically all your dreams will come true. The thing is, time and time again it's proven to be a lie. Hundreds of millions of dead people under communism are proof of that. The unthinkable suffering of the dictatorships throughout the African continent are proof in another light. Ultimately, the only person who can really be responsible for your success is you.
Instead of wallowing all the reasons that you can't succeed, you really need to start thinking about the ways that you can. I'm not talking about some imaginary fancy -- I've seen way too many people get caught up in some absolutely ridiculous fantasy. People who watch too many television shows get this idea in their head that all they need to do is hatch this dramatic plan and they can change the world in one night, and the more dramatic the plan the less work they have to put into it. I've also seen people counting on events that are entirely outside of their control and usually extremely unlikely to happen. One of the best examples was when I was teaching guys to meet women. It was almost like clockwork, every one of them had this girl who they thought they just needed to figure out the magic spell to seduce them and then their girl problems were going to be over. In reality, not one of those girls was interested in one of those guys, because it was a fantasy. There's nothing wrong with having fantasies now and again, but don't mistake them for a plan to live your life. If a girl likes you, you're probably going to know and you're probably not going to have to come up with some fanciful plan to seduce her. Chase an imaginary fantasy too long and you'll find you've spent your best years dreaming instead of making your life happen.
Outside the realm of romance, I've seen people do it in terms of their profession. The fact of the matter is, building your profession takes time and patience and dedication and hard work. It takes 20 years to build a 20 year career. You need to show up every day and give it your best and make people trust you. The more people trust you and trust that you're going to get the job done, the more people are going to want to give you the chance to prove that you can get the job done. You're not going to get some dream job out of nowhere putting absolutely no work in on your own, because dream jobs are highly sought after.
The way to actually achieve your dreams is definitely to start with a plan, but that plan has to be malleable. Start off with a series of events that are SMART -- specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. It's okay to dream big, but you don't dream big by starting big. You start small, and bite off achievable chunks of your goal little by little. You can achieve unreasonable results through reasonable methods by just keeping your eye on the roadmap that you set for yourself. It takes a focus on short term tactics and long term strategy combined to get to where you need to be.
It's a famous saying that necessity is the mother of invention. If that's true, opportunity is the father. Anything that we can accomplish really starts with opportunity. Everybody knows that different people came up with different personal computers in the late seventies, but the reason that personal computers became possible at that point was the opportunity provided by large scale semiconductors. A lot of people hear about the hard work in inventing the car, but few people reflect on the fact that the only reason you could invent a car at that point was because the internal combustion engine and various industrial processes that are already being defined. It was the confluence of necessity and opportunity that made these things possible.
This fact cuts both ways. It means that in your life you're likely to get opportunities that other people won't get, but it also means that you are certain to not get opportunities that others did get. A lot of people talk about Bill Gates hanging out in his basement working on computers, not so many people talk about his rich parents getting him into private schools to work on computers, or the fact that his big break happened to be because his mom knew the vice president at IBM who was developing the personal computer. Everybody talks about Jeff Bezos, but not a lot of people talk about the fact that he was already a high-powered business executive working for an investment firm when he started amazon. That isn't to say that you shouldn't work hard to achieve great things, it is to say don't try to measure yourself against someone else, because you don't know what type of opportunities they've had.
I talked a lot about an opportunities as if they are monolithic, but opportunities usually need to be unlocked by reaching a number of conditions. You can live in a land of opportunities and be totally locked out if you take actions that block you off from those opportunities. When I graduated from college, I heard "Oh, the baby boomers are retiring soon, there's going to be so many jobs!" and some years later that's true. However; even though there are lots of potential opportunities, there's lots of people my age who spent those years not doing anything in particular who never got the education, never got the shitty initial jobs, never put that work in, and even though there's great jobs there's nobody to fill them.
The world right now makes you believe you need to ask permission to do anything. You don't need to ask permission for a lot. When I was younger, I had a bad relationship with a woman who was controlling because she was afraid of losing me. Part of healing from that relationship was taking my power back, and one of the forms that took was messing with my vehicle. I tore out the carpeting, replaced the headboard with fabric wrapped Styrofoam, redid the dashboard. I repaired some of the holes by riveting sheet metal over those parts, then I bought a bunch of flat black spray-paint and painted the whole thing. I didn't ask permission, I just did it.
You know what happened as a result of that? Not much. My truck looked like shit, but I drove it like that until I sold it to buy a new car later. It wasn't a big deal. Seeing that I could accomplish something (and perhaps especially something that nobody would consider positive or valuable) without asking permission or having to beg forgiveness was a key moment in my life. It helped me realize that we're being stepped on, but all we have to do is stand up and they can't do that to us.
Taking your own power often requires taking action, and doing it without prompting. You have to keep your eyes open for opportunities and take them before anyone else notices. You have to act independently based on your own knowledge, because there usually isn't a person with a bell to tell you when opportunity has presented itself. The mindset of a free man is a difficult one to get into, to be the one in charge of your life instead of waiting to be told how to live. It means you should be constantly reading and watching and learning and trying to figure out what you can do and what you want to do.
I've already mentioned, a lot of people want to give up their freedom, to sell it to someone in exchange for being told what to do. If that was a recipe for success, then all the people who do what they're told would be rich and powerful, but that's not the case. Individuals who succeed the most need to forge their own path.
At some point I'm going to talk about economics in depth, but one of the core tenets of economics is supply and demand. If everybody is doing a certain thing, then there's unlimited supply or unlimited demand, so if you are part of that everybody, being part of unlimited supply means that you really aren't that valuable, and being part of unlimited demand means that you are vying for almost everybody for a limited supply of something. One of the most important keys to succeeding in life is trying to find discrepancies in value. If you find something that nobody wants to do, but you don't find that bad to do, there's a good chance you can make a good profit being part of a limited supply. If you find something that nobody wants, but you think that it's actually valuable, then there's a good chance that you can make a good profit owning a limited supply when the rest of the world comes around to realizing the value of what you own. It's something you should always be doing, because it doesn't matter what economic system you live under, it will always be easier to get your hands on something nobody wants, and it will always be easier to do something nobody else wants to do. Properly keeping your eyes open, these are your opportunities.
Likewise, by the time everyone is doing something, it's usually to late to get much value out of it. There's a concept called "Greater fool theory". The greater fool theory states that the price of an asset is determined by whether you can sell it for a higher price, at a later point in time. On assets where the theory applies, it is implied that the asset's intrinsic value is less important than the increase in demand, however irrational it might be. The person buying the overpriced asset later on, for a higher price, is deemed the greater fool. The problem is that eventually you run out of greater fools, and if you're the last one holding the bag, you will have to lose money. The way to get the most value out of an opportunity like that is to be the first one holding the valuable asset before anyone realizes it's valuable. In this way, a free man has the power to get into something before anyone else, get out before it becomes mundane, and make their profit thereby.
One thing that isn't captured well by this description is a key part of decision making: Risk.
Our generation is the most risk averse generation in history. They've been taught to only do the things that are absolutely going to be correct. They've been taught that they are in constant danger. They've been taught that the world is ending right now and we're all going to die. Frankly, it's nothing but a doomsday cult, people worshipping their own death and the destruction of the planet.
In a twisted way, that risk aversion has led people to make ridiculous, absurd risks. Instead of doing small things, they insist that everything they do needs to either save the world or destroy it. It would shock you the number of times I've heard this throughout my life, and it's absurd.
The world isn't going to end in your lifetime, and there's no way to save the world. Quit thinking you're the center of the universe. You're a tiny piece of the world, a single individual trying to make your way through and to find a sliver of success that you can be proud of and that can sustain you.
Understanding that, we need to take calculated risks. You won't save the world, you won't destroy the world, at best you're going to be able to make your life a little better or a little worse. If you make a really smart decision or a really stupid one, maybe you'll become rich or die. No matter what, give it a few years and nobody will remember what you did that time other than you (if you're still around to know it). If you make a bunch of calculated risks and on the balance you come out better off, then you'll over time get better and better. If over time you don't take any risks, then you won't ever come out better off, and entropy will set in and you'll slowly decline into having nothing.
So how to you succeed at taking calculated risks? The most important thing is to keep learning. The key to learning isn't to uncritically listen to whatever anyone has to say, it's to try to cut through to learn truth. Often people who are experts will tell you many true things but distort reality once you're talking about something that benefits them. I like to call this process of looking at what people tell you to separate truth from self serving lie or half-truth a "sanity check". The world's knowledge usually fits together in coherent ways. You'll find that things that fail the sanity check seem not to fit together with other facts. If five unrelated pieces of information tell the same story, then it's more likely that the story is true than if nothing else seems to back it up.
To sum up: you can succeed, people will tell you that it's impossible. Opportunity is the father of invention. Opportunity is something you must help build for yourself and it's inherently personal. Find your own path, take calculated risks, and to do that always keep learning.
@matrix I don't trust big companies, I feel like they'd join the fediverse, dominate it, then find excuses to shut down other services.
@jeffcliff Manitoba is mostly prairie, but I know that as you get further north the landscape starts looking a lot more like northern Ontario. Manitoba I assumed that Saskatchewan was the same, since flin flon is like a 15 minute drive from the border and by that latitude you're already getting pretty rugged.
I sympathize with your first point, I don't know much about it but I believe it.
The third point I think is going to hit everyone soon. I talk a lot about government debt because everyone thinks it's free money but in reality it's just like a payday loan -- Get something today and pay for it forever. This past year is going to haunt everyone, and soon.
I sympathize with your first point, I don't know much about it but I believe it.
The third point I think is going to hit everyone soon. I talk a lot about government debt because everyone thinks it's free money but in reality it's just like a payday loan -- Get something today and pay for it forever. This past year is going to haunt everyone, and soon.
@SecretlyPublicDomain I'm surprised this was copyrightable in the first place. Feel like a government document like this should be public domain by default.
@jeffcliff I think the more realistic strategy would be to convince the people in those areas that change would be better for them instead of trying to jam change down their throats using voters in downtown Toronto. You're going to have a unity problem that way -- you already do.
Saskatchewan has no reason they couldn't be a hydroelectric powerhouse like Manitoba, and then you end up with a lower cost of living because electricity can be cheap as dirt. Low power electricity is a boon for individuals and also a boon for industry. It opens doors that wouldn't be open otherwise.
Alberta would be a tougher sell on hydroelectric power but it definitely is an option there too and could even help the same ways. The bigger thing I think would be to convince the businesses and the government there that letting the CO2 just flash off into the atmosphere is wasteful. There's money to be made in developing processes to turn that CO2 back into something solid that'll stick around for a while.
We're seeing a lot of division in Canada and in the US, and I think increased federalism is the reason. Let people run their regions, and try to change their minds instead of trying to dominate them. It's the right way to run things. Frankly, some provinces are run better than others, and I don't want people from the worse run provinces dictating how people in the better run provinces should live.
Saskatchewan has no reason they couldn't be a hydroelectric powerhouse like Manitoba, and then you end up with a lower cost of living because electricity can be cheap as dirt. Low power electricity is a boon for individuals and also a boon for industry. It opens doors that wouldn't be open otherwise.
Alberta would be a tougher sell on hydroelectric power but it definitely is an option there too and could even help the same ways. The bigger thing I think would be to convince the businesses and the government there that letting the CO2 just flash off into the atmosphere is wasteful. There's money to be made in developing processes to turn that CO2 back into something solid that'll stick around for a while.
We're seeing a lot of division in Canada and in the US, and I think increased federalism is the reason. Let people run their regions, and try to change their minds instead of trying to dominate them. It's the right way to run things. Frankly, some provinces are run better than others, and I don't want people from the worse run provinces dictating how people in the better run provinces should live.
@jeffcliff I reached out to her once because I'm opposed to the way she handled skilled trades as the minister of labor. Typical ivory tower elite, didn't even care to hear what I had to say, she had her stupid agenda and nothing was going to let her deviate from it.
@jeffcliff @apropos @crisp One of the biggest takeaways for me from all this is everything you're saying.
They took away 40 million people's fundamental human rights for over a year so they wouldn't inconvenience a few thousand people who cross the border on a regular basis. Anybody in power right now needs to be retired from government forever, and that's if we're a ridiculously civilized society.
They took away 40 million people's fundamental human rights for over a year so they wouldn't inconvenience a few thousand people who cross the border on a regular basis. Anybody in power right now needs to be retired from government forever, and that's if we're a ridiculously civilized society.
@jeffcliff
Whether we like it or not, oil and gas are economic engines of this country. If that's a problem, then maybe instead of giving the cash from all those taxes to the poor during the good times they should instead spend it on directly implementing technologies for carbon sequestration? Or alternatively, just let them separate like they want to. Lose an economic engine, gain righteous moral indignation. Then it'll just be another country we can ignore like we ignore the #1 emitter of carbon in the world so we can balance our own books by shutting down everything we do and have them do it for us instead.
"If there isn't enough bread to eat, let them eat cake"...
Personally, I'm for allowing the population to drop naturally in general. About 10 years ago I did a study where I tried to figure out how much of the economy we could run on the current (at the time) level of hydroelectric, nuclear, and renewables, and I found that you could simply not even begin migrating to renewables and sustain our current population.
Besides the green standpoint, historically speaking workers rights improve when the number of workers drop. It's simple economics, the price of a scarce resource rises. Although the aggregate economy would shrink, individual wages would rise because businesses would have to compete for a scarce resource.
You say that the government can be convinced to do the right thing, but megacorps are smart -- smart enough to rig the system if it lets them, and big governments do let them. In the meantime, regular people are crushed under the weight of the fascistic government/megacorp chimera.
Megacorps want deregulation when they're normal companies, then they want regulation once they get there, because only they can afford to deal with the specific regulations they lobby for. The rich stay rich, the poor get poorer, and the politicians get to pretend they're working for the people when they're really working for someone else.
Whether we like it or not, oil and gas are economic engines of this country. If that's a problem, then maybe instead of giving the cash from all those taxes to the poor during the good times they should instead spend it on directly implementing technologies for carbon sequestration? Or alternatively, just let them separate like they want to. Lose an economic engine, gain righteous moral indignation. Then it'll just be another country we can ignore like we ignore the #1 emitter of carbon in the world so we can balance our own books by shutting down everything we do and have them do it for us instead.
"If there isn't enough bread to eat, let them eat cake"...
Personally, I'm for allowing the population to drop naturally in general. About 10 years ago I did a study where I tried to figure out how much of the economy we could run on the current (at the time) level of hydroelectric, nuclear, and renewables, and I found that you could simply not even begin migrating to renewables and sustain our current population.
Besides the green standpoint, historically speaking workers rights improve when the number of workers drop. It's simple economics, the price of a scarce resource rises. Although the aggregate economy would shrink, individual wages would rise because businesses would have to compete for a scarce resource.
You say that the government can be convinced to do the right thing, but megacorps are smart -- smart enough to rig the system if it lets them, and big governments do let them. In the meantime, regular people are crushed under the weight of the fascistic government/megacorp chimera.
Megacorps want deregulation when they're normal companies, then they want regulation once they get there, because only they can afford to deal with the specific regulations they lobby for. The rich stay rich, the poor get poorer, and the politicians get to pretend they're working for the people when they're really working for someone else.
@jeffcliff
You're being disingenous in one way: Most provinces don't have to move away from coal/oil because they don't use it in the first place. Of the provinces and territories, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Northwest territories, Nunavut, and Nova Scotia use a lot of oil and gas. Every other province is dominated (and I do mean dominated -- like 90%) by nuclear and hydro.
Those provinces that have high amounts of hydro actually tend to sell their power to neighboring jurisdictions. In the case of the US, that means we're replacing oil and gas with hydroelectric. The reason is simple, that hydro is not just clean (over time), but it's cheap. Unlike fossil fuels or even nuclear, you don't need to constantly be shipping in fuel, so it can sit for decades just making power.
I'm relatively affluent, so the problem with heating my home isn't a problem. I bought a well insulated house, and if I need to I can invest in alternative high efficiency heating and cooling. Someone I worked with had the same problem with high electricity costs, and he just installed a gas furnace, moving from hydro energy to fossil fuels as a direct result of those stupid policies. Even if they doubled his fuel costs with carbon pricing, he still would have come out ridiculously far ahead thanks to dumb government policies.
Poor people can't afford to just leave their home or install a new furnace. They have to put up with the place they can afford to pay rent in.
I once had that, I lived up north in a house with paper thin walls because that's what I could afford, and my hydro bill was ridiculous -- and it would have been so much worse had I been in Ontario. It's easy to say "Just get a more energy efficient place" when you're not already choosing between food and heat.
You know what would immediately change the trajectory of Canada's carbon use? Stop shipping people in from the lowest carbon use areas of the world to the single highest area of carbon use on the planet. The population of Canada is naturally going to drop if that happens (even a stable population will use less energy because technologies are getting much more efficient over time such as the move from incandescent light bulbs to LED light bulbs), and a dropping population will use less energy meaning there's less carbon use.
This constant need to save the world has many effects. how many millions of people in Toronto and Vancouver drive hours and hours every single day to get to work because they have to live somewhere cities away far from their jobs because there are so many people who don't need to be here shipped in from all over the world.
The PPC will reduce the number of people shipped in from low carbon areas to the highest carbon area in the world, and that alone would be massive.
You're being disingenous in one way: Most provinces don't have to move away from coal/oil because they don't use it in the first place. Of the provinces and territories, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Northwest territories, Nunavut, and Nova Scotia use a lot of oil and gas. Every other province is dominated (and I do mean dominated -- like 90%) by nuclear and hydro.
Those provinces that have high amounts of hydro actually tend to sell their power to neighboring jurisdictions. In the case of the US, that means we're replacing oil and gas with hydroelectric. The reason is simple, that hydro is not just clean (over time), but it's cheap. Unlike fossil fuels or even nuclear, you don't need to constantly be shipping in fuel, so it can sit for decades just making power.
I'm relatively affluent, so the problem with heating my home isn't a problem. I bought a well insulated house, and if I need to I can invest in alternative high efficiency heating and cooling. Someone I worked with had the same problem with high electricity costs, and he just installed a gas furnace, moving from hydro energy to fossil fuels as a direct result of those stupid policies. Even if they doubled his fuel costs with carbon pricing, he still would have come out ridiculously far ahead thanks to dumb government policies.
Poor people can't afford to just leave their home or install a new furnace. They have to put up with the place they can afford to pay rent in.
I once had that, I lived up north in a house with paper thin walls because that's what I could afford, and my hydro bill was ridiculous -- and it would have been so much worse had I been in Ontario. It's easy to say "Just get a more energy efficient place" when you're not already choosing between food and heat.
You know what would immediately change the trajectory of Canada's carbon use? Stop shipping people in from the lowest carbon use areas of the world to the single highest area of carbon use on the planet. The population of Canada is naturally going to drop if that happens (even a stable population will use less energy because technologies are getting much more efficient over time such as the move from incandescent light bulbs to LED light bulbs), and a dropping population will use less energy meaning there's less carbon use.
This constant need to save the world has many effects. how many millions of people in Toronto and Vancouver drive hours and hours every single day to get to work because they have to live somewhere cities away far from their jobs because there are so many people who don't need to be here shipped in from all over the world.
The PPC will reduce the number of people shipped in from low carbon areas to the highest carbon area in the world, and that alone would be massive.
@jeffcliff The problem isn't "big", the problem is "correct", and politicians don't do "correct".
My little sister's power bill is higher than my rent was at her age, and a large part of it is the massive cost of solar panels that don't fucking do anything 9 months a year. Meanwhile. The same politicians have spent decades crippling hydroelectric power which is proven to provide massive amounts of clean power forever because a bunch of "green" advocates refuse to allow for practical ideas. There are many other examples of how "green" policies are having a direct damaging effect on the environment.
Don't be fooled, the environmental industrial complex is a massive lobby, but they aren't here to help anyone but themselves. When you let politicians be the ones to decide how to help the environment on climate change, you're accelerating damage to the planet so a few people can get super rich selling snakeoil to idiots who want to look like they're "doing something" so they can get re-elected.
My little sister's power bill is higher than my rent was at her age, and a large part of it is the massive cost of solar panels that don't fucking do anything 9 months a year. Meanwhile. The same politicians have spent decades crippling hydroelectric power which is proven to provide massive amounts of clean power forever because a bunch of "green" advocates refuse to allow for practical ideas. There are many other examples of how "green" policies are having a direct damaging effect on the environment.
Don't be fooled, the environmental industrial complex is a massive lobby, but they aren't here to help anyone but themselves. When you let politicians be the ones to decide how to help the environment on climate change, you're accelerating damage to the planet so a few people can get super rich selling snakeoil to idiots who want to look like they're "doing something" so they can get re-elected.