Civilization series AKA dictator simulator!

The technical problems are likely the most solvable ones, except for the skilled trades shortage. That problem is very difficult to solve because most people don’t want to do the work and the people who don’t have any other options tend to have personal / mental health problems that make them very unreliable as workers.

I have several friends who work in the skilled trades (drywall taping and finishing). It’s extremely tiring work that leads to chronic joint pain later in life. You’re also exposed to large amounts of dust so you’re wearing a lot of PPE which is quite sweaty and uncomfortable. Many of the other people they encounter in the trade have severe problems with alcoholism, drug addiction, and are very unreliable as workers.

You might suggest that these trades should pay more in order to attract higher quality workers but that means the cost of building housing goes up even more! Ultimately, the problem for skilled trades is the Baumol effect. The labour productivity of construction work has not risen to match the productivity of other industries (notably the tech industry). This problem has affected many industries in our society. It’s the hidden cost we all pay for the convenience of technology.

The political problem is even more difficult to solve. The issue there is that the middle class has grown rich on the back of their home. The rise in real estate value for people’s single family houses has been the main contributor to the wealth of the middle class. Building on this, the two main political parties in Canada (Liberals and Conservatives) target the middle class as their voting base. Thus they are both extremely reluctant to do anything that would lower the demand for housing which would cause real estate prices to fall, destroying the wealth of their voting base.

Milton Friedman has called this problem “middle class welfare.” Political parties target the middle income 51% of the population with social programs and policies that benefit them, not the bottom 51% as we might expect. The most obvious of these programs is government-supported higher education (which benefits the middle class at the expense of the working class), but that’s another discussion entirely.

I believe that the Liberal government’s pursuit of aggressive immigration policies was done deliberately to increase demand for housing (making the middle class rich) and to provide more working class taxpayers to support the education of the middle class.

What land is the government going to build all this housing on? Crown land? That’s mostly wilderness. Who wants to live out there?

Farmland? They’d have to buy it from farmers. Appropriating land from farmers is an extremely unpopular and regressive policy.

That leaves land in the city which is generally either occupied by houses or businesses already or it’s in the process of being developed but is caught up in regulatory hurdles or in various stages of construction. It’s actually a big problem that we don’t have enough skilled tradespeople to build houses at the speed we want them built.

The regulatory issues are a problem for municipal and provincial politics. The Canadian federal government doesn’t have any power to fix that stuff. The design of our federation gives most of the power to the provinces.

It’s Synecdoche, a figure of speech where a part of something is used to refer to the whole.

Private equity are the scavengers of the economy. They go after declining companies whose value is overly concentrated in illiquid assets.

The Bay has been rotting for decades as a company. The only people who regularly shop there are the non-price-conscious, non-fashionable white upper middle class (Karens, basically). They haven’t been viable for middle class or working class shoppers for many years now.

A few of the things were explicitly designed (such as the rules for elections, the composition of parliament) but a great deal of it evolved (English common law system, electoral districting/Gerrymandering, and many decades of legislative processes by many different people).

That last one I want to highlight because it seems like it is something explicitly designed. It is not. It’s like a soup pot many chefs walk past and add their own ingredients to. The fact that the soup is not very good can’t be blamed on one particular chef. Thus there is no real designer of our body of laws.

I also want to further point out that laws are not systems, they’re just words on paper. The system is the combined effect of all the people in society acting to produce an outcome. This outcome may be strongly informed by society’s laws (and also by social norms such as respect for the rule of law) but it’s not determined by them the way a computer’s actions are determined by its programming.

One need look no further than the Trump administration which has severely undermined the rule of law in the US. Without the rule of law the system turns into chaos. But that is also an outcome of the system itself, since social norms are the product of social forces (which are themselves highly chaotic).

And yet Albertans will almost definitely support PP

I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Carney is from Alberta. He knows what Albertans care about most (the economy, oil and gas, pipelines, and Alberta beef). He knows they hate carbon taxes and he’s moved very swiftly to axe the tax.

His decisiveness, his heritage, and his determination to stand up to Trump who is trying to tariff our economy into oblivion will make him very popular. I think he’ll take the same approach as Zelenskyy: position himself as a wartime leader who is the right choice for the fight ahead.

Oh I don’t doubt that another violent revolution is coming. But each violent revolution proves the failure of the one that came before. Violence begets more violence.

Building a stable system that works for everyone is much more difficult. It takes many years of careful work. Flipping the table never gets you there. Table-flippers love to take all the credit, however.

As for your premise on “non-violent versus violent revolutions”, I reject it entirely. I’m an advocate for careful reforms, not revolutions.

The main takeaway I would hope people get from the idea (one that I heard from a forgotten source and then began using in the light of my own understanding I have to confess) is that we are living under a system that has been disproportionately and consistently shaped over much of its history by moneyed interests in various ways for the specific aim of winning the class war for the wealthy. That’s what the system is doing, that is its purpose.

Another objection to “the purpose of a system is what it does” is that it implies that systems have purposes in the first place. Many systems don’t have a purpose because they were never designed. Ecosystems are the biggest example of this.

Talking more specifically about our political and economic systems, I think the ecosystem view is helpful. Believing that an elite have conspired over centuries to create a system which entrenches their interests is dangerous, conspiratorial thinking which most importantly does not lead in any positive direction.

Violent revolutions rarely work, yet Americans have a peculiar affinity toward them, perhaps due to their history. It’s a particular sort of societal sickness which I believe leads to perfectionist, radical thinking and shuns graassroots, reform-oriented work.

The original topic of discussion (for this thread) was voting systems and two party systems. Grassroots political work can and has been proven to work at solving problems like this. There are many cases around the world where such voting systems have been changed thanks to the efforts of grassroots politics.

They’re downright awful. They can survive much higher temperatures than most other pathogens which means cooking often fails to destroy them.

Hopefully your Valentine is this guy:

Exactly. He’s serious about wasting everyone’s time and distracting from his attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure. He’s serious about flattering Trump with delusions of grandeur about a 19th century gilded age of “spheres of influence” so that the US abandons Ukraine.

Putin still has a lot to worry about though. The European sleeping dragon is getting restless.

I wouldn’t say he’s an idiot. He’s a narcissist who feigns ignorance in order to pander to his fanboys. I think he’s a lot more dangerous than Trump who is an idiot and also a narcissist.

Articles like this one are well-meaning but they just end up signal-boosting him and validating his narrative that “left wing media are persecuting him.”

Not to mention the driver’s hands and feet!

Ahhh, that’s where I messed up! I forgot to cool the bacon first!

As a Canadian, I’m worried that this stoking of anti-Canadian sentiment among the right wing in the US is a pretext to an invasion to try to make good on the “51st state” promise.

He has a clue. He’s not trying to convince his detractors of anything. He’s throwing red meat to his supporters.

Do you mean you cemented over the weep holes in the brick around your house? Those gaps in the brick mortar are necessary for proper drainage. Brick is porous so it will absorb water and then accumulate behind the bricks unless the weep holes are there to allow the water to drain.

That’s good, though I still feel uncomfortable about it!

Am I paranoid for worrying that the US might order flights from Canada to Mexico to be diverted to a US airport so that ICE can look for “illegals and DEI folk”?

How are people getting to Mexico from Canada without going through the US? You’d have to take one heck of a convoluted flight path to avoid US airspace. Can you actually fly over the US direct to Mexico from Canada without going through US customs?