even if we accept the hypothesis that these two muslim girls that falsely claimed hate crimes were doing so because they feared repercussions for being caught without their hijab on, it still leaves open the question of why they would choose this particular approach of escalating to the police.

in the case of the younger one, it could have just been a web of lies that escalated uncontrollably, but, even so, consider the depth of fear required to actually get to a police investigation without cracking. at 11, you have to have some concept of what's happening when the police are involved.

in the case of the older one, though, i'm sure there could have been approaches taken that didn't rely on blaming it on racist white people. like, she could have said it got caught on a tree, or something. why state, specifically, that somebody threatened to light it on fire? you have to know that is going to escalate, if you're a university student, right?

i'm left to think that at least one of these cases may have been a cry for help. and it doesn't seem like anybody's heard it. sadly.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

well, it would clearly be the latter, wouldn't it, chantal?

it was easier for the opposition to frame the narrative when people got their news from the establishment media that it controlled. the old tory media that i speak of.

nobody under like 50 gets their news this way any more.

so, you can trot your outraged conservative talking heads out on to ctv all you want, nobody really pays any attention any more. worse, that syndicated op-ed piece in the globe and the fp and the ... has a paywall on it. oops. hey, huff post doesn't. but i want to watch something, let me search youtube.

the opposition media of the future might actually have to figure out what people actually care about instead of just feeding it into us, gramscian style. you can't manufacture consent amongst a population that has stopped listening to you. you actually have to adhere to the market.

we call that democracy.

maybe the tory media might want to try a little of it. or it can go bankrupt and be replaced. whatever.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2018/01/15/performance-only-part-of-the-story-at-trudeau-town-halls.html

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

"They don't understand that I'm fighting their end, because if anybody does that to them, I'll be there." - margaret atwood, describing her younger critics

generational bulges are a problem, because they tend to pit the energy of youth against the wisdom of age. we get over them. and, they can have positive shifts in social attitudes that can, if institutionalized, be maintained. but, that same institutionalization can have dangerous tendencies, as well, when that energy refuses to yield to that wisdom, where it ought to.

so, margaret actually has an important role to play, here. hopefully, she's able to get through to a few people - not necessarily in changing their minds, but in helping them see broader perspectives, and make more careful deductions in doing so.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

see, the backlash to this piece is a good example of americans, and i guess that is beginning to mean young canadians due to the absence of toryism here for some time now, not knowing what a tory is.

the reality is that this is the response that you should have expected from this old tory, margaret atwood.

and, is she right? well, she often is, if you can put what she says through the de-torification process.

she may have picked a poor case to make her point on, however unintentional this may be, but i have to give her moral support, here. she's making the right argument, whether it's applicable in context, or not.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/am-i-a-bad-feminist/article37591823/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

if you don't mind me putting a damper on this talk of late capitalism.

late capitalism was supposed to mean a period where workers were in the process of taking control of production; if you want to abstract that out of the labour conditions of the nineteenth century, you could suggest that late capitalism is supposed to be a period of democracy, where the people as a whole co-opt production from the elite, and convert it into a tool for use by the masses.

i don't see that happening anywhere.

maybe we're at a point where the technology could allow for a transition, but i don't see it actually happening anywhere in front of me. workers seem to be more afraid that they're going to lose their jobs to automation, than in control of a movement to command it.

what "late capitalism" seems to mean to the people that are throwing it around rather seems to mean a collapse into decadence, as though the founder of historical materialism was nietzsche, or not even, his critics, and the end of capitalism - perhaps with it's underlying work ethic, and the civic values imbued within it by religion - is just a collapse into nihilism. this view conflates the end of capitalism with the end of history, itself perverted from the hegelian term, to mean the end of western history. it's an ultra-paradoxical response to the co-option of marxism into the scare story to preserve religion in the face of secularism. this is what happens when you let anybody that can afford to pay for it go to school.

but, historical materialism was always a pseudo science, anyways. it set down a plausible path of events, and then claimed it was a law of history. if you even want to take the idea seriously enough to do so, you could argue that marx was presenting a classical argument, and that we understand the world today in terms of probabilities rather than certainties. if you want to take it that seriously....

i think the reality is that the united states is not only not in late capitalism, but that it's devolved from a relatively late stage of capitalism under fordism, and moving into the labour movements of the 30s, and into an earlier stage of capitalism, which was accelerated by a return to mercantilism in the 1980s, under the phoney free trade agreements, which were designed to offload labour to countries with lower working conditions.

so, forget about late capitalism. the united states has essentially overseen a global return to mercantilism - which is the decadence that people are identifying. because that is the great comedy of nietzsche, or his critics: that the collapse into nihilism happened in the seventeenth century, and that the classical period of art (and science) is a consequence of it.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

islam is perhaps the last, great mythology for secularism to conquer. we went through hard struggles to defeat christianity, but the battle is largely won. this is my major annoyance with islam - right when we were winning the war against religion, these muslims have provided the cause of religion with a lot of fresh recruits, and in many ways thrown the struggle against religion backwards by a century, or more.

i mean, we have to have legitimate debates, now, over whether it's ok to put your daughters in scarves before they're allowed to leave the house. i don't want this debate. it's anachronistic.

really, it's unfortunate that the contemporary left has aligned with the historical right on this. leftists have generally historically agitated against these kinds of traditional rules, and stood in solidarity with the oppressed - not come up with opaque arguments about cultural relativism, and ignored individual rights in favour of some imaginary idea of collective ones.

so, i stand in solidarity with the girls that take these off. and i call for a future where they don't need to make up absurd excuses to do it, to avoid who knows what  - immediate physical punishment, banishment or perhaps even honour killings.

this is the issue, here.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

see, it is my immediate deduction from this very limited amount of information that an excuse to take the hijab off is the most obvious explanation:

A University of Michigan student was approached by a stranger who threatened to set her on fire with a lighter if she didn’t remove her hijab, police said.

The incident occurred between 5:30 and 7 p.m. on Friday just outside the campus in Ann Arbor. Police said the woman complied and left.

so, this university student took off the hijab between 5:30 and 7:00 on a friday night and left...perhaps to go to a party, or maybe a bar?

no. that's good. very good. i want to hear more stories like that. but, it perhaps underscores the incredible coercion in muslim families for women to adhere to the dress code, doesn't it?

i think that's the hidden issue, here.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/11/13/university-of-michigan-student-wearing-a-hijab-threatened-to-be-lit-on-fire-police-say/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

again: is this ultimately an excuse to take the hijab off?

let's hope that this is what's happening. but, i would urge these women to take a larger stand. i can provide some verbal solidarity, but they ultimately must emancipate themselves.

www.cnn.com/2016/12/22/us/michigan-student-hijab-incident-no-evidence/index.html

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

nonononono, i would actually consider the idea of a young girl damaging her own hijab to be good news.

that's what i want to see happen: young women getting together and burning these things. not because somebody told them to. but because they don't want to wear them any more.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, what actually happened then?

did she damage her own hijab because she didn't want to wear it, and then claim somebody else did it, so as to not get into any trouble with her parents?

http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/toronto/scarborough-hijab-attack-1.4487716

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

well, his policies are quite similar to harper's, in truth.

but, an interesting overlay would be to chart trudeau's approval rating versus those of donald trump.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/new-poll-shows-deterioration-in-approval-ratings-for-trudeau-liberals/article37601246/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

meh. just get divorced.

i think it's a crazy idea. i mean, i don't even want to take it seriously, kind of thing. when somebody comes to you and says "i want an open relationship", what that means is "i want to break up with you, but not for a few more months.". it's the kind of thing that happens when people want to break off a romantic relationship, but not a financial relationship. and, the end result is not actually an open relationship, but the demotion of the relationship to a friendship. partners end up as room mates.

this idea that you can be polyamorous and in a relationship is a consequence of the existing culture, which tells you that you can have your cake and eat it, too. it's a fantasy, in real life. and, i'd suggest to people looking at this seriously that they have to make that choice - that it's ok to be a polyamorous single person, but you shouldn't pretend that you can be in a relationship with somebody, too.

if you're in an open relationship, ask yourself: what does your partner do on saturday nights?

 

that's how you figure it out, right. if you find yourself in a situation where you're spending more saturdays apart than together, you don't actually have a relationship any more. what you have is a room mate.

and, in the real world, things get messy. three or four people might show up at the same concert, or the same restaurant. and, if you're avoiding that, what are you doing? making plans to not spend time with your partner? if you have to avoid your partner on a saturday night, there's no relationship there...

it's fun to be open-minded. but, when you start thinking through the ramifications, it doesn't work. and, it is an empirical question: the arrangement doesn't tend to work.

the prudent advice to give somebody going through this is to try and predict the outcome of such an arrangement in a few months time. and, it's not usually going to be a positive outcome, unless you either have both partners pursuing other options (in which case it's a mutual break-up in disguise), or you have one partner that likes to spend a lot of time alone, and isn't going to spend it thinking about where the other one is, or what they're doing.

in most cases, the person being propositioned with such a thing should take it as a red flag and walk away.

i don't have an issue with the language used. the distribution is the curve, or everything under the curve. it's a semantic point that a statistician would be splitting hairs over in "correcting" you on and most actually probably wouldn't bother with at all. a major hurricane hitting the united states would be a rare event, and whether you want to describe that using a "poisson distribution" or the "curve described by the poisson distribution" is just an issue in language, although i would perhaps suggest that you're misapplying the central limit theorem in a situation with not enough data points to do so, if that's what you're getting at by referencing normality. a misapplication of the clt like this could actually be used to argue for stasis. it doesn't change the point you're making.

and, yes - charting an increase in hurricanes since 2005 is kind of like charting a decrease in temperatures since 1998. or jet stream variability since 1725. 

but, the important thing you pointed out was that global warming is not the only factor. and, if you want to push this on this platform, that's the most important point you can make: the universe is complicated, and this increase in carbon on this planet is just one of the things that's happening in it.

so, i just accomplished something - i've closed all of the audio for period 2.

so, this is where i put the placeholder for period 2, for now.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/period-2

that means my discography is now completed for the period 1996-2003, with the caveat that i'll need to add a pdf file to each release for liner notes, and i have to finish the period 1 & period 2 discs, which are html front-ends on a pdf file that is the culmination of all of the individual ones.

i still have some work to do on this.

but, what's next?

it's jan, 1998 in the alter-reality. i left off in dec, 1996.that's a year worth a journal writing, and i'll need to get to it soon. but, i need to recalibrate, first.

first, i need to clean in here. i need to ship the rest of that order. but, i feel better about it now, because i'm over that hump.

i'm not sure how long it's going to take to recalibrate and get all this data in line, but i should be coming up on absolute final closes on inri000-inri015 in the upcoming weeks. and, then i need to stay up to date...

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

republishing inri074

around october, 2002 i met a friend. i was sort of in need of a friend, and i mean that in the friend sense. but, the mental condition i was in was the explanation of why i needed a friend, if you see what i mean; i was completely unstable in this period and did all kinds of absurd things, which isolated me - and i wasn't getting any better.

i dropped out of school under the realization that i was walking down a path that wasn't getting me anywhere close to what i wanted out of life. i ended up working three jobs to raise money for gender reassignment, and it crossed me paths with somebody that was also trying to think of ways to get out of the box in terms of ways to exist.

she was trying to save up money to go to british columbia. it was some kind of warped take on the grapes of wrath, where everything works out perfectly. but, the rent was eating into her savings, which was making the goal seem impossible. well, unless we stopped having fun.

so, i suggested she should just stay at my parents place. part of it was a hope that she would move her drum kit in, although that didn't happen. and, i might add that this was done with all of the reckless abandon that could be contemplated - we were moving stuff in without even asking, it was really remarkable.

and, it seemed to me that we were getting pretty close over that period.

so, when the time came that she had all that money put aside to go to bc, it was kind of a downer to let her go. and, she initially wanted to go with a friend who dropped out. so, i ended up going across the country with her.

now, i need to be clear: we weren't planning on coming back. we were going to pick fruit or something - we didn't know, exactly, we'd figure it out when we got there.

so, this was meant as a sort of farewell to certain people i hadn't talked to in months and didn't care if i was leaving, anyways. i think it let me work some things out on weird subconscious levels, but the truth is that these songs really aren't about anybody except me, and there's no use in pretending they are - i just liked the idea of a farewell disc.

this disc was initially passed around with a cut up version of the pretentious untitled mix at the end, but this was almost immediately ejected from future burns and is not present on this ep due to the poor quality of the mix. the remaining five tracks became combined into what i now call my eighth symphony.

written and recorded in late 2002 and early 2003. this was initially uploaded unmodified from a cd-r rip in may, 2015, but this was replaced with a version from source on nov 29, 2017 due to clipping due to an unrealized normalization on the burn. disc finalized as symph008 on nov 29, 2017. as always, please use headphones.

the hidden track is the final version and also appears on my ninth record, {e} (inri08x): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/e

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2003, 2015, 2017). 

credits

released May 3, 2003

j - guitar, effects, bass, synth, voice, piano, drum programming, generative programming (sounder), granular synthesis, sound design, soundscaping, loops, bowls, claps, tables, ebow, orchestral sequencing, digital wave editing, sampling, production, composition


jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

publishing inri073

it was in may of 2015 that i first contemplated the idea of a chamber works. i was creating compilations to end my second period, when i realized that a couple of the tracks that did not fit well into the orchestral works might work better as chamber pieces. so, the chamber works was intended as a kind of companion disc to the orchestral works, both to offer a different flavour and to collect the remaining tracks into a compilation of serious music, so they are not left out.

so, i went back and did a systematic evaluation of the period 2 material to see which tracks could or could not be converted into chamber pieces. the last three mixes were created at this time, while the first was removed of clicks.

then, i stopped. i decided that an electronic chamber works was an idea of questionable worth, and i should put the idea aside for a bit and take a look at the idea again upon reconstruction of the period 1 tapes.

what the issue really comes down to is how good the electronic strings sound. does this actually sound like chamber music, or does it sound like a computer creating chamber music? and, if it sounds like a computer, is the issue resolvable somehow?

when i came back to completing period 2 in the fall of 2017, i decided in favour of the release, as the sound fonts are convincing enough, even if one needs to ignore a few relics here and there. tracks two and three were subsequently added to the compilation.

i decided at the end that this format has some future to it, whether it is fully realistic or not. string music will probably never go away. but, composers are going to find themselves less and less interested in actual physical reproduction, as time moves forward. the question of realism in the tracks is consequently somewhat misplaced, as the chamber music of the future is likely to be performed by computers, and sound like it just a little bit.

initially written and recorded between 2001-2003 and remixed and recorded further over 2014-2015. an idea for this compilation was developed over the last week of may, 2015, but it was not finished or released at that time. corrected and expanded from october, 2017 to january, 2018. finally released & finalized as lp022 on jan 14, 2018. as always, please use headphones.

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2014, 2015, 2017, 2018). 

credits

released May 2, 2003

j - controller input, programming, effects processing, mixing, digital wave editing, composition.

the various rendered electronic orchestras include piano, orchestral drum kit, violin, guitar, viola, cello, contrabass, various string sections and choir.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

publishing inri072

an unexpected result of the project to complete my discography, undertaken in late 2013, has been the construction of a handful of orchestral pieces, mostly as remixes of original tracks from the jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj period. while these tracks were initially written out as scored pieces for expanded instrumentation, they were generally written around the guitar and the expanded instrumentation was largely meant simply for colour. the exception to this is the psilocybin symphony, which was written as a piano concerto from the start and previously completed in early 2006.

the ability to expand these pieces into orchestral works is the result of the advances in vst sampling technology that have occurred since 2003. while changes in instrumentation have been accompanied by extra writing (mostly on the guitar), tempo shifts and other general rearrangement choices, the existing technology makes it very easy to rearrange a rock song for an orchestra, by simply multiplying staves and changing the sound fonts.

the condition i've set for a piece to be "orchestral" is that it must utilize the entire orchestra: it must have percussion, piano, horns, woodwinds/reeds and strings. guitars are generally treated like "first violins", whereas violins are generally not considered to be more special than other similar string instruments. some of the tracks also have prominent choral sections. all of these pieces meet this condition, except the last one which does not have a woodwind/reed section.

my delve into scorewriting ended in 2003; the material in my third phase is more focused on live and manipulated guitars and synthesizers. i consequently feel that this is an interesting summary of my second period, taken from a specific angle that is otherwise largely relegated to single-only remixes.

initially written and recorded between 2001-2003 and remixed and recorded further over 2014-2015, except track 2 which was completed in early 2006 and track 5 which was completed in 2017. the initial final compilation date was may 23, 2015, but track five was then added on oct 14, 2017 and the disc was finalized as lp021 on nov 29, 2017. track 7 was added as a download-only bonus track on jan 14, 2018. as always, please use headphones.

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2014, 2015, 2017, 2018).

* download only 

credits

released May 1, 2003

j - controller inputs, drum & other programming, orchestral & other sequencing, live guitars, live bass, live synths, effects, sound design, digital wave editing, composition, production.

the various rendered electronic orchestras includes violin, viola, cello, contrabass, electric guitar, nylon guitar, guitar fret noise, bass guitar, synthesizer bass, french horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, english horn, oboe, bassoon, clarinet, saxophone, bamboo flute, flute, piccolo, synthesizers, mellotron, organ, piano, harp, koto, music box, clavinet, kalimba, xylophone, agogo, mallet, hammered percussion, woodblock, tubular bells, tinkle bells, glockenspiel, orchestra hit, melodic toms, electronic drum kit, timpani, orchestral drum kit and choir.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

republishing inri071

i've taken to splitting my discography into phases, and my hitch-hiking trip to british columbia is a very important separation point - both in terms of the nature of the material that came out afterwards and what is now a substantial body of work that came before it. that makes it a natural point to look backwards and build compilations of intersecting ideas.

a characteristic of my work is that it does not conform well to genre norms. this is not an accident; when compiling a record, i'm guided more by the late beatles' philosophy of vast diversity in a small space than i am by any kind of desire to collect together nice singles, or by some kind of compulsive organizing into categories or concepts. i write psychedelic music. that means something different in 2015 than it did in 1966, but the commonality is that it's necessarily challenging. i want all of my records to do everything at once, and accomplish everything by their end point. that makes compilations of this sort inherently difficult, because every song touches on every compilation idea at the same time. the jazz record would have the same tracklisting as the punk record, the classical record and the folk record - and none would really be what they're claimed to be.

the one exception to this conundrum is how i interacted with ambient music in this period. i very regularly utilized ideas from the genre, but i tended to interpret ambience as something that is necessarily obscure. in this period, ambient pieces are almost always outtakes or b sides. i tended to interpret covers and remixes as ambient pieces, probably because that was unexpected. when ambient ideas make it on to the record, they're almost always for effect: introductions, endings, connecting passages, that sort of thing.

when i began reconstructing my discography in early 2014, i came across a handful of songs i'd written out into midi format and put aside for later. a number of these ended up reworked into ambient pieces, and released as b sides. i also ended up converting some of the material i wrote in this period into ambient sound collages that are more in the style of music i created after 2003.

the end result is enough bsides and remixes to put together two full cds of ambient music. none of the tracks on volumes one or two are on any official record as they appear here; this is technically a collection of remixes and outtakes.

this package was initially released with a mix tape of fragments from 1996-1999, but it has since been moved into it's own release (inri035): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/ambient-works-vol-0

initially written and recorded between 2000-2003 and remixed between 2014-2015. sequenced over mid may, 2015. the final compilation date was initially may 20, 2015, but both discs were mildly updated with some more appropriate mixes of the same tracks on nov 29, 2017; disc subsequently finalized as lp020. as always, please use headphones.

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2014, 2015, 2017). 

credits

released April 28, 2003

j - guitars (acoustic, electric, nylon), effects & treatments, bass, synthesizers, electric air reed organ, orchestral & other sequencing, drum & other programming, generative programming (sounder), "projectile synthesis" (audiomulch), granular synthesis (granulab), sound design, electronic and conventional drum kits, sampling, loops, films, voice, digital wave editing, composition, production.

sean - vocal ideas (tracks 4 & 7, disc 1), ring modulator (track 9, disc 1)
jon - background guitar performance (track 4, disc 1)
greg - drum performance sample source (track 5, disc 1)

the various rendered electronic orchestras include synth bass, electric bass, acoustic bass, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, nylon guitar, guitar effects, guitar noises (fret noises, pick scrapes, knocks), synthesizer, synth pads, mellotron, choir, violin, viola, cello, contrabass, string section, pizzicato strings, french horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, oboe, english horn, bassoon, clarinet, flute, piccolo, mallet, piano, woodblock, music box, xylophone, tubular bells, other bells, orchestra hit, electronic drum kit, melodic toms, drum machine and orchestral drum kit.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

“Every missile or shell we fired was at a valuable target, at underground targets,” Eisenkot said in March “We have developed a capability that allows us to strike them.”

you know that's what this is really about, right?

gaza isn't just an open-air prison. it's a model of a city in revolt. such technology can ultimately be exported to countries like the united states, in the event of the outbreak of armed civil unrest.

the talk of colonialism is weird. it's maybe true from a certain perspective, but it's an effect rather than a cause, and the historical underpinnings of it are somewhat spurious. at best, these are two opposing colonial cultures. but, it really has nothing to do with the actual reality of why israel exists.

israel is an american military outpost in the middle east, necessary as a counter-balance against a tense alliance with the oil-producing arab countries. it's primary function is as a testing facility.

so, finkelstein claims there weren't any rockets being sent from gaza. maybe he means a statistical zero, because the system was ultimately designed to test the rockets that were sent at it for it to shoot down. so, of course it shot down some rockets. it's a test simulation to shoot them down.

comparisons to the holocaust are not exaggerated, and that's why i tend to avoid the term apartheid. apartheid is an economic idea - it's a slave class that existed, for the benefit of the rich members of society. and, so, what they did in south africa was allow a select group of blacks to enter the ruling class, while keeping the apartheid system mostly in place. that cannot happen in palestine, where the people are not being utilized as a slave class, but merely tossed aside as useless eaters.

the united states actually presented an apartheid system as a solution to the actual genocide that's taking place, which is how i prefer to describe it. john kerry wanted to build call centres in the west bank, and convert the palestinians into a pool of cheap labour for multinational corporations. that would have resulted in an apartheid, where palestinians are kept occupied with labour for the dominant israeli group, while being denied basic liberties and civil rights. but, israel wouldn't allow for this. they just want the land they're standing on.

so, referring to the situation as an apartheid actually deflects from the deeper reality, that israel is carrying out a genocide in slow motion, with the ultimate aim of complete expulsion - or annihilation.

but, to america, it's just a war game. and, americans ought to understand that, for what it is.

notwithstanding pull from outside forces, this geo-strategic position is necessary for as long as america relies upon oil as a dominant input into it's economy.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

this article also explains why he has long odds to win in 2019, at all. and, then what?

the ndp have found themselves in a position that i last remember seeing in canadian politics with the old progressive conservatives, when joe clark had to ask somebody to step aside to give them his seat. the party only managed to recover to the point that they could organize a merger with the reform party. whatever happens to the ndp, the canadian left needs some kind of serious renewal, likely in a new party.

what can they do in this mess?

well, there's two choices, really, within our parliamentarian tradition, and they rely on the strength of the leadership. grenier doesn't think that singh will ask masse or hardcastle to step down. what that means is that grenier doesn't think that singh is powerful enough in his own party to take a seat away from an incumbent. yet, that is, in fact, the parliamentarian tradition in this circumstance, where the leadership is powerful enough - and clark is one example of that happening. if grenier is right, and singh is not able to command a seat from a backbencher, then the party must pass a vote of non-confidence, and have singh removed as leader.

what's happening right now, where there are two entities moving in different directions, is not within the parliamentary tradition of canada. there's no way to describe this than watching the party implode and collapse.

somebody needs to take charge. either singh has control of the party and can get a seat from a backbencher, or he does not have the confidence of the party, and should be removed from the leadership.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/grenier-singh-seats-1.4477621

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

ah, good old ralph.

ralph's a good guy. that good old ralph. there should have been a good guy ralph meme, really.

if it's all up to ralph, it'll probably turn out ok - eventually, after he steers it through a dozen obstacles. but, i don't know how much of this is actually up to ralph. if it's up to anybody, i guess it's up to ralph.

this is the kind of thing that the old liberal party, of which ralph is a fading representative, would actually do right. these are the people that wrote our constitution, remember - and our constitution is what got this legalized in the first place. they're actually pretty good at writing laws. this is why i'm able to stand so far on the left and still retain a confidence in the liberal party: they really are good at writing fair laws.

so, when he tells you to be patient, maybe you actually should be. not idle, but patient.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/liberal-marijuana-pardon-legal-1.4484496

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

back in 2001, and bleeding into about 2003, i wrote a number of tracks into a scorewriter with the explicit intent of eventually having them performed by live ensembles. at the beginning of 2014, i decided that this wasn't likely to ever actually happen and went about completing the tracks in finalized forms - which happened over 2014 and 2015.

my initial plan for this compilation was to produce a record of midi compositions mapped to modern vst instruments as a "chiptune" (not literally) project, and have it double a record of fully realized versions of the tracks. as i went about completing the project, i began to realize that these vst versions were not sufficiently different enough from the finalized versions to justify a separate album and consequently aborted the project.

however, something that's happened since 2001 is that a more mature market has developed for midi-generated music, largely on the back of the success of the gaming industry. people have nostalgia for the sounds that their childhood gaming consoles made and an interest in listening to original music in the style of the soundtracks to those games.

i need to be clear that these are not gaming soundtracks - they're a mix of various types of classical and jazz, taking in influences from across the musical spectrum but essentially none from gaming. gaming isn't a thing i've ever really done, and the little bit i've done has tended to act as an excuse for listening to music (i had a mild civ2 obsession in early high school).

however, i feel that compiling a record of soundblaster mixes is something that could appeal to a specialized, niche audience and am going to put this record together for those people. i also feel it captures the headspace that i was in at the time. i've decided to mirror this soundblaster disc with the vst disc i was initially contemplating, to demonstrate where the technology has arrived at.

all of these tracks also appear on a set of cross-listed singles, and most of them are sequenced into a record at some point. there's more info on the track pages.

i've included the raw midi files in the download for further listening and modification.

these tracks were written from 2001 to 2003 and in some cases rearranged over the course of 2014 and 2015. all disc 1 tracks rendered through a soundblaster live! device that was manufactured c.1999. all disc 2 tracks created in cubase with vst software synthesizer technology. the compilation date is may 14, 2015. disc finalized as lp019 on jan 13, 2018. as always, please use headphones.

his release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2001, 2002, 2003, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018). 

credits

released April 29, 2003

j - controller inputs, programming, composition, digital wave editing, effects processing, production

the various rendered electronic orchestras include acoustic bass, synth bass, electric bass, flute, clarinet, brass, trumpet, trombone, tuba, soprano saxophone, orchestra hit, violin, cello, string section (tremolo), drum machine, electronic drum kit, hand drums, finger snaps, nylon guitar, electric guitar (distorted, clean), steel string acoustic guitar, fret noise, sitar, banjo, pc card clavinet, music box, piano, organ, bells, synthesizers, mellotron and choir. 

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i'm actually not sure how i find myself in this position, here, at 2:00 in the morning.

i needed to detox today, but it manifested itself as typing in bed. i slept most of the day, not up until the afternoon. i wanted to clean, but cleaning means vacuuming and i don't know my neighbours well enough to hate them enough to vacuum at 2:00 am on a saturday morning. no, i'd rather at least wake them up at 8:00.

but, i'm not even convinced i can do that. i kind of feel like all i should be doing right now is sweating and typing, until i'm able to finish the plate of spaghetti i've been working on for four days, now.

what's the probability that i can get done through to inri074 tonight? well, let me give it a shot, right? it's just typing....

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

how old am i today?

i don't even plan to put on underwear at any point in the next 24 hours.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

ok: i might change my mind, one day. but, if i ever do, i won't publish anywhere but online, because i don't want to get out of bed to do it.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i like analyzing things, but i have absolutely no interest in writing papers for publication, whatsoever. it would probably involve putting on clothes and meeting with people, and that's the part i don't like about it. so, i'll do this: somebody should, somebody should...

why don't i do it?

because i'm a musician. that's what i publish. that's my legacy. some other people can be mathematicians, if they want to be. i don't want to be....

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

this isn't really news, it's just "doing the math" on something understood, with one exception: these timescales point to natural factors underlying these wide fluctuations, and demonstrate that the fluctuations we're experiencing right now are not in any way unprecedented.

that upholds lockwood over francis. but, that was already clear.

is there a dialectic in francis v lockwood? there might be. except that the reason she's getting so much push back from the academic world is that the physics underlying the idea is very strange. what she wants you to believe is that the heat propagates from the ocean into the upper atmosphere in the form of a wave, and then falls off somewhere else, in tact. that's really the perfect example of something that you can demonstrate the math of, but that is in the realm of imaginary physics. most of what she's demonstrated or suggested using these mathematical models has not been detected by actual experiments, and most physicists are beyond skeptical of the claims.

but, this isn't new. it's been happening for centuries. and, so one needs a more naturalistic explanation than climate change to explain it in it's entirety, going back to the maunder minimum.

(edit: actually, i need to be a little bit more careful about this. what i said ought to be correct, except that she very conveniently cut the tree ring dates off around 1725. saying there is increased fluctuations in the latter half of the twentieth century does not imply warming as the mechanism, as that is the same period that the sun decreased in output - that is why we needed a theory of global warming in the first place: we had global warming and decreasing solar activity, requiring us to look for an alternate cause of the warming. so, in order for this research to have any meaningful input into the lockwood v francis debate, she'd have had to construct the records back before 1725, to include the last period of low sunspot activity. that should have been the actual point of this. but, the truth is that comparable records already exist, so this convenient oversight is of little consequence - we should expect somebody or other to reconstruct the same wavy jetstream over the 1600s that we're seeing today, because we've already done that research, and we already know that that was the case.

i don't know why she picked 1725. she might not be aware of lockwood's work, as lockwood is a solar scientist. so, she might not have realized the importance of presenting the data from the 17th century. she may have consequently misinterpreted the importance of doing this work as a distraction, and avoided it.

somebody should fill in the holes rather quickly and demonstrate the point: not only is the waviness not unprecedented, but it was even more intense during the maunder minimum, demonstrating the (already well known, amongst solar scientists) correlation between solar intensity and jet stream waviness.)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02699-3

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

"I use those words advisably. I understand how powerful they are. But I cannot believe that in the history of the White House and in that Oval Office, any president has ever spoken the words that I personally heard our president speak yesterday." - dick durbin, the high-ranking democrat from illinois who clearly doesn't know a whole lot about lbj.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

"why doesn't anybody from norway want to emigrate to the united states, anyways? huh?" - the president of the united states of america.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

if you feel so strongly about it, i would like you to pen a 5000 word essay explaining why neither central america nor africa (or pick one. but the word count won't change.) are shitholes.

i could easily enough see myself describing a country like el salvador as a shithole. but, the president answered his own question, didn't he?

"why do they leave those shitholes and come here, anyways?"

i mean, does he have to ask the question? it's like asking why you bother to wipe your ass. it's just going to get dirty again, right?

yeesh.

when are the democrats going to stop calling the president names and make some substantive policy proposals?

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

it's not the government that is imposing these values, it's the supreme court, by interpreting the constitution.

i'm not a taxpayer. but, if i was one, i would not want my tax money to fund any kind of religious operations at all. whatsoever.

however, i suspect that government is not cutting funding to religious groups in a wide enough or systemic enough manner to be consistent with the appropriate constitutional rulings. i would hope that this changes in the upcoming years.

for example, the government should not be funding arts projects if they have religious undertones, or promote religious messaging. there should not be funding for mosques or churches, who should also pay taxes. and, i would like to see the provincial government abolish all funding for religious schools, including the end of the catholic school system.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/scheer-summer-grant-jobs-abortion-1.4484588

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

well, ok.

maybe she doesn't like google...hey, she wouldn't be the first person i've heard of that doesn't like google. toss a dart in crowd, right? i'm not exactly the biggest fan, myself.

i found this:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318287618_Why_Are_Arctic_Linkages_to_Extreme_Weather_Still_Up_in_the_Air

a couple of thousand citations.  it's certainly lagging far behind.

but, this is a recent publication, where she actually acknowledges that her work is not widely accepted:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318287618_Why_Are_Arctic_Linkages_to_Extreme_Weather_Still_Up_in_the_Air

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

people, listen.

this is mike lockwood's google scholar page. he's frequently cited. quite respected. and, the paper in question is the most cited, too.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=8280hQ0AAAAJ

if jennifer francis even has a google scholar page, i can't find it. she does not appear to be frequently cited at all.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

i didn't really have any experience with it before, but from what i can see in front of me on my bills, the problem with electricity costs in ontario is not the government, it's the private sector - and the solution is a bigger role for government, and a smaller one for the private sector. what i'm seeing is confirming all of the scary predictions that opponents to privatization brought up during the catastrophic mike harris regime. we should be taking actions to undo this, not carrying on with it.

my second bill, which is going to be more like what an actual bill looks like, is going to look something like this:

usage:  178 kwh (this is maybe a little higher than average, because i'm still adjusting to things)
cost of electricity: $13.84

i wouldn't have much to complain about if my bill was less than $15. i'm doing my part, here: i'm being responsible with my usage. and, the state is rewarding me with a reasonable price. so, what's the problem?

well, then the private monopoly steps in...

delivery charges: $24.12.

(and, you can hear them slap the bill down on the counter while they say it, with a bit of a hellish laugh.)

so, i'm paying the company twice the cost of my electrical usage, as a fee for the privilege to do business with them, as the only option in town. this is preposterous, but i'm paying the company, here, not the government - the government can't order them not to do this, but has actually offered a rebate system to offset it, if you're poor (and i am).

this is the largest component of the bill, by far. and, it simply shouldn't exist at all. thankfully, my $68 rebate should make the bill go away altogether, once it gets applied in full. so, what is happening here, in fact, is that the government is stepping in to reverse the price gouging being done by these private companies.

so, how do you fix this?

well, it doesn't make sense to have competing energy companies; you'll need a monopoly on the lines, anyway. it never makes sense to lay two paths between two endpoints and then force people to compete over which is cheaper; just use some graph theory to find the shortest route, and then pile bridges on top of each other, if you must. electricity lines should be publicly owned for the same reason that roads, cable lines and telephone lines should be. and, then, what you're doing is putting up a front to the line monopoly; there's not an actual choice, there, but merely the illusion of one. these front companies for the line monopoly would not choose to compete with each other, anyways, because competition would be damaging both to each other and to the line monopoly. so, the actual reality of such a thing would be that you could choose which company logo you like the best, while they all offer the same thing. and, if you think this is an exaggeration, let me direct you to the cable internet line monopoly in ontario, where what i'm describing is the actual state of affairs on the ground. there's a dozen different companies that all want to sell you exactly the same thing.

the only difference between a line monopoly and a total monopoly is that a line monopoly creates superfluous jobs in management...

but, would a government charge such an exorbitant fee for delivery? well, it's not entirely clear why there ought to be a delivery charge at all. and, i think a government would actually fold pretty quickly under public pressure, whereas a private entity like enwin will just tell us all to eat cake.

the solution is that we need to retake public ownership of our electricity generation in this province, and stop these private companies from profiting off of what should be a resource held in common.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i'm by no means an expert on oprah, but i'm not sure that her politics are as unclear as briahna is suggesting. she was on tv everyday for 25 years, often discussing politicized issues, and i've seen enough of it to come away with the impression that she's rather obviously very conservative, even if i have to use the term "conservative" in a british or canadian context to get the point across. it's kind of annoying that there aren't any actual tories in the united states, because it makes it kind of useless to identify them. americans don't understand what that means. and, historically, the democrats were always the conservative party, anyways. 

i would suspect that there are millions of people alive that are over the age of 40 and actually have a pretty good grasp on what her politics are, merely by watching her show every day for decades. it actually probably wouldn't be very hard to find quotes from her where she frames things in certain ways that explain what she's thinking. but, what i remember from watching her show (mostly in the 90s and early 00s...) is that she used exceedingly judgemental body language incredibly often, and that she quite frequently quite blatantly looked down upon just about anybody that deviated from those obvious conservative values. the projection was always something like "how'd i get stuck with this job where i'm dealing with freaks all day?" kind of thing.

and, it's kind of differentiating. because, these people basically all did the same thing, but approached it from a different angle. jerry springer wanted to broadcast comedy; his show was a joke. phil donahue seemed legitimately empathetic, although he may have been a faker. of the bunch, geraldo is the one that seemed most interested in systemic inequality, and getting to root causes.

what oprah always projected was "i don't want to be here. get me away from these losers.". and, it really did project a deep social conservatism.

but, the united states doesn't have a liberal/conservative spectrum. it has a black/white spectrum. and, demographics as they are, the black party is going to have to have a conservative streak.

my suggested tactic: let oprah run, abandon the democrats and vote for a third party.

i mean, i just spent a few minutes on google and found out that:

1) oprah has publicly stated that she has often voted republican, in the past.

2) oprah supported the 2003 iraq war. this is especially notable because she did a lot of shows about it. that is, this is informed support for the 2003 iraq war; she knew what she was doing.

3) oprah opposes the estate tax (for obvious reasons.).

this is toxic to the voting base that the democrats need to win elections with. but, it's probably both a necessary and an inevitable path for the democrats to walk down...

so, i'm just coming out of an extended christmas break, and i'm going to be a little bit mentally wander-y for a bit, still. i lost the last few days to distractions, really...

what are my tasks this weekend and into next week and for the rest of the season?

1) i need to finish cleaning in here. this is still move-in cleaning. i had to wait for the isp guy, and then the maintenance guy. floors, especially. so, i'm going to take a few days to do this.
2) i wanted to finish period 2, first, but not now. now, i want to clean first so i can get to the next batch of writing in bed. what's left is just the cover art for inri070-inri074, and i've already shipped inri071, inri072 & inri074. cleaning won't be too long and this will be quick...
3) i'm going to need to go back and finish the outline for period 1. this is the third winter in a row i've tried to do this. i have to actually do it, this time. this will include catching up to the alter-reality. and, once the structure exists, i should be able to carry forward with it. and, i might as well set up the structure for period 2, too.
4) i'll have to do a lot of fixing of things before i'm able to get to period 3. i have a stack of broken and disassembled technology that needs attention. so, there will be an extended studio set-up phase that will also include things like buying bookshelves. basically, this is getting back to what i was doing in the summer, pushing back into the spring. part of that will be catching up on the vlogging, although that will also be a part of building the period 1 disc.
5) notwithstanding any further problems, i should finally be able to start period 3 by summer, hopefully.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

deathtokoalas

the idea here is real, but what you're doing is some kind of inverted conservative confirmation bias: you're affirming the effects of the tory media, which claims it is effective, but which all evidence suggests otherwise.

the fact is that the conservative base in ontario has been eroding for decades and there is no sign that this is reversing. they've tried everything. the right is so dead in ontario, that they've actually spent large amounts of time in the recent past trying to get ethnic minorities to vote for them. it's a movement in irreversible decline that is tied almost entirely to the older generation. and, they've just given up on even being conservatives; the most recent incarnation of the conservative party in ontario is really further left than the democratic party, because it's realizing that it has to be in order to be competitive.

the conservatives might win the next election. but, if they do, the popular vote is going to look something like:

conservatives - 35%

liberals - 33%

ndp - 30%

the reason for this is that the only actual swing demographic in ontario is between the liberals and the ndp. there used to be a larger swing between the liberals and the old pcs, but that has been slowly collapsing since the mid 90s, to the point that it's negligible. what's left of the conservative base just simply does not vote liberal, ever - and would vote for hitler if he wore a blue sweater-vest.

i mean, you could look at the data in the end and find evidence that the there was a 3% swing from the liberals to the conservatives and say "see!". but, if you do that, i'll show you that there was also a 3% swing from the conservatives to the liberals. you could make the argument, sure. but, what you're missing is the 10% swing from the liberals to the ndp that actually decided the election.

the people that are being "tricked" by the media are really the same people that always vote conservative, and they're just looking for an excuse to be a conservative. it's the party faithful. they're not in play.

personally, i think the liberals have a pretty good chance of surviving because i don't see that swing to the ndp materializing at this time - but that if that happens then wynne needs to be putting her successor in motion, immediately.

----

jim

To counter your argument, I'm pretty sure there is data that shows that when minimum wage is increased, number of hours worked decreases. Maybe the total job number doesn't go down or actually goes up, but the hours worked per person usually goes down. Maybe it's just in the short term, though, idk.

deathtokoalas

the number of hours that a manager needs to staff is determined by demand, not by costs. 

here's the thing: if you're working minimum wage then your boss is already minimizing your hours because they only want you there when they need you there, in the first place. if they were to lay you off, they'd be short-staffed, and if they could deal with being short-staffed, they would be. the reason that the minimum wage worker is working in the first place is that the employer needs them there.

if minimum wage increases are going to have any effect at all, they should be to increase demand, which would, if anything, increase the number of staff that is required to meet the demand. 

since reagan, conservative economics have been nothing short of incoherent; david is being empirical here, and that's good, but the idea that a tactic designed to increase demand will lead to job losses doesn't actually make any sense.

if there are any counter-examples, they would have to be very industry-specific. really, any job losses from minimum wage hikes would have to be ultimately tied to automation, and in the rare situations where production is so ramped up that costs are not determined by demand. these are going to be mostly unionized, require some skill and probably not be at the minimum wage to begin with.

one of the things that david points out here is that, as it is, more than 50% of workers are working less than 40 hours. these missing hours are the hours that an employer might cut due to a wage increase, but they can't be cut, because they've already been cut as a process of profit maximization. trust me: companies like mcdonalds and walmart are already doing everything they can to minimize labour costs. there's nothing left to cut. and, if some brilliant accountant could find something to cut without affecting profitability, it would be cut, regardless.

jim

That's a pretty good point. I guess just so long as the increase in cost of living lags behind your increase in minimum wage, the lowest earners should be fine.

deathtokoalas

actually, it's tied to inflation, too. yearly. so, if we get 20% inflation as a result of this, they'll have to boost the wages by another 20%, next year. some businesses might get away with this, if they're not contributing to the cpi. but, the cpi is constructed to focus on the things that real people have to actually deal with...

social assistance is also tied to inflation. so, if the grocery store, for example, reacts to this by inflating prices, the people that really need it will get increases, too. and, if rentiers want to raise the rent, everybody gets paid more, too.

so, if there's going to be an issue with this in ontario, it's going to be this: when wages and inflation get caught in this upwards spiral. and that is what i like about this policy: we've found a way to convert the race to the bottom into a race to the top.

i wouldn't expect this to actually play out. there's little appetite for it, from what i can see. most businesses will probably realize the benefit of the policy to increase demand, in the end. the real potential problem is from rentiers, and that tactic would be ultimately self-defeating for them - they're better off lobbying.

supernuts060

"Minimum wage" was used to keep black people out of the of the job market after slavery, because they would do the same work for a lower wage. 

Now it will be used against people with no experience (teens), old people, disabled people and new immigrants who don't yet speak fluent English. 

For $15/h employers will expect the a VERY productive worker.

deathtokoalas

i would like to counter your point, but what you just typed makes absolutely no sense at all.

supernuts060

Minimum wage laws effects low skill workers. Employers simply scrape off the top. If they have to pay $14 or $15.. They will only hire the most productive workers. Which will likely exclude people without experience.

deathtokoalas

well, that depends on the demand for workers, doesn't it?

if these managers had the choice, everybody on the floor would have experience, as it is. but, sometimes you get short-staffed and have to hire somebody else, or risk losing business because you can't find enough qualified staff.

this has nothing to do with the cost of labour, and the cost of labour has no effect on decisions being made in this regard, either.

i mean, what are you suggesting here? that you think employers are more likely to hire unqualified workers over qualified ones, if both are available?

they cost the same price. so, why would a manager hire an inexperienced worker if an experienced one exists to hire, instead?

when inexperienced workers are hired, and nepotism is not the reason, there is only ever one explanation, and that is that experienced workers are not available in some way - perhaps at all, or perhaps in the precise capacity that is needed.

if an experienced worker exists and applies, they will get that job 100% of the time, anyways.

supernuts060

Well if workers could negotiate their own contract that would best, for example.

"Hello Ms. Jessica, I am a high school student looking for experience, I understand you pay your experienced workers $15. I am more interested in earning work experience can we make a deal for $7.50/h?"

 

Now you as the business owner can still pay your more valuable employees $15/h but you can also have 2 inexperienced workers for the price of 1. The employees should be able to prove their value to the employer. Some businesses have tasks which are not deserving of $15/h, and low skill employees should be allowed to work for any amount of money they choose.

I think it is better than that a motivated high school student can work for $5/h and get some experience, rather than not get a job at all, because an employers cannot legally pay them less than $15.

deathtokoalas

ahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

*breath*.

AHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

ok.

so, to begin with, student wages are actually a little lower, here. that is, kids under 18, which you don't want to give any kind of responsibility at all and only want to hire at part time hours, anyways. you can't run a business this way....

but i am adamantly opposed to any suggestion that children should try to undercut their parents for lower wages, and you should really be ashamed of yourself for promoting that kind of anti-social behaviour.

to put it another way: i don't care if teenagers have a harder time finding a job as a consequence of this policy.

...but your argument is ridiculously weak, to begin with. it's not likely to have any substantive or measurable change in teen employment.

workers are not in competition with each other for jobs or lower wages, they are in solidarity with each other against the upper class. and, in my mind, such a kid should be taken behind the shed, in the first place.

supernuts060

Not ashamed, if right out of high school you are competing for your parents minimum wage job, your parents obviously have no skills and should not have had kids. NOBODY is supposed to have a family on minimum wage. Trying to support a family on minimum wage is antisocial, and disrespectful to your children, shame on you.

I have been in competition with other workers, and so is my wife. We are compensated for our efforts to grow the employers business, we are not in solidarity with anyone but our own family. I respect people enough to allow them to make their own decisions, if they don't want to compete with me for a job, they do not have to. However i feel that not competing will have negative consequences on their life. The people who compete will not be making minimum wage for their entire life. The people who don't compete, will probably try to get the government to force their employer to artificially give them wages that they did not earn.

deathtokoalas

see, this is a very strange change in the mindset of conservatives, who have historically argued that the lower classes need to have many, many children in order to ensure that there is a sufficiently large enough pool of slave labour, including military labour, for them to draw upon. can you imagine the catholic church arguing in favour of contraception? but, perhaps you've just been caught in your own circular logic.

but, i'm not about to listen to a lecture in morality from what appears to be a scab. and, i'll reiterate what ought to be done to scabs when they're identified: picked off and thrown away.

supernuts060

I am not a conservative, I do not believe there is anything about our society worth conserving. I am simply Pro-Freedom, and government legislation on wages and business is oppressive and anti-freedom. 

Singapore has the second highest millionaires per capita (%17.1) in the world, no minimum wage, little regulation.

Qatar also has little regulation and the most millionaires per capita(%17.5) and minimum wage is $200 per month (very low).

I am simply advocating that we follow countries who are boosting the most people into the wealthiest categories possible. 

Canada only has 1.14 million total millionaires. 

You are actually the Conservative one here, i do not want to conserve anything that Canada is doing.

deathtokoalas

see, again, the way you use language is entirely incoherent. you claim you are 'pro-freedom', and yet you are arguing for the abolition of collective bargaining rights, by pointing to policies that exist in deeply unfree countries. they'll kill you in qatar for being gay, but you think that they're more free because they have more millionaires? 

what is the size of the middle class in qatar or singapore?

you should be arguing that you're in favour of slavery, not that you're in favour of freedom, because that is the result of your proposals: a return to slavery.

and, that is what you are trying to conserve, as all conservatives are: the hierarchical class divisions that exist in contemporary society. which is what i'm trying to abolish...

but, would you prefer the term 'neo-liberal', supernuts?

i can be politically correct, if you'd like.

supernuts060

It isn't "bargaining" if the government says "you have to pay minimum $15/h".

You should look it up yourself the economic opportunity there is superior to Canada.

But here is singapore.

Unemployment rate %2.2.. less than half of Canada's

Average wage $4795.00 Singapore dollars a month (1 Sinapore dollar = $0.96 Canadian dollars) AND THEY PAY ALMOST NO TAX.

People in Singapore retire at 62. Many people in Canada cannot retire. 

Yes people in Singapore are very "enslaved".. LOL you are so silly. 

I don't care about Qatar's opinion on peoples sexuality, i am only interested in their economic approach.

Gay people can make a lot of money in Qatar, and then immigrate somewhere else. 

I actually don't have a label, because i choose to take the parts of groups that have demonstrated to work the best for the most of their citizens, and dispose of the ideas that bring people down. Not all ideas i agree with come from 1 specific group (liberal, conservative, ect.) or countries.

deathtokoalas

the collective bargaining agreement underlying the minimum wage is an abstraction of the social contract between governments and voters. and, averaging wages in a brutally stratified society is a stupid way to calculate the existence of a middle class - which does not exist in these countries.

supernuts060

"Collective"- does not represent voters, just loud activists. Only half of Canadians have full time jobs, now the cost of creating jobs is higher in a highly indebted economy.

You talk about "slavery". Most of Canada is already economically enslaved, whether its jobs, housing, education ect. 

Those "enslaved" countries Qatar and Singapore you have a %17 chance of becoming very wealthy. In Canada it's a %50 chance you will be lucky to even have a full time job. 

No where is perfect, its better to be able to make $70 a day than $0 day. 

Minimum wage means you make $15/h or nothing. I am not as cruel as you, and i say the poor people of this country should be allowed to make a little something rather than nothing.

deathtokoalas

well, voters have a responsibility to speak up if they want to be heard, as well. that is also a part of the social contract. but, the changes are more popular than you're suggesting - it's not as though a small percentage of people rammed through unpopular changes. these came out of a popular struggle. conversely, it actually was a small number of people that pushed through the reversal of collective bargaining in places like wisconsin, against popular support for it.

you have a tendency to type nonsense that requires a lot of words to unravel. but, it's ultimately nonsense. and, i'm not interested in continuing this conversation, as a result of it.

 

isailwind

Raising minimum wage to 15 is moronic. Bottom line is if it goes up $4 then everyone else is going to want a $4 raise plain and simple.  Goods and services will cost more, there will be no gain.

supernuts060

isailwind,  Yea, sadly, we have elected leaders who dont know anything about how a bussiness works. Soon we will have 10$ cups of coffee because the person pouring it demands $20\H.

deathtokoalas

again: ontario's minimum wage is set to inflation. so, if you increase the cost of items, what happens is that you contribute to a ratio we call the inflation rate. normal inflation is around 2%, so minimum wage earners receive around a 2% raise every year. if inflation goes up to 5% or 6% or higher due to price increases from the wage increases, businesses will merely have to raise wages by 5% or 6% again the next year. this is a very strong disincentive for owners to raise prices.

supernuts060

NO, you really don't know what you are talking about. Businesses are not going to take the hit. They operate to make a profit, if workers don't give them a profit they close up shop and go to a place where it is more profitable to operate. Simple as that. The thing about rich people is that they create jobs, if we charge them more to operate, they take their business elsewhere, because they can afford it. The poor Canadians who need those jobs can't afford to just pack up and leave. Which is exactly why Singapore is getting a lot of business investment and jobs, they make it profitable to operate. 

Business owners will take the path of least resistance, $14/15 minimum wage is a big hurdle.

California raised minimum wage as well and lost alot of jobs.  Im glad i dont live in Ontario. Nobody with money will invest there because the people there will use the government to steal from them, instead of providing value to an employer for a fair price.

isailwind

If you're going from 11 to 15 a typical mc donalds will have to come up with another 250,000 a year, just to cover wages. It's ridiculous.

deathtokoalas

it's a significant redistribution of wealth. but, the laws are designed to force the business owners to absorb the costs, one way or the other. and the thing is that this approach was chosen because studies done on the way the economy is structured right now indicate that the vast majority of these low wage jobs are not in small businesses, but either in large conglomerates or in franchised outlets - the businesses can afford to restructure this way, which is why they're being forced to.

capitalism is, indeed, about profit generation, and profit maximization. businesses don't operate for the benefit of their employees. so, when the statistics come back at us and say that a disproportionate amount of profits are going to business owners, rather than to workers, we should not be surprised - that is the inevitable direction of unregulated capitalism. but, this cannot sustain itself, as the tendency to push the working poor into poverty is a primary cause of the cyclical downturns in capitalism; when workers don't have money to spend, the economy goes into recession. so, in order to stop capitalism from collapsing in on itself, it itself requires a system of regulation to ensure that incomes do not fall too low. self-regulation, in this instance, is contradictory to short term profits, and because the firm is a psychopath, it cannot operate under a long term strategy - it must be ordered to redistribute, when the statistics deem it necessary to do so.

some businesses will not be able to adapt and will close. they will be replaced by competitors with better business models that will absorb what demand exists for their products, and those competitors will create jobs to replace the ones that are lost. i have little empathy for business owners that want to blame the unsustainability of their poor management practices on government interference.

supernuts060

Why would companies want to compete in an area where self entitled people will get the government to force a minimum wage, "I have a million dollars to invest in a community, i am going to invest in a place where my investment will grow the least" said NOBODY EVER. Do you have empathy for workers who lose their job and no new companies fill in the lost positions?  Which is exactly what happened in California, nobody want to invest there.

I understand you think redistribution of wealth make the poor richer.. But China was cracking down on wealth, and now look and our housing market, it is full of chinese money, BECAUSE PEOPLE WITH MONEY LEAVE WHEN THE GOVERNMENT TRIES TO TAKE IT FROM THEM. The only people who get screwed are the poor Chinese who's economy just had billions of dollars leave.

deathtokoalas

jobs are not created by investment from rich people, they're created by demand from poor people.

supernuts060

LMAO!! If that was at all true, why would there be such thing as an "unemployment rate"???? 

You make no sense. Why is it that poor countries with the least wealth have the least amount of people working??? These countries have a huge demand of poor people, but no jobs.

deathtokoalas

the reason that the captured state, and america is an example of this, would seek to decrease employment levels is to reduce wages. the higher the unemployment rate, the lower wages can be depressed. and, they don't care about the longer term implications, because they're fundamentally sociopathic in nature. you are correct in a certain sense - capitalism is a fundamentally irrational system.

but, to be clear, when i stated that jobs are created by demand, what i meant was in countries that are in the advanced stages of late capitalism, as that was the context. that includes the united states and canada, but wouldn't include a country like india or china, where the unemployment is a combination of poor infrastructure and overpopulation (and, in the case of china, employment is very controlled by the state). these comparisons across states are dubious, in much of any way. when you get to the kind of overpopulation you see in asia,  there's just not enough work to be done. and, that is a problem because, unlike in advanced countries, the infrastructure doesn't yet exist to compensate for it. we'll see what china ultimately does about this, as it continues to move towards a more advanced stage of capitalism.

but, it doesn't matter what you're investing in, ultimately somebody needs to buy it in order for jobs to exist. spending billions on solar cars is just a waste of money if the demand for them fails to materialize. and, in order for the system to be sustainable, that demand needs to come from the lower segments of society. america used to understand this quite well, back when it was actually in a more advanced stage of capitalism than it is now (america has gone backwards since the 80s....), called fordism.

so, i think i need to clarify my point a little, because i know i'm confusing people, who are not used to dialectical reasoning and just see me as supporting the "enemy" in my position. i'm really not.

what i'm doing is looking at as much of the science that i can and trying to come to a balanced deduction. it's not really dialectical, but it seems that way because the narrative has been set up as opposing viewpoints, when it shouldn't be - it should be set up as collaborative understanding. this is what happens when you politicize science, you break it. by asserting a dialectic, i'm trying to break through the ideology and get back to the science of the thing. and, i don't actually feel that i'm explaining myself to scientists, who understand this, but to non-scientists who have politicized the situation and identified an enemy to attack.

scientists make shitty political activists.

so, there's a 97%, 98%, 99% - an overwhelming - majority consensus amongst climate scientists on the reality of climate change. i'm not a climate scientist, i'm just a nerd with a math degree, but i do share in that consensus for two reasons: (1) deferring to experts and (2) based on my less than limited ability to understand the science, it seems to add up in my mind. but, what does that mean?

the consensus on climate change has two components:

(1) the cause of the warming experienced in the past was created by human activity,
(2) notwithstanding some alteration in the system, current trends suggest the warming will continue. that implies "if action is not taken". it also implies "if external factors do not change". it even implies "if internal factors are not changed".

now, external factors are always changing, because we live on a rock that is affected by everything else in the universe. we can't build a model with infinite inputs. we're going to have to discard things in the model. but, the model of the universe is not the universe itself (sorry, positivists). so, there are going to be factors we overlook. and, that's ok, it's always a work in progress.

now, if a gnome coughs in the alpha centauri system, we're justified in ignoring that in the model. but, if the sun decreases it's output by a factor that we can measure, we're not. we're really not. we have to understand this. and, this is most definitely an external factor that can change and alter the outcome.

the consensus on global warming is not a fatalist death sentence, it's an extrapolation of the data, followed by a predictive model. the point is that we have to stop it, right? it's alterable. but, the earth is not a closed system. and, there's lots of things on the earth, even, that could have an effect, as well. some plate could fall off, and produce enough volcanic ash to fuck the whole thing up. we could go into nuclear winter. even the dirty coal being burned in asia is measurable.

so, by suggesting that external factors may have the ability to offset global warming - even if it's only in the northern hemisphere, near the jet stream - i'm not contradicting any kind of consensus. i agree that human activity caused the warming we've already experienced and that, notwithstanding some alteration in the system, things are going to heat up. what i'm saying is that something is changing in the system, and understanding what's going to happen relies on a better understanding of that change - and of any other changes we can uncover, moving forwards.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard