listen. i'm not afraid to state what i think about this, and it's that every skyscraper on this continent should be taken into common ownership, administered by co-operatives of the people that live in them and operated at cost, to the point that any year-over-year surpluses should be redistributed to the tenants.

as a society, we should have absolutely no tolerance for the premise of profiteering from housing - just as we have no tolerance for profiteering from health care.

it's just not something that a market should exist in; it's something that should be seen as a right.

i don't expect to hear anybody start talking about abolishing the rentier class.

but, i think it's a valid question to ask: why should anybody profit off of charging somebody rent in the first place? what justification is there for this?

until we grapple with this fundamental question, we're going to have issues with poverty on both sides of the border.

they get to the point close to the end, which is that these bills are really just a subsidy to landowners, and are in the end just going to inflate the rent. then, under the guise of "targeted tax breaks", they essentially impose a values test on who is eligible for the tax breaks. families get the money, single people (and queer people, who are often the ones that need it the most) don't.

this issue has really been studied to death, and it's well understood that the most efficient approach is to just go with a gai or negative income tax, and get rid of the bureaucracy. this both saves money on administration (and the deadweight cost on this is that you're going to end up forking out billions in salaries and benefits to unionized social workers - if you want to be fiscally conservative about it) and cuts out these values tests that just end up as coercive means to enforce socially conservative value systems on the poor - to essentially restrict access to the poor people you like, while kicking the poor people you don't like out on the street. but, even a gai has to deal with inflation at some point, and aim pretty low to avoid being a tax cut for property owners.

you can't really put band aids over the fundamental relationship of property being theft. a society that upholds property as a right is going to have masses of impoverished people in it as a necessary corollary - these things are intrinsically connected, and it can't be undone without addressing the actual point. you can throw money at the poor all day, if you're not addressing the property imbalance, you're not solving anything. there are historical solutions around the idea of government housing, which actually address the issue by socializing property, but nobody wants to walk down that path, as it is in contradiction to the prevailing ideology of the washington consensus.

but, vox missed the point on purpose.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/30/18183769/democrat-poverty-plans-2020-presidential-kamala-harris-booker-gillibrand

and, warren does not support single-payer. at all.

you don't have to ask her, directly. it's clear from where she stands in the spectrum as a pro-market moderate conservative.

you would expect warren to support legislation that breaks up the big insurance companies and forces them to compete on an open market, not a system that monopolizes insurance. 

https://slate.com/business/2019/01/elizabeth-warren-dodges-kamala-harris-medicare-for-all-question.html

see, this is a smoke and mirrors campaign - we don't know where she stands on this.

i said i was open to listening, and what i'm hearing is mixed signals.

can we not find a candidate with a reasonable age that has some conviction on this?

https://slate.com/business/2019/01/single-payer-health-care-kamala-harris-democrats-2020-medicare-for-all.html

what booker and harris face is a classic prisoner's dilemma - they will destroy each other if they don't run with each other. but, the idea of forming a ticket before iowa is pretty unheard of.

it is up to the left to realize that and take advantage of it.

there are still arms treaties left to withdraw from?

all of these systems should be completely shut down - i oppose all of it, across the board. but, these treaties aren't worth the paper they're written on. and, the anti-war movement has been slacking, in the face of a an islamicist uprising that had to be annihilated.

i usually side with the anti-war side (the caveat being that fascism cannot be tolerated, in any form, christian or muslim), but i'm not an idealist, i'm a realist. and the reality is that we may have to get back to a more dangerous type of mutually assured destruction before we can rebuild popular support for disarmament.

so, i'd rather the americans stop pulling out of these treaties. but, i'm not naive enough to think they follow them, anyways.

there's nothing that a kamala harris or a cory booker can do to squeeze out of this, either. if you're kamala harris, you have to sweep the south - that's how you win. so, you have to beat cory booker. and vice versa.

what i'm getting across is solely a tactical consideration. the south is a problem for the left, because they skew towards conservative value systems. and, i'm just being realistic about something that the field won't openly talk about; the tactic for decades has been that you do your pilgrimage through the black churches, gnash your teeth at the social conservatism and gun culture, and hope it works out - all the while trying to avoid saying something that's going to make you sound like a hypocrite to your base of urban liberals.

this has not helped the left achieve it's goals. it has not helped the democratic party. and, it has not helped the united states of america.

the ideal would be to leave the south behind, but you can't. except, now you can.

most of these states are not going to be in play in the general. there's no broader value in winning the south in the primary; it's just a distraction from the more important battle ground states in the midwest.

if you can get the centrist candidates into a protracted fight in the south, that just frees up resources to fight in the midwest. and, as i say - if they're black, they can't avoid that. to them, this is the only strategy they have, and they know it.

the left needs to know that the only strategy it has is to abandon the south, and the only way it can do that is to split the vote. so, it should count it's blessings and get out of the way....

i will reiterate this statement: it is beneficial to the left to have harris and booker running against each other in the deep south, as it will prevent either of them from running up the score in states like georgia. the tactic should be to let them destroy each other. and, in fact this is the only possible tactic that doesn't end with another corporatist democrat.

this is fortuitous - it's good luck. and, a few more strong black, centrist candidates can only help split the southern vote up even more, to the left's benefit - in fact, to the left's requirement if it wants to actually win the primary.

necessary conditions are in place. we should be excited about this.

but, now we need to find a candidate - and the candidate should be under 75 years old, which is not much of a request, is it?

i want to see this candidate be openly atheist. it's time. the demographics are finally here for a strong, youth-driven atheist movement on the left.

good.

i have not been paying attention to concert schedules since around june, and i know i missed some stuff in the fall (i would have liked to see gang gang dance, but i think the rest was stuff i've seen in the last few years; that's something i'll have to backtrack on and figure out). i simply don't know what information the border cops have access to, but i don't think i should have any problems - that's something i'm trying to figure out. but, regardless, the weather since mid october has been prohibitive given the tunnel. even heading out for a $5 punk show would have required me to spend the night and come back in the morning.

if the weather clears up for mid february, and i get a proper response on my information request, i could maybe start being a little more social again relatively soon. 

there's just nothing to do in windsor, really. that one bar i used to go to sometimes has shifted out of an indie demographic and to a more ethnic one; math rock nights are out, soul groove nights are in. i'm not hating, i'm just not interested.

but, it's been a year since i've done anything, now. i'm sure i'll be eager to look around for concerts in the spring, one way or another. there will come a night when i just need to get out of the house...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/detroit-windsor-tunnel-reopens-after-more-than-a-year-1.5000468

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/winter-weather-montreal-1.4466896

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/when-vancouver-had-winter-1.3918910

this is a better article.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/cold-climate-change-1.4482497

Like most cold waves of the 1970s, temperatures in January dropped to extreme lows. Wind chills across the plains fell to between −70 and −80 °F (−56.7 and −62.2 °C).

that is a reference to 1978.

that doesn't happen anymore....

what the ipcc initially demonstrated was that the warming observed over the second half of the 20th century could not be associated with solar activity, because they were moving in opposite directions.

that is, the temperature was increasing, while the sun was weakening. so, we couldn't be getting warmer as a result of the sun because the sun was getting colder; it would then follow that we ought to be getting colder, if not for global warming. the second part of this is equally important, but it got largely dropped by the media.

so, missed in the media's take on this was that the correlation between the sun and the climate was actually quite robust up until the year 1900, and especially broke down after the year 1980. there's this oft-repeated line - even by publishing scientists - that the ipcc disproved any connection between the sun and the climate, which is anything but the actual truth; the report actually demonstrated a very strong connection between solar output and the climate up until 1980, and then demonstrated that there had been a break in the connection, which had to be caused by something else. after ruling everything else out, it then pointed to us as the last remaining culprit.

i mean, this is the fundamental breakthrough by the ipcc - that we were interfering with the sun. and, in order to establish that we were really interfering with the sun, that we're really to blame, you had to demonstrate the historical link, first. so, a big part of the study is proving the link between the sun and the weather, not debunking it.

so, the argument in the ipcc goes as follows:

1) the earth's climate is strongly correlated with the sun from antiquity up until the middle of the 20th century. and, much effort is put into demonstrating this, because it must be shown to be true to conclude that carbon emissions are altering the climate.
2) starting around 1980, the correlation breaks.
3) after ruling out many potential causes for the break in this correlation, the last remaining answer is carbon emissions.
4) therefore, anthropogenic climate change.

but, after demonstrating that the sun was the main driver of the earth's climate for the last 6 billion years, the ipcc then forgets about it.

meanwhile, the sun has been getting colder and colder since 1985 - while we've continued to get warmer and warmer.

well, sort of.

it is in fact absolutely necessary that we answer the following question: if the earth and the sun are moving in opposite directions since 1980 because of global warming, what rates of change are required to maintain or overturn the break?

because, you have to understand the following point: if we succeed in stabilizing the atmosphere, we will once again be at the mercy of the sun. and, if the sun has crashed, we're going to crash, too.

it's ultimately a rate game. if the sun cools fast enough, it will overpower the emissions; on the other hand, if emissions skyrocket, the sun's influence wanes. everybody is using statistics to try and figure this out, but it's actually a calculus problem - we're talking about optimizing rates of change, and figuring out how curves intersect with each other. and, if you want a good model, you have to take both factors into consideration, because that is what the ipcc proved - that, in the absence of carbon emissions, the sun dominates the climate.

what the studies i've seen predict is that expected emissions rates will dominantly overpower expected decreases in solar output - that global warming will win this fight. but, what that means is that the global mean temperature will continue to increase, not that regional variation will be eliminated.

we know how the vortex works. we know it's driven by the sun. and, there is little reason to expect that the historical pattern won't reassert itself, even if it's muted.

the last error that i'll point out is the idea that these blasts of cold air are creating an overall cooling effect. it may seem extreme, but that's just because we're not used to it. the truth is that these supposedly brutal winters over the last five years are still mild compared to historical solar minimums. if the thing you're trying to prove is why the winters are getting colder, your premise is wrong - because they aren't, and you can see that once you compare minima to minima. if you plot the average winter temperatures in a city like ottawa or windsor (or moscow) going back 100 years, what you get is an increasing wave function, and you can pull out the warming trend by drawing a line with positive slope (or increasing curve) through the troughs of the wave. at solar minimum, these expanded polar vortices used to be longer and more brutal than they are now.

i'm old enough that i remember the minimum in the 90s; i'm sure you can find somebody that remembers the 70s, at least. it's a 22 year cycle, not an 11 year one. our experience with this vortex is nothing compared to theirs. they'd get this for weeks.

so, we need to ask the opposite question: why don't we have long, cold winters like we used to?

and, in that sense i will concede a different point: the reason you think it's so damned cold is because of global warming.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/5/2/024001