Posts filed under “Uncategorized”

Happy organizing!

Your job won’t love you back, no matter what love you give it. But the people you work with will. Organizations know this, and the worst among them actively exploit the bonds between colleagues to extract more labour, correctly assuming that you’re more willing to tolerate bad work conditions to protect your friends. Luckily, the […]

Some things don’t change

From the Financial Times: Another point overlooked by liberal internationalists is one made by Keynes in the interwar period as he retreated from his earlier liberalism. He worried that economic interdependence could increase the scope for friction between countries, even to the point of provoking war. Interestingly, economic relations within the eurozone often resemble war […]

Progress in our ideas of progress

Way back in 2016, Ada Palmer wrote an essay on progress and historical change. It’s well worth reading in its entirety, but I especially wish more of my colleagues were familiar with the history of science and philosophy of Frances Bacon she describes in section two. Science has philosophy and history, and to be ignorant […]

Keep trying, and please watch Don’t Look Up

They do not die screaming in terror, nor have they lost faith in each other.2 It is a similar moral to Albert Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus”: the near-certainty of failure should not lead to resignation, but to even more determination. To end your life contentedly and without regrets, you need to know that you tried, […]

This is going to get ugly

I sure do wish Canada’s economy was more than fossil fuel zombies and a housing bubble. In February, a study of “the world’s least affordable housing markets” showed how Canada’s speculative bubble has made Toronto and Vancouver one of the world’s frontrunners when it comes to unaffordable housing. Using a scale in which a rating […]

American fascism

There’s a good article on American fascism in The Guardian this week. It’s not sensationalist, but it is frightening and sad. There’s a pandemic on that our governments continue to respond to in delayed and reactionary ways. There’s apparently no plan for actually dealing with covid which means the de facto plan is a dramatically […]

If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist, right?

Your Local Epidemiologist critiques a graph of daily covid case projections: I do disagree with this graph hitting 1 million cases. We don’t have the testing capacity to record this many cases. We will run out of tests, reagents, and plastic. Lab capacity is finite. We would hit a plateau in case reporting, while the […]