Not to be too pedantic, but “The Prince” was intended as a sincere operating manual for governing (not a satire in any way).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince
The shocking lack of morality in the book is what made it rather infamous. It was not a joke at all.
That’s not as big a problem as you’d think because they have those scooters at the supermarket. You can ask another shopper to reach stuff on the upper shelves for you.
Unlike the USA, Canada doesn’t have any legal countermeasures against monopoly, duopoly or oligopoly. In many areas of Canadian life, citizens choose between one or two companies for phones, 6 or 7 banks, 5 insurance companies etc. For health care, pensions and education you’re basically dealing with government programs and they are compulsory. It’s all too big to fail and completely uncompetitive. For example, this huge rich telecoms in Canada could never compete outside of the country…they only survive through regulatory capture and mega corruption of the government.
A generation ago, much of the attraction of Canada was the fact that things like education, medical care and social housing were open to both native born and immigrants and the standards were good. People would move to Canada and cheerfully move down the social ladder with the idea that their kids would later have upward mobility. And life could be ok.
A lot of the social safety nets were paid for purely from population growth. They didn’t have a huge pot of saved money to dip into, they take this year’s taxes and pay out current year benefits. So immigrants were coming into the country and paying for elder Canadian’s old age pensions and end of life health care. But at least there was a perception of a social contract and it would eventually benefit these immigrants.
However, now its clear that an entire generation of elder Canadians have pulled this ladder up behind them. Their own kids and grandkids are thrown to the lions now that all these bubbles are either exploiting workers / young people or (in the case of education and health care) popping and leaving everyone to deal with anarchy and collapse.
There is now a phenomenon where immigrants pack up and leave Canada and go back home. Sometimes their kids also leave. A lot of other nations have improved a lot and it can be better to be retired back in their place of origin rather than to face the Canadian systems and high cost of living.
In the case of this particular story, notice that nobody cares about the fact that these government registered colleges were running outright scams? Like charging students application fees, running entirely fake and low quality courses, reporting false and inflated enrollment to the government to scam extra money and all that…that was fine. It didn’t matter how bad it was for these students or the native Canadians who were stuck in the same school system.
They are only fixing this to reduce demand for housing, period. A certain class of Canadians are worth something and everyone else can suffer.
The conversation in the media has been training people to look at the wrong aspect of the problem.
So basically you have the flows and the sinks.
The flow here would be the rate at which more CO2 pollution is added.
The sink is the total amount of CO2 that’s already in the atmosphere.
Everyone keeps talking about allowing more carbon, slowing more carbon or somehow changing the growth of additional carbon.
Future carbon isn’t what’s changing the climate right now. There is a huge time lag of around 15 years between when you dump CO2 into the atmosphere and when it starts actually moving global temperatures.
Current day global temperature doesn’t actually reflect anything with the rate of pollution. What it is showing us is the total amount of carbon in the sink from 15 years ago.
If you stopped all new carbon today you’re already on a ride to 10° that started way in the past. And it wouldn’t stop this from happening. The slowing of the rate isn’t even within the solution space. At all.
Anyhow, going beyond the facts of what is going on, I think there are two real reasons why people talk about the flows even though these are irrelevant. And it’s two things, one thing is that is assumes that humans are not going to survive if we stop polluting, so adding more pollution is a baked in assumption. And two, we have NO ANSWER for how we can possibly clean the sink and put the entire global atmosphere back to the start. So if you start looking at the REAL problem you start having emotional responsibility and no possibility of solving it, and that makes people unhappy. It’s implicatory denial.
Within a single human lifespan. And it keeps rising a lot more.
That’s a solution for decarbonization of future power generation for humanity, but it doesnt seem to remove the pollution that is changing the climate, so the climate isn’t going to reverse itself back to safe stable starting conditions.
So it’s not a solution. Do you see why not?
At 10° it’s the new equilibrium. Not “for a while”. Not “until feedback systems kick in”. After the feedback systems stop the increase it will be 10° hotter and stay there for tens of thousands of years.
https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889?login=false
According to this paper, the paleorecord for our current atmosphere is 10° of warming. So over some period of time, in the future we will reach 10° unless the atmosphere changes before that point. We will reach an equilibrium at 10° hotter than preindustrial. That’s based on today’s existing CO2.
Eventually. There is a very slow lag time. The lag has confused a lot of the science also (because it makes change hard to measure and there are confounding factors). The response time to reach the full amount of temperature change is around one century!
Luckily, we can avoid the warming if we just remove the CO2 before the temperature rises.
Unluckily, we don’t have the technology nor energy sources to remove the CO2.
Or, second solution space: geoengineering / blocking sunlight / other energy interventions that happen at a global scale.
Wasn’t this an episode of Seinfeld?
When I used to live in Canada, I had a client who was a Cuban defector. He had been studying at architecture school in Moscow Russia and when his plane landed in Canada for refueling he jumped out and claimed asylum. I met him when he had been in Canada over 25 years.
He told me that Cuba was so poor, that as an architect everything he came up with was beyond the budget. So for example, he would design a bridge. It would use too many materials and so there would be revision after revision until the final bridge was the least complicated slab of concrete. He left because it was just such a disappointment and a compromised life where a human was unable to rise to their full ability.
A few days later, I had another client who happened to be a Canadian architect. She had been working at these international firms and had built stuff all over the world. She told me that building was easy everywhere but Canada. In Canada there would be zoning, architectural controls, historical preservation, environmental review and on and on. Every building was going through multiple redesigns and the process was so slow that it often bankrupted projects or wasted tons of money. The “budget” for a project would be vaporized in all these intangible delays, repeating rounds of re-designs, lengthy approvals and so on, and every time it made the project cost more and deliver less. She was intensely frustrated that you couldn’t just deliver the best thing you could design.
The Cuban architect in Canada worked in woodworking making kitchen cabinets. He didn’t do any architecture.
One name for this phenomenon of higher standards is “the bigotry of high expectations” (as opposed to the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’).
And just wait until he starts keeping classified documents in the airplane lavatory next to the photocopier.
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/reports/1111/
" vertical land movement (VLM). VLM here varies over relatively short time scales amid changing patterns of subsurface water and hydrocarbons extraction.RSL rise rates of 5 mm/year or more aided by weak acceleration in Louisiana and Texas project a total RSL rise of between 0.4 and 0.5 meters above 1992 MSL by the year 2050; other Gulf and East Coast locations will experience equal or greater rise if upward trends in acceleration continue "
https://news.wm.edu/2025/05/06/2024-sea-level-report-cards-map-futures-of-u-s-coastal-communities/
And it’s just historically ignorant and obnoxious.
Yeah, they don’t even know about the battle of the gulf in the year 1218 when the confederated mayan forces trounced the Americans in an epic cannon battle and won the naming rights.
But what if you make a department of Honey Bun Efficiency? There is surely a simple solution for your fiscal crisis.
Lots to think about and react to here, but I just wanted to pick up one point:
about how the energy pie is divided up, […] genuine concern for fairness has to be as much or more about lowering the wealthy than lifting the poor.
At the very extreme of things there is this idea of the “billionaire bunker”. Like people can somehow cordon off climate change and energy collapse and all of these destructive forces, IF they have enough MONEY.
I question this. I suspect that many of these ideas take for granted many assumptions about collapse being somehow containable.
Like, are oil wells, tankers, electrical grids and refineries and distribution systems all going to keep running so that the rich can live life as usual while everything else goes to ruin? We will still have a system?
I have noticed this in my own area. Forests in this area are logged in a cycle spanning multiple decades.
What I picked up on is that when patches are logged during years where the summer has droughts and heat waves, new trees do not regenerate. When summers are colder and wetter the forest will grow back normally.
So there is a clear mosaic where there are 10 and 12 year old bare patches and 5 year old patches where the trees are shooting up and doing well, and sometimes the new logging scars look to have the older forests and the old cuts seem like they just happened.
The royal “we”. Interesting.