Doom and Gloom

It's so much easier to suggest solutions when you don't know too much about the problem.

  - Malcolm Forbes

I’ve come across two stories this week that both predict doom and gloom in one way or another.  The problem with them is that in each case, they assume that one thing will change but nothing else will. 

 

In the first case, the change is climate change.  The story predicts that global warming will reduce the availability of wine by 20%.  That’s quite a bit considering that the consumption of wine is growing each year.  That may not mean much for some of you, but it would be important to wine lovers like myself. The consequence would undoubtedly be much higher prices for even ordinary wine, and possibly wine riots in Italy and California.

The second story concerns the introduction of self-driving electric vehicles.  This story predicts a veritable paradise of convenient, pollution-free, safe urban transportation with no individual vehicle ownership. It all sounds very exciting, particularly anyone who has driven Highway 401 in rush hour.  But then the gloom part is revealed.  The vast shut-downs and unemployment in the automobile sector as conventional vehicles are phased out.  Think about it – hundreds of thousands of engineers and assembly line workers out of work in less than five years according to the author’s predictions. 

Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
  - George Santayana

Now, let’s look at these scenarios in terms of how the real world works.  In the case of wine, as long as there is a strong demand for the drink, farmers will find new areas to plant and cultivate grapes as climate change. And vintners will use those grapes to make wine. Take Canada for example, as temperatures rise, new places hospitable to growing grapes could open up in other areas of British Columbia, the Maritimes and west of the Niagara area and north of Prince Edward County.  Other countries could see new areas in places such as France, Germany and even England.  People, particularly farmers, are adaptable and will take advantage of every opportunity where there is a market.

And let’s look at the upcoming “revolution” in transportation.  Currently self-driving cars are hand-built by technicians at Google and Tesla.  Ford, a major vehicle maker, is also rumoured to be working on one, and I wouldn’t be surprised if every other car maker worth their salt aren’t doing the same thing.  Electric vehicles are a bit more mature technology with several car makers mass producing them.  But note that, apart from Tesla, it is major vehicle manufacturers who are in the game.  Let’s note however that Tesla is the only one to currently be combining the two technologies.  Self-driving cars (and a few trucks) are currently being developed and driven only under development licences.  There are not yet any vehicle standards for such vehicles and when there are, you can expect them to be pretty stringent from a safety point of view.  Once such standards are developed and put into practice so that those vehicles can be put into mass production, who will build them?  There are currently about 20 million cars and light trucks built in the world each year. Those hand building technicians can’t possibly build anywhere near those numbers.  These vehicles will be built by the same companies and people who currently do it; major auto makers and their engineers and their assembly line workers.  Internal combustion engine makers will be replaced by battery makers to mass produce the batteries needed for these new vehicles.  There will also be burgeoning enterprises making the millions of recharging stations that will be required.  Just as traditional carburetor manufacturers adjusted by making fuel injection systems, so this new technology will be evolutionary not revolutionary.

Too many prognosticators put forth their ideas without thinking through the logical consequences of those ideas.  As I said at the beginning, you cannot assume that one action will happen without a reaction by other affected people and groups.  It is a particularly a dangerous assumption when demand and money are at stake.

I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.
  - Carl Sagan

Whither the NRA

Six people shot and injured in Houston, Texas today.  Whither the NRA (National Rifle Association)?  Five people shot and killed in a mall in Washington State.  Whither the NRA?  Dozens shot and killed in an Orlando night club earlier this summer.  Whither the NRA?

It’s a legitimate question in view of the NRA and other gun lovers in the US who claim that guns in the hands of law abiding citizens will reduce crime by allowing people to stop criminals before or during a crime.  It apparently never happened in any of these cases.  And it wasn’t as though there wasn’t enough time.  The shooter in Houston was active for about an hour.  The shooter was finally shot by a police officer.  Texas prides itself on being an open carry state, so it wasn’t a case of having to go home and unlock the gun cabinet and get to the site of the shooting.  In fact, have you ever heard of a situation where gun carrying citizens have stopped, or at least lessened the severity, of a major crime?  I certainly haven’t.

So where did this illusion that the more guns there are, the lower the crime rate?  It was certainly a feature of western movies in the past, and many “revenge” movies of today.  Who didn’t want to be Clint Eastwood cleaning out the town of bad guys, or Charles Bronson taking revenge for some deed perpetrated against a family member?  It can’t be as simple as that.  After all, we watched the same movies and TV shows in Canada and it didn’t seem to have the same effect.  The license for owning guns is certainly in the US Constitution in the form of the Second Amendment (always capitalized you’ll notice).  But read carefully what it says about the right to bear arms as part of a well formed militia.  Since when is a man (or woman) walking down the street with a fire arm part of a “well formed militia”? Now there is more than one gun for every man, woman and child in the country, more than 330 million we are told. Up until 1959, the US Supreme Court recognized that limitation on gun ownership.  Gun ownership did have restrictions and limitations.  Something changed the Supreme Court’s mind.  And of course, the US Congress has refused to pass any meaningful restrictions under great pressure from, among others, the NRA. 

The truth is that there are more gun related deaths per capita in the US than in any other developed country.  In every other such country, there are meaningful restrictions on gun ownership.  It is always interesting to watch British crime dramas, where the ordinary police officer and detective are unarmed, discover a crime where a gun has been used.  There is a sense of horror and surprise that a criminal has resorted to that means to perform the murder or theft. 

 

It is scary to think about the proliferation of guns in the US.  There are great tensions in that country driven by politics, wealth, immigration and economics.  When a candidate for the US presidency can stand up and give a strong hint that some NRA member can solve problems by taking action against his opposition you have to wonder where this could lead.  Assassination? Civil war?  You have to wonder.  Will the NRA have an answer to that?

Ottawa Tidbits

Okay, I admit it.  I live in Ottawa.  I know it is looked down upon in polite society elsewhere in the country, but there you have it.  This is where the Navy dropped me off and where the work was.  So even in retirement, here I sit. In engineering terms, we used to call this stiction, the difficulty in getting a stopped object to move. But talking about Ottawa, here are a few bits of information and opinions that are worth sharing.

Monuments

There is a plan underway by a private group to build a monument to the victims of communism. The original plan was for a huge, ugly monolith to be built on grounds in front of the Supreme Court building.  This has now, thankfully, been scaled down and moved to another spot previously known as the Garden of the Provinces.  Heaven knows what the park will be called now.  Of course, this private group, thanks to our previous Conservative government, managed to finagle a promise of more than half the cost out of our federal taxes.  I always said that if such a monument were to be built, then an equally large monument ought to be built and dedicated to the victims of capitalism.  There have been many and they deserve recognition as well.

Speaking of monuments, a few years ago, the National Capital Commission (more about them later) broached the idea of building one or two monuments along Wellington Street which is the street that runs from the House of Commons westward passed the Supreme Court and Library and Archives Canada.  My thoughts at the time were that this was a good idea.  At one end of the street there should be a statue of a poor taxpayer and at the other end a statue of a harried, low level civil servant.  I thought is summed up Canada quite well.

Governance

How many governments does it take to change a lightbulb govern a city of a million people?  If you said four, you’re absolutely right.  Okay, so it is the nation’s capital. And it does have about the same area as half of Prince Edward Island.  But four!  That’s right, four.  You have, of course, the city government including 23 counsellors and a mayor.  Overseeing that is the government of the Province of Ontario.  You never hear much from them since most of the MLAs have never heard of anything east of Oshawa.  Then you have the federal government who always has a minister responsible for the nation’s capital and who frequently wants to interfere in strictly local concerns.  And last but not least is the National Capital Commission (NCC).  The NCC is an agency of the federal government, supposedly set up to manage federal lands in Ottawa and its Quebec neighbour, Gatineau (née Hull) “on behalf of the people of Canada”.  The problem with the NCC is that it somehow has managed to wrest jurisdiction over about half the area of these two cities and feels it has the right to meddle in the affairs of the other half.  Of course, if the NCC looks after all of the Senators’ primary dwellings in Ottawa, maybe they do.  

The result of all this is that almost nothing of consequence ever gets done for the residents of Ottawa.  Of course, they are probably all civil servants who belong to one of the governments so they presumably don’t count.  Think of it as some sort of old fashion mining town where everything belongs to the company.  

There is an area of the city called Lebreton Flats which lies just to the west of downtown.  It used to be a residential and light industry area which had got a bit run down, which many older areas of a city do at some point.  For some reason, the NCC, which did not own the land, decided that Lebreton Flats was an eyesore and must be expropriated and torn down by the NCC but which was, at the time, city controlled property.  The NCC had a better plan.  It would manage the renewal of the place.  Now this was fifty years ago.  The area lay virtually untouched for over forty years.  The first and probably most significant building was the new Canadian War Museum which is tucked into one corner of the Flats by the river.  About five years ago a grand plan was unveiled to build a “world class” mixed residential neighbourhood there.  The result has been a few insipid looking townhouses and condos.  This is certainly nothing to write home about.  Finally last year a design competition was held to develop most of the rest of the Lebreton Flats.  Two groups responded both proposing a new hockey arena, retail space and some “sites”.  The result was immediately criticized as not being “grand enough” with no notable national sites or amenities.  It wasn’t “worldly” enough.  Of course what these critics forgot was that these areas was going to be developed by private investors who would demand that the place eventually pay for itself and make money.  There is no future for them to build “worldly” sites that do not make a profit.  That is what private enterprise is all about.

Now let’s consider what would probably have happened if the NCC had stayed out of the whole thing.  Because the area is so close to downtown, developers would have arrived and bought up old homes and businesses and made their own improvements.  This may have included new office buildings or trendy housing developments.  This would have evolved over many years and could have been controlled by the city through zoning and official plan restrictions.  We may have even got a hockey arena there.  But it would all have been done without all of the angst that the NCC has put the citizens of Ottawa through all these years.  

Personal

If I have been relatively quiet recently, it is because the summer has been spent getting ready for and recovering from knee replacement surgery in July. It all went well.  But now that I am able to move around much easier and can sit at my desk and write, I’m baaaaaack!  Unfortunately, there is probably not going to be any golf for the rest of this year.

Enjoy the rest of your summer.

Sins of the Fathers

“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”
  - Abraham Lincoln

I see there is a move in Nova Scotia to denigrate one of the founders of the province, Edward Cornwallis.  People want to remove his statue from downtown Halifax and change the name of the park where his statue is found.  His sin:  he once put a bounty on the head of indigenous people.  Now the fact that he did this in 1749 doesn’t seem to matter.  The fact that almost every other colonial governor in North America was forced to do the same thing does not seem to matter either.  By today’s standards he sinned so he must be expurged. He did put the bounty on – but only on Mi'kmaq warriors who actually fought against the British and it applied to warriors that were either killed or captured. Unlike other Governors before and after him, however, Cornwallis did not target women and children. So it was not, as some assert, a bounty on all indigenous people including women and children.  He did it for the simple purpose of protecting the new British colonists.  The Mi'kmaq of Nova Scotia had been attacking settlers throughout the colony because they did not recognize a treaty that had been signed earlier.  

The problem with this trend to mete out the justice of today on people of the past is one of the most ignorant and arrogant fallacies perpetrated by our current generation.  And it is fairly new trend.  Almost every notable person of the past could be faulted for some part of their lives.  George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee owned slaves.  So did Popes and Kings in Europe for many centuries.  But it was neither illegal nor frowned upon in those days.  Almost every early American and Canadian colony initially tried to peacefully coexist with the indigenous peoples, but the differences in their cultures made hostilities almost inevitable.

 

We also have the reverse type of “justice” being carried out, the deification of those who were originally condemned by the men of the past.  The biggest example of this in Canada is the case of Louis Riel.  He was, of course, condemned by the men of his era for leading Metis revolts against the settlers in the Prairie Provinces.  But in recent years we have seen new “trials” on television of this same rebel and of course he is fully exonerated . . . by today’s standards, as are most of the people who are subjects of this reverse justice.

The problem with all this re-imagining of justice is that we are trying to judge people that we know nothing about in terms of the times they lived and the experiences that they had.  We do not know the attitudes of the time, nor the prejudices that prevailed.  We do not understand the relatively short and often difficult life that these people endured.  We don’t understand their fears and superstitions.  And even when we read about their lives, we don’t really understand why they did these things or the decisions they had to make.  We are even ignorant of most of the laws that prevailed at their time.  Thus we condemn them by our own blindness.  At the same way that we would not expect them to know or understand our own times, laws and attitudes, we somehow expect them to know and understand ours.  Arrogance!  

“Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore.”
  - Ogden Nash

We don’t even have to go back very far to see this in our own lives.  We hear our children say, “But Dad, you just don’t understand!”  Then as parents we realize that they don’t understand us and how we were brought up and educated.  We see that the conditions of our youth are not understood by them.  We call it the generation gap and brush it off.  But when we try and judge history we must understand that there is a generation gap that is ten or a hundred time as wide as the one between us and our offspring.  There was recently news of a woman who at 116 years and several months old was now considered the oldest person alive, and probably the last person alive who was born in the 19^th century.  Do you think any of us really understand the world she was born into?

So be careful when you fall into the trap of condemning the people of the past because some day, a future generation will be judging you.

“The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.”
  - Thomas Szasz