Up, Down.
some when, some where, we had a computer language named eldritch, the genius instigators have all disappeared, from my view at least, and both companies, Omnitech Graphics (ltd? inc? and not the Australian one) and ACDS Graphic System (that's right, no 's') are defunct and disappeared tooBuffalo Springfield, For What It's Worth.
Super Session, Season Of The Witch.
Julie Driscoll, Season Of The Witch.
Donovan, Season of the Witch.
Super Session, It Takes A Lot To Laugh ....
Bob Dylan, It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry (1965), 1965, 1971, 1975, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1992, 1994, 1999, 2003, 2004, don't the brakeman look good bein' where he wants to be ... Super Session was Al Kooper Steven Stills Mike Bloomfield, i remember listening in an apartment in Halifax, again and again ... that's what you did in those days
Mark Kingwell says 'apples and oranges' ... but, after some thought even, i don't think so:
"In fact, though, the more you look, the more it becomes clear that the dispute is about apples and oranges. If smart means clear writing, linear thought and sustained self-organization, then yes, those skills are in short supply; if it means quick-witted talent for hyperlinking, multitasking and other compound gerunds of the screen age, then no, there is no evidence of cognitive deficit - on the contrary.
Statistically, this is truistic. Any human population, plumbed for any cognitive skill, old-school or new, will show a roughly normal distribution of talent.
[lies, damned lies, & statistics!]Unfortunately, all the available answers are both obvious and mutually inconsistent; there can be no right answer because all the half-right answers cancel each other out. So let's ask a different question: What is intelligence for?
The premise behind any worry that kids are getting dumber is that this is a bad thing, a development to deprecate. If Johnny can't write (one side avers), then what hope is there for public discourse, critical diligence and democracy? If Johnny can't tweet (the other side responds), then what hope is there for fast-moving crowd-sourced innovation and collective creativity? Each side defines intelligence in its favour because both assume that intelligence must be the governing value of human evolution.
I have a modest proposal that will resolve this tiresome debate forever: Consider the possibility that both sides are wrong. Imagine for a moment that we have reached the end not only of the book-smarts era of human civilization, but also of the entire smarts era, period. Replacing one form of intelligence with another form just obscures the baseline truth: Human intelligence has become counter-adaptive.Too smart for our own good, Mark Kingwell, see also Jevon's Paradox.
"The saddest thing is that - its sense of limited government long lost - American public opinion endorses this rush to fiscal ruin."
Unlimited government leading to limitless debt, Neil Reynolds.
meanwhile, back at the ranch, k-k-Canada's bailout proceeds apace:$1.4-million for every job saved, Konrad Yakabuski, Thursday May 28.
Cost of bailout sheds light on deficit surprise, Steven Chase & Brian Laghi, Friday, May 29.
Slack-filled young men and women of Yeti descent who are spread, SEEMINGLY randomly, throughout the breakthinking world... but are bent on breaching all Earthly human political and cultural barriers with the searing nonhuman truth of the Word of "Bob", J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, that LIVING GOD WHO WALKS THIS PLANET EARTH IN HUCKSTER'S SHOES.
OR BURN IN SLACKLESSNESS TRYING NOT TO!
Send $1 to:The Church of the SubGenius
PO Box 140306
Dallas, TX 75214
and you'll NEVER be the same again ...
The Church of the SubGenius.
| Give me slack or kill me. |
Shuffle Demons Spadina Bus Summer 2009 Agenda Canada Day Guinness World Record for the largest saxophone ensemble.A Little Bitty Tear, A Little Bitty Tear, A Little Bitty Tear.
it went like this y'see, it has been a while since i have seen anything by Mark Kingwell, i consider him the next generation of Canadian philosopher (after Charles Taylor), but the article looked slanted to sell to boomers, a statistical premiss? whiff-n-poof ... still, i am looking at young people from reasonably up-close, at my children and their friends plus what i see in the streets, two of my children have graduated from university and cannot spell, but none of them are what Rev. Bob Dobbs would call 'pinks' so Kingwell's argument let a little light into my situation and i wanted to remember that, however, that's to day, HOWEVER, the nitwits running the country can spell and the whole thing is clearly headed off over the horizon (horizon here in the sense of a cliff :-) and in the middle of all of this i came across Sonny Rollins and Pat Metheny coming to town and slipped out on the TTC to buy some (very pricey) tickets, so the connection to Shuffle Demons, the COC box office not being far from Spadina and blah blah blah ... then ... well, i don't want to get too personal ... suffice to say that despite a, i think, British line to the effect that 'what the ears do not hear, the heart does not feel' my experience has been that the heart always knows! not everything maybe but most, and much as we might like to try to fool it, interesting that twice in one day i immediately try to shed the brunt by running to music, and in the second case to music from 1961 when i was just a wee laddie, and anyway, i would have her on any terms
a-and maybe now there will be real energy to quit smoking (?)
in the past few days i have noticed three ranting men on the streets, the first one singing, at the top of his lungs, "people are strange when you're a stranger, faces look ugly when you're alone, women seem wicked when you're unwanted, streets are uneven when you're down, when you're strange," that old Doors tune, and almost right away an old man i had seen on the subway came up the stairs behind me and started singing something else very loudly, can't remember what it was, and today i saw a man who looked like he either had Tourettes or was imitating it, i say imitating because he was not screaming obscenities, just gibberish, as if maybe there had been a time when he shouted obscenities and the reaction was too strong?
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Too smart for our own good, Mark Kingwell, Friday, May 29.
Maybe we should punish the clever and reward the dumb so we can eventually get back to a simpler time
It's graduation time at universities across the continent and, as so often at this time of year, people ask me: “Are the kids getting dumber? Can they even write?”
This is a bit like debating the value of the designated-hitter rule: The answer says more about you than about the state of play. Answer yes and you brand yourself a bookish curmudgeon, a fogey no matter what your age. Answer no and you align with new cognitive models, social networking websites, early gadget adoption and freewheeling music download.
In other words, it's cool versus uncool. There are even duelling books on the subject so that the sides can point to argument and evidence - although one might detect a potentially fatal irony in the smarter-kids types needing to cite books in the first place, given that books are so, like, 1780.
In fact, though, the more you look, the more it becomes clear that the dispute is about apples and oranges. If smart means clear writing, linear thought and sustained self-organization, then yes, those skills are in short supply; if it means quick-witted talent for hyperlinking, multitasking and other compound gerunds of the screen age, then no, there is no evidence of cognitive deficit - on the contrary.
Statistically, this is truistic. Any human population, plumbed for any cognitive skill, old-school or new, will show a roughly normal distribution of talent. Past academic emphasis on expository writing didn't make for more good writers as a function of population, it just picked out the individuals who were good at writing. With a university population that was both smaller and skewed in favour of that skill, the tail - those declining away from the mean - was shorter. People wanted to be clear writers, and were punished if they were not. But in no case does it mean that kids were smarter then, or dumber now.
This is the point where the dispute typically hares off into a hand-wringing discussion of what universities are for and whether they're any good at doing whatever that is. Socialization machine or crucible of citizenship? Job-training centre or gateway to wisdom?
Unfortunately, all the available answers are both obvious and mutually inconsistent; there can be no right answer because all the half-right answers cancel each other out. So let's ask a different question: What is intelligence for?
The premise behind any worry that kids are getting dumber is that this is a bad thing, a development to deprecate. If Johnny can't write (one side avers), then what hope is there for public discourse, critical diligence and democracy? If Johnny can't tweet (the other side responds), then what hope is there for fast-moving crowd-sourced innovation and collective creativity? Each side defines intelligence in its favour because both assume that intelligence must be the governing value of human evolution.
I have a modest proposal that will resolve this tiresome debate forever: Consider the possibility that both sides are wrong. Imagine for a moment that we have reached the end not only of the book-smarts era of human civilization, but also of the entire smarts era, period. Replacing one form of intelligence with another form just obscures the baseline truth: Human intelligence has become counter-adaptive.
This might sound crazy. After all, it's precisely the ingenious tricks of human problem-solving that have made us so successful at survival. But these same tricks have also generated large negative effects: environmental degradation, weapons of mass destruction, hedge funds, sophisticated forms of torture and the justification thereof. In the global adapt-or-die sweepstakes, humans keep scraping by, almost despite themselves, the net good effects of intelligence just outdistancing the bad.
How long can this possibly go on? In supercomplex systems, ones with multiple variables that are at once interconnected and threatened, failure is rarely incremental, the way it might be in a single-variable system. If one small part of our world fails, the larger failure is likely to be catastrophic and immediate. Just think about downtown traffic snarled by a collision, or the airline schedule during an electrical storm. Now reflect on the global food chain and energy grid - or the financial network.
It's not that we've been dumb; it's that we've been too smart for too long. Success breeds success - literally so in evolutionary terms. We have succeeded well past our safety thresholds. There are too many of us, and we're too good at inventing things. Being smart turns out to be a dumb idea.
Is there anything to be done about it? Well, experience indicates that calls for restraint and sacrifice are rarely successful when people lack other incentives to change their behaviour. So I suggest we tackle the problem at the root: Let's start selecting for dumbness. Not just in the sense of giving up on old-fashioned writing skills. That ship has sailed. Let's go farther and invert the value scale. Let's actively punish the clever and reward the slow and unambitious.
Maybe then, after a few generations, we will breed our way out of this mess and back into a simpler age. “Are the kids getting dumber?” my academic successors will be asked. “Yes” they will say. “It's working”
Mark Kingwell is professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto.
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Unlimited government leading to limitless debt, Neil Reynolds, Friday, May 29.
The two are not accidental, and the results are predictable
In 1792, the U.S. government spent nothing on pensions, health care or welfare programs. It did, though, spend $1.2-million on defence and $700,000 on "general purposes," which covered all other federal responsibilities - except for the interest on the national debt ($77.2-million), an obligation that required payment of $3.2-million a year. Thus federal expenditures in that final year of George Washington's first term as president came to $5.1-million, or (interest included) a mere 2.4 per cent of GDP ($220-million). This was limited government, more limited than we can now even begin to imagine.
Yet the nascent country (population 4.2 million) deplored its debt, which represented 35 per cent of gross domestic product, a proportion of debt-to-GDP equal to the later Civil War years.
Washington himself was quite explicit. He called on Congress for "vigorous exertion" to discharge in peacetime the debts occasioned by war "and not throw upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear." Thomas Jefferson, the third president, agreed. First comes public debt, he asserted. Second comes taxation. Third comes "wretchedness and oppression."
By 1808, at the end of Jefferson's second term, U.S. debt had been reduced to 8.3 per cent of GDP. Four years later, at the start of the War of 1812, it had been reduced to 5.8 per cent. This, too, was limited government - a reflection of the inherent frugality that disciplined public spending in earlier times.
The War of 1812 wasn't nearly as expensive as the Civil War would be. It did take U.S. debt back into double digits, from 10.8 per cent of GDP in 1815 to 16.2 per cent in 1825. The frugal impulse, however, remained. The national debt stood at 9.4 per cent of GDP in 1826, and was erased by 1835. The United States remained debt-free for eight years. And from 1843 to 1861, debt never exceeded 3 per cent of GDP. This, too, was limited government.
The Civil War - and postwar stimulus spending - changed everything. Debt increased from 9.2 per cent of GDP in 1861, when the war began, to 27.1 per cent in 1865, when it ended - and then ran at 30 per cent through the rest of the decade. The debt did shrink, but never again returned to single-digit numbers. By 1900, the debt-to-GDP ratio was 10.3 per cent.
Although the United States engaged in the First World War for only two years, military spending in 1917-19 drove debt to unprecedented levels: 44.7 per cent of GDP. Throughout the 1920s, debt levels remained high (averaging 34.6 per cent). The American era of limited government was ending.
Then came the double whammy: the "disaster socialism" of the Great Depression and the Second World War, which inexorably pushed publicly acceptable debt levels higher and higher.
President Herbert Hoover presided over a doubling of debt in a period of three years, to 65.9 per cent of GDP by 1932. Franklin Roosevelt kept borrowing but never surpassed Hoover's debt burden in any significant way. U.S. debt hit its Depression high in 1933, at 73.7 per cent; the Depression average was closer to 65 per cent.
The Second World War doubled the debt level of the Depression, setting a record that would remain unequalled until the presidency of Barack Obama, whose budget projections suggest that the United States will soon equal the debt burden of the most devastating war in history.
It takes time for debt to accumulate, in wartime or in peacetime. The increase in U.S. wartime debt tracks this process: In 1942, debt was 56.6 per cent of GDP; in 1943, 78.1 per cent; in 1944, 99.4 per cent; in 1945, 123.4 per cent; in postwar 1946, 128.3 per cent.
In the years immediately following the war, a gradual lessening of debt took place, but never in a definitive way. In the 1950s, the debt-to-GDP ratio fell to 70 per cent. In the 1960s, it fell to 60 per cent. In the 1970s, it fell to 50 per cent. In the 1980s, it rose again - hitting a high of 66.8 per cent. In the 1990s, it rose further, reaching 75.8 per cent in 1999. By 2008, it had risen to 87.1 per cent.
These debt percentages include the parallel rise and fall of debt in state and municipal governments. Although long required to balance their budgets, they now often don't. (By 2010, California will owe $100-billion.) For 105 years - 1796 through 1902 - state governments incurred zero debt. This, too, was limited government. Now state debt represents 18 per cent of the country's debt.
As calculated by the Congressional Budget Office, Mr. Obama's deficit spending alone will take the national debt to 108.5 per cent of GDP by the end of 2009, to 116.6 per cent by the end of 2010, and to 119.7 per cent by the end of 2011.
It is credible to conclude that the United States will set a national debt record - at more than 130 per cent of GDP - by the end of 2016. Based on GDP of $14-trillion, U.S. national debt will almost certainly exceed $20-trillion, or three times the pre-Obama debt.
The saddest thing is that - its sense of limited government long lost - American public opinion endorses this rush to fiscal ruin.
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$1.4-million for every job saved, Konrad Yakabuski, Thursday May 28.
With the latest forecast pegging the overall auto bailout bill at as much as $13.5-billion, or more than three times the original estimate, politicians are testing the limits of recession-racked Canadians' tolerance
With the projected cost of bailing out GM and Chrysler mounting by the day, the federal and Ontario governments may need to come up with a new sales pitch to persuade maxed-out taxpayers to go along for the increasingly wild ride.
Ottawa and Toronto were already asking a lot of Canadians – most of whom have no private retirement fund and earn significantly less than auto assembly workers – by allowing some of the bailout money to go toward fixing an estimated $7-billion shortfall in GM Canada's pension plan.
But with the latest forecast pegging the overall bailout bill at as much as $13.5-billion, or more than three times the original estimate, politicians are testing the limits of recession-racked Canadians' tolerance and financial wherewithal. The ballooning bailouts are pushing Ottawa deeper into the red, with this year's deficit projected to surpass $50-billion.
At General Motors of Canada Ltd. alone, the rescue package could amount to a staggering $1.4-million for every job saved, with no guarantee that the bailout will ensure the long-term survival of the company's remaining auto assembly and engine plants.
“What makes me glum about it all is that it's extremely difficult to get around the political necessity of subsidizing employment at an extraordinarily high cost per job,” said Finn Poschmann, vice-president of research at the C.D. Howe Institute in Toronto.
Even supporters of the bailouts say governments must slap tougher conditions on the loans, starting with a demand that the companies move high-paying research jobs to Canada from Detroit.
As governments continually revise the cost of the bailouts upward and rejig their employment projections downward, critics are seizing on the forecasts as evidence that propping up the car companies was a bad idea in the first place.
“You're not going to save jobs. All you are going to do is destroy jobs at Ford and Toyota,” said Mark Milke, director of research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Calgary.
Mr. Milke dismisses the bailouts of GM and Chrysler as “a massive transfer of wealth to companies that consumers have already rejected.” The result, he maintains, is that governments “are punishing the companies that have actually run their businesses very well.”
Besides, no matter how many conditions Canadian politicians place on the loans to GM and Chrysler, or how ironclad the guarantees may appear, governments will find themselves with little or no leverage to enforce them.
“You have no guarantee that two years down the road, they'll say: ‘Well, this Canadian factory is not up to snuff, so we've got to close it.' What are the governments going to do then?” That is what happened with GM's car assembly plant in Quebec, which received $220-million in federal and provincial interest-free loans in 1987 only to pull out of the province in 2002. None of the money has been repaid.
For Mr. Milke, the auto bailouts are typical of political decisions that benefit relatively few people at the expense of millions. But because the risk of a cross-Canada taxpayer revolt is small compared to the potential payback from voters in hard-up communities in Southern Ontario, the decision to bail out the auto companies is an easy one for politicians.
While such crude political calculus no doubt plays a role in government decisions, most analysts say it's been a secondary consideration for Ottawa and Ontario as they mull the alternatives to bailing out GM and Chrysler.
“Bringing orderly adjustment to what could have been chaos,” is the aim of governments here, said Glen Hodgson, chief economist at the Conference Board of Canada. The permanent stoppage of GM and Chrysler operations in Canada would devastate parts makers and lead to shutdowns at the Toyota, Honda and Ford plants in Ontario that depend on the same suppliers, Mr. Hodgson said.
According to that argument, GM and Chrysler are linchpins necessary for the continued functioning of the entire Canadian auto sector and, hence, simply “too big to fail.” Still, even if they survive, GM and Chrysler will be a shadow of their former selves. GM Canada's work force will have shrunk to around 7,000 workers by next year from 12,000 recently, and down from about 20,000 five years ago. At Chrysler Canada, where employment peaked at more than 17,000 in 2000, the work force will drop to 8,200 in July.
Neither company has ruled out further job cuts. Rather, the Ontario and federal governments have made their help conditional on each company maintaining a certain share of its North American production in Canada, likely somewhere around 15 per cent.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a fierce opponent of corporate bailouts when he ran the National Citizens Coalition, has justified his government's intervention by suggesting Washington forced Ottawa's hand. President Barack Obama has signalled his intention to keep GM and Chrysler alive with tens of billions of dollars in U.S. government aid.
“Either we participate in the restructuring or these companies, which are very big in the Canadian economy, will simply be restructured out of Canada,” Mr. Harper said last week.
That argument resonates with University of Waterloo economics professor James Brox, an expert on Canada's manufacturing sector. “If they were failing on both sides of the border, you could make a case” against the bailout here, he said. “It might have been better if Obama had said they were gone. But it's fairly clear he's not going to do that.”
Despite the unpalatable political optics of guaranteeing existing pension payouts to GM Canada's 25,000 retirees – a prospect so unsavoury for Ottawa that it disputes that any of its money will go to the pension plan – Prof. Brox insists governments have no option but to allow an estimated $2-billion of the bailout money to prop up the pension plan.
“If the pension obligation could be written off, the company wouldn't need the bailout in the first place,” he said. And because pension rules in Ontario enabled GM to underfund its retirement plan for more than a decade, the provincial government has “a moral obligation to make it up” now.
The quid pro quo, Prof. Brox said, should be a requirement that GM and Chrysler perform more research and development in Canada. A recent study Prof. Brox prepared for the Institute for Research on Public Policy showed that Canadian-based auto makers spend only 1 per cent of sales on R&D compared to 15 per cent in the U.S. auto sector.
“Clearly, there are engineers and scientists that could be hired in Oshawa and Windsor just as much as Detroit,” Prof. Brox said.
Canadian Auto Workers economist Jim Stanford counters that GM and Chrysler already do more R&D in Canada than their peers and points to the establishment of automotive research institutes at McMaster University and the University of Windsor, which are jointly funded by government and industry.
Still, the relative lack of R&D in Canada shouldn't colour policy makers' decisions about whether to save GM and Chrysler assembly jobs in Canada, he said.
“Governments have to pay special attention to strengthening the presence of industries that are technology-intensive and trade-oriented. The most successful trading nations – whether it's Finland, Korea, Germany or China – have all done that in the past couple of decades. We haven't,” Mr. Stanford maintains. “If we don't do that now, we will end up with two industries – one that digs stuff out of the ground to sell to other countries and another [made up] of doughnut shops.”
That, Mr. Mike said, “is nonsense. It ignores the fact that [if GM and Chrysler go] someone else is going to come in and pick up those factories and production is going to increase at Honda, Toyota and Ford.” For the politicians, the bailout sales job may have only begun.
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Cost of bailout sheds light on deficit surprise, Steven Chase & Brian Laghi, Friday, May 29.
The Harper government found itself in a Catch-22 as it drafted the January budget during an unprecedented economic tsunami: how much should it divulge about the rising price tag for bailing out auto makers?
Four months later, the public tab for helping the auto sector has emerged as the single-biggest factor behind a surprise jump in Ottawa's budget deficit this year – which Finance Minister Jim Flaherty divulged Tuesday has ballooned by 50 per cent to $50-billion.
Federal officials said yesterday that Ottawa's auto aid bill could top $10-billion – roughly $7-billion of which Mr. Flaherty is now booking as part of the ballooning deficit because of the serious risk this money may never be repaid.
Back in January, the Conservatives were aware that the federal government's bill for helping the Canadian units of Detroit auto makers could exceed the $2.6-billion Ottawa had committed to date. U.S. private-sector estimates had already suggested the final tab for Ottawa and the Ontario government together could hit $15-billion (U.S.).
The Tories were under pressure to be as transparent as possible when they released the January 27 economic plan, one that pushed Canada into deficit for the first time in more than a decade.
But they also didn't want to tip their hand on how much support they were willing to extend to auto makers. This money would be high-risk loans that required a charge on the books to reflect the serious likelihood taxpayers might never see it again.
“You're not really helping your negotiating position if you project in a budget document an amount of money prior to actually entering into negotiation,” a senior federal official said.
Negotiations were still in early stages and Ottawa wasn't about to undermine its ultimatum to auto makers and unions that they had to produce realistic survival plans before their companies received more assistance.
“When you say that we will not provide support unless you restructure properly, you better be willing to live with that and if you roll out an announcement of funding before, prior to negotiations, you're sending the exact opposite message,” the official said.
“You're sending a signal to the company and the union that you're going to give them money no matter what.”
So instead of setting aside a full-fledged commitment of $10-billion in the January budget, Ottawa only took a provision for a portion of the roughly $2.6-billion it had committed in December.
In the past few weeks, as the full extent of Ottawa's commitment to General Motors and Chrysler took shape, federal officials had a better sense of their aid obligation. And that's why Mr. Flaherty is now taking a charge against the books of roughly $7-billion more.
A source said this is the “biggest line item” in the swelling deficit announced this week, which climbed $16.3-billion above January projections.
Sources say the other half of the deficit's climb – approximately $8-billion – reflects Canada's continuing economic decline. That includes rising Employment Insurance claims and falling tax revenue.
Should Ottawa have been able to foresee the worsening economy when it tabled the budget January 27?
Outside economists certainly didn't, for the most part. The budget reflected the average of private-sector forecasts when it projected a modest decline in economic growth.
“They didn't get great advice from most of the private-sector forecasters who were even more optimistic than Finance,” Toronto Dominion Bank chief economist Don Drummond said.
In one respect, the budget forecast was in fact more bearish than the average outlook of bank economists and other outside forecasters. Ottawa cut its forecasts for how much its tax revenue base would contract even beyond that private forecasts suggested.
But within a matter of a month to six weeks after the budget's tabling, Ottawa's forecasts were obsolete. Amid mounting pessimism that the downturn would be worse than expected, private-sector economists hop-scotched past Ottawa in terms of bearish projections, slashing forecasts across the board.
By mid-March, economists projected the deficit could hit about $40-billion.
Few economists would have been shocked then, had Mr. Flaherty announced this week that the deficit had risen to the $40-billion range instead of $50-billion. What took many by surprise was the larger-than-expected outlay for the auto sector – a figure that Ottawa had kept out of public sight.
Down.
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