RIP. As a Canadian I've always liked that we technically had the Queen as our head of state. I wonder how attitudes will change now that her 70 year reign.
I have an idea that's only half insane. Bear with me. Let's assume we want to get rid of the monarch as Canada's head-of-state. Canada will not be able to feasibly do so because it opens up too many difficult questions about re-structuring our government. Ergo, we will probably just coast on the status-quo. But we could use the desire for everything to stay the same to our advantage by declaring the Queen Elizabeth II the Eternal Monarch even in death.
The Monarch of Canada is a ceremonial position. The Monarch's representative (the Governor General) is appointed by the Prime Minister and has no real power (see: the King-Bing Affair for legal precedent), and therefore could technically be done by anyone from anywhere (even beyond the grave). Politically speaking, absolutely nothing would have to change. The Monarch's effective power in our political system would go from basically zero to literally zero, thus eliminating an avenue for potential abuse of power that we risk by keeping a living Monarch as head-of-state. We could achieve this without having to re-open difficult constitutional questions. Traditionalist Canadian institutions with "Royal" in their names (Mounted Police, Army, Airforce, etc) would not have to change their names or branding. Heck, we wouldn't even have to change the designs on our money. Literally nothing would change except closing a loop-hole (albeit a very low-risk one) for potential power abuse in our political system.
The only down side is that smug know-it-alls can say "actually Canada is not a democracy, it's a Constitutional Necrocracy"
The Governor General does, and must, have real power. The King-Bing affair was controversial, but the Governor General's action was arguably justified, and negative opinions of it do not set a precedent that the Governor General can never do anything. The Governor general arguably should have taken a more active role in some recent times - when Paul Martin and Stephen Harper were trying to dodge (successfully, it turned out) votes of non-confidence, which have to be allowed in a democracy. Certainly, if the Prime Minister blatantly violates constitutional convention, such as by refusing to resign after losing the confidence of the House, it is necessary for the Governor General to dismiss them.
Since the Governor General must have real power, it follows that the Monarch must have real power regarding the appointment of the Governor General - rejecting the Prime Minister's request to dismiss or appoint a Governor General when this is clearly an attempt to fill the position with someone who will allow the Prime Minister to act non-democratically.
A dead person will not be able to fulfill this role.
> Since the Governor General must have real power, it follows that the Monarch must have real power regarding the appointment of the Governor General - rejecting the Prime Minister's request to dismiss or appoint a Governor General when this is clearly an attempt to fill the position with someone who will allow the Prime Minister to act non-democratically.
Counter-hypothetical: what if the Monarch decided to act against the Prime Minister and appoint a Governor General to act against their mandate? Both your hypothetical and mine are incidents of "bad-behaviour" going against norms to push agendas. We would prefer were that neither were possible. However in your hypothetical at least the person exhibiting "bad-behaviour" (the Prime Minister) has some mandate given that they were democratically elected. Whereas in my hypothetical the person exhibiting "bad-behaviour" is an inherited position held by someone in lives in a far-away place and may have only set foot in the nation they are meddling in a handful of times.
In either situation we're accepting the risk of bad-faith actors manipulating the structures of power, but if we ditch the Monarch, at least the person doing so is in someway accountable to the people. Harper was successfully able to dodge a confidence vote, but in the end he was ousted from power in a democratic process. I'd argue that's the better scenario.
The difference between a bad-actor Prime Minister and a bad-actor Monarch is precisely that the latter, in today's world, clearly has no legitimacy outside of enforcing well-established norms. So a Monarch appointing their unelected friend as Governor General, contrary to the Prime Minister's wishes, would simply result in an extra-legal declaration that the country is now a republic, or possibly that the Monarch is now the next person in line of succession (ie, forced abdication, again, extra-legal). In contrast, a Prime Minister who tells the Monarch to dismiss the Governor General and appoint their friend as Governor General instead, after loosing a confidence vote and refusing to resign, will presumably have the backing of some segment of the population (unless they're just insane), and hence will be much more dangerous, if the Monarch declines to exercise their power to refuse this request.
I do not think it is a good idea to assume that a Monarch will always be viewed as having no legitimacy outside of enforcing established norms. While that is certainly the case now, I would not want to rely on that being true forever. After which we would have to rely on benevolence (or perhaps indifference) of undemocratic executive power.
Could we not solve the problem of the PM appointing a lackey as Governor General with other form of check-and-balance that requires zero input from individuals with no connections to a democratic process? Perhaps a similar way that Supreme Court Justices are appointed (candidates recommended by the Prime Minister and approved by the federal cabinet). While not immune to abuses of power, I would like this better than a Monarch being that check-and-balance.
In the unlikely event that the UK were to abolish or deprecate its monarchy, Canada would still prefer not to re-open the Constitution. This might indeed lead to Canada worshipping "The Crown" without anybody to wear said ceremonial headgear.
In other words, the logical contortions of a democracy naming one family as being more important than anyone else, and it being a family without power anyway, are less painfully absurd in Canadian politics than discussing the Constitution. ^_^
Because they have no power and we get to hold the actual elected leaders in contempt, as is right and just. The alternative is electing one, and that kind of worship messes with people's heads. Look how bonkers some Americans get about their blessed president.
I don't agree with the argument that having a Monarch somehow shields Canada from worship of it's leaders, or enables us to hold our leaders in contempt. Absolutely no one in country thinks of the Monarch as our head of state except in a technical sense. The Prime Minister is for all practical purposes. Having a monarch in no-way shields Canadian leaders from hero-worship. Nor does it make Canada uniquely able to hold politicians accountable. It's our Westminster-style parliamentary system that (somewhat) achieves that by concentrating less power in the hands of an individual, which could exist independent of the Monarch. It already essentially does since the King-Bing Affair in the 1920s cemented the Monarch's influence as purely ceremonial.
The status quo has a lot of momentum and you need some sort of catalyst to make the change. Liz managed to avoid much controversy so that catalyst never appeared - perhaps her death will trigger the will to change it
I buy the first, not the second. Retailers often charge consumer packaged goods companies (CPGs) for preferential placement in aisle and carry no risk on inventory. The bigger the retailer (eg. bestbuy, walmart), the more likely they can assume no risk on inventory with a full return policy to the CPG. Best Buy just rents out space on their store floor to individual brands.
Hi! If you're looking for a developer friendly indoor mapping suite (both for editing and viewing/navigating), check us out - www.mappedin.com
Totally agree that it's an overlooked problem and we've been quietly working to solve it for years. Early on we realized the key was to build "everyman" mapping tools that facility managers can use themselves to keep data up to date.
We're increasingly focused on our developer-facing tools and I'd love any feedback if you end up taking a look! (https://www.mappedin.com/mapping/sdks/)
I don't know. I would say I'm d) believe that the West cannot and should not enforce a lockdown the same way authoritarian China or Singapore can, and therefore it is doomed to fail.
So:
* lockdowns are guaranteed not going to eradicate the virus the way it has in China.
* lockdowns are guaranteed to crush small businesses and restaurants, creating an L-shaped economic recovery and putting the West at a disadvantage in future geopolitical conflicts.
* the vaccine works but will take a year to rollout to everyone and it is unimaginable that the public will tolerate a lockdown for more than a month
* herd immunity might work
I truly welcome any debate on this as I'd love to be wrong about my critique of my country's (Canada) approach to all this. We seem to be not having our cake and not eating it too.
Waterloo Region here. Up until the end of August, I was pretty happy with the response where I am, at all three levels of government— it seemed like the policies were basically working and the spread was contained, with new flare-ups presumably being seeded from elsewhere (Toronto, the US probably) and quickly dying out.
And then cases started spiking in September, I suppose due to some combination of back-to-school, lockdown fatigue, increased indoor gatherings, etc. At that point I became extremely unhappy as it became apparent how little the Provincial gov't in particular had taken advantage of the long summer of low cases to build up test and hospital bed capacity, and to make plans for vaccine distribution. The second wave hit and it felt like basically just rewinding to March. This was apparent to everyone and I think it probably became a positive feedback loop as more and more people gave up and had in-person Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings.
They can if they stop enrolling and paying tuition. There are plenty of options online for college-style certifications that most employers in my industry (software engineering) would accept.
I get that other professional training with certifications would be harder to do online, but those tend to be done in community colleges anyway. The most "abusive" shops are universities offering BS degrees to students swimming in debt.
Sorry but I strongly disagree with your assertion that building a business is a zero-sum game. At the basic level, a farmer who sows a field and harvests a crop is making the world one harvest richer, and no one poorer. Ditto for the carpenter making a table or mechanic fixing a car. PG addressed this long ago: http://paulgraham.com/gap.html
Scientists turn money into knowledge. Entrepreneurs turn knowledge into money. It's a virtuous cycle. Scientists lament that they don't get their "fair share" but it's wrong to blame innovators, better to reevaluate their own economic strategy. What if we had private research institutes turning out cutting edge research? Or vertically integrated ones that commercialized their own discoveries, like Spacex?
Value and compensation aren't necessarily coupled. Think of school teachers. It's clearly an incredibly valuable job preparing the next generation of society, but pays a miserable wage before the intervening of unions, and still not great even with that.
But there's more teachers available in the labor market compared to demand than computer programmers, so the latter command a much higher salary. Even though I would say many deliver much less value to society.
Or negative value like Facebook engineers. Sorry, I couldn't resist that cheap shot, and I do believe Facebook is a net negative for society.
I'm not even sure it's true that there are more teachers than programmers. But the pool of money for paying programmers is large and expanding, because we can easily calculate the value they produce, while the monetary value of teaching is harder to measure.
It doesn't help that teaching is presented as a "caring" profession, that you do for the love of your charges. Teachers don't threaten to jump to a different school district for more money, and when they campaign for more money, they're presented as not caring about the students. Nobody expects programmers to have any loyalty, so they get to demand money.
I would love to have schools fight to get the most talented teachers, instead of settling for "any woman who likes kids". (Those "caring" professions are usually ones associated with women.) I'd love to see school systems compete with software companies and research institutions, and to have school districts run by the people who might otherwise run Fortune 500 companies. But that won't happen without money, and until we start deciding to pay for it, we're going to get a lot of mediocre teaching.
> because we can easily calculate the value they produce,
I am not trolling but I would really, really like a citation on this. I hear this sentiment so often but nobody ever produced that calculation. Would be great (or maybe not ;)) for negotiations going forward.
I mean it in the simplistic sense that we can sum up the revenue of the software industry. That's not really a complete calculation but it's clearer than trying to measure the value add of teachers.... even though it's arguably more.
well, the software industry is filled with non-software engineers. and if you go with the revenue angle, what do you do with companies that don't produce "value" (i.e. product doesn't sell)?
It wasn't my intention to claim that it could be calculated exactly. It was my intention to point out the distinction between software engineers, where there's a bottom line somewhere to be counted, and teachers, where the bottom line is effectively impossible to calculate.
This isn't about how much programmers are worth, but about why it is we get away with paying teachers so little while programmers are paid so much: their contribution to a corporate profit. The details are beyond the scope of the post.
"and to have school districts run by the people who might otherwise run Fortune 500 companies"
What bothers me with this "race for the best", is that there is a finite amount of people running fortune 500 companies.
My main problem with the school system is that even good teachers can't teach their full potential with all the outside constraints regulating their classes.
> At the basic level, a farmer who sows a field and harvests a crop is making the world one harvest richer, and no one poorer.
Not quite true; the farmer using that land to grow crops is externalizing an opportunity cost onto those who might use that land for something else, e.g. for the carpenter's workshop or the mechanic's garage. Same with the water consumed by those crops. With these natural and finite resources, there very much is a zero-sum game, since your use of that resource is at everyone else's expense.
This is something Graham entirely misses in his article: the wealth, contrary to his core assertion, does flow from a common source, specifically land. The wealthy, in turn, are such specifically because they happened to be the ones able to control that land at the exclusion of everyone else. This was the basis of Henry George's advocacy for a land value tax.
"But YellowApple," I can already hear, "${ARBITRARY_FAANG}'s wealth ain't tied up in real estate!" Au contraire. Their software is developed in offices that consume land. Their hardware is built in factories that consume land. Their hardware is further constructed from materials extracted from that land. It's land all the way down, and the company externalizes those opportunity costs on everyone else. That is where the injustice in their wealth lies; it is unjust for them to reap the benefits of that land without adequately compensating the rest of society for the opportunity cost the members thereof now bear.
Every drop of water on Earth has been "consumed" many, many times over. It doesn't just get used once and then disappear.
There may be localized shortages of water (e.g., in California), but that doesn't mean that the Earth's water overall gets "used up", in any meaningful sense.
That ain't what I'm saying. Every inch of land on Earth has been "reused" many times over, too. That doesn't change the fact that there's a finite amount of it, and the possession of any quantity of it is at the expense of everyone else needing it. Same goes for water; yes, the water itself doesn't magically disappear, but of the 1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers of water on this planet, if you're storing a trillion of those km³ for yourself in water tanks, that's a lot less that other people can use.
That is: as defined above, consumption ≠ destruction, but rather consumption = possession.
(This ain't even mentioning the distinction between actual potable water v. water contaminated with salt or outright toxins - and the resulting labor and energy costs of converting the latter back into the former. It also ain't even mentioning the labor and energy costs of moving water from where it's abundant to where it's scarce.)
> All the water tanks in the world don't add up to a trillion km³. Not by many orders of magnitude.
You're missing my point: that hoarding water is at the expense of anyone else who needs water. One milliliter, one gigaliter, doesn't matter; that's still less for everyone else unless and until it is released, and during that time the mere storage of that water externalizes an opportunity cost on everyone else needing that water.
> The sun does that for free, and has done for billions of years.
Right, because the sun magically drops all precipitation into lakes and rivers, and not a drop of it into the oceans. I'm sure the sun has some sort of tracking system that realizes which molecules of water come from where and puts them right back whence they came, right?
> You're missing my point: that hoarding water is at the expense of anyone else who needs water.
Someone with a water tank in (say) Seattle, Washington is not "hoarding water" "at the expense" of someone in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, because there is no practical way of getting the "hoarded" water from Washington State to Ethiopia. If the Seattleite doesn't "hoard" that water, it's going to run straight into Puget Sound. It's not going to somehow appear at a tap in Addis Ababa.
> Right, because the sun magically drops all precipitation into lakes and rivers, and not a drop of it into the oceans.
Now you're just strawmanning. Of course a lot of it falls on the oceans. But enough of it falls on land that the hydrologic cycle continues, as it has for billions of years.
I think fundamentally you're just wedded to the the idea that water gets "used up" in the same sense that, say, oil, gets used up.
> Someone with a water tank in (say) Seattle, Washington is not "hoarding water" "at the expense" of someone in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,
Well it sure ain't contributing to the "hydrologic cycle" if it's in a water tank. That's a tankful less water in that cycle. And multiply that by everyone else storing water, and before you know it that's a noticeable impact globally, including both for Addis Ababa and the rest of Seattle.
This is, mind you, precisely why a lot of municipalities don't take kindly to people collecting rainfall, or to people damming up streams or rivers without doing the necessary due diligence on ecological impact assessment. There are downstream impacts to these seemingly-innocuous things.
> I think fundamentally you're just wedded to the the idea that water gets "used up" in the same sense that, say, oil, gets used up.
Nowhere have I even suggested that to be the case, and yet somehow you think I'm the one strawmanning here. If you're going to deliberately ignore my point and substitute it for one that's obviously false, then why even bother to respond?
> Sorry but I strongly disagree with your assertion that building a business is a zero-sum game.
It isn't either/or. Nearly all businesses do "create value". Nearly all businesses also compete for a limited supply of customers, because nearly all markets can produce more outputs than are needed.
The ratio between the two matters a lot to the character of the company.
I agree with you completely. There are certainly rent-seeking businesses that do not create value (or net value?). And the majority of businesses are competing in (disrupting) existing markets.
Even if they don't increase total consumer spending by offering better products and winning market share, they do increase consumer _wealth_. I'm glad I can buy a 65" 4k TV for as much as my parents paid for a 15" CRT 20 years ago, adjusted for inflation.
That's the median outcome. Then you get outliers like the sewing machine that greatly increased the productivity of vast amounts of workers, making those users much richer and society wealthier because clothes got cheaper.
I find it disingenuous to claim, as the OP did (perhaps unintentionally), that innovators are bad faith actors playing a zero sum game. Surely that's the exception, not the norm. Just as there are bad actors in academia and any other profession.
> I find it disingenuous to claim, as the OP did (perhaps unintentionally), that innovators are bad faith actors playing a zero sum game. Surely that's the exception, not the norm. Just as there are bad actors in academia and any other profession.
I didn't intend to claim bad faith. As you point out there are surely bad actors in any field. More common, I think, is the (most likely subconscious) Lippmann effect: "We are peculiarly inclined to suppress whatever impugns the security of that to which we have given our allegiance."[0]
>>Even if they don't increase total consumer spending by offering better products and winning market share, they do increase consumer _wealth_. I'm glad I can buy a 65" 4k TV for as much as my parents paid for a 15" CRT 20 years ago, adjusted for inflation.
I think this depends of how are you calculating the cost of things. In this day in age, misery wages and huge negative externalities have more to do with cheap clothes and appliances than the sewing machine, imho. The later mostly contributed on how many of them you can make by the second, but you still need farms of people to work them.
It's not fixed though. You may think the market for cars only has so much demand, but if you can make a car cheaper, demand goes up. This is one of the most fundamental laws of microeconomics (the non bullshit part of economics.)
There are definitely some zero sum games, I'm not disagreeing with you, just pointing out a nuance. The market for eyeballs/attention is zero sum. Netflix famously thinks of its competition as everything outside of Netflix including "real life."
> Netflix famously thinks of its competition as everything outside of Netflix
Is that true or just marketing? Is Netflix seriously competing against every other type of industry? How could it survive if there was nothing but Netflix? Or are they so megalomaniac that they are trying to take over the pharmaceutical industry too? And agriculture? And military? I can't believe.
I don't think building a business is zero-sum in principle. Your point about a farmer creating value is well taken. Our present measures of economic value are notoriously short-sighted though (i.e., willing to ignore hard-to-quantify externalities); did the green revolution create value? It vastly improved yield, but if we don't make serious changes in the next 50 years, it will destroy the viability of agriculture. Value creation is rarely unambiguous.
I would also argue that many VC-backed startups are more about finding unexploited niches or catabolizing existing sectors of the economy than creating new material wealth.
I agree with you that current market incentives do not capture externalities like environmental harm. (eg. soil erosion, in the case of a farmer who doesn't rest his fields)
I hope to convince you to hate the game, not the players. So that we can focus our efforts at the root cause. And to take a measured approach: it's not all bad. I'd rather have our current quality of life (in Canada) than to live in a pre-industrial world in the longhouses of the Aboriginal Peoples who used to live where I do. It seems romantic, but I'm sure I'd be a terrible hunter. I choose to believe that human progress will continue to solve the problems we face, in time. Because historically we always have. Let's root for more Elon Musks instead of hating on the average capitalist.
There are only two ways civilization gets more stuff, and that’s by either by making the current amount of material go twice as far, making twice as many homes and phones, or we mine it out of the earth.
I've always told people interested in startup to "start a project, not a company." I haven't been able to verbalize why yet until this:
But there is another more sinister reason people dismiss new ideas. If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope, consciously or unconsciously, that you'll fail. They worry that if you try something ambitious and succeed, it will put you above them. In some countries this is not just an individual failing but part of the national culture.
How can you know that such an impulse is part of some country’s national culture?
I sometimes think about what sets successful and less successful countries apart, and how profound an effect can cultures have. Assuming that smart people are born everywhere at similar rate, and disregarding unfree societies with authoritative regimes or paralysing religious dogmas, I would naively expect similar outcomes among countries. I would like to know to what degree can the observed difference be attributed to culture, but I guess I will never know.
In Denmark it's so prevalent that it's codified as Jante's Law. It's not a prescriptive law, despite the way it's phrased. It's more descriptive, a satirical summary of the way Danes think of ambitious people.
- You're not to think you are anything special.
- You're not to think you are as good as we are.
- You're not to think you are smarter than we are.
- You're not to imagine yourself better than we are.
- You're not to think you know more than we do.
- You're not to think you are more important than we are.
I may be misinterpreting it here. Although a few points (see point no. 6, 8, 9) help one stay grounded and humble, the other points can be seen as degrading the self-worth of an ambitious person.
In New Zealand, we call it Tall Poppy Syndrome. The typical acceptable way to be successful in NZ without receiving ostracisation in some form is to attribute your success to the country, rather than to yourself.
At a very basic level, it affects children at school. To excel at school is looked down on, here, which leads to the smart kids keeping their heads down and trying to fit in with the average kids. One benefit of immigration from countries with higher approval of academic success is that in many schools you are no longer looked down on for doing well, and I look forward to seeing how that affects the future of my country.
I would like to know to what degree can the observed difference be attributed to culture
I believe you can have a grasp of the magnitude of it by thinking that people are the product of their birth (genes and whatever) and their experience. Certainly we can think of experience as very significative in the way people act and think. Also if you replace the word experience by education (see as being the same thing here), you end up with anything from study environment, to culture to politics that actually determine a lot how people behave.
That's actually my main criticism of the politics in my country. It's not so much that the politicians are saying dumb things, they actually are great people if you look closely. It's just that their politic is not how I would "educate" people, the way people experiences it is the bad part in my feeling.
In short, I think those impulses have a lot to do with experience/education.
> How can you know that such an impulse is part of some country’s national culture?
Singaporean here. I've seen this "crabs in a bucket" mentality since the days of formal education. It's often known as being "kiasu" (afraid of losing to others, in Hokkien dialect) [1] in the 90's.
These days, it's sometimes known as the "sinkie pwn sinkie" phenomenon [2].
Isn't this the standard private equity playbook? Buy, hold, and flip? Though Softbank isn't a VC and I haven't heard of mass cost-cutting after they buy something.
Bombardier has its own problems and is viewed as a corrupt Quebec company by much of English Canada (that is, the rest of us). So the other comments on the political appetite to bail them out again are mostly correct.
So Canadians would rather have Europe or the US take the lead (and make the profits) rather than Canada because the company is from Quebec? To me that makes no sense.
